"He was a patron of
terrorism ... He had long-established ties with
al-Qaeda." - Vice President Dick Cheney on Saddam
Hussein, June 14
"I have not seen
smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the
connection." - Secretary of State Colin Powell, June
10
"We have no credible evidence that Iraq
and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United
States." - 9-11 Commission, June 16
ANN
ARBOR, Michigan - Juan Cole, professor of history at the
University of Michigan, has positioned himself as a
virtually indispensable voice in the Iraq debate. His
Internet weblog, Informed Comment, offers a stark
contrast to the cacophony of uninformed armchair
punditry on Iraq, not to mention talk-show hosts
babbling about "wacky Iraqis". Professor Cole lived in
Lucknow, India, and also in Beirut. He's a fluent Arab
speaker. The blog is uploaded daily, by himself (no
staffers), and also offers extensive quotes from the
Arab press. He gets as many as 200,000 fresh hits a
week. Cole received this Asia Times Online correspondent
in his fourth-floor office at the university's
International Institute in Ann Arbor.
ATol: Let's start with the credibility of
the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis,
Shi'ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the
UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in
the Shi'ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing
Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the
same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi
government?
Juan Cole: Everybody knows it's an appointed government.
It doesn't spring from the rule of the Iraqi people.
Grand Ayatollah [Ali
al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which
he openly said that. His view in this matter will be
widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime
minister should have been a known CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it
changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a
puppet council by many people. There's much more
continuity between the IGC and this government than most
people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast
of characters - either with regard to people who
actually sat at the council and persons who represent
factions who had a seat in that council.
ATol: What are the implications of what
you're saying for the Iraqi street?
JC:
That nothing really has changed. These people are not
getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a
publicity stunt - without substance. The real question
for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or
not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since
the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not
entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one
can be pessimistic ...
Army down, racism
up ATol: On the dissolution of the army: Do you
think this was a blunder by proconsul Paul Bremer or was
it carried out on purpose?
JC: On purpose
in the sense of trying to make the Iraqis dependent on
the Americans? Well, what Jay Garner said to the BBC
[British Broadcasting Corp], I saw it with my own eyes,
is that he believed one of the reasons the army was
dissolved was that the Bremer team has as one of their
primary goals in Iraq the imposition of Polish-style
shock therapy. They wanted to transform Iraq into a
capitalist state, as quickly as possible. This was part
of the general plan to make Iraq a kind of model for the
region.
ATol: This was the original
neo-con plan?
JC: Yes, but the primacy of
the economic policy is something that I don't think is
generally recognized. One of the reasons for getting rid
of the Ba'ath army, according to Garner, was that they
were afraid that the survival of any large Ba'ath
institution like that might be an obstacle to the
extreme liberalization of the economy. You can just
imagine a situation in which the Americans wanted to
denationalize Iraqi companies. If you had kept the
Ba'ath army, they would come to the coalition and say,
"No, you can't sell off these companies, my cousin helps
to run them"... They [the Americans] thought that the
army would remain a power center able to intervene in
policy debates, on the side of state control of the
economy. So they dissolved it not based on security
purposes, but to remove a potential obstacle to
Polish-style shock therapy. They brought Polish economic
advisers - that's the reason for the Polish military
involvement in Iraq. They tried to replicate the Polish
experience. I don't believe that the neo-cons at the
Defense Department wanted to use the US military to
supplant the Iraqi army. In fact, [Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz had told Congress that it's
likely the US would be back to having only one division
in Iraq by October 2003. They thought they could
dissolve the army and just use the police to maintain
order, and then they could do whatever they wanted to do
with the economy: sell it off, bring in the big
companies, open Iraq to Western investment. They hoped
that the Iraqi bourgeoisie would emerge, there would be
productivity gains, the country would be rich, and
everybody else - the Iranians, the Syrians - would want
to follow them.
ATol: Was that a mix of
arrogance and incompetence, plus lack of knowledge of
society and culture in Iraqi and the Middle East?
JC: Certainly the plan was born out of
enormous ignorance of the Middle East. Remember, people
with training in economics and political science very
frequently stay away from knowing details. They have a
set of principles, they think they are physicists, so
the people planning this out, most of them knew no
Arabic or anything really about the history and culture
and society of the Arab world. Except for Wolfowitz, who
had some knowledge of Indonesia when he was there as an
ambassador ...
ATol: But Islam in
Indonesia and Southeast Asia has very little to do with
Islam in the Middle East.
JC: I would say
it's very substantially different. And Indonesia is not
a sufficient background for planning out how to run Iraq
... And moreover Wolfowitz was the only one amongst them
who had this kind of knowledge. So it's clear to me that
first of all they were very ignorant, also extremely
arrogant because they were playing with people's
destinies. Some of the neo-cons of course are very close
to the Likud Party in Israel, and I think that many of
them have imbibed this kind of Israeli racism towards
Arabs, that Arabs only respect force, that you can get
them to inform on each other because of all the internal
clan feuds ... People like Douglas Feith and Richard
Perle have thought along these lines for a long time.
Frankly, Israeli racism towards the Arabs is not a good
guide to dealing with a society like Iraq, or with any
society. Unlike the Palestinians, Iraq is a society that
has not been dominated by a foreign power since 1932.
ATol: And the Iraqis expelled the
British.
JC: The British were expelled
and very decisively, in 1958. And there were many
rebellions before that. This generation of young Iraqis
grew up in Ba'ath schools, learning about nationalism,
learning about anti-colonialism. What their identity
really is about is asserting themselves vis-a-vis the
West. The idea that they would be supine before a
Western occupation was always crazy, and any of us who
knew anything about the region predicted there would be
a lot of trouble. Iraq was a modern, industrial society,
with relatively high rates of literacy, run down in the
1990s very substantially but still not a society easy
for foreigners to come and dominate.
Roads to
hell ATol: Assuming that the neo-con dream - the
road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad - is now in
tatters, would it be the case that now the road through
Baghdad leads back to Crawford, Texas?
JC: There's some question of whether that
could cost [President George W] Bush the election. A
year ago, it didn't seem likely to me that Iraq would be
able to affect an election. But the steady drumbeat of
violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded, the
miscalculations regarding the siege of Fallujah,
provoking the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, and
then the Abu Ghraib scandal, the cumulative factor of
all these events, according to opinion polls, really
have taken a toll on Bush's standing. If he were to be
re-elected it would be historic: no one has been
re-elected with these kinds of poll numbers. I think
Iraq has become an albatross for the Bush
administration. This so-called turnover of sovereignty -
they're hoping that the US press stops covering Iraq
like it is doing now, very intensively, as though it is
the 51st state, which essentially is being run by the
American government. Everyone will have noticed that
when Hamid Karzai was elected by the Loya Jirga,
the very next day Afghanistan fell off the front page
and went to page 17.
ATol: And now it has
fallen off the papers entirely.
JC: Now
you can have several American servicemen killed and they
are not even reported. I discern an unwritten rule among
American journalists, that the American public is not
interested in places which have their own government.
The real significance of the so-called handover of
sovereignty is that the Bush administration and its
political advisers are hoping that the American press
will take this moment as a cue to turn to reporting
about Laci Peterson and other nonsense stories, local
murder mysteries.
ATol: Do you think this
might work? With Fox News maybe, but what about the
Washington Post and the New York Times?
JC: Actually, it might. It might push
Iraq off the front page. I don't agree with you that it
would work most of all with Fox News. Because of its
militarism and its attempt to get viewers from the
American right, Fox pays more attention to Iraq than
most of the other networks do.
ATol: In
terms of sensational images.
JC:
Sensational images, but it's just inevitable that if the
US military very largely votes Republican, and you want
those people watching Fox programming, they're
interested in what's going on in Iraq. I think
capitalism in a way swings Fox towards doing more Iraq
reporting than some of the other networks. If there's a
firefight in Baqubah, it seems that Fox is more likely
to report it than the other networks.
ATol: But they report only the Pentagon
side of the story.
JC: I agree that Fox
is very slanted, but the way mass media work can often
be ironic. Although Fox thinks it is reporting news of
interest to its right-wing viewers, reporting this
firefight in Baqubah and the way the US is putting down
those insurgents, anybody who actually watches this will
come out with a double message: one is the Fox message,
and the other message is "Jesus, a lot of trouble in
Iraq".
ATol: We have learned from the
resistance, from some former Saddam Hussein generals,
that the resistance will actually increase after June
30, that the postwar had been planned for years, and
that everyone associated in some form or another with
the Americans and the new caretaker government will be a
target. So there will be even more bloodshed. How will
this bloodshed rebound on the US? And what about the
media: will they report it?
JC: This is
the problem: it's difficult for the insurgency to target
the Americans. They can get some RPGs [rocket-propelled
grenades] against an American base, they do this every
day, it usually results in some casualties, relatively
light. They've mainly turned to soft targets, Iraqis, so
they blow up a market in Baghdad, or police stations.
They are attempting to just foment a feeling in the
country that the Americans are not actually in control.
That will continue and may as well increase. I read a
lot about these incidents in the Arabic press - they
never get reported in the Western press.
ATol: But the important point is that
these incidents are reported on alJazeera and al-Arabiya
and watched every night by millions in the Arab world.
JC: AlJazeera is excellent on Iraq news,
and it reports all of these incidents where there are
casualties. But as far as the American public is
concerned, I think that it may well be that casualties
among US servicemen in Iraq, that's going to be on page
17. But if you did have an increase in the number of
incidents, it's possible that it would get more
coverage. It's up to the journalists now. Are they going
to take this bait, are they going to be manipulated in
this way as they have been manipulated all along?
ATol: Maybe it's the case that everybody
has been manipulated: the American press, and now also
the United Nations, forced to approve a new Iraq
resolution. For millions of Iraqis, the UN is synonymous
with sanctions.
JC: This is different
from the rest of the Arab world, where they associate
the UN with peacekeeping and a more even-handed policy
towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the UN itself is
not unaware of this, and they don't want to get heavily
involved in Iraq. The problem for the world community is
that the US has presented them with a fait
accompli. It's not in anybody's interest in Europe,
for instance, for Iraq to descend into chaos. Europe is
heavily dependent on Persian Gulf petroleum, it could be
deindustrialized if things get too bad. So when the
Americans come and say, "If you pass a resolution of
this sort, we'll set the process back to order," who's
going to argue with them?
The Muqtada
factor ATol - Let's examine the move against
Muqtada al-Sadr. Was it another blunder by the CPA
(Coalition Provisional Authority)?
JC:
These things are not transparent. It's amazing to me, we
supposedly live in a democracy in the United States. And
yet, once the election has occurred, the public gives up
a lot of right to know. And so the CPA has been run in a
very untransparent way, we never know why they do
anything, they never say, and they are constantly
putting out those kinds of propagandistic statements,
they're always trying to find demons to blame everything
on, Saddam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and then Muqtada
al-Sadr. My own impression is that the Americans
provoked this uprising by Muqtada, that he had not done
anything in particular that might suggest he was a
military threat. He had given strict orders to his
militia not to fire on Americans. When the Americans
came after Muqtada, he launched this uprising. I think
the Shi'ite clerics made a decision to stay out of it,
retreat from their positions and have the Mahdi Army
have Najaf and Karbala. The Mahdi Army was not strong in
those two places. I still think that it's plausible that
it was Muqtada's reaction to the assassination of Sheikh
[Ahmed] Yassin that caused the CPA to go after him. We
must remember that the CPA is dominated by
neo-conservatives, that twentysomething people like
[neo-con pundit] Michael Ledeen's daughter [Simone
Ledeen] have been running the Iraqi economy.
Decision-making would be coming from people who are very
close to the Likud Party and who were extremely alarmed
when Muqtada al-Sadr said he was like the right arm of
Hamas and would avenge the death of Sheikh Yassin.
ATol: Have you read any similar analysis
in any of the Arab papers at the time?
JC: No. I haven't. But it's possible. I
know Hezbollah called for revenge for the murder, and
also did call for Iraqi solidarity about this. But this
analysis, I have never seen it in the Arabic press.
ATol: You were arguably one of the few,
if not the only one, in the West who wrote that the
Shi'ites would never forgive America for the bombing of
Karbala, and you also cared to explain why.
JC: Most Americans and Westerners don't
understand what Karbala means. During the Iranian
revolution there was a slogan that "every day is
Ashura". Karbala is what an anthropologist called a
paradigm in people's lives. The idea of American GIs
firing tank missiles anywhere near the shrine of Imam
Hussein in major battle with Shi'ites is unbearable,
even considering that the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr
are not liked around Karbala, they are considered
lower-class thugs. I compare them to gangster rappers.
So I'm not saying they were popular. I'm saying that the
Shi'ites look at them as their own problem. And if there
is a choice between them and the Americans, symbolically
at least, regardless of what they actually do, they
could never make that choice for the Americans. People
are very upset all over the Shi'ite world that there was
this desecration of the shrine cities. The amount of
rage among the Shi'ites towards the Americans now is
greater than I've seen since the Iranian revolution.
It's a cost of these kinds of frankly stupid policies
the Bush administration has been pursuing in Iraq. I
don't believe the general American public is even aware
of this. They keep asking things like "Why do they hate
us?" ...
ATol: What about the role of
Iran in this new Iraqi configuration?
JC:
They have been behind Ayatollah Sistani. But the
Iranians are badly split - between the hardliners and
the reformists. For the reformists, Sistani is a
godsend. He rejects the theory of clerical rule, the
velayat-e-faqih. And in Iran it is illegal to
reject it. Ayatollah [Hossein Ali] Montazeri was put
under house arrest for rejecting it. From that point of
view, Sistani is much more like the reformists. He's not
a Khomeinist. There have been reports of some of the
reformists actually declaring themselves as followers of
Sistani - because you can choose, in Shi'ite Islam,
which ayatollah to follow. So I think this is a problem
for [Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and
the hardliners if Iraq becomes an alternative center of
religious authority and undermines their position. From
this point of view, they're nervous about Sistani. On
the other hand, he is part of the club, he's got
excellent credentials, training, he speaks their
language. What he wants for Iraq is something they can
live with; he wants a parliamentary government, which
would be Shi'ite-dominated, in which the Shi'ite clergy
could intervene to shape legislation by their
fatwas, by appealing to the consciousness of the
Shi'ite legislators. I'd compare this vision of
Sistani's for Iraq with 1950s Ireland and the position
of the Catholic Church there. There was a secular,
elected parliament. If the parliament took up any issue
like divorce, the bishops would state their position and
put enormous pressure on the representatives to vote
their way.
ATol: So it would be nothing
like a Khomeinist system.
JC: Nothing
like that. On the other hand, from the point of view of
the hardline Iranians, it would not be a terrible system
either. It would be a Shi'ite-dominated state, it would
be friendly to Tehran inevitably, the Shi'ite clergy
would have a great deal of influence. And you probably
could not get Khomeinism in Iraq because of the 40% of
the population which is Sunni. So actually Sistani's
vision is the best Iran can hope for. It would be much
better than, say, a return of the Ba'ath. Moreover,
Sistani wants to eliminate the presence of American
troops, and this also pleases the Iranians. These are
status quo people: they don't like a lot of trouble.
Although the Americans keep depicting Iran as a source
of trouble in the world, they haven't gone around
beating their neighbors. They've been a much less
turbulent revolutionary country than one might have
expected, or that Saddam was. What I'm saying about them
being status quo is that Muqtada makes them nervous.
He's clearly a revolutionary of some sort. He's clearly
got in mind to cause a lot of trouble.
The
al-Qaeda factor ATol: Wildly disparate estimates
of the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq range from 600 to
7,000. Do you discern any pattern, any strategy of
al-Qaeda in Iraq? And do you buy the myth of al-Qaeda as
this major SPECTRE-like, all-enveloping evil
organization?
JC: First of all you have
to begin with the definition of what al-Qaeda is.
There's a technical definition of al-Qaeda: fighters who
gave their loyalty to Osama bin Laden. Those are very
few: a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Then you could
say people oriented towards bin Laden's way of thinking
who have been Arab-Afghans, who had fought in
Afghanistan: this is a much larger group, like 5,000.
I've seen an estimate of 15,000, when you include groups
such as the one responsible for the attacks in
Casablanca. Relatively few of those had any links with
Osama bin Laden - they were local, radical salafi
groups. If we're talking about radical, violent
salafis, they might reach 15,000. But then again
there are 1,2 billion people in the Muslim world. These
are small local networks, you cannot talk of an
organization. Bin Laden has a general policy of not
putting resources into situations that are already in
turmoil. He's never done anything in the West Bank. He'd
be much more interested in getting something going on in
Indonesia or Malaysia. My information is that bin Laden
is not interested in Iraq. I don't think there are even
600 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. There are foreign
fighters but they are not technically al-Qaeda: rather
Muslim Brotherhood types. The vast majority of the
resistance is composed by Iraqis: not only
ex-Ba'athists, but Sunni nationalists, salafis
... I suspect there are 25,000 or so insurgents in Iraq,
doing something at least occasionally. Even if there
were 400 or 500 foreign fighters, they would be a drop
in the bucket.
ATol: How could the
neo-cons engineer a victory next November, by using this
period of illusion of the next four months in Iraq?
Supposing it goes terribly wrong, as it might, how could
they still get Bush re-elected?
JC: I
know they are upset and depressed by Ahmad Chalabi being
sidelined. And there is pressure from the Republican
Party: it wasn't a wise thing to drag the president into
another war that would then spill over into the election
year. However you look at this thing it is a political
disaster: even if Bush survives it. Some of the neo-cons
at the Pentagon are now thinking of putting the Sunnis
and the Kurds together and playing them off against the
Shi'ites - as if the Kurds would cooperate with
ex-Ba'ath Sunnis ... There is going to be a
Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. The neo-cons assumed that the
Sh'ites in Iraq might not be so sympathetic towards the
Palestinians. Looking at your question, what they may
try to do is this: they have managed to get Iyad Allawi
as prime minister - although he wasn't the United
States' first choice. These last few weeks Bremer has
reversed the de-Ba'athification policy, there are a
number of ex-Ba'athists in this new government. And they
may attempt in some way to bring back the Ba'ath army,
as a security instrument for the government to establish
control.
ATol: But most of these generals
are part of the resistance. They would never work for
the Americans.
JC: If you gave them their
jobs back to work for Allawi they might not be part of
the resistance anymore. Allawi for the past 15 years has
been organizing ex-Ba'ath generals. If anybody could
handle them, it could be him. I'm not, by the way,
saying this would be a bad thing. I think the extreme
de-Ba'athification program, pursued apparently at the
insistence of the Chalabi clique, was itself a mistake.
It wasn't what the US military had planned on doing.
ATol: In sum, another total blunder by
the CPA - a Pentagon decision implemented by Bremer.
JC: Yes, I think it was a decision by the
Pentagon. I think it was done for many reasons.
Initially the Pentagon planned on turning Iraq over to
the Chalabi clique. For Allawi to reverse it somewhat,
and to succeed in getting back some semblance of a
military, three divisions, 60,000 men, this could be a
good thing, it could contribute to order. The danger, of
course, is that the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI], the Da'wa party, the Shi'ite
forces which have spent the last 35 years fighting the
Ba'ath, they're not going to like this. It could even
cause more trouble.
ATol: So is there a
risk of civil war in Iraq?
JC: No, not
civil war. I lived in Beirut during the early years of
the civil war there, and you had these militias which
set pitched battles and so forth - I don't think that
can happen in Iraq because the Americans are still
powerful enough through their air force to stop it. What
the Americans wouldn't be very good at stopping would be
if you had mass urban turmoil. If you had Sunni-Shi'ite
riots between Adhamiya and Kazamiya for instance, in
Baghdad. You can't send attack helicopters to stop that.
Or Kirkuk, which seems to me to be a tinderbox. If there
is urban turmoil in the country, this is something I
think the United States cannot deal with. That seems to
me to be the real nightmare scenario.
Iraq as
Bush's nightmare ATol: There's a more realistic
scenario of the resistance increasing in the next few
months.
JC: It will, but the Americans
are hard targets. I don't expect the insurgency to be
able to hit the Americans and make a difference. Whether
Iraq has a big impact on the election will depend very
much on what's going on in Iraq in September and
October, because people have short memories in
elections. I think the Bush administration will be very
careful not to provoke another Fallujah this fall. You
could have a low-level guerrilla [war] going on, not
terribly well reported in America, Iraq could well fall
off the front page, it might not be a big issue in the
election, so Bush may get away with it. But if he's
re-elected, it's still going to be there. You simply
cannot have a big, important oil producer at the head of
the Persian Gulf in a state of turmoil. In a way, if
Bush is re-elected, it would be poetic justice that he
continues to spend a lot of energy [on] putting Iraq
back together. If [Democratic presidential candidate
John] Kerry were elected, he would have the same
problem. Kerry being elected is not a solution.
ATol: Do you detect any Iraq policy at
all from the Kerry side?
JC: Well, he
says he wants to internationalize, and the real question
is whether it's not too late. If Kerry is elected in
November and he goes back to France and Germany and
says, "OK, it's a new ball game, won't you come in with
me?" are the French and German governments really going
to be eager to send their troops? By then also, as the
Sistani fatwa makes clear, all traces of the
occupation should have been erased. There may be a
building demand from the Iraqi side that foreigners just
get out of their country. So Kerry's
internationalization will not even be welcomed in Iraq
by that point. The question is: has Bush ruined the
situation beyond repair so that Kerry's policy is
difficult to implement?
ATol: What would
you say?
JC: I think it is very difficult
for Kerry to have his policy implemented.
ATol: Finally: Will Osama be captured
next October?
JC: If the Bush
administration knew how to capture Osama, he would have
been captured. If they could do it now, they would do
it. It would become a campaign slogan. They don't have
good intelligence, and even the Pakistanis don't have
good intelligence. So I don't think there will be an
October surprise.
Iraq as the 51st
state 
al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which
he openly said that. His view in this matter will be
widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime
minister should have been a known CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it
changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a
puppet council by many people. There's much more
continuity between the IGC and this government than most
people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast
of characters - either with regard to people who
actually sat at the council and persons who represent
factions who had a seat in that council.
