Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
American officials are squabbling over how to put post-Saddam Iraq back together again. The fate of the entire region may rest on whether they get it right.
Apr 2, 2003 | Two dueling models for rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq are being touted in Washington. The first -- call it the "clean sweep" program -- is the favorite among the highly ideological, pro-war civilian leadership of the Defense Department: Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary Douglas Feith, Richard Perle of the Defense Policy Board (a civilian group that advises the secretary of defense) and others. The second model, advanced by the State Department, is sometimes referred to as "head transplant." To judge by the rhetoric swirling around these two options, Washington has become an upside-down, inside-out wonderland, where fanatically conservative hawks have started talking like old-time, starry-eyed '70s progressives.
Little is known about the administration's plans for postwar Iraq, but signs so far suggest the neocons are winning the peace -- that is, if there will be any peace to win. The current preparations to establish an American civilian administration, run by retired Gen. Jay Garner under the military leadership of Gen. Tommy Franks, bypass the rest of the world, most notably the United Nations. That fits into the neocons' hopes to hand over the running of the nation to an interim Iraqi government with a minimum of interference from outside.
On Tuesday, the British newspaper the Guardian reported that Wolfowitz had been given a relatively free hand in appointing key "Iraqi advisors" to the American leadership of the postwar interim Iraqi government being assembled in Kuwait. Some of his appointments have been made over the head of Garner, who is officially in charge.
In the neoconservatives' vision, a democratic and economically vibrant Iraq will spread reform throughout the Middle East -- the "democracy domino" theory. In a Feb. 28 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush signaled his support for this notion, saying that setting up an exemplary government in Iraq will lead to changes in other Arab nations and "show the power of freedom to that vital region."
Some moderate commentators, like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, have cautiously embraced this theory. But in order for Iraq to be an example, it must first be put back together after a war that is clearly going to be longer, harder and more destructive than the Pentagon's initial estimates.
Central to the neocon reconstruction strategy is the concept of "federalism." Writing in the March 17 issue of the New Republic, Lawrence F. Kaplan, coauthor with William Kristol of the pro-invasion book "The War Over Iraq," declared that "Iraqi federalism amounts to a precondition for Iraqi democracy." And, indeed, federalism -- that is, the distribution of power among the country's various regions, much as governmental power is distributed to the states in the U.S. -- appeals to most Iraq hands. "It sounds like a good idea," says Sandra MacKey, author of "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein." "But the devil's in the details."
In opposition to this noble-sounding plan is what Kaplan decries as the State Department's anti-democratic intention to "retain a unitary central government in Baghdad," bolstered by the presence of a U.S. military governor who will rule the country for up to two years, hopefully transferring power to a U.N. administrator at some point. As for the reconstruction project, Kaplan complains that "the Iraqis to whom American officials anticipate delegating this responsibility will mostly be former employees of Saddam Hussein." The State Department's fixation on maintaining a central authority, Kaplan argues, has led to "a modest and halfhearted plan for the removal of Saddam loyalists." State's blueprint for "de-Baathification" (the purging from Iraq's power structure of all members of Saddam's Baath party) is, Kaplan complains, meant to be "neither deeply nor widely" implemented.
That does sound like the old-fashioned, Cold War-style strategic meddling in the affairs of foreign nations that the American left deplored during the late 20th century. In the classic State Department realpolitik quest for stability above all, the "new boss" could well look a lot like the old one. The goal of such neocons as Wolfowitz and Feith, on the other hand, is to see to it that, in Kaplan's words, "the levers of Iraqi power [are] turn[ed] over to the country's democratic exiles within months." Sounds better, right? But appearances can be deceptive.
Iraq is a synthetic, patchwork state, cobbled together by the British in the early 20th century from bits and pieces of the newly defunct Ottoman Empire. It consists, as many Americans know by now, of three large groups: the non-Arab Kurds in the northeast, an Arab Shia Muslim majority spread over the nation but concentrated in the south, and a ruling Arab Sunni Muslim minority who mostly live in the nation's center. (There are quite a few smaller ethnic and religious groups as well.) Many observers have worried that, minus the tyrannical but strong leader it had in Saddam, Iraq will splinter into warring groups as Yugoslavia did after the demise of Tito. "Only it will be worse than Yugoslavia," says Dilip Hiro, author of "Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm," a book critical of the United States' Iraq policy, "because Yugoslavia didn't have oil or powerful neighbors."
Federalism, in its ideal form, promises representation for each group without allowing any one faction to completely dominate the fundamental rights of the others. The threat of reprisals in the wake of Saddam's ouster is very real, says Hiro. "The Shiites have been sat upon since about 1638 and naturally they'll want to get even with the Sunni, who have treated them as second-class citizens." Some of the Shia uprisings following the 1991 Gulf War consisted of just such violent score-settling.
Under "a federal political structure," writes Kaplan, "different regions of the country would enjoy a measure of autonomy." But that's federalism in its ideal form, and ideals are hard to come by in Iraq. Who will represent the interests of each group while this glorious new federal government is being designed? Any emerging and potentially challenging leaders have been brutally eliminated by Saddam during the decades of his totalitarian rule. Neocons and left-wing hawks like Christopher Hitchens point to the blossoming in recent years of self-governance in the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions of the north, but the rest of the nation, the predominantly Arab portions of it, has little experience with self-rule that transcends traditional, bellicose tribal affiliations.
The neocons' idealistic talk of democracy and freedom arouses skepticism from some longtime Mideast observers. William B. Quandt, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, says, "There used to be a view, conservative and culturally deterministic, that said that the Arabs are not cut out for democracy. That used to be the conservative line. Now, and somewhat correctly, people say that's patronizing; you can't condemn a whole people to dictatorship because of their religion. The thing is, this is all meant to sound more open-minded, but it's being said by people who have never before shown any sympathy at all for the Arab world. I've never seen these people in the debate [about Arab democracy] before. Suddenly, they're rosy-eyed optimists."
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