Our New Fire Department
Dear F.W:
The best way for me to respond to your recent letter is by
telling a little story, an allegory of sorts.
Imagine there's a city. Not a very special city either. Its citizens are as well-meaning and upstanding as they are
in most other cities. And among
its citizens there is as much crime and dereliction too. And in that city there is a fire
department.
Of course everyone knows it is right and noble for firefighters
to go into burning buildings to rescue people. That is their calling, after all. But let's imagine for a moment that in this city the fire
department often lets buildings burn rather than go to fight the fires that
have started. Some fires they will
rush to put out, while others they just let burn regardless of how many people
are trapped in the building. So
it's an odd fire department we're talking about here. But let's try to imagine it even so.
Now it turns out that one night there was a big fire on one city block. And the firefighters were sent out in force at an hour when they usually don't even bother to answer the red phones. Many citizens were surprised by this: why this sudden burst of responsibility? Later it came out that that the reason for this sudden late-night enthusiasm was that the fire chief kept his antique collection stored on the fourth floor of the building in question. (Collecting antiques goes back generations in the chief's family, in fact. It's a sort of family tradition we're talking about here.) And look: now an investigation of the fire and the fire department's response shows that in actuality, while some people were rescued from the fire, much more effort was spent putting out the fire on the fourth floor than was justified. The fourth floor, after all, was not where most of the people were; neither was it where the fire was worst.
So articles come out in the
press suggesting that the fire chief was just trying to save his antique
collection: that's why the alarms were rung. And other articles show that the way the fire was fought
proved what the chief's motives were.
But then just as these articles appear all kinds of sentimental citizens
start coming out in defense of the fire chief saying things like "It is
noble and heroic to fight fires!" and "Those young men risked their
lives to save the people trapped in the building!" and "How can you
criticize the chief? His job is to
protect us from fires! I suppose
you'd rather burn, huh?" and "Arsonist jerk! If you don't like our fire chief, why
don't you just move to another city!"
So here are all these hysterical homilies being made (and
not a few hysterical insults as well).
But to the citizens who really study the case these sentimental
statements all seem rather shallow and irrelevant. Because given what happened what did it mean to stand up and
get misty-eyed and start blabbing about what a noble thing it is to risk one's
life to fight fires and save people from the flames? Because that was not really the issue here, was it? It certainly is a noble thing for firefighters to save
people from fires. But the issue
here is one of a fire department that to begin with was called into action
mainly because of an antique collection.
And the issue even more importantly is that this fire department's
methods of fighting the fire in question were hampered by its original dishonest
motives. The fire chief wasn't
really concerned about the spread of the fire, neither was he concerned about
the people trapped in the building.
Studying his orders to the firefighters proved that he was concerned
about the antiques. And what
honest firefighter wants to die to protect a private collection?
The issue in this case was that the fire chief demonstrated
serious ineptitude, and that this ineptitude stemmed directly from his initial
motives in calling out the firefighters.
On the sixth and seventh floors people were burning to death. Meanwhile the chief was worried about
his Louis XVI furniture.
* * *
You write me of Neville
Chamberlain and how "liberals" like myself have obviously never
learned the lessons of history.
You say that under our current "brave leadership" we Americans
are now bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and that if I weren't such a
hypocrite I'd be supporting this great historical project, as I would support
our current "brave" president. But
in fact I am a hypocrite, you say, full of excuses and "propaganda." The only things I read are
"liberal pap" (by "pap" you evidently mean stuff not
written by learned talk radio hosts or Fox News commentators; stuff written
rather by scholars and diplomats and "intellectuals"--all that
pro-UN, pro-European stuff us "lefties" read). It's interesting that on the one hand
you criticize me for not having "learned the lessons of history,"
while on the other hand you attempt to mock me by calling me an
"intellectual" and "Professor." This is strange because I'd have thought it was
intellectuals and professors who'd have learned something of history. But no: it seems it's the talk radio
hosts who know best.
How is it I can criticize
the Bush Administration for its war on Iraq? That's what you really want to know. Wasn't Saddam Hussein evidently evil? Isn't bringing democracy to the Arab
world a good thing? Isn't it
worthy to fight for democracy?
I've tried to get at my answers to these questions through the little
allegory above. It explains as
best I can where I find myself when faced with the kind of supposedly patriotic
criticism your sort usually offers.
You are not, after all, the only hysterical right-wing American who's
written me.
And although for someone like you who hates and mistrusts intellectuals allegory is a pretty big word to use, I'm guessing you can interpret
the story for what it is. If you
put your mind to it.
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator. And yes we overthrew him so as to be
able ultimately to manipulate Iraq's oil.
Our motives have shown through painfully in the way we are managing to
"rebuild" the country. And
the world is rightfully critical both of our supposed war on terror and of our
supposed "war of self-defense" against Iraq.
When Baghdad fell, an inordinate number of troops were sent
immediately to secure the oil ministry, while everything else in the city,
including sites where we supposedly believed Saddam was developing chemical
weapons, were not even searched or guarded. It speaks volumes on the relative importance of WMD as a
reason for the war. And now,
during the period of supposed democratization and reconstruction, we learn that
the Bush Administration has not sent in qualified experts to deal with the
challenge, but has instead sent cousins and cronies (see the following
article). In fact, to borrow a
phrase, cronyism has proven to be the "basic paradigm" of Bush
policy. First we Americans watched
as the War on Terror was bent out of shape to help Bush's oil industry cronies;
then we watched as the most important political posts in the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Iraq were given to Bush's political cronies,
regardless of relevant qualifications or experience. This has all proven to be a great boon to Halliburton and
friends. It has proven disastrous
in terms of Iraqi reconstruction.
What it's doing to America's standing in the world should be obvious to
anyone.
There are still people in America that seem to believe the
war in Iraq was not really about oil.
This is almost unfathomable.
Let's put aside the evident oil connections the Bush family has. Let's forget that Dick Cheney was CEO
of an oil company before coming into the White House. Let's forget too that Condoleeza Rice, before being
appointed by George W. Bush, was on the board of directors of Chevron and
served as an oil company consultant in Central Asia. Let's forget all this merely coincidental petroleum smell
and look instead at the political intellectual side. Let's consider Paul Wolfowitz, our current Deputy Secretary
of Defense and the man who more than anyone is responsible for guiding Bush's
foreign policy.
In 1992 (which seems to me
to be well before the attacks of September 11, 2001) Paul Wolfowitz penned a
draft document entitled "Defense Planning Guidance" in which he
stated his belief that we Americans must establish a global military hegemony
that would be so massive as to deter any other nation from ever even thinking
about standing up to us or our policy goals. Americans must "maintain the mechanism for deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role." Crucial to maintaining
such a pre-eminent position, it was advisable to "safeguard access to
vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil."
To safeguard this vital raw material military intervention in Iraq might
be necessary. That was in
1992. Six years later, in 1998,
Paul Wolfowitz was chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
a new Washington think tank whose other members included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick
Cheney and Jeb Bush. At that time
PNAC was trying to convince the Clinton Administration to upgrade the American
presence in the Persian Gulf and to do this by removing Saddam Hussein from
power. PNAC's recommendation as to
how to remove Saddam was to use military force if necessary and to do this even
without UN approval because, you see, there was a definite need to assert our
new "one superpower" status in that region so rich in that particular
vital raw material, namely oil. All this was clear at the time, but
Paul Wolfowitz was not part of the Clinton inner circle, and so his suggestions
were ignored.
Now, however, the situation is quite different. Paul Wolfowitz is George W. Bush's most
trusted policy adviser. Given his
long-standing plan for U.S. hegemony and the crucial role to be played by Iraqi
oil, it is likely that even without the attacks of 9/11 there would have been a
concerted effort to justify an overthrow of Saddam. After the attacks came, we saw a major push from the White
House to link them somehow to Saddam and his Baathists. Hmm. Even when the links couldn't be found, it was only a matter
of time before administration rhetoric had completely refocused the new
"war on terror" off of bin Laden and onto Iraq. Afghanistan was more or less given back
to its warlords and poppy fields, and our eyes were turned to a new project:
destroy Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction; bring freedom and democracy
to the long-suffering Iraqi people.
But this time--unlike in the Bush team's manifestoes of the 1990s--nothing
was said about oil. I guess
mentioning Persian Gulf oil would have only clouded the "real
reasons" for the war.
That all of these "dots" are still so hard to
"connect" for so many Americans is a wondrous thing. After all, we are not dealing here with
documents written by other people about Bush Administration officials. We are dealing with documents actually
written by the Bush
Administration officials themselves.
------
On Cronyism and Bush's Iraq:
Quoted
from Peter W. Galbraith: "The Bungled Transition," The New York
Review of Books, September 23, 2004 issue
On March 8 of this year,
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the US-appointed administrator for Iraq, staged an
elaborate signing ceremony for Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). In
a gesture intended to recall the closing of the 1787 Philadelphia
constitutional convention, Bremer laid out twenty-five pens so that each member
of the Iraqi Governing Council could sign a document intended to serve as
Iraq's interim constitution. The Bush administration said the TAL would be a
"road map" to the preparation of a permanent constitution. It hailed
the TAL as unprecedented in the Middle East for its extensive human rights
protections, its concern for the status of women, and its independent
judiciary.
At the same time it was choosing Allawi as prime minister,
the Bush administration effectively jettisoned the TAL. The administration had
put itself in an impossible position with respect to its own creation. In 2003,
at the request of the United States and Great Britain, the United Nations
Security Council acknowledged that the US-led coalition was the occupying power
in Iraq. As a general principle of international law, occupying powers are not
allowed to make permanent, or irreversible, changes in an occupied country.
Occupying powers cannot cede territory, sell assets, or make permanent law.
Thus all law made by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) expired when the
occupation ended on June 28.
In order for the Transitional Administrative Law to be
valid after the end of the occupation, it needed Security Council endorsement.
In the 1990s, the Security Council granted other international administrations
(Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor) lawmaking powers but the Bush administration,
having alienated its allies, did not obtain this authority in the original 2003
UN Security Council resolution. In June 2004, when the Security Council
considered the resolution restoring Iraqi sovereignty, the Bush administration
decided not to seek an endorsement of the TAL (and other CPA-passed laws),
ignoring pleas from pro-democracy Iraqis. It made that decision in deference to
the Ayatollah Sistani, who does not want an elected, Shiite-dominated assembly
to be in any way constrained by the American-created interim constitution. In
particular, Sistani objected to provisions in the TAL that would make it
difficult to create an Islamic state and would require a permanent constitution
acceptable not just to the majority Shiites but also to the Kurds and Sunni
Arabs.
To mollify Iraq's Kurds, who had placed great stock in the
TAL, Allawi agreed to "apply" it for the duration of his government.
He has turned down Kurdish requests that it be enacted into law. And even if he
did enact the TAL, he cannot commit the elected assembly that will follow his
interim government to accepting it. For the Kurds, the most important
provisions of the TAL were precisely those that ensure the continuation of a
secular and democratic Kurdistan even after the national elections.
How did the Bush administration invest so much in the TAL
and then find itself forced to abandon it? It appears that Bremer never
realized that his decrees would not legally outlast the occupation. It was a
rookie's mistake caused, as with so many other CPA failures, by the lack of
expertise on the part of his staff. The TAL was largely the responsibility of
two of Bremer's assistants (dubbed "the west wingers"), one an
extremely capable but relatively junior Foreign Service officer and the other a
young political appointee from the Pentagon's stable of neoconservative
nation-builders. Imbued with grand ideas such as remaking the Iraqi judiciary
with a US-style Supreme Court, they apparently neglected to consult an
international lawyer.
The Bush administration's recruitment of staff for the CPA
is one of the great scandals of the American occupation, although it has so far
received little attention from the press. Republican political connections
counted for far more than professional competence, relevant international
experience, or knowledge of Iraq. In May, The Washington Post ran an account of three young people
recruited for service in the CPA by e-mail, without interviews, security
clearances, or relevant experience. They ended up responsible for spending
Iraq's budget; because they knew little about the country or about financial
procedures, they did so slowly. The failure to spend money was of course the
source of enormous frustration to jobless Iraqis and undoubtedly produced
recruits for the insurgency. According to the Post, the threesome, who included the daughter
of a prominent conservative activist, had never applied to go to Iraq and could
not figure out how they were selected. Finally they realized that the one thing
they had in common was that they had applied for jobs at the conservative
Heritage Foundation, which had kept their resumes on file.
In some cases, the quest for political loyalists meant
dismissing qualified professionals who had already been recruited. In the June
20 Chicago Tribune,
the reporter Andy Zajac described how, in April of 2003, the Bush
administration replaced the chief CPA health official, Dr. Frederick Burkle, a
medical doctor with close working relationships with humanitarian organizations
and long experience in conflict zones, with James Haveman, a political crony of
Michigan's Republican former governor. Unlike Dr. Burkle, who for months had
been planning the restoration of Iraq's health care system and who was ready to
put a program in action as soon as Baghdad fell, Haveman did not arrive in Iraq
until June 7, 2003. Although he had never worked in a post-conflict
environment, Haveman strongly denied that he lacked international experience,
apparently considering his travel to twenty-six foreign countries (as he told
the Chicago Tribune) a
relevant qualification.
The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by
Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of
President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the
job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune--without any apparent sense of
irony--that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing
business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."
Haveman, according to the Tribune, ignored Iraq's private health care
system (which meets half the country's needs) and wasted huge amounts of money
by refusing to collect data on the existing clinics. It is probably just as
well that Iraq's privatization program has not worked out, since the CPA could
not, as the agent of an occupying power, lawfully sell any Iraqi assets,
although it is unlikely that Fleisher or Foley knew this.
US spending in Iraq has been slow and misdirected.
Politically connected corporations, such as Vice President Cheney's
Halliburton, received "no bid" contracts and have been accused of
bilking the government with tens of millions in overcharges. But don't expect
politically embarrassing investigations. The CPA's inspector general is Stuart
Bowen Jr., a longtime Bush aide, who came to the position from the Washington
lobbying firm of Patten Boggs. Among the contracts he is supposed to monitor is
one for URS, a client whose $30 million contract he helped obtain. The US
failure to meet the basic needs of ordinary people in postwar Iraq is the major
reason so many Iraqis feel so bitterly angry with the occupation. The failure
was not a matter of money. From the start the CPA had access to more than $1
billion in cash left behind by Saddam's regime and $4 billion in UN
oil-for-food funds earmarked for Kurdistan, but redirected (to the great anger
of the Kurds) to a CPA-controlled budget. In October 2003, the US Congress
appropriated $19 billion for Iraq reconstruction. The CPA also controlled
revenues from Iraqi oil exports, which were, in spite of periodic sabotage,
very substantial.
Eight months after receiving the congressional
appropriation, however, the CPA had spent less than $500 million of it on
reconstruction. The only part of Iraq not subject to the CPA's financial
control was Kurdistan, where the regional government received a cash allocation
equal to just 6 percent of Iraq's total budget (on a per capita basis it should
have received 15 percent), but spent it so effectively that the local economy
has enjoyed a boom that, in some areas, outstripped the local labor market. By
contrast, unemployoment in Arab Iraq has hovered around 50 percent. The hiring
of unqualified staff by the CPA, documented by the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post, helps to explain why the CPA (known to
my Iraqi friends as "Cannot Provide Anything") accomplished so
little.
Bush's attempt to remake Iraq is the centerpiece of his
foreign policy and, almost certainly, will be the defining event of his administration.
The invasion and occupation were highly ideological decisions reflecting the
philosophy of the President and his closest aides. What is astonishing is that
the conduct of this venture was not left to the military and civilian
professionals most qualified to make it work but rather to those most committed
to a fuzzy vision of a transformed Iraq. In too many cases, these were people
with no knowledge of Iraq, with no experience in dealing with post-conflict
environments, with limited experience in making the US bureaucracy produce
results, and with little or no expertise in the substantive matters (i.e.,
finance, trade) for which they were responsible. It is not surprising that so
many gave up after relatively short periods in Iraq.
I participated in what became a major effort of the Clinton administration--bringing peace to Bosnia. While our efforts lacked the ideological fervor of Bush's nation-building in Iraq, the outcome was important both for the Balkans and for President Clinton's prospects for reelection in 1996. In finding people to fill key jobs in the international administration in Sarajevo as well as the US embassy there, the Bosnia peace negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, scoured the Foreign Service, the military, and the civilian bureaucracy for experts who knew the Balkans, who could speak the local language, and who could do the jobs for which they were recruited. The outcome in Bosnia--where no American has died in hostile action in the nine years since the Dayton Peace Accords went into effect--could not be more different from that in Iraq. Professionalism is at least part of the reason.
The most important judgment of the American occupation must
be that of the peoples of Iraq. A US government poll conducted just before the
handover showed that only 11 percent of Arab Iraqis had confidence in the
CPA--down from 47 percent in November. It is not surprising that an occupation
that began with flowers and cheers (I witnessed this in April 2003) ended two
days ahead of schedule with the US administrator slipping out of Baghdad
following a secret ceremony in the highly fortified Green Zone.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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