Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2004, pages 6-7, 14

Special Report

Bush Promises Democracy But Iraqis and Palestinians Aren't Cheering

By Rachelle Marshall

	Iraqi Shi’i Muslim supporters of leading Shi’i cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani shout slogans in support of elections during a protest in Samawa, 170 miles south of Baghdad, Jan. 21. Some 500 people turned out to support Sistani’s demands for the U.S.-led coalition to abandon power-transfer plans immediately in favor of full elections (AFP photo/Mauricio Lima).

"IF YOU MOVE TOO FAST, the wrong people could get elected." Comment by Noah Feldman, Coalition Provisional Authority's law adviser on Iraq, quoted in The New York Times, January 27.

When President Bush says that "freedom will prevail," in fact he means that America will prevail. George Soros in his book The Bubble of American Supremacy.

Now that Saddam Hussain's weapons of mass destruction have proved nonexistent, the fighting in Iraq has become "a war for democracy," according to the Bush administration. At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in late January Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States was "helping the peoples of the Middle East to overcome the freedom deficit." In his State of the Union speech this year George W. Bush declared that "America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East" and vowed to "challenge the enemies of reform." In an interview published in the Jan. 7 New York Times National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Bush was committed to spreading democracy throughout the world. "The president's innovation," she explained, "was to take this sense that democratic states are different, and to apply that to the Middle East."

Bush's dedication to democracy so far has failed to convince most Iraqis and Palestinians—two peoples in desperate need of freedom. One reason for their skepticism may be the lack of credibility on the part of an administration that continues to support brutal warlords in Afghanistan, maintains alliances with corrupt despots in the former Soviet Republics, and gives unstinting support to Israel. To the White House, democracy is a flexible concept, depending on current military and economic objectives. It is especially flexible where Palestinians and Iraqis are concerned.

Rice said in her New York Times interview that during the violence that followed Israel's Spring 2002 invasion and reoccupation of the West Bank, Bush asked "Did we have some fundamental problem here?" The conclusion, Rice said, was that they did have a problem—and it was Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. So while Israeli forces were laying waste to Palestinian cities, destroying the civic structure of Palestinian society and killing scores of Palestinians, including children, Bush and Rice determined that a solution to the conflict required that Arafat be marginalized. It was a policy that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had been urging, and Bush promptly appointed fiercely pro-Israel Elliott Abrams as director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council to enforce it. Neither Bush nor Rice saw any contradiction in preaching democracy to the Palestinians while refusing to deal with their democratically elected leader.

Bush continues to demand that the Palestinians crack down on violent resistance groups and undertake democratic reforms—actions impossible to carry out as long as the Israeli army continues to raid Palestinian towns and refugee camps, demolish homes, and kill both civilians and militants. There is no way Palestinians can hold elections while the entire population remains imprisoned behind checkpoints and an apartheid wall.

While every suicide bombing in Israel arouses protest from Washington, there was only silence from the administration in early January while Israeli troops were demolishing scores of homes in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp and repeatedly invading the West Bank city of Nablus. There were no protests, even from UNESCO, at Israel's destruction of ancient archaeological sites and historical buildings in the old section of Nablus, a city whose history dates back to the Canaanites and Samaritans. "We have a catastrophic situation," the governor of Nablus, Mahmoud el-Aloul, said while the city was under siege and after Israeli soldiers had killed 15 people, including three teenagers.

Aloul accused Sharon of escalating attacks on the civilian population in order to prevent a political solution to the conflict. As if to substantiate his charge, Israeli troops stormed into Gaza on Jan. 28 and killed eight Palestinians while Egyptian diplomats were meeting with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders in an effort to persuade militant groups to end their attacks. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei was meeting the same day with U.S. Middle East envoy John Wolf, who had returned to the area after a four-month absence to discuss ways to restart the peace process.

An angry Qurei accused Israel of deliberately timing the raid to coincide with the peacekeeping mission of the American envoy. The usual cycle of violence followed. The day after the attack on Gaza, Ali Muneer Jaara, a policeman from Bethlehem, set off a bomb in Jerusalem that killed 10 Israelis and wounded 30 others. It was the first suicide bombing since Dec. 25. Jaara left a note saying the bombing was in revenge for Israel's killing of Palestinians two days earlier. Israeli forces promptly rolled into Bethlehem, then into Jericho, demolished several buildings, and made a dozen arrests. Sharon cancelled a meeting between Palestinians and representatives of donor countries to discuss how to improve conditions for the Palestinians.

Continued violence is a price Sharon is willing to pay in order to impose his own solution to the conflict, one that gives Israel permanent control over half of the West Bank and confines the Palestinians to enclaves surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory. He is talking vaguely of removing 17 of the 21 settlements in Gaza, but has set no timetable, and meanwhile he has failed to dismantle any of the 125 settlements or 100 makeshift outposts in the West Bank, as the road map requires. In order to seal Israel's permanent hold on the West Bank he is pressing ahead with construction of a giant wall that will enclose within Israel at least 15 percent of its territory and shut off the Palestinians' access to East Jerusalem.

Sharon knows there will be no serious protest from Washington. The United States was one of the few countries to vote no when the U.N. General Assembly voted last December to ask the International Court of Justice at The Hague to rule on the legality of the wall. The Bush administration now has joined Israel in filing papers arguing that the Court has no jurisdiction over the issue.

If Palestinians living as prisoners under a U.S.-backed Israeli government are not likely to believe Bush's pledge to promote Middle East democracy, Iraqis have even less reason to do so. So far the ousting of Saddam Hussain has brought them few of the benefits of freedom. Movie actor Sean Penn traveled to Iraq in mid-January and visited the Al-Iskan children's hospital to see what improvements the occupying authority had made since his previous visit just before the invasion. He reported in the Jan. 15 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle that conditions at the hospital had become even worse. "The hospital is filthy, extremely understocked and staffed, and low on medicine and blood," he wrote. "It's a place you wouldn't bring a mangy dog to, yet it's where the world's most dense collection of leukemia patients are being cared for."

Nearly a year after the U.S. invasion, Iraqi civilians are still being stopped, and sometimes shot, at military checkpoints. Their homes are still subject to midnight raids by the army. Widespread unemployment, due in large part to the U.S. decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and fire thousands of low-level Ba'athists from their jobs, means that living conditions for many Iraqis are far worse than under Saddam Hussain.

Promises about liberation and democracy sound especially hollow to the families of the thousands of men being held in U.S. Army prisons in Iraq. Estimates of the number of prisoners run as high as 20,000. According to Saeed al-Hammashe, head of the Baghdad Lawyers' Association, soldiers often arrest 100 men or more in one sweep. Most of the prisoners have never been charged, and lawyers are unable even to obtain papers listing their offenses, al-Hammashe said. Families wait months even to find out where the detainees are.

Such conditions intensify resentment among Iraqis and help provoke the ongoing violence that was not anticipated. The Bush administration began preparing for the invasion of Iraq as early as 2001, when the Pentagon awarded contracts to the Halliburton Company for providing logistical services to troops in Iraq and Kuwait. But no such plans were made for the aftermath of the war. Top Pentagon officials deliberately ignored extensive studies by the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs detailing the possible social and political problems that would arise once Saddam Hussain was overthrown. Instead the warmakers relied on the advice they wanted to hear, from Ahmad Chalabi and other pro-Western Iraqi exiles who assured them the Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators and eagerly institute reforms once the army was disbanded and the Ba'ath party eliminated.

Willful Ignorance and Missionary Zeal

The war and its chaotic aftermath were the result of willful ignorance combined with missionary zeal. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the decision to invade Iraq was determined at Bush's first cabinet meeting in January 200l. The longstanding aim of the neocon hawks who descended on Washington with Bush was to overthrow Saddam Hussain, set up a free market democracy in Iraq, and establish U.S. military dominance in the area. Neighboring countries would quickly fall into line. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," Bush declared in a speech on Feb. 26, 2003. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz predicted that democracy in Iraq would "cast a very large shadow starting with Syria and Iran [and extend] across the Arab world." In a Nov. 24 New Yorker article, George Packer writes that the Pentagon and vice president's office intended for "compliant" exiles such as Chalabi to run Iraq after the war. "The idea was to put our guy in there," Packer quotes an administration official as saying. "He'd recognize Israel and all the problems of the Middle East would be solved."

Experts disagreed. The State Department's report, dated the same day as Bush's speech, warned that ethnic and religious conflicts, widespread poverty, and other political and social problems would make liberal democracy in the Middle East impossible to achieve in the near future. Anti-American sentiment was so pervasive, the report said, that a more likely result of free elections would be Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the U.S. As the occupation forces have since found out, most Iraqis had no more love for the Americans than they had for Saddam Hussain.

Bush is anxious to turn over nominal control of Iraq to a provisional Iraqi government by June 30 so that the war won't be an issue in the 2004 elections. But the process of creating a new government is proving difficult in the face of Iraq's religious and ethnic tensions, the desire of many Shi'i for an Islamic state, and Kurdish demands for autonomy in the north. The solution devised by Washington and L. Paul Bremer, chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, was a Rube Goldberg-type plan in which the Iraqi Governing Council would appoint organizing committees in each of Iraq's 18 provinces; these committees would then set up a series of "selection caucuses" supervised by local U.S. military commanders; and the caucuses would choose municipal and regional councils which in turn would appoint members of a legislature. The new legislature would appoint a prime minister.

The advantage of the plan was that it gave the United States and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council control over the selection process, and consequently over the makeup of the new government. It avoided the danger that an independent Iraqi government would order the U.S. to withdraw its troops or cancel the lucrative contracts that the Pentagon has awarded to favored corporations. The disadvantage was that it was undemocratic and impossibly complex.

The learning process for the Americans began when a highly respected cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded direct elections and was supported by tens of thousands of Iraqis who came into the streets shouting the by-now-familiar slogan, "No, no to Saddam, No, no to America." When Bremer and the Iraqi Governing Council argued that a quick election was impossible because there were no reliable electoral rolls, al-Sistani and other Iraqi officials countered that the database of Iraq's food ration system could be used. "The database is 99 percent accurate and is extremely detailed," said Ahmad Mukhtar, director of the ration system. "If you gave me one month and enough paper I could open registration to anyone who was exiled, and then I would give you a complete election roll." Census lists that contain the names of every Iraqi of school age or older also could be used.

The U.S. position also came under fire from Middle East scholars. Dilip Hiro pointed out in a Jan. 27 op-ed column for The New York Times that elections were not only feasible but necessary. "Otherwise," he wrote, "we will be left with a troubling contradiction: President Bush insisting that he has liberated 25 million Iraqis from tyranny while at the same time denying them the right to self-determination." Professor Asad Abukhalil of California State University at Stanislaus warned that "If the Americans obstruct democracy and elections, if they push the Shi'i in a more radical direction, it will require a lot more firepower to keep Iraq under control."

The Bush administration was forced to ask for help from the United Nations—and, accordingly, a team of U.N. experts went to Iraq in mid-February to determine the feasibility of holding elections. But elections are no guarantee of democracy in a country weakened by years of bombing and crippling sanctions, and still occupied by American troops. Also, it is not clear how much real authority Washington is willing to relinquish, especially if Cheney and Pentagon hard-liners have their way. The freedom of Iraqis to take control of their own future was in any case limited when Bremer, a free-market zealot, decreed that foreign investors could own 100 percent of Iraq's banks and businesses, except oil, and take all of the profits out of the country.

Americans will have the edge in profiting from Iraq's reconstruction, since their investments are insured by the U.S. Export-Import Bank and Thomas Foley, a Bush crony and campaign donor, is overseeing the privatization of Iraq's enterprises. So while American soldiers are continuing to die in Iraq, some rich Americans are likely to get richer, and Iraqis could endure the same fate as the Russians after the fall of Communism, when rapid privatization resulted in the creation of huge fortunes for a few, along with poverty for the many.

There is growing consensus among Middle East experts that the U.S. should turn over control to the Iraqis as quickly as possible, with the United Nations supervising the transition. They point out that American Marshall Plan aid after World War II enabled war-ravaged European countries to take charge of their own reconstruction and rebuild their own economies. By providing such aid to Iraq, the United States would enable the Iraqi people themselves to decide what form their economic system should take, and allow local business, rather than foreign investors, to grow and profit from the reconstruction process.

For the Iraqi people, Bush's promises of freedom will gain credibility only when he ends the U.S. occupation of their country and allows them to determine their own future. Palestinians will believe Bush when he guarantees them the same right by using the full power of his office to see that Israel withdraws to its 1967 borders.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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