October 7, 2004:
MAKING SENSE OF IRAQ
The first President
Bush chose not to send ground troops into the heart of Iraq in 1992
because he was afraid there would be no way to get them safely out.
Nineteen months ago, his son chose an altogether different course of
action, sending more than 200,000 American troops swarming across Iraq
to seize Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein, ostensibly because Saddam
was in league with Al Qaeda and sat on a stockpile of weapons of mass
destruction. Six weeks later, President Bush declared "Mission
Accomplished,"
and since then more than 900 American troops have been killed. The Sunni
triangle and large pockets of the countryside have been ceded to the insurgents;
terrorist activity and suicide attacks in Baghdad are ever on the rise.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and civilians are dead. Meanwhile, no
WMDs have been found, the 9/11 Commission concluded that Saddam had zero
connection to Al Qaeda, and there has been no shortage of second-guessing
the president's original decision to go to war.
The war on Iraq has
become the mother of all issues, essentially dominating the presidential
campaign. Many who originally supported the war now concede that the
effort has not gone well and is only getting worse, while those who
opposed the war from the start are howling "I told you so." Kofi
Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, denounced the war as
illegal. But it doesn't matter now whether the war was wrong or right.
The bottom line is that American forces are mired in Iraq, the region
is more unstable than ever, and a bloody civil war is looming. The
$200 billion question - what the hell should we do now? I put that
question to a range of people endowed with informed opinions, beginning
with Mark Juergensmeyer, professor of Global and International Studies
at UCSB, who recently returned from Baghdad.
Nick Welsh: What do you see on the ground? Is Iraq headed
toward a civil war?
There was a significant
policy decision after April '03 that enormously contributed to this problem.
The Bush administration abandoned the Iraqi army. They did not utilize
any units of the old Iraqi army in the new security forces. The old Iraqi
army was made up of more than 400,000 soldiers, who were suddenly thrown
out of their jobs - and who took their weapons with them. They were re-employed
as militia security forces by every political party in the country, every
major religious or political group, and every major business or corporation.
Allawi said before taking office that they needed to get these militias
under control - he was going to have a summit. But then it didn't happen.
And the problem is that in the absence of this you have all these American
troops driving up and down the streets scaring the crap out of everybody.
The American troops are not regarded
well. Is this a shift?
Let's take Falluja as an example, which is touted as the
worst of the worst. Nobody in Falluja resisted the American occupation.
They did not fight back. The reason was that they hated Saddam. Falluja
is the Koran belt. Very religious, very Sunni. So initially they were glad
to get rid of Saddam, but they adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the
Americans. And there was no looting in Falluja. The clergy had the town
pretty much under control. Two weeks after the fall of the old regime,
the 82nd Airborne came in to establish a stronghold - and they had heard
Falluja was a hotbed of anti-American activity. With great trepidation
they set up camp and occupied a local school at the edge of Falluja and
sent all the kids home. Political Fallujans were pissed off. Where were
the kids going to go to school? So they went out and demonstrated in the
streets against the occupation of the school. The 82nd Airborne said my
god they're storming on us, we've got to defend ourselves, and they started
firing into the crowd and about a dozen people were killed. This was a
disaster. It confirmed all the Fallujans' worst fears about Americans.
And things just went from bad to worse from that.
You say a civil war is likely. Why?
Because you have an Allawi government
that's supported by the United States. If that crumbles and the United
States moves out, I think there's less of a possibility of a civil war,
depending on how the election process goes.
Let's say the January elections
are held, and the Shia parties dominate, which they should. That new
entity has two functions - to run the country and draft a new constitution.
Let's say it drafts one that's Islamic in character and maybe reasonably
autocratic but retains the democratic process. Allawi says you guys won,
good-bye. This [new] government then negotiates with the United States
for a speedy withdrawal.
That sounds like a success.
Agreed, but would America tolerate this? You're going
to have something that at best looks like Egypt, at worst like Saudi Arabia,
and is anti-American. The only question is how stridently so it will be.
Will America fight to back Allawi? Will he, knowing that he'll lose, refuse
to hold elections at the last minute? Then there will be a civil war against
the secular government and the American presence.
[ 'Increasingly,
most people in Iraq think that they are worse off now than under
Saddam, because of the lack of security.'
- Mark Juergensmeyer, UCSB professor of Global and International Studies
The question is the degree to which there is jihadi influence or control.
Zarkawi is getting a lot of press because he's beheading Americans. The
degree to which he actually has influence in Iraq is hard for me to say.
What is the Iraqi response to the beheadings?
They blame us. They blame the weakening
of security in general as a problem that was created by the Americans.
The beheadings are tragic and unfortunate. Most Iraqis are disgusted by
them, as we are. But their attitude is you reap what you sow. If you don't
like it, get out. You shouldn't be here in the first place. It's not as
if they're sympathetic with the people who commit these acts, but it's
just another example of the loss of security throughout Iraq.
Understandably, they're more
upset that so many Iraqis are killed. I mean, the vast majority of people
killed by these street bombings are Iraqis, not Americans. When a street
bombing happens, they're pissed off at the people who did it, but they're
more pissed off at America for creating the insecure situation where
things like this could happen.
So if we sent in 100,000 more troops
to help secure the area, would that make things better?
It would make things worse. It's the presence of the
Americans that's incendiary.
You hear a lot from Fox News
and other outlets supportive of the war saying we don't see all the good
things that American soldiers are doing. What was your take?
It's true. But there's a lot less of that now because of the security problems.
And it's not just that Americans do nice things, but the commercial economy
seems to be thriving. There are people out in the streets buying things.
Air conditioners were the hot items when I was there because we were getting
ready for the summer. There are corner markets, kind of like flea markets,
with colorful umbrellas that people sell. With the lifting of the embargo
there are a lot more consumer items in Baghdad, so things are bustling.
Things are also bustling because of political organization. There are humanitarian
organizations. There was a new political party that opened up a newspaper
across the street from my hotel.
So do most people think they're better
off than under Saddam?
We've made a mess there, clearly. What
were the most grievous mistakes?
Is there any way the U.S. could reduce
the bloodshed now taking place?
Reduce [the U.S.] visibility. Allawi is regarded as an
Uncle Tom. That's really unfortunate. I was hoping he'd have some credibility,
but to be seen with the United States greatly diminishes his credibility.
Over here we have images of Muslims deranged
with hate. Was that what you saw?
Most of the people with whom I spoke
were smart, articulate, and calm - they just wanted Iraq to settle down
and become a normal country. They often wore Western-style clothes, even
within the religious organizations. There was a woman at the house of wisdom.
She was a professor of sociology at Baghdad University and wore a dress,
make-up, uncovered hair, coiffed - she could walk down the street in Santa
Barbara and you wouldn't turn your head. And her English was just pristine.
She started off talking about the proscriptions of international law and
then her voice began to get emotional. And she talked about the great hopes
and great expectations they had with the fall of Saddam, that life would
be better. She almost began to cry, saying,
"Things have gotten worse," saying, "You've become the
terrorist you're trying to get rid of." And she looked right at
me, the only American in the room. That somebody like her, so intelligent
and articulate, would lay the blame of most of Iraq's problems at the
feet of the Americans was very telling.
Did you talk to any Americans?
[ 'The
idea that the insurgents are just a few bad guys, a few former Saddam
supporters and a few outsiders, that's a fiction.'
- Mark Juergensmeyer
How did you see the religious
beliefs of the Iraqis influencing the resistance?
What's a more accurate description?
Everybody knows that the CIA
created Saddam Hussein, he said. He's been an American puppet, and that's
why the U.S. didn't destroy Saddam after the Kuwait war. The question
I asked was: "Why would we invade Iraq, then?" The clergyman
said, "Why would the Americans get rid of its puppet?" - smiling,
as if talking to a child. Because the Americans knew he had gotten weak,
that we knew he had no weapons of mass destruction, that this was all
a front to shore up Saddam's own power in Iraq - which is probably true
by the way; Saddam used the myth of these weapons to increase his own
sense of power.
But according to the conspiracy
theory, the Americans knew this, and they knew he was about to be overthrown
by an Islamic revolution in Iraq and the Americans did not want Iraq
to be controlled by an Islamic government. So to prevent the revolution,
the Americans moved in and took over, kicked out their old puppet. Easily.
It was over in two weeks. Everyone in Iraq was amazed at how fast it
went. But they think the Bush administration had to know this was going
to be the case. So what they really wanted to do was control Iraq so
there would not be an Islamic revolution. That's their theory. That's
why the resistance is gaining all this force. Because they're actually
getting to participate in their own war of liberation against this Saddam/American
occupation, which they see as one and the same. Nobody ever thought America
was there for humanitarian reasons, to liberate Iraq. Nobody believed
that for a second.
What do the Iraqis make of the antiwar
movement in the U.S.?
They don't know much about it. They're
aware of it, but they feel Bush has control over America and he's not going
to let it be lost. And by the way, I asked them who they would rather see
in office, Bush or Kerry. These are Sunni clerics I was asking. Bush, they
said. They want to destroy him. They hate Bush so much it would deprive
them of a sense of satisfaction if he were not there to be thrown out.
In Their
Own Words
The argument over whether
or not America should have invaded Iraq is, at this juncture, moot.
We're there. Now what? We posed that question to a plethora of writers,
professors, and experts, all of whom had very different ideas about
what will happen next, and what will be the consequences of our actions.
Kani
Xulam:
"The Kurds have said repeatedly they
will not submit to an Islamic Republic. The Kurds overwhelmingly don't
want to have anything to do with the Arab majority that has abused them,
gassed them, and treated them like animals. Seven percent of the world's
oil - 40 percent of the oil wealth of Iraq - is in the Kurdish area. The
Kurds are willing to give 20 percent of that back to the central government,
because the Kurds only make up 20 percent of the country, on the condition
they could say this land belongs to the Kurds. But the central government
is saying no, that land belongs to Iraq and that oil belongs to Iraq. So
there's a big bomb yet to explode. Kirkuk is the city that sits on this
oil. It used to be that 85 percent of the people in the province of Kirkuk
were Kurdish, but after Saddam's immigration policies back in the '70s,
they were reduced to 37 percent of the population. You have this Kurdish
desire to reclaim this land. You have Arab families that have moved here
30 years ago and in their eyes, this is home. It's very tense. In my worst
nightmares I see it turning into a Sarajevo. The Kurds just want to enjoy
the fruits of liberty. But it's their misfortune that they're sitting on
an ocean of oil.
[ 'In
my worst nightmares I see it turning into a Sarajevo.'
- Kani Xulam, Kurdish rights advocate and UCSB graduate.
There's a culture of violence toward the Kurds because
the Kurds were helping the Americans put down the rebellion in Falluja.
The word got around that the Kurdish forces were helping the Americans.
Word got around that the Kurds were the most enthusiastic supporters of
the Americans, and then maybe a month after the events of Falluja, five
Kurds were taken captive ... and, just as the Americans, were burned to
death and desecrated; the Kurds were then killed and desecrated. And then
a week ago, three Kurds were beheaded. The Kurds are being beheaded just
like the Americans are being beheaded. In the minds of the Arabs, the Kurds
and the Americans are the same, and of course, if you dig in a little deeper,
they say the Kurds and the Americans and the Jews are the same.
Dennis
Ross:
"It's fruitless to talk about
should we have gone or shouldn't we; we are where we are. One thing is
clear - whether or not you believe the war was related to the war on terror,
it is now. If we lose, if we're forced out, every jihadist worldwide will
take heart. They'll say they can always defeat us. Osama bin Laden wrote
how we were defeated and forced from Somalia, that that was a great victory
and it showed you could defeat superpowers. Well, imagine what he would
do with this.
[ 'If
we're forced out every jihadist in the world will say
they can always defeat us.'
— Richard Falk, Princeton professor of International Law,
now living in Santa Barbara.
We have to recognize we have to find a way to get
out of the mess we're in. The first thing is to recognize we're in a mess.
The dynamic is all wrong. It's not going our way right now. It's not going
our way at all - the number of attacks has grown daily. The coordination
among the insurgents is higher and better than ever, the sophistication
of attacks is clearly more developed than before, and [Muqtada al-] Sadr's
standing is higher than before. So we're in a mess. We have to clear out
the Sunni triangle. Falluja, Samarra, Ramadi. We're going to have to go
back into Falluja. It was a big mistake for us to [pull out] in April.
The insurgents are much stronger today than they were then. The whole Sunni
triangle has become a no-man's land for us. Ultimately, the Iraqis have
to own the problem and until they do, nothing is going to change. So we
need to create the political space for them and one way is for us to go
in and clear it out. I don't think we have a choice. We may need more troops.
But in the end, there isn't going to be a military solution to Iraq. If
the Iraqis don't own the problem, if they don't feel they're fighting for
their future, it doesn't matter how many troops we put in there."
Seymour
Hersh:
"I
don't think [Bush and Cheney] lied to us. I think they genuinely believed
in weapons of mass destruction and they think the only solution to the
world's problems was to go there and spread democracy. I really believe
they're true believers. They're utopians. They're idealists. But there's
nothing more dangerous than idealists who are dead wrong and don't know
it. They've been dead wrong and they don't know it. That's why they so
calmly say, 'Don't worry, we've got another five years to see what's going
on.' But as long as we're over there, it's madness. We have to figure some
way out. We're the fuel that's driving [the insurgents]. I'm not saying
cut and run. You don't do that. But you have to systematically figure a
way out. You have to get that country back on its legs and resolve the
political problems and you can't do it by propping up people like Allawi,
who represents nothing and has no chance of being taken seriously by the
people. We've got to get the U.S. out of there. But there's no way out.
There's no victory. What have we done? What have we accomplished? Have
we stopped the terrorism? No. Does it have anything to do with terrorism?
This is madness, and we have to figure some way to cut it off. You want
to do something about the Middle East - you still have to go after the
gut issues, which include Israel and Palestine, and then the social issues.
But it's more complicated than just pulling out. Let me tell you something
- if you think there's any chance we're going to get the UN in there, are
you kidding? You think the Germans are going to come in and bail us out?
[ 'The
outrage over Abu Ghraib demonstrated that we care about values.'
— Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh - chronicler of the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal - will speak at UCSB Sunday, October 10.
The outrage over Abu Ghraib demonstrated that we
still are a moral country, that underneath it all, we care about values,
we care about people representing us, and the idea that these guys would
do this in the name of America ... the disrespect we showed to these Arab
men was just horrible. You don't treat their prisoners any worse than you
want ours to be treated. And did Rumsfeld do anything? Did Bush or Cheney
do anything? They just looked away until the story broke then blamed it
on a few bad seeds. Every single chance they had to do something, they
did nothing. It was a terrible failing and it was a failing at the top
of the government."
Lisa
Hajjar:
"Iraq
is a very important country and I don't think anyone wants to see Iraqis
living in a perpetual state of chaos and destruction - or to see Iraq turn
into Afghanistan. The Iraqis don't want to see their country broken up
into lots of little fiefdoms. We need to begin with a different diplomatic
approach ... to provide Iraqis the sense that they have a stake in a peaceful
solution. But American credibility has just been shot to hell. Not that
I'm crazy about Kerry, but getting rid of Bush might open the possibility
of some other countries coming in with the UN and relieving the use of
American troops. As long as Bush is in office there is no possibility that
the situation can be altered. It would take a different administration,
going around on bended knee. The insurgence - the instability, the violence
- is purely anti-occupation and is focused on the United States. The insurgence
arose initially out of economic chaos, and we can lay the blame for that
in Donald Rumsfeld's lap. They came in and fired the Iraqi army - 400,000
people with arms and no jobs. The United States has screwed up badly but
most of the screw-up has been political rather than military."
[ 'As
long as Bush is in office there's no possibility the situation can
be altered.'
- Lisa Hajjar, UCSB's Law and Society Program and torture
use scholar.
Gayle
Lynds:
"I
don't think there's any one single thing we can do to reverse this. We
need to do a lot of things very quickly, beginning with the idea of changing
our attitude. The administration has adopted a policy of peace through
fear, not peace through respect. That's the first thing we need to change.
We are not going to win the way winning is defined in Washington. We can
win by thinking of Iraq as a country of ordinary people who want to live
peaceful lives and our sole job is to help them find what their own destiny
is - not colored by what we want and what they think. And if that means
they must have a religiously based government - as much as that alarms
me - I think we are playing God [if we tell] them they can't have it. Look
at what's happening with the kids in Iran. Twenty years ago that country
was transformed into a radical Islamic state where we were regarded as
the great Satan. What we are seeing there now is a new generation of young
people - a restlessness and striving for democracy. There's tremendous
hope when you look at Iran. I'd like to pull our people out today, but
we've had such a major hand in this that I don't think it's responsible
for us to do that. But our people can't turn the situation around without
major support from the international community. This whole thing has been
so short-sighted. We've been chopping our legs off one inch at a time for
the last year and a half."
[ 'We've
been chopping our legs off one inch at a time
for the last year and a half.'
- Gayle Lynds, author of international intrigue thrillers.
Juan
Campo:
"Most
Egyptians are not very optimistic about the aftermath, of what's been happening
since Saddam fell. Nobody liked Saddam and there's no sympathy for his
having disappeared. But they are basically horrified by the news reports
- very frustrated and very angry. I think we're helping to feed into a
mind-set of young people who are angry at the United States and that's
going to be very hard to change over time. The best we can hope for is
to stabilize the country and create a situation where Iraqis themselves
can find their way out to reconstruct their government, their society,
everything, and that cannot be done with U.S. military. We can't pound
it into them no matter how many bombs we're dropping.
- Juan Campo, UCSB Religious Studies Professor,
recently back from five weeks in Egypt.
All the polls indicate that the military activity
is creating hostility that will last generations unless we change course.
The key thing is to turn away from the military option - bombing population
centers. Even if there are bad guys there, we're killing a lot of civilians.
We've never succeeded at bringing democracy by the gun barrel. People point
to Germany and Japan, but we allowed the Germans and the Japanese to be
very much involved in reconstructing their own country and their own government.
We didn't bring in Halliburton and Enron to do the job for them. Iraqis
have 40-60 percent unemployment. And that generates a lot of anger."
Richard
Falk:
"At this point there are no clean solutions,
and any proposed course of action with respect to Iraq is beset with gigantic
unknowns. If asked for advice, I would, first of all, make it clear that
the U.S. would no longer seek economic and strategic advantages in Iraq,
and that all external policy advice would be filtered through a UN special
representative. This would mean cutting back on the U.S. Embassy and its
current staff of 3,000, for both symbolic and substantive reasons. I would
also send a delegation of prominent, trusted individuals - [former Secretary
of State James] Baker, [former Sen. George] Mitchell (D-Maine), [billionaire
philanthropist and Bush critic George] Soros - to meet with Ayatollah Sistani
and other respected national leaders to get their guidance on the American
role. I agree that an abrupt withdrawal by the U.S. would likely trigger
a civil war, with an outcome that would most likely be the restoration
of Sunni dominance via an oppressive leadership. Of course, this whole
diplomacy would achieve greater credibility if accompanied by some indication
of a greater willingness to challenge the [Ariel] Sharon approach to the
Israeli-Palestinian relationship, including a clear repudiation of retaining
'illegal' settlements on the West Bank.
[ 'An
abrupt withdrawal by the U.S. would likely trigger a civil war' ]
- Richard Falk, Princeton professor of International Law,
now living in Santa Barbara