Plan: There are around 350,000 Americans in Iraq. Say you put them on airplanes that carry 150 people. That means you need 2333 flights. If you manage 23 flights a day, it takes 100 days to get out. All their stuff gets left behind.

The JakeS plan seems remarkably similar to the basic Progressive agenda for Europe. Do we really believe that inside every Iraqi is a European-style progressive yearning to breath free?

I disagree that this is substantially a carbon copy of the Progressive Plan for Europe(TM). Infrastructure plays a prominent role in both plans, of course, as does transparency, accountability and general good governance; because those things are Good Ideas that have worked in any and every society that I can think of, past or present. I haven't heard about anyone anywhere who seriously entertained the notion that railroads were a bad idea (except perhaps the inevitable NIMBY complaints), and while not having a political and social system based on systematic corruption will make it harder for fatcats to line their pockets, I hardly think that the Man on the Street(TM) would prefer bribes over taxes when it comes to paying for the police...

One important difference that I would point out is that in Europe the progressive agenda calls for increased centralisation of power at the federal level - for various structural reasons that I won't bore you with here. In Iraq, any reasonable peace plan seems to me to involve very substantial devolution of power unto more local units.

Substitute "middle class American" for "European-style progressive" in that question and in fact you have exactly the Bush democracy agenda.

Even leaving aside completely the question of whether the Bush democracy agenda is a Potemkin village, there are a couple of rather important differences: The first difference is that I am not proposing to overthrow existing social structures. We might decide to not support some of them (think the militias and some of the more noxious clergy), but that's a long shot from uprooting them forcibly. If the Iraqi people massively indicate that they want a European and/or progressive style of society, I would of course be most happy to support them in the endeavour. But if the majority of Iraqis prefer their tribal leaders and their clergy, I don't think it's prudent to attempt to replace those loyalties wholesale or overnight.

That's not to say that I don't think we should propagandise for progressive values and progressive agendas. But if our salesman is repeatedly and firmly told to piss off, then he shouldn't keep banging on the door.

The second difference is that my suggestions do not, for the most part, entail blowing stuff up and shooting people. Thus, even if they fail completely, the downside will be minor (a few trillion € lost, which is too bad, but hardly earth-shattering). First of all, do no harm.

Lastly, I am not proposing that we implement schemes this radical in a country that actually functions (more or less). I am not proposing anything like this for a country like Burma, even though I think Burma would benefit from it. I am making the proposal w.r.t. a state that is, if it is even a state at all anymore, a failed state. [1]

In other words, the central difference between Bush's purported agenda - apart from the fact that I'm sincere about implementing it - and mine is that my scheme is not a do-or-die, paradise-or-death scenario. If it works, it'll do great good. If it works partially, it will do some good. If it works not at all, the only people who will get hurt are the European taxpayers - and they will get hurt only in a financial sense, not in a leg-blown-off-by-land-mine sense.

Contrast this with a regime-change-by-war doctrine. If you succeed completely, it might do great good (depending on which kind of regime you install, of course). But if you do not succeed - or even if you succeed partially, you have a very high risk of leaving a failed state.

Before I get down to your item-by-item list - which criticism I appreciate - I will take time to lodge one last objection to your introduction: I think that the measures proposed here are necessary, yes. But I do not think that they are necessarily sufficient. If they turn out to be sufficient, then I would be most happy. If not... Well, none of them will do any harm in and of themselves (and if they are even partially successful, they will still do considerable good), so I can live with them failing their overall objective.

War crimes prosecutions and reparations. The EU and the ICC are separate entities; the EU has no power to dictate ICC procedures or outcomes. The ICC would likely proceed along the lines of the attempted prosecution of Miloševic'. Which means, five years from now, we might be ready to hear from the defense.

AFAIK, there is nothing in international law that prevents or prohibits any party to the treaties that govern the laws of war from prosecuting their own citizens for war crimes and crimes against humanity (IIRC, the Geneva convention specifically mandates such prosecution). We can initiate our own prosecutions, and if and when the ICC starts up their trails, we can hand over the case to them.

Dealing with Iraqi, American and rouge mercenary war criminals (think Blackwater) will not be possible within a purely European process, of course, but lighting a fire under our own bad guys would send an important message, even if the process will not be completed.

And I am not so certain that prosecuting foreign nationals for war crimes is outside the scope of European proceedings. We could announce our intent to prosecute people suspected of such crimes if we catch them on our territory and let the court determine whether it has jurisdiction. Oh, and we might deny diplomatic status to people suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I suppose that one might argue that such proceedings would be kangaroo kourts. But then one would surely have to admit that they are on more solid ground that, say, the Nürnberg processes, which, after all, covered crimes that were ostensibly legal when and where they were committed and which were committed by foreign nationals that were for the most part caught outside the jurisdiction of the states who assembled the tribunals. Yet the precedents set in Nürnberg mostly endure to this day.

At the very least, the average Iraqi would be more than justified in waiting to learn the final outcome and punishment, before acknowledging your sincerity.

He would be entirely justified in that. But I am not quite so pessimistic as you w.r.t. the Iraqi reaction. Although one should be careful with analogies across continents, such hesitation didn't seem to be the case in Chile when Pinochet was arrested.

But ultimately, I can live with Iraqis mistrusting us until the first convictions start coming in. The evidence of crimes is massive, so - while one should not preempt the court's decision - I would be willing to bet a month's salary that there would be convictions (assuming the accused don't die on us first). That's a fairly safe bet, of course, because in the real world there will never be such prosecutions.

Naturally, you would want to prosecute alleged war crimes on both sides, wouldn't you?

I would want to prosecute for war crimes on the political level. I am not convinced that prosecuting the individual militia member or soldier in a full-dress war crimes and crimes against humanities trial is productive. That is best left to the regular judicial system and/or a truth and reconciliation committee.

Precisely where the military level stops and the political level begins is, of course, a non-trivial issue. My own rule of thumb would be that anyone who commands more than about a thousand soldiers/militia members/civil servants is a political figure, but that figure is something I just pulled out of a hat - you could probably convince me that I'm off by a factor of three in either direction. And when you factor in the sometimes informal command structures of a militia, I do realise that this might get more than a bit messy.

Iraqis might eventually come to accept ICC justice for non-Muslims, but would they accept it for Muslims?

"Fortunately," most of those politically responsible for war crimes in Iraq are not Muslims.

For crimes against Muslims done by non-Muslims?

I should think so, yes. They might not agree with the exact nature of the proceedings or the punishment, but putting away someone like Tory Bliar for a very long time would send a powerful message none the less.

Even if you could somehow convince a plurality or even a majority of Iraqis to accept the secular law of the ICC, you would still have hold-outs. They would argue that, for crimes committed on Muslim soil, application of anything other than strict Sharia would be an insult.

Possibly. No, probably. But first of all, such extremists would likely favour employing the death penalty, which is off the table in any civilised proceeding. I will not support kangaroo kourts - and certainly not to placate a gang of ayatollah-wanna-bes. If that means that they will be irrevocably pissed off at us... well, we'll just have to live with that and hope that they will be in the minority.

Second, I am not convinced that there is a sufficiently substantial agreement among those reactionaries about what Shari'a is in the first place to permit us to use it as a basis for criminal proceedings. Of course, that's not terribly relevant, because Shari'a is not on the table in the first place.

Third, I don't think that they are anywhere near being the majority.

Fourth, from a more pragmatic point of view, prosecuting war criminals is not solely about justice for the Iraqi people. Many if not most of the high-ranking criminals from this war are prominent European politicians. Purging such scum from our body politic would be imminently worthwhile in and of itself, irregardless of what the Iraqis think about it.

And aren't these hold outs the very people you most need to convince, in order for your plan to work?

Convince, pay off or sideline. It doesn't much matter which. The first is probably not going to happen. The second might work in about half the cases. If what's left after the first two have been employed is enough to cause major trouble... well, then we're in major trouble and will have to work from there. But trying the first two can't do any harm.

Even if we agreed (which we don't) that coalition forces were guilty of massive war crimes,

Fallujah and Srebrenica. Compare and contrast.

the ICC would be useless, in my opinion.

We can start without it. If it catches up eventually, good. If it doesn't, no harm done.

Truth and reconciliation. I take it you mean something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa.

Something like that.

However, I must point out that TRC's are incompatible with war crimes prosecutions, since people who confess fully are given immunity. Would a coalition soldier wishing to confess something to the TRC be permitted? Or would you force all coalition suspects into ICC war crimes prosecutions?

See above. Prosecution for the politicians and policy-setting officers. TRCs for the rest.

Would the TRC testimony from Iraqi war criminals and such be admissible in cases made against the coalition?  Now that would be an interesting approach, sort of a one-two punch against the coalition. And of course, if TRC testimony fell apart upon cross-examination by coalition defense attorneys, TRC principles suggest that those same Iraqi war criminals would loose their TRC immunity and in addition be subject to prosecution for lying or withholding information.

That's an interesting idea that I hadn't thought about. I'm not sure that I can keep all the potential implications in my head at the same time, so I'll reserve final judgement, but I like the basic outline - it would provide an incentive to tell the truth in the TRCs even to those who are unlikely to face prosecution for their crimes in the ordinary course of events.

So I'll admit, you've got the germ of a potentially powerful idea here, perhaps worthy of being compared to Judo.  Tell me, is that what you had in mind, or were you just winging it? :}

TRCs have come up several times around here recently, in regard to ways of going about a post-Bush restoration of the American body politic. My distinction between policy-setting individuals and low-level apparatchiks was something I suggested as a compromise between the evident need for prosecution of Bush/Cheney and some of their more noxious henchmen and the equally self-evident need to not virtually disembowel the US executive, because that would destroy the federal (and possibly some state) government's ability to function (even further).

But you'd still have to fix the ICC's decade-long dalliance with empty, formal proceduralism.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

I agree completely. That is being worked on as we speak, actually. There is a certain determination to avoid another Milosevic-style fiasco.

"asking the locals what they would like to happen in their area". The general feeling here at ET seems to be that Iraqis, left to their own devices and without a Saddam, prefer to fight a civil war. Since you probably aren't advocating that, I think it is fair of me to say this means you plan to take an active role in rebuilding some or all of Iraq, or else convincing (and paying) Iraqis to do so.

You assume correctly, more or less. I do actually make some implicit assumptions about what the Iraqis want. I assume, for example, that all other things being equal, most Iraqis prefer peace over war. All other things being equal, most Iraqis prefer prosperity over poverty. All other things being equal, most Iraqis prefer clean drinking water and functioning railroads over grey- and blackwater (you should pardon the pun) and dirt tracks. And I assume that the reason that we are seeing something that either is or looks deceptively like civil war at the moment is that a sufficiently large fraction of Iraqis think that civil war is their best shot at achieving these objectives.

If these assumptions are substantially in error, my plan would fail utterly. But then again, if those assumptions are substantially in error, the Iraqis would be a very curious people, quite unlike most people on the planet.

As I explained above, I can more or less live with even complete failure, even if it would disappoint me, because nothing in my plan as proposed does any perceptible harm to anybody outside the pocketbook of the European taxpayer.

But of course, I should have added a couple of qualifiers along the lines of "if they say they want a Kalashnikov factory, then we say "sorry, can't help you."" But use the carrot instead of the stick whenever possible - that tends to get better results and doesn't hurt as many people nearly as much along the way.

"If they want to bug out, give them safe transport to wherever they want to go to" : You are being far too blasé. What if the people at the destination don't want to accept them?

Alright, append "within the jurisdiction of the reparations-paying countries and/or anywhere that's prepared to accept them." Europe damn well has to accept refugees from a war zone if we want to claim membership in the civilised world. And Europe is a big place. We could absorb the next best thing to forty million Polish citizens, so accepting a couple of million of Iraqis shouldn't be an insurmountable task - although granted, the Polish brought their own land and a more or less (though rather less than more in my impression) functioning government.

What if they want to leave Iraq?  Will Europe take them in?  Even when the people at the origin and destination are consenting, it will be easy for propagandists to portray this as just what Israelis did back in the day.

We'll have to live with that. Getting people who want to flee a civil war out of the crossfire should take absolute priority.

Further, I am not sure that you are right about it. Oh, some propagandists will undoubtedly try, but let's give the average person on the street in the Mideast a little more credit than that: Surely they can see a difference between being bussed into an overfilled refugee camp in a third-world country that is barely able to support and safeguard the refugees in question and being offered passage to a first-world country and help with re-settlement.

I am not so enamoured of Europe that I think they hold us up as a shining example of everything good about humanity, but rather a lot of people from the region are actively trying to get here - legally and illegally. The same can hardly be said for Sabra and Shatila.

"And if they decide to change their minds midway, don't get all huffy. It's their project. They can cancel or rearrange it midway if they like."  Ah yes, a kinder, gentler reconstruction. How can that possibly fail?  But how is what you're proposing different from the UN approach under Sergio de Mello?  And you remember what happened to him.

I didn't remember, so I looked it up. Tragic. But I am not convinced that his murder invalidates his approach. In point of fact, his way of doing things has had considerable success in some of the most atrocious situations in recent human history, and with rather fewer resources at his disposal than I propose to spend rebuilding Iraq. Are we really to believe that Iraqis are so uniquely bloodthirsty that they will present an insurmountable challenge to the techniques that worked reasonably well even in an environment as hostile as the Khmer Rouge era Cambodia?

This [foreign personnel requested by the Iraqis] would require security. As would the local labor; people may decline to work if they are worried about gangsters, etc.

Yes. Hopefully part of the security problems would be solved by the fact that the aid workers are working in close cooperation with local power structures, but ultimately you are right: Doing development aid in a war zone is not a safe line of work. But how is this different from development aid work in - say - Somalia? Or, to take a country that The West(TM) actually cares about, in Sri Lanka? And are we going to get more or fewer people killed by sending in engineers instead of (or along with) soldiers?

And as many bloggers, journalists, etc. have attested, Iraqis unfortunately exhibit a surreal sense of entitlement whenever they see a Western face talking about help. I know you think we owe them reparations, prison terms, etc. but some of them, seeing what our technology can do, behave as if we can make the electricity stay on even when the lines have been pulled down.

I see what you're saying, but in this specific case, we actually can. It's called backup generator units. Alright, that's not a permanent solution. And buried cables would probably help limit the copper theft that I assume is what is disrupting the Spice flow.

So empowering the locals only works if they agree that they're empowered. To which you might say, well duh!  But do you really think landing in Iraq and rolling out the progressive agenda, as enamored of it as you may be, will do the trick?

No, not necessarily. But I believe that it will do more than doing nothing, and even if it doesn't do more than doing nothing, it will not do less either. I suppose that one could argue that doing development aid vs. doing nothing is not a fair comparison, because there is an alternative: Send in the Marines. But how long will that still be an alternative? The only power with the capability to project force into Iraq on the scale required is the USA. And the US military is bleeding, the US budget is hemorrhaging and the US industrial base is broken - quite possibly beyond repair.

"hitting people with a stick". "I'd like to keep the stick-hitting to an absolute minimum". So would we all. Who would carry the stick? European troops?

In a pinch.

Contractors Militias?

Absolutely not.

Iraqis?

That would be preferable. Of course, that requires the existence of Iraqi forces that are not, in fact, a subset of category #2. I don't know what state the local Iraqi police and military is in, but it should be possible to train more or less honest and competent policemen and soldiers from the local population. It is possible in Somalia, for crying out loud, and if there ever was a text-book example of a failed state, then Somalia is certainly it.

Taking the US for granted much?

I would be very happy if the US would supply forces as long as they behave themselves - i.e. don't torture people, don't use chemical weapons and don't use air strikes indiscriminately in densely populated areas. But it's not like Europe couldn't do it if we had the political will and the operation was part of a more comprehensive mission. The EU-27 states put together do have a bigger standing army than the US in terms of manpower, even if we don't have quite as many shiny, expensive (and utterly useless in urban guerrilla combat) toys for them to play with.

We might need help on the logistics side, though, because our armies are not designed to support gunboat diplomacy, so they are kinda hard to move around in great numbers (although I might be surprised there, now that I think about it - our merchant marine is actually bigger than the American).

Furthermore, we have the problem of command and control. How does JakeS plan to avoid the command and control problems that bedeviled peacekeepers in Kosovo?

I will unfortunately have to defer that particular question to someone who has first-hand knowledge of contemporary military organisation and doctrines. But I'm sure it's doable.

Budget: Easily 10-20 billion to get started, plus billions per year to run the whole thing. We're talking real money, i.e. Euros

I think those estimates are low by at least an order of magnitude. I don't remember what the war in Iraq costs right now - including the current spending on rebuilding, but if you double it then I should think you won't be too far off once all the bribes and protection money has been paid to keep people from blowing the shiny new railroads up too often.

Of course, if this works, we can direct some funding away from the war effort (if the Americans are willing - and able - to pony up their savings). Still, even if they don't the running costs would be less than a percent of European GDP. Not impossible at all.

Naturally, he wouldn't exploit the local labor, so they'd have full rights to unionize, strike, etc. plus the right to housing and European-quality health care, wouldn't they?

Of course. European-quality health care might be a bit hard to actually deliver at first, but it shouldn't be for lack of trying.

Surely you don't propose to appropriate the Iraqi oil revenues to pay for this?

Goes without saying.

In theory, war reparations could pay for this, but the US position would likely be a) We do not accept ICC jurisdiction until our Senate ratifies the treaty; b) we had ample causus belli, so no reparations are due and c) we have already spend 100's of billions rebuilding Iraq, so we've discharged any obligations we might have. So where does the money come from?  As leader of Europe, you could fund it yourself, but is that really what you intend?

As you said, if need be Europe could pay for it by ourselves. It would be a moderately painful item on the finance bills, but hey, that's what you get for starting wars of aggression (and then proceeding to lose them badly). Now, if those European countries who didn't participate in the Coalition of the Quislings were exempted from reparation payments, then it would get mighty tough for the rest to keep the money flowing. But the assumption in this Gedankenexperiment was that I was Supreme Ruler of Europe(TM), not PM of UK-Spain-Poland-Italy-and-the-small-fry.

It would be nice if other countries wanted to tip in, and it probably wouldn't hurt their image around the world, their soft power or (in the case of Russia, China and various Mideastern countries) their border security. But ultimately, we can do it by ourselves: It is no more demanding than the Marshall plan, and no more than what we owe the Iraqi people, in my honest opinion.

Have you thought this through, or are you winging it?

A little of both. I have given some general thought to this and similar subjects at various times, but it's the first time I try to formulate something that looks like a coherent policy recommendation.

P.S. Oops.  I had already sort of bid farewell to this topic in a comment on the earlier diary. After I posted that, I realized I had this lying around in a drafts folder, and decided that my madd wisdomz must be posted. But take it with a grain of salt, and I can't guarantee I'll follow up on it.

Well, thanks for the response you did give. It did get me to re-think a couple of aspects of The Plan(TM), as you can hopefully see from my post.

- Jake

[1] I ran the numbers for Coalition casualties a couple of days ago and while they are not as horrible as they used to be a year or two ago, they are not impressive either. I might do a diary on the subject one of these days. Coalition casualty figures is not the best metric for the level of violence in Iraq, but unfortunately all the other figures I can think of either lack time resolution or are from governments that I don't trust. And in any case, they span about an order of magnitude from highest to lowest.

PS: I know this post is way too long to be really readable, but I'm too mushed in the head right now to cut it down to size.

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