Adam Daifallah
Montreal Gazette

Saturday, January 29, 2005

BANKING ON BAGHDAD: INSIDE IRAQ'S 7,000-YEAR HISTORY OF WAR, PROFIT AND CONFLICT
By Edwin Black
John Wiley & Sons,

471 pages, $39.99

WHAT WE OWE IRAQ: WAR AND THE ETHICS OF NATION BUILDING
By Noah Feldman
Princeton University Press,
154 pages, $25.95

Barring an astonishing last-minute volte-face in Washington, Iraqi citizens will be heading to the polls tomorrow in their first stab at a democratic election. After living through years of brutal dictatorship and wars, and the last two of American occupation and tumult, Iraqis will now start setting the course of their own future.

Few if any would deny that the occupation of Iraq that began in March 2003 has been more problematic than anticipated. Order hasn't been kept. Costs have ballooned. Resistance from bitter Baathists and foreign jihadists is hamstringing efforts to rebuild. More than 1,400 U.S. soldiers have died; the number of Iraqi deaths is much higher.

No, the scene in Iraq hasn't been pretty. Reasons for optimism still remain, but if newspaper reports and stories from colleagues and sources who have travelled there recently are accurate, the journey to self-sufficiency and democracy in Iraq is going to be a long, tough haul.

Then again, nothing in Iraq's history has ever been pretty or easy. As investigative reporter Edwin Black chronicles in Banking on Baghdad, Mesopotamia - the land known as the "cradle of civilization" - has had one of the world's most unstable, troubled and bloody histories.

This book could just as well have been called A Short History of Iraq. But this is much more than a primer. In the span of 400-odd pages, Black covers remarkably thoroughly the minutiae of thousands of years of geographical, political and religious history.

And what a fascinating history. Iraq has come a long way from its pre-biblical status as a centre of medical, artistic and intellectual prowess.

Black takes us through the various occupations of Mesopotamia over the centuries by everyone from Genghis Khan to the Ottomans to the British, and in acute detail.

Black tries to show that the reason so much attention has been paid to Iraq, especially in the modern era, is its oil. He does so fairly convincingly. Particularly interesting is Black's exploration of the (thankfully unsuccessful) Nazi posturing to seize Iraq's crude in the Second World War.

Where Banking on Baghdad falls short is in its examination of recent history. The ending seems rushed: A total of five pages are dedicated to the period from the first Gulf War in 1990 to the present. Saddam Hussein's genocidal regime is barely tackled, with just a single sentence to highlight the deposed dictator's use of chemical weapons against his own people.

Black is also far too glib in his dismissal of the recent war as being just about oil. He raises the issue of U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's prior employment at Halliburton, the oil services company benefiting from Iraqi reconstruction dollars. President George W. Bush, in Black's words, "wanted to finish the job his father had begun, not because the people of Iraq were precious but because the land beneath them was."

In reading the literature about the lead-up to the war and in listening to Bush's recent speeches, it seems that oil was far from the main factor behind the invasion. The Bush administration seems convinced that the creation of a democracy in the heart of the Arab world would be the first nail in the coffin for Islamist terrorism. What's more, Bush appears genuinely to believe that liberating the oppressed is part of his job description.

Noah Feldman's objective in What We Owe Iraq is quite different from that of Black. Feldman, a law professor at New York University, has been directly involved in the Iraq effort. An expert in constitutional law and Islamic thought, Feldman worked as a constitutional adviser to the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

While his stint there was short, Feldman's views are to be taken seriously. He is part of a breed of bold liberal-minded intellectuals (others being Michael Ignatieff and Fareed Zakaria) who have taken hawkish positions on the war on terrorism. Feldman, in particular, has emerged as a star commentator on Iraq.

This short book, based primarily on lectures Feldman gave last year at Princeton University, is essentially an academic treatise laying out the moral case for nation building. In his view, there has not yet been a thorough discussion of why nation building should occur, and "no one is asking what obligations we might have to the Iraqis whose government we deposed and whose country we occupied."

Feldman's view is simple: invading powers should act as benevolent governing trustees in the period between occupation and departure, doing everything possible to leave the country better off. According to Feldman, the United States, therefore, cannot cut and run now in Iraq. From an ethical and moral perspective, the United States owes the Iraqi people more, especially given the less-than-adequate handling of the post-war security situation. They must stay and make things better, he suggests.

While some may find this book's professorial tone a bit abstruse, it is useful for those interested in the U.S. adventure there. A staunch believer in Islam's compatibility with democracy, Feldman genuinely thinks the Iraq project can work. Tomorrow's vote and its aftermath should give us a good indication of the prospects for future democratic success.