Necessary Anger: Confronting the Contradictions: Plans for a Postwar Iraq
Willis, Ellen
FOR ME THE event that most clearly represents the fecklessness of our hijacked government took place after the fall of Baghdad: the looting of Iraq's historic museum and burning of the national...
...This loss is doubly excruciating because it could so easily have been prevented...
...That the collapse of Saddam's regime amid the chaos of war would create a dangerous vacuum of authority was utterly foreseeable, yet the American military evidently had no plan to fill that vacuum and maintain law and order...
...It's also thuggish reveling in the power of brute force, with a millenarian tinge: history and culture are only in the way...
...But the only indigenous organized group calling for a democratic secular state is the Communist Party, which is too small to hold its own against the Islamists...
...Instead Donald Rumsfeld mumbled something rendered in family newspapers as "Stuff happens," and judging from their tepid reaction, the political class and the political-journalism elite agreed...
...In principle, it's clear what the left should stand for: multilateral supervision of security, peacekeeping, and reconstruction...
...That idea will be all the more tempting if the Iraqi Communists begin to be perceived as a threat...
...and de-Baathification of Iraqi society...
...These are people unwillirig to assume the most elementary responsibilities of an occupying power, even as they rush to claim the spoils...
...Where were the calls for a congressional investigation...
...If anything, we need more troops to establish and maintain security until an international force can take over...
...The loss of life in war is terrible, yet the loss of a cultural legacy is arguably worse, for it negates the enormous amount of human energy devoted, over thousands of years, to the activities that make life meaningful—creating, preserving, remembering, passing on...
...I opposed the invasion of Iraq because I opposed the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and unilateralism...
...I suspect that, as Qanbar and Makiya claim, there is a significant constituency for such a government, given Iraq's large urban population...
...Pace those leftists who have moved seamlessly from "no war" to "end the occupation," the most immediate danger to the Iraqis is the Bushites' limited attention span...
...Bush may well buy the conventional foreign-policy wisdom that we can be friends with good, pro-American fundamentalists who are easily distinguished from the evil terrorist kind...
...One last irony: to the extent that the war was about the future of the Iraqi people, the diplomatic establishment in the United States and Europe has been and continues to be a model of cynical, Metternichean unconcern...
...nothing was done...
...Which is to say that the aftermath of the war poses conundrums for the democratic left, as the war has all along...
...handover as soon as possible to an Iraqi government...
...Furthermore, if a liberal secular government is to emerge in Iraq, that project will require the active support of the United States...
...on the other hand it was about the direction of world politics and of my own country...
...The administration may want Turkey, but it could get Iran...
...Still, loath as I am to be aligned with Paul Wolfowitz on any matter, Chalabi and his people are good guys in this postwar context— democrats and insistent proponents of deBaathification...
...Qanbar expressed his conviction, to much incredulity on the part of the academics and intellectuals in the audience, that George W. Bush and the Defense Department (unlike the State Department and the CIA) were committed to Iraqi democracy...
...Where was our so-called opposition party—you know, the Democrats...
...We judge the loss of memory and consequent loss of self a calamity for the individual human being...
...The Bushites are a rogue regime, a runaway faction of capital...
...On the Internet claims have circulated that the Pentagon, in league with rich collectors, deliberately allowed the looting...
...THE WAR' S END has not resolved this conflict...
...As I write, the main beneficiaries of the Bushite mentality appear to be the Shiite clergy, the only Iraqi force that's been organized enough to get moving on the task of restoring some semblance of normal daily life, and Baathist bureaucrats the Americans have kept in place, the better to facilitate our military's speedy exit (this maneuver has already generated protests by Iraqi doctors and professors...
...Where was the media conglom—uh, the press...
...From a left perspective it has two drawbacks: it's composed of exiles whose internal connections are uncertain, and it's sponsored by the Pentagon...
...ELLEN WILLIS directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University...
...The other main force for liberal secularism is the dominant faction of the INC, headed by the muchmaligned Ahmed Chalabi...
...It's hardly in the interest of the mainstream of the global ruling class that international checks and balances on U.S...
...because I believed Afghanistan offered more of a clue to how the United DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS States would behave after victory than Germany or Japan...
...Cultural critics were upset, but who cares about them...
...His skeptical look embodied the contradiction that bedeviled me: on the one hand, the impending Iraq war was about Iraq...
...But applying these principles to the actually existing situation is at best a convoluted task...
...But their behavior is not simply a matter of capitalist triumphalism or "the oil, stupid...
...how much more so, then, for a civilization...
...But I was uneasy in my opposition because I couldn't answer the question raised by Iraqi democrats like Kanan Makiya: how else, in a totalitarian society with a pervasive apparatus of state terror that had crushed all opposition, could the Iraqi people get rid of Saddam Hussein...
...Although I had no faith that the war would result in a democratic Iraq, I found it hard to argue that Iraqis would not be better off under virtually any kind of postwar government...
...Archaeologists and museum experts had warned the Pentagon about the danger of looting and provided information about what needed to be guarded...
...Democratic leftists should support them, while also demanding that the Communists be included in negotiations to form a new government...
...The oil ministry was protected...
...the plans to privatize and sell off Iraqi industries and use Iraqi oil to pay for reconstruction...
...Witness their gleeful urgency to turn military victory into economic plunder: the contracts brazenly awarded to corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton...
...Talking to him after the meeting, I remarked that for us, the Bush administration was a serious threat to American democracy, given the stolen election followed by the relentless pursuit of a hard-right agenda, assaults on civil liberties, abrogation of church-state separation, and so on...
...The unbearable truth is that we are being governed by barbarians who have no compunction about sacking the world in the name of American supremacy (just as they sack their own country on behalf of its plutocrats...
...But larceny or criminal negligence, it hardly matters...
...At the same time, we should strongly oppose any effort by the State Department to make a deal with supposedly moderate, pro-democracy Shiite clergy, as urged by both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal...
...FOR ME THE event that most clearly represents the fecklessness of our hijacked government took place after the fall of Baghdad: the looting of Iraq's historic museum and burning of the national library in full view of American troops, who looked on and did nothing...
...DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 7...
...basic human rights—including, it always needs to be 6 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 stressed, women's rights—and democratic institutions...
...the lies told about all of the above...
...This should be a national scandal...
...I thought we owed the Iraqis for having failed to depose Saddam in 1991 and then failing to support the uprisings against him...
...At a time when the American left is terminally weak and the Democrats reduced to a squeak, look to the corporate globalizers to rebel against the new American order...
...Having already demonstrated their boredom with the mundane task of policing, and ever unwilling to spend any money except on conquest itself, they are all too likely to pull our troops out prematurely, leaving behind a chaotic mess or whatever inheritors of power prove most convenient...
...And afterward, where was the president's apology...
...It says something about the nature of the Bush regime that I find myself unable to dismiss such charges out of hand...
...the rule of law...
...power dissolve, or that the American economy collapse under the weight of unemployment, reckless tax cutting, and huge military outlays...
...But to the extent that the war was about aggrandizing the Bush administration at the expense of international cooperation and American democracy, this same establishment—and the transnational corporations it represents— could be, for the moment, our best hope...
...It was Qanbar's turn to be incredulous: I saw there was no way he could take seriously my complaints against the American government when the oppression the Iraqis were suffering was of a wholly different order...
...the museum and the library— and for that matter the hospital—were not...
...As usual, the tradeoff of women's rights will not be seen COMMENTS & OPINIONS as a problem...
...But in the current volatile situation it is doubtful that religious "moderates"— assuming they are not merely telling the Americans what they want to hear—would be an effective bulwark against the militant theocrats...
...Shortly before the invasion, I attended a meeting addressed by Entifadh Qanbar, Washington director of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and, like Makiya, a member of its democratic secular wing...
...because I feared open-ended adventurism abroad as a cover for ruinous economic and social policies at home...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
