12 month government, 30 year contracts

The Independent reports that the Maliki government in Iraq is soliciting bids on '30 year' contracts to exploit Iraq's oil.

In doing so the government is almost certainly guaranteeing the fall of both the government and the constitution.

The long lease on the rights to exploit natural resources has long been the favored prize of colonial occupation. It has also been a prime causus belli. The UK and the US replaced the democratically elected government in Iran with the bloody dictatorship of the Shah, a tyrant who was despised by his people as much as Saddam who eventually replaced him with the Mullahs. The dispute began when the democratically elected government demanded an audit of the oil royalties to determine whether they were being paid even the pittance due under the unequal contracts imposed during the collonial era.

The Maliki government is facing a civil war. It is a weak force both politicaly and militarily. Any bidders for the leases have to take into account a substantial probability that the leases will be repudiated by a future government. The terms of the deal will not be favorable.

The pressure on future governments to repudiate the deal will be enormous. But this would inevitably bring protest from the US as the US companies were robed of their prize in the same way that French companies did after the fall of Saddam.

The justification given for the repudiation of the French contracts was force of arms. The US is creating an incentive for factions on both sides in the civil war to repudiate the constitution. Even if the terms of the deal are fair the opposite will be assumed by most Iraqis. Insurgents have a new incentive to fulminate.

This will not be seen as a sign of confidence in the Iraqi government, rather the reverse. At the beginning of the war it was widely assumed that the real war aims of the Bush administration were to control Iraq's oil, establish permanent military bases to protect Israeli and US interests and revenge. Signing a 30 year deal at this time looks like a last gasp attempt to grab the oil even if nobody seriously expects the attempt to succeed.

Propaganda was meant to be something we do well.

The botched execution of Saddam goes from bad to worse. The Al Zarquawi style snuff video with the hooded executioners was bad enough. A waiter should dress at least as well as his clientele, the same goes for executioners. Shouting vulgar abuse makes the condemned look less like a criminal and more like a victim. Saddam's grave has already become a monument for the insurgents.

The choice of crime (the judicial murder of 147 men and boy suspected of sympathizing with Prime Minister Maliki's party), the decision to carry out the execution on a day the Sunni observe a major holiday, the choice of the holiday (the day on which Muslims celebrate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac) were all intentional insults made by the Shia-Kurd dominated government against the Sunnis who will hold the US occupiers responsible regardless of the implausible denials comming from Washington.

How could the situation have been handled better? Simple, put Saddam on trial by an international tribunal. Bring charges that reflect the extent of Saddams crimes: the use of chemical weapons, the unprovoked attacks on Iran and Kewait. The trial of Milosevic left no doubt as to either his guilt or the fairness of the proceedings. By the time of his death Milosevic was a pathetic figure with few remaining supporters willing to continue the fight. The same is not true of Saddam and the blame for this is entirely due to the Bush administration.

Update: Apparently the abuse was hailing the Moktada al Sadr we are currently attempting to crush.

Learning from mistakes

One of Jim Collin's key points in Good to Great is the need to learn from mistakes. The Iraq war is demonstrating the wisdom of this advice while providing a long list of mistakes to learn from.

Fiasco lists many of the mistakes that were made and are being made. Chief amongst them the failure to learn from history. Before the invasion I pointed out on a radio call in program that 50,000 civilians had died during the British occupation of Iraq and that an invasion was likely to lead to at least as many dead. So far even the grossly under-reported administration estimate is higher. Independent estimates are consistently above 400,000 and as high as 650,000 if deaths resulting from the damage done to the sanitation infrastructure are included.

The picture painted in Fiasco is of a bunch of ideological zealots convinced of the justness of their cause and the absolute rightness of their political prejudices carelessly ripping up the established order in Iraq but being entirely unable to replace it. This group of alleged conservatives do not appear to have recognized the inconsistency of their core belief that government is bad while establishing what amounts to a command economy.

The Green Zone follies are most familiar to anyone who has read biographies of Stalin or Mao. Both murdered millions but they killed tens of millions through incompetent economic management. Substitute rubber plants and steel mills for hospitals and schools and the rhetoric is depressingly familiar.

A command economy can work but only for limited purposes and for a limited time. The British economy was successfully put on a command basis during World War II. The war could not have been won under the free market but after five years the entire industrial infrastructure was run into the ground.

What seems to be missing in the conservative ideological view is the acceptance that the policies that are most beneficial to a modern industrial economy are not necessarily most beneficial to one attempting to recover from a dictatorship. The economies of Eastern Europe that mamaged the transition from communism most successfully were the ones that ignored the fashionable advice in favor of an immediate transition to a free market and instead took a moderate, pragmatic course.

The vingnettes are telling: a person is put in charge of managing the Iraqi stock market who does not speak Arabic and has no experience in finance. The Iraqis use whiteboards and a manual accounting system to track trades. This is 'obviously' not acceptable to the US administrator so an attempt is made to computerize the system. Management of a major computer project being yet another area where the US appointed expert has no expertise. What Ricks does not mention is that until recently the London and New York Markets both operated in essentially the same way.

What Ricks unfortunately does not provide is a solution to the mess. This is not so much a flaw in the book as a reflection of the lack of options which are in any case dwindling.