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 The inability of the elected individuals in Iraq to
form a government lies in the fact that they are not trying to form
effective institutions that can actually govern. Rather, they are trying
to find a formula for divvying up the fantastic future profits to be
gleaned from exploiting the second largest proven crude oil reserves
in the world.
At this stage of the game, this involves setting up
the governmental flow charts: which ministries and sub-ministers will
man the gates and control the sluices when the Billions and Trillions
in oil money start flooding through the system? Which cells and spigots
and holding tanks will collect the run-off, distill the hydrocarbon haze
into gold,
bearer bonds, or simple digital depositories of wealth? And who will
man the gates and guardhouses, the antechambers and back rooms of systems
control?
This is complicated stuff, and a life or death matter
to many of the "politicians" (aka warlords) and "parties" (aka militias)
involved. No wonder it’s taking so long.
Of course, the free-flowing billions are pure vaporware
so far, entirely hypothetical, but so alluring that the players on the
ground are paralyzed by the possibilities and unable or unwilling to
sacrifice enough of each of their expected share of the pie to reach
a realistic compromise.
As a result there is a complete civilian power vacuum.
The is nobody to run the government, there is nobody to turn the reins
over to, there is nobody to negotiate with.
Yesterday, British Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw, in
Iraq to reinforce the urgency of a coherent government’s emergence, said,
"We’ve got to be able to deal with Mr. A or Mr. B, or Mr. C. We can’t
deal with Mr. Nobody."
Mr. Straw has stumbled on the nub of the problem. The
Iraq found in Western Atlases today is entirely a creation of those selfsame
Western powers. Poised as they were 90 years ago over the prostrate,
oily underbelly of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and privy to the central
secret
of the
turning of the past century, that Oil would be King, and the key to the
20th century, and well beyond, they drew lines on a map of the Middle
East and created an ungovernable mutant amalgam of three mutually
antagonistic cultures which had been violently endeavoring to exterminate
each other for centuries,
They did this basically so that "we" (the West or the
oil companies, depending on your degree of cynicism) would have someone
to negotiate with, to "deal" with, to sign
the contracts,
to make the Petrochemical Century feasible and verifiably "legal".
The problem with Iraq is that it doesn’t exist, in any
historic sense, except in the hegemonic ravings of paranoid, power-mad
dead European white guys. That they have managed to make most of us believers
in this fantasy is a testament both to our gullibility and to the importance
of maintaining access to the oil fields as long as they are viable.
Whenever the world powers lose interest, lose their
nerve and cut and run, or when the oil finally runs out and they just
go home, the modern nation state of Iraq will cease to exist, along with
most
of the
other countries in the region we have come to accept as the status quo.
Some, with millennial histories and solid ethnic bases,
will continue to exist in some form: Egypt, Turkey, Persia, Syria. Others,
like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, are probably doomed.An independent Kurdistan
deserves to emerge during the realignment.
Of course, Baghdad is a multi-millennial
city, but ancient Babylon and modern
Iraq
bear
little resemblance, in territory or cultural makeup, and the later
is doomed
to evaporate when the the price for propping it up becomes too great
to bear.
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