DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The treasure, the strongbox
and the crowbar
Tom
Engelhardt interviews Juan Cole
The man
who starts my every online day is standing at the
door. He's small-framed with short, wavy hair and
fragile-looking specs. Nattily dressed in a dark
suit and tie, he apologizes, as he enters, for
being so formally togged out on a Sunday morning.
As it happens, I'm but a pit stop on the way to an
afternoon TV interview at the PBS program Great
Decisions on one of his specialties, Iran.
This is Juan Cole. His website, Informed
Comment, first came on line in April 2002, almost
a year before the Bush administration's invasion
of Iraq. As he recalls his life back then, "I was
just a Midwestern college professor. I taught my
courses and wrote my articles about the Middle
East. My interests were in religious institutions,
religious movements, especially Shi'ite Islam and
Sunni modernism. I knew where these movements came
from. I knew the history of the Shi'ite clergy in
Najaf back to the eighteenth century. And I had
lived in the Middle East off and on
for
a significant period of time. When my blog began,
it was little more than gardening for me, a small
hobby on the side to put up a few thoughts every
once in a while, initially read by 50 to 100
people a day". Now, it is counted among the top
100 blogs at Technorati.com, a site that follows
such things, and may be one of the more linked to
blogs on earth. American reporters trapped in
hotels in Baghdad read it regularly for the latest
news from Iraq. The secret of his success? "I type
fast," he says with a sly smile. "Seventy words a
minute".
An "army brat," with Arabic,
Persian and Urdu under his belt, a scholar who
"can make something out of an Ottoman text", he
teaches modern Middle Eastern history at the
University of Michigan. He is exceedingly
mild-looking, mild-mannered and quiet-spoken. Even
his humor is hushed. He's ironic. The very name of
his blog, he tells me, was meant as a quiet
commentary on the "grandiose" blog titles people
were then choosing back in 2002. And yet, as
anyone who reads his blog knows, his mind is
anything but mild. As a reasonable man
increasingly appalled by the Bush administration
and American policy in the Middle East, he can be,
and often is, an impressively fierce essayist.
As he settles into an easy chair in my
living room to await breakfast on a day when
nature has once again dealt a horrific blow to
humanity - the Pakistani earthquake had just
occurred - he proceeds to tell me much I didn't
know about the history and plate tectonics of the
region. When asked a question, he pauses to
formulate his response. It's rare in our world,
but you can actually see him think. If you were a
student with a penny of sense in your head, this
is the man you would want for your professor. In
fact, an hour and a half after our interview
begins, as I click off my tape recorders, I feel
I've only scratched the surface. There are reams
of questions still to be asked - perhaps on
another day - and the first Tomdispatch two-part
interview to type up.
Tomdispatch: Do you sleep?
This is a question your readers wonder about. Take
October fourth. You put up four posts,
time-stamped between 6 and 6:30 am. By the time
I'm up at 7 you're always there.
Juan Cole: I'm a night owl.
The way it works is this: The Arabic and Persian
newspapers in the Middle East go up around 10 or
11 pm our time, but they're the next day's
newspapers. So basically it's like time travel. I
get to see tomorrow's newspapers tonight.
TD: About the president's
most recent global terror speech you wrote, "Mr.
Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint."
Could you start by laying out for us what's
missing from our picture of Iraq - not just Bush's
picture, but the mainstream media's?
JC: It's not just from Iraq.
It's our picture of the world. The United States
is a peculiarly insular society. Most people here
haven't traveled very much and our mass media, all
television news of any significance, is controlled
by about five corporations. We have a tradition in
the State Department and our press corps of
preferring generalists and being suspicious of
deep expertise as a form of bias. So a journalist
covering Iraq, who knows the Middle East well and
knows Arabic, might well be seen as someone too
entangled with the region to be objective. The
American way of ensuring objectivity is to
parachute generalists into a situation and have
them depend on local informants. The whole theory
of it is wrong. The BBC, for example, wouldn't
dream of having most of its Middle Eastern
coverage done by people who don't know Arabic.
Basically, the public is informed about
things like the Middle East by generalist
journalists who were in Southeast Asia or Russia
last year, and by politicians and bureaucrats who
were dealing with some other region last week. And
then there's official Washington spin, and the
punditocracy, the professional commentators,
mainly in New York and Washington, who comment
about the Middle East without necessarily knowing
anything serious about it. Anybody who's lived in
parts of the world under the microscope in
Washington is usually astonished at how we
represent them. You end up with an extremely
persistent set of images that almost no actual
information is able to make a dent in.
TD: Can you apply this to
Iraq?
JC: The famous
instance is the interview deputy secretary of
defense Paul Wolfowitz gave to National Public
Radio in February before the Iraq War. He said
words to the effect that Iraq will be a better
friend to the United States than Saudi Arabia had
been. It shows you he was intending to replace
Saudi Arabia with Iraq as a pillar of the US
security establishment in the Middle East. Saudis
are Wahabis and they have sensitivities about
their holy cities, Mecca and Medina. Iraq, he
said, is a Shia society. It's secular. He
juxtaposed Shia and secular. And then he added, it
doesn't have the problem of having holy cities.
The Washington power elite that planned out the
invasion appears to have thought that Iraq was a
secular society, including the Shi'ites amongst
them, and they seem to have been unaware of Najaf
and Kabala as among the holiest shrine cities in
the world of Islam.
It's not a matter of
stupidity on Wolfowitz's part. It's a matter of
being uninformed. Willfully uninformed. He just
believed whatever people like [long-time Iraqi
expatriate politician and corrupt banker, now
vice-premier] Ahmed Chalabi told him about Iraq.
He probably hadn't read as much as a whole book on
Iraq's modern history. Well, Iraq wasn't a secular
society.
TD: You wrote in
April 2002, considering American dreams of a
post-Saddam Iraq, "A democratically elected
government and a friendly government are not
necessarily going to be the same thing, at least
in the long run." This is where we are now and it
was obviously very knowable a year before the
invasion.
JC: The
International Institute at the University of
Michigan asked me to write a pro-and-con piece
about an Iraq war in January of 2003. Among the
reasons I gave for not going to war were: a) if
you overthrow the Ba'ath regime and discredit
secular Arab nationalism in Iraq, the Sunni Arab
community may well gravitate toward more al-Qaeda
types of identity; and b) if you invade Iraq and
let loose popular politics, the Shi'ite Iraqis may
well hook up with the Ayatollahs in Iran. These
things were perfectly foreseeable. I think if you
went back to the early 1990s and took a look at
Dick Cheney's speeches, he voiced similar
analyses.
TD: So what
happened between then and March 2003, for Dick
Cheney at least?
JC: I think
Dick must have found motives for an Iraq war that
overrode his earlier concerns. We don't have
transparent governance and therefore we're not in
a position to know exactly what our vice
president's motives were, but clearly he became
convinced that, whatever the validity of his
earlier concerns, they were outweighed by other
considerations.
TD: And your
guess on those considerations?
JC: My guess with regard to
Cheney is that his experience in the energy sector
and with Halliburton as CEO must have been
influential in his thinking. For the corporate
energy sector in the United States, Iraq must have
been maddening. It was under those United Nations
sanctions. It's a country that, with significant
investment, might be able to rival Saudi Arabia as
a producer of petroleum. Saudi Arabia can produce
around 11 million barrels a day, if it really
tries. Iraq before the war was producing almost 3
million barrels a day and, if its fields were
explored and opened and exploited, it might be up
to the Saudi level in 20 years. This could bring a
lot of petroleum on the market. There would be
opportunities for making money from refining.
There might even be an opportunity, if you had a
free-market regime in Iraq, for Western petroleum
companies to go back to owning oil fields -
something they haven't been able to do since the
1970s in the Middle East when most of these fields
were nationalized. All that potential in Iraq was
locked up.
The petroleum industry,
structurally, is a horrible industry because it
depends on constantly making good finds and being
able to get favorable contracts for developing
them, so that one is constantly scrambling for the
next field. To have an obvious source of petroleum
and energy in Iraq locked up under sanctions, and
this Arab socialist regime with the government
controlling everything, it must have just driven
people crazy.
And you never knew when the
sanctions might slip and Iraq might crank back up
its production. If you're in the petroleum
industry, what you'd like is have a 10-year
timeline for what the future's going to look like.
What if Iraq was able to produce 5 million barrels
a day? That would have an impact on prices. It
would have an impact on the plans you might like
to make. But you couldn't predict that. It was
completely unknowable.
So Iraq was like a
treasure in a strongbox. You knew exactly where it
was; you knew what the treasure was; but you
couldn't get at it. The obvious thing to do was to
take a crowbar and strike off the strongbox lock.
My suspicion is that, for someone like Cheney,
such considerations had a lot to do with his
support for an Iraq war - and he was willing to
take a chance on the rest of it, including the
Shi'ites.
TD: The rest which
he, unlike many of the others in the
administration, already knew?
JC: Oh, he knew it very
well. Among all those people who planned out this
war, Cheney and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell
were knowledgeable about the situation on the
ground in Iraq.
TD: What do
you make then of the rest of them, their
motivations?
JC: When we as
historians get access to all the documents and can
figure out how this thing was planned and who
supported it, I think we'll find that the Bush
administration was a coalition of various forces
and each part of the coalition had its own reasons
for wanting to fight this war. The group most
explored has been the neo-conservatives, but I
suspect they will bulk less large in our final
estimation of the promotion of the war. They
weren't in command positions for the most part.
They were in positions to make an argument. They
may also have been fall guys. When things started
going bad, more stuff got leaked about what they
had been saying than about others.
I
suspect it will come out that George W Bush had
wanted an Iraq War since he was governor of Texas
- "to take out Saddam," as he said. The various
reasons he might have wanted this are undoubtedly
complex. He had connections to the energy sector
and so would be influenced by Cheney's kind of
thinking, but there was a personal family vendetta
too. You know, George Bush senior expected Saddam
to fall after the Gulf War. By his own admission,
he was very surprised when Saddam survived. I
think he expected the Iraqi officer corps to -
quote unquote - do the right thing, which tells
you something about the American WASP elite, what
their expectations are about politics. When
someone fails miserably, they expect the rest of
the elite to step in and remove the person. It
didn't happen in Iraq and I think that was a blow
to Bush family prestige. It may have been
important for W to vindicate the family in that
regard.
There were probably many
motivations for the war, but the degree to which
Bush himself has been a central, policy-making
player somehow gets elided in American discourse.
It's not as if he's a leaf blown by the wind. When
the Bush presidency is finally examined from the
primary documents, a lot of the things that are
attributed to the number three man at the Pentagon
may actually turn out to have been Bush's idea
from the beginning, and something he pushed hard
for.
His personal style is to play it by
ear. He doesn't have patience for a lot of
details. In Texas, he was used to calling together
the Republican and Democratic state
representatives to work out deals about this or
that as they came up. That's his background as a
policymaker, but the world is not like the Texas
legislature. It's not a chummy club in which you
can find compromises and go forward. The world is
a much more complex and vicious place, and there
are often incommensurate issues for which there is
no acceptable compromise. Trying to run the world
the way you run Texas is a big mistake.
As
a set of organizations, the US government has
actually had a lot of experience in post-conflict
situations. Bosnia. Kosovo. This is what a lot of
people in the State Department and the Pentagon
have been doing for the last twenty years. There
are functional experts who may not know Bosnian or
Arabic, but know about the need for policing after
a war or about the need for sanitation and garbage
collection. These people were giving advice about
Iraq. I know for a fact that they were. But they
were simply ignored in the actual event. Somehow,
the civilians in the Department of Defense
sidelined all those experts and so the US military
was given no instructions about how to put Iraq
back on its feet after the war.
TD: Just to return to your
strongbox image, the lock was busted in March of
2003. Now, two and half years later, I'd like you
to take us on a little tour of Iraq as best you
understand the situation there.
JC: Okay, let's start from
north to south. Three of Iraq's 18 provinces were
heavily Kurdish and formed a confederacy called
Kurdistan under the [post-Gulf War I
Anglo-American] no-fly zone. They were a kind of
mini-state with a regional parliament and prime
minister. The US military never had much of a
presence in the far north. The city of Kirkuk was
actually taken during the war by Kurdish fighters
with close US air support - rather as [in 2001]
many cities in northern Afghanistan had been taken
by the Northern Alliance. So the northern part of
Iraq looked much more like the Afghanistan war.
TD: Air support, the CIA,
and tribal peoples, this had been a basic style of
American warfare since Laos in the 1960s.
JC: Yes, that's how Kosovo
was fought. That's how Afghanistan was fought too,
but it was especially significant here because the
Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga, which took Kirkuk,
then formed the police force for that contested
city whose population includes Turkmen, Arabs, and
Kurds. The Kurds are probably close to half now. A
lot of them had been expelled by Saddam, but
they're coming back in large numbers. From all
accounts I've been able to get from people on the
ground, the three provinces that are heavily
Kurdish are doing very well.
TD: And are unoccupied?
JC: There aren't many
American troops there. Behind the scenes there
have been some battles between the Kurdish forces
and the Americans from time to time, some bombing
of Kurdish positions when the Americans feel
they're going too far, getting out of hand. But
those have not been reported publicly. I've heard
about them from people in Iraq. By and large,
though, Kurdistan has not been occupied by the
United States and economically seems to be doing
very well. There's low unemployment and a lot of
construction work.
On the other hand, the
province of Kirkuk is potentially a powder keg. It
could explode in a way that might have unfortunate
consequences for all of Iraq and the region. Oil
fields are around Kirkuk and the Kurds want those
fields and the city for their Kurdistan
federation. The Turkmen, traditionally dominant in
the area but recently overwhelmed by the Kurds,
resist this idea, and the Arabs Saddam settled up
there are not happy about it either. The Kurds
would get their way under ordinary circumstances,
but the Turkmen are supported by Turkey; and
northern Iraq is a mirror image of Turkey itself
where the Kurds are a minority and the Turks a
majority. If a kind of communal war broke out -
and there is a lot of terrorism, people are
assassinated almost every day - it would inflame
passions of a regional sort. So one worries about
Kirkuk.
And then you come to the Sunni
Arab center. It's not true by the way that the
problems in Iraq are only in four provinces. I
figure, including Baghdad, about half of Iraqis
live in the troubled parts of the country. The
seven or eight provinces especially affected are
in a condition of unconventional, low-intensity
war. People who haven't lived in such a situation
find it difficult to imagine what it's like,
because the tendency in any reporting is to focus
on the specific violent events that occur. But
you're talking about an area in which maybe 12
million people live and most of them get up every
day, go about their business, and don't encounter
any violence. If you were living in Mosul, most
days you might not see any violence with your own
eyes. On the other hand, quite often there would
be machine-gun fire in the distance. From time to
time, there would be the sound of a bomb going
off. This is how it is in Baghdad. This is why
it's so wrong for Western reporters to parachute
into Iraq, often embedded in US military forces,
and say, well, I saw the markets bustling and
things seemed to be going on just fine. It's the
constant drumbeat of violence over time that
produces insecurity and fear, that affects
investment, the circulation of money, the ability
to employ people, people's willingness to send
their children to school. This is something that's
not visible to the naked eye.
So, in the
center of the country, there's no guarantee of
security. Basically, the Sunni Arab guerrilla
movement wants to destabilize Iraq, force the US
military to withdraw, and, once it's gotten rid of
them, hopes it can kill the politicians of the new
government and make a coup. It's a classic
guerrilla strategy used in Algeria and elsewhere.
TD: And what of the ongoing
destruction of the country's infrastructure?
JC: The guerrilla movement
destroys infrastructure deliberately. Electricity
facilities, petroleum pipelines, rail transport.
And it deliberately baits the US military in the
cities, basing its fighters in civilian
neighborhoods in hopes that a riposte will cause
damage, because Iraqis, even urban ones, are
organized by clan. Clan vendettas are still an
important part of people's sense of honor. So when
the American military kills an Iraqi, I figure
they've made enemies of five siblings and
twenty-five first cousins who feel honor-bound to
get revenge. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has
taken advantage of that sense of clan honor
gradually to turn the population against the
United States. Many more Sunni Arabs are die-hard
opposed to the US presence in Iraq now than was
the case a year ago, and there were more a year
ago than the year before that.
The US has
used bombing of civilian neighborhoods on a
massive scale because the alternative is to send
its forces in to fight close, hand-to-hand combat
in alleyways in Iraq's cities and that would be
extremely costly of US soldiers' lives. It
certainly would have turned the American public
against the war really quickly.
TD: When the Bush
administration was getting ready to launch its
invasion, this was the great professed fear, the
subject of a hundred predictive articles - being
trapped in house-to-house urban warfare in the
back streets of Baghdad, which is more or less
where we are now.
JC: It
didn't happen in the course of the actual war
because Saddam always mistrusted the military. He
wasn't a military man himself; he was a failed law
student and he would not allow the military into
the capital. He made them stay outside,
essentially to be massacred by the US. But the
people who went underground from the Ba'ath party
and are mainly running the guerrilla movement have
decided to use this tactic of basing themselves in
cities. And it has succeeded. Even a city like
Fallujah - the United States destroyed two-thirds
of its buildings, emptied the city for a long
time, and has been very careful about allowing
people back in - is not secure. Every day there
are mortar and bomb attacks against US forces in
that area. So it's certainly not the case that the
US has made any friends in Fallujah.
TD: In a recent post, you
wrote of Baghdad: "Bush has turned one of the
world's greatest cities into a cesspool with no
order, little authority, and few services."
JC: That's the image I get
from people who are there and also visiting Arab
journalists.
TD: If you go
back to the neo-cons and their prewar vision, the
world out there on the peripheries was a jungle
world of failed states to which we were going to
bring order. Isn't that what Iraq has become
today?
JC: Iraq is a failed
state at the moment.
TD: Now
just to continue the tour south…
JC: The south is largely
Shi'ite. Most of the areas have gradually been
taken over, as far as I can tell, by the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The
Supreme Council was a coalition of fundamentalist
Shi'ite religious parties who fled Saddam's
repression in 1980, based themselves in Tehran,
received the patronage of Ayatollah Khomeini, and
conducted essentially terrorist raids on Ba'ath
targets in Iraq from Iranian soil. They would come
into Iraq through Basra, through the marshes,
through Baquba in the east, and so gained
supporters in those areas.
After the fall
of Saddam, the Supreme Council came back from
Iran. Its leadership settled into Najaf and Basra.
Their people would go out from the cities to small
towns and villages and open political offices.
They were very good grassroots campaigners. It's
not exactly clear to me how they pulled it off,
but they won nine provinces in the January 30th
elections.
The problem with the Shi'ite
south was: After the war, the US asked its
coalition partners to garrison the south. These
were small forces - Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian,
Dutch, Polish - and often not very well
integrated. So the south was this patchwork of
multinational forces, and there were only eight or
nine thousand British troops for Basra, which was
a city of over a million, and Maysan, another half
million. Local security was provided, if at all,
by neighborhood militias, and who was going to run
those militias? The local Shi'ite religious
political parties. Not surprisingly, when the
elections came, they won. So now it's the Sadr
movement and the Supreme Council that run Basra.
It's Khomeini and Khomeini's stepson. Of course,
liquor and video stores have been closed, and
girls are being forced to veil, and the militias
patrol the streets. Since their parties took over
the civil government, they're now being admitted
to the police force.
So that's how Basra's
being run - by religious political parties the US
essentially helped put into power by having these
elections that everybody in America was so excited
about last January 30th. The elections were taken
by most Americans as a political victory for Bush,
but they didn't seem to pay any attention to who
was actually winning them on the ground in places
like Basra. Now the British have a big problem.
Their 8,000 troops have to deal with security
forces and police heavily infiltrated by the
paramilitaries of these groups. Of course, there
have been increasing conflicts. And I'll tell you,
in the long run, I don't think the British are
going to win this one.
NEXT: Part 2
of Juan Cole's interview, which focuses on the
question of an American military withdrawal from
Iraq, among other subjects.
Tom Engelhardt is editor
of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
