A Post-Saddam Iraq

This morning me and Mark C were chatting on IRC, and he was asking for interview questions to ask an exiled Iraqi opposition leader. My suggestion was: "Which would you prefer: Iraq as it is today, with Saddam Hussein as leader; or Iraq ruled by you, with all its infrastructure and major cities completely destroyed?"

We can identify at least one pro-democracy faction with the skills to make progress in this regard: Western-educated exiles. How quickly and efficiently can such people reinsert themselves into a power vacuum? How much trust, exactly, would the regional powers of Iraq have in people who have been hanging out on college campuses in Iowa for the past decade?

I get the sense that in a complete Iraqi power-vacuum returned exiles won't be able to necessarily rally great numbers of people or really "lead" in that sense, but they will be integral to any actual function nonetheless.

If anyone knows of any books that can shed some light on this question, post here and maybe the "History Books" thread as well. Thanks!

Apparently there isn't, and supposedly not taking out Saddam during the Persian Gulf War was considered to be the best of a really bad set of options.

As for models of democratic development in the last 10-20 years, Afghanistan is groping its way towards a new constitution and government, with the West only providing development assistance, advice, and technical support. However, this process is very fragile, as a lot of provincial warlords are opposed to a centralized government -- it's a battle of feudalism versus federalism, and Hamid Karzai's opponents are nowhere near defeated.

...and really isn't this what the war is all about? We will strike back against the metric system by any means necessary.

OK, sorry didn't mean to interrupt. Continue theorizing.

I think people are being just a tad pessimistic about things. I also think the reason we didn't oust Saddam previously had to do with other issues, not that it was the lesser of a number of possible evils. Really, unless Kim Jong Il comes into power, I don't see how the Iraqi situation could get a lot worse. Best thing about it all - removing the sanctions!

Iraq needs to be given an industrial infrastructure to enable it to look beyond oil and petrochemicals, because the oil will not last forever. It does have the benefit of being potentially the most fertile nation and the region and the potential to be a food exporter. The Tigris/Euphrates system and associated irrigation needs to be repaired and farming needs to be improved. The worst thing that could happen would be if Iraq was still dependent on food aid or even on food imports.

its is of paramount importance that Saddam era Iraqi debts are written of and that the US does not exact reparations or uses Iraqi oil to pay for war and occupation. I can think of anything more likely to turn the Iraqi people against the west than that.

I'm not sure about this. Law is going to have an important role to play, obviously, in this transitional 'vacuum'. In contrast with previous transitional periods (C18 Glorious Revolution type stuff, post-World Wars etc.) in which law was given an all-or-nothing role to play, in the late 80s/90s it was given a more complex role. Whereas earlier transitions had preceded on a pure political basis etc law’s role has been to complement politics.

The ultimate concrete expression of this peculiar role? The prominence of quasi-legal institutions in these transitional processes (constitutional tribunals, the TRC). They are legal in that they’re suffused with a regulatory role/power but also political in a way that courts aren’t (staffed by political appointees with considerable latitude; allowing amnesty instead of prosecution etc). The question that’s important here is: how does transitional politics differ from ‘ordinary’ politics? Now, as nabitsuh, has pointed out there is a danger of teleology here, assuming a particular end-point to the transition (note the conflation of ‘transition’ and ‘democratisation’) when everything is UP IN THE AIR is dangerous; and in the current context there may be no/little mobilisable democrat faction. The truth is that these are periods in which the most basic aspects of a society’s political fabric are up for grabs (the Human Rights Act, Scottish Parliaments, Welsh Assembly vs abolition of Communism, death of Apartheid etc).

Conditions of possibility: ‘thin’ communities (one with minimal shared values among its members; ILE; LAW) + ‘thick’ communities (one in which a great deal is shared; ILM). Transition requires only ‘thin community’; it requires no more than that parties recognise sufficient commonality; it doesn’t require a ‘thick community’, although the ‘thin’ may be made up of lots of ‘thicks’ (hey nabitsuh!); in fact it requires the absence of an all encompassing ‘thick community’ (hey nabby!).

Shit, this is all just crazy background transitional jurisprudence; it is interesting but I’m not sure it answers nitsuh’s question directly. I never got round to saying why I don’t agree with Tom Millar, in the strictest sense. It involves precis of Ruti Teitel’s gargolbelith article “Transitional Jurisprudence” and the notion that in such times law is both retrospective and prospective, it has to look back in order to fact-find, delegitimate the old regime’s law, while instituting its own new constitution.

mark s - I'll read my Ruti Teitel article, it has a big section on Constitutions, and see if has any relevance for your other thread.