War in Iraq

War in Iraq

This paper was written before the outbreak of war in Iraq, or its interim conclusion. We have left it on the web site because it raises many questions which have not yet found an answer. It considers the implications of various outcomes to the current confrontation over Iraq. It is not concerned with the rights and wrongs of the issue, or with the origins of the conflict.

In order to frame this discussion, however, we need to consider two points. First, what are the aims - that is, what effects can be achieved - by military intervention; and, second, as the effects are primarily to do with the nature of governance in that country, how can we best think about institutional change in a nation such as Iraq?

The aims of modern military intervention

Force is used rationally for three reasons: to seize, to coerce and either to pre-empt or to deter. All of these use force not as an end in itself, but as a tool towards a desired consequence or "effect". Thus, military planners speak of effects-based policy. One seizes to exploit corn fields or trade routes, not for abstract ideas such as glory or empire. One coerces in order to bring about a specific pattern of behaviour, with the hope that this will become embedded as a preferred paradigm. One deters in order to achieve the same effect, but without the hope of changing minds.

Force which is applied without a stable, self-sustaining effect in mind will need to be applied chronically, or else revisited again and again. Coercion towards institutional tranquillity - "peacekeeping" and "peacemaking" - are activities in which the building of institutions is innately central to a useful intervention. The business of suppressing armed dissent in a minor element in the time budget, and probably also in the resource budget, as compared to the demands of setting the institutions of a country to rights. It is even harder to gain local enthusiasm for what has been done. Interventions in the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, central Europe and Asia have all shown that it is hard to achieve durable stability through force. However, the blunted effort of the army of development workers around the world show that it is even harder to achieve political and institutional change without access to power.

Institutional upgrade.

Social, economic and political development are three almost independent processes. However, for balanced development to be achieved, each must proceed in parallel. More complex societies - as measured along the other two axes - demand increased capacity to manage complexity from the third.

Two things are therefore evident success in development. These features which are as applicable to the industrial world (which is also, of course, also developing, to who knows what institutional, economic and social outcomes) as it is to the conventionally developing world.

First, as already noted, development is identical with the capacity to manage increased complexity. This ability can be sustained only through concomitantly complex formal, informal or tacit and economic institutions. The term "institution" as it is used here means a predictable, generally understood pattern of response to events. This response can be emergent (as it is in markets, where the invisible hand "emerges" from a myriad of transactions managed only by immediate ambitions, supply and demand.) It can also be tacit (as it is in daily social contacts, where the way a person behaves towards another is informally understood across a society, and where this understanding manages much of the complications of life.) Finally, institutions can be explicit, as they are in the civil and criminal law, in property rights and, ideally, in achieving political power and decision-taking.

The development of these institutions is the key limiting factor on social and economic development. Nations which fail to create parallel ways of handling social, economic and political complexity will be blocked from social, economic and political growth. The failure of any one of these development 'legs' - as occurred in the Soviet states - leads to a general reduction in the level of complexity that can be sustained. Weak politics creates poor economies; poor economic performance cripples complex social arrangements; lack of social cohesion prevents the functioning of sophisticated political structures; and so forth. It follows that an attempt to "raise the game" in a failing nation needs to address all of these legs, not just one of them - for example, weak or primitive political institutions. Saddam has maintained Iraq in a primitive political form - a warlord governing for and through an oligarchy - well beyond the point where a society of the economic and social complexity of Iraq would normally find this practical, let alone acceptable. However, in doing so, he has stunted the development of tacit structures and human capital that should otherwise have formed in Iraq. Intervention will have to try to bring on the development of these, which will not be an easy or a swiftly-completed task.

Second, there are many different and effective ways of delivering the ability to manage complexity. There is no one single prescription for success, but rather a wide plateau on which various forms of optimisation are possible. Canada, with very different institutions, has outperformed the USA economically (for a lower base) for over a century. However, there is a (vastly) much larger set of behaviours which do not work. As Neal Stephenson suggest in The Diamond Age, it is not that some peoples are generically more able than others, but that some cultures are unconditionally superior to others. This is obviously true. Cultures, however, tend to be transmitted effectively only through direct experience and not by fiat, teaching or external example.

There is, therefore, a series of gaps in the toolkit of those who want to coerce others into reforming their institutions. There is no single prescription for good set of institutions, but rather a plateau on which various combinations produce successful results. It is plainly the case that the nature of such plateaux depends on the situation in which the country finds itself, and that how one goes about being a successful Islamic oil producer or a knowledge-based Asian state are as different as how nature defines the grounds for success at being a coral reef or a bird.

There is no right way, but there are clusters of broadly correct solutions to various existential problems. Equally, these plateaux are surrounded by vast voids in which things do not work, and in which complexity is not mastered. Finding these peaks is why development is so laborious, and why history is filled with brief candles of hope, and much gloom.

There is, in truth, not much that can be done about the first issue, except to recognise its reality and to set one's aspirations accordingly. The useful approach to this second issue is, of course, to consider the generics of stable institutions: the division of power; the provision of knowledge and information; the inclusion of people into a system from which they gain more than they lose through disruption; the creation of popularly-understood paths to self-betterment that deliver the expected results of following them. Corruption is to be extirpated, human and property rights assured, the law made universally accessible and applicable, public resources collected effectively and allocated rationally, efficiency and best practice are to be brought into the operation of public agencies.

How these and related generalities are deliverable by an external force. However, they have to be translated into active processes and agencies in a country that has undergone civil and military turmoil, and where none of the social reflexes that help to foster these are in place, is something with which military interventions have had to struggle and something with which they will, in future, have to struggle successfully if they are to be in any sense useful.

On intervention in Iraq

We discuss the underlying motives for intervention in the section which follows. What those inclined to intervene want as an effect is far less ambiguous, and far harder to deliver.

This is going to be difficult to deliver. The society is cowed, and its tacit institutions revolve around minimal disclosure, self-preservation and sucking up to authority figures. Its formal institutions are about to be defeated and then discredited by professional communicators. It will be occupied.

The Ba'ath regime has centralised and terrified the society such that self-sustaining, bottom up institutions may be extremely difficult to construct. There is nobody with any experience within the country who is not tainted by Ba'athist collaboration or indoctrination. It is as though Nazi Germany had been conquered by the Allied powers after several generations of Nazi rule. Saddam has run a nation in which housewives are summoned from their beds to answer questions such as: "You were observed driving a stranger in your car last week. Please explain who they were, and describe the conversation that you had with them." There are no experienced figures who can be rehabilitated. Externally, there are a plethora of academics, business people and others who are doing their best to survive. None has any meaningful experience, and many have lived away from Iraq for most or all of their lives.

Those with positive views about the ability of outsiders to bring about institutional change in Iraq comfort themselves with analogies that are from the past. These are, however, extremely weak guides when they are examined closely.

The analogy with Eastern Europe - that an Iraqi Havel could be found, and would be acclaimed by the people - ignores the resentment with which the Soviet imposition was felt in Czechoslovakia, and ignores the cross currents of tribalism, religion and xenophobia which have been cultivated in Iraq.

The US occupation of Japan was able to create a major change in the way that the society worked. It was successful to the extent that it was able to challenge the US on its economic home territory within a generation. Here, it is said, was a similarly propagandised, centralised and militarised nation that had to be reconstructed in a new image. There are, however, two points to note about Japan. First, the imperial-militaristic period was a self-evident disaster long before Japan entered into conflict with the Allied powers. It was one of a series of experiments in modernity that followed the Meiji restoration. Second, the new paradigm was entered into willingly and without religious or other baggage. To then-Japanese culture, a victorious power automatically defined a new and successful regimen: adopt it and prosper! Such a view is unlikely in Iraq.

It is, therefore, likely that the installation of a 'better way of being Iraqi' - by and through a foreign governor, and following a US blueprint - is unlikely to be an easy process or swift one.

Motives and outcomes.

The reason for intervention in Iraq is, ostensibly, twofold. It is said to fund terror, and it is said to hold weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Saddam has funded some terror groups in order to annoy his enemies, but neither he nor the forces which he heads are inclined to favour revolution or eschatological terror.

The possession of WMD is a separate issue, around which debate is innately difficult. Essentially, those seeking weapons control have had to draw an arbitrary line, on one side of which sit "legitimate" possessors of WMD, and on the other sit those deemed illegitimate. Whatever merits this may have to realpolitik and common-sense, it sits uneasily with UN-focused legalism, in which all are equal before international law. Consider the gray areas which reality raises. Iraq financed and in other ways assisted the Pakistani bomb, but so did Saudi Arabia. Both have had access to Pakistani science.

In reality, motives are naturally more complex, and whilst it most who support a war agree that WMD should go and Saddam with them, few would see these as more than a causus belli. Iraq matters to the wider world for the same two reasons that the Gulf as a whole matters: because its brittle institutions can easily be broken - and because the potential for disruption is considerable - and because of its energy resources. The two are unavoidably linked, and this linkage will grow over time as alternative sources of hydrocarbons become depleted.

The future governor of Iraq will have a major influence over the price of oil. Too much production will destabilise the Gulf, damage indigenous production elsewhere - such as Mexico, Canada and the US to name but three - and encourage carbon emissions. Too little production will damage the emergent economies, major importers such as Japan and in general place an effective 'Gulf' tax on all economic activity. A chronic occupation of Iraq implies chronic intervention in the internal affairs of the oil producing states, however indirect this may be done. If the key issue around which the intervention is being structured is regional stability, then the tools to deliver this effect my go far beyond Iraq.

Intervention in Iraq gives rise to a series of potential outcomes. Some of these are extremely undesirable, and this defines a momentum to what has to be done once the first step is taken. Consider the following sequence of branches in events.

A stand-off - with the Western powers "marching up to the top of the hill, and then marching down again" - would produce a major political response in the region, would in some sense validate Saddam and certainly strengthen his position. A failed intervention in the manner of Suez, perhaps called off through public opinion, would be even more difficult to manage. An unscathed Saddam would be a regionally-validated Saddam. Iraq would be the focus for all those who resent the power of the West. The consequences of this would be, of course, dire.

A successful intervention - essentially, the conquest of Iraq by the US and UK - that was not backed by a strong "effects-focused" measures of the sort discussed earlier would lead to local and regional instability. Local problems would arise as rival factions strove to fill the power vacuum, most modelling themselves on all they have known: Ba'athist or religious authoritarianism. Regional instability would be unavoidable. Whatever his faults, Saddam served as a stabilising influence to the arch of the Gulf. He held the Iranians in place, frightened the Gulf states into mutual tolerance and, in general, behaved as a dangerous dog around which other inhabitants tiptoed carefully. All this rigor would be lost with his displacement, and the heartfelt sigh of relief would soon be succeeded by the panting of ambition.

Therefore, the policy which will deliver the effect which the allied powers seek is a full scale, unambiguous conquest of Iraq, followed by a prolonged (generational) period of institution building and re-education. This model has been recognised in Serbia, but its implications have not sunk home amongst the public of the industrial nations.

Conclusion

Countries are complex things, and occupations of them that are successful in bringing about lasting change are innately complex and subtle processes. It is extremely difficult to talk to the public about this. It is likely, however, that any such game plan will be seen as decidedly threatening by other nations to whom the strictures - of instability, aggression, the possession of WMD - apply equally. One can expect countervailing propaganda.

The motives for managing Iraq and, through it, the economics of Gulf oil production, are plainly strategic. They are also extremely difficult to bring about. This is particularly true where an educated and professional public needs to be complicit in what is being done in their country if, ultimately, anything is to work in it.

One can manage a complex state by absolute rule backed by terror if one has both a money mine - oil - and a public tradition of absolutism and obedience. Iraq has possessed both of these levers. Mesopotamian rulers were always able to turn off the water supply to cites which resisted their wishes. However, these tools are not going to be available to those who would govern a conquered Iraq. Indeed, they may well be even less available to them - due to external scrutiny and internal resistance - than they are in the US and UK. The task will, therefore, be a difficult one. As the earlier diagram shows, however, this is a trail from which one cannot retreat once the first step has been taken. It is a primary rule of military affairs that one should not embark on action without having a clear view of the effect that one wishes to create. One should not embark on a journey to an effect which one knows that one cannot deliver.