Iraq-“iffy”-cation– yet more

I got some nice reactions to the CSM column that came out today. Of course, Iraq-iffy-cation has become quite the big topic, all of a sudden.
It’s very hard to tell what-all the Bushies’ plans (if they have any) currently are. Is the huge military escalation a sort of “last gasp” before they all ignominiously “redeploy offshore”? A precedent for that would be having the battleship New Jersey hurling Volkswagen-size marine munitions into villages in Lebanon in late ’83/early ’84 even as the brass were actively preparing for-indeed, even as they undertook– the withdrawal of ground forces from the whole country.
A sort of petulant, retributive, and very shortsighted way to exit any country, let me note. I wrote about that whole episode not long ago, here.
But nah. I don’t think that “covering a withdrawal” is what the present bombardments and escalation in Iraq are all about. (Though I would truly love to be wrong on that.) So far, it looks to me more like the petulant, retributive, and shortsighted part of what happened in Lebanon, but without any underlying strategic plan.
Looks like they’re trying to bomb the bejeesus out of the Iraqis while saying they want to build a democratic constituency of Iraqis with whom they can peacefully negotiate Iraq-iffy-cation as soon as possible?
And this fits together how????
You know what? People have been mainly looking at the challenges of Iraq-iffy-cation through some very limited lenses. In the mainstream discourse, most people’s memories only seem to go as far back as– oh, Afghanistan, 2002.
So that’s why you get all these mainstream headscratchers saying oh, so, “wisely” things like, “What we need in Iraq is a Hamid Karzai figure!” or, even more pretentiously, “Maybe we should move to a loya jirga model there instead.”
What horse-@#$%. People, let me say, “I know something about Iraq, and Iraq is no Afghanistan!”
They tried the Hamid Karzai model there already, remember: the suave westernized long-time emigre who could work smoothly with the Americans…

His name was Ahmed Chalabi, and he bombed. But totally. Iraq’s indigenous society was not, it turned out, so totally shattered that just any old carpet-bagger from Knightsbridge, London could be parachuted in and received like a savior.
And now, my God, a loya jirga — an ancient, ritualized form of greater tribal gathering, blah, blah, blah. This, in a country that has one of the best-educated, most modern societies and workforces in the whole third world? Gimme a break.
How about, instead of either of those shortsighted models, the Bushies take their own rhetoric seriously and figure out how a representative, authentic, democratically accountable government of Iraqis can be put into place. That, surely, is what all decent people around the world ought to be hoping for.
But honestly, can they do it at the same time time that they’re bombing the bejeesus out of the country? I mean, can they?
The best analogy I can find for this, honestly, is not post-war Germany or Japan. (Though if you’ve read some of my “Oldie but goodie” posts on comparative military occupations, you’ll see there was some interesting material along those lines there.)
The difference is, that in Germany and Japan the Allied occupation forces were dealing with populations that had been ground down by years of incredibly destructive war. Think Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Berlin, etc. Ground down in every possible way: physically, demographically, economically, emotionally… There, the Allies had to literally re-build the societies almost from the ground up. Japan was almost totally re-invented in the process! And given the scale of the rebuilding required, the whole job through to the final attainment of full “independence” by the new regimes and the conclusion of peace treaties with the Allies took 7-10 years.
In Iraq, there certainly is a need for re-building. But not on anything like the massive scale required in Japan, Germany, or Afghanistan. In Iraq, crucially, there is a much more intact indigenous society than the occupation forces faced in any of those three places. Which is both good and bad from the point of view of those now trying to Iraqify.
It’s “good”, because it means you don’t have to invest the large amount of time required to resume provision of basic services, etc., and then hope for the gradual re-emergence of indigenous society… So in theory you could get on with the work of starting the political negotiations almost immediately. If only you could figure out how to do this.
But the existence of intact indigenous society in Iraq is “bad”– or anyway, challenging for the occupation forces– because in order to succeed in their Iraq-iffy-cation project they will have to figure out a way to engage with the indigenous, organized political forces. They can’t hope to build their own future negotiating partners up out of almost nothing. (See entries under “Chalabi”.)
So if this is the challenge, then the “Coalition” (!) occupying powers can look at a number of relevant reference points other than Afghanistan, Japan, or Germany. And these divide into two main groups: those where the occupying/repressing power tackles negotiations with the indigenous claimants on power directly, and those where the UN helps out by playing a mediating/buffer role.
At the end of the day, this is really an exercise in decolonization. And the UN has a lot of wisdom to offer on that. (Think Namibia; think East Timor… )
But if the Bushies should fail to take my advice, and stick instead to their foolish ideological objections to the UN, then they’re going to have to figure how to administer the Iraq-iffy-cation in, as it were, “in one fell swoop”. South Africa really is a very productive analogy here– far more so than I realized back on Tuesday when I mentioned it when writing my CSM column.
In apartheid South Africa you had a small, very well-armed and hard-nosed repressive power exercizing its will over a considerably more numerous society of fairly well organized indigenes. But came the day when the political bosses of the apartheid establishment had decided that they could not continue trying to impose their will on the majority by force; they realized that they had to negotiate. And as they started to explore the possibilities for this, they came to understand that the only terms on which the indigenes would agree to negotiate were those of a full, one-person-one-vote democratization.
Which from many points of view was a very generous offer from South Africa’s Black, Colored and other non-White peoples, since they were actually offering to let the marauding Whitefolks stay on in the country as full and equal citizens…
It was a tough thing, too, for many of the Whitefolks–who’d been raised for generations on engrained notions of racial superiority– to accept. But they did accept it, some more grudgingly than others…
And thus, in April 1994, you had the amazing sight of all the country’s people lining up to vote in its first democratic election. The Whites realized that through this vote they would lose their grip on political power. And yet, the physical security for that whole, very complex voting process was organized and implemented by the White-dominated security forces.
What a miracle!
Of course there are differences between apartheid rule in South Africa and the US-led occupation rule in Iraq. The US government does not actually aspire to keep longterm control over Iraq. Though we should admit that the political authors of this war certainly hoped that the US and the large US corporations with which they had long links could exercize a huge amount of influence over the decisionmaking of the post-occupation administration of Mr. Chalabi. (Let’s hope they at least understand now that those pipe-dreams of “influence” are now far beyond any realistic hope of plausibility?)
But still, the central question of how a repressing power can “hand off” governmental authority to authentic representatives of the much more numerous society of repressed people remains.
In South Africa, as I noted in my column, it took four years of intense politicking to figure out a workable formula for doing this. They had CODESA-1, CODESA-2 and goodness only knows what other attempts at finding a way to find a workable constitutional formula for the handoff. In the process, the anti-apartheid organizations had to transform themselves into political parties, figure out how to do that, how to operate as political parties, how to build alliances, etc etc. And they were all testing their strength against each other, as well as against the NP power-holders.
And of course, for the White politicans, it was also a brand-new game, trying to figure out how to deal with Mandela and other Black leaders as fellow-negotiators (and future political overlords), rather than as “scum”, terrorists, or abject prisoners.
Welcome to the world of de-colonization!
In South Africa, miraculously, it worked. But I just absolutely still don’t see how it can be made to work in Iraq.
Partly, on the US side, no-one wants to stick around, or keep investing in the occupation venture, for the multiple number of years that–with all the best will in the world–such a process of transformation is going to take.
The Bushies had a strong commitment to taking the Saddamist regime apart, even if that might involve (as it did) dismantling a lot of Iraq’s vital systems. So far, they’ve shown little commitment to–and absolutely no aptitude for!–putting the country back together…
So where is this whole post leading? Mostly, right back to where I finished my CSM column. The US is, for any number of reasons, quite incapable of (and ill-suited to) leading this Iraq-iffy-cation project to any successful outcome. It needs the UN now more than ever.
When shall we see this President go to Kofi Annan, Jacques Chriac, Gerhardt Schroeder, and the rest of them and respectfully asking them for the UN to give him the help he so desperately needs? And how much more blood will have to be shed before that happens?