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PIPES' LINE
A weekly column by Daniel
Pipes, President George W Bush's controversial
appointment to the board of directors of the federally
funded United States Institute for Peace.
The case for
'Iraqification'
Stay the course
- but change the course. That was the meaning of the
sudden, sharp and understated change in Washington's
Iraq policy last week.
After the American
civilian administrator of Iraq, L Paul Bremer, made a
hurried visit to the White House, President George W
Bush said that he wants "the Iraqis to be more involved
in the governance of their country" and offered some
ideas toward that end. Two days later, the Iraqi
Governing Council announced that the formal occupation
of Iraq would end by June 2004, becoming at that time a
mere "military presence".
Ambitious plans for an
early constitution have now been shunted aside; instead,
reports the Associated Press, Bremer will "name an
interim Iraqi leader with authority to govern the
country until a constitution can be written and
elections held". The military will be "Iraqified". The
new emphasis is less on establishing a Jeffersonian
democracy than on shifting power and responsibility to
Iraqis, and doing so pronto.
This welcome shift
marks a victory for the Defense Department's realism and
a defeat for the State Department's dreamy hope (as the
Wall Street Journal puts it) "to re-create the
Philadelphia of 1787 in Baghdad".
Sure, it would
be wonderful if Americans and Britons could, in
leisurely fashion, educate Iraqis in the fine arts of
governance. But Iraqis are not children eager to learn
from Western instructors. They are proud of their
history, defiant toward the outside world, suspicious of
Anglo-Americans, and determined to run their own
country. Attempts to tutor them will surely fail.
Iraqi today is deeply dissimilar to Germany or
Japan post-1945, primarily because a very different
equation exists:
Germans and Japanese were each defeated as a people,
ground down by a multi-year total war, and so they
accepted the remake of their societies and cultures. In
contrast, Iraqis emerged almost unscathed from a
three-week war designed not to harm them. Feeling
liberated more than defeated, Iraqis are in no mood to
be told what to do. They take what serves them from the
occupation and fend off, through violence and other
forms of resistance, what does not.
Conversely, not having gone through a long and
brutal war with Iraqis, Americans display limited
concern about the future course of Iraq.
In
brief, Iraqi determination is much greater than that of
the occupiers, severely limiting what the latter can
accomplish.
Washington's sensible new approach
is in keeping with my call in April 2003 for a
"politically moderate but operationally tough ...
democratically-minded Iraqi strongman", as well as my
recommendation to let Iraqis run Iraq.
That's
not to say that I want American, British, Polish,
Italian and other troops to abandon the country; no,
they must remain but limit themselves to a lesser role:
Presence: Boots on the city streets should be Iraqi,
not foreign. Remove coalition forces from the inhabited
areas, transferring them to the deserts (which are ample
in Iraq).
Power: Guarantee borders, oil and gas lines, and the
government in Baghdad. Hunt down Saddam Hussein and his
henchmen. Otherwise, Iraqis should maintain order.
Decisions: Let Iraqis make internal decisions
(security, finances, justice, education, religion, etc),
keeping only foreign and defense policy in coalition
hands.
Iraqis should - with only distant
coalition oversight - be given the chance to make a go
of it on their own. When a government has proven itself
over an extended period, it deserves full sovereignty.
Should things go wrong, those troops in the desert can
always intervene.
And, make no mistake,
Iraqification offers ample opportunity for things to go
wrong. The Iraqi record of self-rule over the past 70
years has been disastrous; realistically, we must expect
the future leadership to be less than exemplary. But so
long as it poses no danger to the outside world nor
brutalizes its own population, that should be
acceptable, for Americans and Britons gave their lives
in the spring war less to fix Iraq than to protect their
own countries.
Iraq is not likely to serve the
Muslim world as a model of democracy any time soon. But
if the Bush administration stays the course with its
excellent new policy, a new Iraqi government has the
chance of developing over years and perhaps decades into
a decent country with an open political process,
successful economy and flourishing culture.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is
director of the Middle East Forum and author of
Militant Islam Reaches America (W W Norton).
(Copyright 2003, Daniel Pipes)
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