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Iraq: a Possible Solution
On March 20th, 2003, the United States and a few other countries it called a coalition started its invasion of Iraq, an invasion that lasted just under one month and led to an occupation that has so far lasted almost eleven months. Common wisdom, at least according to those who pushed for the invasion in the United States, Britain, and Australia, is that the invasion liberated the Iraqi people from the brutal dictator that was Saddam Hussein. Common reality is that the United States liberated the Iraqis to about the same degree that the Viet Cong liberated the Vietnamese, or that Mao liberated the Chinese, or that Osama Bin Laden liberated the Afghanis.
If you just peek at a few articles on Baghdad Burning, you will quickly understand that the situation in Iraq is far from optimal—to hugely understate the case. A few people may argue that disorder, proliferation of terrorist militias, unreliable electricity and water, ethnic and religious tensions, and an occupying power that doesn’t do anything about these are all fine and dandy, but such people may be safely ignored on the grounds that death, poverty, and terrorism are ethically wrong under all circumstances.
As with all negative situations, this has its share of people who offer magical solutions. The numerous groups in Iraq vying for power of course think, or at least say, that all of Iraq’s problems will be solved if only they will gain power. The United States doesn’t quite offer magical solutions as much as it tries to sweep the problem under the carpet and hope that the people who can vote in its election either don’t know or don’t care. Various organizations say that the authorities must concentrate on but one thing, be it order, democracy, consensus, or whatever.
It almost goes without saying that there are no magical solutions in Iraq and that development needs to be done on several fronts simultaneously. Further, there needs to be cooperation, as there are many sides that can stall development, but none that can singlehandedly cause it. The United States of course needs to start putting the interests of the Iraqi people first and not just pretend to do so; the Iraqi people are at least as important, because if they insist on sticking to authoritarian traditions, democracy is stalled, and we will get either a pro-American dictatorship like there were in numerous countries, particularly in Latin America, or a fundamentalist state, which is even worse.
A lot of people emphasize unity in Iraq; that is, a sense of nationalism that transcends ethnic politics. I disagree. A sense of unity is not at needed in the short-term, and will hardly if at all affect people positively in the long-term. It will help the survival of the Iraqi state, but this will not necessarily be good for the Iraqis. What is needed is a destruction of ethnic unity, which causes much of the strife in Iraq. Perhaps the best way to maintain racial equality is to ensure that people ignore race and let the fact that all races and ethnicities are biologically equal to prevent a surge in inequality. It doesn’t matter who the people perceive themselves as, as long as this perception does not divide the people into sects; and perception of ethnic or religious groups (i.e. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds) or of tribes always do.
A lot of Iraqi bloggers will tell you that Iraq should be a unitary state and that Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis are all Iraqis. The latter is completely false, because while Kurds are Iraqi in nationality, they have a different pre-colonial history, a somewhat different social structure, and their language is completely different from Arabic (Kurdish is an Indo-European language, related to Farsi, Hindi, and almost all European languages, but Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language, related to Hebrew and Aramaic). The former is nonetheless true, because Kurdish nationalism is counterproductive, and is in fact bad for the Kurds. An independent Kurdistan will have to constantly defend itself from Turkey, which means it will need to conscript its citizens and adopt a militaristic attitude, whereas as equal citizens of Iraq, the Kurds will need neither. Further, there is no real need of a federal Iraq; there are only twenty federal states in the world, and most have either a very high and diverse population or a huge land area, whereas Iraq has neither.
So, as far as the Kurdish question goes, autonomy for Kurds is out of the question, not least because it is going to lead to strife not just between Kurds and Iraqi Arabs but also between Kurdistan and Turkey. What Iraq should have is a unitary state with completely equal rights for people regardless of religion, gender, or ethnicity, preferably with equality written into the Iraqi constitution in order to make it harder for Arabs to oppress Kurds.
Public order is crucial for Iraq’s development into a democratic, first world state. To help achieve it, the United States needs to start cracking down on the main organizations that try to end it, namely the fundamentalist terrorist groups that have terrorized the Iraqi people for decades and now have seats on the Governing Council because they were anti-Saddam. The first step is kicking Al-Daawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq off the Governing Council. The second is to start prosecuting these terrorist organizations, as well as to use the military to keep public order. The Iraqis once started citizens’ patrols that, while far from optimal, reduced the number of abductions and lootings; the United States cracked down on these but never replaced them with another security force. This means, among other things, that an American withdrawal is out of the question, at least until a larger UN force comes in. On the other hand, as long as the occupation keeps screwing things up more than it helps the situation, a withdrawal will probably only help.
I don’t know why there are blackouts thruout Iraq. The United States, however, should, and the fact that Iraqis only get ten hours of electricity per day indicates that either the US Army is incompetent or doesn’t care—I go with the latter but it is really up to you to choose which. Iraq has no shortage of engineers and other specialists who can help not just in the electricity situation but also in repairing infrastructure such as bridges and roads; particularly in the pre-Gulf War period, Iraq enjoyed a relatively high quality of life with many middle-class professionals, many of whom are still in Iraq and can do the various jobs the United States insists on either not doing or doing without utilizing the Iraqi talent pool, which on top of everything else will also work for much less than western workers.
Many Iraqis lament the fact that the framers of the new Iraqi constitution will not be elected. In Weimar Germany, the constitution was written the other way around: a new parliament was elected on the basis of proportional representation, and it was that parliament that was charged with passing the new German constitution (the constitution itself was written by only a few people, but the new Reichstag oversaw it and that was what mattered).
The only reason why this might not work in Iraq is that Iraqi psyche is more fundamentalist and authoritarian than German psyche at the end of World War One, although not that much more authoritarian. If the Iraqis insist on electing fundamentalist delegates, then Iraq has no chance, for despite all of Bush’s talk, democracy cannot be forced from above. While some countries have combined dictatorship with a relatively high quality of life, such as Singapore, modern-day China, and even Saddam’s Iraq, the two types of dictatorship Iraq is likeliest to get, namely fundamentalism and a banana republic- or Shah-style crony rule, have had a terrible history at improving people’s quality of life.
Of course, a lot of people might bash me on the grounds that “I have no understanding of Iraqi culture” and that “the Iraqis would never succumb to the kind of cultural imperialism I am offering.” The former is a pure ad hominem attack that can be safely ignored. The latter is based on no evidence unless the unsubstantiated assumptions of cultural relativism are “evidence.” Yes, Iraqis will be faced with a choice between their way of life and quality of life, but this doesn’t mean that choosing to stick to traditions even when they impede quality of life is good. They say that in a democracy, it is the second election that counts the most, not the first, and it is the Iraqi people’s responsibility to keep electing democrats of whatever political affiliation and ideology and not succumb to fundamentalism.
At the same time, it is very hard to overstate the influence the United States has on Iraq. If the Iraqis need to believe in democracy, the United States needs to give them the reasons to, which includes keeping and promoting public order and ensuring that sanitation, water, and electricity are up at least back to pre-invasion levels, preferably to pre-Gulf War levels, and even more preferably to first- or even second-world levels.
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