Remora

One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.

However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge. The history of the No Fly Zone in Northern Iraq is a case in point. It is also a case that should receive more attention. If we want a picture of the forces with which the American occupiers of Iraq would be contending, it is a good idea to look at a genuine slice of the post-Saddam countryside.

Susan Graham-Brown gives us a nice potted history of the decisions that led to the No Fly Zone on the globalpolicy site There was no consideration of the the need for democracy in Bush the first's order that American aircraft purge Northern Iraq of Saddam Hussein's military. It was, rather, a response to the refugee problem:

"
The original northern no-fly zone was first declared by President George Bush in early April 1991 to protect coalition aircraft during the airdrops of aid to Kurdish refugees on the Turkish border and then to protect coalition ground troops advancing into northern Iraq as part of Operation Provide Comfort. This action, Britain, France and the US asserted, was taken under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 688, which called on Iraq to cease repression of its civilian population. However no explicit endorsement in the form of a Security Council resolution was obtained for either Operation Provide Comfort, or the no-fly zone.

"When coalition ground troops were withdrawn, the no-fly zone was left in place, ostensibly to "protect"
the Kurds and the international humanitarian workers based in the north. After the Iraqi government decided, in October 1991, to withdraw its ground troops -- and all funding -- from the three northern governorates, the region came under Kurdish control but had no formalized status. It was part of Iraq but not under government control. The no-fly zone and the presence of international humanitarian staff may have deterred the Iraqi regime from trying to retake the northern region, but as a protection mechanism it has had considerable limitations."

So, a decision in one context, of military and political action, leads to a situation that was not planned -- the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein's power from the three northern governorates. For the first time since the end of World War I, the inhabitants of Northern Iraq are liberated from the governance of the Arabic south. What happened?

There's a nice story of democracy, free markets, and prosperity that is commonly retailed in the media. However, the real story is more complicated, and involves armed factions, smuggling, and unsavory alliances. In 1996, when the Free Fly Zone suddenly hit the news again, this is how David Plotz summarized the recent history of Northern Iraq:


"The United States, France, Britain, and Turkey delivered humanitarian aid, established a no-fly zone, and pressured Hussein to withdraw from Kurdish territory. With Western help, the Kurds elected a Parliament in 1992. Based in Irbil, the Parliament split evenly between the KDP and the PUK.

Democracy didn't last. With no Iraqis to fight, the Kurds turned on each other. Civil war broke out in 1994, and more than 2,000 Kurds were killed before the United States brokered a peace in 1995. That peace collapsed this summer. The PUK helped Iran conduct an incursion into northern Iraq. Barzani's KDP, in turn, asked for Hussein's help (even though Hussein had slaughtered thousands of Barzani's supporters during the 1980s). Hussein accepted the invitation. On Aug. 31, 30,000 Iraqi troops and thousands of KDP fighters drove the PUK from Irbil. This raid inspired United States cruise-missile strikes on southern Iraq. After securing Irbil, Barzani's men quickly routed the PUK from its other strongholds. Talabani fled to the Iran border, and the PUK is all but defunct. Barzani insists that he's not Hussein's puppet, and that Iraqi troops have withdrawn to the south. But Hussein's secret police have settled in; the Kurdish Parliament has collapsed; and experts doubt that the KDP can resist Iraqi bullying."

Well, experts were wrong. Not only did the KDP and the PUK resist Hussein's bullying -- with a little help from their friends in the sky, raining down bombs -- but the fighting between them trickled off. Which isn't to say that there isn't still a great deal of factional struggle. For the latest news on Kurdistan, in fact, there's no better place to go than to Kurdistan Observer, and even a glance at its contents tells you that fraternity has made considerable inroads on hostility since 1996. But our point is that the supposed moral front, which is aglow with the idea of a democratic Iraq growing under the benign eye of an American governor, is fantastically different from the patchwork of conflict and compromise that appears in the only post-Saddam Iraq we know. And that is going to only increase when the Ba'athist structure collapses. The best "solution" is for the Iraqi peoples to have control over that collapse, rather than have it micro or macromanaged by Americans. This will turn out not to be a solution at all -- it is LI's idea that all solutions are Final Solutions. Solutions are about death -- in living societies, they just don't happen.