Informed Comment

Wolfowitz of Baghdad?

Rumors are flying around official Washington that the new US ambassador in Iraq as of July 1 will be Paul Wolfowitz. He is currently deputy Secretary of Defense, but probably could not have continued into a second Bush term. He is associated with the worst mistakes of Iraq– concentrating in 2001 on Saddam rather than on al-Qaeda, hyping Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, insisting that Iraqis would welcome a US occupation with garlands, thinking Iraqi Shiites were “secular” and had no sensitive holy cities in that country, and backing the corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi and his militia as successors to Saddam and the Baath. He is probably already a liability to Bush in this election. There were earlier rumors that he might step down this spring.

Sending him to Baghdad as ambassador would solve a problem for Bush domestically, perhaps. But having a Likudnik* run the US embassy in Baghdad would be a complete disaster for US policy in Iraq and in the whole region. It would be proof positive to the insurgents in Iraq that the US intends to reshape the country in accordance with a Zionist agenda and make Iraqis the bitches of Ariel Sharon [Mind you, I think this conspiratorial way of thinking illegitimate, but it is already a theme in Iraqi popular political discourse]. It seems unlikely to me that Wolfowitz could get the cooperation of the Shiite clerics.

You also wonder whether Wolfowitz could be a successful ambassador, given the way he has sidelined and badmouthed the State Department. Wouldn’t the foreign service officers find ways to sabotage him?

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*the objection to calling Wolfowitz a Likudnik is often raised, that he believes in a Palestinian state. But even Sharon says that. Wolfowitz is probably closer to the Sharansky faction in Israeli politics (which is in coalition with Likud) than to Sharon, but he is still on the Right and would not exactly vote Labor. It is a little unlikely that the Arab street will be interested in these distinctions.

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8% of Iraqi academics have Fled, 1000 Professionals Assassinated in past Year

Ahmad Janabi reports that

‘ More than 1000 leading Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been assassinated since last April, among them such prominent figures as Dr Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University. The identity of the assailants remains a mystery and none have been caught. ‘

Political scientist Dhafir Salman is quoted as saying that although many Iraqi intellectuals fled the country during the sanctions regime in the 1990s, ‘ under the occupation the rate of emigration has increased. “Iraqi universities have lost 1315 scientists who hold MA and PhD degrees,” al-Ani said. “This number constitutes eight per cent of the 15,500 Iraqi academics. “Up until now, 30% of those who were sacked as result of the [de-baathification] campaign have left Iraq.” ‘

In my view, a lot of the assassinations have been carried out by individuals with Baath-era grudges or by radical Shiite militiamen. But some of them could just be personal grudge-settling. (I saw this phenomenon–of personal grudge-settling, not with regard to academic–in Beirut during the Civil War. When there is social chaos, neighbors with rifles who don’t like another neighbor sometimes just take a pot shot at him through his kitchen window. It is a little unlikely that the shooter will be caught when there are few effective police and bigger fish to fry).

There has been a struggle during the past year over de-Baathification. Party membership was forced on a lot of capable people. Ahmad Chalabi wants to do massive de-baathification, which means even minor party members would be blackballed. This is apparently what is happening in the universities. Others have suggested only banning or conducting reprisals against the people who committed crimes or held fairly high party or military posts. My impression is that the latter policy was followed in post-war Germany, and that the Nazi high school teachers just went on teaching. Likewise professors like Martin Heidegger were not locked up or killed, even though Heidegger fired his Jewish colleagues and was certainly a fellow traveler of the Nazi regime.

There is a contrast to be made here in revolutionary situations. In 1949 when the Chinese Communists came to power, they actively tried to keep entrepreneurs and professionals in the country, and made special arrangements to allow that. In contrast, in 1979 when Khomeini carried out the clerical revolution in Iran, the hardliners chased most of the really talented professionals out of the country. Iran suffered horribly as a result.

So, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim Governing Council can do things the Chinese way, or the Khomeini way. It looks as though Chalabi is taking them in the Khomeini direction. It can’t be good for the future of Iraq to lose nearly 10% of its academics. Some of those may have been involved in Baath Party dirty tricks, but were all? And, the campaign of assassination makes a mockery of the rhetoric about democratization.

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UN Excluded from Overseeing Elections

Al-Hayat reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of “help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC that elections would have to be a purely Iraqi affair,

that Iraqis would have to take the leading role in them, and that there would be no UN role in administering elections. He also said that no interference would be brooked from Iraq’s neighbors.

Qanbar and the INC sharply criticized UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for having opposed the first Gulf War (which aimed at forcing Saddam back out of Kuwait), and blamed him for meeting with Saddam in 1998. He also criticized Brahimi’s statement that Iraq might face a civil war. Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a cleric now in the last days of his temporary presidency of the IGC, had also complained two days ago in Kuwait that Brahimi’s report on Iraq had lacked balance.

Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has rejected charges that he had misused American funds, saying that such charges derived from the CIA and that they were false.

Chalabi was supported by the CIA and the State Department around 1992 to 1996 or so, when they dropped him because he could not give an accounting of the millions of dollars they had given him to overthrow Saddam. He was then picked up by the Pentagon instead, and especially once the Bush administration came to power.

The attempt by the INC to marginalize Brahimi and the United Nations reflects Chalabi’s fear that he would not be able to win a fair, UN-supervised election. One fears he plans on vote-buying and other corrupt acts to be elected or appointed to a high Iraqi governing post, possibly as Prime Minister. Although the al-Hayat story says that the IGC wants to limit the UN role, if one looks carefully this move seems to be coming mainly from Chalabi and his people.

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Sistani: Elections must be Held soon

az-Zaman/Wire Services:

A spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani says that elections must be held as soon as possible, and that anything done before the people have spoken is illegitimate. He is quoted as saying that “the principal political forces are not calling for an Islamic republic.” He said that Iraqis are well aware of the dangers of ethnic conflict and that they “do not call for the establishment of religious government. “

Sistani just wants a government that will respect the universally acknowledged Islamic principles. The state should respect the rights of minorities, he said.

Sistani is portrayed in some quarters as a Khomeini wannabe and as indistinguishable from Muqtada al-Sadr.

Going on what he says, though, he envisages a situation in Iraq analogous to that in Ireland for most of the 20th century. That is, the Catholic church did not rule; there was a secular parliament for that purpose. But the church effectively weighed in on legislation it thought affect it. Likewise, Sistani says he doesn’t want ayatollahs actually running the government. But they should intervene with fatwas or rulings when legislation arises that affects Islamic issues.

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Is the failure of the Arab Summit a Failure of Bush’s Democratization Plan?

Rob Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle examines the issues around the collapse of the Arab League summit that had been planned for Tunis, asking if the “Greater Middle East” plan of the Bush administration, which pushes democratization, is having any effect.

‘ U.S. officials hoped that the summit would set the region on a path toward Western-style free elections and free markets. But commentators in the United States and the Middle East say the administration has instead made matters worse by appearing to shove democracy down the throats of reluctant Arab leaders.

“The Greater Middle East Initiative is going nowhere fast,” said Andrew Apostolou, a Mideast analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative Washington think tank. “The problem is that Arab states are in no mood to agree to any form of externally generated freedoms, and I see no way out of this. I don’t think the Bush administration has handled this well.” ‘

I am quoted saying that I thought the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq have if anything caused severe setbacks for civil liberties and democratization in the region. Iraq’s chaos is enough to scare anyone in the region into thinking maybe a little authoritarianism is better, as long as you don’t have to worry about your kids being kidnapped or your mosque being blown up. The US has encouraged governments like Tunisia and Yemen to take Draconian measures because of the war on terror (it should be recognized that terrorists are mostly only conspirators before they pull off an operation, so the temptation, as in Egypt in the 1990s, is to put thousands in jail for thought crimes). The Iranian hardliners have encaged the reformers. I don’t see any positive effect of Bush administration policies in the region. Positive views of the US in the region have fallen to like 10% a lot of places. The US vetoing UN SC condemnation of Sharon’s government for firing helicopter gunship rockets at a paraplegic was probably the last straw for a lot of people. I doubt the Bush administration has any credibility anywhere in the region. That it is going to “reshape” anything when its HQ in Baghdad is under routine rocket attack seems to me a little unlikely.

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