Michael Rubin, Trust the Iraqis, TNR
THE NEW REPUBLIC TRUST THE IRAQIS. Silent Majority by Michael Rubin Post date: 05.27.04 Issue date: 06.07.04 Last August, I participated in a town-hall meeting hosted by the administrative council of Dibis, an ethnically mixed town 22 miles northwest of Kirkuk. Locals complained about everything from sporadic electricity to fertilizer shortages to potholes, and their Iraqi representatives listened attentively. It was an encouraging sight, all the more so because the month before, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head L. Paul Bremer had proudly announced, in a televised speech, that all of Iraq's main cities, and dozens of other towns, now have administrative councils. But there was a problem. Soon after his announcement, Bremer--not wanting to complicate planning for the Iraq donor's conference to be held in Madrid in October--refused to give the councils budgetary authority. As a result, council members in places like Dibis could listen to complaints but lacked the means to respond to them. Iraqis quickly decided that their local representatives were little more than props. In many other areas, the story has been the same. Iraqi farmers missed this year's planting season because the CPA's senior American adviser for agriculture (later fired) repeatedly refused the Iraqi minister of agriculture's request to order fertilizer. Despite problems restoring Iraq's electrical infrastructure, CPA electricity advisers never bothered to consult Saad Shakir Tawfiq, who oversaw its reconstruction after the Gulf war in 1991. In fact, they didn't even return Tawfiq's calls, a tiny example of the paternalism that has characterized the American occupiers' treatment of the Iraqi people. Iraqis, contrary to what many in Washington now believe, were not anti-American from the beginning. Many troops were greeted as liberators. The Boston Globe reported, the day after the fall of Baghdad, that [j]ubilant Iraqis greeted US troops with cheers, victory signs, and flowers. Many are anti-American today because the United States has refused, in ways big and small, to give them real control over the country. Unless that changes, the June 30 handover will be a fiasco and a farce. The paternalism began even before the war did. Fearing it could undermine prewar diplomacy, the State Department resisted efforts to create a Free Iraqi Force of exiles committed to fighting Saddam Hussein. On the first night of the war, the Free Iraqi Force huddled around radios at the Taszar Air Base in Hungary, 1,600 miles away from the country they were supposed to help liberate. The United States paid a price. Iraqi cheers turned to stunned silence when, on April 9, 2003, Corporal Edward Chin draped an American rather than an Iraqi flag over the face of Saddam's statue in Baghdad. The person climbing the statue should not have been an American carrying an Iraqi flag, but an Iraqi. Unfortunately, the forces most likely to have realized this were left cooling their heels in Central Europe. Occupation brought more of the same. Heeding Iraqis' pleas, the United States formed the Iraqi Governing Council in July 2003. Unfortunately, Bremer soon dashed Iraqi hopes by proclaiming his veto power. At the bottom, the [Coalition Provisional] Authority still has the ultimate authority here until we have a government in place, Bremer said five days before the Council's inauguration. As created, the Council presidency rotates each month, and no one leader gained the kind of longer-term power needed to negotiate with the CPA. When the Council tried to elect a prime minister, Bremer refused, saying it might undercut his own authority. Even the symbolism has been paternalistic. Rather than use Governing Council members to deliver weekly radio addresses, Bremer delivered them himself, and the CPA's Strategic Communication's Office focused more on outreach to The New York Times than to Iraqis. Many Iraqis are upset that, more than a year after Saddam's overthrow, they still see CPA spokesman Dan Senor and General Mark Kimmitt, rather than an Iraqi, delivering the daily briefing to reporters. In the U.S. press, the CPA is often portrayed as a force for liberalism, battling Iraqis' instinct for theocracy. But, in truth, liberal Iraqis have been given no more authority than their conservative countrymen. Kanan Makiya, one of Iraq's leading liberal intellectuals, spent the year following Saddam's overthrow developing the Iraq Memory Foundation, a museum that would commemorate the victims of Baathist tyranny and allow Iraqis to reflect on their history. Makiya's team catalogued documents and applied for CPA permits to build a museum accessible to all Iraqis. But, on April 23, 2004, with the stroke of a pen, Bremer undercut Makiya and established his own National Commission for Remembrance. Similarly, when Dr. Raja Al Khuzai, a liberal Shia member of the Governing Council, voiced concerns in a Council meeting in February 2004 about some of her colleagues' endorsement
Dave Marash, A Brighter View of Iraq, ABC News
ABC News.com Brighter View There Is More Than One Way to Look at Upheaval in Iraq Analysis by Dave Marash BAGHDAD, May 30, 2004 Most thinking these days on Iraq is decidedly pessimistic. Part of that is traditional political/intelligence cover your a--, worst case analysis. Part of it is a very justifiable fear of the unknown, because the surest thing to be said about Iraq's political future is that it is unknown. Nevertheless, here's a more, but not completely, optimistic view. First, the strategic threats to the state of Iraq are declining. In ascending order, they are civil war between Sunni and Shi'ites; a 3-way division of the country into Kurdish, Sunni and Shi'ite dominated mini-states; the guerilla threat of Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, and the threat from international terrorists, perhaps led by the Jordanian ally of al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Let's start with the easiest, the dismissable threat: civil war between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Although definable, the dividing line between Sunna and Shi'a in Iraq, has not been violent for hundreds of years. For decades, intermarriage between Sunna and Shi'a has been common, especially in Baghdad. Furthermore, each attempt to drive wedges between the communities, by assassination or mass murder, has been overwhelmingly rejected by public expressions of solidarity, We are all Muslims, nothing can divide us. Within days, thousands of pints of blood were collected for Shi'ite victims of the Ashoura attacks in Kerbala and Baghdad in March, by the 2 hardest-line cities of the so-called Sunni Triangle, Ramadi and Fallujah. Almost as remote, the threat most recently raised by the former US Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith: an Iraq tri-furcated along Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish lines. Please. Significantly, this is not a threat seriously raised in Iraq by Iraqis, this year, because it has no constituency here. The interests of none of the 3 parties would be served by partition; the interests of all of the parties are susceptible to compromise. Those who worry about the rhetoric unleashed in Iraqi media about national offices and ministries and oil revenues, and degrees of autonomy and immediately translate it into a real threat have never covered a New York City labor negotiation. Kurds, their political/paramilitary parties KDP and PUK, and their respective leading families, are all better off in a stable Iraqi Kurdistan than in any of the alternatives, including an infeasible independent Kurdish micro-state. Furthermore, the Kurds are guaranteed an acceptable, close to current, level of autonomy and oil money (the 2 big issues here) because no one in the region, including Turkey, the strongest remaining regional military power, wants to tangle with the Peshmerga, the 100,000 man strong Kurdish militia, more or less equally divided between adherents of the KDP and the PUK. Rest assured, Mssrs. Barzani and Talabani will negotiate a deal through which Kurdistan will be rich enough and autonomous enough to stay within an Iraqi state. Settling the future of Kirkuk, violently claimed by Kurds, Arabs, and Turcomen, will be the hardest single issue. Moqtada al-Sadr may once again emerge as a problem for the 95% of Iraq and the Shi'ite hierarchy that is to the right of him, but his threat to involve Coalition Forces in a half-national guerilla war is over. His skillfully managed but still, to Iraqis, unmistakable retreats from Kerbala and Najaf, following equally forcible, but less formally negotiated retreats from Nasiriya and Amarah, and the disintegration of his forces in Basra have left Moqtada considerably reduced and increasingly rejected by the people of the places he tried to take control of. His militia, the Mahdi Army, originally (perhaps under-) estimated at 2000, lately (perhaps over-) counted at 5000, lost a more painstakingly estimated 300-400 dead and 2 or 3 times that wounded, in a month-long campaign that wound up gaining nothing, and left al-Sadr with just 2 strongholds, the Najaf suburb of Kufa and the huge Shi'ite ghetto of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. Sayyid al-Sadr knows the US military is itching for an excuse for a final showdown. He's unlikely to stir up serious trouble before June 30, since he's been encouraged to think he will eventually be able to cut a deal on his murder charges with some future Iraqi government. That, and the hope of a political future in the elective Iraq, where at the very least his Sadr City stronghold should command him some respect, may be enough to keep harmless. The international terrorist threat is still very much with us in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. We call them the car bombers. But the terrorists' callousness about shedding Iraqi blood, their association with Salafist anti-Shi'ite extremism, their increasingly notorious refusal to accept guidance from local Sunni leaders in the Sunni Free City of Fallujah, and
