From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AFTER THE WAR
Passive Saboteurs
Ideological prejudice leads relief agencies to cut and run from Iraq.
The world is now witnessing an exodus from Iraq. But it is not an exodus of refugees, whom critics of the war told us would flood in panic across the borders into neighboring states. These simply didn't materialize--and it tells us much that is good about the postwar realities of the country that they didn't.
So who exactly is abandoning Iraq and its still considerable deficiencies in sanitation, clean drinking water, medicine, medical care and an equitable distribution of food? The answer is astonishing because the deserters are many of those nongovernmental organizations and other groupings organized by governments whose precise moral singularity is that they arrive and stay to dispel human distress when no one else will.
They are leaving, however, their spokesmen tell us, because of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 23 people and because the U.S. cannot safeguard their security. It turns out that, for U.N. personnel at least, the first part of the explanation is not quite true: According to a Baghdad dispatch in the Aug. 31 edition of the Boston Globe, they had already been considering "a proposal to evacuate" the capital even before the bombing. And that reflects not the adequacy of American protection, but--since mostly they were against the war in the first place--its ethical and political probity. American (and, for that matter, British) protection would compromise, they felt, their mission.
As it happens--and as U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard admits--the second explanation is also not true: The U.S. did offer to protect the international presence with men and barricades. In any case, as the Globe reports, already "dozens of U.N. staff members have been evacuated" to Jordan and Cyprus, where, of course, they are needed not at all. Nevertheless, these withdrawals do solve the problem that "they could not bear working under the shadow of the attack."
It is not only the U.N. that is pulling its employees out of Iraq. So are the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The EU does nothing concretely helpful; its employees can just as well spout off from Brussels. As for the World Bank and the IMF, their lending, such as it is now, can also be done long-distance.
But it is the departure of NGOs, with their relentless pretense to be the conscience of humanity amidst all its depravity, that truly rankles. And they run the gamut: Oxfam, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children, Swedish Rescue Services, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Médecins sans Frontières, Merlin. On Aug. 20, Oxfam said it was staying; by Aug. 28, it was gone. According to the Financial Times, the ICRC's venture in Iraq had been one of the world's largest humanitarian operations. Now two-thirds of its foreign staff is gone, and more are on their way. Save the Children claimed on its Web site to have the "largest presence in Iraq." It has just about vanished. According to the Mercury of Australia, "there are dozens of non-governmental aid and support groups working in Iraq . . . and most of them were studying whether to reduce foreign staff, or already had." A spokesman for Caritas said simply, "most of them are reducing their staff as much as possible" and spiriting them out to safety.
Many of these international aid agencies somehow felt uncompromised in Saddam's Iraq, adhering to the enshrined doctrine of humanitarian relief that they are beyond politics or "metapolitical." No one can deny that they were blunting the force of U.N. sanctions against Saddam, and thereby making his rule more tolerable. But starvation is not a policy of the U.S., and Americans freely contributed to the easing of Iraqi distress.
There are even more vexing ambiguities. As the author David Rieff has pointed out many times, the NGOs in Rwanda and Zaire relieved the suffering of millions of Hutu families whose members had waged genocide against the Tutsis. Those who now suffer in Iraq never committed genocide or, indeed, any crimes at all. They were mostly victims of the Baathist regime. But they were freed from their captivity by the U.S. and the U.K. and--their agony notwithstanding--the identity of their liberators somehow sullies them and makes their wretchedness tolerable. Or at least not worthy of the routinely brave work of humanitarian institutions.
Many of the NGOs that are on their way out of Iraq from fear--if we believe them--maintain elaborate operations in Liberia, where their employees were until recently probably more at risk than in Iraq. After all, Liberia has been plagued by wanton, random killing. And yet the relief workers soldiered on. Meanwhile, in Iraq--where whatever mistakes have been made by the occupying authorities and however vexing the internal struggles, there can be no doubt that the U.S. wants to leave the country in a better way than it found it--the NGOs are leaving in droves.
I do not wish to demean the value of relief workers and their contributions. But let's face the truth: Any success in rebuilding Iraq would undermine the widely diffused ideological presumption of relief organizations and many international agencies that powerful nation-states cannot provide the impetus for decent change or even real relief among suffering pre-industrial and pre-modern populations. That is a task, the humanitarian professionals argue, for the practitioners of the post-sovereign ideal--for them, that is. It is for this reason that these professionals actually engage in what one might call passive sabotage in Iraq, a mean-spirited version of what Thorstein Veblen called "the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency." They do not want the water to flow if the tap is turned by Paul Bremer.
One more telling irony: While the idealistic abandoners of Iraq move on to their safe-haven podiums in Kuwait City and Amman, the entrepreneurial corporations Bechtel and Fluor, drawn to the country by contract for massive construction and oil-field projects, have plans to evacuate no one.
Mr. Peretz is editor in chief of The New Republic.
