Iraq and Afghanistan

Richard Clarke of Congressional Hearing fame was the leading person in the war against terrorism before 2002. His book, now more than a year old, tells of his struggles within several administrations to get them to listen to him and his friends, a cabal within government that was obsessed with the danger to the country of terrorists, and particularly of Ussama bin Ladin and al-Qaida. He got further with the Clinton people than he did with the Bush, even though he was for a time allowed to continue his work alongside Bush's National Security Council. Bush's people never took him or his ideas seriously. There were many reasons, but one important one was that they simply did not accept ideas or issues or approaches that they associated with the Clinton years.

He is a harsh critics of many of the entrenched persons and approaches of the FBI and CIA, as well as the too predictable reactions of the Pentagon and the military brass. Many heroes from these agencies shine through the narrative, but the overall picture is negative. The CIA and the FBI and their subdivisions remain more interested in turf than in the national interest. The Homeland Security Department was a failure from the beginning: poorly planned, poorly staffed, given impossible jobs with no additional money and very little time to accomplish its objectives. His harshest criticism is of those in the Administration who came into office determined to conquer Iraq no matter what. For them, 9/11 was a handy excuse. This may have not been the case with Bush himself, but he sees Bush as an essentially unfocused figurehead unwilling to really try to understand anything. Our conquest and continued involvement in Iraq has enflamed the Islamic world and trained a new generation of terrorists much as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did. The reader has probably heard these opinions of Clarke from the news media and his appearances before Congress. On the negative side, in the book he appears self-interested, conceited, cocksure of everything. He no doubt overinflates his importance at critical junctures in the story. One might not like working with Clarke, but fundamentally he means well, is very knowledgeable, and should be listed to.

He believes the country should be spending a great deal more on homeland security than it does. Even the first responders have been starved for funds (NYPD had to reduce its police force after 9/11). New intelligence resources, even a new analytic agency should be developed, preferably separate from the CIA and the FBI, but possible housed within the latter. Someone has to deal intelligently with the intelligence stream and no one is! He would like to see us spend more on the propaganda wars, doing the kind of things that we managed to do in the cold war in our struggle against communism. He is a little too sanguine about efforts to reform Islam from the outside, but he is more helpful when he agrees with Anonymous on the necessity of modifying our actions in the Middle East in a way that will reduce hatred.

His identifies the countries we should be targeting in the region as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He considers Iran to have been and be much more important in the support of terrorism (Hezbollah especially) and the development of nuclear weapons than Iraq. This does not mean that we should invade Iran. It means that we should take it more seriously through an approach that would work both with the present leadership and work to replace that leadership. He agrees with Friedman (today's Op-Ed) that Iran has a large number of pro-Americans. We have to help them create a democratic state. But we must do it in a way that does not seem to make Iranian students into CIA agents. I agree, but it is a difficult proposition..

If this election succeeds at all in the most challenged provinces it will be a true miracle. I hope the Bush team has his staff praying hard. 90,000 election kits are being sent out to 5500 polling places in the next few days. 200,000 poll workers have been trained. Each polling place consists of a room with a variety of tables that each person must come by. When it is over, the workers will sit down and count the votes, shipping the results (and the ballots?) to Baghdad over the next few days. Now each voter has to have his finger marked with a special dye that will last at least a week. This all in a country in which major roads even in the better areas are seldom safe, and where the insurgency has claimed that voters are traitors to the country and/or Islam. If you had seen insurgents active in your area, would you go to the polling stations? Would you take the chance that someone might stop you and demand to see your finger? One hopes that Iraqis are made of sterner stuff than you or I.

Zhao Ziyang, the head of the Communist Party of China in the 1980s, fell from favor with the real leaders of the country in 1989 because he favored treating the students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square less harshly. Since then he has been under house arrest and seldom allowed to be mentioned. Now he has died. His death has hardly been acknowledged, obituaries are not allowed, eulogies are erased from web sites and chat rooms in so far as the authorities can get to them. A private memorial is being allowed, but no one important can come. His long-time aide has been prevented from leaving his house to attend.

This is the China that much of the world is trumpeting as the coming leader of Asia and perhaps the world. This is the China where an amazing percent of consumer products consumed in the West are now being manufactured. This is the China where economic growth is supposed to be laying the basis for a transition to democracy. But life in China seems so far from democracy. Its leaders thumb their noses at demands for more civil freedoms, let alone political. The Western media are quick to criticize Putin’s Russia, but Russia today has far more freedom than China. The totalitarian practice of erasing history, of creating nonbeings, is no longer practiced there.

How do we get a handle on the problem of China? How do we help China become part of modern civilization before it gets any more powerful? I do not know. But we could begin by taking down a few bridges, by emphasizing the differences between Taiwan and China, and by reducing our interest in trade, free or otherwise.

Yesterday’s optimism surrounding the election needs to be corrected in several regards.

First, the idea that there were going to be a million Iraqis voting outside the country was apparently wildly off. By today’s figures it appears the election board will be lucky to get 100,000. This changes the picture considerably. Does it mean that overseas Iraqis are uninterested? Does it mean there has been coercion in overseas communities? Does it mean that election organization (for example with only five places to register in the United States) was massively inadequate? I do not know.

Secondly, there seems to be a darker mood in Iraq than I was reporting. An Iraqi government official says that if not enough people vote (apparently he means Sunni Arabs), it is likely to lead to civil war. A U.S. intelligence report sees a great deal of violence after the election. The report also considers the probability of civil war to be substantial. At the same time, reports are that the Shiite parties are posed to demand from the Americans a time table for leaving after the election. Condoleezza Rice and other American officials say that there can be no time table. It depends on how well the Iraqis do in establishing their own security forces. Here, too, there is much dissension. Condi tells the Senate that we now have 120,000 trained Iraqi security forces; Senator Biden says that we are lucky if we have 4000. And so it goes.

As the days toward the upcoming election drag on, we hear a steady drumbeat of reported assassinations, roadside bombs, attacks on police stations, attacks on anyone in any way connected to the election. Yet we also read of the continuing hope of the Iraqi people that the election will mean something. Seven to eight million are expected to vote in the country, another million overseas. It is now estimated that 2/3 of the people of Baghdad will participate. Half of these are expected to vote for secular parties; half for religious. Perhaps a million overseas Iraqis are registering at considerable expense and expected to vote. Among the overseas, there are few reports of killings or fears. Particularly in the United States, the Iraqis seem happy to have the opportunity. Fear does not stalk the community. For Americans, used to a soft, carefree life in the suburbs, it seems inconceivable that the potential Iraqi voters in Iraq could be this blasé about the dangers, so ready to face the possibility of death from unknown enemies. Candidates are campaigning, if only in secret. They are assisted by the fact that voters are voting for parties rather than individuals, thereby reducing candidate exposure. In the toughest areas they have decided to have registration and voting occur at the same time to reduce the exposure of the voters before election day.

My belief is that the vote will take place on January 30; in most of the country it will be a success; the Shi’a candidates will win overwhelmingly, but they will not be a unified force within the parliament; Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders will be given a role in the resulting government. After this God only knows. It may all break apart again. Elections are by no means the end of the game. We can only hope that we can with a little urging from the new government find a graceful exit.

If this is pulled off, some heroes in heroic organizations need to be recognized. In Iraq, it is the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq and their thousands of employees working with the assistance of the United Nations. Outside Iraq, it is the International Organization for Migration, a group associated with the United Nations that has done a phenomenal job in just a few weeks. And again back in Iraq, it is the more than a thousand candidates that have allowed their names to be put on party lists, and finally it is the millions of individual voters willing to take a chance on democracy. I know, talking this way sounds too much like George, but we have to be prepared to admit that his foolish faith appears at this moment to be not entirely foolish.

Another way to look at this is to think back on the story in today’s paper of Iraqis coming as far as 900 miles to register in Nashville, only to have to come back another 900 miles in two weeks to vote. And think about their hopeful and relaxed attitude. One can draw two obvious conclusions. First, the Iraqi insurgency is extremely weak in the Iraqi community in the United States, so weak as to hardly make their opposition to the election known. Second, the international “enemy”, the al-Qaida that does have its supporters in Iraq has not been able to make much progress in extending its operations to this country. There is still the possibility of a couple of al-Qaida spectaculars in America (the inauguration is an obvious time of danger), but even if these are brought off, the American public can be reassured by the easy-going confidence of the Iraqis amongst us that the country is not a honeycomb of Islamic cells planning our destruction. If they are here, they are few and scattered, with limited long-term capacity.

In North Carolina, General Vines is training 10,000 military advisors for Iraq. He wants to teach them about Islam, and so has assembled a group of books that they are all to read before they leave. Unfortunately, among these books is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington is a well-known Harvard professor and his recent work in this area has led to a great deal of commentary. The General certainly cannot be faulted for assigning such a book. However, assigning it is misguided, and along with a number of other recent writings by those who claim to be knowledgeable on Islam and what we are facing is likely to have a pernicious effect — particularly because of its Harvard origin.

In the book, Huntington predicted that the 21st century would be characterized by violent struggle between the civilization that had dominated the 20th century and those that were now rising up to challenge it. He particularly saw the Sinic and the Islamic as potential foes. Wars between Western Civilization and Islam, for example, were seen as all but inevitable. His predictions regarding the struggle of Western and Islamic civilizations has particularly struck observers because of the events of the last few years.

The problems with the Huntington analysis are many. First, "a civilization" is an arbitrary category difficult to define in space or time. The term was developed primarily to apply to ancient civilizations that at least had the terminological advantage of being separated more clearly in space and time than is the case today. Secondly, Huntington reads history in terms of the struggle of civilizations. A better way to read history would be to recognize that most wars were actually within civilizations, or along the periphery of civilizations against less civilized peoples (for example the story of how "the West" represented primarily by Rome moved northward to incorporate the British Isles and Scandinavia into its sphere). World Wars I, for example, was primarily within Western Civilization, with the rest of the world bit players. Third, at any one time, the peoples that are loosely lumped together as belonging to civilization X or Y are often quite diverse, speaking a variety of languages, believing in a variety of religions, and living on many different economic levels. Fourth, whatever may have been the situation in the past, today the leading sectors of all so-called civilizations are actually living more within the confines and assumptions of Western Civilization than those of their own. Paul, the manager of Hotel Rwanda, for example, did not take part in the massacre of Tutsis because he had culturally moved beyond that level. To him the calls to action by the radical Hutus were nothing but dangerous nonsense. People such as Paul are much more common in leading circles outside central Africa than they were in Rwanda. The leaders of many Muslim states are Muslims in little more than name. They hold on to their traditions just as many educated Christians or Hindus hold on to their traditions. But these traditions are not determinative of their actions in the real world. Even in Iran, a country often held up as an example of an implacable enemy, recent visitors find that the people in the street are more pro-American than anti-American. Certainly the lives they lead would be unrecognizable to the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Iraq, our main enemies are actually former Baath officers, representing a distinctly secular and anti-religious movement that only uses Islamic slogans to gain nationalistic support. The Kurds are under secular leadership. Surprisingly, the Shiites that are our best allies in the run-up to the election are also the community in Iraq with the best religious credentials.

This being the case, we should not be letting our soldiers be indoctrinated with the idea that Muslims are irrevocably against us by virtue of the fact they belong to another "civilization". Kipling said in another age that "never the twain shall meet", but in our age, they are meeting, they are living together, they are moving to America, becoming professionals, establishing relations with their relatives in Iraq. The vast majority of Muslims everywhere are individuals, pursuing individual goals, moving about, getting connected, going on line, and spending very little time thinking about how to destroy Americans.

The fact there is an al-Qaida that does want to attack us because they think we interfere too much in Islamic countries must be recognized and dealt with. We should realize there are many people who have adopted their ideas. But if we consider how little has really happened in the United States since 9/11, we might begin to appreciate the fact that the millions of Muslims in this country, even when mistreated by overzealous immigration and security personnel, are not about to sign up for a holy war. Some no doubt are, but so few that Bin Ladin has been unable to put them together long enough to carry out the continual series of attacks that he has promised and that alone should change the way we approach the world.

After seeing "Hotel Rwanda" yesterday I was reminded of the situation of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq. With not more than 20% of the population, they have traditionally been the rulers of the area, a position magnified by Saddam Hussein, especially after the Gulf War. The assumption is that with the upcoming election the Sunni Arabs will lose this preeminence; the Shi'as are set to play the major role in the future. Given this judgment, the continuing violence of the Sunni Arab community (both Jihadist and secular Baath) would seem to be a hopeless attempt to reverse history. The Sunni Arabs do not see it that way, and there are many historical reasons not to agree with them.

Rwanda was traditionally ruled by the Tutsi with about 14% of the population. They ruled over the other 85% who were classified as Hutu. Supposedly the Belgian colonialists benefited through accepting this arrangement, but it is an error to imagine they created it. In 1959, three years before formal independence from Belgium, the Hutus revolted, killing and displacing Hutus. When Rwanda became independent, it was easy for them to cement their ascendancy through elections. During the next 30 years, they continued to press their advantage, killing thousands of Tutsi and driving hundreds of thousands out. By 1990, Paul Kagame had organized Tutsi refugees in Uganda into an army and invaded Rwanda. Peace agreements held for a few months, but they were followed by renewed hostilities in 1991 and 1992. A more enduring peace was then bartered with the help of a small U.N. force. Yet during the next two years Hutu extremists organized thousands into popular militias and instigated a hate campaign on the premise that all Tutsi deserved to be killed. They used the radio to help organize and recruit adherents. Then in 1994, the death of the Hutu President in a plane crash was blamed by the extremists on the Tutsi. This was used as an excuse to start a well-planned extermination campaign that between April and July 1994 killed over 800,000 Tutsi, as well as many thousand Hutu "traitors". This genocide led the Tutsi refugee army along the border to start a new offensive. In a couple of months they had conquered the country and driven out the army and the Hutu militia along with two million civilian Hutus (most of whom have since returned). Paul Kagame and his party easily won elections in 2000 and 2003, which I doubt were free and fair. But why should they be? They no doubt feel they have earned the right to once again rule over the Hutu.

The lesson I take from this is that popular majorities, such as the Shi'a, even when they are able to organize militias such as al-Sadr's "Mahdi Army", may be no match for more highly motivated, organized, and confident majorities such as the Sunni Arab community. Leading a few thousand people who believed they have the right to rule and are used to ruling, Paul Kagame was able to overcome a much larger majority community with both a national army and a large militia. The Sunni Arabs on the basis of their actions against American and Iraqi governmental forces may well be another minority community that cannot be denied (unless we stay permanently). It is true that they will be largely shut out in the upcoming election. But the leaders of the resistance know that and welcome it. They know that democracy is not the route that they can take to reestablish their community's power. It is rather through the better organization and institutionalization of their community that they can once more rise to the top. They may have a good shot at success.