"it's amazing how quickly a problem goes away once the
people with a vested interest in there being a problem go
away"
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REQUEST OF THE WEEK
To request a favorite column from the archives, drop a line here.
My request: Mark's travels in post-invasion Iraq. Should have printed for friends instead of passing on to my skeptical brother-in-law. Wasted as his mind was already made up.
Des Carpenter
Midland, Ontario
Happy to oblige. Re-reading this for the first time in six months, I'm struck by a couple of things.<font size=4> First, it's amazing how quickly a problem goes away once the people with a vested interest in there being a problem go away. All the terrible things that were allegedly engulfing in Iraq in the spring and summer - refugee crisis, humanitarian disaster, starvation, cholera, etc - simply vanished once the NGO nellies scrammed out of the country in August. True, the naysayers have moved on to a different line of attack - the indestructibility of what Tariq Ali calls the brave Iraqi resistance.<font size=3> But, in the months since, I can't help noticing that the preponderance of people who aren't professional journalists incline more to my view of the situation than the BBC's. <font size=4>Most folks who visit Iraq and don't hole up with the other press guys at the Palestine Hotel and don't use the old Baathist translators most media organizations are still relying on come back cautiously optimistic.
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A motoring tour of Iraq
from The Sunday Telegraph, June 1st 2003
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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks on a motoring tour of western and northern Iraq, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.<font size=3> The roads are empty except for the occasional burnt out tank and abandoned Saddamite limo. You can make excellent time, as it will be several months before a deBaathified Iraqi Highway Patrol squad is up and running and even longer before they replace the looted radar detectors. On the boring stretches of desert motorway you can liven things up by playing D-I-Y contraflow. <font size=4>And best of all, if you avoid Baghdad and a couple of other major cities, you’ll find the charming countryside completely unspoilt by western reporters insisting that America is “losing the peace”.
For most of the Iraq war and its immediate aftermath, it was easy for any relatively rational person to dismiss the media doom-mongering. Hundreds of thousands of dead civilians? Never gonna happen. Hand-to-hand street-fighting as Baghdad morphs into Stalingrad? Dream on. Even that Iraqi National Museum “disaster” was an obvious hoax, though I was sad to see my friends at The Spectator fall for it and add their own peculiar twist that it was all a conspiracy of a sinister US antiquities lobby.
But, when the naysayers started moving on to claim the whole post-war scene was going disastrously for the Yanks, I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. As a general rule of thumb, when two NGOs, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and The New York Times agree that the whole powder keg’s about to go up, it’s a safe bet things are going swimmingly. But who knows? Even these guys have got to be right once a decade or so. So I decided to see for myself.
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Unlike those parliamentary delegations getting ferried around by the military and Continental TV crews embedded with convoys of NGOs, I have no contacts either in the MoD or the World Food Program. So I hopped a flight to Jordan, rented some beat-up Nissan piece of junk in Amman and headed east. <font size=4>After four hours, I passed a sign on the highway saying “IRAQI BOARDER 39km”. I assumed this was a misprint, but 39 kms down the road there were indeed some Iraqis boarders, boarding in a UN refugee camp in the no man’s land between the Jordanian and Iraqi frontier posts.<font size=3> Lacking one of the gazillion pieces of paperwork necessary to get past the interminable Jordanian frontier bureaucracy and gamely bluffing my way through, I left the car on the shoulder just past the sentry box a few yards from the tents. I returned to find a woman and her children clustered round it and anxious to know whether I could offer them safe passage to a third country. It seems they lacked the relevant papers to satisfy the Jordanians and, unlike yours truly, had been unable to talk their way round. <font size=4>Although the camp had set up enough tents for hundreds, this family were the only refugees in residence. The singular of that “IRAQI BOARDER” sign was a slight exaggeration but not by much. And that underpopulated border camp is a fine motif for what’s going on: vast numbers of bureaucrats are running around Iraq with unlimited budgets in search of a humanitarian catastrophe that doesn’t exist.
“Had a lot of refugees?” I asked the Jordanian customs officer.
“We had about ten through last week,” he said. “Palestinians.”
“Where were they headed? Amman?”
“No,” he said. “They were going back to Iraq.” Apparently, having fled across the Jordanian border to the UN facility near Ruweished, they concluded after a few days that the camp wasn’t quite up to snuff and decided to go back home. Amazing. Over on the West Bank, the Palestinians have been in their grotesque UN “refugee” “camps” for over 50 years. But, faced with a choice between Ruweished and the “chaos” and “insecurity” of Iraq, the Palestinians have finally found a refugee camp up with which they will not put.
Incidentally, when I was there, every single Iraqi refugee in the UN camp at Ruweished was Palestinian. In other words, this isn’t a humanitarian crisis, but Arab politics - the longstanding refusal by Middle Eastern regimes to accord Palestinian residents any kind of legal status. Many of those in the Ruweished camp are the husbands and children of Jordanian women, but it makes no difference: flee Iraq with Palestinian documents and you get slung in a refugee camp. The inability of their Arab brothers to resist screwing over the Palestinians is not a problem George W Bush can fix, only King Abdullah, and all that UN refugee camp is doing is letting His Majesty get away with it.
So that’s the most basic thing about post-Saddam Iraq: for all the “anarchy”, no one’s fleeing. In the course of my trip, I drove as far east as the outskirts of Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk. I spent a pleasant evening prowling round Saddam’s home town of Tikrit, where I detected a frisson of menace in the air, but marginally less than in, say, Stockwell. Come to think of it, I was wearing a suit and tie (the Robert Fisk look isn’t really my bag) and carrying substantial amounts of hard currency, which I’d never do after dark round Tottenham. I had an illegally acquired firearm but even in Tikrit I was relaxed enough to leave it in the glove box.
Maybe I just lead a charmed life and ten minutes after I’ve moved on to the next town the starving kids and armed gangs show up. But, even if that’s so, let me make a couple of predictions. First, there is no chance of Iraq winding up an Islamist theocracy. None. Zero. Secondly, there is no possibility of a Ba’athist renaissance. There are no “Ba’athist elements” – not in the sense of any kind of viable organized political resistance. There are disaffected elements who were once bigshot Ba’athists and are now trying their hands at a little freelance banditry. But they’re no long-term threat and no-one who wasn’t also on the Saddamite payroll wants them back. Dictatorships, no matter how long they last, rarely put down roots. And, when they’re gone, it’s as if they were never there (Tito’s Yugoslavia springs to mind). The country either reverts to what it was before, or it becomes something entirely different. That’s the choice Iraq faces.
But, in the western towns, which were relatively unscathed by the war, it’s the almost surgical removal of the regime you’re struck by.<font size=3> Every Main Street roundabout has its empty plinths where the Saddam portraits stood. There are generally a couple of large blocks plus a compound and maybe a fancy house with elaborate decorative stonework with their doors and gates hanging off the hinges and the odd goat or donkey defecating over the interior: <font size=4>these are the Ba’athist buildings, and they’re the sole target of highly focused looting. Everything else is untouched<font size=3> – the poky grocery stores piled high with boxes of soda you could boil a lobster in, the ramshackle auto shops with their mounds of second-hand tires, all these are open for business, and in the end they’re more relevant to the future of Iraq than the legions of unemployed Saddamite bureaucrats in Baghdad or the NGO armies in their brand new, gleaming white Chevy Suburbans and Land Rovers cruising the streets touting for business like pushers in search of junkies.
Last Saturday, I was back in Rutba, a town I rather like in its decrepit way, and stopped for a late lunch at a restaurant with big windows, a high ceiling with attractive mouldings and overhead fans, and a patron who looks like a Sinatra album cover, hat pushed back on his head. As I got out the car, I noticed across the street a big white sports utility, a sure sign that someone from the humanitarian jet set was in town. This one was marked Oxfam. <font size=4>“Hmm,” I thought. “Must be some starvation in the neighbourhood.”<font size=3> The winsome young Arab boy with a face as lovely as Halle Berry’s and a lot less grumpy brought me a whole roast chicken – stringy but chewy – piled with bread and served with a generous selection of salads. <font size=4>I managed to determine that the Oxfam crowd were holding a meeting with the Red Cross to discuss the deteriorating situation. But just what exactly was “deteriorating”? As my groaning table and the stores along Main Street testified, there was plenty of food in town. Was it the water? I made a point of drinking the stuff everywhere I went in a spirited effort to pick up the dysentery and cholera supposedly running rampant. But I remain a disease-free zone. So what precisely is happening in Rutba that requires an Oxfam/ICRC summit? Well, the problem, as they see it, is that, sure, there’s plenty of food available but “the prices are too high”. That’s why the World Food Programme and the other NGOs need to be brought in, to distribute more rations to more people.
Can you think of anything Iraq needs less? If prices really are “too high”, it’s because storekeepers are in the first flush of a liberated economy. Given that the main drag in Rutba has a gazillion corner shops lined up side by side, competition will soon bring prices down to what the market can bear, if it hasn’t already. Offering folks WFP rations will only put some of those storekeepers out of business and ensure even more people need rations. But perhaps that’s the idea.
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And perhaps that’s why I found rather more hostility toward the WFP, UNHCR et al than toward the military. “Americans only in the sky,” one man told me, grinning as a chopper rumbled overhead. “No problem.” Down on the ground, meanwhile, the new imperial class are the NGOs. Like the chaps in the Colonial Office of old, they shuttle across the globe, mingling with their own kind – other SUV users – and bringing with them the values of the mother country, or the mother bureaucracy. Like many imperialists, they’re well-meaning: they see their charges as helpless and dependent, which happy condition has the benefit of justifying an ever growing humanitarian bureaucracy in perpetuity. It will be very destructive for Iraq if the tentativeness of the American administration in Baghdad allows the ambulance-chasers of the NGOs to sink their fangs into the country.
Instead, the Americans ought to opt for genuine multilateralism, not the permanent floating crap game of international bureaucrats gambling with other men’s countries. <font size=4>I’m not so sure there’s a “power vacuum” in Iraq. The previous regime was highly centralized and devoted a lot of resources to state-of-the-art torturing. But there’s little evidence tootling around the potholed garbage-strewn side streets of Rutba and Ramadi that there was ever much in the way of a municipal highway department or refuse collection. For essentially non-political technocratic activities, Washington should ask its allies. Get some civil servants from New South Wales or Queensland to set up local road agencies. Other than that, foreign investment will be more use than a thousand NGOs, most of whom would do more good if they sold off the white Jeep Cherokee and scattered the proceeds in a five-mile radius.
I’m pleased to report, then, that the obscene Oil For Food program has been radically privatized. In much of Iraq, the government petrol stations have been pillaged and the gas pumps stripped of their metal panels so that they stand on two thin metal pins, their hoses hanging loose, like R2D2 before he goes in for a service. Instead, entrepreneurial Iraqis stand along the roadside with small tanks of mysteriously acquired petrol. Heading back to Jordan, I pulled up in the desert. “How much for a fill-up?” I asked.
“Ten dollars,” he said.
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“I’ve only got a 20,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “Bush,” he added, pointing to the picture of Andrew Jackson on the bill.
“Close enough,” I said. Afterwards, he wanted another 20 for his seven-year old boy. I’m a softie but not that soft, so I fished out a Canadian 20.
“What this?” he said suspiciously. “American one dollar?” He pointed to the Queen’s portrait. “Who this?”
“George Washington,” I said. <font size=4>He’ll have a hard job getting rid of the Canadian but that Yankee 20 he’ll change in one of the stores back in town and he’ll do himself and the local economy more good than the UN’s bloated boondoggle ever will.
Of course, this is only one guy’s experience of Iraq. But I’d like to think it’s catching on. In Ramadi, in another café, the maitre d’, in honour of my presence, flipped the TV over to BBC World. Some Beeb type was doing a piece about some Baghdadi who hadn’t been paid since March. Now what sort of fellow hasn’t been paid since March? A chap who worked for the toppled thug government perhaps? Might be a committed thug ideologue, might be just a go-along-to-get-along type. But, given that the new Iraqi government is never going to be as huge as the old one, maybe that chap should just stop whining to the BBC and look for a gig in the private sector. Ditto for the BBC reporter, come to that.
As usual, the piece wound up with the correspondent standing in the children’s ward of the Saddam Hussein Medical Center predicting more doom and gloom. By contrast, every medical facility I went to in Iraq was well short of capacity. The NGO types concede Iraqis aren’t exactly rushing the hospitals but say that’s because they know there are no drugs and/or they’re worried they can’t afford them. Might be that. Or it might be they don’t want to be stuck on a ward trying to get a moment’s sleep under the blazing lights of round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all Rumsfeld’s fault. These days, I always laugh my head off at BBC World reports. And, in that Ramadi café, I was touched to find that, even though most of them hadn’t a clue what he was going on about, within half a minute, the rest of the crowd were roaring along with me.
Back in Jordan, I drove the long stretch of empty road through the dark toward Ruweished. Judging from the spectacular sodium blaze in the distance, the town was evidently a lot bigger than I remembered it. By night, it looked the size of Birmingham. But it wasn’t the town at all, just the UN camp, hundreds of huge floodlights lighting up a colossal area in the centre of which were those handful of tents containing the unfortunate Palestinian spouses of Jordanian women while they plead with King Abdullah to be let in. Just ‘cause you’ve only got a couple of refugees is no reason not to light up the sky. Money no object, that’s the UN way. And anyway we all know it’s Bush’s fault.
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