When a Kleptocratic, Megalomaniacal Dictator Goes Bad nytimes.com
[ that was quite a note, Steven. With which I am largely in agreement. "Democracy in Iraq" has been one of the three main pillars of the war marketing plan, but there's no indication I can see that it'll be easy. Rather than a point-by-point ataboy, I will broaden things a little by tying in this other article from the NYT magazine. ]
( from the NYT article JohnM noted, nytimes.com )
Only "key" senior officials of the Hussein government "would need to be removed and called to account," according to an administration document summarizing plans for war trials. People in the Iraqi hierarchy who help bring down the government may be offered leniency.
The administration plan says, "Government elements closely identified with Saddam's regime, such as the revolutionary courts or the special security organization, will be eliminated, but much of the rest of the government will be reformed and kept."
SR's take on that:
This is going to be a problem, probably a big one. Actually it will be several problems. The first, of course, revolves around the populations that bore the brunt of Saddam’s oppression. They are not going to be at all happy about seeing the people who participated in genocide at the ground level being let off. They will want revenge, or justice, or something like it, and some effort will have to be made to go beyond the people who gave the orders and remove individuals who held key roles in the implementation process.
As I’ve mentioned before, we also have to decide what to do with the people who used to be in the intelligence services, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, the police, and other key elements of Saddam’s administration. Many of these institutions will be disbanded, but the individuals that composed them will be at large and will remain connected. Together, they form a significant antidemocratic power bloc. They will also be targeted for recruitment by terrorist organizations and local antidemocratic politicians.
Other problems are more complex. Bureaucracies almost always reflect the character of the government that created them. If the government is authoritarian, corrupt, paranoid, and nepotistic, the bureaucracy will reflect that. I am quite sure that the existing Iraqi bureaucracy exhibits all these characteristics, and that key posts at all levels are dominated by Sunnis and Tikritis. Leaving this bureaucracy intact is going to create an extremely difficult challenge for the occupation government and whatever Iraqi government succeeds it, particularly if that government is not dominated by Sunnis and Tikritis. Easy to say that much of the government "will be reformed and kept". Actually reforming it will be a whole lot harder.
From the NYT article on Turkmenistan:
Like the other formerly Soviet republics in the Central Asian tinderbox, Turkmenistan has made the transition to freedom only in the sense that it is ruled now by a local dictator rather than by one in Moscow. Turkmenistan also shares with its neighbors rampant corruption and economic calcification masked by wealth from natural resources -- in Turkmenistan's case, plentiful reserves of natural gas. But even in this unstable region, which has suddenly become a focal point for the war on terrorism, Turkmenistan stands apart. A year or two ago, it was a wobbly country ruled by a profoundly weird and corrupt but apparently benign dictator. More recently, things have grown even weirder, and darker.
The whole story is very depressing. The "nation building lite" plan for Iraq might work better, but leaving much of anything from the existing regime in place seems like a pretty bad idea, as you say. Then again, the alternative is not real clear. On the other other hand, there's the locally favored "Arab Mind" theory, I don't know how any of the local purveyors of that line of thought can consistently argue that Iraq will be governable at all.
On a vaguely related note, there were these depressing figures from Ignatieff's big article, nytimes.com
Each month the United States spends an estimated $1 billion on military operations in Afghanistan and only $25 million on aid.
Spending $1 billion a month in Afghanistan, where there are maybe a few hundred American military on the ground, and where by all indications things haven't gone all that well on the nation-building front , does not give me a good feeling about the likely long term costs of the Iraq operation. |
