If you do not fight the war, you will not control the peace. When the war in Iraq is over, the US Army will remain in control of the country, just as the Allies were left in control of Germany in 1945. How long that period will last will depend on the success of the reconstruction programme, which is bound to be under American control.
Some people imagine that President Bush will turn to the United Nations, which spent 12 years failing to disarm Iraq, from 1991 to 2003, and politely ask it to take over responsibility for the reconstruction.
There are several objections to this proposal. As Bosnians have cause to remember, the UN can take a pacifist view of peacemaking operations. If nasty people shoot at the blue berets, they are sometimes too polite to shoot back. In President Wilson’s words, they are “too proud to fight”. After the end of this war, Iraq may well remain a dangerous place for some time. It would be a mistake to replace the “overwhelming force” of the United States with the underwhelming force of the United Nations.
Handing Iraq over to the UN would mean bringing back into high influence Saddam Hussein’s closest international allies, France and Russia, the two countries which invested in the Saddam regime on the largest scale, supplied him with weapons and lent him money. Both countries agreed to the disarmament of Iraq under UN Resolution 1441, with its threat of “serious consequences”, then decided to veto the consequences when Iraq failed to disarm. They did not cause the war, but they did make it inevitable.
Saddam has comprehensively ruined Iraq, leaving behind huge debts which have been estimated at around £65 billion. This money was not spent on development, or for the benefit of the people of Iraq, but on weapons for the army, presidential palaces for the Saddam family and high living for the regime, including its security apparatus of torturers and murderers.
France and Russia, which supplied the arms, are no doubt among those with the largest holdings of Saddam’s debt. If the United Nations were responsible for reconstructing Iraq, France and Russia would be well placed to protect their financial interests. Each has a permanent seat on the Security Council; each has a veto. The American Administration would prefer to spend the money on the redevelopment of Iraq rather than on meeting the bills incurred by Saddam’s weapons programme.
Russia might hope to be forgiven. The main Russian support for the Iraqi regime goes back to the time of the Soviet Union, much of it even to the days of Leonid Brezhnev. In those days the two totalitarian dictatorships naturally made good friends for each other. But Brezhnev is long dead, as is the Soviet Union, and the world is a cleaner place for it. In the case of France, Saddam’s leading sponsor over the years has been Jacques Chirac. He is very much alive, and living in the Elysée.
If one asks whether the United States ought to hand over reconstruction to the UN, one should first look at President Chirac’s record over Iraq. One should also remember the record of Saddam Hussein himself: the wars, the massacres, the tortures, the megalomania, the grotesque self-indulgence, the hostages, the poison gas, the attempt to build a nuclear arsenal. All of these were well known to France. Such was the regime of which M Chirac was the cynical sponsor for nearly 30 years. No one can defend M Chirac who is not prepared to defend Saddam as well.
William Shawcross last night presented his film, J’Accuse Jacques, on Channel 4. He recounted how M Chirac, as Prime Minister of France in 1975, greeted Saddam, then the Vice-President of Iraq. At the banquet, he called Saddam “a personal friend and a great statesman”. M Chirac agreed to sell Iraq arms worth billions of pounds and a new fast-breeder reactor. Saddam himself claimed that “the agreement with France is the very first concrete step towards production of the Arab atomic bomb”. So it would have been if the Israelis, with admirable foresight, had not bombed the reactor in 1981. Since that banquet France has sold something like £13 billion of arms to Iraq. Those are the weapons the Americans have had to destroy in two Gulf wars.
Between these two wars, France repeatedly intervened on Saddam’s behalf in the UN Security Council. These French interventions had the effect of undermining the work of the inspectors of that time. France’s reward was to become the largest exporter to Iraq, selling £428 million in 2001, despite the existence of UN sanctions. In this period, the French resistance to UN disarmament of Iraq was motivated by commercial advantage, for France had been a huge provider of arms. It is difficult to believe that President Chirac, who was prepared to help Saddam to create an Arab atomic bomb in 1975, was altruistically concerned with helping the UN inspectors in 2003.
The United States respects the humanitarian side of the work of the United Nations, and would welcome the UN as a humanitarian partner. But one has to face reality. France torpedoed American efforts to deal with the problems of Iraq’s disarmament. The result was that America has had to fight another Gulf war, costing about $100 billion (£65 billion) and some casualties, when they thought that they had dealt with the matter 12 years ago. Americans feel that M Chirac stabbed them in the back. They are not going to ask him to do so again. That is not the American way.
Another part of modern reality is that electronic eavesdropping means that both the Americans and the French — and the British for that matter — know almost everything about each other’s secret diplomacy. Every telephone call between Paris and Baghdad, every currency transfer by Elf Acquitaine, will be monitored by the CIA in Langley, Virginia. Modern nations do not have to guess what each other’s dealings and motives are. As never before every telephone call, every electronic message, might just as well be broadcast to the world. Indeed, if it were broadcast, that would only mean that it would be less believed. The Americans know that M Chirac double-crossed them over Resolution 1441; they know every detail of how and why he did it; they know what it has cost them in money and in lives. They will shake hands at photo opportunities; they will play the Marseillaise; they will drink toasts in mediocre champagne at diplomatic dinners; but they will be slow to forgive and they will never forget.
For the present, that is just as well. Having failed to disarm Iraq for 12 years, ending with the fiasco of the volte-face over Resolution 1441, the UN does not have the capacity, the self-confidence or the unity to take the decisions that will soon be required. The UN is far from useless; it is the best UN we have got. But it has always been like Shakespeare’s proverbial cat, “letting I dare not wait upon I would”. Reconstructing Iraq will not be a job for the fainthearted.
The objective is agreed, Everyone wants, or professes to want, an independent democracy. Unfortunately, Iraq is divided into three major religious or ethnic groups: the Arab Shias, the Kurds, and the Arab Sunnis. This pattern is even more complicated than that, including groups such as the Turkomans, who are small in numbers but have the influence of being ethnically linked to Turkey.
If the new democratic constitution were to be based on the Westminster model, it would produce an overwhelming Shia majority, which might itself be dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. That would be unacceptable to the Kurds and Sunnis, who between them make up about a third of the population. Some combination of regional government, plus proportional representation, might provide a viable democratic constitution.
Turkey, which is the nearest there is to a working democracy in a Middle Eastern Islamic country, depends on the army as the ultimate national institution. Iraq’s democracy will only succeed, or survive, if it can command the loyalty of whatever army emerges after the war has been won and lost. Yet winning the war will itself destroy the existing Iraqi army, which was hopelessly corrupted by Saddam Hussein. The conditions for reconstruction include democracy, the support of Islam, a place for the Kurds and the Sunnis, as well as the Shias, and the loyalty of the army. That is quite a Rubik’s Cube for an American general to solve.
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