US President George W. Bush’s remarks Monday night on his country’s strategy to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis after June 30 were impressive as always at the level of emotional rhetoric about freedom and democracy, but unconvincing at the level of policy. There is no easy way out of the current unstable situation in Iraq, because the American-led invasion, regime change, and occupation of Iraq shattered the institutions that allowed it to function as a viable country, and replaced them with a series of power struggles that now bedevil the land.
These power struggles are so many and so fierce that they defy easy resolution. The remnants of the former Baathist regime are fighting to regain power, with the illusory hope that the Iraqis people will value stability enough to accept a strong-armed central government again. Many ordinary Iraqis are fighting against the US, UK and other foreign troops who now run the country, because of their disdain for foreign occupation. Different Iraqi ethnic, religious and tribal groups, including Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and others, are vying for their share of power. Neighboring countries want to be sure their own interests and the power of their friends are preserved in Iraq. Some Islamist militants and fighters from nearby countries have come to Iraq to do battle against the US. Even within some major demographic groups in Iraq, such as the Shiites, we witness power struggles that sometimes spill over into violence.
The case of radical Shiite minor cleric Muqtada Sadr is a case in point of the convergence of several of these struggles into a single battle. Sadr has transformed himself from a marginal figure into a national or even a regional force by mobilizing thousands of supporters to confront the US. He is also simultaneously confronting his more respected fellow Shiite and other Iraqi leaders, seeking to win a place in the power structure of the new Iraq that will emerge one day after the current occupation ends. Obvious political tensions among Shiite groups tend to be somewhat camouflaged by the more public confrontation between Sadr’s forces and US troops, because the US presence in Iraq is more of a problem for most Iraqis and Arabs than is any inter-Iraqi or inter-Arab dispute.
The American president’s remarks, like those of Secretary of State Colin Powell last week to the World Economic Forum in Jordan, are not convincing to most people in the Middle East because they appear to come from a different planet. Washington insists on convincing us over and over again that it wants to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq and the Arabs, and that it will punish those Americans who committed crimes at Abu Ghraib prison to emphasize how American justice and democracy work. These are fine words about noble deeds – but they appear to most Middle Easterners like a rainbow in the sky at the same time that a thunderstorm is killing people a few miles away. We want to get out from under the American-made thunderstorm, and then we can find our own way to the rainbow.
The American leadership keeps digging itself deeper into a hole of its own making in the Middle East because it refuses to acknowledge the fundamental objection to its policies by the vast majority of people in this region and also the entire world: the US is not mandated morally or legally to use its armed forces to change regimes and to reconfigure regions of the world. When the US and the UK undertake such grandiose projects, they cross the important line that separates legitimate collective self-defense and deterrence from crass imperialism.
The US’ romantic and well-intentioned notions of how to remake Iraq and other Arab societies into instant democracies have been swamped and buried beneath the more complex and ugly realities of what happens when the combination of America’s massive foreign policy ignorance and military power are simultaneously deployed in a single Arab country. The dismantling of the Iraqi government, armed forces and security system was the first ever example of a foreign army coming into a modern Arab state, taking it apart, and rebuilding it, sector by sector. The exercise has proved to be very messy and violent. Imperial projects usually are.
By dismantling the state structure that existed in Iraq and held it together as a country, the Anglo-American occupation has also revealed the fundamental underlying weaknesses of that country’s national identity and cohesion – and also of most Arab countries, I would argue. Iraq is, and has been, a violent place in large part because of its repeated subjection to imperial adventures. These include the initial formation of the Iraqi state by the British in the early 20th Century, which ended up in a brutal Baathist police state, and the current chaos that is also a consequence of this renewed imperial frenzy.
The irony is that most people in the Arab world share the American call for democratic governance in our region, but they object to the attempt to achieve that goal through the violent means the US and UK are now using. There will be no easy way out of this situation in Iraq. President Bush will make many speeches to bolster his sagging electoral fortunes at home; yet his words about American resolve to make the world free will ring increasingly hollow in a Middle Eastern region that equates American foreign policy with promoting militarism, subjugation, occupation, human distress and chaos, in both Iraq and Palestine.
The transition to Iraqi sovereignty will be messy and long, and there is no option for the moment other than to go along with the UN-US plan, quickly transfer authority to Iraqis, put the foreign military presence under an internationally mandated force, and allow Iraqis themselves to draw on their wisdom to quickly agree on a power-sharing formula that would permit a central government to restore stability. The Iraqis themselves will determine what kind of governance system they embrace, and what kind of balance they strike in the short term between freedom and security.
As long as the American leadership refuses to acknowledge that the vast majority of peoples and countries in the world rejects its premise for invading Iraq, we risk the danger of more tragic adventures like the current one in Iraq. If the US insists on preaching to the world about its fine values, it should not be surprised that the rest of the world only preaches back to Washington about its flawed, occasionally imperial, and sometimes criminal policies.
Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 27 May 2004
Word Count: 1,085
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