The BBC is reporting that the significance of the impending US and British handover of power in Iraq is not nearly as telling as the number of American humvees needed in the savaged country. According to the article, The Iraqi Interim Government will suffer from four outstanding limitations:

• It will be appointed not elected
• It will have no powers to make laws
• Laws and rules already made by the Coalition will remain in force
• It will probably not have controlling power over the Coalition forces which after 30 June will become the “multi-national force”

Like most political curmudgeons, I had expected the the June 30 handover to come with strings attached. But I never thought it would be such an unconcealed farce. The whole, dubious excercise seems to hinge on one’s ability to believe that an unelected and impotent interim government is useful for anything besides the commisioning of new governmental stationary.

In light of these limitations, nothing about the handover seems to make much sense. If the coalition handover is a genuine attempt to foster leadership in Iraq, then why undermine the prospective governing body so obviously? Wouldn’t the mere existance of a castrated leadership grate mightly on anti-coalition factions¹? If the handover is a public relations ploy, then is it not obvious that the handover will only cause future credibility hardships for the coalition? A lengthy period of unproductive governance will force the coalition to address the utter uselessness of its symbolic body at some point in the near future. Could the only reason left for the coalition’s handover be nothing more than simple patronage²? Atleast that would make conventional political sense.

Look to Arms, Not Artifice

Paul Reynolds is right, “The actions of soldiers carry more weight than the predictions of politicians.” Thus, the US Army’s “world-wide search for armoured Humvees” is far more useful for understanding the siutuation in Iraq than this handover nonsense. What’s the point of an undermined and irrelevant interim government, when what Paul Bremner cites as “the path which leads to a new Iraq, a peaceful, democratic Iraq….the path to a bright and hopeful future” will be carved out by the tires of US Humvees? Ignore the coalition’s emphasis on the coming events of June 30th. The stability of Iraq should be gauged by the amount of bloodletting occurring on the sands and not by the flippant gestures of unilateral statecraft.

¹ I’m sure that even Iraqi’s know what an Uncle Tom is even if they have a different term for it.

² In which case the coalition is no longer engaging in a handover so much as it is applying a reacharound.