BooMan links to a lengthy essay by George Packer at the New Yorker titled “Planning for Defeat”: a look at the possible consequences of various American exit plans and semi-exit plans for Iraq. Packer is a journalist who has written for Mother Jones, Harper’s, and is a staff writer for The New York Times. He wrote the book The Assassin’s Gate.
What interests me about Packer’s essay are not his predictions for Iraq, as such, but a possible future to which he has inadvertantly alluded, for the world.
I am imagining a future in which the hyper-abundance of small arms makes the propping-up and defense of “third world governments” — i.e. thugs bribed to keep great swaths of humanity in line — impossible. As nation states collapse around the globe, the remaining ones, the most powerful ones, will negotiate with much more local political entities — tribes, as it were — for access to natural resources, especially oil. Instead of dealing with the governments of defunct “third-world ‘countries'”, deals will be made with sheiks, with chieftans, with counsels of elders. The great powers will have thousands of embassadors, all well-armed.
If popular democracy cannot be prevented at national levels, then it will be prevented by the destruction of nations and the devolution of thuggery to areas the size of zip codes. The United States is engaging in a precursor to this with Bush’s recent visit to Anbar province.
I was about to say that the 21st century will be a century of resource wars, but that strikes me as trite. I assume that every century since the one in which humans first appeared on the scene has been a century of resource wars in one way or another; tribe fighting tribe for the best waterfall, the best hunting ground, the best weed. The century we call the 21st, though, seems likely to leave them all in the dust, and we shall be lucky not to become dust ourselves — glowing dust — by the time the twenty-first century comes to a close.
Iraq is just the first or maybe second failure in this collapse of fake nation-states. Packer describes the consequences on page 7 of his essay.
As the U.S. plans for the gradual withdrawal of forces, it should start preparing now for what it can realistically leave behind. The focus of most discussion is on the military side, but America’s long-term influence in Iraq will more likely be political . . . One of the less noticed aspects of the surge has been a belated effort to return American officials to the more obscure corners of the country in the form of “provincial reconstruction teams”: . . .
(Read there: “provincial resource negotiators”.)
. . . joint civil-military efforts that funnel technical help and money from the American and Iraqi governments into the provinces, where political and economic development seems more feasible and responsive to the local population. The recent formation of local police forces and town councils in Anbar Province has had nothing to do with the central government and has been far more successful than previous attempts. These teams should be expanded during the life of the surge, so that they reach the self-sustaining, self-protecting size of a hundred and fifty people; this approach roughly follows the model of Afghanistan, where provincial reconstruction teams first developed several years ago have been an important, if insufficient, tool for extending development to the countryside.
Packer moves on directly to describe bigger-picture apsects of this — in my interpretation — cavernous lurch in the world political order as follows:
Since Iraq is going to remain in pieces for years [possibly forever — LC], different strategies must be pursued for different regions. Provincial reconstruction teams can provide support to local officials who share the vision of a less sectarian, more democratic Iraq, and they can serve as American eyes and ears. . . . This political and intelligence work wouldn’t necessarily end if the teams have to be withdrawn, because they would have cultivated Iraqi allies in each province.
— snip —
Given the unspeakable violence this local thuggery could lead to, a world in which not several hundred but tens of thousands of dictators rule by relative pre-eminence in ownership of small arms, it may be necessary, in order to sustain the memory of world culture through a new dark ages, to bring samples of each local culture to a latter-day Noah’s Ark, the United States.
— snip —
If, after a large-scale American withdrawal, Iraq becomes unlivable for such people, then it would be in America’s interest to evacuate those who request it, and contingency plans for mass airlifts and expatriation should be made before a crisis comes. This evacuation should go well beyond the current, sluggish process of resettling Iraqis here who worked directly for the U.S. in Iraq. It should be a much more ambitious effort to save the core of what perhaps someday could become a more decent society in Iraq, including military officers, local politicians, and the many thousands of other Iraqis (and their families) who have worked closely and well with Americans. U.S. officials and officers should begin making lists for evacuation. Most Iraqis would be settled in neighboring countries, but as many as a hundred thousand should be brought here, especially if Iraq begins to resemble Cambodia in 1975 or Rwanda in 1994. Beyond the humanitarian imperative, the United States would be salvaging what’s left of its enormous investment in Iraq and preserving the seeds of a better future.
This “preservation for a better future” is wishful thinking: a casting of stones to ward off the karmic consequences of some seriously bad mojo. The idea that transported exiles might one day return in triumph to rule over something called “nation states” is an idea that ought to have been shown up in the person of Ahmed Chalabi.
In any case, this is the future I see, darkly, through the pages of George Packer’s essay.
