When I argue with pro-war people, they all seem to assume that Iraq will be freer and better off as a democracy than under Saddam. They seem to be missing a very important point, which is that Saddam was a secular dictator, who was (for the Middle East) relatively pro-education, pro-female rights, pro-freedom and progressive. Now Iraq is becoming a religious democracy, strongly influenced by radical Islam. These ignorant hawks assume that Iraqi dictatorship was repressive of all freedoms (perhaps based on Russian dictatorship?), when it was extremely repressive only of political freedom. They assume that Iraqi democracy will be progressive and egalitarian (perhaps based on first-world democracies), when it may well turn out to be repressive and patriarchal.
Now, it may be that the gains outweigh the losses, and Iraq will get more free. I think there is a decent chance of this. But I also expect the difference to be far smaller than the naive viewpoint. As an example, consider this article about the change in tolerance for alcohol. Alcohol was widely accepted during the Saddam era, and now in "Free Iraq" liquor stores are being blown up by fundamentalists. This could just be due to temporary civil disorder which will end when the police get the upper hand. Or perhaps it will be the police who enforce prohibition.
Don't assume that Dictatorship -> Democracy increases all freedoms.
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patrissimo- Patri Friedman
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A few links that may be of interest to the seastead project:
Ultralight concrete
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cr
BUOYANT CONCRETE FOR OCEAN CONSTRUCTION, Technical Note N-1232, Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory, Port Hueneme, CA, by Harold M. Kusano, June 1972, 34 pages.
http://www.hydroports.com/concrete.htm
Super Dwarf Seed Crops (they may give you free seeds)
http://www.usu.edu/cpl/outreach_seed_in
The Floating Neutrinos -- a family of musicians builds the first scrap raft to sail across the Atlantic
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cr
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BTW, have you had any contact with this guy:
"I'm a Mechanical Engineer with 15 years experience in rocket propulsion. Lately I do Naval weapon system integration and electro-optical fire control systems for high speed boats. I've had enough fast boats for a lifetime."
He appears to have independently arrived at a spar buoy design for a long-term seastead. He makes a lot of intelligent posts on the boatdesign.net. Might be worth making contact with him.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/artic
The Floating Neutrinos sound very interesting, I'll have to read their site in more detail and maybe drop 'em an email.
I've seen that boatdesign post before, and I think I emailed him a message about seasteading, but didn't get a reply.
Thanks for the info.
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Papercrete is indeed very cool. From what I've read however, it's quite absorbent, so you would need to either apply an impermeable coating, or build in a very dry climate.
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I wonder how much weaker the foamed concrete is? Perhaps you could create a sandwich of two standard ferrocement walls, with foamed cement in the center. The result might be very strong and intrinsicly buoyant. Of course polyurethane foam might work too, and be even cheaper. I don't know how the costs compare.
e.g. mold: 1ft of reinforced concrete to absorb tensional stresses and the lightwieght cheaper stuff for compressional
or vice versa, carve and spraycoat/pour over (more expensive)
It seems somewhat obscene to talk about liquor store bombings in comparison with such a massacre.
(I'd like a cite for you on that number, but I'm very tired right now and I can't seem to manage to find it. It was all over the blogosphere though and it should be on technorati.)
http://www.hughhewitt.com/#postid50
This Google search will get you various discussion:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22five+to+seven+million%22+saddam+%22
A less solid cite than I thought it was when I track down the numbers, for which I apologize; I'm not following this closely anymore. Doing some more research, this is clearly a very politicized number and it will be a while before the truth emerges, I think. But 270 mass graves have been found and everyone agrees that the number is at the very least hundreds of thousands, in which case my original point holds.
Hell, the guy got 5000 in one day when he gassed Halabja with sarin, and he executed thousands of political prisoners a year. It's not hard to work in to the millions when you run a thirty or forty year reign of terror that way.
reliable casualty figures do not exist. For example, Iran claimed to have lost 200,000 or fewer of its own citizens, while Iraq claimed to have killed 800,000 Iranians. Neutral estimates come closer to the Iranian claim but are uncertain. Because of different battlefield techniques, Iraq’s deaths were probably about half those suffered by Iran. The total number of people killed almost certainly exceeds 300,000. Wounded and captured soldiers push the casualty total over one million, and some estimates of total casualties exceed two million.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761
Casualty figures are highly uncertain, though estimates suggest more than one and a half million war and war-related casualties -- perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees. Iran acknowledged that nearly 300,000 people died in the war; estimates of the Iraqi dead range from 160,000 to 240,000. Iraq suffered an estimated 375,000 casualties, the equivalent of 5.6 million for a population the size of the United States. Another 60,000 were taken prisoner by the Iranians. Iran's losses may have included more than 1 million people killed or maimed.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milit
So at most a million casualties on each side, probably less, and perhaps half a million total deaths.
Still, the Hussein regime was monstrous. Even if the Iraqis end up losing some freedoms, like the ability to drink alcohol, they'll gain on so many other levels. Besides, the free market is taking hold in big ways in Iraq, and that's a positive sign. The previous regime was a command-and-control economy, and Saddam basically spent the economy into disaster prosecuting his wars and his terror state. There's not much place to go but up.
I'm not expecting it to be perfect tomorrow, but I am expecting life in Iraq to be better in five years than it ever was under Saddam, and that's good for both us and them.
I think that women's rights in the new Iraq will be an improvement over anywhere else in the Arab world. There are positive signs to that effect, although it's a battle that hasn't been won, yet.
As for social issues, you're going to have to hope for incremental change. In very small increments, at that. The kinds of social issues you care about aren't at the forefront of the Arab world, and they won't be until some other, more fundamental freedoms get worked out.
I don't know what you mean by the statement that the kinds of social issues that
My point is that the number was high, and that the oppressive nature of having to live in a country where alcohol isn't tolerated doesn't really compare to the oppressive nature of having a reasonable probability of being killed by a firing squad and buried in a mass grave.
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I make no claims that this article proves that Iraq is getting less free. It is a subpoint of a subpoint of a... of the question of whether us invading Iraq is a good thing. I'd fit it in something like this:
A. Should we have invaded Iraq?
__B. Will the invasion of Iraq prove a net gain for Iraqi's?
____C. Will Iraq be more free as a democracy?
______D. Will Iraq have more social freedom?
________* E. Alcohol use is becoming less accepted.
I have seen analyses where people seem to be assuming the answer to C is trivially "yes", partly because they assume the answer to D is trivially "yes". E demonstrates that this is false. Iraq may end up with less social freedom, which is a factor to weigh against the greatly increased political freedom when evaluating total freedom.
Your point about murders is another topic under B, namely "F. Will less Iraqi's get murdered under a democracy, and if so how many". I think C can be weighed against F in answering B (Net gain to Iraq is affected both by how many less are killed, and how free the living citizens are). But I would first weigh "G. How many Iraqi's have been killed by the invason and subsequent civil disorder" against F, since its in the same currency (dead Iraqi's).
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Another way to look at it is to consider that people have often risked their lives to consume alcohol. (Say drinking homemade during prohibition, drinking when you know you must drive home, drinking to excess which damages the liver). This clearly demonstrates that alcohol use is worth some small risk of death. So why can't we weigh them?
I don't have anywhere near enough information to sum up the totals. But I don't think that "less people are getting murdered" is so huge that all other changes become irrelevant.
And, of course, there's the standard response: democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.