Not all democracies are equal

One of the defining myths of the second half of the 20th century, and the start of the 21st, is that by slapping the label "Democratic" on a system of government, it magically becomes good.

It's part of the lazy thinking that judges books by their cover, the self-satisfied idea that because we live in a democracy we can do no wrong, and of course it is cynically encouraged by the Bad Guys who know damn well that democracy just means you get to vote, not what happens either before or after the vote. People voted for the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein, and by memory he won 98% of the popular vote.

Saddam was a strong man who didn't feel the need to be subtle in his stealing of elections. In the West, we have a long tradition of quietly subverting the popular vote, from gerrymanders to super-delegates to outright ballot-stuffing. As Boss Tweed said, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Or for that matter, counting the votes. And if that fails, well, it's nice to have some friendly Supreme Court judges rule against the need to actually bother counting the votes. (In the words of Justice Scalia, counting the votes fairly and carefully would threaten "irreparable harm" to Bush "by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Got that? Actually having a fair election is a Bad Thing, because that would challenge Bush's public claim that he won in a fair election.)

But generally, despite the flaws, Western post-WW2 democracy manages to mostly be good, at least compared to dictatorships and faux-democracies in the developing world. More or less -- mostly more, with occasional less.

But the illusion that democracy implies goodness is dangerous. Over in Iraq, one of the former members of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), John Agresto, was tasked with rebuilding the country's education system. (Sadly, the CPA neglected to actually give him any money to do it with.) Agresto bitterly wrote:

America's been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule--just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free--limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all, the breaking and moderating of factions--all this we forgot about. We act is if the aim is "democracy" simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore...we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them...

We, as a country, don't have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.

[Emphasis added.]

The truth behind the surge

Iraq has more or less fallen off the radar for many people. But it's a mess. The all-important "surge" that was supposed to bring peace to Iraq has done no such thing. (That's not to say that it hasn't had any effect. But too little, too late, and almost certainly it is setting Iraq up for an even more horrifying tragedy.)

It's a sad day when the most detailed, insightful pieces of journalism come from magazines like Rolling Stone magazine instead of "proper" news outlets. Unfortunately, the newspaper and television news industry have all but stopped doing investigative journalism, leaving it up to magazines like Rolling Stone.

Very disappointingly, even Rolling Stone confuses Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in Iraq, two very different groups with little in common. Keeping that in mind, their article about the surge is depressing but informative. The nation of Iraq is no more, no matter what flag still flies in the UN. It is now a failed state, with a central government unable to govern and bombings and assassinations virtually every day.

"The situation won't get better," he says softly. An officer of the Iraqi National Police, a man charged with bringing peace to his country, he has been reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighborhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And what can come of that, Arkan asks, except more fighting?

Sitting in our comfortable house in the West, safe and secure, it is sometimes tempting to think of the Iraqis as ungrateful wretches. Don't they know we're doing all this for them? How dare they resist, this is for their own good.

But even if we ignore the serious doubts about the real reasons for the invasion and occupation, and accept for the sake of the argument that it was done with the best possible intentions (please don't laugh), for those on the sharp end there are many good reasons to hate the occupiers:

The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist — they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

And so it is in every military occupation.

The Deserter's Tale

Smoking Chimp reviews a book by former US soldier Joshua Key, who deserted from the army and ran away to Canada because of the things he did and saw in Iraq. His application for refugee status in Canada has been rejected and he faces deportation to the US. In his book, he says:

“My own moral judgment was disintegrating under the pressure of being a soldier, feeling vulnerable, and having no clear enemy to kill in Iraq. We were encouraged to beat up on the enemy; given the absence of any clearly understood enemy, we picked our fights with civilians who were powerless to resist. We knew that we would not have to account for our actions.”

“... the American military had betrayed the values of my country. We had become a force for evil, and I could not escape the fact that I was part of the machine.”

“How would I react if foreigners invaded the United States and did just a tenth of the things that we had done to the Iraqi people? I would be right up there with the rebels and insurgents, using every bit of my cleverness to blow up the occupiers.”

(Quoted here.)

It's easy to forget that bad things happen in wartime not just because bad people go to war, but because war makes even good people turn bad.

Adventures in hypocrisy, part eleventy bazillion

Remember the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq that Turkey denied they made?

Seems that Junior Prez Dubyah Bush has something to say about that. Namely, that Turkey shouldn't ignore the will of the international community and that they better leave Iraq right now, terrorists or no terrorists. Pretty please. Or something like that.

Earlier, Turkey admitted that they had 10,000 troops battling the Kurdish terrorists. Naturally, the elephant in the room that the media doesn't want to mention is that northern Iraq has been under US and UK protection since the first Gulf War ended in 1991, and even today, the US is sheltering the Kurdish independence groups who have been committing terrorist attacks against Turkey.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said:

It's very important that the Turks make this operation as short as possible and then leave, and to be mindful of Iraqi sovereignty.

It would be nice to say that his words were received with peals of laughter, or even stunned silence, but such is the irony-free 21st century that they were probably accepted as self-evidently true. Some things never change.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, primary architect of the US invasion of Iraq, speaking on 21 July 2003.

Striking at the terrorists

Remember when the "War On Terror" was supposed to make us safer? Well, somebody forgot to mention to the US military that their supposed to be stopping terrorists, not sheltering them while they attack one of the US's NATO allies.

Turkey, fed up with Kurdish terrorists launching attacks while under the protection of the US military, has invaded northern Iraq. While this isn't a full-blown invasion, nor is it a border incursion with a handful of troops: it apparently involves thousands of soldiers. Turkey has publicly denied the invasion, a denial which is looking less and less credible every day. Why isn't this big news?

And a reminder that it's not just "Islamo-fascists" who are terrorists, like racists and conservatives would have us believe. Christian terrorists in Serbian have attacked and burned the US embassy in Belgrade, angry at Kosovo gaining independence.

Bin Laden rants again

Compared to previous time Osama bin Laden has made threats against the US and West, there's been little attention paid to his latest rant. Apart from the general silence, those few commentators who have talked about him have been mostly saying he made no threats against the US. Juan Cole wonders why they are denying he made threats.

Nevertheless, I think bin Laden is essentially irrelevant in the big picture. Not because he can't cause trouble, but he's essentially a murderer and trouble-maker, not a genuine threat against democracy and the West. He could kill some people, but he can't overthrown Western civilization and install a global Islamic theocracy. Not that he ever could, despite the Chicken Little cry-babies on the conservative-right of politics. (No, the only ones who are destroying the Western virtues of freedom, democracy, tolerance and liberty are our own leaders.)

Bin Laden is especially irrelevant in Iraq. Despite propaganda from the US government, al Qaeda In Iraq doesn't take orders from bin Laden, and even if they did, they're a tiny player in the civil war. As Juan Cole puts it:

Bin Laden, however, is not now and perhaps never has been a credible actor in Iraq. Most Iraqis are nationalists and would not want a Saudi telling them what to do. He made a big but perhaps unavoidable error in attacking the Shiites, and so denying his movement a nationalist platform. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a small cult of hyper-Sunni bigots and serial murderers. Instead of playing Abdul Nasser, who attracted the allegiance even of many Shiite Arabs in his day, Bin Laden long ago chose to play the role of a cultist, a David Koreish with better explosives.

[...]

Bin Laden is like a venomous snake, always dangerous, and you never want to underestimate a cobra if it is in striking distance. But Iraq isn't the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, and if Bin Laden thinks it is, he is very out of touch.

Watching the last six years of stupidity unfolding has just made me more sure than ever that the right response to 9/11 was to treat it as a crime, not an act of war. Maybe the Taliban would have needed some sabre-rattling to cooperate, maybe we'd even need to send in troops to force the issue, but the fundamental strategy would be to treat bin Laden as a mass-murderer, capture him, put him on trial in the Hague, and lock him up to rot forever. No martyrdom for Osama!

Instead, we had the stupid games of the Bush administration threatening war if Afghanistan didn't hand bin Laden over for trial. When the Taliban offered to comply (see also here for another offer), the US invaded. Then, with bin Laden trapped like a rat, US forces were told to stand-down and watch as he escaped into the wilderness. Having sworn that nothing would stand in his way of catching bin Laden, Bush soon lost interest, and apart from occasionally remembering to mention the bogey-man, there has been no serious attempts to catch or kill bin Laden for years now.

A cynic would suggest that having bin Laden free to make threats suited the US government's purposes better than having him in jail or dead. A trial wouldn't have given them the excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

When will we get a PM we deserve?

When will Australia get a Prime Minister who will put Australia first? Our PM, "Honest John" Howard, has promised to stand by the US in Iraq regardless of the danger to Australia and the complete lack of any tactical or strategic benefit to our nation.

Mr Howard said Australia should stand by its ally in difficult times.

[...]

"One of the things that influenced my thinking is the belief that in the difficult time for your major ally, you should deliver as much international support and display as much international solidarity with your most important ally as is most appropriate."

This is the second time in recent months that Howard has nailed his flag to Bush's discredited, unpopular Iraq War. Six months ago, he tried a cheap-shot at Democrat presidential-candidate Barack Obama, and ended up embarrassing himself and his country when Obama challenged Little Johnny to put his money where his mouth is by sending more than a handful of troops to Iraq.

Somebody should take Howard aside and mention quietly to him that a true friend of the US would help them reduce their addiction on oil and violence, not encourage it. A true friend says "Come on mate, you've had too many, time to go home" and not "Fark ya all, me mate and me 'll take on any barstid in the house!". Especially when your contribution to the war effort is a few hundred troops deployed in the least violent part of Iraq.

In World Wars I and II, it was "for King and Country", and nary a word about whose king and country our boys were dying for. At least in WW-II there was an actual sense that our security was at risk from Japan, even if it turned out after the war that Japan had little or no interest in or capability of invading Australia. In Vietnam, it was "All the way with LBJ" -- our then-Prime Minister, Harold Holt, picked up the Democrat's slogan and made it his own, and we know how the Vietnam War turned out.

And now Iraq, where Howard has been one of Bush's most enthusiastic supporters (despite the lack of actual practical assistance in this ill-planned war), assuring the people of Australia that he had personally seen all the reams and reams and reams of conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, no matter what the UN weapons inspectors said.

(That evidence turned out to be either non-existent or wrong. There was the plagiarized student's essay, the poor-quality forged papers claiming Saddam was buying uranium ore from Niger, and the lies told by the drunken Iraqi defector "Curveball". Curveball is an especially interesting example, because the West Germans who were handling him warned the US that his reports weren't trustworthy, but he became the centrepiece of the Bush administration's case for war because he told them what they wanted to hear.)

Australia's politicians have a long and inglorious history of putting our interests a distant second to those of the UK or the USA. It says something about our search for a national identity that many Australians don't even see anything wrong with that. For all our supposed patriotism, when it comes to international politics Australia is much abused and put upon by the US and UK, and we always come back for more.

Actually, I can think of one Prime Minister who did attempt to put Australia's national interest ahead of that of the US's -- Gough Whitlam, who was preparing to stand up to the US over their secret military base at Pine Gap. Coincidently, Whitlam was sacked by our Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. Despite the CIA referring to him as "our man Kerr", and despite the fact that he was an executive board member of a CIA front organisation, there's no reason to think Kerr acted at the instigation of the USA. (The coincidences sure stack up, don't they?)

Tribulation Force

Alternet reports on Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that, as an official part of the Defence Department's America Supports You programme, has the blessing of the administration. OSU actively proselytizes among active-duty US military personnel, and is about to mail out copies of the apocalyptic video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq.

OSU is also scheduled to embark on a "Military Crusade in Iraq" in the near future.

"We feel the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades that will sweep through this war torn region," OSU declares on its website about its planned trip to Iraq. "We'll hold the only religious crusade of its size in the dangerous land of Iraq."

The Defense Department's Chaplain's Office, which oversees OSU's activities, has not responded to calls seeking comment.

"The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized," Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan Administration White House counsel, ex-Air Force judge advocate (JAG), and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me. "Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military." Weinstein continued: "The fact that they would even consider taking their crusade to a Muslim country shows the threat to our national security and to the constitution and everyone that loves it."

Left Behind is especially interesting. In the game, players get to make believe they are commanders of an evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic American city, where they wage violent war against United Nations peacekeepers. When the game was first published, it garnered a storm of controversy, with Christian and other groups condemning it and demanding that Walmart pull it from the shelves.

Even Marvin Olasky, the evangelical publisher, intellectual author of "compassionate conservatism," and a force behind the George W. Bush Administration's White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," denounced the Left Behind videogame.

The game is inspired by the best-selling pulp fiction series about the Tribulation following the Rapture. During the seven years of the Tribulation, surviving Christians battle everyone else in the Battle of Armageddon.

For more about Left Behind the series, see Wikipedia's article and Conservapedia's take on it. For a long, detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique from a Christian, see Fred Clark's review.

Big fish in small ponds

Jonathan Schwarz discusses the tendency of imperial elites to prefer being enormous fish in small ponds over being big fish in a large lake:

That's the interesting thing about the standard historical trajectory of imperial elites...at a certain point they either (1) forget the power they can wield outside their country ultimately derives from a healthy society beneath them, or (2) understand that but decide they'd rather be comparatively more powerful within a poorer society and less powerful outside.
To understand choice #2 it's useful to look at an extreme example, like Saudi Arabia. Certainly it has the natural wealth to be able to oppose Israel effectively. And you'd assume their elites want to do that, given that they're always screeching about it. But effective opposition would require Saudi society to be internally far more democratic, educated and egalitarian. So the Saudi princes have decided they'd prefer their country to be a weak, poor backwater if that's what's required for them to each own nine palaces.

The signs point to the elites of the USA being the same. Look at the way the White House talks up the need to fight the War On Terror, while simultaneously reducing their actual ability to do so: alienating allies, penny-pinching on basic equipment for the troops, making decisions so mind-explodingly stupid that even incompetence can't be the explanation, like the early decision to sack 400,000 Iraqi soldiers without pay, but allow them to keep their weapons.

(Aside: the above link, by Eliot Weinberger writing for the London Review of Books, contains the most understated yet eloquent description of the mess that is the invasion and occupation of Iraq I've yet seen.)

Etiquette lesson

Mark Kleiman at the Reality Based Community again:

If an armed society is a polite society, as the gun nuts like to say, then think of all the good manners we've brought to Iraq by losing 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols

Al Qaeda regrouping while clowns sing and dance

Some people simply don't care about the harm and suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people in the name of "helping them". Fair enough -- there are overlapping circles of care, and some people's circles don't extend out that far.

But even ignoring the harm to Iraq, one thing is absolutely certain: President Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq has harmed the West, directly, by allowing our real enemies the time and space to regroup, to recruit, to train, to learn new ways of attacking us.

While we're busy in Iraq, stuck in a completely unnecessary quagmire of our own making, the clowns supposed to be in charge of Homeland Security are trying to distract us from their incompetence with "gut feelings" of terrorist attacks.

As Les writes:

Could it be that we’re still vulnerable because we’re wasting time and money confiscating any bottle of liquid larger than 3oz at the airport while letting the bomb sitting next to it slip right on through? Could it be that we’re spread too thin fighting an illegitimate war in Iraq that we’ve allowed Al Qaeda to recuperate to almost full strength? You know, the group of people who are directly responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers? How many of you remember how on December 14th of 2001 our so-called Commander and Chief vowed to bring in Bin Laden, dead or alive? It’s been almost 6 years since that vow, he only has about a year and a half left before he’s out on his ass. When does he plan to honor that vow? It’s the one promise he’s made that I’d really love to see him keep.

Sorry Les, didn't you get the news? Dubyah no longer cares about bin Laden, and hasn't for years.

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." -- G.W. Bush, 13/03/2002

Security in the Green Zone

Professor Juan Cole reports on the terrible security situation of the American Green Zone in Baghdad:

The Green Zone was originally supposed to be the safe place in Iraq, with the area outside it (everything else) called the "Red Zone." The US Embassy in Baghdad appears to have forgotten what the phrase "Green Zone" means, since a spokesman there told the LAT, "There's fire into the Green Zone virtually every day, so I can't draw any conclusions about the security situation based on that . . ."

Let me draw the conclusion. If you've got fire into the friggin' Green Zone every day, then we can draw the conclusion that the security situation in Baghdad sucks big time. When you've got people killed and a large number of people wounded in the one place in Iraq that was supposed to have a "permissive" security environment, then security in general is the pits.

(Emphasis in original.)

Mortar fire into the Green Zone is bad enough, but even worse is the fact that the Iraqi Police Colonel Mahmoud Muhyi Hussein, director of security in the Green Zone, was kidnapped. That requires significant insider knowledge.

Security collapsing in the Green Zone

Despite the Surge, despite Senator McCain's ridiculous Pollyanna-ish claim that Americans can travel safely around Baghdad, things are looking bad for the Americans in Iraq. Even the Green Zone, the high-security "safe area" in Baghdad, is no longer safe. After a rocket attack that killed an American soldier a few days ago, the US Embassy has sent out a memo warning all government employees to wear protective armour whenever they are outside of a building in the Green Zone -- including when moving from one building to another.

The occupying forces in Iraq have a term for areas where you have to wear protective gear at all times. That's called a Red Zone.

Fool me twice...

The Bush administration is at it again, returning to the same tactic that worked so well to justify the war in Iraq, this time to justify war on Iran.

I've already written about Iran's barely-existent nuclear research program before. According to the evidence, Iran is something like fifteen thousand centrifuges short of being able to produce weapons-grade uranium. Now Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, has spoken up, stating that Iran's nuclear research program is much more primitive than Iraq's was in 1991.

Even if Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons -- and that's a seriously big IF -- they're no threat at all.

Blix also points out that the Bush administration's "negotiating" tactic with Iran is counter-productive and doomed to failure. As Juan Cole reports:

He points out that Washington's insistence that Iran capitulate to all Bush's demands before negotiations even begin is "humiliating."

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Insisting on total capitulation before negotiations even begin (and then what's left to negotiate?) might make Bush and Cheney feel like big manly men, but that's no way to run a picnic, let alone international relations with a country that can make your day miserable.

Cole also reminds us that:

[the Iranian] Supreme Jurisprudent has given a fatwa against having or using nuclear weapons as illicit in Islamic law. You can't acknowledge that Iran is a dictatorial theocracy and then turn around and say that his fatwa is irrelevant.

Naturally, the Bush administration isn't silly enough to re-use the same mushroom cloud story again. So they have a backup story: Iran, so the story goes, is behind the sudden rash of successful attacks on American tanks in Iraq.

Several weeks ago in Iraq, the Americans gave a military briefing claiming that the highest levels of the Iranian government had ordered the manufacture and supply of powerful explosive devices to Iraqi insurgents.

But the problem with this claim is that the greatest number of successful attacks has been coming from Sunni areas of Iraq, not Shi'ite. Not just blowing up tanks: also shooting down helicopters. Iran, being Shi'ite, is hardly likely to be arming the same Sunni who want the Shi'ites dead. To put it into perspective, imagine Iraq was Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and the British claimed that Catholic Italy was arming the Protestant Ulster Defence Association.

Professor Cole has published a long letter from a reader detailing this issue.

Privatisation in Iraq

Juan Cole has a welcome sign that at least some parts of the US government are starting to take responsibility for the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration, and discusses the disaster that privatisation has been for the American military:

' The committee also released an internal Army memorandum reportedly written in September in which the Walter Reed garrison commander, Col. Peter Garibaldi, warned Weightman that "patient care services are at risk of mission failure" because of staff shortages brought on by privatization of the support work force at the hospital. '

The privatization of patient care services is responsible for a lot of the problem here. And so is the privatization of services for US troops in Iraq punishing them. Indeed, the privatization of guard duties through the hiring of firms like Blackwater caused all that trouble at Falluja in the first place. KRB never delivered services to US troops with the speed and efficiency they deserved. The Bush-Cheney regime rewarded civilian firms with billions while they paid US GIs a pittance to risk their lives for their country. And then when they were wounded they were sent someplace with black mold on the walls.

Israel to Saddam: come back, all is forgiven!

Too late now, but the head of Israel's Shin Bet (the domestic security agency), Yuval Diskin, has admitted that chaos left by the forceful removal of Saddam Hussein is a danger to Israel: Israel may rue the day the USA invaded Iraq:

When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos. I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam.

Diskin also admitted that that Israeli judiciary treats Jewish terrorists differently from Arab terrorists, and while he opposed the withdrawal of Israeli security from Palestinian areas with no effective or lawful security forces, he also criticised Israeli militants who opposed further withdrawals from the West Bank.

Tanks of the air

The US Army is having helicopters shot out of the air by small-arms fire in Iraq. There are good reasons for this. Seven years ago, in the context of the Kosovo war, an American Lieutenant Colonel wrote about the dream of helicopters being tanks of the air, pointing out that the experience of Vietnam shows that even combat helicopters are very vulnerable to small arms fire -- a fact the Americans in Iraq are re-discovering to their sorrow.

The fall to barbarism

A day doesn't go by without some sort of killing, bombing or other attrocity in Iraq. Normally I don't mention them, since I have little to add beyond the excellent Informed Comment website.

However, on this occasion I will comment. This is how a relatively modern (by Third World standards) country sinks into barbarism: first the upper and middle class flee the country, and then those few who remain become targets to be killed. Last Tuesday, unknown terrorists used a car bomb and a suicide bomber to kill at least seventy students, mostly girls, at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University. Mustansiriya University is one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1232 by the Caliph al-Mustansir. (The University hasn't had an uninterrupted existence for the entire 770 years, but even so, that's quite impressive.)

As Juan Cole explains, Iraq's status as a (relatively) literate, educated nation is not just at risk but grievously harmed. Education, particularly of women, is essential for any nation wanting to climb out of poverty. Unfortunately, Iraq's women have gone from a respectable 75% literacy rate (by Middle East standards) to a cripplingly low 25%. With terrorists now deliberately targeting University women for kidnapping and murder, and now bombings, few families are prepared to let their daughters go to school, let alone college. This bodes badly for the future of Iraq. So much for Bush's vision of Iraq as a shining beacon of democracy and civilization in the Middle East.

Cole explains:

We should be clear why these bombings are taking place. It is because Bush's policy in Iraq was total victory, along with his Shiite and Kurdish allies, over the previously dominant Sunni Arabs. Bush did this thing as a zero sum game, one where there is only one pie and if one person gets a bigger piece, someone else gets a tiny sliver. The Sunni Arabs-- among the best educated and most capable people in the country-- were offered the tiny sliver. They won't accept US troops in their country for the most part, and won't accept reduction to a small powerless minority. They have succeeded in provoking the Shiites to form guerrilla groups and engage in reprisal killings, as well, as a way of destabilizing the country. Bush's allies won't share power and wealth with them, and Bush himself keeps pushing for what he calls "victory." Today is what his victory looks like after nearly 4 years, and it is highly unlikely to look different any time soon.

The mess of Iraq is what happens when hard-nosed, hard-hearted, hard-headed so-called "realists" treat international relations as a game of football: if one side wins, the other must lose. Only a small minority of non-trivial interactions between people and countries are zero-sum in this way. Virtually all of human history has been the slow but steady increase in the number of positive-sum interactions, and yet world leaders who treat international relations as a poker game (or worse, a boxing match) are treated as intelligent "realists" who understand how the world works. And those who understand the principles of cooperation and compromise are denigrated as soft, touchy-feelie, fuzzy-headed, "Give Peace A Chance"-singing, naive liberals.

What nonsense this is. Consider Iraq's hypothetical weapons of mass destruction. I think we all agree that, had Iraq really been in league with terrorists (they weren't) and had they actually had WMD (they didn't) it would have been worrying, dangerous or even deadly for Western democracies.

Imagine that everything the Bush administration said was true actually was true. Which solution would have been smarter -- for the US to shoulder the burden on their own by insisting on a unilateral decision to invade? Of for them to cooperate with their allies, make it an international effort, so that the burden was shared by the benefactors?

Daddy Bush handled the first Iraq War the second way, and look how well it turned out: a clear plan with a clear mission. (You may not agree with the mission, think it didn't go far enough, but they did what they set out to do.) The UN was, if not completely united, at least united enough.

Junior Bush, on the other hand, told the rest of the world "my way or the highway" and, predictably, the rest of the world (with a few exceptions) left the US to carry the can. The US pays the cost of making the world safe (ha!) for democracy, effectively saying "Stand back France, we'll throw our boys into the quagmire of Iraq so you can be safe! No, don't thank us, it's a dirty job but somebody has to do it."

And that, according to the "realists" and neo-cons and hawks, is the smart solution.

On the other hand, if we assume the American government knew what they were doing, then it puts a different perspective on the whole sorry story. If the talk about democracy and international security was just a cover for an old-fashioned power grab -- controlling the oil -- then it makes sense for the US to have treated it as a zero-sum game. Control of the oil is zero-sum: Iraq had it, now they don't and America has it instead. Security, peace, trade and democracy are all non-zero, and it is stupid for America to bleed for the benefit of others without expecting them to cooperate in return. A cooperative, multinational force grudgingly invited by Saddam into Iraq would have given the nations of the world security, but would not have given the USA control of the oil.

If the neo-cons knew what they were doing, then talk of combating terrorism was a sham, and the chaos and instability caused by the invasion were side-effects: America gets the benefits (control of the strategic oil fields) and the whole world shares the costs of terrorism -- especially those Iraqi women blown up for the heinous act of trying to get an education.

Are the neo-cons behind this stupid, wicked war stupid or wicked? Me, my money is on both.

Consequences and martyrdom

Professor Juan Cole is reporting that one of the predictable consequences of Saddam Hussein's execution is the revival of the Iraqi Baath Party and its successors, such as the Awdah ("the Return") Party. Saddam, whose name was mud after the successful overthrow of his government, is now a hero to a large percentage of Iraqis. And I dare say, even amongst those who don't support the Baath Party, there will be a lot of people thinking "He might have been a bastard, but he was our bastard".

Anyone would think the US was deliberately setting out to cause chaos and disorder in Iraq...

Good for the goose

Professor Juan Cole is reporting that the Prime Minister of Turkey is warning that Turkey will invade Iraq if they want to -- and who is the USA to say they mustn't?

From Reuters:

"We have a 350 km border with Iraq. We have historic relations ... the United States is 10,000 km away from Iraq, and yet is it not intervening in Iraq's internal affairs?" he said.

Isn't that a fine how-do-you-do? Turkey, America's ally, threatening to invade Iraq, America's occupied territory, because the US won't take action against Kurdish terrorists. I can't wait for President Junior to explain to the world why the USA is allowed preemptive self-defence but Turkey isn't.