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The Pentagon, the State Department and the U.N. are fighting over who controls postwar Iraq. It's a battle that could be more critical than the military campaign.
Apr 14, 2003 | The bloody fighting on the ground in Iraq may be drawing to a close, but in offices and back rooms in Washington, London, New York and Kuwait, the battle to control the country's reconstruction rages. Three groups are vying for dominance -- the Pentagon and its neocon proxies, with their grand dreams of a new Middle East, the State Department realists, who fear Iraq could become a new Lebanon, and the United Nations, fighting the Pentagon's efforts to marginalize it. Which group prevails will determine, in part, what the next government of Iraq looks like, and whether the liberal democracy many exiles dream of is born and whether it survives.
Ultimately, there will be elections, so no group will be able to simply install Iraq's new leaders. But there are important open questions about when those elections will take place, under what kind of constitutional system, and who will rule the country in the interim. Whoever is running the country while the groundwork for democracy is being laid will be able to place Iraqis in temporary positions where they can consolidate power. According to Aziz Al-Taee, chairman of the Iraqi American Council, 36 exiles, handpicked by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, have spent the past four weeks in Virginia training for prospective roles in a transitional Iraqi government. Whoever ultimately has the power to fill such roles will have the power, at least in the short term, to shape Iraqi politics.
On Friday, Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq's transition to democracy would happen in three stages. America's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance will run the country in the immediate aftermath of the war. Meanwhile, Gen. Tommy Franks will hold meetings across the country to identify potential local leaders who can join Iraqi exiles in an interim authority. Once basic services are up and running in the country, Iraq's administration will be turned over to the Iraqi authority, which will govern until elections can be held.
Most publicized planning indicates the elections will be held under some sort of federal parliamentary system, which grants a measure of autonomy to Iraq's Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions. How much autonomy is up for debate. So are most other facets of the transition to Iraqi self-rule.
"There are many parties outside and inside Iraq who would like to have democracy," says Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East Forum at the Council on Foreign Relations. "What form of democracy, and how a country emerging out of Stalinism becomes a democracy, all those things have to be worked out. The wrangling between the State Department and the Pentagon is built into the American system. The reason it continues is the president has yet to declare himself about who wins."
Among most liberals, the conventional wisdom is that U.N. oversight is preferable, State Department control tolerable and Pentagon dominance disastrous. Yet among the Iraqi liberals who sympathize with the Iraqi National Congress, the poles are reversed. They believe only the hawks with an ideological passion for this war will show the necessarily zeal to create the right kind of peace. The State Department, they say, values stability over democracy, and factions of the U.N. want to sabotage the whole project. One of the major Kurdish groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, also trusts the Pentagon to safeguard Kurdish interests, and even some experts who advocate a broad U.N. role acknowledge that the international body is likely to give short shrift to Kurdish aspirations.
On the other hand, other experts say that only the U.N. can provide international legitimacy to the rebuilding process in Iraq. As for the State Department, some see its incremental approach to democracy as the best hope of staving off sectarian warfare.
"There is no easy answer," says Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University who spent 20 years as a senior Middle East analyst for the CIA. "None of these people comes out looking really squeaky clean and heroic. Maybe that's a reflection of what Iraqi politics has looked like forever. It's a scary and often violent business and these people are often swimming in dangerous waters."
A look at the factions involved, each with their own tricky mix of self-interest and competing ideals, suggests why easy answers are so hard to come by.
The Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress
Many observers sneer at the Iraqi National Congress. After all, the group's head, Ahmed Chalabi, was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan and only escaped his 20-year sentence by fleeing the country. The INC is backed by the neoconservative hawks at the Pentagon and at far-right think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, and the group's cordial attitude toward Israel and Chalabi's close ties with American supporters of Ariel Sharon lead some to think of it as a stooge for Israel's right-wing Likud party. The CIA grew disillusioned with the INC in 1996, after the group launched a failed coup against the Iraqi regime, and recently circulated a classified report about the group's lack of support inside Iraq. A UPI story quoted a former U.S. intelligence official who'd read the report as saying, "They basically say that every time you mention Chalabi's name to an Iraqi, they want to puke."
Yet there are uncertainties surrounding Chalabi's conviction. His defenders insist it resulted from pressure Saddam put on the king of Jordan, not from any criminality on Chalabi's part. In any case, both the State Department and the CIA supported Chalabi for years after his banking scandal. According to Chalabi's supporters, when the State Department and the CIA finally did turn on the opposition leader, it was not because of ethical lapses on his part, but because his broad democratic aspirations were at odds with their preferred post-Saddam scenario of a more pliant military government.
Whatever one thinks of Chalabi and his backers, his group also contains some of the most passionate, sincere Iraqi liberals, people whose values mirror those of the Pentagon's fiercest domestic opponents. The INC's theoretician, Kanan Makiya, is the primary chronicler of Saddam's atrocities, and he's deeply respected by many observers across the political spectrum. A liberal humanist, Makiya is also no supporter of the Likud: in "Cruelty and Silence," his devastating indictment of Arab intellectuals' failure to condemn Saddam's regime, he blasts the Israeli occupation. Other members of the group talk about human rights and democratic institutions the way George Bush talks about Jesus. It's one of many ironies of the moment that the most illiberal forces in America are allied with the most liberal of the exiles.
Mansour Farhang, a professor of international relations and Middle Eastern politics at Bennington College, was revolutionary Iran's first ambassador to the United Nations and a mediator during the early months of the Iran-Iraq war. An opponent of the war in Iraq and a proponent of U.N. oversight of the reconstruction, he nevertheless admires Makiya, an old friend of his. "I know Kanan Makiya and I deeply respect his humanity and his liberalism," he says. "He has a solid commitment to liberalism and democracy and human rights."
That commitment is evident in the INC's dream for Iraq. Makiya knows that elections in the absence of civil society often lead to tyranny, and the INC has thus called for strong protections of individual rights, a federal system that will give a large degree of autonomy to Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni regions, the strong separation of mosque and state and a drastically reduced military, with elections to follow once these safeguards are in place.
In other words, Makiya wants for Iraq all the things that American progressives want for their country. "I love Kanan Makiya," says Yaphe. "Kanan's got a beautiful vision in his brain. He has a lot of credibility and he's under heavy fire from unfair quarters." Unfortunately, Yaphe says, "Visions are one thing, reality is something else."
And the reality is that to achieve his vision, Makiya and the INC have tied themselves to the Pentagon hawks. "The INC doesn't have its own army. The INC has the Defense Department," says Farhang.
The group is beloved by the neocons partly because it is sympathetic to Israel, but also because it is rooted in the values of the West. As Michael Lind has noted, the American Enterprise Institute crowd shaping Bush's foreign policy are ideologues, not opportunists. Espousing classical liberalism, the INC's message resonates with the neocons' messianic faith in exporting America's political system.
Joshua Muravchik, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who describes himself as a Chalabi fan, says his admiration lies in Chalabi's commitment to ideals they share.
"When I first met him during the Gulf War in 1991, he was advocating democracy then, and he's advocated it for a dozen years," Muravchik says. "I do take the point that when you're not in power its easy to advocate. The only thing that I would say on the other side, as someone who has been a democracy advocate worldwide, is that over a couple of decades I've worked with lots of exile opposition groups in lots of countries, and even though it might cost them nothing to advocate democracy, I haven't met many who advocated it as consistently as Chalabi has."
