John Roughan: Emperor's court could do with an Iraqi barber

It's wonderful the people you meet in New Zealand now. It doesn't seem so long ago since the place was as Pom and pale as a New Zealand First conference.

The other day the barber across the street mentioned casually, when I asked, that he was from Iraq. He had been clipping away, rather depressed that day because someone had just broken into his Auckland flat and taken everything of value.

That was particularly sad to hear because I knew from previous haircuts that he was supporting several families back home. He regularly sent a share of his earnings to his sisters whose husbands were in hard times.

It was no big deal, he had explained. It was just the way families worked where he came from. It was expected. Iraq, he added after I asked, used to be a very good place to live. But not now.

I wondered, naturally, what he thought of Saddam Hussein and he duly delivered the sentiments of disgust that he knew I expected. But he didn't seem hopeful that much would change if Saddam was removed.

Like many you meet in the Third World, he didn't have much confidence or interest in governments. Life was a matter of working and looking after your family and hoping that powerful people would leave you in peace.

He, in fact, was a Kurd, he told me. Kurds in Iraq and adjoining countries have been fighting for eons for their own state, but not for him. The Kurdish factions, he said, spend more time killing each other than their overlords. He shook his head at the thought of a Kurdish state.

As for the Americans, he shook his head again. He had been in the Iraqi Army, he said. He had fought in the eight-year war against Iran after the fall of the Shah. The United States had financed Iraq for that war.

He had been one of those who opened ammunition boxes and the boxes had always come from the US with instructions in English.

He didn't add that it was not long after the war that Saddam got it into his head the US would look the other way while he annexed Kuwait. So began the defining chapter of the world we will live in for, who knows, the rest of the 21st century.

Is it to be an American empire or an international settlement loosely governed by a coalition of four or five powers, as in the United Nations Security Council? My barber doesn't mind. All he asks is space for himself and his family to make a living and enjoy life, safe from nationalists, warlords, factions and thieves.

I can't help thinking that an empire would be preferable. If the US had not kicked the UN into action 12 years ago, I have no doubt that Kuwait would be a province of Iraq today - and we would still be waiting for sanctions to work.

Those who have been complaining in latter years, quite rightly, about the cruelty of economic sanctions are generally the same people who in 1990 were advocating UN sanctions as an alternative to war.

Sometimes a precise military operation using overwhelming force for a clear, practical objective is kinder to all concerned. Bush the elder and General Colin Powell wrote the textbook with Kuwait. Bush the younger didn't read it.

"Regime change" in Iraq was not a practical objective, not unless you know the likely new regime. Mr Bush needed an Iraqi barber.

Fortunately he had Mr Powell as Secretary of State and a clever ally in Britain's Prime Minister. Together they led Mr Bush gently to the Security Council where, last week, he agreed to a set of objectives on Iraq that look more practical.

Iraq could be cleared at last of suspicion that it has, or can produce, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. But it is not the Security Council that will need to be convinced, it is the country which alone possesses the might and the will to impose its order on the world.

Empires have had a bad press for the past 150 years or so, but that is a mere interlude in the sweep of history. More often than not down through the centuries one nation has imposed its order on most of its known world.

And the longevity of most empires suggests it might have been a fairly contented world.

History, written by today's democrats, concentrates on the discontents. Emperors are remembered for putting down rebellions and conquering people at their periphery.

But the vastly more usual experience for most of their citizens was probably one of peace under predictable law, settled authority, recognition of their rights and property, a reliable currency, education of the able and all the music, games, theatre and art that we still have from periods of imperial stability.

The shock of September 11, 2001, has sent American strategic thinking in a consciously imperial direction. The collapse of the Soviet Union has left the US many times more powerful than all of its nearest rivals combined, and that is a position it now intends to maintain.

At the West Point military academy in June President Bush made a speech which has been too little discussed. He declared that the US no longer tolerates the idea that another country, or even a coalition of friendly countries, might match its military strength.

The balance of power has gone and with it the principle of deterrence. Enemies with no territory or state cannot be deterred.

Deterrence has given way to pre-emption. Henceforth the US would take it upon itself to act against incipient threats to its security anywhere. The sovereignty of others was no longer inviolate.

Will the real world welcome that? It's time I had another haircut.