Just to add something about weapons of mass destruction..........what weapons of mass destruction?????
Iraqi troops refuse to attend U.S. army training
04 Jun 2005 12:43:01 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Fadil al-Badrani
RUTBA, Iraq, June 4 (Reuters) - An Iraqi army unit has been disbanded after it refused to attend a U.S. training course in Baghdad, former members of the unit said on Saturday.
The soldiers, part of a 90-strong force called the Defence Force of Rutba, said they had refused to attend training because they feared reprisals from locals if they were seen to have cooperated with the Americans.
"We refused to go because we were afraid that when we came back to Rutba we would be killed," Taha Allawi, a former member of the unit, told Reuters. Rutba is in the far west of Iraq, close to the border with Jordan.
"The people here would believe that we were cooperating with U.S. forces and that is a reason for anyone to be killed."
A U.S. military official who oversees training said Iraqis who refused to attend courses could be dismissed, but said the decision rested with Iraq's Ministry of Defence.
"While coalition forces may have delivered the news, those decisions are made by the Ministry of Defence," said Lieutenant-Colonel Fred Wellman. "The United States does not disband units or dismiss soldiers."
Iraq's Defence Ministry had no immediate comment.
Another former soldier in the force, Ahmed Dhahi, said the disagreement began two months ago when the U.S. military first raised the idea of them attending training in Baghdad.
"They told us we had no right to refuse, they said the duty of soldiers was to obey orders, but we said 'We are Iraqis, not Americans, we don't follow orders from Americans'," he said.
"We did not want the locals to think that we were working with the Americans and then threaten us."
Dhahi said that once it became clear that the unit would not attend, the U.S. military took away their weapons, uniforms and identification tags and dismissed the force.
Iraqi units have fled the front line when ordered to fight insurgents before, but it was believed to be the first case of soldiers refusing to attend training for fear of reprisals.
Rutba, on the main highway heading to Jordan, is a predominantly Sunni Arab town with strong tribal allegiances. It has been the scene of occasional violence over the past two years, including attacks on military convoys.
A member of Rutba's local council said the soldiers, who had been receiving a salary of around $300 a month, were right to refuse to attend the course.
"The soldiers have all the right if they refuse to go because we understand the reason why they have taken this position," said Hamid Saleh al-Kubaisi.
"We have tried many times over the past two months to get the Americans to change their order, but they have insisted that they must go. The council has no affect on anything because the Americans don't listen."
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Quote:Good Intentions Gone Bad
NEWSWEEK's Baghdad bureau chief, departing after two years of war and American occupation, has a few final thoughts.
Hard roads: Marines search for mines and IEDs on a remote desert track near the Syrian border with Iraq
Scott Nelson / WPN for Newsweek
Hard roads: Marines search for mines and IEDs on a remote desert track near the Syrian border with Iraq
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
Newsweek.............isn't that the organization what just apologized for telling lies?????
Newsweek.............isn't that the organization what just apologized for telling lies?????
rayban1 wrote:
Newsweek.............isn't that the organization what just apologized for telling lies?????
It has been all over the world in all media - how could it happen, rayban that you missed what it was about (and what newsweek said)?
National Review on Line
Victor Davis Hanson
June 03, 2005, 8:07 a.m.
Our Strange War
Looking ahead, our options.
The three-year-plus war that began on September 11 is the strangest conflict in our history. It is not just that the first day saw the worst attack on American soil since our creation, or that we are publicly pledged to fighting a method — “terror” — rather than the concrete enemy of Islamic fascism that employs it.
Our dilemma is that we have not sought to defeat and humiliate the enemy as much as wean a people from the thrall of Islamic autocracy. That is our challenge, and explains our exasperating strategy of half-measures and apologies — and the inability to articulate exactly whom we are fighting and why.
Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these “indigenous movements” and “deplore” such “terrorism,” even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to “bridge the gap,” and seek a “peaceful resolution,” while we sought to “liberate” rather than defeat the German nation.
So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.
Beyond the terrorists, a larger percentage of Middle Easterners, if it cost them little, gain psychological satisfaction when fellow defiant Muslims (terrorists or not) “stand up” to Westerners, who enjoy power, status, and wealth undreamed of in the Middle East.
Even if they would hate living under Taliban-like theocrats, millions at least see the jihadists as about the only way of “getting back” at the Western world that has left them so far behind. This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.
Still, most in the Middle East wish simply to embrace the human desire for prosperity, freedom, and security within the umbrella of traditional Muslim society — and will support American efforts if (a) these initiatives seem to be successful, and (b) are not seen as American.
Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon’s “pitiful, helpless giant”) cannot or will not win the war.
Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.
Although the enemy is weak militarily and its nihilist ideology appeals to few, it still has powerful ways to meet our own overwhelming military power and economic strength.
First is the doctrine of the deniability of culpability. In the legalistic world of the United Nations and international courts, Islamists depend on their patrons’ not being held responsible beyond a reasonable doubt for the shelter and cash they provide to those who kill Westerners. Elites in Syria or Iran deny that they offer aid to terrorists. Or if caught, they retreat to a fallback position of something like, “Do you really want to go to war over our help for a few ragtag insurrectionists?”
A second advantage is oil. A third to half the world’s reserves is under Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Iraq, and Iran. None until recently were democratic; most at one time or another have given bribe money to terrorists, sponsored anti-Americanism, or survived by blaming us for their own failures.
These otherwise backward societies — that neither developed nor can maintain their natural wealth — rake in billions, as oil that costs $2-5 to pump is sold for $50. Some of that money in nefarious ways arms terrorists. Should an exasperated United States finally strike back at their patrons, we risk ruining the world economy — or at least so it will be perceived by paranoid and petroleum-dependent Japan, Europe, and China. Without an energy policy of independence, this war will be hard to win, since Saudi Arabia will never feel any pressure to purge its royal family of terrorist sympathizers or to cease its subsidies for Wahhabist hatred.
A third edge for the terrorists lies in the West itself. After 40 years of multiculturalism and moral equivalence — the wages of wealth and freedom unmatched in the history of civilization — many in the United States believe that they have evolved beyond the use of force. Education, money, dialogue, conflict resolution theory — all this and more can achieve far more than crude Abrams tanks and F-16s.
A bin Laden or Saddam is rare in the West. In our arrogance, we think such folk are more or less like ourselves and live in a similar world of reason and tolerance. The long antennae of the canny terrorists pick up on that self-doubt. Most of the rhetoric in bin Laden’s infomercials came right out of the Western media.[boldface emphasis added by ican]
As September 11 fades in the memory, too many Americans feel that it is time to let bygones be bygones. Some now consider Islamic fascism and its method of terror a “nuisance” that will go away if we just come home. We are a society where many of our elite believe the killer bin Laden is less of a threat than the elected George Bush. Al Qaeda keeps promising to kill us all; meanwhile Ralph Nader wants the wartime president impeached for misuse of failed intelligence.
Fourth, in an asymmetrical war the cult of the underdog is a valuable tool. Europeans march with posters showing scenes from Abu Ghraib, not of the beheading of Daniel Pearl or the murder of Margaret Hassan. They do not wish, much less expect, al Qaeda to win, but they still find psychic satisfaction in seeing the world’s sole superpower tied down, as if it were the glory days of the Vietnam protests all over again. How else can we explain why Amnesty International claims that Guantanamo — specialized ethnic foods, available Korans, and international observers — is comparable to a Soviet Gulag where millions once perished? So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West.
In response, we have embarked on the only strategy that offers a lasting victory: Kill the Islamic fascists; remove the worst autocracies that sponsored terrorists; and jump-start democratic governments in the Middle East.
Our two chief worries — terrorists and weapons of mass destruction — wane when constitutional societies replace autocracies. Currently few democratic states harbor and employ terrorists or threaten their neighbors with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, even if they have ample stockpiles of each.
Where will it all end? Our choices are threefold.
We can wind down — essentially the position of the mainstream Left — and return to a pre-September 11 situation, treating Islamism as a criminal justice matter or deserving of an occasional cruise missile. This, in my view, would be a disaster and guarantee another mass attack.
Or we can continue to pacify Iraq. We then wait and see whether the ripples from the January elections — without further overt American military action into other countries — bring democracy to Lebanon, Egypt, the Gulf States, and eventually the entire Middle East. This is the apparent present policy of the administration: talking up democracy, not provoking any who might disagree. It may well work, though such patience requires constant articulation to the American people that we are really in a deadly war when it doesn’t seem to everyone that we are.
Or we can press on. We apprise Syria to cease all sanctuary for al Qaedists and Iran to give up its nuclear program — or face surgical and punitive American air strikes. Such escalation is embraced by few, although many acknowledge that we may soon have few choices other than just that. But for now we can sum up the American plans as hoping that democracy spreads faster than Islamism, and thus responsible government will appear to ensure terrorists and WMD disappear.
The above, of course, is what we plan, but gives no consideration to the intent of the enemy. As we speak, he desperately searches for new strategies to ward off defeat as jihad seems more likely to lead to ruin than the return of the caliphate.
For now Islamic fascist strategy is to make such horrific news in Iraq that America throws up its hands and sighs, “These crazy people simply aren’t worth it,” goes home, snoozes — and thus becomes ripe for another September 11.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Gee.....I dunno Walter. Would you like to repeat their lies so everyone will know what the hell you're talking about?
War From the Top Down
By JAMES S. CORUM
op.ed.
New York Times
June 2, 2005
Oxford, England
MOST Americans, including many of those making military decisions in
Washington, have been surprised by the intensity of the Iraqi insurgency
since the January elections. How, despite their failure to coalesce into a
united front and their lack of a coherent political program, have the armed
factions shown such staying power? History suggests an answer and, more
important, provides a model for putting the insurgency down.
Once started, rebellions develop their own internal logic and momentum.
People who take up arms are normally reluctant to put them down again, even
if the chance of ultimate success is minimal. The unsuccessful communist
insurgency in Malaya after World War II lasted 12 years. The Huk insurgency
in the Philippines lasted a decade. The rebellion in El Salvador that began
in 1980 continued for 12 years. In many cases, the rebel cadres simply
fought until attrition made them irrelevant.
Another common element was that the rebels flourished in an environment of
disorder. Many insurgencies erupted in the messy aftermath of the world wars
as factions took advantage of postwar power vacuums. Likewise, when Saddam
Hussein's regime fell, there were too few American and allied troops to
establish control; this gave Iraqi factions a perfect opportunity to arm and
scramble for power. In the aftermath, the American military has lurched from
one quick fix to another. At first we tolerated factional militias - until
they threatened the Coalition Authority. Then we recruited large numbers of
police officers and briefly trained them. They performed as well as poorly
trained forces usually do: badly.
Our current goal -- to bring enough stability to the country that we can
bring the American troops home -- depends on our giving the Iraqis enough
expertise to win their own war. Again, history provides clues. When the
Malayan insurgency broke out in 1948, Britain initially brought in 40,000
army troops and rushed to expand the colony's police and security forces.
>From 1948 to 1951 the police force was quadrupled to 40,000 men and more
than 100,000 "home guard" auxiliaries were recruited.
Sheer numbers had an effect, but over time, the hastily trained police and
security units were inefficient, and in 1951 senior British commanders
reported that they had stalled against the rebels.
So in 1952 Britain sent out a new high commissioner, Gen. Gerald Templer,
and a new police commander, Sir Arthur Young, formerly head of the
Metropolitan Police in London, who realized that the Malayan police had
plenty of manpower but lacked competent leaders at every level. Young began
a long-term training program that emphasized developing highly professional
commanders and noncommissioned officers.
Dozens of capable men were sent to the United Kingdom for a yearlong police
academy course. Hundreds of junior officers were sent to new police and
military schools in Malaya run by the British. Templer, paradoxically,
slowed the expansion of the Malayan Army until cadets and junior officers
with the highest potential could be sent to schools in the United Kingdom.
Yes, this caused short-term manpower problems, but the strategy paid off. By
late 1953, the police department's effectiveness had noticeably improved and
again the government was winning the war.
The situation in Iraq today is similar to what faced Templer when he arrived
in Malaya. After the fall of Baghdad, American officials had little
understanding of just how politicized and corrupt the Iraqi police and
military forces had been under Saddam Hussein. Most dictatorships favor
party loyalty over merit; this is why third-world armies look impressive on
parade on Revolution Day but fail on the battlefield. Officers under Saddam
Hussein were well educated, but those who had performed well in the long war
with Iran were seen as a threat and were purged or mysteriously died. So
while the Pentagon was correct in assuming that there were plenty of
officers who were not Saddam Hussein loyalists and who would be willing to
serve a new government, it overestimated their skills.
The character of these men should not have been a surprise: the NATO
militaries spent most of the 1990's rebuilding the old Warsaw Pact armies.
Retraining the officers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the
Czech Republic into Western-style forces was a long, expensive and difficult
task. For example, the German Army had to set up a three-year program to
re-educate 14,000 officers and noncommissioned officers from the East German
Army; even now, according to people I know in the German Army, you can still
pick out those who had been trained under the Communist system by their lack
of initiative and unwillingness to assume responsibility.
I know from my own experience that training the Iraqis will be an equally
arduous venture. Early last year I went to Iraq with a small team of
American officers to advise the Iraqi military on officer training. One of
my colleagues had spent years working with those Eastern European soldiers,
and said the similarities were striking. Even to me, it quickly became
obvious that many of the Iraqi officers were looking for no more than a
well-paid sinecure and eventual pension.
Still, there were some men who clearly wanted to help build a better Iraq,
at great risk to themselves. And while they seemed smart and willing, they
lacked even basic professional training. We decided that the best way to
help them would be the Templer model: sending dozens of the best men to the
United States for training. On their return, these men could not only take
command of military units but, equally important, could become the teaching
staff for the new Iraqi military schools.
This is merely common sense, but at the time it was at odds with the
overwhelming desire at the Pentagon to reduce the American troop commitment.
As one American Army colonel in Iraq told me, "We'll train the Iraqi Army
after the insurgency."
So for the past year and a half, the Pentagon has relied largely on private
contractors to provide training. Iraqi officers have been given short
courses inside Iraq and a handful of mid-ranking officers have been sent to
other Persian Gulf countries for brief staff courses. The results have been
predictable: the insurgency is stronger than ever.
In January a few thousand American troops were assigned to directly advise
Iraqi military forces; many of them, frustrated with the Iraqi officers'
lack of initiative, have virtually taken over leading Iraqi companies. This
may help, but only by spending an extended time abroad in a professional
environment can Iraqi officers truly understand the principles of leadership
that make Western armies effective on the battlefield while remaining
servants of democratic states. Unfortunately, by the end of last year there
were only two Iraqi officers at the 20-week Infantry Officers' Advanced
Course at Fort Benning in Georgia and only one Iraqi officer was sent to the
Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas last
year.
Following the Malaya strategy, I would suggest sending hundreds of Iraqi
officers to the United States over the next three to four years while
leaving American troop strength at its current level (most of the Iraqis
speak enough English for the course work). Several hundred senior officers
at a time would go for a full year to the military staff colleges where we
instruct our majors and colonels. An additional 200 to 300 mid-ranking
officers could attend our six-month advanced courses for officers. In
addition, hundreds of police officers should be sent to yearlong courses at
American police academies.
The cost would probably not please the Pentagon -- based on what we now
charge other countries that send officers to our staff colleges, it could
reach $100 million a year. But this is pretty small change compared with the
price of some of high-tech weapons (and our Anglophone allies, Britain and
Australia, could bring Iraqis to their own institutions).
Counterinsurgency is not rocket science - which is unfortunate because
America would be good at it if it were. A successful counterinsurgency
strategy requires a return to military basics, especially well-trained
officers. Unless we provide Iraq with good leadership, our plan to spread
democracy, which looked so close to victory two years ago, will end in
defeat.
-- James S. Corum, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States
Army Reserve, is a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Kanan Makiya: "All Levels of the Iraqi Government Were Complicit."
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2005
This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at http://www.meforum.org/article/718/
Kanan Makiya is among Iraq's most prominent democracy and human rights advocates. Born in Baghdad in 1949, he left Iraq in 1968 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but, starting in 1981, dedicated himself to advocacy for a free Iraq and the study of tyranny. His 1989 book, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq,[1] <mid://00000064/#_ftn1> offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. Other works followed, including The Monument,[2] <mid://00000064/#_ftn2> and the prize-winning Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World.[3] <mid://00000064/#_ftn3>
Following the 1991 Iraqi Kurdish uprising, Makiya visited northern Iraq where he organized the collection of captured Iraqi military and security documents. These documents became the basis for an award-winning 1992 documentary, Saddam's Killing Fields, describing Saddam Hussein's ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds. In 1993, he also organized the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University in order to catalogue the documents and make them accessible to scholars.
Since Saddam Hussein's April 2003 ouster, Makiya has been a leading advocate for de-Baathification and a commemoration of the victims of Baathist tyranny. In June 2003, he founded the Iraq Memory Foundation. He is also a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University. Sam Spector, a research analyst at the Long-Term Strategy Project, interviewed Makiya in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 26, 2005.
The Nature of Iraqi Baathism
Middle East Quarterly: What is Baathism?
Kanan Makiya: Baathism is one of the many streams of Arab nationalist ideology and practice. It is undoubtedly the most virulent strain. While Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Baath party, was interested in fascist ideology, the party started to fuse elements of socialist ideology with Arab nationalism after World War II.
MEQ: If Baathism is a form of Arab nationalism, how do Baathists define who is an Arab?
Makiya: To Baathists, being an Arab is connected with the degree of loyalty that one has, not only to the idea of "Arabness," but also to the party that carries that idea, that party's central committee, and ultimately, to the party leader. In that sense, it is fascist. Baathist ideology in the pure original sense means you could have ancestors going back hundreds of years in an Arab country and your first language might be Arabic, but still you are not an Arab in the Baathist view. The quality of being an Arab is therefore a subjective and not an objective attribute of an individual.
MEQ: How did the Baath Party exert control in Iraq?
Makiya: The Baath Party cultivated a culture of fear when it seized power in Iraq in 1968. Fear became an important and constant feature of Iraqi politics. It is difficult, even two years after the regime's overthrow, to underestimate the impact upon Iraq's population of three decades of fear inculcated on a daily basis by virtually every state institution.
MEQ: Have your views about the nature of Baathist tyranny changed since Iraq's liberation?
Makiya: The basic thesis of Republic of Fear was accurate through the 1980s and the early 1990s when that state was still strong and in control of the country. But the 1991 Gulf war began to change all that. Iraq transformed from a classic totalitarian state to a criminal state. While sanctions and war let Saddam's regime remain, beginning with the creation of the safe haven [in northern Iraq] and the sanctions, class totalitarian Baathist institutions were eroded in ways that we did not appreciate before the liberation.
MEQ: How did the criminalization of Iraqi institutions impact political life?
Makiya: Initially, and in sharp contrast to much of the Arab world, corruption was much less rampant in Iraq under the Baathist regime. The penalties for corruption were simply too great. The party ran an efficient system that was designed to control the people. Once the Baathist elite began to shed ideology, Iraqi officials began to use the powers of the state for personal benefit through criminal activities of one kind or another. State institutions became riddled with corruption and eventually stopped performing even basic services.
MEQ: Were the highest echelons of the Iraqi government involved, or was corruption a low-level affair?
Makiya: All levels of the government were complicit. Profiteering, black market trafficking, and sanctions-busting became the principal activity of the Iraqi elite. United Nations officials turned a blind eye as top Iraqi officials diverted funds from the U.N.-managed Oil-for-Food program into secret bank accounts.
MEQ: Were sanctions effective?
Makiya: The idea behind the sanctions was that they would weaken the regime enough so that the Iraqi people could overthrow it. But it turns out the theory of sanctions didn't work out that way in practice. On the contrary, while sanctions weakened Iraq's ability to threaten its neighbors, they strengthened the Iraqi regime in relation to the Iraqi people.
MEQ: So the coalition invasion in March 2003 served, to some degree, as a catalyst for changing an unsustainable situation?
Makiya: The war made it possible for the country to have a chance—I am not saying a guarantee—of moving ahead in a democratic fashion. The sanctions could not be removed before the regime was removed, and only then could the country pick itself up again. With the removal of the old regime and the elections, we have reached the beginning of a new era. Baathist ideology has, I believe, been dealt a deathblow in Iraq.
MEQ: On April 9, 2003, you watched the fall of Baghdad on television with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Can you describe your feeling?
Makiya: It was a wonderful moment. I think that the liberation of Iraq is a great historic achievement of the United States, and I think that it will go down in history as such. I am very proud to have been in that room on that day.
De-Baathification
MEQ: Do you believe that de-Baathification, purging high-ranking Baathists from government in the new Iraq, is necessary?
Makiya: I was one of the people who most strongly advocated de-Baathification, and I remain convinced that this process has yet to take place to the necessary degree in Iraq for truly successful transformation. Germany was the main historical precedent for this sort of broad political and societal transformation that we in the Iraqi opposition all looked back to.
MEQ: Is it fair to penalize Iraqis for joining the Baath party? After all, didn't teachers and public servants have to join the Baath party to keep their jobs?
Makiya: Crucial to the policy of de-Baathification is reaching out to those many hundreds of thousands of people who were fellow travelers of the Baath party—not out of ideological conviction, but out of necessity. They had no alternative, and that was the only way to function in society.
MEQ: How then, do you suggest that de-Baathification could be implemented more effectively and fairly?
Makiya: It is important that there be an open-hearted policy—one that welcomes people to break with the Baath party and enter the fold of society and politics. De-Baathification ought not to be about blacklisting large numbers of people. It is important that de-Baathification not become de-Sunnification. The Sunni community should not believe the policy is in the first place directed against them. Iraqi Shi‘ite and Kurdish politicians have to be extremely sensitive to make that distinction. And, remember, this is a matter of perception, as well as practice. Partly for that reason, we have not in Iraq yet succeeded with de-Baathification. Moreover, de-Baathification is not in and of itself a solution to the problems of Iraq. It is only one component of a set of other policies. It really has to be seen in that context.
MEQ: What is the status of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification today?
Makiya: It was the major player during the period of the Governing Council, but it was weakened considerably, first by [former Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul] Bremer, and then by [prime minister Ayad] Allawi's interim government.
MEQ: What message did the partial reversal of de-Baathification send?
Makiya: The formation of the Fallujah Brigade [in April 2004] was an essential moment in the reversal of de-Baathification. It was by common agreement today a terrible idea and a failure. Its point was to recruit and co-opt former Iraqi officers, who were even allowed to dress up in Baathist uniforms. That kind of reversal had more to do with appeasement—with the vain hope that appeasing Baathists could curb the violence. But the exact opposite, of course, is true. Whether they were for or against de-Baathification, Iraqis recognize what a disastrous policy this reversal was. I expect de-Baathification to become a central plank of the new government.
MEQ: Didn't de-Baathification exacerbate the insurgency among Sunnis?
Makiya: I think the insurgency would have happened anyway. It did not so much exacerbate the insurgency as make it harder for many Sunnis to break with the insurgency. Iraqi politicians did not explain adequately that de-Baathification did not mean de-Sunnification. We who advocate this idea need to do a lot more in that department. Ironically, the insurgency has made this harder to do.
MEQ: What is the goal of the insurgency?
Makiya: The insurgents don't want to re-launch the Baath party; they want to return to its politics, its way of thinking about the world. They seek to exacerbate a Sunni-Shi‘ite division. Once the conflict is cast in those particular terms, they win. It is, therefore, in the interest of all Iraqis to resist such a transformation. It is important to frame the new Iraqi struggle as being against the Baath party and what it stands for, and not against specific communities. How to do that is the art of politics today in Iraq.
MEQ: What could the coalition have done differently to avert some of the complications and violence that followed the occupation?
Makiya: The central error was the coalition's tendency to focus on the 52 "Deck of Cards" suspects, who were at the absolute top of the Iraqi state pyramid. As a result, tens of thousands of trained thugs, intelligence officers, and senior army personnel did not believe that they would be held accountable for what they had done under Saddam's regime. Those people should have been arrested, questioned and, at the very minimum, closely watched. That didn't happen though, and these same people are now the leaders of the insurgency.
MEQ: Can the United Nations or Europe assist with reconciliation in coming years?
Makiya: From the Iraqi point-of-view, every involvement of the United Nations has been negative. But it is desirable to have the appearance of U.N. involvement. We need to break the isolation that currently exists, with the United States and a handful of other countries shouldering the burden of the Iraq project. The silence of the Europeans, the negative role of the United Nations—the fact that neither did anything for the people of Iraq during their historic elections—is shameful. The United Nations' and European hearts are just not in the Iraq project. That is unlikely to change in the near future. They might feel it necessary to make some effort, but it will always be halfhearted. In that sense I would say that the European countries, and particularly France, Germany, and the U.N. have actually given succor and assistance indirectly and unwittingly to the insurgents in Iraq. That is a shameful blot on their record.
MEQ: Have any of the states neighboring Iraq played a more helpful role?
Makiya: None. None at all. There is no doubt about this whatsoever: We never expected to have friends in the region, and we still don't.
Iraq Memory Foundation
MEQ: What are the origins of the Iraq Memory Foundation?
Makiya: In 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the last war, I went to northern Iraq to look into rumors that the Kurds had captured tons of Iraqi documents. With the tacit knowledge of the then-director of Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies [William A. Graham], I sought to gain support to transport those documents outside of Iraq so that academics and scholars could work with them. The project began the following year at Harvard.
MEQ: How did you get the documents out of Iraq?
Makiya: Both the U.S. government and Human Rights Watch were involved in shipping the documents—about 2.4 million pages—out of Iraq. Outside that original visit, I was not involved in the mechanics of arranging the transfer. The U.S. government scanned the documents, and then we worked on the scanned, digitized versions. We were initially working with about 2.4 million pages. Over the years, we added another 800,000 or so pages that came out of Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. We got grants from various foundations and from the U.S. State Department to start working on these documents.
MEQ: Did you acquire any new documents after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein in April 2003?
Makiya: After the war, I found in the basement of the headquarters of the Baath Party—the Revolutionary Command Council— a huge cache of documents, another 3 million pages. These were of far greater significance coming as they did from the Baath party building in Baghdad rather than from the outlying provinces. With great difficulty, we got permission to relocate those documents to our offices. We have been organizing them and classifying them into various sets. In the second half of 2004, we got hold of additional documents. We now have a total collection of more than 11 million pages, and we face the gargantuan task of trying to scan them.
MEQ: Can you describe what types of things these documents revealed?
Makiya: There are all sorts of categories of documents. For instance, there are party membership files. These give you sociological information about the backgrounds of party members and the ways in which they rose up in the party. There was a wide variety of material in these box files that could be the correspondence of a branch of the Baath party, or correspondence from the office of the president. Nobody has read through all of this. It takes forever. We have, for instance, eight years worth of rumors on the Baath party in the 1990s. This is a treasure trove for future scholarship on the mechanics and inner workings of dictatorship in the Middle East.
MEQ: Was there anything you found that surprised you?
Makiya: We found registers of Iraqi secondary school students with all kinds of personal information, especially political information: when they joined the party, including their degree of loyalty measured by various criteria; whether they participated in such-and-such an event; the loyalty of the members of their family up to cousins of the third degree. So, you end up with virtually a blacklist of the secondary school population. You can imagine the implications of studying Iraq through the prism of these kinds of documents.
MEQ: How do you intend to make these documents accessible to a broader public?
Makiya: We have to digitize them, and index them, and classify them so that we have ways of searching through them. We have developed systems for doing that, and we intend to begin the production of monographs.
MEQ: How is the Iraq Memory Foundation financed?
Makiya: We have received support from the Iraqi government and from the Coalition Provisional Authority and from grants and contracts from the U.S. government. We have also received a grant to take oral histories of witnesses and survivors of atrocities—we have made about twenty films at the moment. We have about thirty more that we are scheduled to make. Our interviews span the whole spectrum of Iraqi society: men, women, children, Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and people of all social stations and walks of life. We are starting a library of victims' testimonials. Many of these will air on Iraqi television in coming months.
MEQ: Will the foundation be based in Iraq?
Makiya: It is already based there. That is when it started, in 2003, the year of liberation. There is a special prime ministerial order that grants us use of the "Crossed Swords" site in Baghdad for our museum. It will become a national archive, a museum of remembrance, the offices of the Iraq Memory Foundation, and the location of these documents. We also envisage a place where Iraqi citizens can come and type in the name of a missing relative, their village, the period, with whatever information they have and enable them to personalize a search through our extensive database.
MEQ: This sounds very similar to the interactive features at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Makiya: The big difference is that we are located in the country where the abuses happened.
MEQ: What are your long-term objectives for the foundation?
Makiya: We are working on uncharted territory. There is no similar remembrance in any Arab Muslim country. There are precedents in European countries, parts of Latin America, parts of Southeast Asia, and, of course, South Africa. Those of us who are committed to this project believe that it will, in the long run, transform the Iraqi sense of identity.
MEQ: Do you really think it is possible to create a new Iraqi identity based on this collective history of living under Baathist rule?
Makiya: Yes, I do. I don't think there can be an Iraqi identity without acknowledging that, dealing with that, and coming to terms with that. It is simply impossible. We will either fragment as a country, or we will come together on the basis of what was done. It may take a lot of time, but the healing is absolutely necessary.
[1] <mid://00000064/#_ftnref1> Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
[2] <mid://00000064/#_ftnref2> Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
[3] <mid://00000064/#_ftnref3> New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
... We were discussing previously about the statistics in Iraq. Here they are: The good and the bad. NYT
