Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2003, pages 14-17

Three Views

 

A Post-War Arab World—Three Views

 

Democracy—Be Careful What You Wish For

 

By Youssef M. Ibrahim

The rumble of armor across southern Iraq and the thunder of bombs in Baghdad ended the debate over whether to go to war. But it opened new fronts in the debate over the use of American power.

Few doubt that the war will bring historic changes in the region as well as in America’s relationships with other nations. A member of the Defense Policy Board has said that U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would “reshuffle the deck” in the Middle East and promote U.S. interests, democracy and liberal values. But the invasion could also be akin to taking the deck, throwing the cards in the air and hoping they land facing up. So far, the results remain up in the air.

Even if the invasion is a military success, it could still mean new dangers for American diplomacy, political tensions in the Arab world, dilemmas for the antiwar movement and challenges inside Iraq itself, which President Bush said would be ruled by an “Iraqi Interim Authority” imposed by the United States.

There were two striking results in an opinion survey conducted earlier this month by Zogby International in six Arab countries—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.

One was that a huge majority of people in those countries said that, if given the choice, they would like their Islamic clergy to play roles bigger than the subservient ones currently prescribed by most Arab governments.

Equally impressive, less than 6 percent of those polled believed that the United States was waging its campaign in Iraq to create a more democratic Arab or Muslim world. Close to 95 percent were convinced that the United States was after control of Arab oil and the subjugation of the Palestinians to Israel’s will. The survey, commissioned by University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, also showed that overwhelming margins said that terrorism was going to increase, rather than decrease, as a result of the U.S.-led invasion.

President Bush has said that the invasion of Iraq, and the establishment of a new government there, would be a “catalyst” for change in the region. But what kind of change? Rather than leading to liberal, pro-Western democracy, as Bush suggests, the war in Iraq is likely to bring only more radical Islamic fundamentalism. After all, the Islamic fundamentalist parties, grouped under the big tent of the Muslim Brotherhood, are the only forces with the organization, capability and ambition to take power if democracy were to become an option in the Arab world.

 

Democracy could lead to one-time elections and the triumph of radical Islam.

Arab leaders are plainly worried by this prospect. A few weeks ago in Cairo, during a fact-finding trip for the Council on Foreign Relations, I had a three-hour private conversation with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about the politics of the region, the coming war in Iraq and U.S. policy. Though closely allied with the United States, Egypt has been pressed by the Bush administration to undertake democratic reforms.

Mubarak recounted an episode to illustrate the degree to which radical Islam has infiltrated Egypt, the most populous Arab country. When Mustafa Mashhour, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, died in the middle of the night last November, Mubarak ordered his domestic intelligence and security services to go on high alert and block tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers from flocking to Cairo from all over the country to take part in the funeral. As in Judaism, Islamic burials have to be carried out a day after death. The adherents had no more than a few hours and word of mouth to get word of the funeral out through their vast secret network.

Yet the Muslim Brotherhood is, to use a Saddam Hussain euphemism, the mother of all Islamic militant organizations. Founded in Egypt in the 1930s, it has helped give birth to every Muslim radical movement, from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda to Palestinians’ Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Its tight structure helped spread the word of the funeral quickly.

“I had security people block all the entry points and exits of Cairo,” Mubarak said, speaking of the Egyptian metropolis of 16 million people. “It was a massive security operation and our services are among the best at it,” he said, gesturing to make his point. By all accounts, tens of thousands were turned away. Hundreds of buses were searched. Well-known militants were arrested or sent home.

“Yet, you know what,” Mubarak said, raising his eyebrows. “When the funeral took place, there were over 80,000 Muslim Brothers there.” The president paused, and jabbing his finger at me, said, “When your Americans talk about democracy in the Middle East, who do they think is going to take over? Democrats?” It will be the Muslim Brotherhood’s pawns in Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and Palestine, Mubarak asserted.

Mubarak has reason to be concerned. Given sentiments in the Arab world today, democracy could lead to one-time elections and the triumph of radical Islam. It happened in Algeria in 1992, forcing the army there to void the election results and resume its rotten dictatorial rule. Civil war there has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

 

An Alternative to Failure

Everywhere you look in the Middle East and the Muslim world, including places such as Pakistan and Indonesia, fundamentalism is rising, thanks to the social services, medical care and religious education that Islamic groups provide as an alternative to the failed services of failed states.

Yet Islamic fundamentalism appeals not only to the poor. Most leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are graduates of engineering and medical schools, people one might consider less inclined to blindly embrace religion. Bin Laden is an engineer. Ayman Zawahiri, his number two, was a successful physician. Mohammad Atta, who led the attack on the World Trade Center, was a multilingual architect.

While the radicals are gaining strength, alienation is spreading among the ruling elites, business class, academic and artistic circles, and moderate religious leaders—America’s natural friends, who could provide liberal alternatives. Take the sheikh of Egypt’s prominent Al-Azhar University, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who is renowned as both a scholar and a moderate. Over the past two years, with considerable difficulty, Sheik Tantawi has ousted radical preachers from his university. Yet last week, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he said people should wage jihad against the United States.

Anger emerges in popular culture, too. The most popular singer in Egypt is Shaaban Abdel-Rahim, an illiterate man whose tape “I Hate Israel” has sold more than 5 million copies. One of the most successful plays, “Mama America,” a virulently anti-American piece by well-known artist Mohammed Sobhi, has been running for months.

Around the region, the story is similar. In Jordan, Muslim Brotherhood leaders have bonded with Palestinian Islamic movements, hoping to arouse the Palestinians, who make up 70 percent of Jordan’s population, to rise in support of their brethren in the Israeli-occupied territories next door. In Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabi preachers are thriving still, the Bin Laden message continues to resonate. Despite denials from the Saudi royal family, the population knows that U.S. forces are using Saudi bases to operate against Iraq.

Even Syria, despite its fearsome reputation for crushing dissent, is struggling to contain the radical Islamic threat. Alarmed by the spread of Islamic influence in medical school classrooms, Syrian President Bashar Assad has made several speeches recently attempting to disconnect science from Islam. People close to him say that Assad, a physician himself, has argued that science should encourage the questioning of beliefs, not the blind embrace of them.

The rising power of radical Islam is driven by two forces. One is anger that the bankrupt states of the Muslim and Arab world have offered nothing better than the sort of repression Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, delivered for years. The other is deep mistrust of U.S. intentions and policies toward Palestinians, Iraqis and Muslims in general—before and, more so, after Sept. 11. In surveys conducted over the past two years, Arabs and Muslims describe the Palestinian issue as very important, indeed central, to their antagonistic attitude toward the United States.

There is little question Arab and Muslim regimes are contributing to what I believe will be their ultimate demise by running on empty. While Islamic militants have no genuine social program—except the empty slogan of “Islam is the solution”—the governments repressing them don’t have programs either. Instead the governments have tolerated corruption and grave social neglect. Democracy is the last thing on the minds of either side. Radical fundamentalists believe it is positively anti-Islamic. Present governments are not prepared to depart.

Above all, hardly anyone in the Middle East believes the Bush administration gives a hoot about it either. I recall a dinner last spring given by a senior Saudi prince at the plush Globe restaurant in Riyadh on top of the Faisaliyah towers, just after Bush called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “a man of peace.” My host, a graduate of UCLA, looked at me and asked, “Is that how your American pals are planning to make friends in this region?” He was speaking of his American pals, too.

Youssef Ibrahim is a former Middle East and energy correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared in The Washington Post March 23, 2003. ©2003 The Washington Post Company. Reprinted with permission.

 

Iraq: More Unified Than It Looks

 

By Andrew Cockburn

Back in March 1991, when much of Iraq had risen in revolt against Saddam Hussain, posters of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini began appearing in southern Iraqi towns, where the population is overwhelmingly Shi’i. Nothing could have been more calculated to give heart palpitations to the Bush administration of the day, since the posters signaled that the Shi’i rebels were mere cat’s-paws of the ruling Shi’i mullahs in Tehran.

Fearful that the Iranians might be poised to help themselves to a large, oil-producing chunk of a disintegrating Iraq, Washington withheld even moral support for the uprising, and Saddam survived to fight another day. So conveniently did the posters fit in with American preconceptions about sectarian loyalties and divisions in Iraq that knowledgeable Iraqis insist they were produced and displayed by Saddam’s own agents to stoke paranoia in Washington—and achieved precisely their desired effect.

Twelve years on, inhibitions about displacing Saddam have obviously evaporated, but misconceptions regarding Iraq as a fragile entity, riven with sectarian divisions and prone to disintegration, persist. What might be called the American version of “Iraq 101” depicts an artificial state created 80 years ago by order of the British out of three distinct vilayets—provinces—of the Ottoman Empire, in which the minority Sunni Arab population, most forcefully represented by Saddam Hussain, has always dominated the resentful Shi’i majority, and the ethnically distinct (Sunni) Kurds in the north, not to mention the Turkomen and Assyrians and other small minorities. Hence it is conventional wisdom that Iraq could well fall apart if the Shi’i—“an underclass through Iraq’s modern history,” according to Iraq pundit Kenneth Pollack of the Council on Foreign Relations—were ever given the opportunity to secede.

But while non-Iraqi experts may have little problem with the idea of an Iraq with the fractured nationhood of Northern Ireland or Lebanon, Iraqis themselves tend to vociferously disagree, often reciting their personal ties to other communities for good measure. “My mother is Sunni, my father Shi’a,” says Fareed Yassin, who left Baghdad in the mid-’70s and now lives in Boston. “One-third of the Muslims in my high school graduating class were from mixed Sunni-Shi’i marriages, and that was typical of Baghdad—and remember that everyone in Iraq is at most two relatives away from Baghdad.”

Nor does he think much of the idea that Iraq is too young to be a real country: “So what if Iraq only formally became a nation 80 years ago. De Tocqueville had no trouble discovering an American identity, and the U.S. had only been going 50 years when he visited.”

 

“Everyone in Iraq is at most two relatives away from Baghdad.”

Indeed, Iraqi nationalism could be said to have manifested itself as early as 1920, when most of the territory that had been captured by the British from the Turks rose in bloody revolt against the new colonial masters. “The mistake we made in not adopting repressive methods earlier,” wrote the British military commander afterwards, “threw…the Sunni townsmen and the Shiah [sic] countryfolk together.”

Hussein Shahristani, a leading Iraqi nuclear scientist and a revered figure in the Shi’i community, who suffered years of torture and solitary confinement for telling Saddam Hussain to his face that he would not work on a bomb, hotly decries the notion that Kurds, Sunni and Shi’i cannot work together in a democracy. Although there have been a handful of instances of inter-communal strife, such as Kurdish-Turkomen riots in Kirkuk in 1959, Shahristani notes that they are rare and politically inspired. “In Iraq there has never been a civil war,” he points out, citing not only the long centuries of tolerance between different sects but also different religions and races in what was once called Mesopotamia. “Iraq is a very old nation—multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-sectarian for many millennia.”

Violence against particular communities, he insists, has always been the work of a dictatorial government rather than popular movements. Even government campaigns against the ethnically distinct Kurds to quell their perennial efforts to achieve independence, argues Shahristani, never had popular endorsement.

My friend Anwar Diab, a Shi’a who can claim a Sunni wife and a half-Kurdish son-in-law in his immediate family, points out that while the Sunni population has tended to hold most of the political power, the Shi’i have hardly been confined to the underclass as a group. While the vast slum of Baghdad’s Saddam City attests to the poverty of Shi’i immigrants from the countryside, the Shi’i community spans all social classes.

“Under the Ottomans and the British the Sunni went to school and became bureaucrats and army officers,” he explains. “But the Shia had the economic power, either as big landowners in the south or in business.”

Ahmed Chalabi, for example, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, is not only a Shi’i, but a scion of what was one of the richest banking families in Baghdad. Nor indeed, have the Shi’i always been totally excluded from political influence. A few rose to senior positions in the days of the monarchy. More recently, many have been members in good standing of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, an unfortunate number of whom were torn to pieces along with their Sunni colleagues by angry rebel crowds in March 1991.

 

Saddam as Instigator

Iraqis often point to Saddam as the source and instigator of whatever inter-communal tension may exist. The core of his regime has always been exclusively Sunni, but that sectarian affiliation is far less important than the fact that he has ruled through his family, clan, tribe and associated tribes from around his home base of Tikrit.

Around the country these tribal networks, some of which encompass both Sunni and Shi’i members, form a potent network of allegiance and power.

Hence, with Sunni tribesmen holding political power in Baghdad, they tended to hand out jobs and patronage to fellow family members and tribesmen. But “the Shia tribes do the same thing whenever they get the chance,” observes Diab.

Saddam, no mere thug but a crafty political manipulator, has always been deft at turning tribal politics and rivalries to his own advantage. He has also, especially lately, shown a keen interest in pumping up otherwise quiescent sectarian rivalries, the better to reinforce his own position as the ultimate umpire of Iraqi politics. For example, in Basra, the staunchly Shi’i principal city of the south, there is an enclave of Sunnis, who had traditionally enjoyed harmonious relations with their fellow Basrans. “After the 1991 uprising had been defeated,” explains Laith Kubba, a veteran opposition activist, Saddam “used the Sunnis to punish or execute Shi’i prisoners. The idea was to make them terrified of their neighbors and therefore readier to fight for Saddam in any future uprising just to survive.”

Given Iraq’s history of relative sectarian harmony, Kubba is worried by reports circulating among the opposition that the United States plans to govern Iraq in the immediate postwar period with the help of a “Group of Ten” Iraqis, each selected to represent a particular sect or ethnic group. “If Saddam planted the seeds of sectarianism in Iraq,” he laments, “this will nurture them.” Kubba cites the ominous precedent of Lebanon, the political system of which was organized by the French on a similar sectarian basis.

“Despite a strong, well-educated middle class,” he points out, “the Lebanese have never been able to shake off this legacy.” He fears that a misplaced belief that Iraq is merely a collection of distinct communities may lead his country to the same fate.

On the other hand, the coming months may show that Iraqi nationhood is greater than the sum of its parts—even the Kurds are now seeking a more powerful role in central government, rather than independence, as a means of guaranteeing their liberties. If that is the case, then anyone who attempts to rule over Iraqis should recall the rebel hymn chanted by the Sunnis and Shi’i who came together to fight the British in 1920: “O you people of Iraq, you are not prisoners/To submit your shoulders to the chains.…“

Andrew Cockburn is co-author of Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (Harper Perennial). This article first appeared in The Washington Post March 23, 2003. ©2003 The Washington Post Company. Reprinted with permission.

 

Adnan Pachachi: Iraqis “Should Run Post-War Iraq”

 

By Neena Gopal

Flying in the face of a carefully orchestrated, U.S.-inspired opposition that convened in Salahddin only weeks ago, that aims to set up an interim administration in post-war Iraq overseen by the Americans, Adnan Pachachi, former foreign minister of Iraq and a self described “Arab nationalist” is putting the finishing touches to his own wholly Iraqi opposition conference.

To be convened on March 29 in London, the conference will represent “the silent majority of Iraq,” the stepping stone toward creating “a post-war Iraq for Iraqis by Iraqis.”

His group, the so-called “Leadership Group’s” conference later this month will bring together “hundreds of independent Iraqis, representative of the silent majority of Iraq, the true Iraq, a secular, democratic Iraq.”

“We want to establish a pluralistic democracy in Iraq, a free press, free speech, restore human rights,” he said, in an exclusive interview with Gulf News yesterday, a day after returning from London.

Determinedly brushing aside criticism that Iraq unused to democracy for over 30 years may find freedom unleashing fissiparous tendencies he said: “Churchill said democracy may be a terrible system of government but it is still the only acceptable system. Why can’t we have a democracy?

“We had it in the ‘20s when the state of Iraq came into being, and up until the government was overthrown in 1958. There was a vocal opposition that was allowed to freely criticize the government over its policies. There was no retaliation. The only government crackdown was on saboteurs and communists.”

“Even an imperfect democracy is better than this,” he added.

Distancing himself from the so-called “group of six” formed at Salahddin, overseen by U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, he said: “My name was put up twice, I was nominated twice, and I have declined twice. I have nothing to do with Salahddin.”

Pachachi’s critique—the group, made up of mainly Kurdish and Shi’i leaders is “deeply controversial,” as it is not broadly representative of the Iraqi people and divided on ethnic and religious lines, when in fact, Iraqis do not see themselves as colored by their ethnic or religious roots. The fact that it was under the U.S.’s umbrella and therefore suspect in Iraqi eyes was left unsaid.

He is the lone Sunni, in a largely Shi’i-dominated opposition with known links to neighboring Iran, but rejects that nomenclature, saying: “We Iraqis have lived together for centuries without discriminating between Christian and Muslim and Shia and Sunni. There are no blood feuds. There is widespread inter-marriage. The spread of education has ensured that we remain secular.”

As Iraqi ambassador to the U.N. from 1959 to 1965, and again from 1967 to 1969, and foreign minister from 1965 to 1967, he is seen by many in Washington as having the democratic credentials and necessary gravitas to head an interim administration in a post-war Iraq, as opposed to the other U.S. favorite, Ahmed Chalaby.

Pachachi’s political lineage is also impressive—his father, father-in-law and uncle were members of a secret society that worked against Ottoman rule, and took over the running of the newly emergent Iraqi state.

While admitting that, at the current time, he is uncertain what role, if any, the U.N. could play, with the U.S. and Britain looking to bypass the U.N. on plans to attack Iraq, Pachachi said his group’s London conference would go ahead with plans to work with the U.N. on appointing a representative to run post-war Iraq.

This representative would, in turn, hold extensive consultations with Iraqis drawn from all political persuasions and professional groups to set up a civil administration.

“This Iraqi administration will have three main tasks—to maintain peace and order, to protect and defend the country against any outside interference, and to provide all essential services to the people, including water and food, as well as health care [and] education, while taking immediate steps to revive the economy.”

The main task, he stressed, will be to set up a transitional government that will prepare Iraq for democratic elections.

“We would set up electoral laws, based on universal suffrage, preceded by free debate in newspapers and the media. There will be a constituent assembly set up under the U.N.’s auspices that will be entrusted with the task of drafting a constitution, which will have irrevocable guarantees of democratic freedoms and a smooth transfer of power through periodic elections.

“This constitution will be submitted to the Iraqi people’s approval in a referendum. The Iraqi people will decide what system of government they want—a republic, a presidential form of government, a bicameral parliamentary system. And within two years, we will hold elections. We want a lasting, genuine democracy in Iraq, that expresses the will of the people.”

Objecting to U.S. plans to run post-war Iraq, he said he held talks on Friday with U.S. special envoy to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad on the subject.

“Why do we need anyone other than Iraqis?“ he asked. “We have highly educated, accomplished Iraqis who can be tasked with running an interim administration,” added Pachachi.

He believes, too, that there is no necessity for U.S. troops to be involved in peacekeeping once the Iraqi regime had been ousted, warning that it could lead to instability. “The Iraqi soldier is not political, the bulk of the Iraqi army is far removed from the regime, he would do a far better job with maintaining peace and order than an American soldier, as he knows the country better. He would also be far more acceptable.”

Suggesting that “a general amnesty” would be in order to avoid the politics of vendetta, he said it was the only way to start afresh. “A lot of people have suffered under this brutal regime,” he added, noting, too, that the U.S. attempt at regime change was probably the only way to replace the current dispensation. “None of the previous attempts to topple the regime have succeeded.”

Indeed, he says, [UAE] President His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s proposal calling on Saddam to step down was welcomed by Iraqis all over the world. “It was the proposal of a leader and a visionary who understands the wishes and aspirations of the Iraqi people,” he added.

As Pachachi emerges from retirement to pick up the baton of opposition leader of what is even now, with war seemingly only days away, a largely discordant orchestra, he is stepping back into a diplomatic vortex.

The phone doesn’t stop ringing in his plush apartment overlooking the azure blue Arabian Gulf in Abu Dhabi. There are a string of visitors, among them senior diplomats, and back-to-back interviews with journalists these days.

“My life is completely topsy-turvy,” confesses the urbane former diplomat, who served in the UAE government as an adviser to Sheikh Zayed for 30 years until his retirement recently. He is now a UAE citizen and there is no longing to return home. “Even when I worked for the Iraqi government I lived abroad, I am a citizen of the world.”

“My wife, Selwa, and I were looking forward to the quiet life in the twilight of our years—you know I am nearly 80,” he said. A black-and-white photograph of him with Sheikh Zayed in 1971 on the day the UAE became a nation underlines his strong links with his adopted home. “But with events unfolding the way they have, I felt compelled to step in,” he said.

Never targeted by Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, he has in fact been invited to return many times. “The Ba’athists never saw me as a threat. I am not motivated by vendetta. My motivation is purely the restoration of democracy to my country.”

March 3, 2003 Gulf News Online ©Al Nisr Publishing LLC. Reprinted with permission.

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