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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (119642)	11/15/2003 4:15:37 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, the "insurgents" (what a nice way of renaming terrorists who murder Red Cross personnel with a suicide truck bomb or two...) are obviously dreaming of their own "national flag". It is definitely a repercussion of not actually forcing all the Republican Guard and Fedayeen to surrender and be detained. We also should have gone through the formality of an actual surrender procedure by the ranking official in the Baathist government. Furthermore, we should have required that ALL tribal clan leaders, especially those from the Sunni clans, be forced to view the mass graveyards. For the Shiites and Kurds, it would have resolved them to say "never again", while the Sunnis would have hopefully felt some twinge of guilt and responsibility.. But that's water under the bridge now.. What's going to be important is that those who support these terrorists/insurgents discover the consequences for doing so.. Even if it means favoring Kurds and Shiites over the Sunnis.. There has to be a balance of power restored in this ethnic "troika", with real repercussions for those who seek advantage over the others, or to disrupt reconstitution of the government and economy.. Since I can't imagine any way the coalition can turn over the government to Iraq while these people are active there, unless the Iraqi population were to unite against them in their own interests. The only way there will ever be peace in Iraq is some group of "federalists" finally are forced to own the problem of creating stability and social order and justice. I had advocated from the beginning of the post-war stabilization effort that local clan leaders be called forth and given local responsibility for their respective territories, working with other rival clan leaders where required. It should have been the US responsibility to hold their feet to the fire and assist them in maintaining order and providing for their people. The result, in my opinion, would have resulted in a relationship that co-opted the clan structures to American benefit, while providing a mechanism for maintaining accountability. It also would have, again IMO, provided the means of playing one clan off against another, should such tactics be required. It also would have removed much of the false impression that the US was going to just make everyone's lives better without their having to participate, rewarding cooperation, while disincentivizing resistance. The clan leaders would have had to be accountable to their people and would have put them under pressure to cooperate, while the US could remain aloof as an honest broker amongst them. In my view, this approach was not implemented.. It ignored all the hard won lessons gleaned from previous tragic experience in Lebanon. I have a gut feeling that what we're seeing now is the possibility of fostering the creation of a semi-authoritarian regime that once again establishes social order. But such a regime would likely only be as powerful as the physical and financial support the US provided, thus providing the US some measure (knock on wood) of influence over the transition to some future form of democratic accountability to the Iraqi people. Another thing that has saddened me is that I believe a program to make EVERY legitimate Iraqi citizen a shareholder of the country's oil resources through some form of trust (Iraqi "Permanent Fund") would have given the people as a whole the incentive to support a new regime. And such a fund would go far to preventing any particular regime from attempting to gain full control over those resources, while making them directly accountable to their own people for the management of them. Hawk