After the war:
Can a people unfamiliar with rights and politics unite to
fill Iraq's void in leadership, or will deeply held hatreds
plunge the nation into sectarian violence and chaos?
By Michael Hill
Sun Staff
Originally published April 13, 2003
EXCERPT:
"A major problem is that there is no obvious leader who can
span the myriad schisms and rally Iraqis behind their new
country. That's a fundamental difference from what
happened in South Africa where Nelson Mandela and his
African National Congress were the clear successors to
power. There are some who think Mandela's Iraqi
counterpart is Ahmad Chalabi, who leads a London-based
exile group called, not coincidentally, the Iraqi National
Congress, which has received U.S. funding.
But unlike Mandela, Chalabi has not spent his time out of
power in prison, but living a comfortable life in exile. In
Jordan, he was convicted in absentia on bank fraud
charges.
Divide within U.S.
Some praise Chalabi, a mathematician who left Iraq in
1958 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
as an idealist seeking the best for his country. Others
denounce him as an opportunist. Whatever the truth, that
division of opinion is emblematic of another division that
might plague a peaceful future in Iraq -- between the U.S.
Department of Defense and Department of State.
Most of Chalibi's friends in Washington come from the
Defense Department and allies who led the ideological
push for the Iraqi invasion -- including Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Defense Department
adviser Richard Perle. His detractors come from the State
Department and the CIA, though to further complicate the
picture, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is said to
be a supporter.
When Chalabi, accompanied by a small army of exiled
Iraqis, was flown into Iraq by the U.S. military last week,
some thought it was an attempt by those friends to put
him in place for a leadership role.
"I think Chalabi's arrival was a coup d'etat against the
State Department," says Cantori.
Chalibi's supporters say that as a Shiite he has credibility
with that majority population group. But Hazbun says that,
unlike most Shiites, Chalibi's family was well-off.
"He came from an elite Shia family so I don't know what
kind of ties and connections he has to the Shia
community," Hazbun says. "I can't imagine him playing a
really big role."
Rashid Khalidi, of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
at the University of Chicago, is even more dismissive.
"He's a lounge lizard in his $4,000 suits who has been
living high off the hog on the American taxpayer. Chalabi
is a joke. He has no basis of support in Iraq. If those people
are relied on for Iraq's future, you have real problems."
Cantori says the split in the U.S. government goes deeper
than the dispute over Chalabi's legitimacy.
"You have this game within a game. State is pushing
certain people, Defense is pushing others. On top of that is
the question of the U.S. government vs. the United
Nations," he says.
"You start with that tension and then you have internal
tension about recognizing certain groups within the Iraqi
opposition, further tension about who the so-called expert
administrators are going to be. The whole thing is very
conflicted and, at this very moment, unresolved," he says.
According to Cantori and others, the State Department
model calls for certain areas of the Iraqi government to be
taken over by trained Americans while others remain in
the hands of competent Baath Party members who are
considered more civil servants than loyal servants of
Saddam.
This would follow South Africa's path. Even after Mandela
came to power, most of the civil service remained in the
hands of Afrikaners of the National Party that had imposed
apartheid. If those white bureaucrats had left, the
government would have ground to a halt.
The Defense Department model, backed by many of those
who championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, calls for a more
radical transformation along the lines of the
de-Nazification of Germany after World War II.
"They will try to de-Ba'athify Iraq," says Khalidi. "Every
crime will equal being a Nazi and they will see any Arab
nationalism as a crime, as a diseased ideology that needs
to be torn out.
"They are neo-conservatives who have no shame," he says.
"They have an agenda and they will push until they reach
the limit and then they will keep pushing. They will try to
get Iraq to recognize Israel. If they get their way, Iraqis
will be up in arms in less than a year."
The fact that an internal dispute in the U.S. government
would have these sorts of repercussions illustrates
another complicating factor -- unlike either South Africa or
Yugoslavia, Iraq's former dictator was overthrown by an
invading army.
For now, it appears that most of the country welcomes that
army as liberators -- something that was predicted but
took longer to emerge than expected. The question is how
long that feeling will last.
If the U.S. military overstays its welcome -- or if the U.S.
government is too heavy-handed in molding a new Iraqi
government -- resentment could build. The model for that
scenario might be Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Welcomed
as liberators from the oppression of the Palestine
Liberation Organization in 1982, the Israeli army was
under attack by the time it left a decade later.
To avoid that fate, the United States must encourage the
emergence of Iraqi leaders. But after a generation of
repression, they may be difficult to find.
"Restrictions are being lifted on a society that has been
under house arrest for years and years and years," Zilfi
says. "Everyone has been externally controlled in many
ways. So it is hard to know what is going to happen. You
get a taste of it with the looting you see all over."
'Picking up the slack'
Zilfi contrasts such chaos with what happens in more
developed societies when there is a loss of order because
of a power outage or a snowstorm:
"What you find is people, when confronting situations
when the law is not around, they walk out in the street
and start directing traffic," she says. That did not happen
in Iraq because "in many ways there is so little left of
personal initiative. It was persecuted, condemned,
destroyed, certainly not prized ...
"You need people picking up the slack at all levels, but I
don't see the precursors for it. There was only punishment
for it in the past so I don't know if we can put manpower on
the ground to encourage it, to model it, to reward it so that
it proliferates, then work from the grass roots up," Zilfi
says. "There are so many repercussions, so many
imponderables."
Hazbun says the next few years in Iraq will, at the least,
be interesting to watch.
"It is a fascinating to analyze it as a political science
experiment, so fraught with all the possibilities of
instability," he says. "I try to be optimistic about Iraq ... but
there is a whole range of things that could go wrong. The
breakdown of civil order is not the thing I fear most. It is
that people have been demobilized for so long it will take a
while to feel they can be involved in the country. They
need channels to get there.
"It's not going to be worked out in the next year," he says.
"Maybe in the next five to 10 years."
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun |
