Saving Iraq - Rebuilding a Broken Nation

Nemir Kirdar was brought up in Iraq and comes from a family that served in the Ottoman Parliament before the First World War.  He fled Iraq in 1958 when the Hashemite Royal Family, which had held the Iraqi throne from 1921, was overthrown on the first of a series of military coups that eventually brought Saddam Hussein to power.  Kirdar was a childhood friend of the last King, Faisal II, murdered in the coup.

Kirdar presents a very favourable view of pre-1958 Iraq.  He stresses the heavy investment in education and in physical infrastructure.  He claims that the Kingdom of Iraq was successfully integrating the different ethnic and religious groups in a single Iraqi nation, and blames Saddam for starting a process of disintegration by offering privileged autonomy to the Kurds, a policy he subsequently brutally reversed.  He also says that the Ottoman rulers and the British showed bias in favour of the Sunnis.

He criticises Saddam for building an overlarge bureaucracy, leading a position in 1991 that 40% of the populace were dependent on the state for their income.

He condemns the United States' approach management of Iraq after its successful invasion in 2002.  He says the laying off of all Baath Party members from their government jobs, and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, led to the insurgency and civil war which peaked in 2006.  The 2005 electoral system, which offered voters choices among national lists of candidates rather than representatives of local constituencies, aggravated the sectarianization of Iraqi politics.

He also talks of the corruption under the American occupation, and of the "massive ongoing theft of U.S. and Iraqi funds", over which he claims there was virtually no U.S. Congressional oversight.

He now worries that Iraq will not remain a single country.  The Kurdish regional government has its own armed forces and banned the flying of the Iraqi flag in its territory in 2006.  Disputes remain unsolved about ownership of oil and gas and the status of Kirkuk.

His prescriptions for the future of Iraq suffer from the fact that he has spent most of his life outside the country – running a very successful company which channeled Gulf oil money into investments in Western countries.  He lists the many leaders and experts he has spoken to, but none of those are currently living in Iraq either.

Most of his prescriptions are fairly standard, a strong central Government, separation of powers, a fair tax system, and a new petroleum law.  He makes a very convincing case for the revival of Iraqi agriculture, pointing out that the country in which agriculture was first invented was able to export food before 1958, but now cannot feed itself.  But some of his suggestions seem fanciful and extravagant, like building a new national capital to replace Baghdad.

This book argues for a single, non sectarian, Iraqi state.  To those coping with the daily realities of Iraq today, this may seem quite unrealistic.  But it should not be forgotten that there is such a thing as Iraqi patriotism.  It was shown during the Iran/Iraq war and, most recently, in the support the current Iraqi Prime Minister is getting for his determination that the Iraqi army replace the Americans as completely and as quickly as possible.

The Best Intentions – Kofi Annan and the U.N. in the era of American Power

This book provides a good narrative history of most of the major international crises since Kofi Annan came to prominence in the United Nations, first as Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping in 1993, and then as Secretary General from 1997. It covers Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, Iraq, Darfur, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the oil-for-food affair.

Kofi Annan originally came to the Secretary Generalship as a U.S. backed candidate, but was later to conflict with the U.S. over Iraq. Coming from a semi aristocratic and politically moderate background in Ghana, he had spent his working life with United Nations bodies, starting with the World Health Organization in 1962. Self protective, silent and modest, he was a contrast to his brilliant but status conscious predecessor, Boutros Boutros Ghali. Kofi Annan is described by Traub as having the political reactions of a “high minded and progressive” European, and of having “a horror of violence that made him prone to find interlocutors where there were none”. This characteristic is blamed for his supposed mishandling of Saddam Hussein in the run in to the Iraq war.

Annan revised U.N. doctrines to justify armed intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states to prevent crimes against humanity. Although there was no U.N. Resolution to approve the 1998 NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo, Annan was seen to have justified it later in a speech to the General Assembly where he said there was a right to intervene in such cases but that it must be “fairly and consistently applied”. He later had the concept of a “right to protect” accepted as part of the U.N. reforms of 2005.

Annan’s term was dogged by investigations into past U.N. failings. Genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the corruption in the U.N. Oil for Food programme in Iraq were the subject of rigorous public enquiries and Annan found himself defending the indefensible. The problem was that these inquiries had full access to the U.N.’s own papers, but not to the decision-making records of member states, particularly those on the Security Council. This structural bias did no favours to the United Nations.

Mandates of U.N. peacekeeping operations are set by the Security Council, not by the Secretary-General. Peacekeepers need clear, credible and achievable mandates, but do not always get them. Units within U.N. forces often took their instructions from their home capitals, rather than from the U.N. Commander on the spot. At one point, only 32 officials in New York were supervising 27,365 peacekeepers in different parts of the world. That combination of large mandates and insufficient staffing creates conditions in which after-the-event blame fests are inevitable.

The great tragedy of Annan’s tenure occurred on 19 August 2003 when 22 United Nations personnel, including the immensely talented Sergio Vieira de Mello, were blown up by suicide bombers in Baghdad. Many U.N. staff blamed Annan for having sent them there in the first place and believed he had done so to please the United States, although he himself had described their invasion of Iraq as ‘illegal”.

This is a worthwhile book. The author had continuing access to Annan over four years and observed him in moments of both triumph and despair. The book deals with so many parallel crises that it is at times hard to follow, and would have been benefited from a chronology of events at the end of the text.

Kofi Annan will be seen by history as the Secretary-General who attempted the most comprehensive reform of the United Nations since its foundation, and who set up a Peacebuilding Commission and a Human Rights Council, streamlined management and won agreement to the principle of humanitarian intervention.

He could have achieved more if energy had not been exhausted in ultimately futile arguments about who should be on the Security Council, where the World War Two victors hung onto their archaic privileges.

In international organisations fundamental changes can only take place by unanimous agreement, and that requires exceptional levels of farsightedness and generosity, characteristics which were missing at the end of the day.

Half Gone – Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis

This is one of a crop of recent books looking at what will happen when the world wakes up to the fact that the annual production of oil cannot go on increasing forever.

Oil, being liquid and easily transportable, really is a wonderful fuel. It does not need an electricity grid for its distribution. When used in private motor cars, oil responds to a deep human need for instant freedom of movement, something for which those who can afford it are willing to pay a high price.

President Bush said in his State of the Union address this year that America was addicted to oil. He could have added that the middle-class lifestyle to which much of the rest of the world aspires is also based on high oil consumption.  Low-density housing developments in Ireland assume that oil prices will not rise to $100 a barrel because these developments are incompatible with anything but the private car-based lifestyle. The burgeoning middle classes of India and China will also want to have cars, so the demand for oil will not tail off just because supply is no longer increasing.

The problem is one of timing. Will we have substitutes for oil in place before the crunch comes, or will the transition be sudden and nasty?

The answer to that question depends on when the peak of oil production is reached. If, as Jeremy Leggett believes, the peak was reached last year, then the sudden and nasty scenario is almost upon us, because substitutes like hydrogen fuel and biodiesel will take 10 years or more to roll out. The car fleet is normally replaced over a 10-year cycle so a sudden switch to new fuels would be exceptionally disruptive and costly. No infrastructure of stations exists to distribute the new fuels, and people will not buy a car for which convenient fuel is not available everywhere they might want to use it.

Others, like Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), believe oil production will increase substantially up to 2015 and that peak production will not be reached until around 2030 or later. They expect Saudi Arabia to be able to increase its daily production by a further 20% by 2015, and see additional supplies coming from Libya, West Africa, Angola, the Caspian Sea, Angola and Brazil.

Matthew Simmons, the oil geologist who wrote ‘Twilight in the Desert’, believes the direct opposite. He claims Saudi production will peak very soon. He says Saudi oil reserve figures are exaggerated and unreliable. They are not broken down field by field and have not been independently audited. As a ‘swing producer’, sharply increasing or decreasing production to counter shortages or gluts, Saudi Arabia has reduced the long-term potential of its oil fields.

Like Simmons, Jeremy Leggett is an oil geologist who has left the oil business. He runs a consultancy which is promoting alternatives to oil, like solar power and hydrogen. He says no really big oil field has been found in the last 25 years and most areas with suitable geology are already explored.

He says that some alternatives to oil have big downsides. Hydrogen fuel requires natural gas for its production. Coal burning produces even more global warming than oil. This could be countered by carbon sequestration which involves burying the carbon in caverns rather than burning it off into the air. But here are a limited number of caverns and they could leak.

Leggett’s preferred solution is a decentralized system of energy production based on solar panels which would heat or cool homes and produce surplus electrical energy that could be fed into a localized grid. It is not clear how this would be enough to power the world’s motor cars.

Whether oil production peaked in 2005, or will peak in 2030, nobody denies that it will eventually run down.  Ireland’s decision to meet its 1990s housing shortage in a dispersed way has made itself dependent on the unlikely scenario of a seamless transition from oil to an equally convenient substitute.

That substitute is simply not yet available. One can only hope that the oil peak will be in 2030, and was not in 2005!

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

George Friedman is the founder of Stratfor, a Texas-based strategic intelligence consultancy advising many major US corporations. Although described as a conservative Republican, his views would mirror those of many foreign policy realists in both parties. He assumes that military and economic power determine the future. As he puts it, “anger does not make history, power does”.

He believes the United States will remain the dominant global power for the rest of the 21st century, because of its huge natural resources of coal and oil, its geographic immunity from attack in its fortress of North America, and its control of the world’s seas and of space.

Just as England’s strategic goal, as an island nation and a naval power, was to prevent Europe’s unification under one power coalition, America will pursue a similar policy on the Eurasian land mass. It will not want any one coalition – be it of Russia, China, Turkey or Japan – to dominate that land mass.

He is critical of the way American politicians sometimes approach foreign policy. Because America is so powerful, it has a much bigger margin for error than others, and it sometimes overuses that luxury. He says America is “adolescent in its simplification of issues, and in its use of power”.

Other less powerful countries have less margin to make mistakes.

Russia, following the eastward expansion of NATO to within 100 miles of St. Petersburg, is he claims “in an untenable political position” and “unless it exerts itself to create a sphere of influence, it could itself fragment”.

Both China and Japan are vulnerable because they are export economies and they rely on the all powerful US Navy to keep sea lanes open for their exports of goods and their imports of raw material.

Friedman says that the European Union is a schizophrenic entity in that its “primary purpose is the creation of an integrated economy, while leaving sovereignty in the hands of individual nations”. The current economic crisis will put this proposition to the test, and I believe that Friedman will be proven wrong. But he has a point. EU’s states often set ambitious common objectives for themselves, but fail to match them with the necessary central authority.

He argues that there is a divergence of interest between Germany and others who will want easy relations with Russia, and more easterly EU members who will fear again being sucked into Russia’s sphere of influence.

Surprisingly, Friedman does not see China becoming as a great power because of its inefficient allocation of capital, its corruption, its profitless exports and its unhealthy reliance on US consumers to buy its goods. He sees Japan emerging as the major Asian power, notwithstanding its lack of resources and its very elderly population. He ignores India. I believe this analysis of the long-term balance of power in Asia is quite unconvincing.

He sees Turkey emerging as the major power across all the former Ottoman lands from North Africa to Central Asia. But he believes Islamic fundamentalism will run out of steam because its real target, the liberation of women, is irreversible.

Friedman speculates about the likely conflicts of the twenty-first century – including its wars. He believes the wars will be conducted by unmanned aircraft using high precision weaponry and guided from space. They will be backed up by small numbers of highly equipped infantry. The aim will be to destroy the electricity generation capacity and close sea lanes of the enemy. There will be modest casualties. Wars will be limited, and will end with negotiated treaties. Pursuit of unconditional surrender will be off the agenda, because nuclear weapons will make it too dangerous.

This book shows why and how population trends, military technology, and economic policy interact to give some countries more power than others and will create real sources of conflict. Although some of its speculations have a touch of science fiction about them, its basic assumptions about the realities of military power are credible and sobering, especially for those who might think that neutrality would protect a country from the conflicts foreseen.