08Jan04-Daniel Oppenheimer-An Elective War - Iraq, its exiles, its neocons and their reasons
by Daniel Oppenheimer - January 8, 2004
PHOTO ©AP/WIDEWORLD PHOTOS
Stuff happens
The poignant figure in Truth, War and Consequences , one of a series of Frontline documentaries about the war in Iraq, is Kanan Makiya. Exiled from Iraq until the U.S. occupation, Makiya is identified in the first scene of the program, by correspondent Martin Smith, as a man "who has been at the center of efforts to topple Saddam for more than a decade."
Smith and Makiya are driving in a convoy of Iraqi exiles from Kuwait City to Baghdad, two weeks after the toppling of the statues of Saddam Hussein and 32 years after Makiya left Baghdad, at the age of 18, to study architecture in America. They pass exploded Iraqi tanks on the side of road, as well as American army convoys moving equipment and soldiers into the interior of Iraq. The landscape is desolate. "This was once upon a time the Fertile Crescent," says Makiya. "Saddam's turned it into a desert."
Smith and Makiya part ways in Baghdad, but the echo of Makiya's troubled voice accompanies Smith through the morass in Baghdad -- caught most awfully, on camera, by the shooting by American soldiers of an unarmed pedestrian -- and through Smith's interviews with other Eminent Men as he tries to disentangle the decade of decisions, and the awkward synthesis of motives, that led to the successful war and the not-so-successful postwar engagement.
Depending on whom you talk to, Makiya is either a hero of democratic resistance or part of a dark cabal to subjugate the Arab world to American power. On the heroic side of the ledger is his publication, in 1989, of Republic of Fear , the first real exploration of the crimes of the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein, and its 1993 sequel Cruelty of Silence , which focused on the complicity of Arab intellectuals in ignoring Saddam's brutality. In 1992 he traveled to the north of Iraq to help Frontline produce Saddam's Killing Fields , about the massacres of the Kurds. Now, in the aftermath of the war, he's on the committee to draft a new constitution and is the leader of a project to create an archive to catalogue the crimes of the Ba'athists and commemorate their victims.
On the sinister side: He was, from 1991, one of the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group that provided the Bush administration, via allies in the Department of Defense and the neoconservative establishment, much of the highly suspect intelligence about weapons of mass destructions upon which the case for war was made to the public. He's an eloquent advocate of what Smith calls the reverse domino theory, the notion -- which was apparently essential to persuading president Bush-- that a stable and democratic Iraq would spawn liberalization throughout the Middle East. And he's the man who told President Bush that American forces would be greeted as liberators, "with sweets and flowers."
He also looks like James Taylor, with the same half-moon of a receding hairline and the same gentle face touched with sorrow. His voice and tone are soulful in a way that none of the other 11 men -- generals, spooks, diplomats, proconsuls -- interviewed for Truth, War and Consequences can manage. They wear crisp fatigues, bureacratic dark blues and slick Armanis, but we see Makiya, on the road to Baghdad and in his studio interview, in soft, middle-aged clothes: slacks, loafers, a short-sleeved collar shirt and rounded glasses.
He looks less like a conspirator than like a dad, and it's that fact, more than his arguments, that constitutes his most potent plea to restore justice to Iraq, to make it a place where mothers and fathers can protect their children. He admits, however, as few of his fellow apologists for the war will, that the American people were sold the war as a matter of national security rather than as the war of liberation he defends. "We could do with a lot more talking about that," he says, "but of course for reasons that are -- let's call it typically realpolitik -- people don't talk about these things."
Truth, War & Consequences is excellent, but not for the reasons its creators intended. It takes on too much to suffice as either a good overview or a penetrating microcosm of the leadup to the war or the problems of its aftermath.
There's a fascinating moment, for instance, when American soldiers use their tank to crush the sedan of a suspected looter, and it's heartrending when Smith then reports that the car's owner was a taxi driver whose one means of support for his family was just destroyed. The soldiers' glee is also disturbing, but it's hard to judge the incident's meaning because it was the army's initial failure to prevent looting that's the object of so much criticism in the rest of the program.
We get glimpses into the careful syntax of bureaucratic hostilities and rivalries. Greg Thielmann, a former high-level official for the State Department, explains how his intelligence analysts considered and then rejected the possibility that aluminum tubes traced to Iraq were for a secret nuclear program. When asked if Colin Powell, his former boss, was lying when he made the contrary claim in his presentation to the U.N., Thielmann says, "I don't like to use the word 'lying' because, again, it implies that I know what was in his mind on these issues. All I can say is that I have to conclude he was making the president's case."
Robert Perito, a veteran organizer of peacekeeping and post-conflict operations, lashes out at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his reaction to the looting in Baghdad. "If you remember, Secretary Rumsfeld made these now-famous remarks about people should be free to do stupid things, or these remarks about, 'This is what happens when you allow people the freedom to act on their instincts.' ... 'Stuff happens.' There were all these remarks that he made, and that struck me as -- 'irresponsible' is a pretty harsh word -- but basically irresponsible."
In an interview segment that didn't make it into the program but was published on Frontline's web site, Smith asks Richard Perle, half-seriously, "What's the cabal?"
"There is no cabal," says Perle.
"You're a charter member of the cabal," says Smith.
"OK. But what does it mean to say there's a cabal?"
The cabal Smith means is the group of people -- exiles like Makiya and INC founder Ahmad Chalabi, neoconservative operators like Perle and administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz -- who promoted regime change in Iraq for years and who found in September 11 an opportune political moment to pitch the plan to the President.
Perle's question, however, remains unanswered by the documentary. What does it mean to say there's a cabal?
The war in Iraq raises so many suspicions -- of conspiracies, imperial ambitions and oil pipelines -- because, as former State Department official Richard Haass says, "It was something we chose to do." It was an elective war, and it was advocated by a tiny group of people whom history conspired to provide access to the president at a moment when he would be willing to listen, and when the American people were willing to be led. Does this constitute a cabal?
The answer, I would hazard, is no. The answer, and this is what Truth, War and Consequences gets right, is Kanan Makiya. He is a small man, proud but also humble before the enormous gamble he's helped to set into motion. "I mean, look," he says, "this is a historic change. Nothing like this has ever been tried before.... There are no rules for what is going on here, this is new. Everything is new."
That many of his allies, high on hubris and abetted by the media, have glammed themselves up doesn't change the fact that they too are small. This is a grand war being conducted by small people -- by human beings -- and that's scarier than any cabal.
Truth, War and Consequences
can be watched online at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/truth/. The full transcripts of interviews with Kanan Makiya, Ahmad Chalabi, L. Paul Bremer, Jay Garner, Richard Perle and others are also available online, as are links to other informational sites on the war.
valleyadvocate.com |
