Kanan Makiya: Dear Iraqi friends in Europe and the United States

The New Republic ^ | MArch 20, 2003 | Kanan Makiya

[katman]

Wise words to recall. We covered it at the time on Winds of Change.NET as part of the whole debate over neo-sovereignty and an emerging neo-colonialist movement with adherents on the left (hard to describe the UN as anything else) and the right. It acquires new meaning in the wake of the recent Iraqi elections, coming as it did from a leading Iraqi dissident who called the key issue long ago....

[Editor's Note: Kanan Makiya, a leading Iraqi dissident and intellectual, and author of the Democratic Principles Working Group report for the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, will be reacting to developments in Iraq over the next several weeks in a "War Diary" for TNR Online.]

February 20 was a particularly bad moment during the run-up to the conference of the Iraqi opposition in Salahuddin. A tremendous uncertainty hung in the air. It was unclear whether or not the United States delegation, led by envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, would show up. Some delegates had just been turned back at the Turkish border and were on their way back to London. Others could not or would not enter through Syria or Iran for political reasons. The conference had just been postponed for the umpteenth time, and reports that Mukhabarat--Baath Party intelligence--agents were infiltrating the nearby city of Irbil to sabotage the conference were gathering in frequency and seriousness. The reports were so severe that my daughter had been visited by FBI agents in Cambridge, who terrified her out of her wits with information they had picked up from Baghdad indicating that I was personally being targeted by the regime. I was effectively, and for my own protection, a prisoner in a gilded cage in Salahuddin, guarded by Kurdish peshmerga soldiers.

Meanwhile, ardent Western-based Iraqi democrats were writing and speaking in the West as if no one else in the opposition mattered and as if they could achieve alone some kind of utopian new democratic order solely through the agency of the United States. The idea of an American military rule for two years was looking attractive to them as a way of bypassing the traditional parties of Iraqi politics (Kurdish, nationalist, and Islamist), parties that I myself had harshly criticized in the run-up to the London conference--which turned out to be a very badly managed affair--for their exclusionary and Stalinist practices.

Whatever their shortcomings--and they are many--there is simply no alternative to engaging those parties in a new kind of politics inside Iraq. Ahmed Chalabi and I had staked everything on this idea. That is why we were in Iraqi Kurdistan. The point, we believed, was to include them, to take leadership of a process incorporating people whose democratic credentials are dubious at best.

Justice is going to be the first thing everyone in Iraq wants in the immediate aftermath of liberation, and the hardest thing for anyone--Iraqi or American--to deliver. Detecting among fellow Iraqis in the West the avoidance of such bitter and difficult truths, I wrote the following letter, distributed through various e-mail listservs, to every Iraqi democrat in the world--we who stand poised, now that the greatest test of our lives has begun.

Dear Iraqi friends in Europe and the United States,

In reading the e-mails commenting on my Observer article (both pro and con), I developed a disturbing impression of something that was not openly being said, but that was occasionally implied between the lines, almost certainly unconsciously and without bad intent. Since it is an issue of grave concern to the building of a post-Saddam Iraq, I thought I would bring it out into the open. My comments are not directed at anyone one person in particular, and they originate in an objective dilemma that we are certainly going to have to face tomorrow: the contrast between those of us who have been privileged to live outside in the West and those Iraqis who never have, and with whom we want to build a democratic society tomorrow inside Iraq.

I begin with an anecdote that happened to me the day before yesterday. A gentleman who had read a somewhat inaccurate translation of my Observer article on the web called late in the night and spoke to a colleague sleeping in the same compound with me to say that he was "going to wipe me off the face the earth." He was livid and deadly serious; it was a physical threat coming from a deeply disturbed man. Apparently he had read the article, the main idea of which he agreed with, as a personal attack on him because of one of its sentences. He was sure that in one tiny little phrase of that particular sentence I was "intending" him, even though I did not know anything about this man (who he was, or why he was even in Kurdistan to attend the Iraqi opposition conference) at the time that I was writing the article. The whole thing blew over the next day and he came up to apologize after a colleague patiently explained to him how he was mistaken in his interpretation.

The details of the incident are not important. It is important however to know that this is a person who has suffered as much as any human being can possibly suffer at the hands of the Baath Party--relatives murdered, his body the target of terrible, terrible atrocities, etc, etc. Try to imagine the worst and still you will not come close to the physical pain this man has suffered in his life. At one point he weighed 30 kilos. And remember while you are trying to imagine what this person went through, that this is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for.

Every day in the last five weeks of my travels I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply chauvinistic and suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy and ravaged land. Don't even think of coming back to it after liberation if you are not prepared to deal with such facts.

Why do I write this? Because I developed the impression (and it is only an impression--targeting no one in particular, and arising from the hundreds of e-mails I must have received about the Observer piece) that some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath Party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream. The Americans will be here for the shortest time that they can possibly get away with, and they will not understand during that time, nor even are they capable of imagining, exactly what it is they are dealing with, much less have they the stamina to move it all in the direction of the gentle and forgiving way of life (by contrast with Iraq) that we all have enjoyed for so many years in the West.

No one can rebuild and take responsibility for such a catastrophe other than the people who are in some way or another part of it, and even responsible for it. That is the most fundamental reason why we Iraqis must always insist on being partners of the United States and not its stooges. I am happy to be a stooge--I have no nationalist or patriotic problems with stooge-ism, believe me--if I thought it were in fact a stance towards the world that would actually get me to where I, and I believe you all, want to go. My problem is that I know it will not. And I do not know how to fool myself, or get myself into the mode of thinking, that maybe it will.

Among the people who are not attending the Salahuddin conference--it has to be said--are a rather high proportion of Western-based Iraqi democrats, who, it appears, do not want to smell unpleasant things and prefer to ride into Iraq atop American tanks. That is a sad and unpleasant but real comment on all of us, the so-called democrats of Iraq. Incidentally everyone has noted these absences here inside Iraq. (Can you blame them?) The subject of daily gossip is "Why is so-and-so not coming?" "Is so and so afraid?" etc, etc. History, in the shape of the people here in northern Iraq, is unlikely ever to forgive these absences.

I am getting too old to be going on wading in the shit of Arab politics, as I have been doing for over 30 years now. I write this e-mail in part because I am not sure how much more of it I can take, and in part so that those of you who are younger than I am will benefit from my experience and understand exactly what it is that you face when and if you decide to come back to Iraq after liberation. I write to warn you that the United States, to which I am supposed to have hitched my star more than any other Iraqi in decades, is bound to let you down if you think you can ask her for too much. Actually, if you think about it hard enough, it is not the United States that is letting you down; nor is it President Bush or even his CIA and his State Department that is letting you down; it is you, who by coming face to face with your own illusions, will end up letting yourselves down the most, and it is you and all those Iraqis who have put their faith in you, who will end up paying the biggest price of all.

This week, the Iraqis stood up, and stood proud. Let us down? On the contrary, they were an inspiration... to us, and to each other.

[Brooklyn Kid]

There's a lot of healing to be done.
We and our allies may be able to help with emotional support through friendship or even medical intervention and psychological therapy, but the Iraqis themselves, the ones who've suffered and still live there need to help each other. We will never know the hell these people have gone through. And we can't relate on the level necessary to truly help them heal.
We saw on their faces, in their eyes the beginning of their healing process after casting their ballots. A bittersweet victory for many. They need to help each other to move forward, now.

We wish them the best.

[daybreakcoming]

Well said.

Upon reading reports of the violence against the civilians, I have wondered "Hey Iraqis, where are you?" But I likened it to what I've heard called "battered wife syndrome". We know the terrorists are not real fighters, they are cowards, just as an abusive mate is. The Iraqis have been so beat down - it is taking a while for their spirit to surge back. I wish them the best in getting it together.

[F14 Pilot]

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