A place of possibilities

A new United Nations is required to save Iraq and the world. Where could it be built?

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

As Napoleon could attest to no less certainly than countless divorcees, getting in is so much easier, and way more fun, than getting out. Even if the Bush regime in Washington decided it had had enough of the improvised roadside explosive devises and wanted out of Iraq, it’s hard to imagine how they could do it.

The Iraqi nationalist resistance would like US forces withdrawn immediately, most European governments agree it would be best, pretty much everyone in the world wants them gone, and in fact a majority of US citizens now also want their military to quit the Iraqi adventure. Easing the extrication of the US military from the mess it rushed into in Iraq is surely a cornerstone of current Canadian foreign policy as well, even if it is unspoken.

Bush has recently replied to these demands at his ranch in Crawford Texas, where he is vacationing for the month of August, by pointing out that any withdrawal ahead of a perceived victory would encourage the world to look upon the US military as weak. Not only is that the least of the problems an early withdrawal engenders, it’s also not a problem anymore. Everyone can already see how weak the US military is as it struggles for 28 months and counting just to secure the 16 kilometre highway from Baghdad to the airport.

It isn’t so much the risk of an Iraqi civil war breaking out that complicates all US withdrawal plans. It’s the risk of an already well-advanced civil war spilling out over the whole neighbourhood and advancing into a hair-raising regional war. The oil prize is only one reason, but it is an important one. Iraq has the current capacity to produce at least three million barrels of oil a day, and can export about 1.4 million barrels of it. At current oil prices, which are rapidly rising, Iraq could earn upwards of $4 billion a month on export sales.

All Iraq’s neighbours could really use that oil and the foreign earnings it promises. Turkey is teetering on bankruptcy. Maps of Turkey produced by Turkish printers show the country extending over the Kirkuk oil fields, home of about one third of Iraq’s oil reserves. Iran is struggling to maintain the compliance of a huge relatively middle class population by showering money on them, and has fought numerous territorial wars with Iraq for the southern area, home to two-thirds of the country’s oil reserves. Saudi Arabia has enjoyed the benefits of dominating the world oil markets more by it’s copious spare production capacity than through the sheer volume of its supply, and that prominent role in the world would be immediately undermined by Iraq’s space capacity, should it ever come on-line under someone else’s control.

It’s all well and good to say the US should leave Iraq, but when the US says it can’t until Iraq can “stand up” it’s own competent military, they’re not kidding. The $4 billion per month prize is too much a distraction for all Iraq’s neighbours to ignore. And it isn’t just the money, but rather what power that kind of money can buy. The White House convinced itself Iraq had an ongoing advanced nuclear weapons research project in 2003 mostly on the true evidence that it could if it wanted to—the state earned that much money from exports of oil, even while under stringent oil-exporting sanctions, and even with oil selling at less than a third that it does now. The Bathhist regime in Baghdad made no bones about its hostility to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As an historic and natural centre of Arab and Islamic power, Baghdad under anyone’s control after an American departure would return to its antipathy toward Israel, just as is the case throughout all of Pan Arabia. Only Iraq would bring to that antipathy the power and influence of copious supplies of oil money.

Israel and the Israeli lobby in America provided important encouragement and support for the Iraq war hawks in the first Bush administration. Any change in America’s stance in Iraq now would require the same level of support from the Israeli lobby in the United States, which is virtually the same thing as the support of Israel itself, so long as Likud extremist Ariel Sharon remains in power. Domestic politics in the United States therefore also prevents the Americans from simply cutting and running and leaving Iraq and its oil to whomever can lay claim to it.

If Iraq is ungovernable by itself for the time being, as seems the case now after American forces shattered all governing institutions, who might provide an interim government that leads the region back to peace and order? A grouping of militaries and diplomats from the immediate neighbouring region is as unlikely to form a consensus and govern Iraq cooperatively as any alliance of groups from within Iraq has been. The divisions ripping Iraq apart are a reflection of the divisions prevailing across the whole Arabic world.

A grouping of world powers is also unlikely to gain the confidence of any, let alone all, communities vying for power in Iraq today. Non-coalition forces from Russia, China, India, France and Germany are all tainted with the stench of past opportunism, being each massive consumers of oil and already engaged in a global struggle to secure their own supplies. Any plan by NATO or even a similar ad hoc organization of powerful nations would appear to Iraqis, with great justification, as a new round of patronizing colonialism, something Iraqis know quite a bit about already. Also, any group of such nations that includes the US and Britain would only end up looking like an expanded version of the current coalition, and would do nothing to gain the confidence of Iraqis or quell the resistance. Yet any group excluding the US and Britain could potentially set the world’s biggest military powers on a collision course toward world war.

Perhaps, then, a mixture of Arabic neighbours and world powers could form a new military and diplomatic core necessary for the restructuring of Iraq. This indeed was the conclusion following the devastation of Europe and Asia in the 1940s, and in particular, the untethered and volatile Arabic region between them. It was most specifically the question of mandated Palestinians and uprooted European Jewry clashing over territory both claimed in the Levant for which the United Nations was formed to resolve.

While the United Nations doesn’t look today to be the body necessary to quell Iraq and prevent the explosion of a wider war, something very much like the original vision of the United Nations is the only plausible alternative. It is, it seems, time to radically reform and re-launch the United Nations with the specific and immediate purpose of ushering the Americans out of Iraq in a manner that avoids a bloodbath among neighbours and world powers eager to fill the enormous power vacuum that would result.

As usual, since it commands the largest, most powerful military and economy, any plan to re-launch a globally-respected, powerful, and legitimate United Nations-type organization would require the cooperation of America, and in particular, the connivance of the country’s awfully suspicious and xenophobic interior regions. Counter-intuitively, Americans may trust such an organization more if it were located not in New York as the present United Nations is, but in some other country, so long as that place is not too foreign. (Pew Research has found that the less a people see of Americans, the more they like and trust them; the same might be true in reverse: the less Americans see of the parade of strangeness that is the United Nations in New York, the more they may like and trust the rest of the world.) Besides, no one elsewhere in the world will trust a re-launched United Nations-type organization that resides in the United States.

This is where Canada comes in. Already both a Pacific and an Atlantic nation, already European in its heritage, Western Hemispheric in its geography, and American in its influences, already intimately connected to both the English and French speaking worlds left behind by colonialism, and to the rest of the world in its broad intake of post-World War II immigrants, and lacking a threatening military, an economy that matters, or a national history with any serious scores that need settling, Canada has already earned a reputation as the world’s quiet and competent dispute resolution negotiator. Say what you will about the shortcomings of UN Peacekeeper forces in war zones that Canada did much to initiate and most strongly supported, but where parties were ready to seek peace, Canadian contingents of peacekeepers provided absolutely necessary support.

In a world that desperately needs to calmly mollify frightened and trigger-happy Americans in order to escort their forces out of a country they should never have invaded, and at the same time, earn the trust of warring factions itching to take over inside Iraq and historically hostile neighbours itching to keep the country crushed, few nations on Earth are in a position today like Canada’s allowing them to still talk to all sides.

The question of Palestine was enough to cause the world to create the original United Nations, and to centre it in the United States, then seen as the only place on the planet where everyone was welcome to come and talk out their grievances. The question of Iraq today is at least as urgent a problem as Palestine was, and it ought to be cause enough to re-create the original vision of the United Nations, and then to centre it in the only place on the planet where everyone might today still be welcome to come and talk about this and all other problems. That place is Canada. And if the United Nations wants at the same time to shed its image of the past and cast a new modern future for itself, there is no newer a major and modern city in the world than Vancouver, a place where future possibilities still outnumber past attempts.

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