Showing Them How It's Done

Our nation-building mission in Iraq does not consist merely in advising the natives how their oil might best be exploited; no indeed. Even Ann Clwyd's valiant attempts to shoehorn human rights into the Iraqi psyche are not the end of our civilising influence.

The British Council has initiated a programme to bring British and Iraqi universities closer together. "We have a duty and a responsibility to help the Iraqis rebuild their country," said the higher education minister, Bill Rammell. So we're focusing on "management training and capacity-building." The grateful natives are "learning about management techniques, about working with industry, engaging with employers, community engagement and governance." That will certainly help.

According to the Guardian, Bill Rammell said "that vocational training in Iraq was 'one of the best in the region' in the 1980s, before Saddam Hussein ran it down." The 1980s was the decade when Iraq was a favoured western trading partner and ally against the Iranian threat. The 1980s was also the decade during which Saddam Hussein gassed Halabja, much to the west's chagrin in 2003. Perhaps the Saddam Hussein who was in charge of Iraq during the 1980s was a different Saddam Hussein. Iraqi colleges were "cut off from their international peers" under at least one of the Saddam Husseins, though the Guardian is regrettably silent as to whether it was the one who was armed with western equipment in the 1980s or the one who was strengthened by western sanctions in the 1990s.

Naturally, the natives have been impressed by our architecture, some of which has not been bombed: "They've been very impressed by the resourcing and the very modern buildings they've experienced when they've gone to the colleges," said Katie Epstein, the British Council's director of vocational partnerships. Above all, they have been impressed by "working alongside their peers and learning new systems for student-centred learning." This is certainly natural. The vocational partnerships division of the British Council has even managed to give the Iraqis a few pointers about "what is valuable in their own system." That sounds heartwarmingly multicultural of them.

All in all, for the hitherto unfortunate victims of one or other of the Saddam Husseins, all this - the British architecture, the resourcing, the learning of new learning systems, and of course the valuing - adds up to a revelatory experience: "Coming over here has given them enormous confidence and recovered their pride in their history and academic traditions that they always had in Iraq," said Katie Epstein. "They can really see a point where they can rebuild that," especially as "labour mobility is a real feature of the Middle East", as in all free societies. Already, some of the natives "have radically changed the way they manage their institutions and have introduced more participative democratic management models". Gosh. And it's all thanks to us.