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Fools
rush in: or is Blair on the side of the angels?
14 April 2003
It must, as we noted last
week, be galling for Tony Blair that his humanitarian agenda for war in Iraq
has no justification in international law. Fortunately, provided it works
for the Iraqis, that won't matter. But will it work? And how to make it?
It is a familiar dilemma:
how to give a people self-government while simultaneously protecting them
from the possibility of its going hideously wrong. It is a dilemma the consequences
of which Britain has learned to live with in relation to many of its former
colonial possessions. In general it does not do to try to save a country from
itself, and much misery has occurred in Africa and elsewhere on account of
that principle. But in Iraq saving the people from its own government is precisely
what the coalition powers say they are doing. So what's the plan?
For a start - was the moral agenda of the war merely against something, or was it also for something? Did the humanitarian purpose go beyond getting rid of Saddam's regime and then hoping for the best?
Suppose the former. Suppose, as seems likely, the coalition powers do not have a constructive plan for post-war Iraq. Lots of ideas, mostly conflicting, but no plan. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It can help, when faced with an intractable problem, to stir the pot and see what happens. Unintended but desirable consequences may result, provided that the stirrer is in a position to crystallise the positive and deflect the negative before it causes harm. Two conditions, therefore, must be met, viz. (1) that the stirrer is in control and (2) that the stirrer is able to tell the difference between the positive and the negative consequences of his stirring.
With the invasion of Iraq the pot has been well and truly stirred. But the invading forces will not have political control unless they take it, which, despite much posturing, they seem reluctant to do. Explicit control by the occupying force at least has the merit that no free-for-all breaks out to fill the power vacuum. There is no vacuum, because the occupier has filled it. Home grown political forces then have the chance to develop their roots and branches before they take power. The occupying power can prune and fertilise as they think best.
It may not be the most enlightened approach, it may not play well on the Arab "street", but at least it is a plan. However talk of a short-term U.S.-led administration does not disguise the fact that the coalition powers do not wish to be visibly in control for the time it would take to achieve this. The window of opportunity to influence events is therefore a small one and decisions taken now will have a disproportionate effect on the long-term outcome of the whole adventure.
What the U.S. is looking for, naturally, is a client state; one that will do more-or-less what it is told without appearing to have been told to do it. If a new Iraqi government is truly democratic it is not going to be that. But then democracy on the European model is not a likely outcome: the country cannot be expected to acquire the mind-set of a western liberal democracy when it has no tradition whatsoever of that nature. Much of the population has only ever known the politics of Saddam Hussein and the political forces that now rise to the top can be expected to err towards the hierarchical rather than the consensual. This in turn makes client status more feasible: it is easier to suborn a strong-man ruler than an entire electorate.
That may suit the Americans, but it leaves Tony Blair's moral agenda dangerously exposed. Having stirred the pot, and assuming for the sake of argument a brief moment of control, the question still arises which political shoots should be nurtured and which dosed freely with Roundup. Nobody knows, and those who think they know disagree with others who know differently. The truth is, it takes time, aeons of it, to develop effective political institutions where none have previously existed. The Iraqis' best chance is to do this for themselves, living through the undoubted bumpiness of the ride. Any attempt from outside to accelerate or channel this process will contradict the whole avowed moral purpose of the exercise - liberation. The Iraqis have not yet been liberated. This they could only and can still only do for themselves. Will the American geo-strategists let them? Like the rest of us the British government will just have to wait and see.
© Copyright mindhenge
2003
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