Why has Iraq turned out to be so difficult? Where did it all go wrong? Libertarians and neo-conservatives do not share many values but both agree that there are cultural characteristics which can render governance easier than this current war has shown. Iraq has proved that state-building can go horrifically wrong and that a chaotic situation involving a nation divided by tribe and religion can viciously spiral into civil strife.
After Iraq was conquered or liberated depending upon your viewpoint, the upsurge in terrorism sponsored by surrounding pariah states was very likely. Yet, if the correct steps had been taken to rebuild the Iraqi economy, then the insurgency would not have worsened. We would not now have a civil war, sectarian massacres, the dripfeed of corpses and kleptocratic authorities. All of these developments feed off each other in a failed state.
Iraqis were browned off with their impoverishment from sanctions and their ruined middle class aspired to the prosperity that they had enjoyed prior to Saddam’s wars. Now that middle class has departed. What did these Iraqis want? They wished for security and the expectation that thieves, from militias or the secret police would not steal their goods or injure and kill them. They wanted title or the local equivalent, whether individual or communally based perhaps for the March Arabs so that their chattels and homes could not be expropriated. After 2003, we should have appropriated and extended Saddam Hussein’s social revolution through free-market reforms, breaking down tribal loyalties with education and the modernising cash-nexus. Hernando De Soto expresses this advantage very clearly.
In early March, I [Ramesh Ponnoru] called de Soto to talk about the relevance of his ideas to Iraq’s future. As you will see, he was a model interviewee; I didn’t have to do much talking.
NRO: How important is the establishment of property rights in a post-totalitarian country such as [we’re hoping postwar Iraq will be]?
HDS: It’s obviously crucial. If you want to create a market society, that’s what it’s based on. . . . [T]he starting point, the genesis of a market society is property rights because it relates to the issue of what belongs to whom. Once you determine that, you know who starts with what poker chips. And once people see that the law protects rights that they already have, then people begin to believe in the rule of law.
They wanted a medium of exchange that the government could not devalue and that would enable them to travel to the surrounding countries and buy more goods. They wanted employment so that they could aspire to such travel, and create opportunities for themselves. The building blocks existed to satisfy the middle classes and avoid the degeneration of political conflict into the defence of religious and ethnic identity. Where neo-conservatives and libertarians part company is the importance of establishing democratic institutions without satisfying the preconditions of a free-market and liberty. De-Ba’athication removed one possible source of security without an immediate replacement, allowing the militias to rush into the vacuum. Rather than moving whole-heartedly towards liberalisation and free-market reforms on the German model after the Second World War, Iraq has retained a large-scale state structure, a bureaucratic model of planning with some privatised tinkering around the edges and has sucked in a vast amount of aid, recycled through a less than transparent contracting process that favoured dependency and inefficiency. Iraqis voted in the referendum for these expectations, and were sold a cart without a horse.
Security, liberty, property rights and a free market would have certainly lessened the problems that Iraq now faces. Libertarian voices such as Cato pointed this out at the time. It is an irony that opportunities have been lost as soft power can still win this war. It is the soft power of an Iraqi wife able to buy clean water from a private company, visit a market without danger of being blown apart and knowing that the dinar she hands across to the marketseller holds as much value as the one that she earned.
When were Libertarians ever enthusiastic about the war? The Demicans and Republicrats were, but the Libertarian party opposed the war from the beginning. Maybe it was differant on your side of the pond?
Yep, we were definitely all jingo-istic babykillers all slavering for Ayrab blud to be spilled by noble British and American God-fearing troops being sent in to liberate Iraq from George Galloway’s best mate.
I think that’s one of the principal problems. The 1940’s era of reconstruction saw the development of the modern Germany without so much of the colossal financial waste endemic to modern state functionality. One of the advantages seen in that instance was the ability of the new country’s planners to create a revised German model of bureaucracy, at the same time as virtually gutting the old system under the banner of de-Nazification of the state.
In Iraq we still do not appear to have seen any clear casting out of the old, in fact many Iraqis do speak of their anger at seeing Saddam’s old police still carrying out their old jobs without having been punished for past actions or atrocities. Presumably it is now too late for the West to step in and dismantle the old Saddam network, which we should have done back in 2003, and our throwing (seemingly) unlimited financial resources from the US taxpayer at Iraq seems to be some way of admitting that error.
Philib, Julian,
Yu’re wrong. Wrong in believing that the main failure in Iraq was not creating a suitable economic environment (free enterprise, secure private property, etc.). These things are surely desirable, but I don’t think the problem in Iraq is mainly economic. It has to do with religion, tribalism, history, customs, culture. Little to do with economy, property rights, prosperity.
Many suffer from a residual belief in Marx’s materialistic interpretation of history. Marx said that economic (materialistic) factors cause and explain everything.
If Iraqis fight among themselves – there must be some economic reasons for this. Create the right economic conditions and the insurgency will end. Likewise, in the West it was believed for a long time that fighting poverty will make communism lose it’s appeal.
It doeasn’t work this way. Communism (or collectivism)is back – now fighting affluence (consumerism) and global warming.
The root causes of the Iraqi conflict are religious, tribal, cultural, historic, and mainly irrational. Economic policy change can do little toward ending the conflict.
Perhaps more libertarians could have spent time expressing these ideas and less time bleating on about ZOG. They might actually have done some good.(I know thise website is an exception, but it really is an exception).
Well using enough troops to actually ocuppy the country rather than just hiding behind large concrete wall in the centre of baghdad might have been a start.
Cracking down on the wave of looting that started just after the occupation(apparently only the oil ministry was protected – hah bet that filled ordinary iraqies with confidnence for thier new protectors).
Disbanding the army of Iraq, so filling the streets with unemployed young men with weapons training was also not one of the best calls either.
I wonder how many troops the allies used to occupy Germany or Japan, i bet it was loads more per capita?
“in fact many Iraqis do speak of their anger at seeing Saddam’s old police still carrying out their old jobs without having been punished for past actions or atrocities. ”
I think this is where the “de-Nazification” parallel breaks down. Nazi Germany had not been engaged in the oppression of the *majority* of its own people: it was the majority that needed to be de-Nazified and any failure to do so in an individual case would not have the same effect as the above.
Those that were oppressed and might have reacted had either fled or been killed – the occupying forces in 1945 did not have to deal with the pent-up resentment of the majority: on the contrary, the populace was broken and defeated in a way that did not happen in the Iraq invasion.
Jacob, I think you misunderstand Marx. Marx didn’t believe that culture was unimportant or that culture did not have economic impact. The kinds of things that you are referring to, indeed, form central elements of his thought. Class consciousness and the ability of people to work together to pursue economic aims are arguably the primary objectives of ideal marxists in a pre-communist country.
I think it is quite telling that people seem to believe that they are agreeing when the argument goes something like this: “Bush sux because he de-baathified Iraq and thus destabalised it” “Yeah! Bush sux because he didn’t de-baathify Iraq!”
James,
I heartily agree with this:
As to Marx and culture.
If you propose a theorem that is nonsense (the materialistic interpretation of history) you must support it by additional nonsensical theorems. Such was his dictum about “Class consciousness”. He said: there is no individual consciousness, no personal opinions and convictions. What you think is determined by the class you were born into. If you think that private property needs to be protected, that is because your father was a burgeois, had he been a prole, you were bound to think that private property needs to be redistributed.
If anyone opposes communism – that’s not because maybe communism is wrong – that’s because he belongs to the wrong class – i.e. the burgeoisie.
As a consequence – in communist countries – they accepted only sons of proletarians into universities or governmant employment, as they were afraid that a boy whose fater had been a merchant or a doctor would “contaminate” the institutions with burgeois ideas, and would be disloyal, since he has a wrong “class conscience”.
Marx’s notion of how “culture” works and influences reality was no less wrong than his ideas about what moves history (materialism).
We should have brought the boys home and had a victory parade soon after pulling down Saddam’s statue.
Neither national interest nor realpolitik is served by providing the Iraqis with target practise for a civil war they seem keen to have.
The Newsweek(Link) article is probably the obvious place to turn to for an optomistic review of Iraq’s economy. I’m not pointing to it for the idea that Iraq is booming, so much as for the idea that the US policy has been precisely to encourage the private sector in as laissez faire a manner as possible. Most of the direct funding goes to large companies because it is for things like roads and power plants and needs large security budgets. You can’t really inject public money directly into small businesses in the same way without even more wide-spread corruption resulting. The flat tax of 15% (Newsweek should probably have mentioned that it was a flat tax) is one of the ways of creating growth that I would hope this site supported. The areas where there has been particular growth (cars, computers, personal banking and cell phones) are noticable as being areas that promote further growth through personal empowerment.
de Soto doesn’t seem to have much in the way of facts about Iraq. He’s not even saying that he hasn’t been consulted, but he does seem to be saying that he doesn’t know much about Iraq. He seems to suggest that they don’t have a written system of law, which is absurd. Other than the suggestion that he should have been paid to do a large scale model, and the stupid implication about Iraqi law (which some of my ex-classmates, JAGs, used to study and were very impressed by), he doesn’t seem to make any claims about Iraq at all. He just regurgitates a basic introduction to his work.
The failure to rely heavily on de Soto’s current work might be more embarrasing if his hyperbole wasn’t so heavily discredited. The Economist(Link), reliably behind the times, relatively recently published an article on the limited degree of difference titling made in Peru, de Soto’s shining example, if you’ll pardon the pun. He’s a good guy, and I really, truly, hope that he can help Garcia with the current Congress, but the lessons that he could teach on Iraq have already been learned and qualified by people involved in the reconstruction.
The economists who are working on Iraq are not idiots, uneducated, socialist, or few in number. They may have made mistakes, but a failure to consider obvious slogans of development economics is not going to be one of them.
Iraq isn’t over yet, so enough handwringing.
Iraq is undergoing transition, boiling down to the settling of scores between Shiite and Sunni. I’d agree that the US administration underestimated the hatred involved and should be faulted for not preparing for the vacuum left after Hussein. However over the next 2-3 years I think we’ll see the situation reversed. Dealing with Iran will have a lot to do with defusing the internal tensions.
The seeds of democracy are present, which is the overwhelming support by the population of the idea that electors decide who is in power and no-one else. That’s the good news. The economy is in good shape and powering along, which is also good news. It’s a slow process, but the fundamental indicators are positive, despite what big media wants you to believe.
Jacob, can you cite your claim that Marx held that nobody has a personal opinion?
wrt opposition to communism being because of the class you were born into, the entire point of the concept of class consciousness is that most of the working class oppose communism. Class consciousness is not just a useful concept for the left. The Clinton/ Gingrich welfare reform was heavily informed by the notion of encouraging class consciousness for African American women and has been a tremendous success as a result. Your claim, as I understood it, that religion, culture, tribalism, and such limit the economic success of individual Iraqis could easily be derived from Das Kapital, although I think that in marxist terms the “tribes” would be seen more as feudal than as tribal entities (I’d be happy to be corrected on that). Iraqi social structures are much more developed than what Marx talks about as being tribal structures.
Citing stupid practices of communist countries is not the same thing as criticising Marx. Marx, indeed, was a big fan of the extention of legal title to property. It’s one of the big things that moves us out of Feudalism all the way to late Capitalism, a shift that Marx felt had greatly benefitted mankind. It was not yet the shift to communism, but Marx was interested in a lot of economic and political changes that did not directly lead to communism.
TD,
Um … yeah. The overwhelming majority (Shia) support the plan that the overwhelming majority (Shia) should “decide who is in power and no-one else.”
How come this observation doesn’t surprise me?
Midwesterner
There is Sunni and Kurd representation in the Iraqi government, which will always be overwhelmingly Shiite, much as American politics will be dominated by WASP men. You can’t avoid the demographics.
However the democratic system is designed to rein in the authoritarian instinct of the dominant majority through the rule of law and regular elections. The situation is a mess at the moment, my point being that it won’t always be and that the trend is positive, despite the attention-grabbing carnage. However without dealing with Iranian and Syrian interference in the region I think the Iraq project will be doomed.
People forget that the death toll under Saddam Hussein was far worse per month than the current situation.
Courtesy of the CFR, but an interesting read.
When people form collectives (and that is what religious alignments are) and disagree to this extent, there are only three choices.
(A) Separate them.
(B) Let them kill each other until only the winning side remains.
(C) Enforce rules to make individuals, not collectives the protected unit under government.
Can you show your statistics? I’m not denouncing your claim. But I do have doubts about it. I’d like to see your sources.
By far worse do you mean 5x? 3x?
Midwesterner
I am not necessarily disagreeing with you, but in my opinion Iraqis are currently better off than they were under Hussein, awful as the situation might be.
Along with other human rights organisations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam’s needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam’s reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power. And the 600,000 figure is a conservative one.
So it would take about another 120 years on current daily death rates to catch up.
“Why has Iraq turned out to be so difficult?”
Because rules of engagement and local politics urged restraint. And even more fundamentally, because building a country from scratch is a difficult job.
I get this with my managers at work. “Last week you said you’d design and implement an entirely new concept in computer languages and integrate it with our existing million-lines-of-code system. Why aren’t you done yet, and why do there appear to be bugs in the code?”
Because that is the nature of the task. You have to rebuild neighbourhood relationships, institutions, customs, methods of resolving conflicts, infrastructure, law, constitution, parties and parliaments, political alliances and business relationships in a nation that was shattered by decades of oppression. I liken it to those cases where abused children are rescued and put into foster homes – initially they are often violent and disruptive, kicking and biting and screaming, until they pick up on the new rules and learn how to fit in. It sometimes takes years. When the Prime Minister of Iraq was asked what they most needed from the West, he replied “Time.”
Consider how long it takes to build things here in the West. (Brits might like to consider the Wembley Stadium as an example, or you could think of the poor Greeks’ struggles to build their Olympic stadium.) Years of planning, just for a building. And all the supply companies, engineering expertise, surrounding infrastructure, and experience are already there. Now take away the infrastructure and multiply it by a thousand, at a job nobody still living has ever attempted or knows how to do, or even how what you’re building is supposed to work, and with Iranian nutbats across the border trying to stop you with heavy artillery.
Quite frankly, I stand breathless in admiration for their fantastic accomplishments. I consider them a people deserving of far better of us than they have had. The errors and incompetencies must be acknowledged – we are all of us human – but they are actually doing what we only talk about: building a society. All our theories about anarchy and how government is the problem – well, Iraq has been for a while a country with no effective government. The problems that are theoretical abstractions to us, they are busy solving. And no doubt we don’t like all of their solutions; but this is the other point – it’s none of our business. It is their country, and if the people there (as opposed to some self-appointed “leaders”) want religion in their constitution, then what right have we to dictate to them that they can’t? Would you care to take God out of the American Constitution?
Freedom is nothing if not the freedom to make your own mistakes. They have a long, long way to go, but I genuinely believe they are (currently) moving in the right direction.
Along with other human rights organisations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
Thank goodness we replaced Saddam’s inefficient oriental despotism with efficient state capitalist enterprise. It took Saddam more than two decades what the US was able to do in four years. That’s the can-do American spirit!
– Josh
Thank you, TD. I will keep those number breakdowns in mind in any future debates I have with people who exagerate the significance of the current death toll. However, my top of the head math I get between 75 and 115 per day based on this estimate. I think “far worse” might be a difficult case to make.
Predictably enough, though, I would still like to change your opinion (or perhaps definition) of “democracy”. You said:
Can you explain how that works? Either it’s a democratic system or it isn’t. A dominant majority always gets its way in a democratic system. I think you are buying into the use of the word ‘democracy’ when you in fact mean ‘constitution’.
James,
No.
I claimed that economic factors (ownership of property or disrespect for it, control of resources) alone cannot explain the current civil war. It is caused by religious and tribal differences, past rivalries and abuses, animosity, etc., by factors not explainable in rational economic terms. Fixing the economy won’t solve the problem or dampen the inner conflict.
I claimed that those who say otherwise (“give people property rights and prosperity and they’ll stop fighting”) are wrong, and are influenced (maybe unconsciously) by false ideas originating with Marx.
That is totally false. Marx said the the “capitalists'” ownership of the means of production (land, machinery) enabled them to exploit the proletariat (those who didn’t own means of production) and enrich themselves at the expense of the proletariat’s labor. The solution he proposed: abolish private ownership of the means of production, “nationalize” them (or collectivize them). The abolition of private property was communism’s highest ideal. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his necessities” regardless of property, which would cease to exist in the ideal communist society.
james
That may be so, but it is not what Marx thought and wrote. Marx said that a man’s thoughts are derived from the class he was born into. Therefore, according to Marxist doctrine, the proletariat endorses communism, while the burgeoisie opposes it.
Ok, enough of Mraxism for now….
Jacob, all of our histories have shared those traits at points of varying recentness. And I for one don’t say “fixing the economy” is the solution. All though there is little doubt it will be a symptom of solution.
I have found no reference to “prosperity” in either of these two threads except in your (Jacob’s) post. This is a clear symptom of strawman arguing.
So that leaves you claiming that people arguing for property rights are succumbing to Marxist beliefs. BS and you will have to twist alot of convolutions to make that case.
You are arguing that property rights are irrelevent to the problem. I say the problem can not be solved unless property rights are secure.
I know am going to get blasted for this on a libertarian website like Samizdata, but I will say anyway:
Why would you want to liberate people who do not respect freedom? If people do not accept the idea of free choice then may, just maybe, it might not be a good idea to give them a choice.
I am aware this goes contrary to libertarian believes. But please bear in mind that libertarianism was not designed to deal with Iraqis, who think it is a good idea to blow themselves up among a bunch of schoolgirls, just to make a point.
eere,
It’s a good question. Generally speaking, we don’t. Read our views on people like Castro and Chavez and the government guys responsible for the LaoGai or Gulag. Read our views on radical Islamists. In our book, people who oppose freedom should be dealt with severely.
But the majority of Iraqis aren’t like that. They do respect and want freedom (up to a point – within the context of traditional values) and are ready to sustain heavy sacrifices to get them. This is the reason the Jihadis blow up Iraqi schoolgirls – the schoolgirls represent a better future being built by ordinary Iraqis that is starting to happen all over the country, and the enemies of freedom are desperate to stop it. It is those Iraqi schoolgirls we are fighting for – the ones ready to defy the Jihadis and go to school, and the Iraqi teachers who teach in those schools despite the threats, and the Iraqi parents who send them.
They generally don’t like us or our beliefs, and we don’t like theirs; but that will only change gradually. We should still make our views known and work towards persuading them, but it isn’t realistic to ask for everything at once. It’s a start.
You will note that it is mostly Iraqis the Jihadists are busy fighting and killing – why would they do that, if those Iraqis didn’t want the freedom we are offering?
eere,
Unless it is to our distinct advantage to do otherwise, individualist cultures should treat collectivist cultures as a single monolithic entity. I personally think that at the same time we should maintain strong and well defended channels for escapees to reach freedom.
Yet in the case of Iraq, I personally view it as very much a case of that sign often seen in antique and glassware etc shops:
Nice to touch.
Nice to hold.
When it breaks,
we mark it “sold”.
My conscience tells me we broke it. Unlike Gulf1 and Afghanistan, it is difficult although not impossible to make a case that we were under any legitimate threat. Whatever it was before, it is our responsibility now. Unlike the Hillary Clinton crowd, I think it is very wrong for us to say, “Sorry. We’re outta here. Go ahead and kill each other now.” without providing at least some safe haven for the people who are seeking to live undisturbed and undisturbing.