Beyond Iraq.

Beyond Iraq.

Passions run high on the Iraq issue. Unfortunately, this is an issue on which there is no agreed or comprehensive framework of values and goals and, as a consequence, it is one which it is extremely hard to debate. That is, if one cannot agree on the nature of a valid answer to an issue, then one cannot usefully discuss it.

I suggest that there are at least three sets of issues in play. These carry different weights with different groups and political centres, and they have been used interchangeably by them. As a result, completely distinct arguments and forms of justification have become hopelessly entwined.

Iraq is, in many ways, a paradigm which will set the way in which interventions are undertaken in the next decades. Such issues are going to be increasingly common. The world is being drawn together. Issues as diverse as intellectual property and military power, social change and religious belief are being forced into terrain that requires societies to find new ways to talk about the issues. Iraq points up the stress which this process is going to impose over the next twenty years. It is important that we find a workable solution to this.

Major paradigmatic political issues are seldom solved cleanly, in the manner favoured by undergraduates and bar-room philosophers. That is why they are political. Aside from seals and brokerage, 'deep' solutions seem to emerge as a common way of talking about the issue develops, always through discourse amongst many agents - between commercial, social, statal interests and in the arts, humour, the media and through other conduits. The society gradual describes the issue to itself, naming the parts and identifying the forces that are at work.

Consider the complexity of the debate around the intervention in Iraq. As I have said, at least three issues are in play, and at least one of these is not open to public discussion or legalistic rationalisation. Let us take this one first.

The Gulf region matters in practical terms to the outside world because it has large oil reserves, and because its political institutions are brittle and fragile. Disruption in the area has the potential to cause enormous harm to the world economy, and in particular to the to the poorest people in it. Twenty years ago, Iran was perceived to be the major regional threat. Iraq was seen - as Iran had been seen - as a friend to the West, and as a keystone of military power against the literal and political Iranian advance. Saddam's initial ambition to create a pan-Arabic unification, and the steps then taken to achieve this, set the West against him. However, as the practical outcome of intervention in the late Eighties would have been either another autocracy, or else a weak state potentially prey to either the Syrian Ba'ath or Iran, the best achievable solution was to contain him as a concentrator of Gulf minds. The geopolitical situation was such as to anyway make such an intervention impossible. The events of the early Nineties showed that a managed stalemate - and the latent threat that this afforded other Gulf states - remained the most viable solution.

There are a number of factors which alter this equation. First, the oil market is changing, with higher prices and a potential return to effective cartelisation. Extremely large sums need to be invested in the region, which its instability and its economic introversion have so far deterred. Second, it is plain that a new generation of educated minds enable the Arab world to get ready for more sophisticated institutions than it has hitherto enjoyed. The path to renewal is increasingly and obviously blocked by irritable, ancient dinosaurs lying across it. Third, Iraq has a crucial role as a supply of relatively secular, well-trained and habitually obedient professionals. It has very large, effectively-unexploited oil reserves; and could be an extremely influential producer in managing supply-demand balances. From a regional policy perspective, therefore, a "managed" Iraq could set a new institutional path for the region, were it to be invaded, governed, gradually set on its own way.

These are not easy issues to discuss in public. They concern sovereignty and international power, matters about which we have learned to be indirect.

However, the second set of issues are much more accessible. Iraq has been badly governed and its people have been mistreated. The record of the Ba'ath regime is bad, and Saddam's role within it has made this worse that its Syrian equivalent.

Plainly, this record has to be seen in relative terms if it is to justify intervention on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CIA estimate that around 20% of the world's states have been in acute failure at any one time since 1950, on a slowly rising trend. Of the 220 million people killed in conflict in the C20th, around 190-200 million died because states attacked their own citizens. Allegedly, present-day China has 50 million slave workers, who are held indefinitely for political crimes. The direct products of this system are afforded favoured trade status by many of the industrial nations. India keeps around a hundred million people in abject poverty and political oppression, denying them almost all forms of advancement because of their caste status. The World Bank assesses around a third of all states as "autocracies", with all of the apparatus which they, and Iraq, display.

This brings us to the third, and most ostensible, reasons for considering an intervention. Iraq has developed an enormous military capability, and amidst this, rudimentary theatre weapons. Few who have spoken with the members of the first weapons inspection team will not have been impressed by the extensive and also rag-tag nature of the developments. I recall an image of a desert plain, scattered with 55 gallon steel drums full of nameless chemical concoctions, many bulging like long-dead cattle in the sun. A senior inspector told me that they had found the fuel rods from an experimental reactor stored in a makeshift pool dug in an orchard behind a school. Prisoners had move the fuel elements there by hand. Allegedly, there had been a plan to see off the Iranians when they were advancing on the Euphrates by dissolving fuel rods in acid, and using crops sprayers to contaminate the desert. Readers may recall that a British citizen was summarily hung by Saddam for collecting soil samples near the relevant reactor, and the Israelis bombing it before it was commissioned. Iraq (and Saudi Arabia) were heavily involved in the funding and technology transfers behind the Pakistani bomb.

This said, it is not at all clear what Saddam might do with these weapons that is of practical concern to the West. There is the vague fear that a 'rogue state' might mount an attack on a Western city (or on Israel) but the motives for doing so are less than clear, and the consequences of having done so are, of course, terminal. States inflitrated by fanatical eschatological movements, insane leaders or spoofed attacks intended to bring down Western wrath on an enemy are all, of course, concerns. However, none of these really apply to Iraq. Naive assessments seem to see it as likely that secular dictators of absolutist states will somehow be liberal with their scarce weapons of mass destruction to ethnically-related terrorist groups. It is chaotic states with legacy systems that we should fear in this regard, not autocracies.

Nevertheless, how should the world react to such issues? Technology - from fission-free fusion to the fruits of biotechnology - and the very rapid expansion in the number and geographical spread of trained human resource means that issues of this character will become ever-more frequently the subject of concern. Small groups, motivated from anything from ecological concern to ethnic hatred may well coenm to have access to tools that were unthinkable even for major sovereign powers. Are we to develop a transparent, judicial use of force in order to contain this, or are we to manage these issues on a per-case basis?

There are two approaches that can be taken to this, the legalistic and the opportunist. The opportunist approach could be parodied as the subject of a consultant's strategy matrix. It asks: is the intervention practical or not? Does the country or those whom it influences matter to us or not? Is there an alliance of interests to go forward on this or not? If all of these conditions are satisfied, and if the major power can be bothered, then an edict is coaxed from a notionally respected source of international legality. This is, perhaps, better than unilateralism, and it does at least get the issue debated. It forces powers to think through the affect which they wish to generate, and work back from an assessment of the practicality of these goals to acceptable means of attaining them.

Such an approach is not, of course, satisfactory to those who want a formalised approach to such issues. However, it is plain that the "legalistic" approach is not going to be allowed to develop quickly. An unambiguous legal framework is set up to apply equally to all. That is, a country is arraigned by complaint, tried by abstract international law and then automatically subject to police action by UN members. The World Trade Organisation is set up on much these lines. However, no major government wishes to see something analogous to blind justice in the security arena. Interventions could be required of the major powers in respect of, for example, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea. This is plainly impractical, and witht he best will in the world, one can only police the tractable.

It follows that the current muddled, multi-threaded "discourse" approach is likely to continue. Debate will be as much about presentation as about facts. Many of the major policy themes will continue not to be open to general public discussion. To do so would be to open up discussion on far broader topics, such as the scope of sovereignty in the face of malfeasance and poor performance. Eighteenth century Britain faced just such debate around property laws: if a river flowed through your fields, was it yours to pollute? Was a contract between an employer and an employee a license to any conduct, or were there abuses to be contained? Could you damage the soil on which future generations might depend? Did power over people come with responsibilities and liabilities? The analogy is clear, but the time frame for answering these extremely complex issues is very short.