Iraqi Economist Takes Insider's Look at Potential War

Economist Abbas Alnasrawi is watching the increasingly volatile situation between the United States and Iraq from a unique vantage point: as an economist and a native of Iraq.

Alnasrawi grew up and attended college in Iraq, where he still has family, before immigrating to the United States nearly 50 years ago to earn a doctorate in economics at Harvard. A recently retired professor of economics at the University of Vermont and a harsh critic of Saddam Hussein, he has written five books on the Middle East.

In his most recent book, "Iraq's Burdens: Oil, Sanctions and Underdevelopment," he proposes that oil revenue has impeded economic and political life in Iraq and cites problems including a military that absorbs a good chunk of the country's resources, a high unemployment rate, persecution of two-thirds of the population and economic sanctions that have done more to reinforce the regime than to undermine it.

"When you have a dictator, you strengthen the dictator by starving the people; they become more dependent on what he gives them," he said.

But Alnasrawi opposes American military intervention. "I do not think that the Iraqi people should be made to suffer again, said the former OPEC consultant. "We're making this an American issue, but it is a United Nations issue."

His alternative to war? Negotiation. Otherwise, the United States will get "bogged down in urban warfare," he predicts, with widespread and devastating effects. Moreover, if war is inevitable, he believes that America "will have a moral obligation to put that country back together."

But his hope is that within the next five years Iraq will be able to plant the seeds of democracy. "People [in Iraq] are beginning to believe...there ought to be a peaceful rotation of power and elections," he said.

A past president of the Middle East Economic Association and Iraqi Economic Forum, Alnasrawi has published articles in the Middle East Journal, American Economic Review, OPEC Review and Arab Studies Quarterly.