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Makiya on Iraq's Future



Here is the speech of a well known Iraqi academic, Kanan Makiya, author of
Republic of fear the politics of modern Iraq (1998) and many other
studies. I think it was included in the long transcript I sent you awhile
ago but this would be maybe the most interesting part - he is outlining
regime change in Iraq under certain preconditions, and it is a most
positive view of Iraq's future. It may be wishful thinking but it
deserves your attention especially if, like myself, you are very skeptical
of the Bush Administration's goal of regime change in Iraq -- CH


American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC

CONFERENCE

The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq

Thursday, October 3, 2002 (excerpt):

. . . . . . . . . .

Our first presenter on the question of how ambitious we should be for a
future Iraq is Kanan Makiya. Mr. Makiya is a scholar-in-residence at the
Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a past
convener of the Human Rights Committee of the INC.

MR. MAKIYA: Thank you, Danielle. Thank you for inviting me to this very
well attended event. My comments are going to be somewhat different vein
than that of the Ambassador's who dwelt on the, very observantly, on the
miseries of life under Saddam. I am going to try and do the opposite, to
paint a picture of what a future Iraq post-Saddam might look like or could
look like.

And I should say at the outset that while the ideas I am dealing with take
as their starting point Iraqi realities, they are not self-evident. And by
this, I mean that they do not take as their point of departure what I call
the lowest common denominator of Iraqi politics.

They are feasible, they are doable, but their feasibility requires
imagination. Iraqi imagination and American imaginative leadership, the
kind of leadership that has a long-term political vision for the area, a
long-term political vision, I should add, not only for Iraq but for the
whole Middle East.

Now, in addition to this all important question of leadership, the
feasibility of what I'm about to suggest rests on a number of assumptions,
which I had best get quickly out of the way because without them, what I
am about to say will sound no doubt like pious hopes and dreams without
any chance of being realized in the short term.

So my first assumption is somewhat obvious one, but nonetheless has to be
stated, that the government of the United States actually proceeds with
its stated policy of regime change in Iraq.

Secondly, that the unseating of the Saddam Hussein regime does not take
place at the cost of large scale civilian casualties, Iraqi or Israeli,
which could introduce consider volatility and unpredictability into the
political situation.

And my third assumption is that these ideas that I'm presenting or some
such variation and amendment of them are actually adopted at a large and
representative meeting of the Iraqi opposition to be held in the medium or
short term.

And my fourth assumption is that the government of the United States as
the partner of the Iraqi people in liberating Iraq sees its role in Iraq
as being again for the long term for democracy and reconstruction, i.e.,
for nation building.

Now, in making this assumption, this last assumption, on nation building,
I am comforted by the words of Condoleeza Rice last week--I think it was
last week or ten days ago--when she was quoted by the Financial Times that
this time around, she said the United States will be, quote, "completely
devoted" to the reconstruction of Iraq as a unified democratic state in
the event of a military strike.

Ms. Rice suggested that the U.S. was willing to spend time and money,
rebuilding the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein. She said that the
values of freedom, democracy and free enterprise do not "stop at the edge
of Islam." That was her phrase. And she underlined U.S. interest in the,
quote, "democratization or the march of freedom in the Muslim world."

I said I am comforted by these words, but I am unfortunately by no means
persuaded that Ms. Rice was stating what is the position of the United
States government in this regard at this point in time.

My fifth assumption, last assumption, I promise you, is that the
government of the United States further to a treaty with a new duly
constituted Iraqi government agrees to keep a military presence inside
Iraq for whose purpose it is to guarantee the territorial integrity of the
country.

And it agrees to do so for a period measured in years, not in months. Now
this having been said, it should be emphasized that nothing in what I am
about to say requires the United States to police or to manage into
existence on a sort of hand-to-hand basis the new and budding institutions
of the country. That is a challenge that I believe the people of Iraq can
and will face up to on their own.

So, given these rather numerous, I admit, assumptions, I want to suggest
that the, and I think the gist of my remarks are, that the removal of this
regime presents the United States in particular with a historic
opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything
that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire
and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917.

Iraq is not Afghanistan. It is rich enough and developed enough and has
the human resources to become as great a force for democracy and economic
reconstruction in the Arab and Muslim world as it has been a force for
autocracy and destruction in the past.

But for the rest of the world to be able to see the challenge in this way,
it is necessary to change the terms of the debate over this coming war
with Iraq, and that has not happened yet. And that is why I said I am
merely comforted by the words of Miss Rice to the Financial Times and not
yet convinced that it is going to be the actual position of the United
States government, not yet at any rate.

Now, unfortunately, much of the debate--I don't know if you are hearing me
very well--is this reaching--okay. Much of the debate over Iraq that has
taken place in Europe, in the Arab world and even in this country has been
what I would call a selfish one, centered on the threats to the West and
its friends on the one hand, and on the moral issues arising out of
so-called American hegemony on the other.

It has been all about quote "us" in the West and not about those who have
to live inside the grip of one of the most brutal dictatorships of modern
times.

I should say here that it has been a thousand times more selfish among
non-Iraqi Arabs, if there can be said to have been any kind of a debate at
all on the possibility that this war might end up being something that is
actually a force for good in the Middle East as opposed to the unmitigated
disaster that almost all non-Iraqi Arabs seem to think it will be.

The spectrum unfortunately of what it is possible to talk about in Arab
politics these days runs from Palestine at one end to Palestine at the
other with no room for the plight of the people of Iraq, the overwhelming
majority of whom believe that military action is the price that has to be
paid for the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The change that has taken place in American policy towards Iraq is, of
course, driven by strategic American considerations post-September 11.
This change has been heartily welcomed in Iraqi opposition circles, even
as it is feared and criticized in the rest of the Arab world.

But as I say this is not the time to pay attention to those Arab fears.
They will come to nothing in the end, as they came to nothing during the
Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan. The 1991 divide inside Arab politics
is still alive for understandable reasons.

But what might become of it in the months and years to come depends on how
willing the United States is to follow through with nation building as
opposed to mere regime change. To be blunt about it, there is a great deal
more at stake than what we are addressing, all of us together, at this
conference today than the subject of the elimination of weapons of mass
destruction and the removal of Saddam Hussein, important and fundamental
as these also are as considerations.

And it is in that spirit of interesting you in what is possible in Iraq
that I would now like to share with you the kind of thinking that is going
on in some Iraqi circles with which I happen to be involved and which are
working closely, intimately, in fact, with some agencies of the government
of this country.

[Sound system difficulties.]

MR. MAKIYA: So I said I was going to share with you some of the ideas that
are being discussed among a group of Iraqis working on these questions of
the future of Iraq. But I also wanted to add before we got interrupted by
the sound system that nothing that I am going to say is in any way, shape
or form the policy of the United States government, not yet at any rate,
or even that of the Iraqi opposition, although the whole point is to make
them so.

So let me begin first with a question, an issue that has for historical
reasons, assumed an inordinately large role inside the Iraqi opposition,
and that is the idea that the new Iraqi state that would emerge out of the
ashes of the Ba'thi regime should in some way or another be federal in
structure.

Now the origins of this idea began in 1992 when the, first of all, the
Kurdish parliament voted for it, and then a few months later the Iraqi
National Congress adopted this policy in its historic conference in
Salahuddin, northern Iraq, an event which I was privileged to attend and
where I was asked to deliver a keynote talk on the subject.

I came down strongly then in favor of the idea as I am in favor of it now,
as a solution to the problems of the Iraqi state. Incidentally, the INC
later reaffirmed the position of federalism at its 1998 conference in New
York--1999, sorry.

These votes were the first of their kind in the modern history of Iraq.
Taken together, I submit they break the mold of Arab politics. There is no
literature in Arabic on this idea of federalism to speak of, just as there
is no experience of federalism, and yet today, and this is what I mean by
breaking the mold, most Iraqi organizations that oppose the regime in
Iraq, whether they are in the INC or not, advocate one interpretation or
another of federalism.

No Iraqi political organization in fact can afford not to these days,
especially not one that calls itself democratic. That is an immense gain
for the people of Iraq, one which should not be frittered away by the
disagreements which have also broken out naturally over what this moveable
feast of a word might actually mean.

Now, two features unite all definitions in play in the Iraqi political
arena at the moment on this question of federalism. The first is the idea
that federalism, whatever else it might mean, is a form of division of
power, of separation of power from the center, Baghdad, towards the
regions.

And the second is that no future state in Iraq can be democratic if it is
not at the same time federal in structure. Now, the novelty of federalism
is a reflection, I argue, of that of the novelty of the whole phenomenon
of the post-1991 Iraqi opposition, an opposition grounded not in issues
of, quote, "national liberation" and, quote, "armed struggle" and the
struggle against "Zionism" and "imperialism," the catchall phrases that
you all know of that have become part and parcel of Arab politics since
1967, but an opposition in Iraq whose be-all and end-all is hostility to
its own homegrown dictatorship.

Now, admittedly, this opposition has not always been easy to deal with. It
encompasses many diverse traditional and modern elements of Iraqi society.
It is fractious. It is prone occasionally to in-fighting. Nonetheless, I
say it is remarkable that virtually all constituent parts agree on the
need for representative democracy, the rule of law, a pluralist system of
government and federalism. Federalism, therefore, should be a cornerstone
of the new Iraqi body politic.

Unfortunately, however, neither the Kurdish Parliament nor the INC have
yet developed in detail what they mean by this new idea. We are in the
course of doing so in the INC and amongst Iraqis in general. Nor have we
yet as an opposition developed the practical implications of this idea
with regards to the mechanics of power sharing and resource distribution.

For Kurds, as we know, the word "federalism" has become a condition sine
qua non for staying inside a new Iraq, and not trying to secede from it.
Without a federal system of government, in which real power is devolved
towards the regions, the currently autonomous predominantly Kurdish north
will sooner or later opt for separation, and rightly so. After all that
has been done to the Kurds in the name of Arabism, no Iraqi should expect
otherwise, and certainly no one who calls him or herself a democrat.

As a result of this, there has arisen a purely utilitarian argument for
federalism, one derived from a pragmatic calculus of what the balance of
power in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow is going to look
like.

One must concede federalism, the argument goes among some Arabs, in the
interest of getting rid of Saddam, and because the Kurds are today in a
position to force it upon us.

On the other hand, on the Kurdish side, the argument goes, we must accept
federalism, not because we really want it, but because the regional
situation does not allow for us to secede and have a separate state in
northern Iraq.

Now, I want to say that I don't think that the project as big as
restructuring the state of Iraq on a federal basis should be undertaken on
the grounds of this kind of utilitarian calculus. No ordinary Iraqi
citizen can be expected to opt for it as an idea on such grounds of mere
expediency.

Federalism, if it is to become the founding principle of a new beginning
in Iraq, must derive from a position of principle, and what might that be?

To begin with, federalism is an extension of the principle of the
separation of powers, only this time power is being divided as well as
separated. The divisions I'm talking about are those of the regions from
one another. Without the divisions of powers, there can be no federalism
worthy of the name. Because the regime of Saddam Hussein was never willing
to relinquish power except under duress, for example, in the 1970 accords,
none of its past concessions to the Kurds could ever be taken seriously.

They were here one day and gone the next. By contrast, a truly federal
system of government is a structurally new system in which power itself is
from the outset both separated and divided.

From this point of view, federalism is what you might call the first step
towards a state system, resting on the principle that the rights of the
part or the minority should never be sacrificed to the will of the
majority.

The fundamental principle of human rights surely is that the rights of the
part, be that part defined as a single individual or a whole collectivity
of individuals who speak another language and have their own culture, that
these parts of inviolable by the state. Federalism, therefore, becomes, is
about the rights of those collective parts of the mosaic that is Iraqi
society.

Now, how should these different parts of the new Iraqi federation be
defined? One important approach or argument rests on the idea of ethnicity
as the basis of the constituent parts of the federation. An idea at play
in the Iraqi arena at the moment is to have Iraq composed of two regions,
the first Arab, the second Kurdish.

Ethnicity is, according to this point of view, the most fundamental basis
for federalism in Iraq. Not illogically and for understandable reasons,
the Kurds are the driving force behind this definition.

By and large, non-Kurdish Iraqis have three problems with this
formulation:

First, it will cause ethnicity to become the basis for making territorial
claims and counterclaims especially with regards to high profit resources
located in one region and not another. The fight over Kirkuk, for
instance, is already moving in this direction with Arab, Kurdish and
Turkoman claims fighting with one another over this oil-rich city.

Second objection is that when a federation is defined as being about two
ethnic groups, then clearly all the other ethnic groups who do not have a
share in the federation are being to some degree or another discriminated
against. Why should an Armenian or a Chaldean or a Turkoman citizen of
Iraq have any less rights as an individual than an Arab or a Kurd in a
post-Saddam Iraq? Such discrimination in favor of the two largest ethnic
groups in Iraq is inherently undemocratic.

The third objection is that we cannot, we simply cannot map out on the
ground a federation that included all the different ethnic and religious
groups in Iraq. These groupings are not all territorially concentrated.
There are Kurds in Baghdad and Arabs in Sulaymaniyya and there are
Turkomans and Armenians and Chaldeans mixed in with Arabs and Kurds
everywhere in many locations.

Therefore, a federation of many ethnic groups would be no improvement on a
federation made up of only two large groups.

Now, the clear alternative to ethnicity is territoriality in which each
separate region receives its share of national resources, for instance,
oil revenues, according to the relative size of its population.

That is what is in effect going on in northern Iraq at the moment through
the Offices of the UN's Oil for Food Program. A good argument can be made,
as I believe Michael Rubin has made in a recent article that I read. In
fact, I took the idea from his article, that for the extension of this UN
formula to the whole of Iraq.

The future all-Iraqi federation should not be one of different ethnicities
but one of different geographically defined territories within which
different ethnicities may form a majority.

The point becomes not to dilute or diminish the Kurdishness of a Kurd or
the Arabness of an Arab. It is to put a premium on the equality of
citizenship for all.

Now, if we follow this way of thinking to its logical extreme, we end up
with a corollary of territoriality as a basis for federalism. And that is
a very important new idea for the Middle East, namely, that the new Iraqi
state cannot be thought of any longer in any politically meaningful sense
of the word as an Arab entity.

This is a novel idea for the region. And one that it will take some time
for it to assimilate. But it follows inexorably from a territorial
definition of regions as opposed to an ethnic one. Israel is today a
Jewish state in which a substantial number of Arab Palestinians, more than
a million, have Israeli citizenship, but are not and cannot in principle
ever be full-fledged citizens of the state.

The fact that they live in better conditions than their brethren in the
West Bank and Gaza, or certainly in better conditions than those in
refugee camps all over the Arab world, is not an argument for second-class
citizenship. In principle, because they are in a religiously or ethnically
defined state, they are in some sense on a different status and it seems
to me that one day in the future, perhaps a very long way down the line,
these two principles upon which the modern state of Israel was founded,
ethnicity and democracy, are probably going to have some form of, come to
some sort of conflict with one another.

I argue we should not want such a formula for Iraq. Iraqis deserve to live
in an area in which a Kurd or a Chaldean or an Assyrian or a Turkoman, be
they male or female, can all in principle be elected to the highest
offices of the land.

That means that even though the Arabs form a majority in the country,
their majority status should not put them in a position ever to exclude
anyone else from positions of power and influence, as has been the case in
a regime led by a party that calls itself the Arab Baath Socialist Party,
and that views itself as part of a larger Arab nation.

A democratic Iraq has to be an Iraq that by definition exists for all its
citizens equally, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion, and that
means, let's face it, a non-Arab Iraq.

Which brings me to the third precondition of a genuinely democratic state
in Iraq, its relationship to religion.

I said before that I was speaking only for myself and I emphasize on this
subject especially I am only speaking for myself.

Nothing has so diminished Islam in recent times as its politicization. The
quality of Islamic education, scholarship and spiritual guidance declined
dramatically once the nationalist secular regimes of the post-colonial
period came into existence and took over these functions.

Nor has the resurgence of political Islam from the 1970s onwards improved
matters. On the contrary, the youth of Iran today are turning against the
very clergy whom their parents had helped bring to power a generation ago.
One hears criticism on the streets of Tehran these days coming from some
of the more enlightened ulama who played a leading role in the '79
revolution.

Nonetheless, Iran has to be counted a success story in comparison with the
atrocities that have been perpetrated in the name of Islam and among
Muslims in Algeria and until recently in Egypt and the Sudan. Or in
comparison, needless to say, with September 11, and the name of Osama bin
Laden, and what that has done to the image of Muslims throughout the
world.

The substitution of jihad for worship is the gravest travesty perpetrated
upon Islam in modern times. It will take much, much work by Muslims to
undo its deeply pernicious effect. And when Saddam Hussein hails the
"martyrdom"--so-called--of Palestinian suicide bombers and distributes
large sums of money to their families or when he uses the resources of the
Iraqi people to build mosques as propaganda during the Iraqi-Iran war, he
too is degrading Islam by using it to further a political agenda.

The cumulative effect of these decades of abuse has served ultimately to
conceal from Muslims and Arabs, in particular, Muslim Arabs in particular,
the immense and still unexamined terrain of their own great contribution
to human civilization. Culture and the life of the spirit have been
degraded in Iraq by action of the state. To guard against the resurgence
of such abuse, Iraqis need to invent a concept of statehood that will give
all religions in the country the opportunity to flourish once again.

Christianity and Judaism have very deep roots in Iraqi history. The
Babylonia Tlmud was written just south of Baghdad. And the many, very many
branches of the Eastern Church, which flourished in Iraq, predate Islam
and are among the very earliest churches in the history of Christianity.

So what, if any, is the relationship which ought to exist between the new
Iraqi state and Islam, and religion, specifically the religion of the
overwhelming majority of Iraqis, Islam? That is something which
ultimately, of course, only the people of Iraq can decide upon in the
course of their deliberations during a transitional period.

But one way of thinking about these issues is to pose them in the very way
that Iraqis have experienced this abuse of Islam by the regime of Saddam
Hussein, and I would do that not by asking Iraqis the simplistic and
somewhat ideological question, do you want a secular state or not, but by
asking more concretely something like the following:

Do you want your future state to be involved in any way in your religious
beliefs either by way of compelling or persuading you towards a religious
belief?

Do you want your future state to define individual citizens as members of
different religious cases, as is the case, for instance, in the
confessional system in Lebanon?

Do you think, in other words, one should ask in Iraq that an individual's
religious beliefs are relevant to his or her rights as a citizen, rights
and obligations as a citizen?

Do you, fellow Iraqi, want your future state to promote, regulate, direct,
or otherwise interfere in matters of religion through, for instance, the
Ministry of Awqaf, which has a long history of such involvement?

Do you trust your Iraqi politicians enough, given your experience with
them, to give them any kind of influence of control over your religious
affairs?

And finally, do you think Iraqi clerics, or ulama, in their religious
capacity, not as individual citizens, have the knowledge and experience
required to decide upon your political affairs?

Now, if you put the question that way, I think that--but this is just a
supposition--that Iraqi experience would suggest that the answer to all of
these questions is no. And if I were to hazard a guess, that is how I
think they would vote. That, in effect, means that the Iraqis have chosen
to keep matters of politics and matters of faith separate from one
another.

But I want to move on to the fourth precondition for what I consider a
genuinely democratic experience in Iraq, and that is the demilitarization
of the Iraqi state.

Now, I have left what is perhaps the most important question of all, given
the history of Iraq's wars of aggression and build up of weapons of mass
destruction until the end. And perhaps that's because my views on this
have not changed since 1991, when I joined up with more than 400 other
people to put my name--and by the way, 400 other Iraqis, of course, from
every ethnic and religious domination, and from all walks of life, to put
our names on to a document called then Charter 91. And the relevant
passages of that document in relation to this question of demilitarization
read as follows:

Quote: "The notion that strength resides in large-standing armies and
up-to-date weapons of destruction has proved bankrupt. Real strength is
always internal, in the creative, cultural, and wealth producing
capabilities of a people. It is found in civil society, not in the army or
in the state. Armies often threaten democracy. The larger they grow, the
more they weaken civil society.

"This is what has happened in Iraq. Therefore"--the document
calls--"conditional upon international and regional guarantees which
secure the territorial integrity of Iraq, preferably within a framework of
the overall reduction in the levels of militarization in the Middle East,
a new Iraqi constitution should:"

(a)"Abolish conscription and reorganize the army into a professional,
small and purely defensive force which will never be used for internal
purposes."

(b)"Set an absolute upper limit on expenditure on this new force equal to
say two percent of Iraqi National Income."

(c)"Have as its first article the following, quote: "Aspiring sincerely to
an international peace based on justice and order, the Iraqi people
forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or
use of force as a means of settling international disputes. The right of
the belligerency of the Iraqi state will not be recognized."

Now, this last paragraph, no doubt many of you will recognize is an
adaptation of the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and it's highly
significant, I think, that so many people put their names to that idea.

I am convinced that if the territorial integrity of the country were to be
guaranteed by treaties and by an outside power, the overwhelming majority
of Iraqis, certainly its Kurdish and Shiite populations, will vote for
such a far-reaching completely transforming program of demilitarization.

Quite understandably, some sections of the Iraqi population will worry
about the implications on them of such of a loss of an institution that
has been important in guaranteeing some stability in the country. Those
fears, particularly those of the Sunni population in Baghdad are
legitimate fears, and they need to be properly addressed. The country will
after all, like post-war Germany, need very powerful internal law and
order institutions.

But like Germany and Japan, after World War II, Iraq's future lies in
unshackling itself in no uncertain way from the burden of its past and
focusing all the creative energies of the country on reconstruction and
renewal, and cultural renewal.

I began by talking about regime change providing a historic opportunity
for the United States government and the Iraqi opposition, an opportunity
I said that was as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East
since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

By that, you now know I meant a federal, non-Arab, demilitarized Iraq.
This vision or something approximating it is achievable. Moreover, an
Iraqi leadership able to work in partnership with the United States to
bring it about exists. The question that I cannot answer, however, is:
Will the new resolve that America has found in itself post-September 11
rise imaginatively to the level of the opportunity it is itself about to
create in the Middle East?

Thank you.

[Applause.]

*****************************
Clement M. Henry
Professor of Government
University of Texas at Austin
Austin TX 78712
tel 471-5121, fax 471-1061


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