We have a vital role for France, latrine cleaner.
Posted on 04/08/2003 5:24:41 AM PDT by SJackson
This war's in trouble, bogged down in a Vietnam-style quagmire, up against a tenacious enemy whose...
Whoops, sorry. That was last week. In Punditstan and Armchairiya, we're already moving on to the next quagmire: George Bush and Tony Blair may have won the war, but they're in danger of losing the peace if we don't get the UN, EU and all the other multilateral do-gooders involved in rebuilding Iraq.
For once, the quagmire predictors could be on to something. It could, indeed, be a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that it's bound to be one if Dominique de Villepin (French Foreign Minister), Clare Short (Britain's excitable Minister of International Development i.e. compassionate colonialism), and the rest of the gang have their way.
One understands why Mr. Blair is concerned that the UN's reputation be restored and that Franco-American relations be repaired. But even if one shares the prime minister's view that these are worthy aims, they shouldn't be the aims of post-Saddamite reconstruction in Iraq. Fixing the joint will be difficult enough without factoring Chirac's and Ms. Short's peculiar psychologies into the equation.
Eight decades ago, Britain botched the birth of Iraq because of a general deference to the modish multilateral umbrella of the day League of Nations Mandates and a particular regard for the feelings of guess who? the French. If you read government memoranda of the day, certain phrases recur: Emir Faisal assures Sir Herbert Samuel, high commissioner for Palestine, that "he does not wish to complicate matters between the British and the French;" the cabinet finance committee instructs Sir Percy Cox, high commissioner for Mesopotamia, to keep the Hashemites on the payroll but to avoid "antagonizing the French."
If Britain had spent less time planning an Iraq that would play in Paris and more time planning one that would play in Baghdad, things might have turned out very differently. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Or, more to the point, they condemn a bunch of faraway natives to repeat it.
So reasonable people should be able to agree that there are two things the Iraqis don't need right now: the UN and the French.
Baghdad's best chance of avoiding either curse rests with Chirac. Submitting to the EU's demand that "the UN must continue to play a central role" in Iraq, Blair decided that what the world needs now is to go back to the old Security Council table and get the whole resolution circus up and running again this time for a UN civil authority in Baghdad.
Fortunately, Chirac is now in the terminal stage of Gallic hauteur and, offered Tony's olive branch, chewed it up and spit the shards back across the Channel. "France," he said, "will not accept a resolution of this nature tending to legitimize the military intervention and giving the American and British belligerents the right to administer Iraq." Thank God for that. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the fetid UN water, Jacques starts polishing his fin.
"I'm praying the French keep this up," an administration official told the New Republic. If the UN has a say in Iraq, the first thing it will probably do is put Saddam back in power. Or, more likely, it will do the next worst thing: install as high commissioner a non-Iraqi Arab bureaucrat say, Hans Blix sidekick Mohamed el-Baradei or Boutros-Boutros Ghali, currently underemployed at the ridiculous Francophonie.
He'd effectively wind up as an Arab League minder, there to ensure that the Iraqis don't get any funny ideas (rule of law, representative government) which might unduly discombobulate the Egyptians, Saudis et al.
EVEN IF you wound up with a benign indeed, comic authoritarian like Lord Ashdown, the EU's hilariously self-important Balkan Viceroy, that's not what Iraq needs.
The UN doesn't solve problems, it manages them in perpetuity; it turns them into Les Mis rables come back two decades later and it's still running. Even without the corruption and drugs and child-sex rings, it's not an impressive record. Any German contemplating the Palestinian "refugee camps" now celebrating their golden jubilee ought to be grateful his country enjoys the straightforward benefits of victors' justice. Or to put it in the only image the BBC and The New York Times apparently understand: the UN guarantees quagmire.
Bush understands this. To gauge the limits of his administration's patience, listen to its most famous moderate.
"We didn't take on this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have significant, dominating control over how it unfolds in the future" Colin Powell told Congress last week.
The Americans took a back seat in postwar Afghanistan because a peaceable Afghanistan was a bonus, not a war aim. But Iraq's different. As I and many others have said, it's supposed to be the first domino. It has to work.
How do you do that? Well, first, if the past fortnight teaches us anything, it's that the minimalist approach won't work. You can't just lop off Saddam, his sons and the top 50 apparatchiks but retain the existing structures and personnel.
It's clear after the depravity of the fedayeen and others that Iraq needs comprehensive de-Ba'athification. The best people to supervise that are the guys who've been on the receiving end the Americans, British and Australians. The French and the UN would lack the motivation, and past form suggests they wouldn't even see it as a problem.
If there's not much of the past 40 years of Iraqi history you'd want to retain as a model for the future, the previous four decades aren't much better. We ought to forget about the Hashemite restoration talk, or save it for the Hejaz. One could easily argue that the two biggest problems in the Middle East arose from London's urge to invent kingdoms for Hashemite princelings.
Aside from anything else, the carpetbag rent-a-kings, in part to divert their subjects' attention from their own obvious foreignness, helped pioneer the Pan-Arabist fantasy to which every incompetent windbag from Nasser to Saddam has enthusiastically subscribed.
That said, if you're in the market for a new Iraqi constitution, the British and Americans are better midwives than the available alternatives.
Washington has to be firm: Iraq needs secular, non-clan government, a military that keeps out of politics, an independent judiciary, and free elections first at the local and provincial levels, finally at the federal level. If they settle for the Mubarak du jour, the whole thing will be a waste of time.
And that's why you don't want the French or the EU or the UN involved, because that way guarantees you'll wind up with an unsavory strongman somewhere on the murky continuum from Emperor Bokassa to Paddy Ashdown.
Tony Blair can't win this one for the international do-gooders. In rebuilding Iraq, the Americans are looking for another Japan; Clare Short, Kofi Annan, Chris Patten and Jacques Chirac are looking for another Kosovo.
It's no contest.
That's my take on it. Let the UN screw up or handle the humanitarian aid. The UN does have an infastructure for that kind of stuff--way better than the Coalition forces who have more urgent things to handle. Like hunting down every last one of those Fedyeen, Ba'athist and non-Iraqi jihadists who want to be martyrs for Saddam, er, allah.
Hopefully, Bush won't let the UN handle the military & political aspects of the war's aftermath. The UN has a proven record of screw-ups and total failures in those departments.
As for the "independent" governments of France, Russia and Germany trying to squeeze in on the spoils...Bush & Blair better not let them in. By force, if necessary. ;)
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