After Saddam: an Arab Congo?

Let's say we fully control Baghdad in the next week or so and the rest of the cities in the next month. What Iraqi government official surrenders? Who runs things? Do we just slide from Saddam rule to American rule?

We have set up clear political goals, remove Saddam, establish democracy, but the problem is that we have no power base to work with.

Kamiya and his fellow liberals in the INC have no power. They say nice things, but they are largely strangers in Iraq. Saddam killed anyone who could be considered opposition, except for the hardest of the hard core clerics and guerrillas. The tribal leaders have been courted, bribed, threatened and have limited power. The Baathists, tainted by their connection to Saddam, still control the levers of government.

Tom Friedman suggested that Iraq was either an Arab Switzerland or an Arab Yugoslavia. I would suggest a third alternative: an Arab Congo.
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Looting breaks out in Baghdad, British control looting in Basra

They're happy today, because the Marines mean Saddam is gone. What happens when those same Marines have to give them orders directed from the new US governor of the province? Will they be happy then?

If this is liberation, why didn't they fight, and why did they loot their own city? No cops, no soldiers, just a power vacuum. What bothers me is what will they do when we try to impose not just basic order, but a military government.

There are so many armed people running around. They didn't surrender, they weren't killed. The US has to do something to get those weapons under control. There are armed fighters from all over the Arab world, armed Saddam loyalists, no chemical weapons found, Shia clerics and a 15,000 man guerrilla army.

Remember, the Catholics were happy to see the British Army in Belfast in 1969. They were there to protect tyhe Catholics from Protestant mobs. It only took weeks before the stones started flying.
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Hold Your Applause
By Thomas L. Friedman

We are so caught up with our own story of "America's liberation of Iraq," and the Arab TV networks are so caught up with their own story of "America's occupation of Iraq," that everyone seems to have lost sight of the real lives of Iraqis.

"We are lost," said Zakiya Jassim, a hospital maintenance worker. "The situation is getting worse. I don't care about Saddam. He is far away. I want my country to be normal."

America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the food doesn't arrive, if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get.   
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Some Iraqis Are Grateful, But Still Wary of U.S. Plans

At that point, an elderly man, Sultan Mahdi, stepped forward to declaim that such ambivalence was an evasion. "For 75 years I have been alive, and I'll say this," he said. "If the Iraqi people loved Saddam Hussein, the American military wouldn't be able to last one day in Iraq. Not one day. We would attack them.

"If Bush just wants to get rid of Saddam, that's fine, but if he is going to try go alter our basic institutions, like our religion and traditions and culture, then he will have no support."
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  thanks to Zoe

THE REAL WAR
Now it starts

There are many differences between the two competing visions of postwar Iraq, and I have covered some of them here. But the one disparity that stands out is that the Morganthau-type plan put out by the neocons, and favored by the Pentagon, assumes a permanent American troop presence. It is an implicitly colonial model, that sees the US military as the de facto ruler of a conquered province – and Iraq as a forward base for future military operations.

The UN-Powell plan, on the other hand, assumes some endpoint to an American military presence. It is an exit strategy, a major aspect of the Powellian view of warfare, that basically amounts to asking the rest of the world to clean up the mess we made, even though they opposed us making it in the first place. This will be far less costly, and risky, for the US, but politically it will be hard to pull off. If anyone can do it, Powell can – if he ever gets the chance.

That hardly seems likely, however. The news that James Woolsey, former CIA director under Bill Clinton – and a tireless advocate of "World War IV" – is on the list of administration favorites to lead the "interim" Iraqi government is a not so subtle hint as to which plan is favored by the White House.

In our accelerated, totally-wired, up-to-the-minute, fully-"embedded" hyper-reality, where immediacy is everything, the war will have lasted but a few weeks, a month or so at the most. But the real war is going to be the long occupation, during which US troops will be sitting ducks for every Islamist nutball in a region filled with them – and the War Party will be looking for new lands to conquer. The danger could not be greater.

God help us all.
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  thanks to Cursor

Is this what we thought we were fighting for?
Hawks find no shortage of enemies abroad; Sen. Stevens says police and firefighters aren't sacrificing enough

So, we've got a crook, a Zionist and an old spy who thinks this is the beginning of WWIV set to run Iraq. How lucky can the Iraqis get? Is this what we thought we were fighting for?
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