AFTER WAR, LET IRAQIS TRIUMPH
Artículo de Nicholas D. Kristof en “The New York Times” del 21.03.03
Con un muy breve comentario al final (L. B.-B.)
KUWAIT
In Kuwait these days, the nice hotels supply mints on the
pillows, and also terrifying brochures entitled "Preventive Measures in
Case of Potential Attack Using Chemical Weapons."
The government press center
serves French pastries as air raid sirens blare warnings about incoming
missiles. U.S. Army officers sit at laptops in the air-conditioned luxury of
the Hilton hotel, gas masks dangling at their sides.
Those are the eerie and disturbing mismatches here in
Kuwait as war begins, and with missiles flying and American troops in danger,
it's natural to focus on the immediate battle. But the biggest mistake we made
12 years ago in the first gulf war was not a military one on the battlefield,
but rather a broader political one: we failed to look ahead and plan adequately
what we would do the day after we won. This time, even more than before, we
urgently need to plan the peace.
That's also an opportunity for us all to move beyond
our own fratricidal debate about the war. Those of us who have opposed this war
need to recognize that we lost the debate, not only in the halls of the White
House but also in the court of public opinion as well. It's time to move on.
We all share President Bush's hope that ousting Saddam
will transform Iraq into a flourishing democracy and revive the Middle East.
Here are two principles that may help us improve the chances of winning the
peace in Iraq:
First, make this an Arab victory.
As the Pakistani scholar Hussain
Haqqani has noted, there's a flaw in the idea that
invading Iraq will lead to a new Arab dawn: for the last 700 years, Muslims
have reacted to defeat not by embracing modernism but by turning inward and
grasping religious fundamentalism. On the other hand, the greatest reform in
any Muslim country in the last century came in Turkey after a rare victory,
when Kemal Ataturk defeated the Greeks and foiled
Western plans to carve up his country.
The U.S. plans to make Jay Garner, a retired general,
the civilian viceroy of Iraq. But every invasion in the Middle East in the last
two centuries, since Napoleon's, has soured within a few years, in part because
of nationalist resentment of the intruders.
That suggests that we should make the outcome in Iraq
seem, as much as possible, like a victory for Iraqis, and we should put them in
charge quickly. There is a way to engineer this: Shiites make up about 60
percent of Iraqis but have historically been politically repressed and
economically impoverished, so if we allow them their fair share of power, this
will be a genuine and historic triumph for them.
Second, don't mess with Iraq's oil. Iraq is,
economically, a disaster, with Unicef reporting that
25 percent of children are chronically malnourished, and estimates of the cost
of rebuilding the country running to $100 billion or more. Just restoring
Iraq's electrical grid to its pre-1990 level may cost $20 billion.
Some have suggested brightly that Iraqi oil will pay
for rebuilding the country. It won't. Iraqi oil production capacity has been
falling in recent years, not rising, and it will be expensive to turn that
around. A report this month from the Council on Foreign Relations estimated
that restoring production to its peak in 1977 — 3.5 million barrels per day,
compared with a capacity today of 2.8 million barrels per day — would require
spending $6 billion over two years.
Everywhere I have been in the Arab world over the last
year, people have been deeply cynical about American motives, assuming that
we're just after Iraqi oil. Unless we want to give anti-Americanism a huge
boost and create tremendous hostility within Iraq that would make our
occupation untenable, we won't covet Iraq's oil — it's just not worth it.
Having harmed America's image in the runup to this
war, let's restore it in the aftermath.
Oh, no, time to go. The air raid siren is shrieking
again, and hotel employees in dark suits and matching gas masks are rushing
unnerved guests into a bomb shelter. Kuwait has become a collection of surreal
juxtapositions: a rich city of gleaming office towers where people fumble for
their gas masks. I have a new mask that allows me to attach a canteen and sip
water during a nerve gas attack, but even it is not perfect. It
won't accommodate my hotel mint.
MUY BREVE COMENTARIO (L. B.-B.)
Existen varias cuestiones que suscitan preocupación, por lo que se
refiere a la crisis iraquí:
En primer lugar, cómo se va a desenvolver la batalla de Bagdad, si
es que llega a producirse: ¿va a ser un infierno numantino, con gran número de
víctimas civiles y militares y uso de armamento químico o biológico?
Otra cuestión es la del Norte: ¿va a crearse un conflicto nuevo y enquistable, como el palestino-israelí, si se permite la
ocupación por Turquía de la zona kurda de Irak? ¿No sería coonveniente
lanzar tropas aerotransportadas urgentemente sobre el Kurdistan
iraquí, de acuerdo con los kurdos, para evitar la actuación por la vía de los
hechos consumados de los turcos?
En tercer lugar, es preocupante el modo de realizar la transición
en Irak: todavía no circula suficiente información acerca del estado de la
oposición iraquí a Hussein, pero da la impresión de una gran división política,
acentuada por las divisiones étnicas.
Pero ante esta fragmentación también resulta preocupante que se
haya de recurrir a un "virrey" militar estadounidense para encabezar
el gobierno de transición. ¿No caben otras posibilidades?
Kristof tiene razón al decir que
conviene irse planteando ya desde ahora los pasos siguientes.