LONDON, 10 April 2003 — Call it the problem of the driver’s brother-in-law. Speaking hardly a word of Arabic or Kurdish, a middle-aged American arrives in Kirkuk or Basra, or at the doors of a ministry in Baghdad, with a skeleton US staff, a couple of Iraqi advisers, and a mission to govern.
Desperate for more helpers, he clutches at what is available. Existing civil servants who seem clean are scarce, and this is where “the driver’s brother-in-law, who has a Ph.D in engineering from an American university” comes by the office, charms everyone, and gets a job.
He may be good or he may be bad, but in either case he brings his own prejudices, connections, and ambitions into the court of the new viceroy.
According to one American expert who is a consultant for the government on Iraq, the brother-in-law syndrome could be more of an obstacle to the country’s chances of a democratic transition than some of the problems which loom larger at the moment, like the role of the UN or the choice between Iraqi insiders and outsiders for an interim authority.
He predicts that a similar confluence could emerge, at a higher level than the brother-in-law, between the needs of the Americans and the opportunism of some local Iraqi leaders and astute members of the Baathist establishment. The local leaders will claim more influence than they really have and that their ties with the past regime were entirely a matter of coercion.
And the single largest problem which America’s temporary rulers will face in Iraq? “Crime, crime, and crime,” he says, as the local mafias work to survive and prosper in the new environment.
They may do so by becoming more purely criminal organizations, or they might in some parts of the country try to assume a political or “resistance” role not unlike that which the Ku Klux Klan played after the civil war.
That is a reminder that the first experience of the United States in “nation-building” was not in Germany and Japan, nor even in the Philippines and Cuba before that, but in the American south, and it was an experience of at least partial failure.
The US difficulty is one reason why the debate over the UN role in Iraq revolves around a fiction, which is that the UN actually wants to run Iraq. The truth is that its experience in Cambodia, where its effort led in the end to what amounted to a coup by the party which had lost UN supervised elections, began the process of weaning it off such ambitions.
There is something of a consensus in Washington that American rule will be more effective than anything the UN could provide. But with the UN already pulling together a team of 1,500, there is no real argument about whether the UN agencies should operate in Iraq. The Americans need them, and the agencies would be derelict in their statutory duties if they were not preparing in this way.
The real argument is about symbols, about whether the Bush administration can bear to accept wording in a Security Council resolution which might seem in theory to make the US the UN’s agent in Iraq, or to cede to the UN some largely nominal power over the political process there. The issue is far from settled.
