Bollettino

So somebody chose the new Iraqi P.M. – unless he is unchosen in the next couple of days. NPR’s Marketplace interviewed an American correspondent, just back from Iraq, who was uncharacteristically frank for an American correspondent. He said, briskly, that Allawi is hugely corrupt, and hugely unpopular.

LI, thinking about legitimacy, power, and the foundations of democracy, decided to search the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, a neo-con deal, for pointers. The new issue has an astonishing ratio of hot air to footnotes. The first article was a performance that would have earned a charitable C from yours truly, during our T.A.-ing years. It proclaimed that, if we don’t watch it, this might be the century of Anti-Americanism. The piece was almost entirely devoid of references, but these were made up for by that perpetual companion of buncombe, the passive voice. My hand got that red pencil urge, confronted with the ‘some have said”s and “there is now a consensus that”s strewn about the page. Among the murk, one thing was clear: anti-Americanism was anti-democratic. Also, mind you, anti-Jewish. Europeans, decadent ones, opinion leaders, were nourishing this anti-Americanism. The one actual person alluded to in the piece was, of course, Francis Fukuyama, that master of the unsupported generalization and the skewed statistic. Well, my surprise was mighty at seeing his name on the byline of the next article. The Journal of Democracy goes in for this kind of group-think, apparently.

So we stopped leafing through the Journal of Democracy. And started leafing through the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

There we read a charming review of a recent tempest in the teapot of Italian historiography. Robert Putnam, the man who wrote about bowling alone, wrote a book in 1993 about building democracy that praises the Italian city states for creating social capital through institutions that, in a sense, built the relationships that made trust possible. Or perhaps this is a relationship of mutual dependence – the relationships came with the trust, and the trust came with the relationships. In 1999, in the J.I.H., there was a symposium dedicated to pondering Putnam’s theses. Such is the stately, if not glacial, pace of academic pondering that Mark Jurdjevic, in the current issue, now reviews the reviewers in an article entitled, Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics.

There is some parallel between the happenings in Florence in 1370 and the happenings in Baghdad now. In Florence, there was a poisonous thirst for political position. Jockeying, disguised by appeals to the “natural rise” of this or that person or party, was fierce. The Italian city states dealt with the ambition partly by unloading the inevitable hostility on a third party: fortuna. Accident was a way of randomizing power. Nowhere was this done with such panache as in Venice. LI humbly urges the CPA, in its wisdom, to consider the way they used to elect council members in Venice:

Consider the safeguards against corruption employed in the Venetian electoral system. The Great Council lay at the heart of the Venetian electoral politics, administering 831 posts in the city and the terraferma. Membership was limited to patricians aged twenty-five and older and usually numbered around 1,000. Four nominating committees compiled lists of possible candidates, each of whom would be subject to a vote in the Council. To determine who the nominators would be, patricians filed past an urn that contained sixty gold balls, plus as many silver balls as were necessary to ensure one ball per patrician. Only those patricians who drew a gold ball were entitled to continue to the next electoral stage. Significantly, anyone in the family of someone who drew a gold ball was also disqualified from proceeding in the election. The sixty patricians who advanced filed past another urn, this time containing thirty-six gold balls and the requisite number of silver ones. The winners divided into four nominating committees and retreated to separate rooms to compose their lists.”
Unfortunately, the CPA’s proconsular tendencies aren’t mitigated by a sense of style so gaudy; these conquerors of Baghdad belong to less ornamental set. But they trust the electorate no more than the Venetian upper class. The conventional wisdom, in the States, is that we are over in Iraq to teach the people about democracy. But as St. Paul liked to say, we see now, as in a mirror, darkly. More bluntly, the conventional wisdom inverts the truth. The real lessons in democracy should be given, first, to Bremer’s set at the CPA, who seem only distantly aware of how the thing works, and definitely opposed to all of its distasteful products. In fact, we have never sent a single individual over there who has ever been elected to any office, including dog-catcher. The inevitable result: we have a bunch of people over there who don’t hesitate to game the justice system, ban papers, and try to game the very mechanism for choosing representatives. In other words, we’ve sent over your typical D.C. lobbyists, and asked them to create a democracy. They have as much chance of doing it as a spayed dog has of birthing pups.
…

Bollettino

Marc Reisner’s 1986 Cadillac Desert occupies a unique space in LI’s mental bookshelf. We first read that book in 1992. This was three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. C.D. caused a wall to fall in our own mind – essentially, C.D. destroyed our faith in the central tenet of what you might call the positive economic aspect of Marxism. That tenet, for one hundred years, had been that rationality in economics was the equivalent of finding a way to minimize the social cost of economic activity, which in turn required government planning. No book that we have ever read has presented a more scathing picture of the largescale effects of government planning. If you read, say, interviews with Hayek, the man whose life work was devoted to attacking central planning, you will find that he retained the 20th century’s touching faith in the government’s ability to engineer the environment. Hayek expressly approved of such government programs as the dam building, largescale irrigation, and the lot. What C.D. did is put into question the results of those programs.

We are just beginning to understand those results. If presidential campaigns were truly about our real, long term problems, in 2000 Al Gore and George Bush would not only have mentioned Osama bin Laden at least once in their debates (did they? LI doesn’t have time to check), they would surely have talked, at length, about the disappearance of the Louisiana coast. We’ve already devoted several posts to this topic, and its multiple causes.

Another symptom of the coming of large scale environmental problems directly linked to the government’s engineering of the environment has been just over the horizon of visibility in the West. For the past five years, the West has suffered from a drought that could be more than a drought – it could be a change in the very equilibrium of the climate system in the West, a change to a much drier weather pattern. That would be eerily parallel to the beginning of C.D., which is a pondering of the end of the Anasazi Indian culture in the Southwest. That culture flourished over hundreds of years within a climate that favored agriculture – a climate that was suddenly transformed into a much drier climate.

Ed Quillen, in a retrospective review of C.D., quotes a marvelous paragraph from Reisner’s concluding chapter:

"We didn't have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did -- and successfully -- but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn't have to mine a hundred thousand years' worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V-8's. We didn't have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have forsworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farms conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau [of Reclamation] sells them water so cheaply they can't afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more....

"But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running; the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient it is that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams."

I do wonder how we will look back, in a hundred years time, at such social phenomena as Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the U.S., perched in the fastest growing desert – for deserts do grow with climate cycles – in the West. Surely the hunger for water, in the next decade, is going to make large scale water projects irresistible – like selling Alaskan water, or Canadian Water, to the Las Vegas or Phoenix municipalities. Mining water like that will extend the unsustainable project of maintaining millions of more people in a desert environment to which they refuse to adapt. At least the Anasazi worked, as well as they could, with what they knew. We don’t have that excuse.

Bollettino

Surely those who keep the institutional memory going in the Company are having a rush right now. The controversy around Chalabi is looking increasingly like a controversy that swirled around another Arab figure who briefly convinced an American government to back him, with the help of a story woven by entrenched D.C. honchos. This earlier character was named Nasser.

That Nasser met with the CIA and received CIA support for overthrowing pro-British King Farouk is a story that has been told by Miles Copeland, his CIA handler, in The Game of Nations and his autobiography (which LI has only read bits of, on the web. Like here). Perhaps the operative word isn’t really told – like a donut, a spook story is impossible to separate from its central hole. But Copeland has broadly hinted that the CIA was convinced that the American problem in the Middle East – the perennial tension between supporting Israel and acquiring the necessary amount of petroleum – could be alleviated by Nasser, who would quietly adopt an Israel friendly, or less unfriendly, policy.

Copeland should know, since he spread the story himself. It turned out to be not so. So much American cleverness in the Middle East turns out to be not so.

This isn’t to say that Chalabi has anything like Nasser’s weight as an important figure. Nasser’s constituency was, at the beginning, pretty much the whole Arab world; Chalabi’s, from the beginning to the end, has consisted of a demimonde of family and sleazy family retainers, and a vociferous neo-con lobbying group. As far as the Iraqis are concerned, Chalabi ranks, in popularity, below al-Sad’r, Saddam Hussein, and Darth Vader.

The interesting thing here is that the strategic agenda being pursued, in 1956 and in 2003, is the same. The public side of that agenda was about modernizing the Middle East –democratizing, globalizing, etc., etc. The essence of it, though, was to recreate Nixon’s tripartite structure in the Middle East, with Iraq taking the place of the Shah’s Iran.

Even this is quietly being abandoned. In 2004, as David Ignatius has pointed out in a recent column, the Sauds, far from being slightly shaken from their key position, have seen that position reinforced. In one sense, one wonders: did the Pentagon strategist seriously think they could shake the Saudis with… nothing? They were trying to send a message to Saudi Arabia, but a threat that is couched in terms of an irreality so gross and obvious is less a threat than a sign of weakness. One of the lessons of 9/11 is that the Saudi elite got away with it. Not that they planned it, but they certainly nurtured the ideology that created the hijackers, certainly conveyed the money to the people who paid them, and certainly put the safety of their own hegemony over any other consideration. In all of these things, they have been vindicated. I can’t remember where I ran across the description of Bush, in the week after 9/11, giving Pakistan “an offer it couldn’t refuse.” It made me laugh. Pakistan, after playing bagman for the Saudis, after constructing the Taliban, after mismanaging foreign loans to the extent that they were on the verge of serious IMF action, were given this offer: “here’s three billion dollars in aid, no questions asked.” Wow, I am sure they were all suitably awed by the display of American strength. So the “war on terrorism” that was, in part, a war of terrorists on the U.S., is being played out in two asymmetric parts. The terrorists are doing rather well, considering that they attacked the most powerful nation on earth. They continue to stage attacks, they repel the army of the nation in which they are encamped, and they can even afford to help their old patrons, the Taliban, in the Afghan guerilla war. Their collaborators, the Pakistani secret service and military, have once more managed to get the money flowing from America. And then there are the Saudis. Once again, we are depending on the Saud family to increase the supply of oil. Once again, we are scrambling around to make the Sauds happy.

Yes, but on the other side of the war on terrorism, Bush, having chosen not to fight the war on terrorism, is entangled in a war in Iraq that has everything to do with occupation and a strategy that should have been decorously strangled in the pages of Foreign Policy, rather than enacted in the deserts and the cities.

Kaus, a Republican who has to continually claim he’s a Democrat – it is part of his cred – has been harping for months that the Dem elders will replace Kerry. Kerry is, admittedly, a suck candidate. However, isn’t it about time for the GOP elders to look at Bush? He is not only a bad candidate, but a clear and present danger to some basic American interests that GOP elders should care about.

Bollettino

“I was expressing my aversion to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, "Why, what do you like, if you hate both disputes and whist?" – Horace Walpole


Indeed, after pouring out the vials about the War, I am feeling rather disgusted with dispute myself.

Walpole wrote this in a letter in the high summer of the enlightenment, visiting Paris in the summer of 1765. He professed to love France, but wished he could “wash it” – having a very Anglo Saxon aversion to filth. He was amused that the French were in the midst of one of their crazes, this one for things anglais – such as Hume, who was (much to Hume’s own surprise) being made much of. Walpole was the son of the Prime Minister who pretty much made Whiggism the cultural default in England; he was, therefore, naturally averse to Hume’s quirky toryism, and makes various catty remarks about his History in his letters. He is also shocked by the French licence in dispute. For instance, here he is dining with some of the nobility:

“The French affect philosophy, literature, and free-thinking: the first
never did, and never will possess me; of the two others I have long been
tired. Free-thinking is for one's self, surely not for society; besides
one has settled one's way of thinking, or knows it cannot be settled,
and for others I do not see why there is not as much bigotry in
attempting conversions from any religion as to it. I dined to-day with a
dozen _savans_, and though all the servants were waiting, the
conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than
I would suffer at my own table in England, if a single footman was
present.”

The concern for the footman is such an authentic English note that it is hard not to laugh – and Walpole, who was a sly correspondent, perhaps intended to raise that laugh. On the other hand, the concern with the moral well being of the servants, while having a conservative side, also has an egalitarian side – a concern for what the servants think. And there is the English sense of proportion. The sense of proportion is a sense for the frame of things, ossifying into a sense that the things and the frame under which they are perceived be so organically united that another frame, another perspective, is, trivially, perverse, and, persisted in, a sort of treason to nature:

“What strikes me the most upon the whole is, the total difference of
manners between them and us, from the greatest object to the least.
There is not the smallest similitude in the twenty-four hours. It is
obvious in every trifle. Servants carry their lady's train, and put her
into her coach with their hat on. They walk about the streets in the
rain with umbrellas to avoid putting on their hats; driving themselves
in open chaises in the country without hats, in the rain too, and yet
often wear them in a chariot in Paris when it does not rain. The very
footmen are powdered from the break of day, and yet wait behind their
master, as I saw the Duc of Praslin's do, with a red pocket-handkerchief
about their necks. Versailles, like everything else, is a mixture of
parade and poverty, and in every instance exhibits something most
dissonant from our manners. In the colonnades, upon the staircases, nay
in the antechambers of the royal family, there are people selling all
sorts of wares. While we were waiting in the Dauphin's sumptuous
bedchamber, till his dressing-room door should be opened, two fellows
were sweeping it, and dancing about in sabots to rub the floor.”

Dancing about in sabots! One can imagine Pasolini being utterly delighted by that image -- the Pasolini who signed off his darkest film, Salo, with the image of two fascist lads doing a brief two step. It would be interesting to compare Walpole’s letters from France – which were private letters to friends, but written with such talent that you know Walpole knew they would be passed around – with Voltaire’s letters from England – letters, of course, only formally, since they were meant to be chapters in a book. There is something so deeply, culturally foreign, to the Anglo, and eventually the American mind, to the kind of gesture implied by the servants dancing in their sabots. In Hume’s correspondence, which the invaluable Library of Liberty has put on line, there is a footnote about the Anglomania of the time that points to the other side of the story:

… the first Lord Holland [visited Paris about this time]. 'The French concluded that an Englishman of his reputation must be a philosopher, and must be admired. It was customary with him to doze after dinner, and one day at a great entertainment he happened to fall asleep. " Le voilà!" says a Marquis, pulling his neighbour by the sleeve, "Le voilà qui pense!"'

Although Hume was at political odds with Walpole – for interesting reasons that I’d like to get into some time – he shared the spirit of witty negligence out of which Walpole created his persona as letter writer. In 1765, Hume was earning a lot of money from the sale of his History. In fact, when his publisher urged him to write another volume, going from 1688 into the present, Hume made the classic reply: “I’m too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich” to attempt it.

1765 was a year before Hume’s quarrel with Rousseau. Hume’s reception in philosophic circles that were in love – love at a distance – with English liberty is a curious thing. At home, Hume was known for his partiality against the ‘friends of liberty’, as the inheritors of the Glorious Revolution liked to style themselves. It is easy to forget that Hume was a Scot. For him, the heirs of the Glorious Revolution were the presbytery. From that point of view, it is easy to see how he took a rather jaundiced view of the Puritans. Add to which the considerable part played in Hume’s life by the imp of the perverse. It isn’t that his skepticism wasn’t serious – Hume’s seriousness wasn’t serious. Which is why LI loves him.

Hume’s enjoyment of Paris was augmented by his sense that he was living at a cultural moment. Here is an extract from a letter to his friend, Strahan:

“…there is a general Tranquillity establishd in Europe2; so that we have nothing to do but cultivate Letters: There appears here a much greater Zeal of that kind than in England3; but the best & most taking works of the French are generally publishd in Geneva or Holland, and are in London before they are in Paris4…. I have not lost view of continuing my History6. But as to the Point of my rising in Reputation, I doubt much of it7: The mad and wicked Rage against the Scots, I am told, continues and encreases, and the English are such a mobbish People as never to distinguish. Happily their Opinion gives me no great Concern.8”

This was the era, you will remember, of the Scots favorites of George III. In consequence, the Scots were no favorites of the London mob. But otherwise, in Hume’s view, and the view of his friends like Smith and Robertson, civilization was undoubtedly improving. And, when one comes to think of it, the Scot in Hume would be much more at home in Paris, at this time, then the Briton in Walpole.

There’s a footnote in Hume’s correspondence that quotes that unutterably miserable traitor to the philosophe cause, Grimm. Grimm, in 1766, had not yet shown his true colors. However, he is a spiteful spirit, given to random malice. This is his Hume:

'M. Hume doit aimer la France; il y a requ l'accueil le plus distingué et le plus flatteur. Paris et la cour se sont disputé l'honneur de se surpasser….Ce qu'il y a encore de plaisant, c'est que toutes les jolies femmes se le sont arraché, et que le gros philosophe écossais s'est plu dans leur société. C'est un excellent homme que David Hume; il est naturellement serein, il entend finement, il dit quelquefois avec sel, quoiqu'il parle peu; mais il est lourd, il n'a ni chaleur, ni grace, ni agrément dans l'esprit, ni rien qui soit propre à s'allier au ramage de ces charmantes petites machines qu'on appelle jolies femmes.'

Walpole saw the sights in Paris. He saw the great monster of Gevaudan – an ‘absolute wolf” -- in Marie Antoinette’s corner of the palace. He liked Rousseau’s opera, and disliked the Italian. And the charmantes petites machines – Grimm is all over that phrase – took to Walpole, just as they had to Hume. The effect went to his head – just as it did with Hume. Here he is, revealing his success in another letter in January, 1766:

It would sound vain to tell you the honours and
distinctions I receive, and how much I am in fashion; yet when they come
from the handsomest women in France, and the most respectable in point
of character, can one help being a little proud? If I was twenty years
younger, I should wish they were not quite so respectable. Madame de
Brionne, whom I have never seen, and who was to have met me at supper
last night at the charming Madame d'Egmont's, sent me an invitation by
the latter for Wednesday next. I was engaged, and hesitated. I was told,
"Comment! savez-vous que c'est qu'elle ne feroit pas pour toute la
France?" However, lest you should dread my returning a perfect old
swain, I study my wrinkles, compare myself and my limbs to every plate
of larks I see, and treat my understanding with at least as little
mercy.
Walpole was famously ridden by gout, and one wonders how he managed to hobble around Paris so much. But he did.


I find no mention in his letters from that time of Adam Smith. But, by coincidence, Smith was also visiting Paris in 1765 – and warning his intimate friend Hume not to settle there:

'A man is always displaced in a forreign Country ... They [the French]-live in such large societies, and their affections are dissipated amongst so great a variety of objects, that they can bestow but a very small share of them upon any individual.'

On that note, let’s end this little divertimento.

Bollettino

The good news is that LI appears to be wrong about the neo-con support for Chalabi. We misread the appointment of Chalabi’s nephew as the chief prosecutor of Saddam Hussein – it signified, not the recrudescence of the old reprobate, but his last hurrah – at least as Wolfowitz’s favorite Iraqi.

This is good. But irony always follows at good news at a mocking distance. Chalabi’s pronouncements, during the last month, have made a lot of sense. The Iraqi government needs to take control of its money and its foreign policy, come June 30. Anything else will be a farce.

For a good look at how crooked Chalabi is, the reader should check out Andrew (or is it Patrick?) Cockburn’s article at Counter-Punch. Entertainment can also be extracted from the NYT article and the WP article, neither of which mention the role they played in puffing Chalabi, with Judith Miller in the NYT being notorious in her guileless belief in the wonderful stories spun by the man – which, incidentally, corroborated what her friend Laurie Mylroie was saying, while Sally Quinn’s article about what a sexy devil this Arab we can deal with can be was a sort of high point of neo-con chic – Chalabi having learned how to Mau Mau a few flak catchers himself as he tripped from one party to another in Republican D.C. See our November 24, 03 post, and this link. Quinn’s article is such a pip that it is worth saving. Memorials of the madness, or what I did during the Bush years.

The nineteenth century Ottoman rulers in Baghdad were Sunnis. Sometimes a Baghdad governor would try to gain semi-independence from Istanbul. However, the Sultans, sporadic Westernizers, pulled back and tried, on the French model, to centralize. Though they failed in Egypt, in Iraq they dislodged the Ma’ud Pasha by armed force, and restored the governorship to its subordinate status with relation to the Porte.

Meanwhile, in Karbala, the Shiite elite had, through negotiation, the desire for protection, and mutual interest, made an accord with various powerful gangs. The Shiites did little more than pay lip service to their Ottoman overlords. Finally, a conservative governor in Baghdad had enough of this. Muhammed Nejib Pasha decided to subdue Karbala, in spite of the Iranian warning that Karbala was sacrosanct. Their were reports that the more powerful gangs had gotten out of control, had raped and murdered with impunity, and were disrespectful of the authority of the Shiite clergy. That, at least, is what Nejib Pasha claimed. So he gathered a force of Turks who marched on Karbala in December, 1842. They parleyed with the leaders of Karbala, but the leadership was divided. In the city, the inhabitants gave credence to various millennial dreams and portents. And the gangs, who could look back on successfully repulsing two earlier forces, had reason to think they could resist Nejib. On January 12, 1843, Nejib blasted through the Najab and Khan gates. In the assault on the 13th, the Turks succeeded in gaining entrance to the city. The gang leadership and its mercenary army fled, while the Turks fought street to street. The Turks lost 400 men. The townspeople lost 3,000, with another 2,000 mercenary Arabs dead.

I gained these facts from an excellent little paper by Juan Cole and Moojan Momen, published in 1986 in Past and Present, entitled "Mafia, Mob and Shi`ism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1824-1843." What is fascinating here -- a sort of Edward Said nightmare of Orientalism enacted before our very eyes -- is that the same social formations, the same vocabulary, and even the same battle formations have emerged under the American occupation. The point, however, isn’t to demonstrate the timelessness of Shiite society, but to demonstrate the continuity between the perceptions of the conquerors – Ottoman and American.

More on the Shiites in my next post.

Bollettino

(seventh in series)

The form of our government, which gives every man, that has leisure, or curiosity, or vanity, the right of inquiring into the propriety of publick measures, and, by consequence, obliges those who are intrusted with the administration of national affairs, to give an account of their conduct to almost every man who demands it, may be reasonably imagined to have occasioned innumerable pamphlets, which would never have appeared under arbitrary governments, where every man lulls himself in
indolence under calamities, of which he cannot promote the redress, or thinks it prudent to conceal the uneasiness, of which he cannot complain without danger. – Samuel Johnson

2. The Kurds

Pity the peoples that encountered a superpower during the Cold War. From the Hmong to the Misquito, such encounters resulted in the socially dissolving shock of gung ho activists organizing military activity at the expense of undermining tradition; a phase of activity usually ending in some rout that, for realpolitik reasons, had to be either countenanced or suppressed by the host power. It was one thing for nineteenth century Victorians to wipe out the Tasmanians; twentieth century Americans, armed with liberal ideals, did quite as much trying to wipe out Communism, an ideology premised on abolishing a capitalism that was little more than a dream to the tribe; while twentieth century communists, with the gospel of Marx, and its scorn for rural idiocy, to support them, could operate on a scale of inhumanity that would have made Pizzaro blush.

Among these unfortunates, the Kurds have figured largely in the American liberal conscience. Among Kissinger’s most brutal ideas was to use the Kurds as a shock force against what he considered the Soviet proxy in the Middle East – Iraq. In agreement with the Shah of Iran, between 72 and 75 a rebellion by Mustafa Barzani was covertly backed against Saddam’s Ba’ath regime. One of the ironies of the situation was, of course, that our two co-conspirators of the time, Israel and Iran, had no use or sympathy themselves for the Kurds. Barzani had actually wrung concessions from Saddam’s government for the Kurds that far outdid what was allowed to Iranian or Turkish Kurds. In 1975, the Shah made peace with Saddam, the price of which was paid by waves of massacre in Northern Iraq. The oppression increased during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, but the news of Kurds being gassed did not penetrate the policy being designed by the Reagan administration, which allowed Saddam’s regime billions in credits and shared intelligence with Saddam’s military. There’s an interesting and in some way counter-argument to the orthodox version of this made here, by the way. And Kissinger’s defense is excerpted here.

Peter Galbraith (who LI has interviewed, and who came across as an immensely likeable man), was an investigator for the Senate who went to Northern Iraq in the late eighties, saw the devastation being visited upon the Kurds, and became, in that moment, the Kurd’s great advocate in Washington. He wrote the first bill that sanctioned Iraq – only to see it shot down by the Reagan administration. The liberal hawks last year were surely moved, in great part, by the memory of Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds, and that narrative was moved and originally shaped in D.C. by Galbraith.

However, the oppression of the Kurds shouldn’t obscure the salient fact, in the history of Northern Iraq, that the struggle for Kurdish independence has never been a struggle for democracy. Since liberals like their romantic national struggles to be all of a piece, this fact has tended to get lost in the shuffle, and it remains irretrievable to a media that suffers, when it comes to foreign parts, from a sad case of chronic short term memory loss. Galbraith’s NYRB article about getting out of Iraq, which has caused a large stir, weaves about certain lacuna with a master laceworker’s skill. To make this point, Galbraith wittingly skips over the history of Northern Iraq in the 90s. Let’s quote, for the sake of abridgement, two grafs:

‘The Kurds, however, are well organized. They have an elected parliament and two regional governments, their own court system, and a 100,000 strong military force, known as the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga, whose members were principal American allies in the 2003 war, are better armed, better trained, and more disciplined than the minuscule Iraqi army the United States is now trying to reconstitute.”

“Since 1991, Kurdistan has been de facto independent and most Iraqi Kurds see this period as a golden era of democratic self-government and economic progress. In 1992 Kurdistan had the only democratic elections in the history of Iraq, when voters chose members of a newly created Kurdistan National Assembly. During the last twelve years the Kurdistan Regional Government built three thousand schools (as compared to one thousand in the region in 1991), opened two universities, and permitted a free press; there are now scores of Kurdish-language publications, radio stations, and television stations. For the older generation, Iraq is a bad memory, while a younger generation, which largely does not speak Arabic, has no sense of being Iraqi.”

Galbraith’s method here is to select certain facts, and cast others into the shadows. For instance, how is it that the same golden era of democratic self-government is also the era in which, according to every newspaper account from 1995 and 1996, the Kurds experienced a civil war? Perhaps that war, in fact, has something to do with the mysterious mention of two “regional governments.” The uninstructed reader conjures up visions of Texas and Louisiana – just two friendly states – instead of a touchy concord between two armed parties, loyal to two warlords.

Galbraith’s idea is that Iraq should survive as a very loose confederation, giving a lot of autonomy to the three major regions. This might be a good idea. However, its extension, that “we” should ‘divide” Iraq into three separate nations to prevent civil war, is wholly pernicious. First, on the grounds of logic. If civil war were preventable by the division of one country into an undetermined number of countries, why, civil war would never happen. This is much like saying we should prevent ‘4” by adding 2 + 2.

Second, on the grounds of the we – what we are we talking about, and what authority does this ‘we’ have? It is definitely the conqueror’s we that is being bandied about here.

Because the Kurds have born an insupportable amount of oppression from governments based in Baghdad, I could understand the Kurdish desire for independence. But it is impossible to envision that desire becoming real without a war. The worst result of CPA rule may be this: building the conditions for a long and bloody civil war, from insisting on provisions in the constitution that seem designed to block Iraq from operating as a sovereign nation -- a constitution that reminds one of one of those legendarily insidious microsoft codes, where the company can use its knowledge to peek into what its users are doing, with the company here being the U.S.A.-- to allowing the disproportion in armed forces to which Galbraith alludes.

Next post: the Shiites.