Dreaming of Democracy (2/2)
By GEORGE PACKER
nytimes.com
One striking feature of Iraqi exceptionalism is the attitude toward Jews. Before their exodus in the early 1950's, Jews made up an estimated one-third of Baghdad's highly diverse population. Among certain exiles, Jewish music and culture have become part of the lore of pre-Baathist Iraq. The Iraqi National Congress newspaper Al Mutamar recently published an article by an Israeli writer and articles about Iraqi Jewish poetry. A London coffee-shop owner named Dia Kashi went so far as to travel to Israel, meet with Iraqi Jews and help found the Iraqi-Israeli Friendship Committee. Several Jews were invited as delegates to the London opposition conference.
The champions of Iraqi exceptionalism include the neoconservatives in the administration -- Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon; John Bolton at the State Department; Lewis Libby in the vice president's office; Richard Perle, who is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon -- and numerous scholars, columnists and activists, most of them identified with the pro-Israel American right. In recent weeks, President Bush himself has appeared to embrace the idea as a geopolitical rationale for war. The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.
The idea is sometimes referred to as a new domino theory, with tyrannies collapsing on top of one another. Among the harder heads at the State Department, I was told, it is also mocked as the Everybody Move Over One theory: Israel will take the West Bank, the Palestinians will get Jordan and the members of Jordan's Hashemite ruling family will regain the Iraqi throne once held by their relative King Faisal I.
At times this story is told in the lofty moral language of Woodrow Wilson, the language that President Bush used religiously in his State of the Union address. Others -- both advocates and detractors -- tell the story in more naked terms of power and resources. David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who wrote the first two words in the phrase ''axis of evil,'' argues in his new book, ''The Right Man,'' ''An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- and a replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States -- would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe the Romans.''
It's an audacious idea, and part of its appeal lies in the audacity. It shoves history out of a deep hole. To the idea's strongest backers, status-quo caution toward the sick, dangerous Middle East is contemptible, almost unbearable. ''You have to start somewhere,'' says Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. ''There are always a million excuses not to do something like this.'' Who wouldn't choose amputation over gangrene? If we have the will and imagination, the thinking goes, we can strike one great blow at terrorism, tyranny, underdevelopment and the region's hardest, saddest problem.
"It's called magical realism, Middle East-style,'' says Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Exactly how, he wonders, would this chain reaction occur? Arab countries are stuck between autocratic governments and Islamist opposition, he says, and ''our invasion of Iraq isn't going to remove those political forces. They're going to be sitting there the next day.'' The war, which is vastly unpopular in the Arab world, is far more likely to improve the fortunes of the Islamists, he says, and provoke governments to tighten their grip, than to ventilate the region with an Arab spring.
The chances of democracy succeeding even in Iraq under American occupation are highly questionable, Carothers argues. War seldom creates democracy; according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, of the 18 regime changes forced by the United States in the 20th century, only 5 resulted in democracy, and in the case of wars fought unilaterally, the number goes down to one -- Panama. Democracy takes root from within, over a long period of time, in conditions that have never prevailed in Iraq. For democracy to have a chance there would require a lengthy and careful American commitment to nation-building -- which could easily look to Iraqis and other Arabs like colonialism. Nor can we be sure that democracy, in Iraq or elsewhere, will lead to pro-American regimes; it might lead to the opposite. ''The idea that there's a small democracy inside every society waiting to be released just isn't true,'' Carothers says. ''If we're pinning our hopes on the idea that this will lead to a democratic change throughout the region, then we're invading for the wrong reason.'' Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment, adds, '''We've suffered so much that the only alternative is democracy' -- as soon as you say it, you realize there's a mile between the beginning and end of that sentence.''
One premise of the strategic rationale for war is that Arab public opinion -- the resentment turning to fury that will probably greet an American invasion -- doesn't matter, because it is wrong, even delusional. ''America,'' Fouad Ajami writes, ''ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the 'road rage' of a thwarted Arab world -- the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds.''
I ran these notions by Hussein Ibish, the Lebanese-born communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He pointed out that some Arab views, especially about the Palestinians, are based on reality, not manipulated paranoia, and that anyone genuinely interested in Arab democracy had better take the popular will into account, delusional or not. If, on the other hand, Iraq is to be turned back into a colonial mandate as it was 80 years ago, inching toward ''Heart of Darkness,'' as Ibish said, we should openly admit that the anticolonial values of the intervening decade are being cast aside. ''How do you think this discussion will sound translated into Arabic and broadcast on Al Jazeera?'' he asked. ''This war will only reinforce the Arab feeling of humiliation and impotence. It could be a giant television commercial for Al Qaeda.''
As Arab regimes try to weather popular discontent, they will be far happier with the State Department's postwar scheme for regional stability than with the Pentagon hawks' notions about regional transformation -- especially if Iraq's oil is used by the Americans to rebuild Iraq and not to undermine OPEC. Iran, which has taken a surprisingly benign view of the war gathering on its horizon, might change its mind once American troops settle into Iraq for the long haul and events across the border make themselves felt among Iranian reformers. France and Russia, with their extensive interests in Iraqi oil and other contracts, might sit out the war but cut to the front of the line during the reconstruction to claim their share of the spoils. America's closest ally in the neighborhood, Turkey, with its troops in Iraq's north possibly provoking a Kurdish revolt, could turn out to be the most problematic player of all. Except, of course, for the Iraqis and the Americans themselves.
The London Hilton Metropole is a garish hotel near Paddington Station, and over a December weekend it seemed that most of Iraq's three million to four million exiles were there, in turbans and robes, in kaffiyehs, in English-cut business suits, huddled in conspiratorial-looking groups, clutching cellphones to ears. Among them Makiya was an anomalous sight, looking rumpled in shirtsleeves, baggy corduroys and all-weather shoes, his face clean-shaven. (One Iraqi told me that the country's next president must either be a woman or a man without a mustache.) The politicos from the Kurdish, Shiite and ex-military parties complained that Makiya's casual appearance lacked respect. The rumored contents of his report, copies of which most of them hadn't yet received, troubled them, too. Worst of all was the bluntness with which Makiya and some of his young, Western-educated allies in the Iraqi National Congress were talking about the need to move beyond the ''old politics'' of the ethnic parties, which had all been born in the image of the Baath.
Before the conference, American officials made it clear that they were opposed to any votes being taken in London; no transitional government would be elected, no report on democracy approved. The State Department had won out. Just before the conference began, Makiya sat down in a cafe across from the British Museum to survey the damage with Salim Chalabi, a London lawyer and nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, who had helped draft the document.
''They want to come out of this as one big happy family,'' Makiya said of the traditional parties. ''They want to show unity and support for the Americans. I want to win something concrete.'' He wanted the Iraqi opposition to commit itself to a proposal and make itself relevant before the shooting started and the logic of war took its course. ''But I'm afraid we're fighting a losing battle.''
Chalabi told Makiya that his outspokenness was hurting his own cause. Makiya is an old friend of the Kurds; in addition to having made the documentary ''Saddam's Killing Fields,'' he directs Harvard's Iraq Documentation Project, which is organizing and translating millions of documents left behind by the Baath Party as records of the genocide. But the Kurdish parties at the conference were vehemently opposed to the proposal for a nonethnic federation in Iraq. They had fought hard to gain recognition and equal status with the Arabs, and they were not going to relinquish it easily. The views of the Shiites on the section dealing with secularism had not been solicited. The Sunnis were less represented than anyone. There had been a lack of inclusiveness. Makiya agreed -- but he couldn't help adding: ''I've begun to hate the word 'inclusive' here. I know it's going to mean the lowest common denominator. Nothing will be said that means anything.''
Makiya was sweating, the lines deepening in his high forehead. The conference, the months of work, the political storm that always swirled around him, seemed to be placing him under an intolerable strain. Finally he relented.
''O.K., what should we do?'' he asked.
''You have to play it more like a game,'' Chalabi said. He suggested emphasizing the points on which there was agreement, like human rights, and muting the controversial ones. He urged Makiya to lower his profile.
On the first day of the conference, at a press briefing, Makiya sat alongside Ahmad Chalabi and a few others, content to listen. But when a reporter asked him a question, he leaned forward and said: ''The report carries forward a completely new idea that doesn't exist in the Arab-Muslim world. This is something tremendous, something unbelievable. We're talking above all of an idea of democracy that isn't only majority rule -- an idea of democracy that is about minority rights and above all individual rights.'' He added: ''This is a fighting document, by the way. We intend to fight for it on the floor of the conference.''
I had seen it before: when Makiya spoke, the energy in the room became focused. Afterward a swarm of reporters gathered around him. Into the room walked a furious Hoshyar Zebari, a leading official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, whose own press conference had been sparsely attended. Later, I asked Zebari about the document and about Makiya. Zebari smiled through his answer, but he kept thumping me in the chest as he spoke. ''We are rooted in the country, we are the ones who have suffered,'' he said. ''What Kanan Makiya has done, I appreciate his intellectual work, but it's just an intellectual exercise.''
Makiya, I suggested, was trying to give it teeth.
''He's the only one,'' said an American who was hovering around the conversation. It was David L. Phillips, who had worked with the State Department on the Future of Iraq Project. ''The report is not a political document -- it's not a blueprint. If it becomes one it will be divisive.'' Phillips later expressed sharp anger at Makiya for hijacking the writing of the report and then lobbying so hard for its provisions.
Back in Washington, officials thanked the Democratic Principles Working Group for its advice and shelved the report that the State Department had solicited. Makiya had called their bluff, and now they were calling his. The London conference ended with expressions of unity and vague support for that thing called democracy in Iraq; Makiya was named to a 65-member transitional coordinating committee. But the report of the Democratic Principles Working Group, printed and bound with hundreds of pages of appendices and dissents, was never officially discussed. It struck me as inauspicious that of all the committees in the Future of Iraq Project -- on water, electricity, agriculture and a host of other topics -- only the committee on democracy was deemed a failure.
he longer you try to look at Iraq on the morning after Saddam, the more you see the truth of what many people told me: getting rid of him will be the easy part. After that, the United States will find itself caught in a series of conundrums that will require supreme finesse: to liberate without appearing to dominate, to ensure order without overstaying, to secure its interests without trampling on Iraq's, to oversee democratization without picking winners, to push for reforms in the neighborhood without unleashing demons. It's hard to know whether to be more worried by the State Department's complacency or by the Pentagon civilians' zealotry.
On the day that Saigon fell in 1975, the British writer James Fenton found a framed quotation on a wall of the looted American embassy: ''Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is short.'' The words are from T.E. Lawrence. Vietnam remains the shadow over every American war, but never more than the one we're poised to fight, for no war since Vietnam has professed greater ambitions: to change the political culture of a country, maybe a whole region. Ever since Woodrow Wilson worked to put democracy and self-determination on the agenda at Versailles, this strain of high-mindedness in the American character has drawn the world's admiration and its scorn. In Graham Greene's novel ''The Quiet American,'' which was recently released as a film, the title character is a young idealist sent to Vietnam in the early 1950's to find a democratic ''Third Force'' between the French and the Communists. The book's narrator, a jaded British journalist, remarks, ''I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.'' Americans have never been very good at imperialism, or much interested in it; we're too innocent, too impatient, too intoxicated with our own sense of selfless purpose. Several Iraqis expressed the wish that their occupiers could be the British again, who took the trouble to know them so much better, who wrote whole books on the Marsh Arabs and the flora and fauna of Kuwait. Afghanistan lost America's attention as soon as Kandahar fell, and it remains unfinished business. As for Iraq, Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment, says, ''Our country is not remotely prepared for what this is going to take.''
If so, the fault mainly lies with President Bush. His articulation of political aims and postwar plans has been sketchy to the point of empty cliche. He has never discussed the human costs of war, nor its price. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus estimates the military expenditure between $50 billion and $140 billion; far more daunting, his study finds, the postwar costs to the United States of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, along with the impact on oil markets and the economy, could run as high as $2 trillion. This is a calculation that no one in the administration has dared to make, at least publicly. Privately, some officials suggest that Iraqi oil will pay for it.
More than anything, the president hasn't readied Americans psychologically to commit themselves to a project of such magnitude, nor has he made them understand why they should. He has maintained his spirit of hostility to nation-building while reversing his policy against it. Bush is a man who has never shown much curiosity about the world. When he met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. War has turned Bush into a foreign-policy president, but democratizing an Arab country will require a subtlety and sophistication that have been less in evidence than the resolve to fight.
I asked John W. Dower, a history professor at M.I.T. and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the American occupation of Japan, to compare that project with the democratization of Iraq. The difference between Japan and Iraq is great enough, he answered; the difference between America in 1945 and 2003 is even greater. ''We do not have the moral legitimacy we had then, nor do we have the other thing that was present when we occupied Japan -- the vision of the American public that we would engage in serious and genuinely democratic nation-building and that we would do this in the context of an international order.'' Even Fouad Ajami, a strong believer in the war's potential for regional reform, told me: ''The country is depressed, psychologically and economically. There is no great calling toward planting our truth in Mesopotamia. The war will have an ideological claim, but tempered by the difficulty of Iraq, by the fact that we don't know this land.''
The unease among Americans, even those who support the president, about the war and its aftermath is certainly due to fear of unknown consequences. It might also come from the sense that we're trying to have it both ways -- guns and butter, war without sacrifice, intervention without commitment. If Iraq succeeds in becoming a democracy under American protection, it will represent the triumph of hope over experience for both countries. It's a notion that I always found easier to imagine when I was within earshot of Kanan Makiya.
n mid-January, Makiya emerged from his meeting at the Oval Office to declare himself ''deeply reassured'' by the president's dedication to Iraqi democracy. Within a few days Makiya had flown to Tehran with Ahmad Chalabi and a few other Iraqi National Congress members to hold talks with Iraqi Shiite leaders. At the end of January, under the protection of Iranian security, they crossed the snow-covered mountains into northern Iraq. One recent morning, Makiya called me from Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan. He and the Kurds had patched up their differences, and one of the two Kurdish parties -- the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- had embraced the principle of nonethnic federalism. ''The opposition is trying to get its act together, basically,'' he said.
When the United States revealed a few weeks ago its intent to impose a military government after the war, Makiya took the news as a betrayal. ''It is Baathism with an American face,'' he declared. In his view, the odds for democracy have never looked longer, and he now wonders aloud if his harshest critics, who accused him of naivete and worse, will be proved right after all. The exiles who gathered in late February to hold a second conference in northern Iraq won't declare a provisional government against American wishes, Makiya told me, but they are trying to forge an Iraqi leadership that will be capable of forming one after the war sweeps through.
What Makiya is trying to do is think his way out of Iraq's blood-stained history. After the gulf war, when he and other dissidents drafted what they called ''Charter 91,'' outlining principles of tolerance for a new Iraq, Makiya received a severe letter from an old friend that he was willing to reprint in ''Cruelty and Silence'': ''I think -- and please allow me to tell you this -- that the ideas of the Charter issue from an ivory tower which has elevated itself so high up into the sky that we who are standing down below can hardly see or hear where they are coming from. You see, our society today has become like '1984.' There is no one who remembers or who even dares to remember the meaning of words like 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'brotherhood' or 'humanity.' They no longer know what 'human rights' are. I mean, what does this have to do with them! . . . Their only preoccupation is to survive and to live, like sheep.''
It's possible that Makiya's ideas are too lofty to stand a chance of being realized soon. David L. Phillips may be right to say that ''Iraqis aren't quite ready for the new politics. The tribal structures, the ethnic groupings -- they matter to Iraqis. They're important. This isn't a university laboratory.'' It's also possible that Makiya was foolish ever to imagine American cooperation with his exile dreams, and that he is out of his element in the dangerous labyrinth of Iraqi power politics. Meanwhile, ahead of the war, an Arabic translation of the report is being smuggled from Iraqi Kurdistan into Baghdad in miniature editions disguised as cigarette cartons.
''The document is just paper at the end of the day,'' Makiya told me one snowy evening at his Cambridge apartment. ''One of the less grandiose impulses behind it was this: there's a world of people out there deeply, deeply skeptical about whether or not this country can make it to democracy. And I know deep down that they have good reason to be skeptical. I'm not really as rosy, I'm not as naive as sometimes I appear on this question. But it seems to me, for history's sake, important to have a group of Iraqis turn out a decent document that can be taken seriously, that will be picked up and remembered and churned over and used as some kind of a test, some kind of a yardstick against which to measure the progress of things afterward. And it was, after all, produced by Iraqis -- so that Iraqis can lift their heads up a bit and go out there in the world and say: 'We meant it. It wasn't all a word game. Some of us tried to give it a shot.'''
George Packer is the author, most recently of ''Blood of the Liberals''
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