Letter From Ground Zero

In Baghdad this week, one Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, an Iraqi businessman with ties to the Iraqi National Congress, has shown up claiming to be the city's governor. He's set up in the Palestine Hotel, where he meets with local leaders, offers to solve their problems and announces plans to get the city's services back on their feet. However, the head of the INC, Ahmad Chalabi, has declined to support Zubaidi's pretensions, and in a recent confrontation between the two and their armed guards, there was accidental gunfire. Chalabi makes no claim to be governor, but he, too, has shown up in Baghdad and started meeting with local leaders, in preparation for an interim government that the United States wants to set up. The United States itself has appeared in the person of Gen. Jay Garner, the intended temporary administrator of all Iraq. He, too, has brought a governor of Baghdad with him: one Barbara Bodine, former Ambassador to Yemen. Just now, it's hard to say which of them, if any, will actually wind up running Baghdad.

Among these pretenders to power, the Garner team has one notable qualification: It represents the occupying power that has just overthrown the former government. The problem has been that the United States has so far declined to act in the classic manner of the conqueror: It has offered no substitute government. Rather, it has come in the guise of a liberator. The normal thing for a conqueror to do once it has routed the indigenous forces is to declare martial law and start giving orders. That is what the United States did on the two occasions most often cited as precedents for the Iraq war--the conquest and occupation of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. The United States made no claim that it was "liberating" those peoples. It conquered them and dictated the forms of their political future, which they, happily, came to accept and approve over time.

The nature of a conqueror's rule has always been well understood. The citizens of the subject population obey because otherwise they can be put to death, just as the soldiers of their defeated army were. The seventeenth-century political philosopher and archrealist Thomas Hobbes had a name for this kind of obedience. Putting to himself the question, "Despotical dominion, how attained?'' he answered that it depended on the "consent of the vanquished." He cited the Roman example--highly pertinent in these days of American imperial ambition. The Romans achieved conquest "not by the victory but by the consent of the vanquished." He explained that "it is not...the victory that giveth the right of dominion over the vanquished but his own covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is conquered, that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he cometh in, and submitteth to the victor." The act that symbolized this consent was the surrender--as in the ceremony on the battleship Missouri when General Umezu signed a surrender agreement with General MacArthur.

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