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COMMENTARY
August 3, 2002
Future of Iraq
Saddam Hussein's regime yesterday invited Kofi Annan to send a team to Baghdad to discuss resuming United Nations inspections for weapons of mass destruction after a lapse of four years. (I wonder why?) It was like the opening of a new opera season; but with the same old Madame Butterfly by Puccini. "Unscom" (U.N. Special Commission) was booted out by Saddam in 1998 Unmovic is its successor (U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commision) under the Swedish international lawyer and gnostic bureaucrat Hans Blix. The new commission was created as a sweetener for Saddam who described the old one as a CIA front; but when it came to the test he wouldn't let Unmovic move either. His foreign minister Naji Sabri now says "hurry on in" while his vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan reminds that inspections must not be "intrusive". Since the point of weapons inspections is to be intrusive this is a silly game. I said opera but I meant unorchestrated farce; a show we've seen over and over. Saddam expects to win breathing space by endlessly presenting and withdrawing demands while driving as big a wedge as he can between the Americans and their allies. His more urgent requirement is for low-comedy inspections to begin right away; he needs the inspectors as hostages against the impending U.S. invasion. The last U.S. president Bill Clinton played this game for a while lost interest and wandered away. If he thinks George W. Bush is also going to do that then Saddam is (breaking news!) insane. The real diplomatic fuss over Iraq is not going to be over weapons inspections this time. They may provide superficial entertainment for the world media and dayjobs for the people who truly believe the way to deal with psychopaths is by negotiation. Instead the seriously interested parties are squabbling about the make-up of the government in post-Saddam Iraq. And since the U.S. is larger than all other interested parties combined much of this squabbling happens within the Bush administration. With the co-operation of the British and Europeans the U.S. State Department continues to play the "great games" of its various "Arabist" "experts". What they have in common is the "realpolitik" belief that Iraq must be governed by some kind of strongman from its Sunni Arab minority -- by another but much nicer Saddam. They think any other arrangement is courting the worst disaster they are capable of imagining namely the break-up of Iraq into its constituent ethnic zones. And yet the foreign sponsorship of Sunni Arab tyranny is probably the best way to realize this self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence the high hopes and secret financing and retired-spook intriguing behind the recent meeting in London of a freakshow collection of Saddam's defected ex-generals and turncoat flunkies to inaugurate an "Iraqi National Movement". (Five of the 15 members of this INM's "executive council" quit within a week in a welter of recriminations.) Hence also from State Department and European foreign offices alike the long-term implacable hostility to funding or encouraging or even talking to leaders and representatives of the various Iraqi ethnic and political factions -- the real people with the real supporters back home in Iraq. Hence the constant stream of "not for attribution" slander against all these genuine Iraqi opposition groups. They are accused of corruption and incompetence which is rich in view of the diplomats' preferred allies. Hence the otherwise inexplicable attempts by Western diplomats to isolate Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress the umbrella organization for these groups. For more than a decade Mr. Chalabi and the INC have provided a broad-based and impressive leadership for both domestic and exiled opposition forces while adhering consistently to no-nonsense Western-style democratic and legal ideals. Mr. Chalabi's relationship with the U.S. was clouded by the mutual antipathy of INC and the Clinton administration which began from the moment Mr. Chalabi realized President Clinton was not serious about removing Saddam and yet willing to make casual rhetorical commitments that led to uprisings then massacres within Iraq itself. From everything I know about Mr. Chalabi I can sincerely echo Jim Hoagland's description of him in the Washington Post as a man who has "fought for democracy rather than for power". But while he deals with a new presidential administration and a receptive new team in the Pentagon he faces his same old adversaries within the bureaucracies at State and CIA -- the "experts" in the black art of dirty leaks to the press. Surprise. President Bush has now organized his own urgent Washington conference of Iraqi opposition leaders. The chief convenor is Douglas Feith (a brilliant Pentagon "hawk"). And none of the ex-generals that the State Department had been cultivating have been invited. Instead the guest list consists of: Sharif Ali Bin Hussein of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (and pretender to the vacant Iraqi throne); Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord; Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim of the Islamic Council; Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party; Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; and ... Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress the man holding the umbrella. As Mr. Bush has stated on several occasions to anyone who happened to be listening he doesn't believe in "nation-building" -- in other people's countries; only in evil-regime removal. He believes that Afghans and Iraqis and others must ultimately rebuild themselves; that the best the U.S. can do for them is to depose the tyrants who are their common enemy and give any available democrats a chance. If Iraqis want democracy they will succeed; if Iraqis don't they will fail. Whereas nothing will come of "foreign office intriguing"; or rather nothing good. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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