ark og ulandskr201103-3.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coming Good, Leaving Better

What about when some kind of normalcy gets established so the local economy starts moving?

KR: That’s what they hope to do. But the guerilla can win just by making that process more difficult. And it doesn’t take that many. Look at ETA in Spain: it has been estimated that ETA consists in only five or ten real hard core people. And through targeted assassinations they have got almost every politician down to village level walking around with armed guards. The same thing with the IRA in Britain during the bad period: it doesn’t take that many. I haven’t been to Iraq since May, but if you assume that among the former Iraqi army, among the prisoners they let out there are a just some who want to drive out the American army … a few thousand, five thousand, ten thousand? It doesn’t take that many people to blow up the oil lines, shoot Iraqi politicians, blow up police stations. The Americans keep talking about how sophisticated these attacks are: it takes three guys, a truck, some fertilizer and some dynamite to make a bomb! Those three guys can keep a hundred thousand troops pinned down in their positions…

I don’t really see a way out of it. One thing you can do is to withdraw immediately, as the French have suggested, and turn it over to an international force that will then be invited in by a new Iraqi government. That’s what I would favor: just pull all the troops out now. Off course, everybody would say: “No you can’t do that, because then Iraq will descend into chaos”. But so what? You can either stay there, trying to turn the thing into a democracy as Thomas Jefferson would like, or you can just say: “OK, we got rid of Saddam, we put a new guy in charge, he’s now the president of Iraq – we’re leaving.”

And let the Iraqis be responsible?

KR: Yes, if they want to keep shooting up themselves, then: “We’re gone, out of here.” That’s one scenario. If you look at it from a patriotic point of view, and you ask “is staying in Iraq worth the life of another American soldier?” the answer would be “No, not really”.

There’s a lot of complexity to the idea of an ethical foreign policy?

KR: I agree with the precept of that, I think going in and getting Saddam and the Baath party was the best thing the US could have done. Now we are talking about staying another few years and building an Iraqi democracy. But Iraq was never a democracy, so what are we trying to do here? That was the problem in Somalia: we went in, we fed people, we stopped the famine – and then some said: “let’s try to build Somalia into some model of democracy in Africa”. But it never works. It doesn’t work. It has to be the Iraqis who build it: they have to get tired of shooting at each other and come up with their own idea of doing it. The Iraqis are more educated and sophisticated people than the Somalis ever were. So let the Iraqis build their own system. I think they are going to resent and keep shooting at any system the Americans impose on them. Maybe the better thing is just to cut your losses.

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Photo (illustration): BrunoInBaghdad.com

Photo (portrait):
Francesca Luk