Shouts from the desert

The big Iraq news this week is that the former interim Prime Minister - the one appointed by the US - Iyad Allawi, is claiming that the current elected interim government is as bad as - if not worse than - Saddam's on human rights. Allegations are being made that the Interior Ministry has set up an underground bunker where "170 men were held prisoner, beaten, half-starved and in some cases tortured," and that summary executions are taking place.

In July last year I said:

In a country like Iraq, which has been under totalitarian rule for decades, and where obedience to the law has been at gunpoint, [the] habit of obedience does not exist. Attempting to build a democracy in such circumstances is a highly risky, difficult and improbable exercise. The odds are massively stacked against success. The most likely outcome in such a situation is the emergence of a new dictatorship. That doesn't mean that a democratic Iraq is impossible - it may well, against all odds, develop that way.

The US-led forces in Iraq are now in a thoroughly unenviable position. The current leader of Iraq - and this is an elected leader - Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is saying that the US must remain in Iraq while it builds up its own forces, but that the US must allow Iraq to fight the insurgency in its way. Currently he complains that the US is tying the hands of the Iraqi forces, presumably by insisting on things such as human rights (perhaps he expects the President to have a little talk to his forces about that).

So the claim is that the US forces cannot leave until the Iraqi forces can manage things on their own, but that the Iraqi forces cannot manage things on their own until the US gives them a free hand to do so in their own way. If the US buy into this demand, they will spend some time visibly propping up a regime of the kind they so triumphantly eliminated in 2003. That is something they cannot afford. On the other hand, they cannot go about overthrowing the elected government either.

Even without a failure of democracy, the invasion of Iraq has to go down as one of the greatest politico-military blunders of all time. Its primary goals were based on a foundation of fantasy, and it actually ran counter to its secondary goals of undermining terrorism. I still regard it even without the failure to set up a functional democracy as far and away the biggest mistake of John Howard's political career, and one that more than wipes out all the good things he has done in his career - a monumental failure of judgement which still could not be redeemed if he remained Prime Minister for another 50 years and made perfect decisions every day of that tenure. Even without failure of democracy in Iraq, the whole fiasco blackens Howard's legacy so far that there is no prospect at setting the balance to a positive. And now with the real prospect that the kinds of autocratic violence that characterised Saddam's regime may be arising under the elected government, the degree of failure is raised by an order of magnitude.

I have previously stated that the US could not withdraw until the Iraqi system was established. While that remains true, the Iraqi government is likely to take longer and require more assistance if they believe they can rely on US forces to be present until such time as it their own systems can be shown to be ready. It is time to set a timetable for withdrawal, and it should be a short one - months, rather than years, measured from the time that the new government, to be elected on the 15^th of December, takes power. Setting such a short deadline will force the Iraqi government to pull out all stops to establish their own security forces, thus bringing forward the time that they are able to assume responsibility for their own security, and reducing the amount of time that US forces are seen to be propping up a system of government that has only the form of democracy, and none of the substance.