Endgames and Engagement by Alan Koenig

The  neoconservative project of an externally imposed revolution on Iraq partially derailed last November. After attempting to implement a jiggered caucus plan so complex that not even members of the Coalition Provisional Authority could explain it, the Bush administration was humiliatingly forced to abandon its transitional scheme when the Shiite Cleric, Ayatollah Sistani, mobilized tens of thousands of Iraqi demonstrators against it. Thus ended an effort to engender a democracy primarily on the terms of the Bush administration, a contradiction in theory because democracy, by definition, implies uncertainty of outcomes, [i] but empirically possible to the extent that the entire transition process, as well as the resulting constitutional-electoral regime, could have been managed.  No longer. The handover to a “sovereign” government, to take place on June 30^th of this year, is in legalistic freefall. Lacking procedural options to insure legitimacy, the United States government has defaulted, kicking down the process to its appointed Iraqi Governing Council, a deeply fractious and inefficient body of dubious legitimacy, which however, is moving towards increased autonomy. What should the response of the Left be to a titanic  neoconservative project stumbling towards a return to Iraqi sovereignty?

 

To paraphrase Professor Andrew Arato in last year’s issue of Constellations: discrediting the neoconservative project, however satisfying, must take a backseat to the contributions the Left can make, in however small a way, to the possible freedoms for Iraqis, especially should significant political forces within the US, the UN and Europe unite on key issues. Very true. We can not afford to stand back and pat ourselves in pious impotence when the stakes are the lives and welfare of 23 million Iraqis.

 

In examining a Leftist engagement in Iraqi reconstruction, it is first worthwhile to survey the Bush administration’s errors in preparing for the aftermath of the war, to briefly limn the self-imposed obstacles that caused the project to trip. 

              

The lack of focus on endgames in military engagements, on a transitional process for state formation, can be seen within the Bush administration as early as the war in Afghanistan. Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, delivers the following anecdote from National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice about events on October 4th, 2001, after CIA teams have already infiltrated Northeastern Afghanistan, Special Forces were poised in Uzbekistan and the start of the bombing campaign just three days away. Woodward writes:

              

As for post-Taliban Afghanistan, Wolfowitz and Rice talked about getting other countries to put up money for rebuilding.

“Who will run the country?” Bush asked.

We should have addressed that, Rice thought. Her most awful moments were when the president thought of something that the principals, particularly she, should have anticipated. No one had a real answer, but Rice was beginning to understand that that was the critical question. Where were they headed? [ii]

 

It is depressing not only that amid all the foreign policy expertise arrayed in preparation for the war that it was Bush who first broached these concerns, but also revealing in that the President had not yet, at that point, signed on to a more neoconservative policy of democratic transformation and expansion. In many respects the Bush administration lucked out with their selection of a minor Pashtun Warlord named Hamid Karzai, a CIA asset so smooth that he also possessed good contacts with the Iranians and Russians, a candidate of nigh universal acclaim. Karzai and his coterie however, remain small and precious, and state consolidation in Afghanistan is arduous, fraught and lengthy.

 

Sadly enough, after the lessons of Afghanistan the Bush administration was deeply divided and negligent in preparing for the aftermath and state transition of Iraq. This was due in part to the relatively small size of the militant visionaries who so forcefully promoted the war. For lack of a better term, the neoconservative faction arrayed within the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President was outnumbered by the more realpoltik practitioners within the State Department and the CIA and the military professionals within the Pentagon. They held less turf but once the war was underway it was more vitally positioned. As a result there were at least two competing offices focused on transition and reconstruction within the US government, a more inclusive, deep and thorough one done under the State Department, the Free Iraq Project (Laith Kubba, Kanan Makiya, Dr. Andrew Erdmann, Richard Haas ) and a second more covert one closer to the heart of the administration under the office of Special Plans, run by Douglas Feith. The primary effort of the Free Iraq Project got strangled in internecine fighting, according to a PBS Frontline interviews with Kanan Makiya, retired General Jay Garner, and former State Departement official Richard Haas, leaving behind an Office of Special Plans that proved to be woefully unprepared. Garner was ordered by Donald Rumsfeld to ignore the State Department’s recommendations [iii] and shelve all the months of hard work by exiles and academics put forward in the Future of Iraq Project.

 

The more Panglossian perspective on reconstruction that won this turf war had its roots in the neoconservative belief that occupation would not be a major task. Once the venomously corrupt Baathist regime was removed, the thinking went, a civil society, political institutions, and free market would organically rise and consolidate. The Occupation’s efforts to midwife democracy would be minimal and security concerns and a decent democratic government should be manageable. Among the many, Project For a New American Century proposals and Weekly Standard articles to this effect, William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan’s “The War Over Iraq” stands as a nicely synoptic and exoteric example of this estimate. In the book they put forth early last year we read the following:

 

The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though the UN, European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops [still waiting for that Arab component], the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 US troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn to several thousand soldiers after a year or two. After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied installing a decent democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States. [iv]

 

Though of course lowballing it for the rhetorical benefit of their home base, the above estimate hints of an ideological unpreparedness for the true cost of occupation. A drawdown in American troop strength though now desirable domestically, in removing an American face to Occupation, can’t be done without other substantive security arrangements. The “Iraqification” of the security situation has yet to bear military results; indeed the numbers of allegedly available Iraqi security forces have swollen to the point where it is bizarre that they are so ineffective. In early September, Rumsfeld declared there were 55,000 Iraqis in security forces with another 50,000 planned for 2004. Then in November the numbers suddenly doubled. More than 100,000 Iraqi troops are supposedly available today, with another 100,000 coming by next summer. Security arrangements vis-à-vis the US military and the Interim government were supposed to be resolved by the IGC in later February, but realizing that they lacked legitimacy to decide such a volatile issue for a truly sovereign government, the council with little American press coverage simply passed on the issue. 

 

Throughout the planning stages and early into reconstruction, presuppositions of an organic democracy that lay just below the rotted surface of the decaying Baathist regime and the quick formation of a new state retarded real institution-building. Jay Garner, shortly after assuming command of the quickly defunct Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, convened a council of prominent political actors in an auditorium in Bagdhad. Queried by the audience as to who was in charge, who would administer services and provide security, Garner responded to the audience that it was their responsibility, they were in charge, an overture that met with widespread incredulity and derision. The lack of security planning was well evidenced in Donald Rumsfeld’s frighteningly glib response to the mass outbreak of looting: “This is what freedom’s all about. Some choices are bad.” The emphasis on the ease of it all shows a fundamental failure to grasp the deep institutional basis required for well-functioning democracies, has hamstrung the Administration's democratizing efforts and deflated much of the neocon agenda. As Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, recently told the NYTimes, “There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee.”

 

The initial Bush reconstruction plans for Iraq have faltered in the economic realm as well. Joseph Stiglitz and other critics have well illustrated the many pitfalls of shock therapy in Eastern European transitions and the perils of foisting similar plans onto the fragile Iraqi economy: As Stiglitz has noted, in Eastern Europe: “Shock-therapy countries saw incomes plunge and poverty soar. Social indicators, such as life expectancy, mirrored the dismal GDP numbers. More than a decade after the beginning of the transition, many post-communist countries have not even returned to pre-transition income levels. Worse, the prognosis for establishing a stable democracy and the rule of law in most shock-therapy countries looks bleak.” Perhaps fortunately then, the Bush administration's economic proposals cannot be implented under present security conditions and with so much constitutional uncertainty. When members of the IGC traveled to Dubai to announce that Iraq would open all sectors of its economy to foreign investement except oil, US Treasury John Snow sounded a sour note in stressing that Iraq must become far more secure to attract investment. ``Capital is a coward,'' Snow said in a luncheon speech after he met in the morning with al-Gailani. ``It doesn't go places where it feels threatened.'' [v]

 

American companies without massive logistic contracts, like Bechtel and Halliburton, are unwilling to invest without suitable insurance to cover their losses to violence or in the event that the successor government re-nationalizes or renegotiates the service or sector in which they operate. Private insurance companies like Marsh & McLennan in which Paul Bremer was a former executive shy away from such risks and such cost, so it falls to the US Taxpayer funded Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to guarantee insurance and loans. Treasury-protected American firms with government-backed loans are not what competitive free market zones are all about, and must look deeply suspicious to a truly sovereign government interested in developing local industries and markets. Capital is a coward not only for security matters but legal-bureuacratic reasons of contract enforcement and sector regulation. Quick privatization therefore, is unlikely to attract much foreign capital, leaving available assets to be bought up by entrpreneurial elites who have thrived under Baathism. As Joseph Stiglitz has remarked on the the potential of Iraqi Shock Therapy,“If prospects are as dismal as my analysis suggests, international contributions to the US-driven reconstruction effort is likely to be little more than money flushed down the drain.”

 

And so, where does the Left go from here? The following cursory proposals are efforts towards normative proscriptions, but they also sit on the cusp of what Steven M. Levine, in this panel discussion, has called the “heavy realpolitik” of the present: the intense strategic interplays between major Iraqi political actors (Sistani, Kurdish factions and the CPA) and the diminishing authority of the CPA (poor Paul Bremer). Perhaps we on the panel can discuss some of these proscriptions from a dual focus of the normative and the necessary. They range from simple, but overlooked aspects of constititionalism to Leftist critiques and counterproposals of shock therapy.

 

Leftist counter-proposals to shock therapy and open markets in Iraq, notably in a corruption-ridden country that has yet to establish a legal code, might be to follow some of the more proven neo-Keynesian policies used by the Newly Industrialized Countries of Asia in the '80’s and '90’s, specifically policy loans. Policy loans are dedicated to those specific sectors or industries, deemed worthy of national development, and provided lower rates than subsidized bank loans. Such a prescription would allow the state to develop the domestic market and push the export sector. Given the many economic pathologies and imbalances of oil mono-industries throughout the Mid-East, a Left project on diversifying the Iraqi economy for comparative advantage could utilize Leftist expertise on economic transitions and sustainable industries. Many economists have noted the lack of regional Arab light-industries and informatics (that is, computer and software sectors). The realpolitk question is how to reach out to an Iraqi entrepreneurial class that shares a similar vision.

 

As advocated by Andrew Arato, many of the electoral concerns could be adressed by the convention of a Constitutional Round Table: A constitutional assembly with a built-in, iron-clad expiration date to both ratify a new constitution--working off the interim document signed earlier this month--and to shepard general elections for a bicameral legislature as soon as possible. Bicameral to ensure minority rights (a sticking point with the Kurds, Sunni and Turcomen), a Senate-like structure with representation based on the existing governates.

 

The present IGC could be rolled into this entity, especially if it were to expand to 100 members, to ensure some aspect of legal continuity, as recognized by the UN under Security Council Resolution 1511 (point 3). The difficulty in advancing this larger, more inclusive, far more legitimate body would be in the nomination and selection of its remaining 75 members. Agreement on who best represents the many factions, ethnicities and parties could be left to the IGC if it was assured freedom from CPA meddling. Since Sistani’s mass demonstrations some of the IGC’s recent actions have shown increasing autonomy from the CPA, not always in ways that those concerned about women’s rights will appreciate.

 

The last proposal, only partially applicable to Iraq, is for an expansion of Joseph Nye’s soft power in combating, in the words of Joschka Fischer, “Islamist Totalitarianism.” Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. Attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.

 

Attraction depends on credibility, something recent Bush administration propaganda campaigns aimed at the Middle East clearly lack.

 

Rumsfeld and the more deranged hawks within the administration have long sneered at this tool of foreign policy and the Bush administration as a whole has poorly utilized it, as evidenced by ineptly executed initiatives ranging from Charlotte Beers advertising campaigns to promote America to the Muslim world to the sporadic funding of moderate Iraqi political parties. A more Leftist engagement could take form along educational lines similar to the stifled proposal of Senator Joseph Biden, to fund a thousand schools in Afghanistan at the cost of twenty thousand dollars per school, a piddling twenty million dollars that offered substantive results. The Left, with its familiarity with NGO’s, humanitarian efforts and claims of a deeper commitment to multilateralism, would also be well suited to enlist in the Lockean clash of ideas with Islamic totalitarianism already underway. These efforts would be similar to the gentle promotion of reform and democratic advocacy promoted by Arthur Schlesinger in “The Vital Center,” his 1949 analysis of how to fight the Stalinist threat.  The Cultural Cold War brought forth the Congress of Cultural Freedom and many of its efforts were worthwhile. The funding of intellectual fora, social democratic parties and publications, cultural events, and artists could be replicated as an instrument within a new framework. More in the vein, hopefully, of Kanan Makiya, Salman Rushdie, and the Saudi dissident Mansour Al-Nogaidan than Daniel Pipes.