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COMMENTARY
December 18, 2002
Iraq's future
The Iraqi "exiles conference" in London ended yesterday having gone two days over the three that were planned. It was a messy if necessary undertaking sponsored by the United States and Britain. Representatives were invited from every known Iraqi political ethnic and religious faction some hundreds of delegates under the general charirmanship of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress the umbrella group for most of them. The most radical groups could be counted on to reject the invitations and they did. On the other hand there were people who wanted to be invited but weren't -- chiefly former officers in Saddam Hussein's military who defected for various motives but who represent only themselves. But there was no attempt to vet for radical affiliations and indeed Shia delegates accused privately of being agents for the ayatollahs in Iran were as welcome as the rest. The whole thing was watched over by Zalmay Khalilzad the Afghan-born strategist of President George W. Bush who was also a "point man" over the Bonn conference and the installation of Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan tghat followed from it. He has recently been acting as the Americans' political station manager in Kabul. Mr. Khalilzad is drawn from a remarkably shallow pool of real Western expertise in the region. By sheer luck he is a remarkably capable man with diplomatic skills to bridge both worlds. He gives the Bush administration a credibility that it could not have with an American-born academic or career State Department diplomat. And in his summary of the conference to media at the end as indeed in his running commentary while it continued he did an heroic job of keeping the train moving along the rail bed. No small accomplishment when you realize it has neither wheels nor rails: for everything about the post-Saddam government of Iraq is being invented out of a political vacuum two generations deep. Of more than 300 delegates only a few dozen Kurds had any experience of running anything -- the Kurdish territory has been out of Saddam's hands since 1991. Most members of other groups have been at liberty to be fractious -- to plot conspire and mostly fantasize abstractly -- more or less since they set up. For practical purposes political life in Iraq after a bumpy post-colonial beginning ended in 1958 with the assassination of the old Hashemite king. >From that moment till this Iraq has been under the law of the jungle; and for the three decades under the biggest gorilla in that jungle one Saddam Hussein. There was much heat in the conference for not only were delegates with incompatible views -- none of them yet road-tested in the world of rain salt and gravity -- trying to agree to common statements. They were also consciously jockeying for positions of power when Saddam comes down. The one thing on which all could agree is that the new government must be Iraqi it must not be an American occupation. But what almost every delegate means by this is my group in charge and before anything like an election gets in the way. The answer to them from an outside view is Fine, you can run Iraq instead of Saddam, and all by yourself if you want to. Now go and depose him. For the people who do that are going to call the shots and that is going to be the Americans. And the second most powerful faction in post-war Iraq will be the British. In practice regardless of what is up front (and some large cosmetic effort will be made) the Americans will be running Iraq for at least a year and I should think likely two or more. This will not be because they enjoy running exotic countries but because they have no choice. They will have a monopoly on raw military power and they cannot allow Iraq to disintegrate; two and two makes four. It will take probably two years minimum to set up anything like a constitutional order that will not collapse the moment somebody sneezes. Mr. Khalilzad and the Bush administration behind him have thus a long nightmare ahead; one that cannot be avoided. On the other hand they are lucky. In Ahmed Chalabi they have an honest fair-minded intelligent and courageous figurehead to call on -- the Iraqi Karzai as it were -- who already has the confidence of the leaders of the six main factions within his umbrella organization the Iraqi National Congress. He is a man (as I've written before) who cares more about democracy than about his own personal power; the kind of man who can thus be trusted with personal power. And he is sufficiently independent-minded that like Mr. Karzai he won't even appear to be a Yankee stooge. This is the man the Bush people want and he emerged from the London conference with all four planks they want him to be carrying. All factions agreed at least in principle that the new Iraq will be one country that it will have a federal system of government a secular constitution and free multi-party elections. None of those points is negotiable any attempt to deviate from them will be met with U.S. force. There will be reconciliation and tolerance -- at gunpoint if necessary. The conference agreed on a list of 65 members for an interim council that will attempt to establish itself in Iraq's northern and already-liberated territory of Kurdistan with a first meeting if possible at Irbil on Jan. 15th. They will begin immediately on the task of mobilizing and orchestrating dissident forces within Saddam-controlled Iraq for the impending liberation of the country. They have decided in advance among themselves on a list of 49 senior members of the Saddam government who will be subjected to war crimes trials should they survive the war -- including of course Saddam himself and his two sons. The general idea is for an amnesty beyond this list. The actual names of members of that interim council were not thrashed out until after the concluding press conference however. For that had to be done off camera. Thirty-two of them will be Shias the largest Iraqi demographic group (with three in five of the population). The Shia seats are distributed among five different political factions ranging from very religious to very secular. For the rest all significant minorities are represented including Christians and a point was made with three women. It is a start at least -- a start on a very difficult but also very worthwhile project to make Iraq into a model for the development of civil society and democratic government in the Arab Middle East. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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