More killing. Less good deeds

[Steve the Planner]

Beetle:

I'm good with the Kurd representations. People forget that the historical map of Kurdistan really begins with the road to Kermanshah (Iran), and that a lot of the anti-Kurd actions against the Kurds by Sadaam were because of Iranian relations. Like Afghanistan, it is a big complex world once you get up into any of those hills.

Go back to Sassanian Empire times and Baghdad to Jalalabad were all one big happy empire (sort of).

I was always very interested in the Yazedis, and some of the micro-sects, some so small and isolated in their villages that they could literally not communicate with the next town. The Jews were, in fact a big presence in the major towns of Basrah, Baghdad and Kirkuk. Most left in 1950 for Isreal, but still have reparations claims swirling around.

But the ref to Mosul. There were two Mosuls in my world: the one before Sunnis/AQI were pushed out of Baghdad, and the one after. Mosul is the shock absorber for Baghdad stability (such as it is), and is hard to understand the scope of damage in 2008.

Steve

[M-A Lagrange]

I disagree, please show the dates that development started and "serious" conflict stopped. We provided security against Saddam's forces since the no fly zone was established (might as well call it a separate economic zone), and the internal conflict was manageable since the late 90's. The development in Kurdistan was no miracle on our part, security came first, then the people reached out and accepted help from outside donors (very simplistic view, but as opposed to the folks on the other side of the Green Line who suffered for many years under punishing economic sanctions, fought us when we arrived, and gradually evolved into fighting one another. You can't compare Kurdistan to Mosul or Baghdad for example).

First: security comes first! It is just the simple truth. No security: no development.
Also, in the same country, you will have two different phase for development/humanitarian actions: Continum and contigum.
Continum phase: in some areas, for many reasons, most of the time not under our control, the situation evolves in the good sens. From disaster you go to humanitarian, recovery then development. And you do not know why but it goes fine.
Contigum: it is the fact that if in place A things goes in the good sens, in place B, in the very same country, things either stay the same (disaster/humanitarian or cannot go further than recovery). This has been experienced by every one every where. It is just that some places are centre and others are peripheries.
But do not mistake the fact that centres can be: trackting economical centres and will generate development. OR can be centres of violence: trackting the place from disaster to fubar.
Then peripheries will:
- in a econimical center:
either follow at lower speed the economical development OR either separate and insecurity will increase. (the choice is not ours). In both cases, security will remain the first issue as you need to protect the center.
- in a violence center:
periphery can either follow and become insecure OR separate and become more secure. In both cases security comes first. But in the second issue, it is quite important to contain the effects of violence centre and support recovery/development. The aim is to turn the periphery into an economic centre.
I know, easy to say, much complexe to implement. I face the problem daily.

The main problem is that much efforts are actually focussed on violence centers or peripheries in the attempt to lower insecurity through social/economical projects. This works (sometimes) but the over focus on security is harming the whole effort.
While in economical centres and periphery, actors tend to hurry to shift to evelopment and creat a gap that may creat insecurity.
This mainly comes from the fact that non military actors are driven by the ratio: moral benefits/physical risk.
And also, the process of contigum may forward and backward.

In clear: when it starts to go fine, we are too quick to pull out humanitarian NGO and not capable to replace them. The appreciation of recovery success in not this 6 month project worked fine let's go to development. It takes more time. And you can even duplicate the continum/contigum paradox/evaluation scale into economic centres and peripheries to have contigums of development and recovery. It is just a question of scale (country, state, county, village/town).

And no need to go back too much in the past. One of the Rostow critics is that even people with a stone age technology do have internal sociological, culturaland technological evolution. What we observe now (2009) in some remote islands is not how humanity use to be at stone adge.