| Drafting an effective Petroleum Law is, perhaps, the key to ensuring Iraq’s survival as it will be oil revenue that keeps the state together rather than any attempt to build a coherent national project in the short term. |
Oh, dear!
It is getting awfully late in the day for the obsolescent and ineffectual brand of paleface planmongering that Chatham House (Prof. Gareth Stansfield) has just added to the heap of. Don Juan Cole, being such a planmonger himself, may find it muy simpático that so grave and august -- so Toynbee-esque -- an institution has begun thinking dangerous thoughts:
| Iraq has fractured into regional power bases. Political, security and economic power has devolved to local sectarian, ethnic or tribal political groupings. The Iraqi government is only one of several ‘state-like’ actors. The regionalization of Iraqi political life needs to be recognized as a defining feature of Iraq’s political structure. |
Thus Dr. Stansfield begins his nonexecutive summary, quoted in a press release and requoted by JC, with what would be an impressive observation if only it had it been observed forty or fifty months earlier. Three-quarters or four-fifths of this scribble entitled "Accepting Realities in Iraq" turns out to be of interest only to inveterate unreality-basers. If there was any chance that the residual quarter or fifth would include Republican and Blairite extremists, it might be of some use even so. Unfortunately Dr. Stansfield is a strictly orthodox paleface planmonger and therefore begins by tacitly assuming that the good folks who gave us the aggression have all gone extinct by now, or maybe gone to the World Bank. Whatever matters in the former Iraq, he considers, it sure ain't the Occupyin' Power.
To be fair, let us look at his own way of expressing that crucial misjudgment, i.e., the first sentence of his Conclusion (p. 9):
| It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak and can be reorganized, perhaps by the US, perhaps by the international community. |
No cloud without a silver lining: it is at least a little something to have got past the idea that China and Peru and Turtle Bay are going to rush in and fix up what Crawford and Rio Limbaugh have so sadly botched. On the other hand, international realists could have told Dr. Stansfield that as much forty or fifty years ago. Everything involving "the international community" that has happened in neoliberated Mesopotamia has been perfectly consistent with generalizations there was heaps and heaps of evidence for already. It may be nice to get up early once and a while and verify that the sun does still actally rise in the east rather than, say, the westsouthwest, yet one need not rush home to the keyboard to describe one's findings as a brave new acceptance of astronomical realities. Dr. Stansfield looks good on this point only graded on the curve, compared with other vendors of dead-on-arrival plans for solving neo-Iraq.
Dr. Stansfeld does stand out from the left-conventional wisdom, a little, by professing to find the natives' parties strong -- their parties, mark you, not their sects or their "communities" or their "identities." I don't recall hearing anybody say that before. Unfortunately one of the reasons why nobody, not even a dimwit Bushie, says a thing can be that the thing is not in fact the case. I incline to think that what we have here is a certain confusion on the analyst's part. To pronouce that the forces behind the natives' parties are strong would be unexceptionable, though also utterly unoriginal, but that is not the same thing at all as the parties being strong in themselves with a properly parteilich strength. To holler slogans along the lines of "Live and die with dear old Da‘wa!" or "All for ‘Alláwianity!" might get the eccentric enthusiast admitted to a lunatic asylum.
At Chatham House they perhaps consider carrying on like that vulgar and clownish when Labourites and Tories do it closer at hand, and be thus disinclined to take my argument seriously that the absence of such mindless yells for one's preferred political team from the Peaceful Freedumbian scene indicates that there can be no strong parties there. Well, the point hardly matters, since Dr. Stansfield's actual survey of the usual suspects (pp. 6-8) ís framed in terms of federalism, by which term he does not mean worrying exactly how to divide the present militant GOP colony up fairly into SCIRI cantons and Da‘wa cantons and Chelabian secularist cantons and Virtuetite Sadrist cantons and Talebanian Kurdist cantons and Muqtádan Sadrist cantons and ... so on. He means by "federalism" the same thing that Ms. Convential Wisdom means by it. We need not pursue the question of whether that meaning in itself takes for granted that all the natives' political parties are insignificant quâ party.
It occurs to me in passing that Dr. Stansfield may have slightly misstated himself here: perhaps one should decode "It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak" into the received banality about how it is now up to the natives themselves to solve neo-Iraq. Alternatively, one might speak again of grading on the curve: though the indigenous political forces be no great shakes considered absolutely, yet when it comes to picking up the rubble in the wake of Hurricane Dubya, they are far more likely to be effectual than Kennebunkport-Crawford Republicans or Blairite New Labour -- or, as previously noted, "the international community" either.
In sum, Dr. Stansfield may be wrong on this issue, or he may be right along with nearly everybody else, but it is highly unlikely that he is both accurate and fresh. I should put somewhat more trust in those stereotyped reports that invasion-language journalists send us from the hotel lobbies of New Baghdad to the effect that the vast majority of colonials consider GZ collaborationist politics a farce or an obscenity: those hack pols keep talking, or taking vacations, but they do nothing to help keep real people from getting killed or kidnapped, or even to get real people a satisfactory supply of water and electricity. Et cetera, et cetera. That is, of course, an imported-from-America template or "narrative," one encountered all the time about donkeys and elephants here im Heimatlande. I daresay the subjects of Ms. Windsor are tolerably familiar with it also. Nevertheless, if such an I-hate-politics rigmarole flourishes in Greater Anglophonia where strong political forces exist and flourish, it seems antecedently probable that it would be a marketable product in neo-Iraq, where such forces do not thrive much better than the electricity supply or the security supply. But God knows best.
Onward! High time we discuss Dr. Stansfield's views on petroleum as Ersatz nationalism:
| Drafting an effective Petroleum Law is, perhaps, the key to ensuring Iraq’s survival as it will be oil revenue that keeps the state together rather than any attempt to build a coherent national project in the short term. However, the Petroleum Law is tied closely to the future of federalism. In the absence of an agreement over the nature of federalism, the negotiations over the Petroleum Law have been characterized by mistrust, brinkmanship and, ultimately, failure. For the Sunni Arab negotiators, the situation is very simple: the oil resources of Iraq are for the benefit of all Iraqis and, as such, should be administered by the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad, with the revenue also distributed centrally. In this model, there is no room for the involvement of regional governments such as the KRG, or a Basra-centred entity. This tension has led the Ministry of Oil, on several occasions, to announce the passing of a centralized Petroleum Law, only for the announcement to be dismissed by the Ministry of Oil and Natural Resources in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region. The Kurdish position follows quite closely the stipulations outlined in the Constitution of Iraq. Central government is to maintain responsibility for administering the resources already established (including the Kirkuk and Basra fields), and also for distributing revenue across the state. However, according to the Kurdish interpretation of the constitution, regional governments are responsible for the management and administering of ‘new’ fields within their territory, and for then undertaking the distribution of revenue within the region and, by agreement, to the Iraqi government. However, the details of how this will work have not been agreed and Sunni negotiators remain adamant that the Petroleum Law is one area of the Constitution that has to be renegotiated in order to ensure their cooperation in the National Assembly. Emphasizing their strength, the Kurds have proceeded to negotiate exploration contracts with international oil companies. Several have already been signed, with small, risk-taking companies, much to the consternation of Baghdad. Disagreements over the Petroleum Law have broken out regularly in 2007. In January, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Shahrahstani announced that a law had been passed requiring all Iraqi oil operations to be administered by the Ministry in Baghdad, irrespective of what region they happened to be located in. The response from the office of KRG Prime Minister Nechervan Barzani was predictably swift. It rejected Shahrahstani’s announcement and stated that the Constitution gave the Kurds the right to administer their own fields. Barzani also raised the subject of utmost sensitivity to all Iraqis – the future of Kirkuk. While this conflict appeared to have been resolved, further disagreements broke out in early May, with Kurdish and Sunni officials objecting to the law for different reasons (the former objecting to the detail of the important annexes, and the latter objecting outright to the existence of the law) and threatening to derail the entire process. |
I think maybe I'll demand my money back from Chatham House. That's an admirable review of the bidding, but where is the advice about play of the hand? How is St. Petrolaeus to go about "ensuring Iraq’s survival," exactly? Instead of learning about that, the Chatham House customer is treated to a gloom-and-doom dissertation on Kirkuk (p. 7-8) that culminates in
| Kirkuk, federalism and oil, combined with the security concerns, the targeting of Iran and the implementation of US policy in Iraq and the wider region, all come together in 2007, creating the likelihood that the situation in Iraq will get much worse before it can get better. Many different agendas, processes and forces will converge in the near future, making it more likely that Iraq will lurch from crisis to crisis in 2007 than enjoy improved security and follow a constructive political process involving dialogue among its communities. Feeding into these developments will be the regional powers of the Middle East, and particularly Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. |
After that comes a (seriously incomplete) discussion of how regional powers might conceivably decide to muck about in Mesopotamia. Dr. Stansfield seems to consider that his own pet scenarios about the day after tomorrow also count as "realities" that require to be "accepted." He does not advise us whether we must accept everybody else's pet scenarios also.
Finally, the Conclusion, p. 10-11, which may as well be swiped in toto:
| It would be a mistake to believe that the political forces in Iraq are weak and can be reorganized, perhaps by the US, perhaps by the international community. While no single party exercises authority over the state as did the deposed Ba‘th, it is an underestimation to describe the current power-holders in Iraq as merely ethnic-sectarian entrepreneurs keen to exploit the situation for their own communal, even personal, benefit. The parties are now, without exception, sophisticated organizations with segmented political and military structures, highly developed ties with neighbouring states and ever-deepening roots in Iraqi society. The government of Nouri al-Maliki has struggled to bring control to the streets of the cities of Iraq. Many of these, including Kirkuk, Mosul, Baqubah, Samara, Ramadi and Basra, have become lawless theatres of inter- and intra-sectarian and inter-ethnic violent conflict. They have fallen out of the orbit of the Iraqi government’s control and instead succumbed to the power gained from the barrels of the guns of whichever group manages to dominate a particular area. Only the Kurdistan Region remains unaffected by the civil wars gripping the rest of the country, but it remains threatened by violence as disagreements in the ‘disputed territories’ of Sinjar, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Mandali all bring Kurds into conflict with their neighbours. Contrary to the initial hopes of policy planners in Washington DC and London, it seems likely that the reality of the regionalization of Iraqi political life – which is in effect a manifestation of identity-based politics – will have to be accepted as a defining feature of Iraq’s political structure. It will need to be worked with rather than opposed. In pursuing such a strategy, military force in the form of surges cannot deliver the critical political accommodation. Only by engaging with leaders and organizations that possess some degree of credibility and legitimacy among local populations can there be any chance that a political solution built upon negotiations between communities can provide a basis for a strategy resulting in the stabilization of Iraq. This recognition and ‘bringing in’ of such leaders can be undertaken by foreign interlocutors but would have a much greater chance of succeeding if prominent Iraqi leaders were seen to be involved. Many of them already are, but in a ‘behind-the-scenes’ way. The process of engagement now needs to be public and transparent. |
(More review of the bidding, no play of the hand, no trace of St. Petrolaeus. There is only one paragraph left, so it had better be spiffy!)
| The three aspects of this approach are simple enough: find Sunni Arab representatives to participate in government; recognize Muqtada al-Sadr as a legitimate political partner; be more responsive to Kurdish concerns. These approaches should colour any actions taken either by the US or by the Iraqi government as policies are formulated and specific actions planned. Meetings such as at Sharm al-Sheikh in early May 2007 proved that the solution to Iraq is to be found inside Iraq itself. While it is obvious that neighbouring powers have interests in and take actions inside Iraq, their support for any particular approach can only assist the stabilizing of Iraq if Iraqis themselves come to some form of accommodation with each other. In effect, Iraqi solutions will need to be found to Iraqi problems. These solutions will then need to be supported by regional powers and the US. Devising US or regional solutions according to the players’ own interests, and imposing them upon Iraq, has been tried and has only served to destabilize the situation further. |
==
Oh, well! We never do hear how the blessèd St. Petrolaeus is slated or fated to smooth the sailing towards ""a coherent national project," and it looks as if Dr. Stansfield does not know anything more about that shadowy scenario himself, for all that it's his own, or Chatham House's, brainwave.
A couple of recensions back, Professor Cole was peacegaming that the Arab Sunnis ought to be given double the oil revenues of mere Kurds and Twelvers, a scheme which, although politically absurd, at least had the merit of being clear and distinct. Unfortunately it also took for granted that only the Arab Sunnis require to be pandered to, whereas Dr. Stansfield adds two more panderees, the Sadr Tendency and the Free Kurds.
One is tempted to call it effrontery when this paleface planmonger announces that this three-headed monster of his is "simple enough," but perhaps self-restraint is in order, for one may charitably fantasize that Dr. Stansfield only considers that his modest recommendation is simple to state, and prescinds from offering any hasty judgment about implementational difficulties that might possibly arise.
Had he trimmed the Chatham House product down to a One Point Plan and said no more than "Go 'find Sunni Arab representatives to participate in government'!," the reader might take Gareth Stansfield for a Jonathan Swift wannabe and the clever spoofing as equivalent to "Let's start by simply assuming that the North Atlantic has beeen converted into soda water . . . ." But since he tacks on the other two items, he is all but certainly quite serious.
Oh, dear!
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