Iraq: KANAN MAKIYA'S WAR DIARY

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because "their" country is bombing "mine." To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.

If you want to understand the perceptual chasm that separates how Iraqis view this second Gulf war from how the rest of the Arab-Muslim world views it--or from how these antiwar elites here in Cambridge or, dare I say, in Turtle Bay or Paris or Berlin view it--then you must begin with the war that has already been waged on the people of Iraq by their own regime. Then you will know, horribly, how the explosion of a JDAM can sound beautiful. For Iraqis, the absence of this new American-led war is not the presence of peace. Years before the first American cruise missile exploded in a "safe house" of the Iraqi leadership, the people of Iraq were living through a war. They have been living through that war since 1980, the year Saddam Hussein launched his futile war against Iran. Since then, one and a half million Iraqis have met a violent death. Between 5 and 10 percent of Iraq's population has been killed, either directly or indirectly, because of decisions made by its own leadership. The scale of such devastation on a people is impossible to imagine. Think of Germany or France after World War I. Think of the Soviet Union after World War II. The peoples that are thrust into such a meat-grinder are never the same when they emerge. Is it any wonder that we Iraqis do not look at this war the way so much of the rest of the world does?

The war rages on around me in the shape of the news broadcasts to which I have become hopelessly addicted. While I watch, my friends in the opposition are gathering in Kurdistan with the Iraqi National Congress and in Kuwait with Jay Garner's office. I should be there with them, but I am told I have to stay. I am needed here, to keep touch with Washington. I cannot stand it. All I have to think about is whether or not the U.S. government is going to once again betray the Iraqi opposition, and renege on commitments made regarding the democratization of Iraq.

There is enough chatter out of Washington to make me apprehensive. Last Wednesday, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, managed to deliver a long briefing to foreign reporters on "Assisting Iraqis With Their Future, Planning For Democracy" without any specifics on the issue. While Grossman summarized U.S. plans and offered statistical details on economic reconstruction, dealing with weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian assistance, and the role of the United Nations in all these things, all he could say about the central political question was that the Bush administration "seek[s] an Iraq that is democratic." Unlike its experience in Afghanistan, the administration has had months, if not years, to think about what democracy in Iraq would look like. And yet when the journalists asked Grossman to elaborate on the subject, he could add almost nothing.

Why? Does the United States have any ideas on this pivotal subject? Will the administration push for those ideas in the establishment of the still-ambiguous Iraqi interim authority that Grossman mentioned in his briefing? And what is the role of the leadership of the Iraqi opposition elected in Salahuddin last month? These are the questions I am left here to argue about with American officials while the war's progress provides a more pleasant soundtrack.

Dont be pessimistic. Former Congressman Flannagan, who represents Assyrian Christians in Iraq, was on Fox yesterday. There was a recent accord signed by *all* parties calling for a secular, national (not federated) Democratic Iraq - all groups signed on to the agreement, from shi'ite, sunnin, kurds , turkomen, and the rest.

He sounded very hopeful, even beyond it to idealism that Democracy could be established readily in a post-Saddam Iraq.

Add another to the growing number of Iraqi voices FOR war. But I suppose it wouldn't matter if you can verify that the vast majority of Iraqis are for the war, because the red-diaper-doper liberals know whats best. But I digress...

Has there been much discussion around here about what sort of post-Saddam govt. should look like? God forbid, we give tham some sort of Euro-socialist parliamentary system. It would be like asking for squabbling factions to cause the sort of paralysis that would leave the people clamoring for another dictator to take charge and "fix" things.
Given the particular cultural and political considerations of the Iraqi demographic, I'd think that a bicameral legislature would work nicely. The lower house could be organized by population based districts (with lines drawn attempting to match traditional political subdivisions) and an upper house that would equally represent the major population groups (Kurds, Shiia, Sunni, and I'm sure others I've forgotten).
Of course all of this is pure conjecture, but I'd love to hear any criticism or alternate ideas.

I bought the author's Republic Of Fear over a decade ago. Its a chilling in-depth look at the Baath Party regime in Iraq and the totalitarian system it imposed on the country beginning with the July coup in 1968. The question of whether the Iraqi opposition will have a role to play in a post-Saddam, post-Baath future is a good one. Up to now the worst opponent of democracy in Iraq, as seen in a leaked Los Angeles Times story last week on the eve of the war, has been our own State Department which put out a document explaining why Iraqis and Arabs can't build a democracy and its been the same Washington bureaucracy that has expressed complete disdain for Iraqi exile groups for decades. In the final analysis its not just Saddam that represents an obstacle to a free Iraq, its part of our own government weeded to the discredited doctrine of preventing chaos and ensuring stabilization at the cost of freedom for the peoples of the Arab-Muslim world in order to keep friendly pro-American dictatorial regimes in power. Apparently some in Washington feel freedom can be dispensed if its a threat to our national interests. Right now the big question is whether we are in fact fighting this war for our stated aims. I suspect we'll soon find out the extent to which Operation Iraqi Freedom lives up to its advertised name.

RE #2

The long span of a brutal dictatorship usually leave behind a number of fractious oppositions which cannot govern effectively once the dictatiorship is toppled. It is not just in Iraq but happened to all countries which went through such an oppression. Bickering and sniping will be inevitable. As long as there is neither omni-present secret police nor civil war nor routine political killings nor expansionist leader picking war against neighbors nor sponsoring terrorists to attack infidels, I will call it a success.

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