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