What to Do about Iraq?

The Princess of Darkness, who is also my wife, has a simple solution for Iraq: make it a big smoking hole in the ground. Fortunately, I took the keys to the nukes away from her. Still, I understand her frustration. There seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Our troops are dying to stabilize their country, while their leaders go on vacation.

I believe the majority of people who live over there just want to get on with their lives. More than coincidentally, they are not the people with the guns. The people with the guns want to make trouble for everyone else because it beats working. The Sunnis with the guns had years of experience doing this and they don't propose to stop now. The Shi'a with the guns had years of being on the receiving end and now they want their payback. The Kurds with the guns want to gather up the Kurds next door, which has Turkey freaking out.

Iraq is not a nation. It is an arbitrary piece of sand marked off after the First World War to balance British and French spheres of influence. Most people have more allegiance to their clan and, except for the Kurds, their sect of Islam than toward the Iraqi state.

Iraq has no rule of law: power flows from the barrel of a gun. For over twenty years they were ruled by a murderous kleptocracy that could only stay in power by keeping the loot flowing. When the Baath regime had exhausted its opportunities to shake down its own citizens, it turned its attention to the neighbors.

We should have knocked Saddam Hussein over after the First Gulf War. He was a destabilizing influence, and it is not in our interest to have instability in the world. We didn't because we knew it was going to turn out something like this. But by failing to act back in 1991, we guaranteed it would be worse when the eventual day of reckoning rolled around.

As reported in Frontline, Paul Bremer came in and, steered by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, promptly started screwing up. He issued orders for de-Ba'athification and demobilization. So now we have a whole bunch of people, upwards of 50,000, that we've frozen out of our plans for Iraqi society and they have gone home with their guns. It was as if we had given Robert Morgenthau free rein in Germany in '45.

Now we're probably well past the point where we can reasonably expect to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and make a nation out of this. We can't partition it because then Iran wins and the Turks will lose their shit. We have soldiers dying because a bunch of people hate us for not letting them kill each other. If we pull out, we will leave behind a petri dish of bad news gangs eager to export trouble all over the region. What do we do?

We make Iraq an American protectorate. Just like the Philippines in 1899, and with considerably more empirical evidence to support it, the people here are not ready for self-government. It is harmful to American interests to have an anarchy in the middle of the region. So we need to run the place for them, indefinitely.

Yes, there will be all kinds of uproar. Many Moslems will claim that we planned this all along, to expropriate the oil. Let them say it. Most of them hate us anyway, and will interpret everything we do in the worst possible light. Fine. We are what you thought we were.

Our national embarrassment, Jimmy Carter, will give us a scolding. Have another Nobel Prize, President Carter. Now, with all due respect, shut up.

There was a time in our history when we didn't get our boxers in a bunch just because someone else might not like what we did. We need to reconnect with that state of mind.