Was the Road to Iraq Paved With Bad Intentions?

By Peter C. Valenti

Even though most of the Arab world views the “insurgency” in Iraq as a nationalistic struggle against foreign occupation, American and Coalition Provisional Authority spokesmen routinely describe it as a band of terrorists, thugs or Ba’athist “dead-enders” who “hate freedom.” This simplified picture of Iraq is evidence of a vacuum of information and a one-sided approach to the region, and is frequently tackled by Arab writers. Dr. Wamid Nazmi argued in the May 28 edition of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, for example, that the Iraqi insurgency “ends forever the lies about the splintering of Iraq and so-called civil war. What credibility remains for this wretched American administration?” Without the pretext of preventing Iraq from falling into civil conflict, the Bush administration is left improvising tenuous reasons to keep U.S. troops in the country, concluded Nazmi. He further observed that there is “no civil war between Sunnis and Shi’i, nor between Arabs and Kurds, nor between Kurds and Turcomen; rather, what we have is a nationalist uprising.”

Political Operations

It seems an obvious truth to most Arabs that no nation wants to be occupied. In a region that lives with the daily reminders of continued Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms, in addition to a recent history of European colonialism, opposition to foreign occupation is a logical response. Mahdi Salih al-Jaburi registered his complaint in the May 28 edition of Iraq’s Azzaman: “The coalition nations had initially announced that they came to spread the values of freedom and democracy,” he noted. “However, after the situation had stabilized, all of this changed into an occupation…that spreads ruin in the country, violates freedoms, destroys buildings and seizes resources.”

Even if we accept the Bush administration’s current explanation that the U.S. liberated the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussain, and that this alone justified the war, the position still obviates the crucial dilemmas of the current situation in Iraq. U.S. legitimacy as the invading power, premised on glaringly incorrect claims about WMD and links to al-Qaeda, as well as on an aggressive unilateralism, has been a major issue in the Arab world since March 2003. Furthermore, Washington already suffered a great deficit of trust in the region due to its well-known history of partiality toward Israel and previous “king-making”—the latter best represented by 1953’s American-sponsored coup in Iran. Repeatedly, the Arab public wonders why, after liberating Iraq, the U.S. must remain as an occupying power and implement its “vision” for a new Iraq?

“Bush knows full well that any free elections in Iraq would be a disaster for the U.S.”

Although the United Nations recently was invited to play a more prominent role in Iraq, through its envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Arabs feel that the world body is hobbled by U.S. interference. Likewise, most argue that Washington’s inclusion of the U.N. is not multilateralism, but simply a kind of political “cover.” In the pan-Arab al-Hayat on June 2, Hasan Nafi‘ah suggested that using the U.N. represents a change in tactics—but not overall strategy—by the Bush administration. Nafi‘ah did note the irony of watching neoconservatives who, prior to the war on Iraq, had disdained the U.N., now seeking U.N. legitimization of their illegal occupation of the country. In the face of ongoing diplomatic affronts to the U.N., Nafi‘ah challenged the latter to “salvage international law from the grips of the American pirates.”

The supposed U.N.-approved nomination of Dr. Iyad Alawi as the upcoming interim prime minister invited scorn, however. It seemed obvious to writers like Muhammad Kharroub that this is a case of musical chairs orchestrated by Washington. Writing in Jordan’s al-Ra’i on June 1, he argued that “the ‘surprise’ [selection of Alawi] was well-rehearsed as [Ambassador L. Paul] Bremer and his supporters in the Governing Council played their game professionally and effected the exclusion of the U.N. envoy [Brahimi] to such an extent that he had no option other than returning to the role of silent observer.”

Nawwaf Abu al-Hayja’ was equally pessimistic in Jordan’s Addustour on June 2, pointing out that the fundamental problem in relying on the U.N. is that the U.S. still plays a dominant role in the Security Council. Any attempt to limit the U.S. occupation or set a time schedule, therefore, surely will only invite a U.S. veto, al-Hayja’ argued.

Virtually all Arab writers see the post-June 30 Iraqi government as no more than a façade from behind which the U.S. will continue to rule. Arabs are deeply suspicious of Washington’s claims that elections for the new government couldn’t be held, which seems to contradict with the Bush administration’s avowed goal of democratizing Iraq. However, as Musa Dawud suggested in Bahrain’s Akhbar Alkhaleej on May 28, in light of Bush’s credibility problems and hawkish policies, and widespread Arab disgust over Abu Ghraib, “Bush knows full well that any free elections in Iraq would be a disaster for the U.S. because they would bring into office a government of greater enmity to the U.S.”

In his May 28 column in Saudi Arabia’s progressive al-Watan, Abd al-Hadi Husayn al-Tamimi argued that Bush’s Iraq strategy actually reflects domestic politics. Posited al-Tamimi, “The U.S. and the U.S.-appointed members of the GC [Iraqi Governing Council] rejected holding any [Iraqi] elections on the pretense of lack of time and absence of security. [However] the reason for the rejection was that Washington wants its [GC] people to remain in their ruling chairs in order to continue the implementation of American objectives under occupation until the [Bush] administration overcomes the difficulties of the presidential elections.”

The legitimacy of the future transition government of Iraq is also intertwined with the security situation. Ahmad al-Dawas described the paradox on June 1 in the Saudi Asharq al-Awsat. Since Iraqis will not accept the post-June 30 government as legitimate because it wasn’t elected, he wrote, violence will continue and the new government will be unable to effectively command the Iraqi military and security services. For that reason, it won’t request the U.S. military to leave Iraq. While the continued presence of the U.S. military is provocative, its absence would spell the absolute ruin of security. Regarding controversies over the U.S. military’s freedom of action, Ziyad Sulayman wrote in the June 1 Azzaman that “we had hoped that the law included the CPA and its armed forces under [the new constitution] unambiguously.” Evidence from Abu Ghraib suggests otherwise, Sulayman inferred.

Abu Ghraib: Revealing the “American Mind”

The so-called Abu Ghraib prison scandal symbolizes two important issues for Arabs. First, it seems to reveal the hypocrisy of an occupation entitled Operation Iraqi Freedom. In an exemplary column written in the June 1 al-Ra’i, Muhammad Naji Amayrah asked, “If Washington was really serious about its democratic project why doesn’t it start with the true cause of all this violence, unrest, trouble and instability in the region—the Israeli presence and occupation of Palestine and [its] settlements in the West Bank and Gaza…protected by America itself through money, men and weapons!”

Incredulous, Amayrah continued, “How can [Arab] citizens believe these American calls [for democracy] as they witness the American ‘democratic’ experiment in Iraq? Isn’t Abu Ghraib a good example of this democracy?”

In the June 1 edition of Asharq al-Awsat, Faysal Abu Khadra railed against the euphemisms used by the U.S. government and media to describe what the Arab world sees as torture. “Why don’t they call what they have done in Iraq terrorist acts?” he demanded to know.

More importantly, and more subtly, the actions of U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib are seen as a manifestation of anti-Arab sentiment nurtured on ideological interpretations and disinformation about Arab society. Rafiq Abd al-Salam captured much of the Arab feelings about Abu Ghraib in Asharq al-Awsat on June 1. He agreed with New Yorker Magazine journalist Seymour Hersh’s assertion that Abu Ghraib was a logical outgrowth of policies pushed by neoconservatives beholden to racist stereotypes outlined in Raphael Patai’s 1973 book The Arab Mind.

Abd al-Salam did not see Patai’s theories being utilized by U.S. soldiers only at Abu Ghraib, however. Rather, he maintained, Abu Ghraib “isn’t [anything] except a small sample of what happened and is happening in detention centers in general, and in the different cities and villages since American forces entered Iraqi lands.”

As for President Bush’s assertion that the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib torture don’t represent American values, Abd al-Salam argued that “what has been proven is that those [methods] do reflect the view and ‘culture’ of the right-wing faction that dominates the offices of the White House and Pentagon.”

Ahmad Chalabi: Darling of the Neoconservatives

Ahmad Chalabi’s downfall has been only from the good graces of the White House—he never held any serious legitimacy among the Iraqi public. Any subsequent losses for Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress will be in the form of those handouts and political appointments he was slated to enjoy from the U.S. As Arab writers explain, in a truly independent Iraqi political system, free from CPA-manipulation, Chalabi never would have played a significant role. His prominence as an “Iraqi politician” was artificially created and sustained by neoconservatives in the Pentagon and White House, not by the Iraqi electorate.

Salim Nassar remembered the day when Chalabi sat behind Laura Bush during the president’s State of the Union address in January and was described as the “golden child” in Washingtonian circles. It is apparent now, Nassar concluded in al-Hayat on May 29, that Chalabi was “a horse [running] for Iran in the race to liberate Iraq, and certainly not the Americans’ horse.” Nassar wrote this just days before the American public learned the news that Chalabi had tipped off Iranian intelligence that the U.S. had cracked Iran’s communications code.

Muhammad Shakir Abdullah, in his May 27 op-ed in the Palestinian al-Quds, described Chalabi as a U.S.-creation gone haywire. Though Washington probably wouldn’t have been brazen enough to make Chalabi prime minister, “the problem is,” Abdullah suggested, “that [Chalabi] deluded himself into thinking he was really a leader. For this reason, he oversteps the rules of the game.”

In the May 25 edition of the same newspaper, Ahmad Amrabi argued that the U.S.-Chalabi split was more politics than personality. The crucial catalyst that engendered Chalabi’s antagonism, Amrabi wrote, was when “the American occupation authorities finally began—due to the feverish escalation [of violence] so close to the June 30 handoff—to backtrack and make an alliance with the Ba’athists, who are the grimmest enemies of Chalabi and his clique in the GC. Thus we should be able to understand the mindset of the majority of the Shi’i and Kurdish members of the GC [who were] afraid and troubled by the extension of American bridges to the Ba’athists.”

Peter C. Valenti works as a translator and contributing editor for the World Press Review.