So I've thought about it...it isn't going to work.
There are two huge reasons it won't work - budget and sovereignty .
Maliki's plan doesn't have any indication of a budget attached - yet aspirations like compensating Iraqis for losses incurred by violence and by the Saddam Regime, "a large-scale development campaign for the whole country, which will also tackle the problem of unemployment", strengthening Iraqs military and the myriad talking-shops (conferences, councils and committees) will not come cheap. No-one's talking about what it will cost, which is a bad sign. Considering the huge amount of money that America poured into Iraq earmarked for reconstruction that ended up being spent on security - over half - the final bill will be huge. America has now cut them off and other nations aren't contributing enough for such a massive program. Iraqi ministers say they have returned oil production to pre-war levels and they cream of about a third of the $70 dollars or so from each of the 3.5million barrels a day...but that is still only $26 billion a year and Iraq really has no other source of income. They hope to increase production to levels comparable with that of Sausi Arabia by 2015 but that's a long time. The entire Iraqi defense procurement budget last year was only $1.8 million - no where near enough for a real country - and all of that got stolen! A new sustained insurgency campaign against the oil production infrastructure could easily prove fatal to their plans. Iraq needs results fast and in the short term they don't have the funds whereas they will have the funds but they don't have the time to spare if they are to prevent a descent into open fullblown civil war.
As to the second, bigger, reason why Maliki's plan won't work...I've written before, on many occasions, about the myth of sovereignty in Iraq. The fabled "handover of sovereignty" has been betrayed as a sham in so many ways, most recently by Bush's unannounced visit to Iraq. But we also have such incidents as British troops attacking and demolishing an Iraqi prison where fellow British soldiers were held and such long-term telltales as the complete absence of a plan to equip the Iraqi military for defense against external national threats. That means the U.S. will have to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq with heavy and advanced equipment to do the job they won't allow the Iraqi military to do. Democrat "withdrawal" plans are as guilty of this credibility gap as Republican ones. Some family planning expert needs to explain to them at it's not withdrawal if you leave some in.
The very fact that two major provisions of the reconcilliation plan - for a "withdrawal" timetable and for the insurgency amnesty to include those who had attacked Coalition troops - were dropped within a weekend after negative press and political comment in the U.S. put a final knife in the fiction of Iraqi sovereignty
Without true sovereignty, the major Sunni insurgent groups are going to realise that negotiating with Maliki's government is negotiating with a puppet power - and one that contains a large element who would like nothing better than to take their whole ethnic grouping and drop it down a well. They probably figured that much out after the Shiites reneged on their promises about renegotiating parts of the constitution after the elections, but they've been slapped in the face with the reality of it in the last week or so by Bush's drive-by and by the way in which American opinion determined the final nature of Maliki's proposal. Given that realization, they are going to bide their time and keep on with what they are doing. There is no percentage in doing anything else since they now know they will get no favors but more to the point keeping fighting while Iraq has no true sovereignty is exactly what they are all about. It's their raison-de-etre and so separating the Sunni insurgency from the Islamist terrorist movement, who will fight no matter what, is going to be impossible under these circumstances. Only a general amnesty that still excludes Al Qaida and its ilk will succeed in driving a real wedge between the two factions.
On the other side of the ethnic divide, the Shia militias are thei puppet government's guarantee of their power against the sudden and unforseen abdication of their American rulers. They will not allow those militias to be defanged in anything but baseless propoganda statements while there is a state of civil war...and the civil war cannot be solved without solving the sovereignty problem.
On a sidenote, when there were rumors of negotiations with the insurgency last year here in America hardline rightwingers were generally against it. Now their positions have substantially reversed, not because they truly think it is a good idea but because they are cheerleading for Bush. Progressives like Juan Cole were for an amnesty and negotiation last year, as was I. Past events in other places such as Northern Ireland and Israel (where a wanted terrorist, Menachem Begin, went on to be leader of his nation and even win the Nobel Peace Prize) have proven the theory. The current rush by Democrat partisans to get to the right of the right on the issue is simply dumb. Could we have a better example of how domestic politics, not the needs of Iraq, are running the debate? Luckily, some progressives, like Robert Dreyfuss still have the right idea.
One day, in who knows how many years or decades, there will be a true sovereign government in Iraq and a negotiated ceasefire between the various indigenous groups. At that time, everyone is going to realise that a general amnesty (almost certainly still excluding Al Qaeda) is in everyone's best interests. Exactly as in Northern Ireland and in Israel after the British occupation, there will be a general acceptance that not all the "bad guys" will ever be caught and brought to trial and that the nation must draw a line under its past and move on. However, as long as the Coalition, and in particular the U.S., refuses to cut the Iraqi government they have set up free in fact as well as in name that cannot happen. In this, the Coalition is the main obstacle to national reconciliation.
Yet the only reason Iraq is not operationally free is an insistence by America and the UK that any Iraqi government must be in their own national interests. It is an insistence that is bipartisan and also implicitly expected by both nation's populaces. Yet more proof that America and Britain don't "do" foreign policy - they do domestic policy that is then inflicted on foreigners. In this, America is the true inheritor of the British hegemony. The hypocricy of rhetoric about freedom over a nation that is now kept chained by its liberators is not lost on the rest of the world - if the U.S. and U.K. were serious, then they would allow Iraq to determine its own national interest free of considerations of theirs. Even more ridiculous then, when Iraq is constrained in what it can and cannot do by how its actions might effect American domestic politics.
It is long past time to talk about the elephants in the Iraqi room.
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