Diplomat Pessimistic About Post-War Iraq
Associated Press
Friday March 21, 18:17 PM
As U.S. ambassador to Croatia at the height of the carnage in the former
Yugoslavia, Peter Galbraith has seen it before _ the ethnic massacres
and
retribution killings that poison a nation's future at the very moment
of
its liberation.
And as the United Nations-appointed midwife to the newly born nation
of
East Timor, he has also seen what happens when things go right _ when
an
aggrieved population puts aside its urge to settle old scores and
concentrates on nation-building, on transforming decades of brutal
subjugation into democracy.
Galbraith's unique perspective, which includes considerable experience
in
Iraq, makes him pessimistic about what may happen there, especially in
the
first few months following an American attack.
The culture of cruelty and violence born of Saddam Hussein's tyranny
will
be difficult to control, Galbraith said. It is a culture, he said, best
described to him last July when he visited Hero Talabani, the wife of
Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, in northern Iraq.
"We not only need to get rid of Saddam," she told him, "We
must also get
rid of all the little Saddams in our head.'"
That, Galbraith said in a recent interview, will be no easy task.
He said he has seen those little Saddams in his eight missions to Iraq,
starting when he was first sent to the Persian Gulf 15 years ago as the
chief investigator on a Senate foreign relations team that looked into
Saddam Hussein's deadly gas attacks against the country's Kurdish minority.
But the cries for vengeance against Saddam's ruling Baath party will
be the
loudest, not in Iraq's Kurdish north, but in the cities of southern Iraq,
such as Basra, Nasiriyah, Najaf and Karbala, Galbraith said.
During the first Gulf War twelve years ago, these overwhelmingly Shiite
communities rose in rebellion against Saddam with the encouragement of
the
United States. In the three months after Iraq's humiliating expulsion
from
Kuwait, Saddam's army crushed them, killing tens of thousands.
This aggrieved population might well use the chaos of a collapsing regime
to settle scores; and for a time, Galbraith said, there will be nothing
to
stop them.
Once the ground war starts, the U.S. blitzkrieg may bypass some of those
impoverished southern cities in its rush to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
As the Americans sweep past, law and order in the south will quickly break
down, Galbraith said.
U.S. troops, he said, are not policemen. And even if when some are finally
deployed in the southern cities, he added, they will be ill prepared to
deal with widespread civil unrest.
The low-tech butchery that might ensue, Galbraith said, could be
considerable before order is restored.
Despite the potential for such a bleak beginning, there may be reason
to be
guardedly optimistic about Iraq's long-term future, Galbraith said. East
Timor, he suggested, offers some lessons in this regard.
In 1999, after an orgy of looting and killing by Indonesian security
forces
left East Timor dysfunctional, the United Nations took over administration
of the area until an independent Timorese government could be formed.
Galbraith became the U.N. mission's chief of political affairs there,
charged with helping to virtually invent a new country.
Within a year, he said, East Timor had an independent and functioning
representative government.
East Timor, Galbraith is first to acknowledge, is no Iraq. It is a tiny
island nation with a population of just 800,000. And it is one of the
poorest countries in the world, a country with no natural resources other
than the oil and gas fields yet to be exploited.
When Galbraith arrived in East Timor, he found himself in a devastated
wannabe nation with little of what he called human capital _ "a country
with only 20 lawyers, poorly trained; only 15 doctors, poorly trained;
not
a single civil servant _ not a single policeman _ and not many Timorese
capable of assuming these responsibilities."
Iraq, by comparison, has a population of 25 million, including a large
educated class. It is a major oil producer, and has what Galbraith
characterized as an already existing, "though admittedly perverted,"
government structure.
While East Timor's people largely welcomed the U.N. mission, Iraqis'
welcome will be "much more ambiguous," Galbraith said, adding
that the
Americans will not be seen as liberators by all.
But what the East Timorese and the Iraqis have in common, Galbraith said,
is the desire to run their own country _ and as quickly as possible.
In East Timor, Galbraith said, it took the population just three months
to
run out of patience with his, and the U.N.'s, administration of their
country.
"They wanted a greater say in their own affairs and it forced us
to rethink
our model" to accommodate their wishes, Galbraith said. After only
a year
of sharing power with the United Nations, the Timorese were running the
country on their own.
Iraqis will be even less patient, Galbraith said.
Bush administration officials have indicated that the commander of the
U.S.
invasion force, Gen. Tommy Franks, might administer Iraq for an
undetermined time after the war.
Galbraith urged that period be short. "I certainly wouldn't do the
MacArthur thing," Galbraith said, referring the administration of
Japan by
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and then by Gen. Matthew Ridgeway for more than
6
years after World War II.
Far better, he said, would be to have the United Nations administer the
country while an Iraqi interim coalition of Iraq's Kurdish, Shiite and
Sunni Arab communities quickly paves the way for elections.
Reforming Iraqi society, building democratic institutions, "will
be
supported overwhelmingly by the Iraqi people," Galbraith said. "The
overwhelming majority will be very happy to see (Saddam's) regime go."
One wild card in any post-Saddam future, Galbraith said, is the Kurdish
population of 4 million concentrated in a Vermont-sized chuck of Iraqi
territory less than 200 miles north of Baghdad.
Under the protection of U.S. jets patrolling Iraq's northern "no-fly
zone,"
the Kurds, in 1991, formed a regional government, conducted what Galbraith
called the only democratic elections in Iraq's history, put together a
highly motivated, if lightly armed, militia numbering as many as 100,000,
and successfully established two universities and 21 television stations,
many of them independent and serving a million people in an area
encompassing the city of Irbil.
Turkey, which lies immediately to the north, is wary of an oil-rich Kurdish
population on its southeastern border _ concerned that it might encourage
Turkey's own Kurdish population to try to fulfill a long-held dream of
an
independent Kurdistan.
Turkey's refusal, so far, to allow the United States to launch a ground
attack on Iraq from its territory "is really a blessing in disguise,"
Galbraith said, because it diminishes the chance that Turkish troops will
be drawn into the war _ and use it as an opportunity to crush Kurdish
autonomy.
Anyone who tries to take away what the Iraqi Kurds have built would
encounter fierce resistance, Galbraith said.