UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT
PLENARY SESSION FIVE:
THE SITUATION IN IRAQ
Address by Mr. Carl Bildt
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sweden
to the
3rd IISS Regional Security Summit,
The Manama Dialogue
Sunday 10 December 2006
Thanks very much Excellencies.
John asked me to give some remarks on the situation in Iraq. I don’t think he did that because he believed that I had a particular expertise on Iraq but perhaps because of experience with other areas in certain respects not entirely dissimilar. But let me start by saying or stating the obvious: we all have a huge stake in the outcome of what is now going on in Iraq. Views have certainly been divided in the past, about different aspects of policy towards that region before 2003, 2003 and after that.
But now we are dealing with a future that is yet to be shaped; we are all dependent upon success of the endeavours in Iraq. That applies without going too much into the next panel. That applies also very strongly from the European point of view.
Iraq is a neighbour of Europe. I’m among those who are very keenly supporting the process of Turkey’s accession to the European Union. It is not going to be easy, it is not going to be fast, but I am convinced it will happen. And that means that in the future the European Union will extend until and onto the northern reaches of the plains of Mesopotamia: we have a huge stake in what happens in this area. Indeed you might note that what we can refer to as the post-Ottoman issues have been fairly high up on the European political agenda in the past years.
In the entire area which we might define as from Bihac in Bosnia up in the North-west down to Basra by the Gulf in the South-east we are facing different sorts of political challenges often associated with what we can call state-building tasks. Indeed when I go to the meeting of the European Union foreign ministers in Brussels tomorrow it will be dealing with Turkey, it will be dealing with Cyprus, it will be dealing with the Middle East peace process all of them in the category of post-Ottoman issues. Before going to Iraq – yes, note the fact that has been highlighted also by the Iraq Study Group recently that you can’t really separate the different issues in this area too much from each other and I would like to stress in particularly the inter-relationship that is there between the ongoing efforts in Iraq and the Middle East peace process. These are the areas of the ancient fertile crescent; these are the ancient lands of Abraham; they were united, they were linked in the past, they are linked today and we are linked into twin state-building tasks of Iraq and of Palestine. They both have to succeed. If one of them fails it will have a detrimental impact, to put it mildly, also on success. In the other, we need to see, in shaping our policies, the inter-relationship that is there, the need to be successful in both of these efforts.
The territorial integrity of Iraq is obviously of paramount importance; that has been stressed by everyone at this conference. Let me just note that I have been following with some concern the tendency that has been there, particularly in the US debate, to move towards what they call partition or soft-partition of Iraq believing that is an easy solution to the difficulties of today. Let me state very clearly that in my opinion there are no soft partitions. Every partition is a partition written in blood and the carnage that we see today is only the beginning if we start to talk about partition scenarios which we believe will be soft but will be exceedingly hard to the people that will affected on the ground. I think it is welcome that the Iraq Study Group so clearly takes distance from the illusion of soft partition – all partitions are partitions written in blood in the recent past and in the more distance past.
The role of the neighbours can never be neglected in situations like this. To neglect the importance of the influence of the neighbours is to invite trouble further down the road and as a golden rule you can say in situations like this that the ability of neighbours to create instability is always bound to be greater than the ability of more distant powers to create stability. Accordingly you must in the one way or the other have them as part of the picture and agreement among the neighbours to create the external framework for stability which creates then the more tranquil conditions for the internal processes that of course are the ones that are going to be decisive, and that external framework agreed by the neighbours should preferably be anchored as firmly as possible in a wider international institutional framework.
Internally of course security is of course the key and a lot of the debate that we follow these days is about the redeployment of coalition, read American forces, or the training of the Iraqi Army. Those are obviously important issues.
But I would like to stress that domestic security is primarily a question of having functioning police forces. If you don’t have functioning police forces you can have an abundance of army, but it is not going to help anyhow – the army is the back-up to the police and we should not repeat the mistake that was there after 2003 to believe that it is only a military problem neglecting the domestic security aspect; building police is even more difficult than building armies. But if you neglect building police, building armies is not what is going to help. The police force is the front line force in state building in every case and Iraq is no exception. And then of course, to state the obvious, that the state must have a monopoly of the use of force – that is easier said than done, but the target must obviously be there.
There has – to go from the territorial integrity to the security – there has of course to be a constitutional compromise. And I stress the word compromise, because every constitution in every country is a compromise. You have to – there are always competing views, they might be ideological, they might be questions of identity, but a constitution is always a compromise. And in the Iraqi case in my view I think that far too many critical issues have been left open for far too long and that have invited discord that has been detrimental to the efforts at achieving security. The sooner one can bring these compromise efforts to an agreement the better it would be. I noticed in the newspapers the other day that there is some progress on the question of the oil law that is obviously of critical importance. There has to be a functioning central authority, then autonomy the key is a functioning central authority not the least when it comes to creating the preconditions for economic development. And then of course the economy which is key to the long term development. If there is not a prosperous economy, if there is just unemployment and despair there is no way that there will be political stability in the years to come. The possibilities are obviously there: the second largest oil reserves in the world, but also the fertility of these ancient lands that are well known to us all.
The legacy in terms of economy is absolutely horrendous in every single respect: in the 1970s a state socialist economy; in the 1980s a war economy; in the 1990s a sanctions economy; and now a situation where attention to economic policymaking is somewhat difficult to put it rather mildly. And we see that in growth figures we’re being well below the potential; inflation being very high; unemployment reaching staggering proportions; investments being nearly non-existent – is not even possible for the oil ministry to spend more than a fraction of the money that is budgeted, and massive institution and state building tasks ahead; the oil law was mentioned and to come with a particular Swedish point of view, the country even needs an income tax in order to be able to survive in the future.
Then final rather obvious point of view, based not the least on the experience I had during my years in the Balkans. Replacing a regime or replacing a state is composed of two different things, first the act of destruction. We do have the machineries of destroying states and regimes in abundance, not only states have them, But we have a proliferation of those technologies as we see in the news report. But when it comes to the construction of states or regimes we don’t have the machineries to the same extent. And the more you destroy the longer time will it take to build up and what is needed more than anything else is an abundance of a resource that is somewhat lacking particularly in our democracies and that resource is strategic patience and time – three and a half years is a very short period. These things take a very long time indeed and we need an abundance of strategic patience; an abundance of men dedicated to the tasks; an abundance of money also to finance those particular efforts, yet only in the longer time perspective that you can start to see whether the construction efforts will balance the destruction efforts – we got the machinery of destruction of states but we haven’t really got the machinery of the construction of states. That is something that is making the efforts in Iraq as well as elsewhere, the Balkans, Africa, whenever, one of the most demanding that is there on the international agenda today.
Thanks.
