The war was a disastrous failure of the imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences of words and acts made possible above all by the corruption of language in politics and by some of the major newspapers. So wrote the Viennese journalist Karl Kraus about the 1914-18 war. And so go some arguments of opponents of the recent Iraqi war such as Jason Epstein.
Many people find it hard to be optimistic about the consequences of the war. But lets for a moment suppose that the neo-con vision that another Iraq just, peaceful and stable, good for its people and for the world is possible. Everyone knows the stakes are high enough. What would it really take to make this vision a reality?
For a start, some radical steps and imaginative thinking. Crucially, these would concern the management of Iraqs oil (looking beyond the immediate uncertainty)and the period of US/UK direct control), but lets get a few other things out of the way first.
A month ago, David Hayes and I called for an act of moral imagination and atonement by the Bush administration. We suggested that, having toppled the most tyrannical, degrading and systematically violent regime in the history of the Middle East, the US should now apologise to the Iraqi people for having supported Saddam for so long in the first place.
We did not exactly come down to Planet Earth with a bump when, for some reason, George W. Bush failed to call and say, hot dog, youre onto something there boys. And I appreciated it when Anatol Lieven took me to task for suggesting that more imagination is needed in American foreign policy. Neo-con arguments are not [merely] imaginative, he said, they're catastrophically imaginative, not to say fantastical!
Living in a neo-con world
But whether or not Lieven is right - and John Lloyd would probably disagree - we all have to deal with the world the neo-cons have made. Globolog agrees with Lloyd that the most important question now should be: what is the best that can be done in the circumstances?
First, all of us concerned about the situation need to have the fullest possible information about what is going on from basic facts and figures to politics and emotions that inform behaviour. Acts of imagination which wilfully ignore parts of the picture or are otherwise ungrounded in detail are irresponsible or irrelevant.
So, for example, Iraqibodycount.net, which lists every civilian casualty since the commencement of hostilities on 19-20 March 2003, is a start. On the morning this was written, the count stood at 2,233 (minimum) to 2,706 (maximum) civilian dead. Every one of those deaths is terrible, a tragedy. But iraqibodycount falls far short of giving the whole picture. Also needed is the fullest possible information on every one of the many hundreds of thousands of people killed by the Saddam regime, not to speak of millions more held in abjection during his tyranny. And, while were at it, lets have Chechnyabodycount.net (200,000-plus), Congobodycount.net (3,300,000-plus), SriLankabodycount.net, WestBankGazaIsraelbodycount.net, Acehbodycount.net and so on.
Right now, amidst what one British newspaper reports as cholera and chaos, one of the most pressing concerns is ensuring that the people of Iraq get fed. Here, there are opportunities for UN agencies and the international community to set things on a better path.
As Arthur Helton and Gil Loescher argue on openDemocracy this week, a sustained World Food Programme presence will be critical. Even in the shadow of Cargill, it may yet be possible at this early stage to develop longer-term strategies that will diversify the Iraqi economy by helping to revive the degraded agriculture sector through various programmes including the purchase of locally-grown wheat.
The motivations and political positioning of major actors in Iraq can be more complex than at first appears. So, for example, some important clerics returning from Iran are strongly opposed to clerical rule in Iraq, having seen its consequences in Iran.
And Iraq as business opportunity is a big part of the picture but again it is not the whole story. That said, American corporations with close ties to the administration can be even more sly than many of their critics imagine. It was reported on 7 May, for instance, that Halliburton will be permitted to produce and distribute oil under a contract secretly awarded by the US government in March.
Reconstruction is often described as the largest rebuilding project since the Marshall Plan. It is estimated that $100 billion or so will be spent on putting the country back together over the next ten years and expanding its oil production capacity.
But the case can be overstated. Highly-publicised contracts can turn out to be less lucrative than expected. Take Halliburton again: it also won a contract to put out oil-well fires and perform emergency repairs on oil infrastructure. The contract had a maximum value of $7bn over two years; as it turns out, the company has received little more than $50 million in work orders.
Estimates of the money to be made in rebuilding may turn out to be as exaggerated as were those after the liberation of Kuwait also estimated at more than $100bn but in practice less than $25bn, of which US companies took less than half.
And critics of US corporate power should not ignore the fact that, under certain conditions, rebuilding the country can be in the interests of the Iraqi people, even if US companies make a profit out of it. Investigating, exposing and prosecuting corruption where it occurs, and coming forward with workable alternatives are more useful thanranting about the cupidity of the Bush regime (which would be obvious even to a short-sighted mole in deep space).
That oil
Earlier this year, Globolog wrote that whatever the near- and medium-term run of events in Iraq and the wider consequences of an American campaign, one likelihood looms large. Within the next decade, significantly larger quantities of oil from Iraqi reserves will be available on world markets. And the oil will flow whether this comes with help from French, Russian, American or even Chinese corporations [Chinese oil consumption is already more than 5m barrels per day, and China urgently needs to develop new sources, both domestic such as the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province and foreign; potentially blocked from participation in Kazakhstans Kashagan oil field, the worlds fifth largest, Chinas giant state-owned corporations will need to look elsewhere] .
Globolog has also argued that the prospects of climate change require that the world community move rapidly to revolutionise the way economies generate energy. But one of the dilemmas perhaps insoluble is that in the near term many of the oil-exporting countries with young, rapidly growing populations are utterly dependent on increasing production.
What is more, even if the US cut its oil imports by two-thirds over the next two decades, as proposed this week by Joe Lieberman (eager to catch up with John Kerry in this regard), Iraq under any regime is likely to expand its oil production as much as possible. The market is bodaciously big, and even if the Americans dont buy (now or in ten or twenty years from now) others will.
According to oil guru Daniel Yergin, restoring Iraqi oil production to its 1980 level of around 3.5m barrels a day could take three years or more, and cost several billion dollars. Another two million barrels per day would require a major push and would still leave Iraq several rungs below the capacity of the big three producers Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia. Making that leap to 5.5m barrels a day would come some time after 2010, says Yergin, at a cost of $20bn to $30bn, because it would also require so much new infrastructure.
These bald numbers reliable or otherwise are only a small part of the picture, of course. Large oil revenues are a huge obstacle to the entrenchment of democracy and property rights in any developing country. This is true in spades in Iraq.
John Plender, the Financial Times columnist, is among those pointing out the extraordinary paradox that oil has been an enormous benefit to the global economy in the near term while being a curse for so many of the countries that produce it. Nigeria, to take just one example, has enjoyed the equivalent of a Marshall Plan thanks to oil, yet its people remain as poor or poorer than when oil first came out of the ground.
There are two major reasons for this. First, large amounts of oil tend to distort an economy. The discovery of large reserves tends to push up exchange rates, undermining the competitiveness of agriculture and damaging other labour-intensive export industries.
Second, oil warps the political process. Governments in developing countries usually take control of extractive industries. Budgetary processes distort. The growing revenues pouring into the governments treasuries facilitate corruption and permit excessive military expenditure.
Indeed, Malise Ruthven argues in openDemocracy that oil is the fuel of fundamentalism: Because the extraction process is largely technical and depersonalised, the creation of oil wealth (unlike wealth acquired through manufacturing) has not necessitated the intellectual or social transformations and the evolving relations of production that occurred in older industrialised societies.
It is not only oil-dependent countries where the state can be utterly corrupted by oil. In France, for example, the ongoing trial of executives from TotalFinaElf shows how politics can become an extension of corruption by other means (this is Globologs assertion, not Ruthven's or Plenders).
Those laying plans for post-war Iraq, says Plender, need to understand that it is no coincidence that so few oil states are genuine democracies:
They also need to learn from the post-cold war privatisations. The imperative is to ensure that the concentration of wealth and power under Saddam Hussein is dispersed on a basis that prevents reconcentration under a new political elite that has no need of the peoples consent. It is a hard trick to pull off. Call the Norwegians!
How can this be done? Last month Globolog supported a proposal by Paul Berman that the Germans play a key role in reconstructing Iraq politically. The proposal here is that Norway, with a UN mandate, be given the lead in a central aspect of economic planning. Norway should help Iraq create a robust national trust fund for its oil wealth.
Brave Norwegians, ready to save the world
Anatol Lieven will surely accuse Globolog of being fantastical. How can Iraq ever copy a mature Nordic social democracy? Surely this is the suggestion of some particularly deranged latter-day Professor Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, who grouches why cant a woman be more like a man? Just you wait enry iggins, just you wait!
But the proposal is meant seriously. The prospect of Iraq coming apart again is dreadful to contemplate. Commentators have a responsibility to do more than just point to the manifest flaws in the policies of the US administration. If and when ideally before the Americans find things blowing up around their ears, plausible prototypes for sensible alternatives need to be worked through and ready.
Whats more, there is a precedent in Iraq itself. In openDemocracys groundbreaking debate between two generations of Iraqis, Faleh Jabar said:
Under the monarchy, a useful mechanism was available for curtailing the power conferred on the executive arm of the state by oil revenues. It was parliament, which decided where seventy per cent of oil revenues would go. The other thirty per cent went to the government, but strictly earmarked for say, education, infrastructure or health. It couldnt be spent on the security services, and all those hidden expenses that unaccountable governments have. This is crucial. An updated version of such an arrangement, with the assistance of people who have made a national fund work successfully in their own country, could move some way towards an answer. It would also be essential to take into account what has been learnt from other experiments and mistakes, albeit in very different circumstances, such as the Chad-Cameroon trust fund.
The key question remains how to prevent thugs from seizing the state again. Answers on a postcard, please. And there are other uncertainties that may destabilise and distract attention not least, the consequences rising tensions between the US and Iran. It is reported, for example, that the US was pressing nations on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency to declare that Iran has violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty a charge Iran vigorously rejects.
Worse things happen at sea
This month saw the last official memorial service in Britain for the Battle of the Atlantic. It is sixty years since, in May 1943, German U-boats ceased to mount an effective challenge to Allied shipping. Britain came closer to defeat in that campaign than at any other time in that war. There were amazing acts of courage and endurance on both sides. My grandfather fought, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Many tens of thousands of men lost their lives. Dark, dark, they all go into the dark.
For most of the time the British were largely alone. But among their allies were the men of the Norwegian navy, who fought on after their country had been occupied and enslaved. The British and their friends may have been fighting for freedom. They may have been fighting for their empire and an unjust world order. Intentionally or otherwise, they were the frontline in a struggle against a greater evil.
In August 1941, with Britain well into the second year of a desperate struggle but long before America entered the war, Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter. It is an idealistic document, not worth any less for all the hypocrisy and betrayals since. Look at point four regarding control of and access to natural resources, for example.
The ideals expressed in the Charter have, at the very least, the soft power that is also embodied in that singular Norwegian creation, the Nobel Peace Prize. Will someone please tell the King of Norway that Globolog is waiting by the phone?
How should oil be managed for the good of people and planet? Post your ideas on openDemocracys energy and climate change forum.
Do you have a story about globalisation? Are you outraged or elated? Contact globolog@opendemocracy.net