"I am elated and worried."
tnr.com
[ Editor's Note: Kanan Makiya, a leading Iraqi dissident and intellectual, and author of the Democratic Principles Working Group report for the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, will be reacting to developments in Iraq over the next several weeks in a "War Diary" for TNR Online. ]
When I heard President George Bush deliver his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on Monday, I could not help but puzzle over one crucial omission: the word "democracy." Why, I kept on asking myself, did he choose not to use it? Now only hours remain before the U.S. military rips apart Saddam Hussein's despotism. I seem to have spent the last 25 years of my life working toward this moment. The effort has been marked by cycles of frustration and elation, painfully elusive opportunities and betrayed promises. Since the end of the Gulf war, every piece of good fortune for the Iraqi opposition has been interwoven with disappointment and bitterness. Over the years we in the opposition have carefully parsed every word, cadence, and image of every public American pronunciation about Iraq. I heard the president say that Iraqi "liberation" was close at hand. But why did he not utter the one word that would ensure that what he was about to do in Iraq would enter the annals of history as one of its great moments?
In spite of his omission, I am more confident than I was ten days ago, when I returned to America from Kurdistan. During these last few days, over the course of many visits, I have met with Vice President Dick Cheney, twice with Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and twice with Jay Garner, the director of the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. I came away from these meetings with the fears that I had developed inside northern Iraq--fears shared by all my colleagues in the Iraqi opposition--assuaged, at least in part. I came away filled with new hope for an American-Iraqi partnership, which is the only way democracy can come to this benighted land. I came away reassured of this administration's commitment to the vital and difficult work that lays before us in building a new kind of order in Iraq long after the war has come to an end.
A month ago it seemed as if the administration was rejecting partnership with the Iraqi opposition just as the moment of truth was at hand. In Ankara, the U.S. envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the opposition of the administration's plan to install a military governor after toppling Saddam. We felt betrayed. I had spent months working with a team of Iraqi friends to draft a document about the transition to democracy. The document took for granted the idea of such a partnership; we had spent years preparing for this moment. We dropped our professions, all other commitments, virtually abandoned our families and worked relentlessly to put it all together. The document was first presented to a large conference of the Iraqi opposition held in London in last December, attended by some 400 Iraqi delegates. Out of those 400 people emerged a committee of 65 whose job it was to create an Iraqi leadership--an arduous process culminating last month in Salahuddin, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where 53 members of the committee selected a 6-man leadership on Iraqi soil representative of Sunni, Shia, and Kurds.
But we had no assurance that our leadership would have any bearing on the future of Iraq. Instead, in its vision of an Iraq after Saddam, the United States seemed to rely on the existing structures of the Baath-controlled state, an apparatus of torture that reinforced a power structure in Iraq favorable to the Arab regimes that have always despised and feared democratic opposition. We could see the mistake the United States was about to make. In response, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, and myself published op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the London Observer warning of an "unworkable and unwise" American plan that would turn the Iraqi opposition "into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation." Through various channels we were told to be patient--and quiet--and that the military government plan would not be as bad as I feared. I left Kurdistan, but the nagging apprehension still hung over my head.
It was lifted last week. In effect, I learned from Doug Feith that the Bush administration had discreetly abandoned its military government plan and decided to reaffirm the United States' decade-old alliance with the opposition. With little international support for this war, the administration has calculated that it cannot afford to lose support from the Iraqi people. I admit I was surprised. Feith said that it is now U.S. policy to pass over decision-making responsibilities to an all-Iraqi interim authority in stages, as quickly as it was possible for the Iraqis to manage them. In Salahuddin we had already constructed 14 subcommittees to deal with humanitarian relief, financial assessment, economic rehabilitation, field operations, military coordination, and more. These subcommittees, the backbone of the interim authority, will find their American counterparts in Garner's office and under General Tommy Franks's command to ensure that Iraqis match their efforts with the Americans'.
Jay Garner is a very focused, no-nonsense kind of man whose appointment no doubt stems from his experience--as a former general during the Gulf war, he was in charge of Operation Provide Comfort, the hastily-conceived effort to alleviate the suffering of Kurdish refugees decimated by Saddam after the first President Bush allowed him to crush the March 1991 intifada. Garner told me about what he plans on building, how he intends to distribute food, and we discussed coordinating efforts between his office and the various relevant committees formed in Salahuddin. A contingent of Iraqis close to the Iraqi National Congress will now be joining his staff in Kuwait. Heading them is my colleague and co-writer of the Transition to Democracy document, Salem Chalabi.
Yet I worry that all this comes very late in the day. We should have been at this stage of coordination six months ago. Garner should not have to wait for his Iraqi staff to meet him in Kuwait at the eleventh hour. The INC and the Kurdish parties have networks all over Iraq who have not been given very clear instructions for what to do during the war. When I came back from northern Iraq last week, I was flooded by requests from Iraqi-Americans who kept asking me questions like, "Kanan, who is the best person to join Garner with a focus on cleaning out Baathist elements in the Ministry of Education?" I couldn't always come up with names. Confusion is the order of the day. After all, what does de-Baathification really mean in a practical sense--and, while we gave it heavy consideration in the Transition to Democracy report, what does the United States think it means? Somebody needs to think that through. No one has. And yet today there are hundreds--if not more--of Iraqis in America, Britain, and the rest of the diaspora who are quitting their jobs and boarding planes to help rebuild their ravaged country. With the tyrant's destruction finally at hand, I am elated and worried. |
