There is still no real reconstruction plan for Syria

One of the many good reasons not to get involved in Syria is that it is clear that those voices baying for Western intervention have taken no heed of criticisms that in Iraq, the post-conflict planning was, grimly, lacking. There were documents drawn up – if you get a spare half an hour you can read them – but by 2006, three years after the invasion, the Iraq Study Group was forced to publish “The Way Forward – A New Approach”. With fewer than a hundred pages, the report contained “findings and proposals for improving security, strengthening the new government, rebuilding the economy and infrastructure, and maintaining stability in the region.”

If you want an idea of the quality of this document, consider that amongst the interviewees listed were “George W. Bush and members of his cabinet”, the New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman and former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger; as far as the latter is concerned, his only diplomatic experience abroad was in Europe, and he sat on the board of profiteering construction giant Halliburton. There were also an assortment of Reagan-era Washington types.

By 2012, the special inspector general for Iraq protested that a third of government contracts, worth billions of dollars, were not being processed through the proper channels, and over one in ten American taxpayer dollars were being totally wasted. Companies were revealed to be spending money unnecessarily in the run up to project deadlines, so that they wouldn’t have to give any money back to their funders. Companies were fined a whopping $176 million in total.

Now, if northern Iraq is dominated by ISIS troubles, southern Iraq is dominated by economic woes. Fuel shortages, labour strikes, unemployment and lacklustre education provision continue to hamper growth and, therefore, stability. Little attention was paid to how reconstruction efforts might actively heal sectarian wounds rather than inflame them; that shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that the fool who ordered the invasion — President George W Bush — didn’t even know the difference between a Shia and a Sunni Muslim.

Even more remarkable is that neoconservative businessman-cum-politician Paul Wolfowitz, amongst others, had been pushing for a US invasion of Iraq since the late seventies. In all the decades since the calls began, neither Wolfowitz nor any of his neocon comrades had thought that it might be a good idea to consider what would happen once Iraq’s state machinery was dissolved overnight. The armchair experts had pushed for a war beyond which they had not planned and that they would definitely not fight in themselves. The people of Iraq, though, paid dearly for such rash adventurism. Even the cover of the Iraq Study Group’s reconstruction booklet revealed US contempt for the Iraqi people; funds raised from its sale were promised to help injured American soldiers, but not Iraqi charities helping Iraqi civilians.

The key problem in Syria isn’t that there isn’t a plan, it’s that there are too many plans. Ministers from President Bashar Al-Assad’s government are sitting down with the Iranians and Chinese to create their own blueprint. Amongst the proposals are the denial of home ownership rights in Syria’s slums.

Meanwhile, in Beirut, the UN has a team working on the issue, assisted by academics at St Andrews University in Scotland. However, the international body believes that perhaps only a quarter of the necessary several hundred billion dollars will be covered by Western states. The rest will probably come in expensive loans. The formidable private sector in Lebanon, drawing on its construction expertise and experience rebuilding the country after its own civil war, is also readying itself.

There are too many cooks spoiling the broth, including some in Damascus who are hardly known for their abilities as team players on the international stage. Diplomats in both Washington and London admit quietly that the likelihood of any Western invasion is so low, and in Britain’s case budgets are so stretched, that there is little time to help these efforts.

Is there any point in invading Syria, as neoconservatives and so-called muscular liberals continue to push for intervention? Especially given that the lack of focus on post-conflict planning would undoubtedly lead to a Libya v2.0? There is an argument that says that the current loss of life is so high that even a brief respite offered by an American or French-led invasion would be ethically superior to letting Assad continue with his war crimes. This is partly convincing, but the war ends when the violence ends, and getting the violence to end relies on there being effective reconstruction plans in place and then implemented. As we have seen in Iraq and Libya, the absence of such plans means violence continues with no end in sight.

So I would like to offer a tip to the interventionists: instead of using your newspaper columns to remind us all of Bashar Al-Assad’s war crimes – as if we weren’t aware of them already – and doing the same with your neoconservative think tanks, perhaps you might set aside more time to explain how you would reconstruct Syria. An intervention without reconstruction isn’t an intervention, it’s a flailing gesture destined for failure. Iraq, and Libya, should have taught us that.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.