February 28, 2003

THE HORSEFEATHERS MANIFESTO

OR WHAT TO DO ABOUT IRAQ UNTIL THOMAS JEFFERSON ARRIVES

A few days ago I discovered that I was older than all of Iraq. That factoid inspired me to look into its history a little more carefully, and now I pass my researches on to you.

Of course the physical land mass that contains the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and is bounded on the west by Arabian Peninsula and on the east by the Zagreb Mountains and Persia is as old as the hills, but the modern nation of Iraq which was defined by a bunch of British and French politicians in 1920 was only given its independence in 1932, which makes it three years younger than I. And since that time I have turned out to be more stable and economically sound than Iraq, since I have been conquered only once, in 1951, when I was betrayed by my heart and was forced to surrender to the arms of my wife; whereas Iraq has changed governments 23 times between 1932 and 1979 when Saddam Hussein became dictator/president.

In fact from earliest times instability has been one of the chief characteristics of the area. Surrounded by arid deserts and wild mountains, the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers represented very tempting real estate for its neighbors. Before the Arabs conquered what is now Iraq in the 7th century AD it had been occupied and conquered by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. During the thousands of years of its history until the end of the First World War none of this land ever had defined borders. Borders were created by mountains or rivers, or areas were separated by custom, language, religion, or tribe into villages and a handful of small cities. No matter what invaders came there was never any central government or control, only local tribal leadership. Every seventy-five or hundred years a new wave of invaders would sweep down, kill the men, enslave or displace the women and children and occupy the land with new languages and customs. Around 600 AD the Persians crashed through the countryside. A few generations later the Arabs conquered the area and their tribes and caliphs fought each other for the next three or four hundred years. Then came the Seljuqs, Turkmen from the north, and then the Mongols, and many others until in the sixteenth century the Ottomans took over, first Suleyman and then dozens of other Turkish despots. In the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire split the land into three large culturally distinct provinces—Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad, and Shi’ite Basra—and attempted to Europeanize and commercialize the country under the influence of several European powers, especially Germany and Great Britain.

For complex internal political reasons Turkey chose to become Germany’s ally in World War I, which forced the British to land an expeditionary force in southern Iraq in order to protect their interests. By 1917 the Brits had captured Baghdad and set up a British administration to control most of Iraq. Modern Iraq was about to be ripped from the defeated Ottoman Empire.

From this very condensed history of ancient Iraq it is not hard to see that for almost two thousand years it has been invaded hundreds of times by dozens of different peoples whose aim was to conquer, acquire its wealth and exploit its natives. Its cities and villages have been settled and resettled by many different cultures and religions. It has no longstanding history of centralized government, or indeed of stable government at all. It has no political traditions, only a multitude of captivities and influences from all over the Middle East and central Asia.
Two thousand years of governmental transience and instability, despotism, violence, and kleptocracy had trained the Iraqi polity to expect more of the same during the history of modern Iraq.

In the aftermath of the Versailles Peace Conference the Ottoman Empire was carved up one April morning in 1920 in San Remo, Italy by a cohort of bureaucrats from London’s Foreign Office and Paris’s Quai D’Orsay. They decided to give Syria and Lebanon to France, and Iraq, Trans-Jordan, and Palestine to Britain.

These men in striped trousers drew and redrew the boundaries of hundreds of thousands of square miles unmindful of the consequences that an inch or two here or there would make on the lives and destinies of millions of people. Eventually, because of their ignorant tinkering, thousands would die and hundreds of thousands would be uprooted and dispossessed. They were not God, not Allah, but mere men, conscientious, but fallible in their judgments and imperfect in their vision.

The mess that is the Middle East today has its origins on that day in San Remo in 1920. Nothing, absolutely nothing worked out as planned by the chaps in striped trousers, all their fine talk and cleverness notwithstanding. Iraq’s national boundaries with its destiny as an oil exporter was decided that day and has more or less remained so to the present.

Iraq was “mandated” to Britain, meaning that the latter was to be responsible for its people and government. From the very beginning, the Brits were on the defensive even though they maintained an army in Iraq at a cost of hundreds of billions of pounds (in today’s money) a year, a price they could not afford. Caught in the midst of religious, ethnic, cultural, and political animosities that go back two thousand years, the Brits could find no support, no foothold in the country. In the end they found themselves retreating piecemeal from their great political expectations until they happily gave Iraq its independence in 1932. During their mandate of twelve years there was scarcely a day free of governmental crisis and violence.

Life in Iraq after independence was hardly any better. It started out as a constitutional monarchy, but the same intense squabbles and rivalries persisted through the monarchy, and through the Republic that followed. Then a decade of military coups and counter coups during the sixties complicated the already complex political picture with the introduction of Soviet influence through the Iraqi Communist Party. Finally, on July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein officially became president of the Republic, secretary general of the Baath Party Regional Command, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, and commander in chief of the armed forces. The forty-seven years between the beginning of Iraq as a sovereign state and the accession of Saddam Hussein to dictator included twenty-three governmental changes, most of them coups and not one a constitutional election. The Iraqis appear to be habituated to governmental change by extra-constitutional means.

LET’S SAY WE WIN THE WAR, WHAT THEN?

The last thing we should do right now is begin to fall for our own propaganda. For the purposes of getting him out of the picture we have painted Saddam as an irredeemable despotic monster. Actually, from the point of view of ordinary Iraqi Joes he has made Iraq politically stable, taken back their oil resources which were charmed away from them by the crafty Europeans, given them a sense of pride in the strength of their country, and—until the US laid an oil embargo on Iraq—given them a pretty good economic life. He has constructed important projects like power grids and dams. From the point of view of the average Iraqi it doesn’t matter that there are no Shi’ia in the Ba’ath Party. Who cares? So a few thousand Kurds got killed up north somewhere, they’re a lot of trouble anyway. What do you mean freedom, I have my freedom, all the freedom I need. Freedom of the press? We’ve got our TV, what are you talking about? Two parties? What do we need two parties for? One is enough.

There are two ways to go in a post-Saddam Iraq, the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to keep our focus on the reason for invading Iraq in the first place—to destroy Iraq’s WMD programs and weapons for good. This will not be easy and may take as long as two years. This is and should remain our primary military and political aim. It is doable and other politically desirable goals may not be doable. Win the war, destroy the weapons, leave. Relatively simple and we will have acquitted ourselves honorably. If in the two years it takes to do the job, we can supervise and administer the reconstruction of some of the infrastructure of Iraq—at their expense—fine, icing on the cake.

Then there’s the hard way. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has begun to hear the siren song of nation building: “The nation of Iraq, with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.”

What makes this choice “hard?” You mean beside being expensive and time consuming? For one it goes against the thrust of two thousand years of despotic rule. For another the crucial concepts of “rule of law,” “multi-party systems,” Constitutional government,” “consent of the governed,” and a dozen other important principles and values of Jeffersonian democracy are completely alien to the modern Iraqi. The evidence for this is that since 1932 when independent Iraq had a constitutional government, the only method of political change it could find was extra-constitutional. It didn’t want a constitutional monarch—Feisal, an Arab but not Iraqi enough—and it didn’t want a republic. The only form of government that seemed to meet its needs was a warrior dictatorship, a form it has been accustomed to for thousands of years, and not just any military dictator, but the strongest and most ruthless of a series of military dictators.

America may be put in the position of giving the average Iraqi a lot of things he doesn’t really want and disrupting his life in the bargain. Iraq does not appear to be ready for a Western-style democracy today. It would need several generations of education and the training of a cadre of elite administrators to ready the country for a strong enough independent democracy to withstand the powerful traditional pull for government by strongman.

THE HORSEFEATHERS PLAN—A LONG SHOT

To repeat for emphasis: The smartest plan would be to conquer, disarm, do a little rebuilding, install the friendliest leaders we can find, and then get out.

If that is not good enough to satisfy America’s grandiose rescue fantasies, then HORSEFEATHERS, never at a loss for adventurous ideas, presents THE HORSEFEATHERS PLAN.

The Iraqis may not cotton on to democracy as we know it, but they do know and understand three things very well: trade, oil, and military power. They are a trading people, and have been for thousands of years. They may not be choosy about the form of government that rules them, but they do enjoy prosperity through trade when they can get it. And they do respect force as a regulator of the affairs of men. These two highly valued notions are the basis of the HORSEFEATHERS PLAN.

Within a few months of the beginning of the occupation of Iraq by the military arm of the International Coalition of the Willing (ICOW), as soon as the dust has settled, we should begin to build a large and elaborate complex called the ICOW naval and air base south of Basra. The land could be leased from Iraq and/or Kuwait. It should be large enough for our largest ships, aircraft, and an army the size of the one that we have kept in South Korea for the past fifty years—a hefty force. (This would allow us to say bye bye to our friends the Saudis and the Germans.) A smaller, subsidiary airbase might also be built around Mosul in the north for convenience and speed in monitoring the Turks and Iranians in their relations with the Kurds. The purpose of these more or less permanent bases, it will be announced, is to protect Iraq from Iran, Turkey, and terrorist incursions from any quarter. The model for this kind of military operation would be Guantanamo in Cuba or our base in South Korea. The publicly articulated raison d’etre for the military installation is not to occupy Iraq, but to stabilize the Middle East and to protect the Iraqis while they are in a weakened transitional state. Sounds good, right?

At the same time the ICOW Trade Commission (ICOWTC) will build a large building in Baghdad to house the machinery which will help attract capital and Western banking to business ventures which will earn money and provide employment for Iraq. These ventures will be protected and guaranteed by the presence of the ICOW military establishment. The ICOWTC’s purpose is to stimulate trade, set up commercial legal standards—anything that has to do with making Iraq a prosperous trading partner with the West, including encouraging entrepreneurship and setting up Western style newspapers, TV stations, and a modern school of government administration.

The ICOW would also set up an Oil Commision (ICOWOC) to guard, protect, maintain, and develop the oil reserves in Iraq. The accounting procedures of the oil facilities already owned by the Iraqi government would be made more transparent to ensure that the proceeds from Iraqi oil would go to the government for the benefit of the Iraqi people, rather than going into the pockets and projects of the current politicians and bureaucrats.

In addition the ICOWOC would internationalize the undiscovered and undeveloped oil reserves in the country. The purpose would be to stabilize, depoliticize, and demonopolize world oil production. OPEC and its threats and manipulations would be greatly weakened, and the rest of the world would not have to be afraid of Arab blackmail. New oil discovery and development would be encouraged by private interests in the ICOW nations. The income from new production would be divided up between the private producers, the Iraqi government, and the ICOW nations to cover the expenses involved in protecting and administering Iraq’s interests. What ICOW would do for Iraq would be a form of outsourcing. It would probably be far cheaper to hire the ICOW nations to protect and administer the country’s trade and assets than to spend enormous amounts on a defense budget.

While this was going on who would be running the country? The military administration would continue only until some form of representative Iraqi government would take over. Whatever the people choose would be acceptable except for one proviso—the laws of whatever government would have to be consonant with the regulations of the ICOW commissions, just as the administrative bureaucracy in Brussels regulates the economy of the European Union even though each nation is run by its own government and laws.

The major advantages of the HORSEFEATHERS PLAN are that it protects and stabilizes Iraq and the Middle East in general, it stimulates economic prosperity by guaranteeing foreign capital and investment, the administration and protection pays for itself, it gives the ICOW nations some economic reward for the risk they took, and it tends to modernize Iraq economically and demonstrate to the Iraqi people that Western ideas can be a benefit to them. It introduces the values of democracy by way of their pocketbooks, the most reliable route to their hearts and minds.

The main problem with the plan is that George W. Bush and his coalition will be the object of denunciation and criticism in the American and worldwide press. Not unlike what they are experiencing today. The left will shout that this is colonialism, imperialism, hegemony, exploitation, and all the other clichés of twentieth century Marxism. What to do about it? Calmly explain the good reasons for it including the self-interest. As long as we’re in the catbird seat it doesn’t matter what anyone says.