Helena Cobban, Laurie King, George Bisharat and Chris Toensing, Electronic Iraq, Mar 27, 2007
(Photo: DoD)
The media loves an anniversary, and for good reason. In a media environment where a story needs a hook, anniversaries are a hook to hang all kinds of stories.
Sadly, anniversaries are often marked by the squashing of nuance under the weight of rote review. The four year anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was no exception.
If the occupation was discussed, the very idea of occupation - with all of its political and moral implications - was ignored. If violence was discussed, it was Iraqi violence, not the violence of the US military. If Iraq's future was discussed, the vision was uniform: without the US, Iraq will descend still further. What role the US has played in that descent was limited too narrowly to the incompetencies of the Bush administration and ignored the role of Congress and the international community as partner in the tragic events unfolding in Iraq since 2003.
For a more nuanced discussion of all that has happened since 2003, Electronic Iraq turned to four keen observers of Middle East politics. Add their years of experience watching, commenting on, visiting and living in the Middle East, and you have in this panel nearly a century of hard-earned wisdom.
Experts like Helena Cobban, Laurie King, George Bisharat and Chris Toensing were scarcely consulted by media and ignored completely by policy makers in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Today, their voices are, sadly, just as marginal. They are also just as vital.
If you wish to join the conversation, please click the comments button at the bottom of the page. We would love to see this conversation continue.
Also essential is the Iraqi perspective on four years of war. Iraqi blogger Treasure of Baghdad has assembled an excellent round table discussion featuring Iraq bloggers. You can read and join in that discussion here.
- Jeff Severns Guntzel, Editor, Electronic Iraq
Round Table Participants
Helena Cobban is a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, Contributing Editor of Boston Review, and publishes the popular blog Just World News. Cobban worked as a journalist in the Middle East from 1974 to 1981.
Laurie King is co-founder of Electronic Iraq and Electronic Intifada. She has been a commentator on national and international news programs on political, cultural, and military developments in the Middle East and US foreign policies in the region. King has a Ph.D in Sociocultural Anthropology. She currently teaches in Washington DC.
George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. He has lived, studied, and traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, with extended sojourns in Beirut, Tunis, Cairo, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Four years ago, how did you envision the war in Iraq unfolding?
TOENSING: Here is what I envisioned: The invading forces would crush the Iraqi army in a matter of weeks, and be welcomed (at first) by the Iraqis.
Saddam Hussein and his inner circle would die in bunkers during a climactic, but brief battle for Baghdad.
The US would quickly realize that its favored Iraqi exiles had no social base, and could not simply be installed as the new government.
The US would finally realize that the reams of UN and NGO documents about the socio-economic effects of sanctions were not just Baathist propaganda, and that Iraq required massive, painstaking rebuilding.
These two realizations would compel the US to commence a direct military and civilian occupation of 5-10 years' duration.
I did not foresee that the US and its Iraqi proxies would import a de facto Lebanon-style system into Iraq, thereby institutionalizing communal idenity as the formal organizing principle of Iraqi politics and putting the country on the path to civil war.
The American public would support this project on the grounds that building a better Iraq would "drain the swamp" of the supposedly terrorist-infested Middle East. Eventually, however, the US occupation, coupled with the bitter memory of the sanctions era, would inspire resistance of some kind. This resistance, coupled with the inter-communal tensions built up under the old regime, and the threat of Iraq's neighbors to intervene if those tensions were allowed to break up Iraq, would push the US to find a new Iraqi strongman to put in place before declaring victory and withdrawing.
I believed that Saddam Hussein's regime probably had some old chemical weapons stockpiles (and even thought these would be used against the invaders), so I did not anticipate that the primary stated rationale for the war would collapse so quickly and utterly, and that therefore American public opinion would start turning against the war so quickly.
I expected anti-Baathist score settling and some level of sectarian-ethnic strife, but I did not foresee that the US and its Iraqi proxies would import a de facto Lebanon-style confessional system into Iraq, thereby institutionalizing communal idenity as the formal organizing principle of Iraqi politics and putting the country on the path to civil war.
In general, I expected the war to be a disaster for both Iraq and the US, but I did not expect the scale of the cataclysm or the rapidity with which it would become apparent. I "misunderestimated" the Bush administration, focusing on their imperial ambitions, and missing their sheer incompetence, stupidity and carelessness.
COBBAN: On March 13, 2003, I wrote in my column in The Christian Science Monitor:
"The fight-to-the death that the president is poised to launch against Saddam Hussein's regime will send a tsunami of destabilization throughout the Middle East. But beyond that, if this war is not authorized by the UN Security Council, it threatens to unravel not just the 58-year-old UN system, but the whole web of interstate relations that has grown up through the past four centuries..."
A little earlier, I went to the meeting of our city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which the council discussed declaring the city "a city of peace." I spoke at that meeting and warned quite clearly that the cost-estimates the Bushites had been making regarding the imminent invasion of Iraq were completely unrealistic, that the costs would be quite enormous, and that hometown communities throughout the US would be paying for this war for a generation to come.
None of this was unforeseeable (or, indeed, unforeseen). The two main precedents I was looking at were the US's earlier engagement in Vietnam and Israel's lengthy engagement in Lebanon from 1982 on.
KING: how did you envision the war in Iraq unfolding? Badly. Although I felt it was high time that the Iraqi people were out from under Saddam's vicious rule, the way it was done seemed to be booby-trapped from the beginning. Regime change is never a good idea when the people whose regime is being changed are not listened to, consulted, or respected.
The Iraqis had been through so much trauma for so long, and there was such deep mistrust, fear, and emotional devastation in Iraq, that any attempt to impose a new governance structure was going to be a very big job requiring long-term commitment and a lot of dialogue with Iraqis from all backgrounds. A working administration was crucial to this, and Bremer's decision to launch a wide-scale de-Baathification campaign meant that no one who had any experience running a country was going to be included in the post-Saddam Iraq government. This was an act of incredible ignorance and arrogance, and I think we can peg a lot of the suffering in Iraq on this one decision, but the initial decision to force democracy on people who did not trust one another, and who, after three decades of tyranny and one decade of sanctions had fallen into an attitude of learned helplessness was the height of folly.
I think it was a great pity that the UN gave such strong, ex-post-facto support as they did to the legality of the post-invasion order in Iraq.
However, I did not have any illusions that the war was about Iraq or Iraqis' interests. It was first and foremost about projecting American power and shoring up Israel as the key military power in the region. The oneness of purpose, ideology and strategy between the Bush administration and the Likud Government of Ariel Sharon was never in doubt. If not for September 11th, I cannot imagine that there would have been the unquestioning support we saw in official Washington and among the media. The US also wanted to frighten Iran, but it seems that Iran was the only real winner in this war.
BISHARAT: I cannot say that I predicted the depths of sectarian hostility that have emerged, tragically, in Iraq since 2003. However, that a determined and durable resistance to U.S. occupation would develop was entirely predictable, as was the deepening of hostility toward the United States throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, not to mention elsewhere.
What have the last four years revealed about the world's emerging political system and the ability of local or global peace movements to shape it?
BISHARAT: That the U.S could launch an essentially illegal attack against another sovereign nation with complete impunity confirmed the weaknesses of the post-World War II security system, centered around the United Nations. The relative inability of any external actors to positively influence US policy since shows what a long way the global peacement movement has to go before becoming truly effective.
TOENSING: The Iraq war has shown that the linchpin of the global order, the US, cannot always impose its will. But neither do the UN and other powers, like the EU, want to abandon the US-led global order and fashion something new. As the 2006 Lebanon war clearly showed, no other power or group of powers is really willing to stand up to the US when it counts. China is biding its time, allowing its economy to grow while the US overextends itself. The result is a unipolar world order, but one with a higher tolerance for chaos and violence, and a greatly diminished vision for something better. Internationalism of all kinds - except maybe pan-Islamism - has suffered a huge blow, as the drumbeat of horrible news about the world makes people want to avert their eyes and turn inward.
Local and global peace movements were stronger before the invasion than after, at first because the fact of the war in the teeth of so much opposition was deeply demoralizing, but then because there was clearly no guarantee that ending US involvement in the war would bring peace to Iraq. Instead of an intifada against empire, the invasion has brought rising sectarianism and civil war. Of course, such phenomena are constructed and manipulated by vested interests, but they are real. This makes it easy to say what you're against, but not quite as easy to say what you're for. From a secular point of view, not to speak of a progressive secular one, the world looks like a darker and more perplexing place now than it did at the crest of the global justice movement in 1999-2000. The challenge, as always, is to keep advancing an internationalist politics despite the overall climate.
COBBAN: I am very sad that the reaction of many governments to the arrogance and contempt with which the Bushites treated the UN and the whole construct of international legality in 2002-2003 was not to excoriate the US government and search for ways to contain this very destabilizing, "rogue" power within the international firmament, but rather to find ways to try to accommodate the UN to the Bushites' will. I think it was a great pity that the UN gave such strong, ex-post-facto support as they did to the legality of the post-invasion order in Iraq. I found it shameful that the UN would agree to be a "junior partner" in the US-led "Quartet" of powers regarding the Palestinian issue, and raised no serious questions regarding the Bush administration's very one-sided pursuit of the "Road Map to Nowhere" on that issue. And in 2004, I found very perplexing the degree to which the French sought to regain the favor of the Bushites by adopting an extremely confrontational policy regarding Syria and Lebanon.
Local and global peace movements were stronger before the invasion than after, at first because the fact of the war in the teeth of so much opposition was deeply demoralizing, but then because there was clearly no guarantee that ending US involvement in the war would bring peace to Iraq.
In all these instances we can see that right now there are few substantial governments anywhere in the world that are yet prepared to stand up to US power, even when the administration in power in Washington is as arrogant, militaristic, and unilateralist as this one.
Local and global peace movements have started to be able to establish a globe-girdling forum to discuss the excesses of Bushist unilateralism in the world. But so far we have not shown ourselves capable of doing very much to halt it in its tracks. Actually, the most hopeful development was the result of the US midterm elections last November.
I see the problem facing the US citizenry as we confront the issue of US power in and relationship with the world as very analogous to the problem that "White" South Africans faced during the Apartheid era, regarding the relationship of their "White" community to the vast majority of South Africans who made up the rest of their national citizenry. As US citizens, who have been showered with enormous benefits and quite disproportionate power, simply by virtue of the accident of our birth (or naturalization), we have a correspondingly huge responsibility to work within our own society and in the international order to try to transform our country's relationship with the rest of the world into one based truly on the principles of human equality. We still have a long, long way to go!
KING: The war revealed the underlying weakness and fragility of the international governance system. The UN was helpless, the EU was helpless, the Iraqis were helpless, the Arab League was helpless, and although the massive demonstrations against the war in February 2003 showed that there was wide and strong civil society support for international law, in the end those with military and monetary power brashly did whatever they wanted to do. And who was going to stop them? The ensuing damage and chaos of the war now poses logistical, political, legal and economic challenges that remind us why we had, since the end of World War II, an international governance and legal system to begin with.
That system has been among the collateral damage of this war. Multilateral responses at the international, as well as the regional, level are now stymied because no one has trust or faith in these frameworks now. The international peace movement does not exist except in cyberspace, which gives people the illusion that they have more power and voice than they actually do. I think many people feel they are doing their part simply by reading websites like ours and sending on reports, analyses, and eyewitness accounts to their friends, colleagues and family members. That is not enough. It's not focused or strategic. It does not put any pressure on the power centers responsible for continuing the insanity unfolding every day in Iraq. Despite the results of the last US congressional elections, for instance, there is still a disconnect between what most Americans seem to want - the end of the war and withdrawal of troops - and what the new Congress is willing to do. People power does not seem to be working well in an institutionalized system that is supposed to effect it, so it's hard to see how those who are outside of any institutionalized structure are going to make a significant impact or change.
No political movement survives or succeeds without daily interactions and efforts in the real world, i.e., without socially grounded and contextualized efforts of real people in real places developing relationships and interacting in a face-to-face manner in concert. And such a movement should not be one led by Americans and Europeans on behalf of Iraqis or Lebanese or Palestinians, but hand in hand with people on the front lines of daily devastation. There is a real problem, too, with the Left in the United States, which often takes a self-righteous attitude, or even snobbishness, towards those who could be its allies. The best is often the enemy of the good.
Natural and key allies for the Left in the US are the families of troops serving in Iraq and those who have returned. Too often the troops are depicted as the enemy, part of the problem. Demonising young men and women who have joined the army largely to climb a steep socioeconomic ladder, and who are suffering with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on a scale not seen even in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, is counterproductive. Viewing people in black and white terms is for teenagers, not anyone serious about building a real and resilient peace movement.
What has most surprised or alarmed you about politics, public debate, and media performance over the last four years?
BISHARAT: This is not a new lesson, I suppose, but I am constantly amazed at how craven our media are to power. Of course, now that it is politically safe to criticize the war and President Bush the media are all over him. I wish they had had the spine when it counted. And I hope they gain the spine to determinedly oppose the current march to war against Iran.
KING: Many knowledgeable writers and policy makers raised the alarm about the detrimental consequences of this war and occupation months before it began. They were ignored at best, and denigrated at worst, as detailed in a recent article noting the strange and distrubing reality that pundits and journalists who supported the war are still rewarded and given considerable air time and column inches, while those who warned of its dangers from the beginning continue to be marginalized in the mainstream media.
TOENSING: In the alarming but not surprising category: To this day, it is virtually impossible to see, hear or read the many people who opposed the war before it started in the mainstream media. The media reports on the anti-war movement sketchily at best. Moreover, the media does not consult as "experts" the many analysts who were right that Saddam's weapons posed no threat justifying war and that war would make Iraqis worse off than before. One may criticize the execution of the war or argue that in retrospect it was a mistake, but one may not venture outside these red lines to a more full-throated critique of the foundations of bipartisan foreign policy thinking and the imperial worldview. Incredibly, Iraqi voices are also virtually absent from the talk shows and op-ed pages. Because the debate over the war is so impoverished, too many Americans have turned against the war for the wrong reasons, among them the disgraceful canards that Iraqis are ungrateful for their liberation and that Sunnis and Shiites nurse an unfathomable "age-old hatred." This makes me worry that, as was the case with "Vietnam syndrome," any "Iraq syndrome" will not be lasting.
COBBAN: The biggest disappointment, for me, was to see the cravenly unquestioning attitude that nearly all the big names in the US media adopted to all the claims made by the Bushists during those crucial 18 months from September 11, 2001 through March 19, 2003. I found it almost incredible that this great institution of the US mainstream media - whose role I had admired from afar during the Vietnam years and the Watergate years - should turn out to have been so thoroughly co-opted into a chronicling, subservient attitude toward the government in power rather than asking the hard questions, challenging their claims by recourse to their own thorough-going reporting of the facts, etc.
I guess I was way too idealistic.
The media, of course, play a huge role in framing and fashioning public perceptions. Somehow, I blame the mainstream media much more for the role they played - and it was not just the openly identifiable war-drum-beaters like Judy Miller or Jim Hoagland - it was just about everyone - than I do our so-called 'representatives' in Congress.
To this day, it is virtually impossible to see, hear or read the many people who opposed the war before it started in the mainstream media.
Regarding the media, I could also mention the almost effortless and unremarked rollback that nearly all mainstream media organizations have made regarding the inclusion of "different" kinds of voices within the kinds of fora they sanction. Above all, look at the near-absence of the voices of the many highly qualified professional women when issues of "war and peace" are discussed! There seems to be some kind of an idea among media bookers either that only white men know anything about war and peace, or that the viewers somehow need the reassuring presence of the white male "expert".
Look at the race and gender of all the leading figures who took us into this war...
What organizations and trends do you see emerging in the Middle East that give you hope?
COBBAN: The disutility of the use of pure military force has never been so amply demonstrated for all to see than during the US's military (mis-)adventure in Iraq and Israel's (mis-)adventure in Lebanon last summer. Prior to 2003, many Western liberals had been somehow seduced into the idea that the rights situation of people in benighted communities could somehow be improved almost through the application of military force alone. Ain't so. We now have a good opportunity to argue (once again) that helping to improve the rights situation of people living in tough times is a hard slog that requires real human engagement, and that there are always good, solid nonviolent ways to do this.
After the experience Iraqis have gone through in the past four years, we do now have a better chance than hitherto to show US citizens that military occupation is a quite unacceptable, rights-abusing situation; and that it must be ended wherever it exists - including in Palestine and Golan, as well as in Iraq.
I think that in the Middle East there is a fatigue at numerous levels with the effects of violence. Sometimes, episodes of violence or tremendous atrocity can lead to their own backlash, and to a rededication to the idea that coexistence is possible, is not a zero-sum game, and can be pursued through nonviolent means.
This is not just pie-in-the-sky: I have seen the walls of hatred and distrust come down much more rapidly than anyone could ever have expected through my work on southern Africa - in South Africa, and in Mozambique. And at a modest but significant level I think it is very, very encouraging that despite all the divisiveness and mistrust in Lebanon, the situation there over the past couple of years has not yet sparked a descent back into the horrors of the civil war that I lived through there, in the 1970s.
I am working with a small new network that we hope is going to grow into a big new force. It's called the Global Network for Nonviolence. We'll be rolling it out into the public domain in just a few weeks now. We have some very serious participants in this project from numerous parts of the Middle East...
TOENSING: In many countries, there are small grassroots efforts making people-to-people connections that circumvent official and other "normal" channels. Helem and its network of affiliates in Lebanon is a good example. The work they did during the summer 2006 war was fantastic.
BISHARAT: I am never as much inspired by organizations as I am by the people of the Middle East, who have faced unimaginable hardships with strength, dignity, and steadfastness. Beyond that, I also view the Palestinian movement for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel as extraordinarily important and encouraging. It was launched on 2005, on the anniversary of the judgment of the International Court of Justice against Israel's wall by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations. Particularly significantly, the groups represented Palestinians from everywhere, including the diaspora, from within Israel, and in the occupied territories. It called for respect for international law, and realization of the rights of all Palestinians, embodying a form of unity that has not been seen for decades.
What are the main missing ingredients in policy-making, media coverage and commentary, and public debate and discourse about Iraq in North America and Europe?
COBBAN: Understanding, hopefulness, the inclusion of different voices, the idea that there is a possible way out of Iraq's current mess if serious efforts are made to allow the strengthening of an idea of inclusive Iraqi citizen-hood rather than having the media play on all these divisive questions like "Why Sunnis and Shi'ites have always hated each other and always will?"
I think that in the Middle East there is a fatigue at numerous levels with the effects of violence. Sometimes, episodes of violence or tremendous atrocity can lead to their own backlash, and to a rededication to the idea that coexistence is possible, is not a zero-sum game, and can be pursued through nonviolent means.
It would also be good to have a little more awareness among media people of the fact that colonial powers have always - always! - sowed divisiveness and the ideas of divisiveness as a way of perpetuating completely unjust colonial situations.
TOENSING: Iraqi voices are the main missing ingredient. There should be lots of them, though of course they will not all argue the same thing. It is appalling that the subjects of this so-called humanitarian intervention matter so little in the American deliberations about it.
BISHARAT: The media does very little to expose the depth of suffering of the Iraqi people. While the numbers of deaths from car bombings are routinely splayed across headlines, this is, at most, the tip of the iceberg. The scale of the problem of displaced Iraqis - whether to places within Iraq or outside - is particularly neglected.
What are your greatest fears and concerns about Iraq in particular and the rest of the Middle East in general as we mark this fourth year anniversary of the war?
COBBAN: Mainly, that the US Democratic Party will screw things up. I think we have to wage this present anti-war campaign with (largely) the Democratic Party that we have rather than the one we might have wanted. And when I say "anti-war" campaign, I see it as a campaign not only to bring the US troops home on a basis that, I hope, will optimize the ability of the Iraqis to rebuild a functioning political system for themselves, but also beyond that, to restructure the relationship of the US with the rest of world on a much more egalitarian basis. If we can't do that, then given the craziness of our political system, it may be only a matter of time before another dangerous and heavily armed crackpot like George Bush or Dick Cheney appears on the scene and wreaks his havoc on the world.
KING: One can only separate the dangers facing Iraq from those facing the rest of the region on an analytical level. Clearly a lot of US officials and pundits are operating on that level - the theoretical and hypothetical - and imagining that the situation has not reached the tipping point, or already passed it. Three or four years ago, I thought that some sort of structural change in the "rules of the game" in the region was possible, and hoped it would emerge from within the region, rather than be imposed upon it from the outside.
Now I think the game itself has changed; the situation has spun out of control for all Americans and Iraqis alike. I fear that the chaos, trauma and suffering we are witnessing (and that too many are living) everyday is just the beginning of a longer story, a more dangerous game.
It's not clear to me how anyone can intervene or transform the situation as this point. Sadly, I think it has to play itself out, and that process may leave a lot of scorched earth in its wake, not only in Iraq but in surrounding countries. Every war is a public health emergency, and now we are seeing more and more attention to the mental health impact of the war in Iraq and at home. But wars launched in violation of the UN Charter (Chapter 7) and conducted outside the frameworks of the Geneva Convention are global governance emergencies. For that reason a comprehensive analysis of the disastrous war in Iraq has to include the global as well as the local repercussions of the last four years.
TOENSING: There may very well be an awful civil war in Iraq if the US withdraws, but there will certainly be an awful civil war there until the US withdraws. At the same time, there is very little genuine courage in the American political class. So my greatest fear is that the status quo will be allowed to drift indefinitely.
We will see all of the horrible consequences of withdrawal that are predicted by those who want to give war a chance. Most of these consequences are happening right now, of course - sectarian cleansing, mass refugee flight, intervention by Iraq's neighbors. All this could still intensify greatly with the US still in Iraq, and there's no reason now to think it won't. The longer US withdrawal is delayed, the worse the consequences of it are likely to be. The planned referendum on the status of Kirkuk is another upcoming crisis that could add to the carnage. Iraq is a failed state sitting atop what may be the world's second largest oil reserves. The prize is huge, and it will be fought over. The fight could most certainly draw in Iraq's neighbors, and the result could be another "intractable" Middle East conflict to add to the one in Israel-Palestine.
BISHARAT: Although I would like to think that cooler heads will prevail, the greatest fear I have is of a U.S. attack against Iran. I think it would be madness to do so, and frankly think it unlikely. However, I remember thinking the same thing in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
