Author: Helena

PLANNING FOR THE ‘AFTERMATH’: The military outcome of this war is, at this point in time, completely unpredictable. The currently “best possible” scenario for the US-UK troops could be mean getting into Baghdad within the next 2-3 days; regime collapse there spreads out through the whole country; extension of a measure of US-UK military control over the whole country by the end of April. The “worst possible” scenario would be that sometime between 2004 and 2005 the US decides the still-continuing imbroglio has become so costly that it finally decides to “redeploy offshore” (Reagan’s memorable term for the withdrawal from Lebanon, 1984) and has to plead desperately for the United Nations to facilitate its departure…
Actually, a short-term appearance of that “best case” does not in itself preclude the subsequent realization of the “worst case.” But even in itself, the “best case” scenario as outlined above now looks highly unlikely.
What is clear is that what was envisaged — and actively peddled– by many in the Washington policy community as a sort of hygienic and rapid shift from an “Iraq dominated by Saddam” situation to an “Iraq rebuilt by America” situation has been neither hygienic nor rapid. Instead, the US-UK forces are mired in the mud, fog, and pestilence of combat. Which is the precise fact that the war-peddlers wanted the rest of the world to forget about all along. Hence, what I always called their strong attempt to “elide” the nasty fact that before the “rebuilding by America” phase could begin, there would still, actually, have to be a war.
They made it sound like some wonderful, Iraq-wide urban renewal scheme. Just a few political details to be seen to there– oh, just the collapse of a national government, nothing major– and then the good and the great could get on with their intensely visionary, intensely humanitarian task of building a new Iraq.
Except that three or four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had to be summoned in along the way there.
But no need for me to labor this point any more. I wrote a lot about the “elision of war” move before the war was launched. I guess I do want to make one arcane etymological point, though, while we’re talking about an “aftermath”. This word has no relationship to ordinary math– arithmetic and geometry and such. Instead, the “math” in there is an Old English term for land that has been mowed. (As “filth” is an area that has been fouled, etc.) So to have an “aftermath”, first of all you need to do some “mowing”. And mowing is a totally appropriate term to describe what is being inflicted on the people of Iraq right now…
Example: the Brits are now jumping up and down saying they need to get into Basra because the people there have no clean water. Well, why do they have no clean water? Is it that they’ve never had clean water? No. Is it because the city’s water-pumping plants– whose capacity had previously been reduced by 12 years of UN-US-UK-imposed sanctions on vitals parts– were finally knocked out of business in the first days of this war by a British or American bombardment? Yes: this explanation of what happened is far, far more likely.
And throughout the whole country the same pattern has been observed. Because of President Bush’s inhuman decision to launch this war, major damage has been caused to many pillars of Iraq’s national infrastructure. That is what happens in war. (Which all the eager “urban renewers” in the policy and “humanitarian” communities preferred to forget.)
But then, for the protagonists of this war to say that at this stage they need to continue the fighting in order to “save” the Iraqi people from the consequences of the resulting, and quite predictable, humanitarian disaster– well, this defies all morals and logic.
[The other day, my 17-year-old daughter Lorna Quandt said in amazement: “Mom, has the world always been this crazy?” I said, “Well, love, it’s true that states often treat other states and their citizens very cynically. So I guess at one level it’s always been somewhat like this. But these present claims of ‘humanitarianism’ really are beyond belief.” We agreed that an analogous situation in our neighborhood would be if we set fire to our neighbor’s house, and then as the flames rose higher rushed ostentatiously in to “save” her. And that after that, we would just stay on in her house and say that because we had “saved” her life, now we claimed her house as our own… ]
I actually set out to write about the still-ongoing wrangle inside the Bush administration over who gets to control post-war Iraq. Even though it may seem hard to see just why anyone would want to get stuck with what likes a mammoth tar-baby of a political challenge there. But still, Washington infighting being what it is, everyone there is fighting for a piece of the piece of the “post-” war action. In fact, they’re doing it so hard that few people even look outside Washington and notice that actually, even Tony Blair wants the UN to play a major role in overseeing Iraq’s rebuilding.
The fighting, as so often, has been between the hawkish Pentagon suits and the State Department. Earlier, agreement had been reached that post-war Iraq would be administered by an all-American body headed by a recently retired General, Jay Garner. But who would work under him? (Garner himself comes across as either tight-lipped or very unsure of himself.)
State had earlier rolled out its own plan: to have, under Garner, three very well qualified senior Foreign Service Officers (two females and one African-American) each rule Gertrude Bell-like over a sector of a somewhat federalized Iraq…
But then, the Pentagon countered with a petulant insistence that No! It wanted to have its own favored nominees in control of the whole shebang. One name prominently mentioned was that of Jim Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA in the early Clinton years who is also a Board member of the extremely rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (Garner also has a lesser link with JINSA: he went on a JINSA-sponsored trip to Israel a few years ago.)
In the NYT today, David Sanger has a piece in which he reports that, “On Capitol Hill, however, even the Republican-controlled appropriations committees of both the House and Senate voted today to take control of reconstruction out of the hands of the Pentagon, and give it to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The committees voted to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-conflict aid that the Bush administration sought for the Pentagon under an emergency appropriation.”
So the issue has been resolved for now…. Or has it? Who can tell whether the Pentagon suits might not mount a counter-attack? What about Blair and his continued insistence that the UN has to have a role? And anyway, more fundamentally, who can foresee at this point when it might even be safe to start thinking about starting long-term reconstruction in Iraq, rather than just short-term distribution of emergency rations?
One thing does seem clear. Given that all the promises made by the exiled Iraqi pol, the Great Pretender Ahmed Chalabi, to the effect that “his” people inside Iraq would all rise as one to welcome their US-UK “liberators”, have been proven disastrously misbegotten, that is one person who most likely will NOT be given any role in “rebuilding” Iraq.
Meanwhile, the 60-plus percent of the Iraqi population who are Shi-ites seem simply to be biding their time. It increasingly seems to me that the future of nearly all the non-Kurdish part of the country will lie in their hands, and in no-one else’s.
In a future post– to be written, perhaps, as I take my 40-hour, four-leg journey to Arusha, Tanzania in just a few days’ time– I’ll say a few things about the time I visited the Iraq’s two very holy Shi-ite cities, Najaf and Kerbala, back in 1980.