The Death of A Left
Alan Johnson: How do we make sense of the left-intellectuals denial? How do we account for their refusal to engage with the first part of Cruelty and Silence? Given the expressed values of the left one would expect them to have tended to it very closely, and to have cared very deeply. But that's not what happened. How do we explain that?
Kanan Makiya: You are putting your finger on the central issue of what's happened to the left since the fall of the former Soviet Union. There is a vacuum at the moral centre of the left which is what makes it so ineffective today. How did that come about? There are many forces at work.
The left retreated into a politics of cultural relativism during the 1980s. The activist generation, that entered politics for the anti-Vietnam war campaign and the civil rights movement, retreated into academia and began theorising outside of having any active role in politics. Increasingly the language of being against the Vietnam war underwent a subtle transformation. It became a form of cultural relativism that deep down, through such movements as deconstructionism, became antithetical to the original values upon which the internationalist left had been founded.
Look back at the Spanish civil war and think of the brigades of volunteers who went to fight. Think of George Orwell. That's the spirit of the traditional left. The language of human rights comes naturally to it as an extension of its internationalism and its universalism. Yes, perhaps culture was not studied enough by that older left. But it was right to subordinate culture to that which we had in common as human beings. Increasingly, by the 1980s, that is no longer the case. That which makes us different began to be posited as a positive value in itself. The internationalist concern with those universals that human beings have in common declined in importance. Now, any form of intervention began to be seen as immoral, not just a particular intervention, at a particular time. There is a generalisation against all intervention that takes place from Vietnam onwards. And, in the Arab case, all this mixed with the moribund state of our political culture.
I feel the left that I came from has almost become nationalist. This language of relativism has translated itself into, 'Well, even if the regime of Saddam Hussein is so nasty, why should we go and liberate it?' Now that is something you would have got from an American isolationist, back in the old days. You would never have got it from somebody on the left. The positive element which I carried from the Trotskyist movement, from the writings of Trotsky himself, was an internationalist spirit. It was more alive in me, I think, than in many of those who claimed Trotsky's mantle, but did not practice that internationalism. It is a very sad state of affairs. The left has turned against its own internationalist traditions and thrown away its own universal values. The older left was able to cross boundaries and think across boundaries. That was its strength and its weakness.
I am not saying that intervention is always a good thing. I argued for intervention in Iraq because of particular circumstances. First, the exceptional nature of the Saddam Hussein regime. Second, the world owed the people of Iraq after putting them in the straightjacket of sanctions for 12 years and giving them no way out. The country was rotting. Society was rotting. Sanctions weren't working. The regime was not toppling from within. You either remove the regime or you re-legitimise the regime. Continuing with the status quo was morally unacceptable. The price being paid inside Iraq was too high. The case for war, the case for regime change, can be made on many levels in the Iraqi case. These don't necessarily apply elsewhere. They certainly don't apply for Syria, or Iran today. Everything has to be looked at in terms of the concrete circumstances.
The 'Civilisational Challenge'
Alan Johnson: Your work has been distinguished by its criticism of Arab and Muslim political culture. That culture, you say, is 'continuing to wallow in the sense of victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility'. After 9/11, you warned that, 'The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire'. Can you say what you mean by this notion of a 'civilisational challenge'?
Kanan Makiya: On a simple level, I mean there is a culture of not taking responsibility for the state of one's house. The culture of constantly shunting that responsibility to others-'imperialism', 'Zionism', and so on-has become a break on moving forward across the Middle East. Look at Muslim societies today. They are relatively backward in terms of income levels. They have been unable to create democracies. They are stuck in a language and a rhetoric that is patently unmodern. The defensive wall that exists between Islam (at least as it is currently constructed) and the necessary changes needed is, above all, the idea that others are responsible for what we've done, and that everything bad that happened to us has happened because of others. The answer to the question 'what is wrong?' is always 'it's somebody else's fault'.
The future transformation of Islam
Now, why is Islam in that position, and is it changing? The 'civilisational challenge' is this: can the Arab Islamic world come to terms with the fact that it is responsible for its own ills, and for pulling itself up by your own bootstraps in order to get into the world, rather than keep finding ways of staying out of it? This is not an easy thing. For a religion to undertake that kind of internal self-critique means it has to accept a real reformation of itself. Christianity was able to do that. Judaism was, in a completely different way, more or less able to do that (not as completely). But Islam hasn't even begun to do that. And in the meantime there is a kind of rot. We don't live in a world that allows long periods of time for making this kind of internal reformation of oneself. In the meantime the rot represented by the rise of Salafi Islam, Jihadi Isalm, etc is so great, so palpable, that it is threatening us all, and is threatening Islam itself, above all.
Islam is largely at war with itself. The greatest number of people who are dying on the battlefields are Muslims. Muslims are fighting Muslims. Think of Algeria. Think of the struggle inside Egypt. Think of the Lebanese civil war. The greatest number of casualties so far, 9/11 notwithstanding, is Muslims fighting Muslims. But we don't have a properly focussed debate, with those trying to reform and transform the religion leading one side and those trying to hold it back leading the other.
However, there are very important changes starting to take place, New voices are being heard. Cruelty and Silence is everywhere. That was impossible in 1993. There are Muslims critiquing Islam itself. These voices are starting to emerge. This reformation may be beginning. But they haven't yet cohered into a clear movement with an agenda that is tackling the other side, the Jihadi view of Islam, the obscurantist and fundamentalist side of Islam. So while there are reasons for optimism, there are also reasons to worry. Because, as yet, these new voices aren't anywhere near as strong as they need to be. Moreover, Jihadi Islam now has a substantial social base it didn't have ten years ago. One could even say we look like we're losing the battle at the moment. I certainly hope that's not the case. But we are in the throws of a deep convulsion that is taking place within Islam itself, among Muslims, and we have no way of clearly predicting how this is going to turn out. I call that a civilisational crisis of the first order.
Islam and Democracy
Alan Johnson: On the one hand, you have pointd out that 'Islam has a relation to politics, which is very different from Christianity and Judaism'. On the other hand, you have made this appeal: 'it's very important that Arabs and Muslims believe in your heart of hearts that fundamentally it's both important and necessary to break the stereotype that just because someone's a Muslim or and Arab, there's somehow an antithetical relationship to democratic values'. Is there a tension between your insight into Islam's unique attitude to politics and your fervent hope that Islam comes to terms with democracy?
Kanan Makiya: It's a tension only in the sense that every great religion has to find its own way of freeing itself and moving forward in the world. Islam will find a way that is different to that of Christianity. The same formulas-separation of church and state, etc-may not play themselves out, in the convulsions that take place within Islam, in exactly the same way they played out in Christianity. We should not look for a straight line between the European experience and the Islamic experience. But can it in principle be resolved? Absolutely, I think it can.
Yes, Islam's relation to politics - it's insistence that it legislates for day to day life - can cause problems when you try to separate it from politics (quite different from Christianity where you can start to put religion and politics into two separate boxes). However we negotiate this reformation-transition, we know it is going to be different. But that it can take place is a proposition I completely believe. It hasn't taken place this far simply because the individuals, the subjective factor able to make it take place, have not yet emerged strongly enough from within Islam.
It's not the same thing for a person like me to write from a secular point of view about these issues, and for a cleric, breaking with his own traditions, to write about these issues. In Iraq today there are such clerics. Think of Sayyid Ayyad, a remarkable man in his mid-forties. who has arrived at a series of conclusions utterly from within the Shiite tradition of Islam, which accept the separation of church and state. He's on the lists, he's up for elections, he's on TV, and he's a real firebrand. He is a new kind of force speaking a new kind of language, shocking traditional Muslim audiences. He has a very high opinion, for instance, of the American constitution and the Bill of Rights. Many more people like him need to engage in the debate, as well as people like myself. I and others like me can't break through that wall by themselves; we need help from inside the fortress of Islam. Missing, at the moment, are the clerics who will fight from within and make their argument not in the way I make my argument (from western texts, general texts of human rights or from someone like Hannah Arendt), but from within the religion itself. This is, after all, how the reformation came about. It was largely by very religious, pious men constructing arguments for human rights from within their own tradition. That this can be done in Islam I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt. The nature of scriptural texts is that they are infinitely malleable. It is what you chose to put forward that counts. In fact, it is really quite remarkable how the growing Salafi, or Jihadi, trend of Islam rests on a tiny body of text. It represents a very small minority position within Islam. It has succeeded largely through the strength, vigour and energy of its own militancy, which it has used to capture a whole section of the tradition. That's never happened before. There is, in principle, a huge body of texts and many traditions with which to create an alternative version of Islam. I haven't a shadow of a doubt that it can be done. It just needs the men and women from within to do it.
The European Silence
Alan Johnson: The western left has responsibilities here. When the left shouts that 'Bush is engaged in a war on Muslims' it isn't just factually wrong. It's politically dangerous. It echoes the message of the Salafi or Jihadi groups, it boosts them, and it leaves the Muslim democrats and reformers isolated from a left that should be its natural ally.
Kanan Makiya: You're right. And Alan, I'd go even further. It's not just the left. People like myself, those of us who went into Iraq after April and March 2003 as part of the effort to transform this country, have felt betrayed by Europe as a whole. We were attacked by the media of all the surrounding countries, countries utterly hostile to the sort of values on which Europe rests. Satellite stations distorted what was going on. The silence in Europe at that moment gave enormous sustenance to all those forces struggling against the transformation of Iraq. It enabled the Jihadis, the Ba'athists, the extreme Arab nationalists, and the Arab regimes, to say 'Look at the hostility of Europe to what the United States has done!' Europe made it possible to isolate not just the United States but everything that is represented by the west. Europe gave strength to the argument that it was a traditional colonist land grab or oil grab, which was nonsense, of course.
I would say that much of the strength of the hostility of the Jihadi movement, and of the forces that have made life so horrible in Iraq, came from the silence of Europe. Europe has a lot to answer for. It's not even that it was half-hearted. They fell in completely with the language of the non-democratic Arab regimes. They bought their line and they seemed to stand for the same things. They undermined entirely the values of the operation. Europeans knew that the United States was not going to permanently occupy Iraq. Deep down the smarter Europeans must have known it wasn't just about oil. It was - rightly or wrongly - a way of changing the traditional western attitude towards the Arab Muslim world. It was an end to the support for autocratic and repressive governments. It was a new view that if we are going to succeed in this war against terror then we are going to have to be viewed by the populations of this part of the world in a totally different way. Now Europe might not have thought it was the right time. Europe might have thought it should be done differently. But Europe should never have been seen to be undermining the argument itself.
Europe was justifying and supporting the foundations on which these repressive regimes stood. It had acquiesced so fully in that relativist language it had no views of its own that it thought could be shared. More: it looked racist because it looked like the democratic values it enjoyed were not possible for Arabs and Muslims to enjoy. All of a sudden the shoe was on the other foot entirely. It was not the Americans who were the imperialists or racists. It was the Europeans who, by sitting back, were saying 'you Arabs and you Muslims really can't do any better than this, so why mess around with this thing in the first place?'
The Arab Silence
Alan Johnson: Alongside this European silence, you have written about an Arab silence. A gulf opened up between Iraq and the Arab world in 1991. What caused this gulf?
Kanan Makiya: In a nutshell it was a gulf between Iraqis, who began basing their politics on their own experience of tyranny, and the Arab world, which carried on thinking politics amounted to the Palestinian question, the national question as it was called. It was not that we Iraqis didn't think Palestinians needed rights, a state, and so on. We totally support that. But we had a huge problem of our own. Deep down, the debate between Edward Said and myself was about that tension inside Arab politics.
Iraqi people are angry that for the last three years the Arab world has not supported them. In fact the Arab world seems to support the terrorists, in the name of 'Arab solidarity' or 'Arab unity'. There is a real fury about this. Take the case of the Jordanian suicide bomber, Raed Mansour al-Banna , who killed 125 Iraqis in Hilla when he blew himself up on 28 February 2005. When his body was flown to Jordan instead of a funeral there was a party, a giant celebration of the hero's return! They said he had sacrificed himself for God and for the holy struggle against the Americans. This was not organised by the family itself. Often, as in the Palestinian case, families of suicide bombers are forced into these things. They want to mourn the young man who was their son. Instead they are forced by the organisation around them to treat it as a wonderful thing and a great sacrifice. They are kissed and told that they are so fortunate their son is now in Paradise. When Iraqis heard about this Jordanian celebration there was such a popular fury! The Jordanian government had to officially apologise. And, to show you the worlds of ignorance we live in here, the parents of the suicide bomber asked reporters, 'didn't he kill Americans?' The reporters informed the parents, 'No, actually it was 120 Iraqis who were killed'. Again we have the gulf between rhetoric and reality that was at the heart of Cruelty and Silence.
Hope
But in spite of the European silence, and the Arab silence and complicity, we now see the ripple effects from what has happened in Iraq. Think of the reaction to Rafiki Hariri's assassination in Lebanon! Think of the isolation of Syria. Think of the civil society movement in Lebanon. I was almost a pariah in Lebanon for ten years, because of Cruelty and Silence. Suddenly, all these Lebanese NGOs appear, interested in memory, and in what happened during the civil war. They are digging up mass graves and inviting me over to speak. Hostility to Syria is now the predominant tenor of Lebanese politics (with the exception of Hezbollah, which is still supposedly fighting the good fight, and waiting for the good struggle against Israel). And there is opposition inside Syria itself. The Syrian regime is in its final stages. Lebanon was one of the bastions of the old rhetoric, and it is changing as we speak. The overwhelming majority of people are angry, and they know exactly who is behind these assassinations and bombings. The attempt of the Syrians to pretend there is some greater plot to isolate Syria in the world (they haven't yet managed to specify exactly how Israel is behind it) is not persuading anybody. There's not a single Lebanese who thinks anybody but Syria was behind the assassination. So you have change taking place in spite of everything.
Part 2 of the interview, in which Kanan Makiya discusses the Iraq War, will appear in Democratiya 4 (March-April 2006).
Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya (Part 2)
Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, and the President of The Iraq Memory Foundation. His books, The Republic of Fear: Inside Saddam's Iraq (1989, written as Samir al-Khalil] and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) are classic texts on the nature of totalitarianism. Makiya has also collaborated on films for television. The award-winning film, Saddam's Killing Fields, exposed the Anfal, the campaign of mass murder conducted by the Ba'ath regime in northern Iraq in 1988. In October 1992, he acted as the convenor of the Human Rights Committee of the Iraqi National Congress. He was part of the Iraqi Opposition in the run-up to the Iraq War, which he supported as a war of liberation. The interview took place on December 16 2005. Part 1 appeared in Democratiya 3.
The Iraq War
Alan Johnson: In the run-up to the Iraq war few radical democrats were as close to the centres of decision-making as you, or more privy to the crucial debates. Few are in a better position to draw lessons. Can we begin in June 2002 when you are approached by the State Department and asked to participate in the Future of Iraq project. Initially you had a big clash with the State Department over the very terms of the project and of your involvement, right? What was at stake?
Kanan Makiya: When I was approached I was aware events were heading towards war. The State Department was actively preparing for it, and had invited a series of former Iraqi military officers over. The implication was that they were being groomed for leadership and that the Department of State was seeking change from within the Ba'ath regime, not from without by means of the organised Iraqi opposition. Regime change led by former Ba'athists was their way to the future and I would have none of that. I objected vigorously and refused to participate in the Future of Iraq project unless it was clearly and unambiguously about bringing democracy to Iraq. In its origins, and I am talking about the period between May and August 2002, the Future of Iraq project was clearly not conceived by the State Department as a project for building democracy in Iraq. It was about regime change without democracy. Letters went backwards and forwards between myself and United States government officials on these issues between May 2002 and August 2002.
After it became the American position to democratise Iraq (around August 2002) I agreed to participate in the Future of Iraq workshops. I had a meeting at the highest levels of the State Department and formulated a set of conditions regarding my participation. I participated in the Democratic Principles Workshop (it was called the Political Principles Workshop but the title changed after democratisation became the goal, and on the insistence of the US Congress, as I recall). My idea, as put to the Department of State prior to my involvement, was that a plan for the transition in Iraq would emerge from the discussions of the 32 Iraqis they had already chosen for the workshop. The Americans said they would not participate in the discussions, only host them. It was a tumultuous experience but in the end a document of several hundred pages was produced. The Transition to Democracy in Iraq is still available on the internet (http://www.iraqfoundation.org/studies/2002/dec/study.pdf <http> ). I was intensively involved in the writing with four or five other leading figures, as is in the nature of these things; but it was discussed thoroughly and finally approved by all 32 members of the workshop.
But we soon realised that the State Department had a totally different vision of the workshop. In their eyes it was about learning democracy, 101-style. They thought Iraqis would benefit from the process of sitting around a table and airing their views. I found this very condescending and wanted instead a position paper on the transition to be produced that would provide, in a crude sort of way, a joint Iraqi-American blueprint for the transition. They did concede to me that the document could be put to a vote at a conference of the Iraqi Opposition in London in December 2002, but they did not tell me before the workshop that they were not going to tie their hands in any way by its conclusions. In fact they took distance from it the moment it was produced, especially after they realised the document was arguing strongly for a transitional provisional Iraqi government as the way forward, not American military occupation. That was a source of a lot of tensions in the run-up to the war.
Iraq and the Inter-Agency Process
Alan Johnson: You have called the inter-agency process-the co-ordinated efforts of the White House, State Department, Department of Defence, and CIA-'the great albatross of our lives'. In your opinion 'Many of our problems afterwards in Iraq are a consequence of ... squabbling within the U.S. administration'. You said to one journalist that '[t]he enemies of a democratic Iraq lie within the State Department and the CIA, who have consistently thwarted the president's genuine attempt ... to do something very dramatic in this country. Fortunately they have not totally succeeded.' What was the basis of these inter-agency disputes and what were their consequences?
Kanan Makiya: The little story of the Future of Iraq project unfolded against the backdrop of a much larger problem in the preparations for war. There was tension-I would even call it warfare-between the different branches of the US government. This has still has not been written about properly. Deep internal American conflicts hobbled the whole enterprise from the outset. Matters reached the level of hatred between and among Americans. Iraqis were portioned off by different agencies. Some were close to the Department of Defense, some to the CIA, some to State, and so on. The warfare at the heart of the Bush administration was shaping the agenda rather than any positive plan.
The change in the United States government's position that brought about such tensions within the administration goes back to September 11 - a transforming moment in American political culture. From that day a small minority of influential people in the United States government emerged who said that the way forward was democratic change in the region, starting with Iraq. They argued that US foreign policy towards the Middle East had rested for 50 years on support of autocratic regimes (like Saudi Arabia, like Saddam in the 1980s, like Mubarak's Egypt) in the interests of securing oil supplies, or whatever it might be. This policy had led to a level of anger at the United States inside the Arab world that provided fertile breeding ground for organisations like Al-Qaeda.
So, at the strategic level, what needed to happen was a dramatic change in US policy. The US should reach out to peoples not governments, to focus on democratisation as opposed to stability, and so on. That school of thought emerged in the Pentagon, led by people like Paul Wolfowitz. It ran headlong against the State Department's traditional accommodationist policies. The conflict was between those agencies that were wedded to the policies of the past and those breaking new ground. The former were often in the State Department - people who knew that part of the world in a very particular way. They had been Ambassadors, they had hobnobbed with the Saudi ruling families, and they had developed certain preconceptions about how the Arab world worked. By contrast those who were pushing for a dramatically new policy, like Paul Wolfowitz, were not shackled by such a past, nor burdened by the weight of those prejudices. But they did not necessarily know the Middle East as well. They were not Arab linguists, and these people tended to reside in the Pentagon and in parts of the White House.
In this struggle the CIA was close to the State Department. The Pentagon was close to the White House (though the White House had no single view). The struggle could have been a healthy one resulting in a plan of action for post-2003 had there been sufficient control of these divisions from the top. There wasn't. Bush just laid down a policy and was not a man for the details. And the National Security Council did not opt clearly for this or that way forward. Instead they set up something called the 'inter-agency process'. This involved representatives from the different warring agencies who would sit down and compromise over every single decision. The result was not that there were no plans, as people say, but that there were too many plans that were no longer coherent because they were picked apart in this inter-agency process until they were a little bit of this and a little bit of that. For instance, the Pentagon was for a provisional Iraqi transitional authority rooted in and stemming from the Iraqi opposition. The State Department was dead set against that. And its intense dislike of the Iraqi opposition drove them to support what I think was the worst possible strategic formula for the transition: an American military occupation of Iraq with all that that entailed in terms of responsibilities for the minutest of details in the post war period.
Alan Johnson: You have complained bitterly about 'this distinction that was created between the inauthentic externals and the authentic internals'. Did the State Department think the exiles had no base and could not be trusted?
Kanan Makiya: The State Department didn't think the Iraqi opposition was up to it. It wanted Iraqis who were from 'the inside'. We were very suspicious about that formulation because at the outset it was clear they did not mean the broad mass of Iraqis. They meant the former elements of the regime. They invented this great big artificial wall between the exiles on the 'outside' and the Iraqis on the 'inside'. The exiles were portrayed as Rolex-wearing opportunists or dreamers (or, worse, even Kurds) who didn't know their own country. Ironically the State Department, which was against the war in the first place, ended up being for the most dramatic form of transformation: military occupation. But having agreed military occupation as the way forward, which agency was going to supervise the plan of occupation? It turned out to be the Defence Department, which... favoured a transitional provisional government! So it ends up a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and I think we ended up with the worst of all worlds as a consequence.
Iraqis and the Liberation of Iraq
Alan Johnson: So we end up with a war that was a stunning military success - in terms of the rapidity with which the coalition reached Baghdad - but which was an unfolding political failure?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. You have put your finger on the central problem. The formula that was chosen by the United States government for the transition-occupation-by its very nature did not involve Iraqis in their own liberation. A huge number of American troops entered Iraq but-and this is really an important statistic-only 63 Iraqis were part of that American army. 63 people who knew the language, the mores, and who could interact with Iraqis. By all accounts they performed brilliantly. But there should have been thousands of those Iraqis trained in the months running up to the war to go in with every American unit so that the necessary bridges of trust and understanding could be built. Then you could have put your hand on your heart and said Iraqis had participated. Where else could you draw these Iraqis from other than the organisations of the opposition and from the Kurds, the Shiites, and from the millions of Iraqis in exile? Had that been done you would have had the nucleus of something Iraqi even as you arrived in Iraq.
The Iraqi opposition wanted to be involved in the fighting but it was excluded from it. This was a tension that continued right through January and February of 2003. Finally, there were scenes between the opposition and the US representative sent to the meeting of the opposition in Salahadin in Northern Iraq. At that meeting structures were set up to discuss Ministries, Security, and so on, but the Americans totally bypassed them, another missed opportunity.
The moment the Unites States government turned Iraqis into spectators in this transformation they set in motion a dynamic that was to last a very long time, until the Americans realised the error of their ways and transferred sovereignty to an interim government in June 2004. One consequence was that there was a constant tension between the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which had many former exiles in it, and Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This paralysed things. The Iraqis were sitting there with no authority or responsibility over anything, so naturally they could irresponsibly discuss irrelevant little details in exactly the way they used to in opposition. They were not, after all, responsible for delivering things on the ground. Bremer and his CPA staff were. So very quickly it became armchair discussants on the one hand and Bremer on the other. The exception, by the way, was the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) which was the precursor to the current constitution. That was drafted by Iraqis working with Americans. That's the kind of working relationship we needed throughout.
Alan Johnson: Instead we had tank columns racing up towards Baghdad, leaving behind Fedayeen thugs on every street corner...
Kanan Makiya: And confused Iraqi people...
Alan Johnson: Who desperately needed to feel confident about what exactly what was happening....
Kanan Makiya: Absolutely. And look, I admit, we in the opposition got many things wrong as well. I personally, in retrospect, realise that I underestimated the wounds in the population left by the betrayal of the Iraqi intifada in 1991. People didn't trust the Americans after they were let down in 1991. 'I don't believe they are going to do it,' was the dominant feeling amongst Iraqis inside the country. Even after the coalition had taken half the country the people remained sceptical of American intentions to see the thing through. 'Are the Americans going to let us down again? They did it to us once before,' was the prevailing mood. In 1991 more Iraqis died in the crushing of the uprising than in the war itself. Frankly, I underestimated the degree of residual hostility. The presence of Iraqis with that army, Iraqis who could have talked to the sceptical people on the ground, could have helped meliorate that hostility.
Alan Johnson: Were the Americans taking their distance from Chalabi specifically? You have been a supporter of the Iraqi National Congress since 1992 and you will know that the one thing the far left, the CIA, and the State Department agree on is, as the saying goes, 'ABC - Anyone But Chalabi'.
Kanan Makiya: He was certainly the lightning rod for the hostility toward the opposition on the part of the CIA and the State Department. There's simply no doubt that his personality, and so on, played an important role. But there were other factors. For instance, the State Department-which has never really been sympathetic or understanding towards Kurdish aspirations in Iraq-was very worried that disproportionately large numbers of Kurds would be involved in the liberation. The Kurds had run their own affairs for a very long time and had a huge number of very well trained fighters organised in the Peshmerga. I understand why there was the resistance to the idea of involving the Kurds in the liberation of Iraq. It was thought the Arabs would be deeply hostile. I don't think that was true. And it would have been infinitely better than not having anyone there who spoke Arabic and was part of the country.
State worried the Kurds would become too strong and create an overly-Kurdish government, which would be very negative for the rest of the Arab world. In fact after three years we can see just how important and positive the role of the Kurds has been. They have been one of the most moderating and stable forces in the Iraqi interim government. They've behaved very responsibly compared with some of the Arab parties, quite frankly. Without them the state would be a total shambles. Some of that maturity is because they had ten years of experience of running their own affairs, and because their political organisations had some historical depth and weight to them, something entirely lacking in the thoroughly atomised Arab parties of the opposition.
The Bremer Model
Alan Johnson: What were the consequences in your view of adopting the pro-consul model of running Iraq in 2003-4?
Kanan Makiya: There are many things you can say about his style: overbearing, and so on. But the main thing about the model is that for the first year, at least, it further increased the sense Iraqis had of not being involved in decision-making about their own affairs. It continued the policy that we talked about earlier, designed before the war and carried through in the conduct of the war, of not involving Iraqis. But, to be fair, Bremer and the US administration realised the error of their ways and changed plans - the occupation was originally going to be much longer than one year. But we paid a price for this change. You either do an occupation and you do it well, or you don't do it in the first place. But you don't do it in a half-assed way, with inadequate troop levels to boot!
The United States government never deployed enough troops. It opted for an occupation but didn't provide the wherewithal to do the job properly. Here again is this tension between the Pentagon and the Department of State. State wants an occupation, but Rumsfeld-who has theories about how to conduct warfare in the modern age with less and less troops-never wanted an occupation. In fact, he may never even have been for Iraqi democratisation. He was just an in-and-out kind of a guy. It was the other people within the defence department, in particularly the really extraordinary figure of Paul Wolfowitz, who argued the political case for democracy.
After 9/11 an enormous change takes place in the way the US thinks about this part of the world, but the problem is this. It's all happening so fast, not everybody has caught up with everybody else, and so we have different levels of understanding, and these are tearing apart the administration. We have old ways of thinking interwoven with radically new ways of thinking and we have strange mixtures in between. And to cap it all no decisive decision-maker at the top. That, I think, is the mix that went so wrong.
Eventually there was an about-face on the question of the period of occupation and on the training of the Iraqi police and army. Many people ask why the Iraqi security forces are not up to the job yet. Well, you know, training didn't really begin in earnest until the summer of 2004! Bremer acted against advice from the Pentagon in his slowness in beginning the training programmes of the Iraqi police and army. So we have only a year and a half track record of training.
The dissolution of the Iraqi Army
Alan Johnson: As war approached you and the Iraqi National Congress warned President Bush, Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice against any reliance on the Iraqi army. The Iraqi National Accord, with CIA help, were working to keep the Iraqi army intact to the last minute. Many have said that the dissolution of the army, right down to the last rank and filer, was a catastrophe that made the insurgency all but inevitable. What do you say to that? Was that kind of total demobilisation what you had in mind anyway?
Kanan Makiya: We argued very strongly for dissolving the army, but over stages. And we never argued for not paying them their pensions and their salaries! We argued for a staged dissolution of the army, not this sudden abrupt abolition. But, yes, part of the responsibility for what happened must also lie on the opposition and on people like me in particular. I was a strong and relentless advocate of demilitarisation. I had the terrible history of Iraq's military coups during the 1960s before my mind and the example of Pakistan looming as a possible outcome. I suspect Bremer listened to us or had read parts of the Democratic Principles document.
However there are two things that need to be said and they are somewhat contradictory. Number one is, in a very important sense, the army was already dissolved before Bremer formalised the matter. The army hardly existed, we discovered, after the war in 2003. It had been bled dry. It was corrupt. The salaries of soldiers were barely enough to allow them to visit their families. The army was in horrific shape, we discovered, afterwards. Whether we should have known that that was the state of the army is an interesting question. But the fact is we did not know how truly fallen-apart the army already was by 2003. In fact when the war came the army did not fight. There was no Iraqi defeat in 2003 in the sense there was a defeat of the Nazis or the Japanese armies in World War Two. The army just disintegrated. There was no war of liberation in that sense. Our liberation and our civil war are occurring now, simultaneously, so to speak. Eventually the old order does fight the new order, but that fight didn't really happen in March/April of 2003 as the rhetoric of the Bush administration would have us believe.
Second, our great fear was that the enemy of democracy would be the army, as it always has been in Iraq. But our fears, as democrats, that the army could step in were perhaps not well grounded. It had become by now (in the wake of the Iraq-Iran war and 1991 especially) a hated institution, a far cry from the 1940s and 1950s when the army presented itself as a vanguard of modernity and espoused nationalist values. By the end of the Iraq-Iran war, after 8 gruelling years and hundreds of thousands dead, the Army was a creature of the Ba'ath party. And after the debacle of the first Gulf War the army had lost all prestige.
We should not have alienated that army so quickly. It could have been purged and transformed from within over a number of years rather than make a great big political issue out of something that was not a threat. So looking back on it I think we were wrong because it gave the insurgency a cause. It gave them many thousands of disillusioned potential recruits. And that was all unnecessary. So I look back critically on some of my positions dating back to before the war.
Losing control of the borders
Alan Johnson: I have an Iraqi friend who suspects that the US has deliberately left the borders porous. He suspects the US is applying a fly-paper strategy: draw the terrorists to Iraq and kill them. His complaint is that Iraq is a country not a piece of fly-paper. You have reported that 'I had to go and bang the doors in Washington and say, '"Close those ******* borders." ... everybody was telling me to say that. I mean, sheiks, clerics, everybody was saying, "Tell them to close the borders. They're pumping people in here. We're going to have trouble here."' Yet the borders remain porous to this day. What are the obstacles to closing the borders? Troop numbers?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. I know of the theory that the United States is deliberately inviting the terrorists in so as to fight them in Iraq rather than anywhere else. I honestly don't think that's the case. I've been too close to this. There is nothing that has hurt the United States as much as its apparent inability to maintain security and make the Iraqi experiment work. The conspiracy theory completely fails to see that. It is in American interests to make a success of Iraq. At bottom the problem is inadequate troop levels, yes. The coalition never had enough troops to police those borders and we are back to the question of pre-war planning. They can take the insurgents out, anywhere, but then they have to move on and the insurgents come back. But now they're changing strategy. Iraqi troops are settling in and they are not just taking places but holding them. And they are working on the borders much better. The inadequate troop levels go back to the inter-agency process. The fact is Rumsfeld never wanted to be in Iraq this long anyway, as I said.
Presiding over a security vacuum
Alan Johnson: You have described a meeting in Baghdad, on April 28 2003, at which you and about 400 other Iraqis tried to persuade the US that the immediate restoration of law and order was the priority. This is how you described the reaction of the US officials present:
[there] was again this incredible, very American, embarrassment at being what you are - in authority, in a position of power, in a position to determine government ... somebody [said] 'You mean you don't have a plan for the government?' He [Garner] says, 'No, we are here to meet to discuss that. This is your government, not our government. We don't want to impose this government on you.' It all sounds so ridiculous. (...) There was nobody in charge who understood that democracy s not some sort of instant switch. It's institutions that have to be built over time.
Kanan Makiya: There was a very naive attitude on the part of at least some of the Americans responsible for decisions during the first months after the war. This attitude was that democracy is freedom. People now can express themselves and do what they want. It's total nonsense. Democracy is a process and it requires authority. You don't lift the lid of authority on a population that has been ruled so dictatorially for so long and expect it to immediately act responsibly. Responsibility and democracy are very closely aligned, and responsibility doesn't come without authority. The idea that democracy is not about authority is an anarchist pipe dream. In Iraq political authority was absent after the Americans took out the old authority and then stepped back. They should have assumed authority, enforced curfews, held people back, shot looters, protected key strategic sites, and so on. The anarchy that broke out has accompanied this experiment down to this very day, creating a sense that the Americans are not in control. For example, there was a no-shoot policy towards looters. Why? The fear was that if Al-Jazzeera filmed an American soldier shooting or intimidating potential looters, this would play badly. That is a new reality of global life. But it's a fact that every Iraqi wanted them to shoot the looters. Iraqis were puzzled why soldiers gave the impression they were licensing this looting.
Transforming Iraq in a democratic direction requires the replacement of one authority with another. Somebody once called the Americans 'the reluctant superpower'. This is completely contrary to the view the left takes but I think there is a large element of truth in it, having seen them at work in Iraq. Mind you, at the ground level I worked with American soldiers, colonels and lieutenants, and so on, who are just magnificent people. They are building projects, maybe as small as a school, or a neighbourhood playground, and I witnessed the energy and the spirit of these young American men and women who didn't know this part of the world but who genuinely threw themselves into reconstruction and democracy building as they saw it. I feel they were let down by their leaders. The initiative, the will, the drive and the spirit was all there and all that was felt at the local level. But American and Iraqi leadership failed to translate it to the political superstructure.
The Torture at Abu Ghraib
Alan Johnson: Around the world-and I bracket the question of whether this is fair or not-the dominant image of an American soldier is not the hero rebuilding a school but the tormentor at Abu Ghraib. From an Iraqi perspective how damaging to the whole venture has it been that some Americans have had such a fast and loose relationship to the Geneva convention?
Kanan Makiya: Look, I have no doubt that a fast and loose relationship with fundamental human rights is going on in the prisons of Iraq. The abuse is torture and it is totally and morally unacceptable. For the people inside Abu Ghraib, and their families, there is justifiable fury. But the curious fact is that Abu Ghraib didn't have the same impact on American credibility in Iraq that it had on the rest of the world. I am not trying to gloss over anything. But remember, those very same prison cells have witnessed infinitely worse forms of torture, over the decades of Saddam's rule. Often, you hear expressions from people on the street such as, 'They call these pictures torture? You should see what I went through, my uncle went through, my cousin went through. This is peanuts.' That's a typical Iraqi reaction as I heard it on the streets of Baghdad when the scandal broke out. Not that we are not horrified by what the Americans did inside Abu Ghraib. And globally it's another matter - a punch in the solar plexus for the United States' whole effort in Iraq.
The USA, the democratic left, and Democracy Promotion
Alan Johnson: You met with President Bush twice. First, on 10 January 2003. About that meeting you have said, 'He left me with the very clear impression that he was deadly serious about it [democracy promotion], that this was not just rhetoric, and he was committed to it personally and in some emotional way.' Do you still think that?
Kanan Makiya: It's not about Bush as a person. The Bush administration has a very black and white view of the world but maybe that was a good thing for Iraq, maybe that's what made possible the ambition to bring about regime change and attempt democratisation. The argument for a democratic Iraq was genuinely convincing to Bush. He became passionately wedded to it. How deeply did he understand all the implications? That's not really for me to say. I don't know the man. But the administration has genuinely pushed for this democratisation line. It isn't just a façade. I've seen it at work on the ground. I've seen Bremer and his staff try to make it happen. I've seen the committees. I've seen the support given to women's organisations and NGOs. That it was done amateurishly and naively is all true. But the notion that it was not happening or was not genuine is just patent nonsense.
Unfortunately, it may no longer be there. The insurgency and the setbacks mean democracy-promotion is no longer the driving force of American policy. But it was the driving force in 2003/2004. Now there is a retreat and an attempt to get the troops back home. Now there is a pulling back very quickly. And the people of Iraq are the big losers. Now it is up to them to do the work, in a sense all by themselves. Maybe that is how it should have been all along. But regime change from the outside was the necessary condition. How much groundwork been laid? That's a good question.
Alan Johnson: Is it possible for the democratic left to retain its independence while critically supporting democracy-promotion efforts led by the USA?
Kanan Makiya: Of course democracy promotion as we saw it in Iraq stemmed in good part from a view of American national security
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Subject: DEMOCRATIYA, Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya (Part 2)
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Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya (Part 2)
Kanan Makiya is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, and the President of The Iraq Memory Foundation. His books, The Republic of Fear: Inside Saddam's Iraq (1989, written as Samir al-Khalil] and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) are classic texts on the nature of totalitarianism. Makiya has also collaborated on films for television. The award-winning film, Saddam's Killing Fields, exposed the Anfal, the campaign of mass murder conducted by the Ba'ath regime in northern Iraq in 1988. In October 1992, he acted as the convenor of the Human Rights Committee of the Iraqi National Congress. He was part of the Iraqi Opposition in the run-up to the Iraq War, which he supported as a war of liberation. The interview took place on December 16 2005. Part 1 appeared in Democratiya 3.
The Iraq War
Alan Johnson: In the run-up to the Iraq war few radical democrats were as close to the centres of decision-making as you, or more privy to the crucial debates. Few are in a better position to draw lessons. Can we begin in June 2002 when you are approached by the State Department and asked to participate in the Future of Iraq project. Initially you had a big clash with the State Department over the very terms of the project and of your involvement, right? What was at stake?
Kanan Makiya: When I was approached I was aware events were heading towards war. The State Department was actively preparing for it, and had invited a series of former Iraqi military officers over. The implication was that they were being groomed for leadership and that the Department of State was seeking change from within the Ba'ath regime, not from without by means of the organised Iraqi opposition. Regime change led by former Ba'athists was their way to the future and I would have none of that. I objected vigorously and refused to participate in the Future of Iraq project unless it was clearly and unambiguously about bringing democracy to Iraq. In its origins, and I am talking about the period between May and August 2002, the Future of Iraq project was clearly not conceived by the State Department as a project for building democracy in Iraq. It was about regime change without democracy. Letters went backwards and forwards between myself and United States government officials on these issues between May 2002 and August 2002.
After it became the American position to democratise Iraq (around August 2002) I agreed to participate in the Future of Iraq workshops. I had a meeting at the highest levels of the State Department and formulated a set of conditions regarding my participation. I participated in the Democratic Principles Workshop (it was called the Political Principles Workshop but the title changed after democratisation became the goal, and on the insistence of the US Congress, as I recall). My idea, as put to the Department of State prior to my involvement, was that a plan for the transition in Iraq would emerge from the discussions of the 32 Iraqis they had already chosen for the workshop. The Americans said they would not participate in the discussions, only host them. It was a tumultuous experience but in the end a document of several hundred pages was produced. The Transition to Democracy in Iraq is still available on the internet (http://www.iraqfoundation.org/studies/2002/dec/study.pdf). I was intensively involved in the writing with four or five other leading figures, as is in the nature of these things; but it was discussed thoroughly and finally approved by all 32 members of the workshop.
But we soon realised that the State Department had a totally different vision of the workshop. In their eyes it was about learning democracy, 101-style. They thought Iraqis would benefit from the process of sitting around a table and airing their views. I found this very condescending and wanted instead a position paper on the transition to be produced that would provide, in a crude sort of way, a joint Iraqi-American blueprint for the transition. They did concede to me that the document could be put to a vote at a conference of the Iraqi Opposition in London in December 2002, but they did not tell me before the workshop that they were not going to tie their hands in any way by its conclusions. In fact they took distance from it the moment it was produced, especially after they realised the document was arguing strongly for a transitional provisional Iraqi government as the way forward, not American military occupation. That was a source of a lot of tensions in the run-up to the war.
Iraq and the Inter-Agency Process
Alan Johnson: You have called the inter-agency process-the co-ordinated efforts of the White House, State Department, Department of Defence, and CIA-'the great albatross of our lives'. In your opinion 'Many of our problems afterwards in Iraq are a consequence of ... squabbling within the U.S. administration'. You said to one journalist that '[t]he enemies of a democratic Iraq lie within the State Department and the CIA, who have consistently thwarted the president's genuine attempt ... to do something very dramatic in this country. Fortunately they have not totally succeeded.' What was the basis of these inter-agency disputes and what were their consequences?
Kanan Makiya: The little story of the Future of Iraq project unfolded against the backdrop of a much larger problem in the preparations for war. There was tension-I would even call it warfare-between the different branches of the US government. This has still has not been written about properly. Deep internal American conflicts hobbled the whole enterprise from the outset. Matters reached the level of hatred between and among Americans. Iraqis were portioned off by different agencies. Some were close to the Department of Defense, some to the CIA, some to State, and so on. The warfare at the heart of the Bush administration was shaping the agenda rather than any positive plan.
The change in the United States government's position that brought about such tensions within the administration goes back to September 11 - a transforming moment in American political culture. From that day a small minority of influential people in the United States government emerged who said that the way forward was democratic change in the region, starting with Iraq. They argued that US foreign policy towards the Middle East had rested for 50 years on support of autocratic regimes (like Saudi Arabia, like Saddam in the 1980s, like Mubarak's Egypt) in the interests of securing oil supplies, or whatever it might be. This policy had led to a level of anger at the United States inside the Arab world that provided fertile breeding ground for organisations like Al-Qaeda.
So, at the strategic level, what needed to happen was a dramatic change in US policy. The US should reach out to peoples not governments, to focus on democratisation as opposed to stability, and so on. That school of thought emerged in the Pentagon, led by people like Paul Wolfowitz. It ran headlong against the State Department's traditional accommodationist policies. The conflict was between those agencies that were wedded to the policies of the past and those breaking new ground. The former were often in the State Department - people who knew that part of the world in a very particular way. They had been Ambassadors, they had hobnobbed with the Saudi ruling families, and they had developed certain preconceptions about how the Arab world worked. By contrast those who were pushing for a dramatically new policy, like Paul Wolfowitz, were not shackled by such a past, nor burdened by the weight of those prejudices. But they did not necessarily know the Middle East as well. They were not Arab linguists, and these people tended to reside in the Pentagon and in parts of the White House.
In this struggle the CIA was close to the State Department. The Pentagon was close to the White House (though the White House had no single view). The struggle could have been a healthy one resulting in a plan of action for post-2003 had there been sufficient control of these divisions from the top. There wasn't. Bush just laid down a policy and was not a man for the details. And the National Security Council did not opt clearly for this or that way forward. Instead they set up something called the 'inter-agency process'. This involved representatives from the different warring agencies who would sit down and compromise over every single decision. The result was not that there were no plans, as people say, but that there were too many plans that were no longer coherent because they were picked apart in this inter-agency process until they were a little bit of this and a little bit of that. For instance, the Pentagon was for a provisional Iraqi transitional authority rooted in and stemming from the Iraqi opposition. The State Department was dead set against that. And its intense dislike of the Iraqi opposition drove them to support what I think was the worst possible strategic formula for the transition: an American military occupation of Iraq with all that that entailed in terms of responsibilities for the minutest of details in the post war period.
Alan Johnson: You have complained bitterly about 'this distinction that was created between the inauthentic externals and the authentic internals'. Did the State Department think the exiles had no base and could not be trusted?
Kanan Makiya: The State Department didn't think the Iraqi opposition was up to it. It wanted Iraqis who were from 'the inside'. We were very suspicious about that formulation because at the outset it was clear they did not mean the broad mass of Iraqis. They meant the former elements of the regime. They invented this great big artificial wall between the exiles on the 'outside' and the Iraqis on the 'inside'. The exiles were portrayed as Rolex-wearing opportunists or dreamers (or, worse, even Kurds) who didn't know their own country. Ironically the State Department, which was against the war in the first place, ended up being for the most dramatic form of transformation: military occupation. But having agreed military occupation as the way forward, which agency was going to supervise the plan of occupation? It turned out to be the Defence Department, which... favoured a transitional provisional government! So it ends up a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and I think we ended up with the worst of all worlds as a consequence.
Iraqis and the Liberation of Iraq
Alan Johnson: So we end up with a war that was a stunning military success - in terms of the rapidity with which the coalition reached Baghdad - but which was an unfolding political failure?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. You have put your finger on the central problem. The formula that was chosen by the United States government for the transition-occupation-by its very nature did not involve Iraqis in their own liberation. A huge number of American troops entered Iraq but-and this is really an important statistic-only 63 Iraqis were part of that American army. 63 people who knew the language, the mores, and who could interact with Iraqis. By all accounts they performed brilliantly. But there should have been thousands of those Iraqis trained in the months running up to the war to go in with every American unit so that the necessary bridges of trust and understanding could be built. Then you could have put your hand on your heart and said Iraqis had participated. Where else could you draw these Iraqis from other than the organisations of the opposition and from the Kurds, the Shiites, and from the millions of Iraqis in exile? Had that been done you would have had the nucleus of something Iraqi even as you arrived in Iraq.
The Iraqi opposition wanted to be involved in the fighting but it was excluded from it. This was a tension that continued right through January and February of 2003. Finally, there were scenes between the opposition and the US representative sent to the meeting of the opposition in Salahadin in Northern Iraq. At that meeting structures were set up to discuss Ministries, Security, and so on, but the Americans totally bypassed them, another missed opportunity.
The moment the Unites States government turned Iraqis into spectators in this transformation they set in motion a dynamic that was to last a very long time, until the Americans realised the error of their ways and transferred sovereignty to an interim government in June 2004. One consequence was that there was a constant tension between the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which had many former exiles in it, and Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This paralysed things. The Iraqis were sitting there with no authority or responsibility over anything, so naturally they could irresponsibly discuss irrelevant little details in exactly the way they used to in opposition. They were not, after all, responsible for delivering things on the ground. Bremer and his CPA staff were. So very quickly it became armchair discussants on the one hand and Bremer on the other. The exception, by the way, was the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) which was the precursor to the current constitution. That was drafted by Iraqis working with Americans. That's the kind of working relationship we needed throughout.
Alan Johnson: Instead we had tank columns racing up towards Baghdad, leaving behind Fedayeen thugs on every street corner...
Kanan Makiya: And confused Iraqi people...
Alan Johnson: Who desperately needed to feel confident about what exactly what was happening....
Kanan Makiya: Absolutely. And look, I admit, we in the opposition got many things wrong as well. I personally, in retrospect, realise that I underestimated the wounds in the population left by the betrayal of the Iraqi intifada in 1991. People didn't trust the Americans after they were let down in 1991. 'I don't believe they are going to do it,' was the dominant feeling amongst Iraqis inside the country. Even after the coalition had taken half the country the people remained sceptical of American intentions to see the thing through. 'Are the Americans going to let us down again? They did it to us once before,' was the prevailing mood. In 1991 more Iraqis died in the crushing of the uprising than in the war itself. Frankly, I underestimated the degree of residual hostility. The presence of Iraqis with that army, Iraqis who could have talked to the sceptical people on the ground, could have helped meliorate that hostility.
Alan Johnson: Were the Americans taking their distance from Chalabi specifically? You have been a supporter of the Iraqi National Congress since 1992 and you will know that the one thing the far left, the CIA, and the State Department agree on is, as the saying goes, 'ABC - Anyone But Chalabi'.
Kanan Makiya: He was certainly the lightning rod for the hostility toward the opposition on the part of the CIA and the State Department. There's simply no doubt that his personality, and so on, played an important role. But there were other factors. For instance, the State Department-which has never really been sympathetic or understanding towards Kurdish aspirations in Iraq-was very worried that disproportionately large numbers of Kurds would be involved in the liberation. The Kurds had run their own affairs for a very long time and had a huge number of very well trained fighters organised in the Peshmerga. I understand why there was the resistance to the idea of involving the Kurds in the liberation of Iraq. It was thought the Arabs would be deeply hostile. I don't think that was true. And it would have been infinitely better than not having anyone there who spoke Arabic and was part of the country.
State worried the Kurds would become too strong and create an overly-Kurdish government, which would be very negative for the rest of the Arab world. In fact after three years we can see just how important and positive the role of the Kurds has been. They have been one of the most moderating and stable forces in the Iraqi interim government. They've behaved very responsibly compared with some of the Arab parties, quite frankly. Without them the state would be a total shambles. Some of that maturity is because they had ten years of experience of running their own affairs, and because their political organisations had some historical depth and weight to them, something entirely lacking in the thoroughly atomised Arab parties of the opposition.
The Bremer Model
Alan Johnson: What were the consequences in your view of adopting the pro-consul model of running Iraq in 2003-4?
Kanan Makiya: There are many things you can say about his style: overbearing, and so on. But the main thing about the model is that for the first year, at least, it further increased the sense Iraqis had of not being involved in decision-making about their own affairs. It continued the policy that we talked about earlier, designed before the war and carried through in the conduct of the war, of not involving Iraqis. But, to be fair, Bremer and the US administration realised the error of their ways and changed plans - the occupation was originally going to be much longer than one year. But we paid a price for this change. You either do an occupation and you do it well, or you don't do it in the first place. But you don't do it in a half-assed way, with inadequate troop levels to boot!
The United States government never deployed enough troops. It opted for an occupation but didn't provide the wherewithal to do the job properly. Here again is this tension between the Pentagon and the Department of State. State wants an occupation, but Rumsfeld-who has theories about how to conduct warfare in the modern age with less and less troops-never wanted an occupation. In fact, he may never even have been for Iraqi democratisation. He was just an in-and-out kind of a guy. It was the other people within the defence department, in particularly the really extraordinary figure of Paul Wolfowitz, who argued the political case for democracy.
After 9/11 an enormous change takes place in the way the US thinks about this part of the world, but the problem is this. It's all happening so fast, not everybody has caught up with everybody else, and so we have different levels of understanding, and these are tearing apart the administration. We have old ways of thinking interwoven with radically new ways of thinking and we have strange mixtures in between. And to cap it all no decisive decision-maker at the top. That, I think, is the mix that went so wrong.
Eventually there was an about-face on the question of the period of occupation and on the training of the Iraqi police and army. Many people ask why the Iraqi security forces are not up to the job yet. Well, you know, training didn't really begin in earnest until the summer of 2004! Bremer acted against advice from the Pentagon in his slowness in beginning the training programmes of the Iraqi police and army. So we have only a year and a half track record of training.
The dissolution of the Iraqi Army
Alan Johnson: As war approached you and the Iraqi National Congress warned President Bush, Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice against any reliance on the Iraqi army. The Iraqi National Accord, with CIA help, were working to keep the Iraqi army intact to the last minute. Many have said that the dissolution of the army, right down to the last rank and filer, was a catastrophe that made the insurgency all but inevitable. What do you say to that? Was that kind of total demobilisation what you had in mind anyway?
Kanan Makiya: We argued very strongly for dissolving the army, but over stages. And we never argued for not paying them their pensions and their salaries! We argued for a staged dissolution of the army, not this sudden abrupt abolition. But, yes, part of the responsibility for what happened must also lie on the opposition and on people like me in particular. I was a strong and relentless advocate of demilitarisation. I had the terrible history of Iraq's military coups during the 1960s before my mind and the example of Pakistan looming as a possible outcome. I suspect Bremer listened to us or had read parts of the Democratic Principles document.
However there are two things that need to be said and they are somewhat contradictory. Number one is, in a very important sense, the army was already dissolved before Bremer formalised the matter. The army hardly existed, we discovered, after the war in 2003. It had been bled dry. It was corrupt. The salaries of soldiers were barely enough to allow them to visit their families. The army was in horrific shape, we discovered, afterwards. Whether we should have known that that was the state of the army is an interesting question. But the fact is we did not know how truly fallen-apart the army already was by 2003. In fact when the war came the army did not fight. There was no Iraqi defeat in 2003 in the sense there was a defeat of the Nazis or the Japanese armies in World War Two. The army just disintegrated. There was no war of liberation in that sense. Our liberation and our civil war are occurring now, simultaneously, so to speak. Eventually the old order does fight the new order, but that fight didn't really happen in March/April of 2003 as the rhetoric of the Bush administration would have us believe.
Second, our great fear was that the enemy of democracy would be the army, as it always has been in Iraq. But our fears, as democrats, that the army could step in were perhaps not well grounded. It had become by now (in the wake of the Iraq-Iran war and 1991 especially) a hated institution, a far cry from the 1940s and 1950s when the army presented itself as a vanguard of modernity and espoused nationalist values. By the end of the Iraq-Iran war, after 8 gruelling years and hundreds of thousands dead, the Army was a creature of the Ba'ath party. And after the debacle of the first Gulf War the army had lost all prestige.
We should not have alienated that army so quickly. It could have been purged and transformed from within over a number of years rather than make a great big political issue out of something that was not a threat. So looking back on it I think we were wrong because it gave the insurgency a cause. It gave them many thousands of disillusioned potential recruits. And that was all unnecessary. So I look back critically on some of my positions dating back to before the war.
Losing control of the borders
Alan Johnson: I have an Iraqi friend who suspects that the US has deliberately left the borders porous. He suspects the US is applying a fly-paper strategy: draw the terrorists to Iraq and kill them. His complaint is that Iraq is a country not a piece of fly-paper. You have reported that 'I had to go and bang the doors in Washington and say, '"Close those ******* borders." ... everybody was telling me to say that. I mean, sheiks, clerics, everybody was saying, "Tell them to close the borders. They're pumping people in here. We're going to have trouble here."' Yet the borders remain porous to this day. What are the obstacles to closing the borders? Troop numbers?
Kanan Makiya: Yes. I know of the theory that the United States is deliberately inviting the terrorists in so as to fight them in Iraq rather than anywhere else. I honestly don't think that's the case. I've been too close to this. There is nothing that has hurt the United States as much as its apparent inability to maintain security and make the Iraqi experiment work. The conspiracy theory completely fails to see that. It is in American interests to make a success of Iraq. At bottom the problem is inadequate troop levels, yes. The coalition never had enough troops to police those borders and we are back to the question of pre-war planning. They can take the insurgents out, anywhere, but then they have to move on and the insurgents come back. But now they're changing strategy. Iraqi troops are settling in and they are not just taking places but holding them. And they are working on the borders much better. The inadequate troop levels go back to the inter-agency process. The fact is Rumsfeld never wanted to be in Iraq this long anyway, as I said.
Presiding over a security vacuum
Alan Johnson: You have described a meeting in Baghdad, on April 28 2003, at which you and about 400 other Iraqis tried to persuade the US that the immediate restoration of law and order was the priority. This is how you described the reaction of the US officials present:
[there] was again this incredible, very American, embarrassment at being what you are - in authority, in a position of power, in a position to determine government ... somebody [said] 'You mean you don't have a plan for the government?' He [Garner] says, 'No, we are here to meet to discuss that. This is your government, not our government. We don't want to impose this government on you.' It all sounds so ridiculous. (...) There was nobody in charge who understood that democracy s not some sort of instant switch. It's institutions that have to be built over time.
Kanan Makiya: There was a very naive attitude on the part of at least some of the Americans responsible for decisions during the first months after the war. This attitude was that democracy is freedom. People now can express themselves and do what they want. It's total nonsense. Democracy is a process and it requires authority. You don't lift the lid of authority on a population that has been ruled so dictatorially for so long and expect it to immediately act responsibly. Responsibility and democracy are very closely aligned, and responsibility doesn't come without authority. The idea that democracy is not about authority is an anarchist pipe dream. In Iraq political authority was absent after the Americans took out the old authority and then stepped back. They should have assumed authority, enforced curfews, held people back, shot looters, protected key strategic sites, and so on. The anarchy that broke out has accompanied this experiment down to this very day, creating a sense that the Americans are not in control. For example, there was a no-shoot policy towards looters. Why? The fear was that if Al-Jazzeera filmed an American soldier shooting or intimidating potential looters, this would play badly. That is a new reality of global life. But it's a fact that every Iraqi wanted them to shoot the looters. Iraqis were puzzled why soldiers gave the impression they were licensing this looting.
Transforming Iraq in a democratic direction requires the replacement of one authority with another. Somebody once called the Americans 'the reluctant superpower'. This is completely contrary to the view the left takes but I think there is a large element of truth in it, having seen them at work in Iraq. Mind you, at the ground level I worked with American soldiers, colonels and lieutenants, and so on, who are just magnificent people. They are building projects, maybe as small as a school, or a neighbourhood playground, and I witnessed the energy and the spirit of these young American men and women who didn't know this part of the world but who genuinely threw themselves into reconstruction and democracy building as they saw it. I feel they were let down by their leaders. The initiative, the will, the drive and the spirit was all there and all that was felt at the local level. But American and Iraqi leadership failed to translate it to the political superstructure.
The Torture at Abu Ghraib
Alan Johnson: Around the world-and I bracket the question of whether this is fair or not-the dominant image of an American soldier is not the hero rebuilding a school but the tormentor at Abu Ghraib. From an Iraqi perspective how damaging to the whole venture has it been that some Americans have had such a fast and loose relationship to the Geneva convention?
Kanan Makiya: Look, I have no doubt that a fast and loose relationship with fundamental human rights is going on in the prisons of Iraq. The abuse is torture and it is totally and morally unacceptable. For the people inside Abu Ghraib, and their families, there is justifiable fury. But the curious fact is that Abu Ghraib didn't have the same impact on American credibility in Iraq that it had on the rest of the world. I am not trying to gloss over anything. But remember, those very same prison cells have witnessed infinitely worse forms of torture, over the decades of Saddam's rule. Often, you hear expressions from people on the street such as, 'They call these pictures torture? You should see what I went through, my uncle went through, my cousin went through. This is peanuts.' That's a typical Iraqi reaction as I heard it on the streets of Baghdad when the scandal broke out. Not that we are not horrified by what the Americans did inside Abu Ghraib. And globally it's another matter - a punch in the solar plexus for the United States' whole effort in Iraq.
The USA, the democratic left, and Democracy Promotion
Alan Johnson: You met with President Bush twice. First, on 10 January 2003. About that meeting you have said, 'He left me with the very clear impression that he was deadly serious about it [democracy promotion], that this was not just rhetoric, and he was committed to it personally and in some emotional way.' Do you still think that?
Kanan Makiya: It's not about Bush as a person. The Bush administration has a very black and white view of the world but maybe that was a good thing for Iraq, maybe that's what made possible the ambition to bring about regime change and attempt democratisation. The argument for a democratic Iraq was genuinely convincing to Bush. He became passionately wedded to it. How deeply did he understand all the implications? That's not really for me to say. I don't know the man. But the administration has genuinely pushed for this democratisation line. It isn't just a façade. I've seen it at work on the ground. I've seen Bremer and his staff try to make it happen. I've seen the committees. I've seen the support given to women's organisations and NGOs. That it was done amateurishly and naively is all true. But the notion that it was not happening or was not genuine is just patent nonsense.
Unfortunately, it may no longer be there. The insurgency and the setbacks mean democracy-promotion is no longer the driving force of American policy. But it was the driving force in 2003/2004. Now there is a retreat and an attempt to get the troops back home. Now there is a pulling back very quickly. And the people of Iraq are the big losers. Now it is up to them to do the work, in a sense all by themselves. Maybe that is how it should have been all along. But regime change from the outside was the necessary condition. How much groundwork been laid? That's a good question.
Alan Johnson: Is it possible for the democratic left to retain its independence while critically supporting democracy-promotion efforts led by the USA?
Kanan Makiya: Of course democracy promotion as we saw it in Iraq stemmed in good part from a view of American national security.
As more one person has said, the scroll button has its uses.
ICAN PREDICTIONS MADE IN JUNE 2006
1,050Iraqi civilians died violently in June 2006.
Another excellent piece by Arthur:
"War kills people; the culture of war does not, but the culture of war kills something precious and indispensable in a civilized society: freedom of utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of knowledge. Recently, an official of the Pentagon explained why the military had censored some TV footage depicting Iraqi soldiers cut in half by automatic fire from U.S. helicopters. He explained, "If we let people see that kind of thing there would never again be any war." It is obvious that censorship of that type is a necessity in any modern war. It is usually rationalized by the need to keep the enemy in the dark about our plans; it is also valuable to conceal military blunders and war crimes from a public that, in the absence of censorship, might learn to be critical of the military's actions read on
Iraqi Army Struggles to Lure Sunni Arabs
By ANTONIO CASTANEDA, Associated Press Writer
1:45 PM PDT, July 14, 2006
RAMADI, Iraq -- Their televised graduation was supposed to be a moment of national celebration: A class of 1,000 Sunni Arab soldiers emerging from basic training would show Iraqis that the country's worsening religious divide was not afflicting the national army.
Two months later, only about 300 of them have reported for duty, U.S. officials say.
The evaporation of the class underscores the struggling U.S. and Iraqi effort to increase recruitment from the disgruntled Sunni Arab minority, which forms the backbone of the insurgency.
The success or failure of the effort holds broad ramifications, especially as U.S. forces begin to hand control of troublesome Sunni cities and neighborhoods to Iraqi soldiers, most of whom are now Shiites and Kurds.
Unless more Sunnis join up, soldiers from one sect will increasingly target the hometowns of the other sects -- without U.S. supervision.
"Units that are purely Shiite or Kurd or Sunni are looked on by various other sectors of the community as not being representative of their needs," Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview this year. "A unit that has all Iraqis embedded in it is better able to handle whatever kind of strife comes along."
The 1,000 graduates were part of a program to recruit 6,500 Sunnis from restive Anbar province. But with two classes of enlistees trained, only 530 soldiers have been added to the ranks, said Lt. Col. Mike Negard, a spokesman for the U.S. training command.
"The program is ongoing and its duration is based not on a timetable but to achieving the recruiting goal," Negard said.
Though the Iraqi army does not track the religious affiliation of its soldiers, U.S. commanders acknowledge Iraq's military lacks a proportionate number of Sunni troops. The effect of this imbalanced force has been unmistakable.
In Baghdad, civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods like Azamiyah and Dora have attacked Iraqi troops, thinking they were Shiite death squads that have slain hundreds of Sunnis. Such attacks have been rising in many parts of Iraq.
Key Sunni Arab leaders, such as Anbar Gov. Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani, say people often complain about the behavior of Shiite troops. In Ramadi, Marines recently held public meetings where residents could scold soldiers who allegedly stole from homes or mistreated civilians.
Maamoun and other Sunni Arab politicians have long complained the government waited much too long to recruit from the Sunni heartland in western Iraq.
Recruiting stations targeting Sunnis were only added west of Fallujah in late 2005 or early this year -- while tens of thousands of Shiites had been lining up to enlist in southern Iraq for a year and longer.
The Ministry of Defense blames persistent insurgent attacks in Anbar for the slow recruiting drive.
But some critics fault the U.S. military for not making recruitment in Anbar a priority sooner and complain it doesn't track the religious makeup of soldiers.
"It's a mistake not to track the sectarian makeup of the security forces. In fact it's a big mistake," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
But he also said getting more Sunni Arabs to enlist carries problems, because of the possibility of insurgents infiltrating the army.
"If you bring too many Sunni Arabs into mixed units, you will set them (the units) up for ambushes, because filtering out insurgents is very hard and imperfect," O'Hanlon said.
U.S. officials track the religious makeup of battalion commanders and above, but say the decision not to ask common soldiers about their religious background was left in Iraqi hands.
"That's not for me to decide," said Negard.
Many U.S. commanders play down the importance of balancing the Iraqi army's religious makeup, arguing the main problem is retaining troops who have already joined.
"It has nothing to do with them being Sunni or Shiite. It's all about an army that doesn't have a conscription program. They can leave whenever they want," said Lt. Col. Mark Simpson, head of a U.S. team training an Iraqi army brigade that has only 70 percent of its authorized soldiers.
It's a problem in many places, particularly Iraq's unstable areas. Iraq's 1st and 7th army divisions in Anbar should have a total of about 20,000 soldiers, but U.S. officers acknowledge the units have only half that.
They haven't given up on the Sunni class of 1,000, however.
"We've put out the message to get them back. We've asked city leaders to help get the message out," said Marine 1st Lt. David Meadows. "It doesn't mean they're lost."
ican, these long posts are unrewarding.
If you find a piece compelling, link us to it. If we are pulled in by the first few paragraphs, we will read it.
ican, these long posts are unrewarding.
If you find a piece compelling, link us to it. If we are pulled in by the first few paragraphs, we will read it.
