IRAQI SCHOLAR CALLS OCCUPATION A "CONFLICT" OF ITS OWN
Alec Appelbaum
September 10, 2003

A prominent Iraqi intellectual told a New York audience on August 25 that his fellow citizens had become "victims of an ideological conflict" within the administration of US President George W. Bush.

Isam al Khafaji, who resigned from the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council on July 9, advised the Bush administration throughout 2002 and much of 2003. But he told an Open Forum at New York's Open Society Institute that Bush's team had ignored the primary recommendation he and other experts had made: that Iraqis govern, rather than simply consult on, the nation's reconstruction. For al Khafaji, the Coalition Provisional Authority reflects a stalemate between two agencies in Bush's cabinet. He said the Defense Department, willing to invade hateful regimes, had failed to work out a policy with a State Department unwilling to dismantle them.

In his critique of the Coalition Provisional Authority, al Khafaji questioned nearly all of its major tactics. He disputed the logic behind administrator L. Paul Bremer's efforts at purging officials from the Baath party, the official organ of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. He said Bremer had invited chaos by disbanding the national army, sending hundreds of thousands of men knowledgeable in violence to the unemployment lines. And he insisted that by denying Iraqis meaningful roles in postwar governance, officials were both ignoring the country's available experts and sowing instability.

The stalemate between the Pentagon and diplomats, he insisted, made American occupiers oblivious to Iraq's "tradition of statehood," the speaker argued. "Nation-building has become the fashionable term for colonialism," he declared. "In all major decisions, no Iraqis were consulted."

"This country has been a state as long as Finland," he said. "What nation are you building?"

Al Khafaji, who participated in private Bush administration workshops on possible post-Saddam transitions throughout 2002, said this scenario could change. He called on Bremer's team to "cede, as much as possible, every leading role" to Iraqis. Until that happens, he said, Iraqis would have reason to suspect that American-led forces do not care about Iraq's future and that Saddam might return. He spoke of rumors that began cropping up in Baghdad that Saddam had collaborated with invaders and would return to punish anyone who spoke against him.

These rumors catch on because the Republican Guards and others in Saddam's inner circle, who never had to show loyalty by joining Baath, have largely escaped punishment in al Khafaji's view. He accused the United States, in the name of short-term stability, of trying to import an entire political and military structure while ignoring skilled servants and tolerating hateful thugs. "I see a policy aimed at preserving so much of the despised regime as [not dovish but] most cynical," he said.

In particular, al Khafaji said Bremer and his predecessor, retired general Jay Garner, had made basic blunders in setting up the occupation.

According to al Khafaji, Garner received a decree from his higher-ups that all oil policy would originate at the White House. Shortly after April 9, when a statue of Saddam in downtown Baghdad fell, al Khafaji claimed that soldiers guarded only the Oil Ministry building while the rest of the city experienced chaos. This suggested ignorance, he said, since most important oil-related documents lie in the Presidential Palaces. Garner's successor, though, aroused more anger than mockery.

Al Khafaji said the dissolution of the national army, which Bremer ordered on May 23, "sent a message of hatred" to its members and their families. Many of these soldiers, he argued, hated Saddam and his regime, and many had joined the army through conscription. In a nation with a 65 percent unemployment rate, he argued, even "corrupt and indoctrinated" systems like the army should undergo reform with seasoned professionals at the helm. He concluded that the swift termination of the army, and the halting creation of a new one, would leave Republican Guard officials poised to undermine security.

Despite the "blanket" policies of Bremer's occupation, al Khafaji told the group, he remains optimistic that Americans will eventually cede control of institutions to Iraqis. But his return to teaching in Amsterdam after only weeks on the reconstruction commission makes his prognosis for the short term notably dark.