Author: Helena

I went to a pre-lunch presentation on Iraq today given by our dear friend Adeed Dawisha. It was really good to see him. When he was last in Charlottesville, back last October, our conversation was a little stilted since he was a big supporter of Prez Bush’s war effort…
Well, our opinions on the advisability of launching that war still differ hugely, but now, there’s no point any more in arguing about it.
Regarding the present and future of Iraq– the country that Adeed grew up in– we can agree on some things and differ on others. So now at least, it’s easier to talk with him!
Adeed’s view of the present situation and future prospects in Iraq is considerably rosier than mine. Though I noted that it is now not nearly as rosy as the kind of scenario he sketched out when he was here back in October.
He and his spouse Karen Dawisha also had an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, in which they argued that there are some fairly good prospects for the establishment– or re-establishment, as they claim– of democracy in Iraq.
In that article, they argued that two major assets Iraq has that will help build democracy there are (1) a large and well-educated middle class, and (2) a history of pluralism in the pre-Saddam era.
He made part of that same argument today. Well, the part about the middle class.
Personally, I’m a bit wary of that argument. It seems to spring from a generally unexamined classist kind of fallacy that people elsewhere who are “of the same class as us” will therefore end up thinking like us.
One thing I’ve learned from my close study of Lebanese and Palestinian society is that people who are bulwarks of the middle class– educated people, people of generally conservative social and economic views– in those societies don’t necessarily end up thinking like Jeffersonian democrats. In fact, they often end up being bulwarks of Islamist movements.
It was actually Ziad Abu Amr– Abu Mazen’s present emissary to Hamas– who pointed out to me when we were doing research together in Palestine back in the late 1980s that it was his best students from Bir Zeit University who would tend to gravitate toward Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That is, the students who stuck to their books, studied hard and effectively (and didn’t spend time running after girls, etc etc)– and who then went on to become very solid middle-class members of many different professions.
I think the ones who were less studious, more easily distractable, would be the ones who’d end up in the secular nationalist organizations.
And I’ve also noted the same phenomenon in Lebanon.
People in the west tend to have these stereotypical views of people of Islamist political leanings that they are all (1) wild-eyed radicals from the poorest segments of society, and (2) dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. I know for a fact that (1) is not true. And I’m open to entertaining a more nuanced view of things regarding (2)…
So even if, as Adeed claimed this morning, the benevolent occupation forces in Iraq (!) can succeed in getting people there back to work, and then the middle class will find its social and political footing there once again– well, according to Adeed, this would instantly make democracy a much more likely outcome. Myself, I’m not nearly as certain that this is so. (Nor, actually, am I certain about any of the antecedent logical steps in that argument.)
In this amazingly prescient post that I wrote on April 12 (from Tanzania), I wrote:
“People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so… In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order… In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need… “
Hey, did I call it, or what?
Anyway, one other last note from the morning’s session before I get up to go out to dinner with Karen and Adeed–
This is definitely the “oldster” crowd that gathers there at the Miller Center for Public Affairs for their mid-morning discussions. (Good for the no-night-driving crowd.) At 50 yrs old, I was probably the third youngest person in a room of some 40-50 people. But it’s a crowd that includes a lot of smart, well-informed people.
In the 35-minutes-plus of discussion that followed Adeed’s presentation about Iraq, the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Ahmad Chalabi” did not come up once.
I think this tends to confirm my suspicion that the WMD issue (as in, who was it who by grossly inflating the size of the WMD threat jerked us into this war, anyway?) may not really develop political legs unless things go visibly very badly for the US occupation force in Iraq.
As for Ahmad Chalabi– boy, has he ever dropped off the map! Justifiably so, I think.
And of the other former heroes of the Iraqi exile– whatever happened to Rend Francke?? She’s the head of the (pro-democracy) Iraq Foundation in DC. When I last heard about her, Caryle Murphy was quoting her in the Washington Post— must have been February, maybe– as saying she planned to be aboard the first of the US tanks that entered Baghdad!!!!
Has anyone heard anything of her since?

CHALABI DOUBLY DISCREDITED: Ahmad Chalabi, the sleazemeister of Jordan’s Petra Bank scandal, has now been completely discredited on two key claims he made when he successfully “sold” himself and his ambitions for Iraq to Bombs-Away Don in the months leading up to the US invasion.
The first of these was that he had extensive networks of supporters inside Iraq who would rise joyfully to greet him and his US military pals as “liberators” when they entered Iraq.
The second was that he could provide to the US and their British allies insider information (presumably, from members of those same “networks”?) extensive and reliable details of many aspects of Saddam Hussein’s very advanced and dangerous WMD programs.
Well, it didn’t take many hours after the launching of the offensive against Iraq for the claim about Chalabi’s “extensive networks of supporters” to become discredited. The invasion proved NOT to be the promised cakewalk. And– as a matter of even greater continuing importance– the claims Chalabi had made about being easily able to negotiate the installation of a pliant, pro-US (and even, pro-Israeli) governing structure inside post-Saddam Iraq, based on those elusive networks of supporters, have also proven quite unfounded.
So the US is now mired inside Iraq for the long haul.
No surprise there, to me. Sadly.
Which brings me to the whole “WMD” issue. (Quite apart from the fact that ‘WMD’ itself is a highly misleading term, that has been deliberately introduced into this whole discourse by those who seek to gloss over the fact that there is a huge difference– in actual effect, as in the structures of international arms-control agreements– between nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and biological and chemical weapons, on the other… In the Middle East, there is only ONE state that has an existing nuclear-weapons capability. It ain’t Iraq, and it ain’t Iran… )
But here’s the thing. Thus far, the total fallaciousness of all the overblown claims that Bombs-Away Don, the Prez, their pals, and even their hired hand Colin Powell made about Iraq’s so-called ‘existing WMD capabilities’ has not become a huge issue within the US body politic.
Nothing like the size of an issue it has already become, for example, for Tony Blair, inside the British body politic.
But as Iraq turns into more and more of a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Bush administration (see Chalabi false claim #1 above), then the questioning inside the US as to “How on earth did our country get into this mess in Iraq?” will evidently become more pointed. (Think Gulf of Tonkin.)
At which point, the character of the so-called “evidence” on Saddam’s WMD programs will inevitably come under greater and greater scrutiny.
Meanwhile, of course, the COST to the US taxpayer of sustaining the large-scale military occupation inside Iraq will become far, far higher than Wolfowitz and Co. had projected– not just because of the size of the occupation force required and the length of its stay (reason for both of which being Chalabi false claim #1), but also because of the reluctance of other powers to join in an occupation venture which was launched on the basis of such inaccurate and deliberately manipulated “evidence” about the alleged WMD programs.
I have seen numerous signs that there’s a lot of anger out there, in the international community, about the increasingly evident deceptiveness of the grounds on which the Bushites first of all launched the war against Iraq, and then tried to strongarm as many weak governments as they could into joining the so-called “coalition”. This feeling of having been deceived has probably only been further stoked by Wolfie’s recent boasts to Vanity Fair about how the ‘WMD issue’ was used (manipulated?) primarily for bureaucratic reasons, rather than because it had any particular merit. It is a feeling that will certainly make other governments think twice or thrice about responding positively to the administration’s pleas that they contribute either troops or treasure to Washington’s continuing tasks regarding the administration of Iraq…
Which will put the onus for staffing and paying for the lengthy occupation of Iraq firmly back where it belongs: on the shoulders of the US.
But heck! That’s you and me, US taxpayers!! This is going to cost us real dough!!!
… So who got us into this situation, then?
The easy thing is to blame Ahmad Chalabi. However, contrary to what you might infer from reading the above, I don’t put the primary responsibility on him. Hey, the guy’s an operator! He was easily able to roll all those thousands of small investors who lost their savings in the Petra Bank– and, for quite a while, the Jordanian bank regulators, too.
So, do we blame him for trying to “roll” the US government when he got a chance? Possibly, yes. To some extent. But much more than Chalabi, I place the blame on the shoulders of those within this administration who were his willing dupes, who placed US foreign policy, billions of dollars of US taxpayer money, and the lives of scores of US soldiers (as well as untold thousands of Iraqis) totally and uncritically in hock to this proven conman.
And they would be?? Well, I’m sure that you, my readers, are smart enough to figure this out.