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September 02, 2004
NYRB: Galbraith - Iraq
First, my thanks to Bigod for bringing this to my attention. The NYRB is not my general 'cup of tea' but I found the Galbraith article on Iraq to be intriguing.
Let me link and quote for some notes on more interesting sections.
Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
Feature
Iraq: The Bungled Transition
By Peter W. Galbraith
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17406
I will skip over the first section, which I am not entirely in agreement with, as to the analysis of Allaouie.
This does bear citing:
The administration seems to be gambling that Allawi can mobilize sufficient Iraqi force against the insurgents so that coalition troops will stop dying at the current frightening rate. It is a measure of how far America's once grand ambitions for Iraq have diminished that security has become more important than democracy for a mission intended not only to transform Iraq but with it the entire Middle East.
Indeed.
I also note this
To choose him over his rivals was also to make a clear statement about the kind of Iraq the US seeks.
Why Our Bastard in Baghdad, of course.
A bit of realism in the end, although Galbraith's comments on the irrealism of the new realism below are well taken, but we will get there.
In 1991, Iyad Allawi founded the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which .... stood for an Iraq more or less like the one Saddam Hussein ran but without Saddam and without the worst abuses of the Baath Party.
A large ommitted section there: Rather more realistic I should say than the cheap crack that our Thief in Baghdad was pimping.
Moving along then, to this paragraph, with again some telling points:
Allawi's tough-guy approach has won him admiration not just in official Washington but in Iraq as well. Many Iraqis are fed up with the insurgencies, and citizens of Baghdad appreciate his efforts to deal with that city's kidnappings and armed robberies, which have gone out of control. (Allawi rounded up more than five hundred known criminals, a move that apparently never occurred to the American occupation authorities, since crime was not a problem in the highly fortified Green Zone. Allawi's comments about postponing elections (which he has not repeated in recent weeks) seem to have cost him little support in a country far more concerned with security than democracy.
Emphasis added.
Amusing, not perhaps quite true, but amusing.
I think rather the issue was the Americans keep confusing opposition to themselves with criminality, which may not be entirely seperate, but also is not the same thing.
On this point:
The main problem for Allawi is that he lacks both the political constituency and the material resources to translate his tough line into effective action. According to an April public opinion survey commissioned by the US government, Allawi is one of Iraq's least popular politicians, and is strongly opposed by some 61 percent of the population (a finding that seems to have carried no weight with the Bush administration, which both commissioned the poll and chose Allawi). The Iraqi forces available to implement his tough line are neither capable nor loyal, while the use of American troops further undermines his government's narrow base of support.
I believe Galbraith is right, although there is perhaps a window for Allaouie to gain some momentum and popularity if he can reduce criminality in Baghdad. If....
Of course that if is so large as to be overwhelming in its uncertainty on the side of success.
Now, as to the materials that really attracted my attention, Galbraith's cool laying out of the clumsiness of the American efforts and how opportunities were lost gratuitously.
On March 8 of this year, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the US-appointed administrator for Iraq, staged an elaborate signing ceremony for Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). In a gesture intended to recall the closing of the 1787 Philadelphia constitutional convention, Bremer laid out twenty-five pens so that each member of the Iraqi Governing Council could sign a document intended to serve as Iraq's interim constitution. The Bush administration said the TAL would be a "road map" to the preparation of a permanent constitution. It hailed the TAL as unprecedented in the Middle East for its extensive human rights protections, its concern for the status of women, and its independent judiciary.
Ah yes, the fantasy world of the "Remaking the Middle East" crowd. Wave the magic wand.
But this is not the key point, rather Galbraith nicely points out the very creation was an act of ... incompetence:
At the same time it was choosing Allawi as prime minister, the Bush administration effectively jettisoned the TAL. The administration had put itself in an impossible position with respect to its own creation. In 2003, at the request of the United States and Great Britain, the United Nations Security Council acknowledged that the US-led coalition was the occupying power in Iraq. As a general principle of international law, occupying powers are not allowed to make permanent, or irreversible, changes in an occupied country. Occupying powers cannot cede territory, sell assets, or make permanent law. Thus all law made by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) expired when the occupation ended on June 28.
Ah, well, that fine law...., and as I recall a year ago or so I was arguing with people that there were real if subtle penalties to acting in a cavalier manner with the international community, that the cost of doing business goes up.
Galbraith highlights just how that price has emerged:
In order for the Transitional Administrative Law to be valid after the end of the occupation, it needed Security Council endorsement. In the 1990s, the Security Council granted other international administrations (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor) lawmaking powers but the Bush administration, having alienated its allies, did not obtain this authority in the original 2003 UN Security Council resolution. In June 2004, when the Security Council considered the resolution restoring Iraqi sovereignty, the Bush administration decided not to seek an endorsement of the TAL (and other CPA-passed laws), ignoring pleas from pro-democracy Iraqis. It made that decision in deference to the Ayatollah Sistani, who does not want an elected, Shiite-dominated assembly to be in any way constrained by the American-created interim constitution. In particular, Sistani objected to provisions in the TAL that would make it difficult to create an Islamic state and would require a permanent constitution acceptable not just to the majority Shiites but also to the Kurds and Sunni Arabs.
Prisoner of one's own machinations and ignorance, I should say.
I find it amusing that I have recently seen "conservative" writers praising Sistani as a humanist and the like. Amusing, their man of the moment, likable because these know-nothing types know so little of what they're tackling.
And so we have a fine situation of so much effort spent on creating sand castles, with little thought given to the tide that comes back in.
Now the question on our minds, although I think my own comments a bit back are perhaps in this vein: "How did the Bush administration invest so much in the TAL and then find itself forced to abandon it?" Or how did the occupation get quite so fucked up?
I found Galbraith's comments ... intriguing and I think perhaps accurate.
It appears that Bremer never realized that his decrees would not legally outlast the occupation. It was a rookie's mistake caused, as with so many other CPA failures, by the lack of expertise on the part of his staff.
On the last I think I have almost redunantly harped on about this, as for example here, (http://www.livejournal.com/users/collounsbury/191422.html).
Gross errors. Certainly one sees all the signs of the CPA not understanding that is many fine little efforts (well not truly fine, actually comic bookish in their approach, as if one had handed a country over to a bunch of first year college students to run....) would not survive contact with reality, as I believe I put it last year at this time in commenting on the liberalization decrees.
And mind you, I have nothing against the overall policy of liberalization, but I knew well such maneuvers would never be legitimated.
So, I think Galbraith wrong here to an extent, Bremer no doubt knew that legally CPA law did not survive its own extinction, he simple believed that they were going to be able to get around that by hook or by crook.
Incorrectly of course.
The TAL was largely the responsibility of two of Bremer's assistants (dubbed "the west wingers"), one an extremely capable but relatively junior Foreign Service officer and the other a young political appointee from the Pentagon's stable of neoconservative nation-builders. Imbued with grand ideas such as remaking the Iraqi judiciary with a US-style Supreme Court, they apparently neglected to consult an international lawyer.
Well, I doubt that, I rather think they simply ignored the advice they recieved, being charged up with the idea of transformation, and the belief all could be over come. Simple oversight is a pedestrain form of incompetence. I grant the CPA this, they were not merely pedestrain in their collective incompetence, they were staggeringly and creatively blind in their incompetence. It renders their incompetence almost grand, a sort of Don Quixote type of incompetence that were it not so painful to see, and had it not cost me so much goddamned fucking money, I would almost bronze it and make it into some kind of ... I don't know, perhaps Salvador Dali art?
Now here is an item I have ranted on and on about more than once, but never let me miss an occasion to rant on:
The Bush administration's recruitment of staff for the CPA is one of the great scandals of the American occupation, although it has so far received little attention from the press. Republican political connections counted for far more than professional competence, relevant international experience, or knowledge of Iraq. In May, The Washington Post ran an account of three young people recruited for service in the CPA by e-mail, without interviews, security clearances, or relevant experience. They ended up responsible for spending Iraq's budget; because they knew little about the country or about financial procedures, they did so slowly. The failure to spend money was of course the source of enormous frustration to jobless Iraqis and undoubtedly produced recruits for the insurgency. According to the Post, the threesome, who included the daughter of a prominent conservative activist, had never applied to go to Iraq and could not figure out how they were selected. Finally they realized that the one thing they had in common was that they had applied for jobs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had kept their resumes on file.
Emphasis added.
In other words, they helped contribute to losing the war.
Politics over practicality, pragmatism.
I may add, as I have said before, I had always found it weird that in my contacts with CPA, and them knowing I speak Arabic (the real deal, not some stammered college Arabic as some of them had), know the region, business.... (hello Fleischer I mean you) why no one tried to recruit me.
I've expressed this before - not for personal loss, at the time I had bigger fish I thought in the net (so I got fucked there, such is business) - but for the sheer strangeness of it. Desperate as they were for staff, not one outreach. Now, I think someone said perhaps it was clear I am not one of their kind - true enough, I bite - but that speaks to the failure. Sure I would have said no, but the attempt should have been made - appeal to my dubious patriotism and all that.
There it is, the key issue here is not me personally but rather them meeting someone like me should have led to an approach given their needs. (And mind you on a peronsonal level, I would say that I probably would not have been 'right' but then no one they had was right).
However, as this paragraph makes clear, their needs were not driven by pragmatic desires, but starrey eyed political ideology:
In some cases, the quest for political loyalists meant dismissing qualified professionals who had already been recruited. In the June 20 Chicago Tribune, the reporter Andy Zajac described how, in April of 2003, the Bush administration replaced the chief CPA health official, Dr. Frederick Burkle, a medical doctor with close working relationships with humanitarian organizations and long experience in conflict zones, with James Haveman, a political crony of Michigan's Republican former governor. Unlike Dr. Burkle, who for months had been planning the restoration of Iraq's health care system and who was ready to put a program in action as soon as Baghdad fell, Haveman did not arrive in Iraq until June 7, 2003. .......
Hah.
Now this part:
The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune—without any apparent sense of irony—that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."
Fleischer..... well since he's out there somewhere, let me say I have a fullsome sense of the competence of his operation.
Steel.
I note this contrast:
Eight months after receiving the congressional appropriation, however, the CPA had spent less than $500 million of it on reconstruction. The only part of Iraq not subject to the CPA's financial control was Kurdistan, where the regional government received a cash allocation equal to just 6 percent of Iraq's total budget (on a per capita basis it should have received 15 percent), but spent it so effectively that the local economy has enjoyed a boom that, in some areas, outstripped the local labor market. By contrast, unemployoment in Arab Iraq has hovered around 50 percent. The hiring of unqualified staff by the CPA, documented by the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post, helps to explain why the CPA (known to my Iraqi friends as "Cannot Provide Anything") accomplished so little.
The comparison is not entirely fair, the emphasized section rather is correct.
Now let me highlight this:
The invasion and occupation were highly ideological decisions reflecting the philosophy of the President and his closest aides. What is astonishing is that the conduct of this venture was not left to the military and civilian professionals most qualified to make it work but rather to those most committed to a fuzzy vision of a transformed Iraq. In too many cases, these were people with no knowledge of Iraq, with no experience in dealing with post-conflict environments, with limited experience in making the US bureaucracy produce results, and with little or no expertise in the substantive matters (i.e., finance, trade) for which they were responsible. It is not surprising that so many gave up after relatively short periods in Iraq.
Emphasis added.
I believe this among the clearest indictments of what happened that I have read.
I also draw attention to the contrast Galbraith makes iwth the Bosnian effort
In finding people to fill key jobs in the international administration in Sarajevo as well as the US embassy there, the Bosnia peace negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, scoured the Foreign Service, the military, and the civilian bureaucracy for experts who knew the Balkans, who could speak the local language, and who could do the jobs for which they were recruited. The outcome in Bosnia—where no American has died in hostile action in the nine years since the Dayton Peace Accords went into effect—could not be more different from that in Iraq. Professionalism is at least part of the reason.
There it is. Professionalism.
The most important judgment of the American occupation must be that of the peoples of Iraq. A US government poll conducted just before the handover showed that only 11 percent of Arab Iraqis had confidence in the CPA—down from 47 percent in November. It is not surprising that an occupation that began with flowers and cheers (I witnessed this in April 2003) ended two days ahead of schedule with the US administrator slipping out of Baghdad following a secret ceremony in the highly fortified Green Zone.
A sad statement and an indictment of how badly this has been and continues to be bungled.
I omit a longish discussion on current politics and bungling to note this: Belatedly recognizing the political disaster of having the Americans serve as his iron fist, Allawi announced that he would use Iraqi forces to secure Najaf. Unfortunately for him, the new Iraqi army—the most cherished project of the Pentagon's neoconservatives —is not a serious force. Like everything else undertaken by the CPA, recruitment and training took place largely on paper.
Indeed, on paper. The kinds of things the idjits who lap up agitprop love to regurgitate, thinking it significant.
Now as to the current situ, Galbraith notes:
Neither the US military nor Iraqi forces now enter Falluja, enabling extremists to train for, and plot, attacks elsewhere in Iraq with relative impunity. While there is no similar formal arrangement keeping US and Iraqi forces out of Samarra and Baquba, insurgents and terrorists have free rein in large parts of both cities.
Wonderful, is it not? American occupiers control in many ways less of the country somewhat more than a year after the 'end' of the war than they did in April 2003.
That is progress, is it not.
Now, Galbraith argues:
In the May 13 issue of The New York Review, I argued that the breakup of Iraq seemed more likely than a successful transition to centralized democracy. I suggested that Iraq can be held together only as a loose federation consisting of Kurdistan, a Sunni entity in the center, and a Shiite entity in the south, with Baghdad as a jointly administered federal capital.
As I have argued previously, I think this too neat by half. Central Iraq is simply too mixed to have a workable Sunni entity, and the Federal zone of Baghdad is bound to be a flash point.
In other words, Lebanon, c. 1975.
Now in regards to the analysis of break up, I agree that Subsequent events make such a breakup more likely than ever.
The description of the alienation of the Kurds sounds right, and if they opt for a "Taiwanese" solution of not openly declaring independance (and thus provoking many parties), they just might get away with that.
A note on the probable error on the part of the Administration in being so shy of religious parties: With only marginal positions in the current administration, moderate Shiite religious parties risk being challenged by their more radical coreligionists, both in the street and at the ballot box.
A serious issue, and one that the simple minded "anti-theocrats" seem to miss.
Now, the suggestion that "A loose federation would allow each Iraqi federal unit to have the political system its people choose." sounds fine enough, the problem is where to draw the lines.
All well and fine in the abstract, but to create the federation, one has to draw the lines, and drawing the lines is going to force decisions. Decisions are going to force power plays aimed at maximizing positions, facts on the ground. That leads to... Well does anyone recall a small, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country on the Mediterranean? A small degree of unpleasantness arose from moderately similar circumstances when new lines or power relationships had to be drawn.
The citation to this: "At the end of July, Iraq's three southern administrative districts, or governorates, proposed to form their own Shiite majority region, and specifically asked for the same powers as the Kurdistan region. If this suggests that thinking among Shiites may evolve away from using their majority to impose their rule on all of Iraq, it could be a very hopeful development. is all well and fine, but the real push has not come. It's on the margins where the hard decisions come.
I note this item as well: While insisting that the militias of non-Kurdish parties be disbanded (or merged into a national army), Americans privately acknowledge that this will not happen, and is not necessarily desirable.
Did I not say so months ago?
Finally:
"Realism" has replaced democracy and nation-building as the central concern of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Unfortunately, it is having trouble defining and carrying out a realistic policy. As with its previous triumphalist policy, the problems with the new, realistic, policy come from ignorance of Iraq's history and society. Even if Iyad Allawi wanted to be a gentler version of Saddam Hussein, he could not succeed. Before the American invasion, the institutions that held Saddam in power—the army, the Republican Guards, the security services —had already become riddled with internal problems. The Americans shat-tered them, and they cannot now be reconstituted.
A truly realistic policy would acknowledge what actually exists in Iraq and work with that reality. Kurdistan operates as a virtually independent state where the central government has no presence. Various Shiite parties and religious institutions are the popularly accepted authority in the south, providing the local administration and having co-opted Baghdad's nominal representatives. Neither the United States nor the Allawi government has the power to change this reality, nor has either made any attempt to do so. Institutionalizing this "ground reality" in a loose federation can help reduce the risk of civil war. Further, a recognized and empowered Shiite entity has a much better prospect of handling its own troublemakers, such as al-Sadr, than an alien central government.
A fair argument, but as I note above, the problem comes with the Center, which is oddly... the margin. It is the margin of Turcoman-Kurdish lands, the margin of Sunni and Shia Arab. It is the place that will be invevitably the heart of darkness.
I grant by the way that a tripartite division of the country on a quasi formal, wink wink nudge nudge level might create breathing room to help calm the center to the point where maybe, just maybe one can avoid having Baghdad become Beiruit c. 1980.
I'll close in quoting this:
The United States faces a near-impossible dilemma in Iraq. If it withdraws prematurely, it risks leaving behind a weak government unable to cope with the chaos that is the breeding ground of terrorism. By staying in Iraq, the United States undermines the legitimacy of the Iraqi government it wants to support....
Catch-22.
Beautiful, no?
Best of all, a Catch-22 created by the very actor that is caught in it.
Willfully so.
Posted by The Lounsbury at September 2, 2004 08:24 PM
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Aug-Dec 2004
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