Thinking Like a State

by Liberty and Power

[cross-posted at Praxeology.net]

Suppose you owned a mostly vacant lot that happened to contain a famous historical landmark, one that attracted visitors from all over the world. What would you do?

Would you put a fence around the site and start charging admission?

Or would you plunk a 300-pound concrete slab down on top of the site"to prevent it from becoming a tourist attraction"?

Guess which option the U.S. Army chose in connection with Saddam Hussein's"spider hole"?

Such is the difference between governmental incentives and the incentives of private enterprise.

(Of course it’s debatable who owns the hole; but that's another issue ....)

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Jonathan Dresner - 2/16/2004

Because it's humiliating triumphalism. And that doesn't help us in any way.

Because we're supposed to be handing over sovereignty in a few months, and then they can decide what they want to do with it: until then, monuments are not our job. If we make it our job, then we call into question our committment to Iraqi self-rule.

Because drawing large numbers of Iraqis would also provide highly visible and meaningful targets for insurgents. Not to mention a (weakly, I grant) Masada-like monument to their defeat, a focus for their rage.

Robert L. Campbell - 2/16/2004

I certainly take Jonathan Dresner's point about foreign (especially American) tourists not wanting to visit Saddam's last "spider hole" while in imminent danger of being blown up.

But just how would drawing attention to the place where Saddam was apprehended like a cornered rat impair de-Baathization?

Jonathan Dresner - 2/15/2004

The problem with libertarians is the tendency to ignore non-economic issues. Yeah, it's a generalization; it's also true.

Given the potential for Saddam Hussein to become a rallying point for anti-democratic insurgents, it is entirely appropriate, from a security and de-Baathization standpoint, to deemphasize anything associated with the old regime.

Not to mention the absurdity of thinking in terms of a tourist trade in Iraq at the moment: foreign tourists would be a fabulous target for destabilizing extremist violence (especially if tourism became an important source of income, the attacks on tourists could create economic instability in addition to diplomatic and security problems) and I think domestic tourism will wait until basic services are restored and the murder rate drops back down to merely nerve-wracking.