Thinking the Unthinkable: Iraq

How the U.S. can pull out of Iraq and that country might actually do O.K.

Prelude.

Before starting, we must remember that the horse has likely already left the barn. The Bushwhackers have messed Iraq up so royally that is probably impossible to save Iraq from its worst nightmares.

Alas, it is unlikely that the Bush League will abandon their war goals -- even though that abandonment is absolutely necessary to my plan working. Rigidity is their strong suit. In addition, the Cheney gang is too busy building for a war against Iran to even think about changing the war goals.

Even though I can't read their "minds," I use the economists' "revealed preference" technique* to interpret those goals as being:

(1) getting and keeping strategic control over Iraqi oil; and

(2) having permanent military bases in Iraq to "project power" over the entire Middle East. (The latter represents a second major military presence, in addition to that of that U.S. loyal ally, Israel.)

My guess is that the Bushies have already likely gave up on the idea of helping their friends (Halliburton, etc.) make gigantic profits -- because those profits are likely very small nowadays. But they are unlikely to give up on these big two. If they want to have just a little bit of law and order in Iraq, they'll have to do so.

As I've said before in my e-mail rantings, Iraq is like a monkey trap: the hunter catches the monkey because it (the simian, not the hunter) reaches into the coconut to get the food and is unwilling to release the food in order to make its paw small enough to exit the coconut. The hunter has chained the coconut down, creating the trap. As with all analogies, this one is not totally accurate: there is no "hunter." Our Fearless Leaders created their own monkey trap. However, if Osama had any dreams before 911, they likely included the creation of such a trap.

Fugue.

But what's my plan? In case you forgot it in the middle of my ramblings, I was proposing a plan to allow the U.S. to quickly pull out of Iraq while allowing that country to do O.K.

The plan first involves giving up on the whole idea establishing capitalism (what the Bushies call "democracy") in Iraq in the immediate-to-intermediate future.

Creating capitalism not possible without a sustained regime of law and order. Capitalism and markets cannot prevail without secure property rights and a general atmosphere of trust. So much Rumsfeldian "stuff" has "happened" that Iraq has become a poster child for the Hobbesian war of each against all.

What the U.S. elite needs to do is to establish feudalism. So my plan should be dubbed "Operation Iraqi Feudalism." (The government won't have to change their operation's initials. They can continue to use the same luggage, etc., without changing the monogram.)

When feudalism arose in Western Europe, it was a natural-seeming (decentralized) outcome of the collapse of the Roman Empire and a long series of wars, civil wars, "barbarian" invasions, and the like.** For Iraq, however, feudalism would have to be feudalism imposed from above.

1. The U.S. power elite has to get rid of Maliki and the current Iraqi "government." The U.S. has to rule with raw power rather than hiding behind the fig-leaf of Iraqi "rule." This presents a real problem with legitimation with U.S. taxpayers, for sure. But it probably wouldn't make any difference to Iraqis. They know what's happening in their country. They know who's really in power (to the extent that the U.S. actually has power).

2. The U.S. leaders have to create power "on the ground." This creates the basis for local law and order, which in turn can eventually allow the creation of a central state. Here, following the late political economist Max Weber, a state monopolizes the generally-accepted use of force within a geographical area. My plan starts with mini-states (fiefdoms) and then hopes to create a centralized state to impose law and order on the country-wide level.

A. First, the U.S. has to use information that it should have collected a long time ago. That is, they needed to break Iraq into a large number of districts -- as small as possible. Next, the Bushwhackers -- or their "think" tanks -- have figure out which military or paramilitary group has the most power in that area.

Both military power and issues of legitimacy have to be considered, but if it's a toss-up, it's the ability to use force that's more crucial to the creation of law and order.

B. Then, the U.S. must turn local power to the most powerful group in each district. That group could be parts of the official Iraqi army; it could be "death squads"; it could be Saddamite dead-enders; and it could even be allied with "al Qaeda in Iraq" (if that organization really exists).

However, foreign groups -- including the U.S. armed forces, what's left of the so-called "coalition of the willing," and the actual "al Qaeda in Iraq" -- would be excluded from this role. Law and order must be created by Iraqis, even if they do not live up the exalted moral standards that we in the "West" claim to believe in. After all, the point is to give Iraq back to the Iraqis.

C. If possible, larger districts could be built out of the smaller ones, so that it's not just a matter of a large number of fragmented districts of an equal size. But these larger districts should not be designed with the current provincial system in mind. It should be built from the bottom up, because that's what's most likely to create and maintain law & order within each district as soon as possible. The larger provinces are abstractions, not realities.

3. The leaders of these military organizations should then be named as rulers -- dictators -- of their districts. They could be called "barons" (or whatever the Arabic term for "baron" is). They might be given hereditary office -- to honor classic European feudalism -- but that wouldn't matter in practice. After all, it's only the more powerful and effective barons who would be able to pass their power down to their offspring.

One difference with classic W. European feudalism is that I am not suggesting that serfdom should be recreated. However, it's quite likely that everyday Iraqis will surrender their rights (in land, etc.) to their local baron in return for military/police/mafia-style protection (against other barons, bandits, etc.) That looks a lot like serfdom. But it's hard to believe that it's worse than the current situation that Iraqi peasants and workers face now.

Serfdom might be recreated -- but only in some districts. Just as European feudalism, there would be a tremendous amount of variation between areas. The greater amount of individual freedom in some districts might inspire people in other districts to fight for their democratic rights.

4. The central parliament should be replaced with a council of barons. That would be responsible for managing the collective interests of the entire Iraqi state. It's sometimes forgotten that such councils existed in the Western European version of feudalism and often played a significant role. (That's where that stuff about the "First Estate," the "Second Estate," etc. came from. The feudal classes had political organizations.)

5. The U.S. should then appoint strongest baron in the land as the king. In the feudal era, the kings often took on the name "Caesar," trying to dress up as Roman emperors. So maybe the new Iraqi King should be called "the Saddam" -- or "the Bush." If the king is a Shi'ite, of course, the king would not be a Saddam. He wasn't their idol.

The king should be given control over all of the U.S. military bases, the Green Zone, and other properties that the U.S. has stolen from Iraq. This would establish the kind of system that prevailed under European feudalism -- with the king as the biggest baron. It would also bias the system toward the creation of a more centralized system (under the king's thumb, natch).

In general, having an uneven distribution of territories and power among the barons (including the king) would create more possibilities for the creation of a country-wide coalition to impose law and order. In plain but purple prose, if there is a small number of Big Barons, it's easier to come to a compromise and form a real centralized state.

6. As noted, the U.S. should forget about controlling Iraqi oil. Instead, oil revenues should be distributed to each Iraqi citizen in equal amounts, after taking about 1/2 to finance the Saddam's new Iraqi government. (This is the plan actually used with Alaska oil revenues.)

Also, such things as the power grid should be turned over to the new central government and its
king. Anything that must be under centralized control should be centralized, if possible.

Will this work in practice? No. The distribution of oil revenue and the electricity will continue to be severely disrupted.

But the centralized political organizations -- the council of barons, the king's bureaucracy -- would have some incentive to end this dislocation. If they have enough power to move toward the creation of centralized state power, they can institute the oil revenue plan and the like. They'll likely skim off a lot of revenues for themselves, but having the "Alaska" oil plan in place would create a precedent in the popular mind that would limit the corruption a little.

In the end, only the Iraqi people can make things right. But for this to happen, the country first needs law and order to prevail from border to border.

7. After creating the barons, the king, and the Alaska plan precedent, the U.S. should pull its troops out completely and as quickly as possible. The current civil war might intensify for awhile. However, the speed of this intensification might actually be slower than nowadays.

There would be a lot of population movement between districts, along with ethnic cleansing and similar disgusting phenomena. Life will continue to be nasty, brutish, and short. For quite a while, just as many Iraqis would die per month as are doing so nowadays.

There would be a multi-sided war as the various barons fight with each other, but the king -- or some new king -- would eventually become the hegemon as exhaustion set in. In sum, Iraq would recapitulate the bloody history that European feudalism went through. Unfortunately for Iraq, they won't be able to conquer other parts of the world (the way Europe did) to exploit them and to moderate its transition process.

Whoever the king is, he (or she?) would likely end up being as bloody-minded as Saddam was. However, it's got to be remembered that the kings who created our beautiful "modern" nation-states were exactly the same way. They used an iron fist to create their nations. Absolutist kings such as the French Sun King were no pussycats. They ruled with fire and iron.

Then, Iraqis would have to struggle to establish a full-scale state of the modern sort, i.e., one that monopolizes the means of violence within the country. Then democracy or capitalism could be established (or an unstable combination of both). As noted, both of these would be extremely hard to establish under current conditions. "Extremely" seems an understatement in this context.

8. The international relations piece of this puzzle would be exceedingly sticky. Kurdistan would want to split off. Turkey would invade. Etc., etc., etc.

I guess that the solution would be for the U.S. to guarantee Iraqi borders: the country is not allowed to split up and other countries are not allowed to invade. This seems quite unlikely, since it goes totally against the U.S. imperialist grain. However, the U.S. owes Iraq a lot.

In addition, the U.S. should try to limit the flow of arms into that country. That would speed up
the end of the civil wars and help create a unified power.

This may be one of those cases where "if wishes were SUVs, homeless folks would waste gasoline" cases. We cannot assume that the U.S. will do the right thing. But in most cases, the U.S. elite has the incentive to preserve national boundaries. There are other incentives that can undermine that one, of course. But I can't see what they are, once the rest of the plan is followed.

Coda.

Of course, the whole plan is extremely unlikely. However, the situation in Iraq is so bad that neither W nor Hillary will be able to fix it the way they'd like to. The results are likely to be even
worse -- and more expensive -- than under my plan.

As usual, I would enjoy hearing from the experts on this subject.

* That is, I look at what they do, not what they say. But it sounds better when draped in jargon, doesn't it?

** The word "barbarian" is in quotes because those folks have received a bad rap.