Regards, Ivan
Posted on 02/19/2003 3:04:43 PM PST by MadIvan
Iraqis must be assured of a brighter future
Saddam Hussein can even now halt the march to war; but he can do so only by prompt and unconditional surrender to the demands of the United Nations. Military defeat would put an end to his 34-year reign of terror; a humiliating about-face might buy him time, but would undermine the aura of invincibility that fortifies the regime. For a man who has made so many enemies, the second course is also fraught with risk. So he is playing for time, so far, he must think, with success. He failed in 1991 to recognise when time had run out; he may do so again.
But so long as time is given him, the American and British governments face obvious constraints when it comes to answering “after Saddam, what then?” questions that trouble millions of people, both those who accept that force must, if necessary, be used and those who do not. In the event of invasion, will Iraqis desert Saddam or fight their “liberators”? In defeat, what are the risks of anarchic score-settling? Would occupying forces come under terrorist attack? Might Iraq split apart, destabilising the entire volatile region? By contrast, could Washington turn out to be justified in its hope that, far from radicalising the Islamic world, “regime change” in Iraq will usher in benign change that ripples through the Middle East?
Jostling for power in a post-Saddam Iraq is already fierce. A host of mostly exile opposition groups is meeting in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, officially to hammer out a common position, but also clearly bent on pre-empting American plans to put the country under international, US-led, control during the transition to a system of representative government. Ominously, a 5,000-strong force of the al-Badr brigade, Iraqi fighters loyal to the Iraqi Shia leader, Ayatollah Hakim, but trained and controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, has entered northern Iraq.
But this foreground is almost certainly less important than the background — the climate within the regions of Iraq under Saddam’s uncontested control. Field surveys, covert and therefore necessarily “unscientific”, by organisations such as the International Crisis Group, have found Iraqis surprisingly ready to talk about the “day after”, expecting an American-led attack and willing to endure one if it puts an end to tyranny, confrontation with the outside world and isolation. In contrast to Western publics, for whom the question is whether or not war should be waged, for Iraqis what matters is that a state of war that has lasted more than two decades can at last be ended.
The United States committed an error as well as a terrible injustice back in 1991, when out of fear that Iran would exploit regime collapse by grabbing southern, mostly Shia Iraq, allied forces stood by as Saddam’s forces killed 60,000 Iraqis who had risen, encouraged by the US, in rebellion. Iraq’s Shia are not in Iran’s pocket; the great majority fought for their country against Iran. And it is an enormous oversimplification of Iraq’s complex, highly urbanised society to treat it as a “Gaul divided into three parts”, Shia in the south, Sunni in the centre and Kurdish in the north. Kinship and political loyalties complicate sectarian and ethnic questions.
Fear of armed anarchy should not lead America or others to repeat that mistake; Iraq will need help for the long haul, and must unstintingly have it. Given Saddam’s destruction of civil and legal institutions, post-Saddam Iraq will need the protection of armed contingents, the more international the better — possibly as a temporary “ward” of the Security Council which would simultaneously guarantee Iraq’s territorial integrity. The priority, beyond the obvious need to ensure supplies of daily essentials, must be to set in place as fair and transparent an administration as anyone could muster in the messy debris of a collapsed totalitarian state. Many Europeans refuse to believe it, but the US has a fundamental interest in proving, by its generosity and readiness to stay the course, that post-Saddam Iraq will not only cease to pose a threat, but can be a far better place. In the war against Islamist extremism, nothing could be a better investment than Iraq’s rehabilitation. If the world finds the means, Iraqis freed of fear will find the will to succeed.
Regards, Ivan
Having ABTHAT* in charge of Iraq.
*ABTHAT = Anybody But The Husseini Al-Tikritis
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