Saturday, June 12, 2004
WASHINGTON'S NEW WORLDVIEW.
Springtime for Realism
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Post date: 06.10.04
Issue date: 06.21.04
In Washington, being a member of a "coalition" or a "committee" is to a foreign policy wonk what being a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera is to a New York arts patron or a good seat at the Ivy is to a Hollywood mogul: an emblem of status. The only distinction being that opera extras and movie producers tend not to influence the world's sole superpower. An important committee does. The Committee to Defend America By Aiding the Allies, which battled isolationism before World War II; the Committee on the Present Danger, which argued for a harder line against the Soviets during the 1970s; the Committee for the Free World, which did the same in the 1980s--each has helped shape U.S. foreign policy. And, last year, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq did as well. As its title suggests, the group, which featured a bipartisan roster of democratic idealists, including former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey and current Republican Senator John McCain, promoted the moral case for war--that is, ending a tyranny and creating a democracy in its place. Its members met with White House officials, The New York Times profiled them, antiwar protesters besieged their headquarters, and Vanity Fair wrote about a Committee reception at which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz delivered an impromptu pep talk. (Full disclosure: The Committee hosted the reception partly in my honor, and I spoke as well.)
The Committee no longer exists. It has long since vacated its Pennsylvania Avenue offices. Its website doesn't work. In its place, another group has emerged, one that captures Washington's new mood. The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy has become the anti-Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. As Coalition member and author David Hendrickson explained at the group's "American Imperium" conference in April, the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein "violated the basic legal principle placing the right and responsibility for the internal institutions of a given state in the people of that country." The Coalition, which was unveiled at the National Press Club last October, quickly attracted a bipartisan who's who of foreign policy experts, including former Democratic Senator Gary Hart; a campaign adviser to John Kerry, Charles Kupchan; and former Reagan aide Doug Bandow. All count themselves foreign policy "realists" who support a foreign policy grounded in narrowly conceived "vital interests" and loathe America's efforts to "impose" democracy around the world.
If America's democratic project in Iraq continues to disappoint, it won't be long before the Coalition's members find themselves meeting with White House officials. Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post's George Will recently argued that America's errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself--"the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism." The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy. The Bush team still employs high-minded rhetoric about America's democratic mission abroad, but, in practice, it has reverted to a more humble focus. The Kerry campaign, too, has abandoned any pretense of democratic idealism. Strategic chokepoints, oil wells, alliances--these are the things that animate Kerry's "realistic" vision of the world. Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism.
Today's premier realist, the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, explains the worldview this way: "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Put bluntly, the character of regimes does not matter. Or, as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II realism, George Kennan--who denounced even "the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment"--put it, "No people can be the judge of another's domestic institutions and requirements." All this leads to a disdain for what Hans Morgenthau, another father of American realism, described as "the contemporary phenomenon of the moral crusade."
Although typically associated with hard-headed Republicans like former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, realism gained traction on the left in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when many liberals decided the United States was marred by involvement in too many suspect conflicts and unfit to pass judgment on other political systems. With the end of the cold war, President Clinton repudiated this sentiment, as did 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore, who insisted that, just as battling communism had been America's mission, today the nation's mission was to spread democracy around the world.
But, for John Kerry, pronouncements like these derive from a lethal mixture of naïveté, hubris, and chauvinism. Hence, when in 1997 Clinton repeated his administration's mantra that the United States had become the "indispensable nation," Kerry complained, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?" As with nearly everything else, Kerry attributes his disdain for foreign policy "arrogance" to the lessons he learned in Southeast Asia. But, as my colleague Franklin Foer has pointed out ("Like Father," March 8), Kerry imbibed his realism even earlier in life, at the foot of his diplomat father. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Kerry explained that his dad instructed him in the futility of tending "to see other people in the context of our history, our own hopes, our own aspirations."
The lesson appears to have stuck. In April, Kerry said the goal in the present war should be "a stable Iraq, not whether or not [Iraq] is a full democracy." When it comes to Egypt, Kerry said in a recent interview, democracy promotion would have to take a backseat to "general stability in the Middle East." In China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan, too, "Kerry indicated that as president he would play down the promotion of democracy," according to the Post. After all, Kerry said, in an echo of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous argument that the United States shouldn't push too hard to democratize "friendly" dictatorships, "You have to put your priorities first." All this proved too much for Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who says, "What is most disturbing about the Kerry statements is the suggestion that a sophisticated security strategy need not be complemented by human rights values."
Kerry's advisers see little need for the complement, either. Members of the campaign claim that former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who mocked George W. Bush's aspiration "to change the world" and his "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism" in a recent CNBC interview, has drained idealism from Kerry's foreign policy platform. In place of "neo-Wilsonianism"--a term the Clinton team once used to describe itself--former Clinton national security adviser and Kerry confidante Sandy Berger has coined a new motto for the presumptive Democratic nominee: "forward-looking realism." What this means in its particulars may be gleaned from Kerry's top foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, who told the Los Angeles Times in April, "We have been concerned for some time that Bush's position about having some kind of democratic state [in Iraq] was too heroic." So, too, in the case of Iran, where, far from aiming for regime change, Beers says the United States must engage "the hard-line element." Another of Kerry's foreign policy advisers, Gary Hart, makes the point more bluntly. Inveighing against Bush's pledge to mount "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Hart, a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, said last year, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush."
There are, to be sure, people in the Kerry orbit who acknowledge that democratization is a vital U.S. interest. Former Clinton Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ronald Asmus, the Progressive Policy Institute's Will Marshall, and the Hoover Institution's Michael McFaul all boast long histories of democratic idealism and all have brainstormed ways for Kerry to address the subject. Yet, when approached by democracy and human rights advocates about having Kerry devote an address to the subject during his recent series of speeches on national security, the campaign declined. Asked to explain the lack of any references to the topic in Kerry's recent addresses, one adviser says, "He doesn't want to sound too 'soft,' and, my guess is, he doesn't feel passionately about it."
ronically, while Kerry advisers blast the president's Wilsonianism, many administration officials regard Wilsonianism as last year's theme. True, the president himself still often channels Wilson. "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours," Bush said in a speech last week. "But the realists, in this case, have lost contact with a fundamental reality. ... America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
Trouble is, the very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy. The Pentagon's neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now. The nadir came three weeks ago, when the National Security Council (NSC) signed off on a raid on the home of former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi--without informing the Pentagon beforehand. The neoconservatives' decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group--again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice's boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has "reduced the Defense Department's influence to zero," says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon. On the NSC itself, Blackwill, who shares the title of deputy national security adviser with Stephen Hadley, a Pentagon ally, "has sucked the air out of" his colleague, according to a White House official. As for the other locus of democratic idealism in the White House, the Valerie Plame investigation has consumed the vice president's foreign policy team. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has been soliciting advice from Kissinger, and members of the Bush team claim that Rice, chastened by her prewar foray into the world of democracy promotion, has been doing the same from Scowcroft.
In Iraq, the results of this springtime for realism have been plain to see. Recent decrees revoking the independence of newspapers and reversing Bremer's earlier de-Baathification order may make a certain amount of short-term sense, but they hardly augur well for Iraq's democratic prospects. "The administration has largely given up on its own [former] priorities," says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "going from a reluctance to rely on tribes, militias, and Baathists to accommodation with them." Most of all, Bremer and Blackwill favor the sort of technocrats with limited democratic credentials touted by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a man Blackwill has championed inside the White House as the solution to all that ails Iraq. Hence, last week, Bremer and Brahimi tried to install Sunni octogenarian Adnan Pachachi as Iraq's interim president. Alas, Iraqi politicians chose their own candidate.
Blackwill, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, also has an influential hand in Iran policy. Gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change in Tehran. Gone, too, in fact, is any mention of democracy there at all--apart, that is, from Armitage's insistence that Iran already qualifies as one. "The administration's realists are running Iran policy," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the National Defense University. "It's no longer regime change; it's détente." In Libya, as well, democracy has taken a backseat to the new realism. In exchange for Libya's renunciation of its WMD arsenal, Secretary of State Colin Powell now hails the brutal dictatorship as "an example to other nations"--this, despite his own State Department's assessment that Libya still employs "widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment [and] restricts freedoms of speech, assembly, press and expression." For his part, Bush has gone so far as to praise two autocrats, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for their willingness to "recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions." Demonstrating that "recognition," both boycotted this week's unveiling of Bush's initiative for democracy in the Arab world.
In fact, not even the much-hyped Greater Middle East Initiative upends Washington's decades-old bargain with the Arab world. Though Rice originally trumpeted it as the first step in transforming the Middle East, the administration quickly backpedaled in response to an outcry from Arab leaders. "Each nation has to find its own path and follow that path at its own speed," Powell hastened to point out. The watered-down initiative, according to Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "will address a wide range of social, economic, and political issues, but it will do little of consequence to advance what is at the heart of the regional transformation that the United States says it wants--democratization." Instead, the program focuses on secondary issues--a literacy campaign, a "micro-finance" proposal--which have long been part of U.S. and European aid programs to the region.
he genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.
Nor is it clear that the Bush team's particular recipe for building a democratic Iraq amounted to much more than a cartoon version of democratization. "The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments," says former U.S. Information Agency Director Penn Kemble, "was an idea never understood by the administration." Indeed, it was precisely the equation of the absence of oppression with the existence of democracy--exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld's infamous "freedom's untidy" comment during the postwar looting--that underpinned the White House's assumption that it could rapidly draw down U.S. forces after toppling Saddam. It took the United States years to transform Germany and Japan. In Iraq, by contrast, the CPA already has its bags packed.
Stepping into the vacuum created partly by the mistakes of the Pentagon and White House, realists now counsel that the quickest path to stability in Iraq lies in abandoning our democratic hopes for the country. Some, like Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, argue for partitioning the county into Kurd, Shia, and Sunni zones. Others argue for installing an autocrat. Still others, like Pat Buchanan, advocate withdrawing altogether.
Ultimately, however, democracy offers the best--perhaps the only--way to ensure stability. Now that Iraqis have been granted some degree of freedom, what Shia or Kurd will submit to a Baghdad strongman again? Only elections can confer the legitimacy a new Iraqi government will require. Argues Jennifer Windsor, a Middle East expert at Freedom House: "Democracy is the only political system that can balance competing attachments and interests in Iraq today, so it is the only hope for stability."
The lack of "realistic" alternatives to democracy in Iraq applies equally to the Middle East as a whole. Complaining that democratic idealists "incorporate Wilsonian ideas into their vision in urging the spread of democracy," prominent realist G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University scoffs at the notion that this "is not merely idealism, according to them; it is good national security policy." Meanwhile, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in The New York Times last week, "What we need now is pragmatism and not ideology. ... We must do everything we can to help the region's more moderate and friendly regimes--the Saudis and others--to defeat terrorism and improve the protection of foreign workers and oil facilities." Likewise, Republican Senator Pat Roberts insists that Washington must restrain its tendency toward "social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy."
But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."
This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.
Nor will victory in this highly ideological war be accomplished by standing by while Arab states leisurely pursue their "own path" to democracy, as Powell puts it. When it comes to the Arab world, either the spur for democratization will come from without or it will not come any time soon. Realists like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel insist the solution to the lack of freedom in the Middle East cannot be that "we are going to go forth and impose democracy." If Hagel means to suggest we should not regularly resort to arms to do so, he has a point. Yet, the realist critique refuses to distinguish between war and democracy promotion. (In this, it takes its cue from the White House, whose revised case that it waged war for the explicit purpose of creating democracy--rather than to topple an aggressive tyrant and then implant a democratic political order--has created the impression that America cannot promote democratization by means other than force.) Yes, America will need to "impose" democracy in the Arab world, but it can also rely on peaceful tools, such as broadcasting, financial aid, diplomatic pressure, public support for regimes that pursue democracy, and public opprobrium for those who do not. If this amounts to an imposition on the sovereignty of dictatorial regimes, so be it.
The notion that we ought not impose what Cordesman derides as "our own political values"--that is, democracy--on others misses the fact that, as democracy scholar Joshua Muravchik has pointed out, if people do not want to be governed by consent, they can always vote for a tyrant. In fact, defining democracy as a universal rather than specifically American aspiration means the United States would not stop such an outcome. More compelling is the argument that some countries might not be ready for democracy. No one has espoused this view more vigorously than Powell, who, in his memoirs, dismisses the idea of a "desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran." This line of reasoning mirrors the logic that American policymakers applied to other formerly undemocratic regions of the world. Joseph Grew, the State Department's chief Japan expert, cautioned President Truman that "the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Awash in cultural relativism, his colleagues and successors made the same point about East Asia, Germany, and South America. Now that the tide of democracy has swept over these regions, they are making the same point about the one part of the world it has yet to touch.
To be sure, with Iraqis killing Americans every day, the temptation to yield to such pessimism may prove irresistible. But, when they advertise Iraq--like they advertised Vietnam before it--as the repudiation of a larger democratic war of ideas, the realists encourage a more pessimistic conclusion than circumstances justify. A policy can be measured by its successes, and it can be measured by its failures. When it comes to America's record in promoting democratic change, the former surely outweigh the latter. The world may not change easily, but, because of America, it has changed. Having come so far, and confronted with a new totalitarian threat, how "realistic" would it be to quit now?
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.
Springtime for Realism
by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Post date: 06.10.04
Issue date: 06.21.04
In Washington, being a member of a "coalition" or a "committee" is to a foreign policy wonk what being a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera is to a New York arts patron or a good seat at the Ivy is to a Hollywood mogul: an emblem of status. The only distinction being that opera extras and movie producers tend not to influence the world's sole superpower. An important committee does. The Committee to Defend America By Aiding the Allies, which battled isolationism before World War II; the Committee on the Present Danger, which argued for a harder line against the Soviets during the 1970s; the Committee for the Free World, which did the same in the 1980s--each has helped shape U.S. foreign policy. And, last year, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq did as well. As its title suggests, the group, which featured a bipartisan roster of democratic idealists, including former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey and current Republican Senator John McCain, promoted the moral case for war--that is, ending a tyranny and creating a democracy in its place. Its members met with White House officials, The New York Times profiled them, antiwar protesters besieged their headquarters, and Vanity Fair wrote about a Committee reception at which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz delivered an impromptu pep talk. (Full disclosure: The Committee hosted the reception partly in my honor, and I spoke as well.)
The Committee no longer exists. It has long since vacated its Pennsylvania Avenue offices. Its website doesn't work. In its place, another group has emerged, one that captures Washington's new mood. The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy has become the anti-Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. As Coalition member and author David Hendrickson explained at the group's "American Imperium" conference in April, the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein "violated the basic legal principle placing the right and responsibility for the internal institutions of a given state in the people of that country." The Coalition, which was unveiled at the National Press Club last October, quickly attracted a bipartisan who's who of foreign policy experts, including former Democratic Senator Gary Hart; a campaign adviser to John Kerry, Charles Kupchan; and former Reagan aide Doug Bandow. All count themselves foreign policy "realists" who support a foreign policy grounded in narrowly conceived "vital interests" and loathe America's efforts to "impose" democracy around the world.
If America's democratic project in Iraq continues to disappoint, it won't be long before the Coalition's members find themselves meeting with White House officials. Indeed, it appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now. Neatly summarizing the revised wisdom, The Washington Post's George Will recently argued that America's errors in Iraq flow not so much from the bungled implementation of the democratic idea as from the idea itself--"the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism." The new realism, moreover, has already been enshrined in official policy. The Bush team still employs high-minded rhetoric about America's democratic mission abroad, but, in practice, it has reverted to a more humble focus. The Kerry campaign, too, has abandoned any pretense of democratic idealism. Strategic chokepoints, oil wells, alliances--these are the things that animate Kerry's "realistic" vision of the world. Which is too bad. Because, no matter what you think of Iraq, realism can't win the war on terrorism.
Today's premier realist, the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, explains the worldview this way: "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Put bluntly, the character of regimes does not matter. Or, as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II realism, George Kennan--who denounced even "the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment"--put it, "No people can be the judge of another's domestic institutions and requirements." All this leads to a disdain for what Hans Morgenthau, another father of American realism, described as "the contemporary phenomenon of the moral crusade."
Although typically associated with hard-headed Republicans like former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, realism gained traction on the left in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when many liberals decided the United States was marred by involvement in too many suspect conflicts and unfit to pass judgment on other political systems. With the end of the cold war, President Clinton repudiated this sentiment, as did 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore, who insisted that, just as battling communism had been America's mission, today the nation's mission was to spread democracy around the world.
But, for John Kerry, pronouncements like these derive from a lethal mixture of naïveté, hubris, and chauvinism. Hence, when in 1997 Clinton repeated his administration's mantra that the United States had become the "indispensable nation," Kerry complained, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?" As with nearly everything else, Kerry attributes his disdain for foreign policy "arrogance" to the lessons he learned in Southeast Asia. But, as my colleague Franklin Foer has pointed out ("Like Father," March 8), Kerry imbibed his realism even earlier in life, at the foot of his diplomat father. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Kerry explained that his dad instructed him in the futility of tending "to see other people in the context of our history, our own hopes, our own aspirations."
The lesson appears to have stuck. In April, Kerry said the goal in the present war should be "a stable Iraq, not whether or not [Iraq] is a full democracy." When it comes to Egypt, Kerry said in a recent interview, democracy promotion would have to take a backseat to "general stability in the Middle East." In China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan, too, "Kerry indicated that as president he would play down the promotion of democracy," according to the Post. After all, Kerry said, in an echo of Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous argument that the United States shouldn't push too hard to democratize "friendly" dictatorships, "You have to put your priorities first." All this proved too much for Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who says, "What is most disturbing about the Kerry statements is the suggestion that a sophisticated security strategy need not be complemented by human rights values."
Kerry's advisers see little need for the complement, either. Members of the campaign claim that former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who mocked George W. Bush's aspiration "to change the world" and his "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism" in a recent CNBC interview, has drained idealism from Kerry's foreign policy platform. In place of "neo-Wilsonianism"--a term the Clinton team once used to describe itself--former Clinton national security adviser and Kerry confidante Sandy Berger has coined a new motto for the presumptive Democratic nominee: "forward-looking realism." What this means in its particulars may be gleaned from Kerry's top foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, who told the Los Angeles Times in April, "We have been concerned for some time that Bush's position about having some kind of democratic state [in Iraq] was too heroic." So, too, in the case of Iran, where, far from aiming for regime change, Beers says the United States must engage "the hard-line element." Another of Kerry's foreign policy advisers, Gary Hart, makes the point more bluntly. Inveighing against Bush's pledge to mount "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Hart, a founding member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, said last year, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush."
There are, to be sure, people in the Kerry orbit who acknowledge that democratization is a vital U.S. interest. Former Clinton Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ronald Asmus, the Progressive Policy Institute's Will Marshall, and the Hoover Institution's Michael McFaul all boast long histories of democratic idealism and all have brainstormed ways for Kerry to address the subject. Yet, when approached by democracy and human rights advocates about having Kerry devote an address to the subject during his recent series of speeches on national security, the campaign declined. Asked to explain the lack of any references to the topic in Kerry's recent addresses, one adviser says, "He doesn't want to sound too 'soft,' and, my guess is, he doesn't feel passionately about it."
ronically, while Kerry advisers blast the president's Wilsonianism, many administration officials regard Wilsonianism as last year's theme. True, the president himself still often channels Wilson. "Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours," Bush said in a speech last week. "But the realists, in this case, have lost contact with a fundamental reality. ... America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
Trouble is, the very realists whom Bush decries are now running his foreign policy. The Pentagon's neoconservative democratizers have been losing influence for months now. The nadir came three weeks ago, when the National Security Council (NSC) signed off on a raid on the home of former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi--without informing the Pentagon beforehand. The neoconservatives' decline was already apparent last October, when, in an attempt to centralize Iraq policy at the NSC, Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group--again, without consulting the Pentagon. The official chosen to chair the group, Rice's boss in the first Bush administration, Robert Blackwill, has "reduced the Defense Department's influence to zero," says a senior administration official. Iraq czar L. Paul Bremer, who worked with Blackwill under Kissinger, now reports to his fellow realist at the White House rather than to the Pentagon. On the NSC itself, Blackwill, who shares the title of deputy national security adviser with Stephen Hadley, a Pentagon ally, "has sucked the air out of" his colleague, according to a White House official. As for the other locus of democratic idealism in the White House, the Valerie Plame investigation has consumed the vice president's foreign policy team. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has been soliciting advice from Kissinger, and members of the Bush team claim that Rice, chastened by her prewar foray into the world of democracy promotion, has been doing the same from Scowcroft.
In Iraq, the results of this springtime for realism have been plain to see. Recent decrees revoking the independence of newspapers and reversing Bremer's earlier de-Baathification order may make a certain amount of short-term sense, but they hardly augur well for Iraq's democratic prospects. "The administration has largely given up on its own [former] priorities," says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "going from a reluctance to rely on tribes, militias, and Baathists to accommodation with them." Most of all, Bremer and Blackwill favor the sort of technocrats with limited democratic credentials touted by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a man Blackwill has championed inside the White House as the solution to all that ails Iraq. Hence, last week, Bremer and Brahimi tried to install Sunni octogenarian Adnan Pachachi as Iraq's interim president. Alas, Iraqi politicians chose their own candidate.
Blackwill, along with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, also has an influential hand in Iran policy. Gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change in Tehran. Gone, too, in fact, is any mention of democracy there at all--apart, that is, from Armitage's insistence that Iran already qualifies as one. "The administration's realists are running Iran policy," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the National Defense University. "It's no longer regime change; it's détente." In Libya, as well, democracy has taken a backseat to the new realism. In exchange for Libya's renunciation of its WMD arsenal, Secretary of State Colin Powell now hails the brutal dictatorship as "an example to other nations"--this, despite his own State Department's assessment that Libya still employs "widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment [and] restricts freedoms of speech, assembly, press and expression." For his part, Bush has gone so far as to praise two autocrats, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for their willingness to "recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions." Demonstrating that "recognition," both boycotted this week's unveiling of Bush's initiative for democracy in the Arab world.
In fact, not even the much-hyped Greater Middle East Initiative upends Washington's decades-old bargain with the Arab world. Though Rice originally trumpeted it as the first step in transforming the Middle East, the administration quickly backpedaled in response to an outcry from Arab leaders. "Each nation has to find its own path and follow that path at its own speed," Powell hastened to point out. The watered-down initiative, according to Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "will address a wide range of social, economic, and political issues, but it will do little of consequence to advance what is at the heart of the regional transformation that the United States says it wants--democratization." Instead, the program focuses on secondary issues--a literacy campaign, a "micro-finance" proposal--which have long been part of U.S. and European aid programs to the region.
he genesis of the new realism is, of course, America's problems creating democracy in Iraq. But today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.
Nor is it clear that the Bush team's particular recipe for building a democratic Iraq amounted to much more than a cartoon version of democratization. "The distinction between liberation and democratization, which requires a strategy and instruments," says former U.S. Information Agency Director Penn Kemble, "was an idea never understood by the administration." Indeed, it was precisely the equation of the absence of oppression with the existence of democracy--exemplified by Donald Rumsfeld's infamous "freedom's untidy" comment during the postwar looting--that underpinned the White House's assumption that it could rapidly draw down U.S. forces after toppling Saddam. It took the United States years to transform Germany and Japan. In Iraq, by contrast, the CPA already has its bags packed.
Stepping into the vacuum created partly by the mistakes of the Pentagon and White House, realists now counsel that the quickest path to stability in Iraq lies in abandoning our democratic hopes for the country. Some, like Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, argue for partitioning the county into Kurd, Shia, and Sunni zones. Others argue for installing an autocrat. Still others, like Pat Buchanan, advocate withdrawing altogether.
Ultimately, however, democracy offers the best--perhaps the only--way to ensure stability. Now that Iraqis have been granted some degree of freedom, what Shia or Kurd will submit to a Baghdad strongman again? Only elections can confer the legitimacy a new Iraqi government will require. Argues Jennifer Windsor, a Middle East expert at Freedom House: "Democracy is the only political system that can balance competing attachments and interests in Iraq today, so it is the only hope for stability."
The lack of "realistic" alternatives to democracy in Iraq applies equally to the Middle East as a whole. Complaining that democratic idealists "incorporate Wilsonian ideas into their vision in urging the spread of democracy," prominent realist G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University scoffs at the notion that this "is not merely idealism, according to them; it is good national security policy." Meanwhile, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in The New York Times last week, "What we need now is pragmatism and not ideology. ... We must do everything we can to help the region's more moderate and friendly regimes--the Saudis and others--to defeat terrorism and improve the protection of foreign workers and oil facilities." Likewise, Republican Senator Pat Roberts insists that Washington must restrain its tendency toward "social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy."
But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."
This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.
Nor will victory in this highly ideological war be accomplished by standing by while Arab states leisurely pursue their "own path" to democracy, as Powell puts it. When it comes to the Arab world, either the spur for democratization will come from without or it will not come any time soon. Realists like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel insist the solution to the lack of freedom in the Middle East cannot be that "we are going to go forth and impose democracy." If Hagel means to suggest we should not regularly resort to arms to do so, he has a point. Yet, the realist critique refuses to distinguish between war and democracy promotion. (In this, it takes its cue from the White House, whose revised case that it waged war for the explicit purpose of creating democracy--rather than to topple an aggressive tyrant and then implant a democratic political order--has created the impression that America cannot promote democratization by means other than force.) Yes, America will need to "impose" democracy in the Arab world, but it can also rely on peaceful tools, such as broadcasting, financial aid, diplomatic pressure, public support for regimes that pursue democracy, and public opprobrium for those who do not. If this amounts to an imposition on the sovereignty of dictatorial regimes, so be it.
The notion that we ought not impose what Cordesman derides as "our own political values"--that is, democracy--on others misses the fact that, as democracy scholar Joshua Muravchik has pointed out, if people do not want to be governed by consent, they can always vote for a tyrant. In fact, defining democracy as a universal rather than specifically American aspiration means the United States would not stop such an outcome. More compelling is the argument that some countries might not be ready for democracy. No one has espoused this view more vigorously than Powell, who, in his memoirs, dismisses the idea of a "desert democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran." This line of reasoning mirrors the logic that American policymakers applied to other formerly undemocratic regions of the world. Joseph Grew, the State Department's chief Japan expert, cautioned President Truman that "the best we can hope for is a constitutional monarchy, experience having shown that democracy in Japan would never work." Awash in cultural relativism, his colleagues and successors made the same point about East Asia, Germany, and South America. Now that the tide of democracy has swept over these regions, they are making the same point about the one part of the world it has yet to touch.
To be sure, with Iraqis killing Americans every day, the temptation to yield to such pessimism may prove irresistible. But, when they advertise Iraq--like they advertised Vietnam before it--as the repudiation of a larger democratic war of ideas, the realists encourage a more pessimistic conclusion than circumstances justify. A policy can be measured by its successes, and it can be measured by its failures. When it comes to America's record in promoting democratic change, the former surely outweigh the latter. The world may not change easily, but, because of America, it has changed. Having come so far, and confronted with a new totalitarian threat, how "realistic" would it be to quit now?
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Bring back that loving feeling
Repairing relations between the US and Europe is urgent - and the Americans should be making the first move
Timothy Garton Ash
Wednesday June 9, 2004
The Guardian
After the trauma of the past three years, there is now an absurd stand-off between Europe and America. America says: "We'll support a united Europe so long as it's not anti-American." Europe says: "We won't be anti-American so long as you take seriously our uniting Europe."
I would urge America to go first and break the deadlock, both because it is the stronger of the two partners and because, being a single nation-state, it's easier for America to take clear, decisive action. Americans should be bold, and say: "We unequivocally support a uniting Europe (sotto voce: even if some Gaullist French are making trouble). We've supported it since 1945, and don't propose to change now. Europe is the first partner we need in building a free world. We wish there really was one telephone number we could call. Let's sign a declaration of interdependence. Let's make a transatlantic free trade area. Let's talk about better ways of coordinating the policies of the EU as a whole - not just individual European powers - with those of the US. Let's develop that common project for the Middle East."
From time to time, Europeans will have to work with conservative, religious Republican administrations, speaking a political language very different from their own. If we can't manage this, we need to find ourselves another world. But Americans must also see that, after the unilateralism of George Bush's first years in office, after the hubris of the wounded following 9/11, and after the bruising experience of Washington's "divide and rule" in Europe, some mistrust is understandable.
There's also a difficulty that derives simply from the United States' unique plenitude of power. Private Eye has an occasional series of front covers on which the Queen is portrayed asking of prominent visitors: "And what do you do?" When President Bush came on an official visit in 2003, Private Eye showed him answering: "Whatever I goddam like."
In many respects, the hyperpower can do whatever it goddam likes. Most states aim to maximise their power. They try, in a phrase that British diplomats use much too often, to "punch above their weight". I won't say that the challenge now for America is to punch below its weight - that would be silly, especially when the punch is landed in a good cause. But the challenge for America is to exercise a degree of self-restraint.
Respect for international law and organisations is an important sign of self-restraint. Chief among those organisations is Franklin Roosevelt's baby, the United Nations. If Europe understands that it shares the same basic values, goals and long-term interests as America, then America should want Europe to be a benign check and balance on its own solitary hyperpower.
Admittedly, to want someone else to balance as well as complement your own power is a very unusual thing for any state to do, but the US is a very unusual state, the European Union is not a state at all, and both are historic variations of the same dream. After Iraq, America should also go to war again. The enemy to be defeated in this war is not a state, a dictator or an ideology, but extreme poverty and its accompanying plagues of disease, hunger and early death.
The US is spending some $80bn a year on the occupation of Iraq and only $13bn a year on development aid to all other countries. The disparity is grotesque.
A special American responsibility is to reduce its excessive emissions of carbon dioxide. Without American commitment, we shall never reach international agreements that bind emerging industrial giants such as China. And then we'll all be cooked.
I believe that America is capable of taking these steps. If I'd been born in the Middle East, Latin America or south-east Asia, I might be less inclined to believe this.
As a historian, I know that, in the global competition of the cold war and in its pursuit of oil and economic advantage, the US supported undemocratic regimes and licensed oppression. But as an Englishman who has seen at first hand what the US has done for Europe, I still believe it. And when I go to California, as I do every year, I wonder again at the way in which the sons and daughters of immigrants from utterly different cultures, from China, Indonesia, Somalia or Nicaragua, will embrace an ideal that was once proclaimed by the Levellers during the English civil war, at a small church in Putney.
Even Europeans whom many Americans would call "anti-American" are often disappointed lovers, measuring America against its own high ideal of itself. A Europe that likes the idea of America is a better Europe. Indeed, if we confront America with its own better self, we are confronting it, historically speaking, with a vision of a better Europe. And an America that likes the idea of the new Europe is, in turn, supporting another version of itself. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it punchily: "I support united Europe because I think two United States are better than one."
Americans can still do these good things in the world, but they don't have unlimited time. As time goes by, the power of the United States will fade. As time goes by, Americans will be less and less able to shape the world around them. We cannot know how long this time will be, but it may be no more than 20 years. In those 20 years, however, Americans have a historic chance, working with Europeans, to lay the foundations of a free world.
Repairing relations between the US and Europe is urgent - and the Americans should be making the first move
Timothy Garton Ash
Wednesday June 9, 2004
The Guardian
After the trauma of the past three years, there is now an absurd stand-off between Europe and America. America says: "We'll support a united Europe so long as it's not anti-American." Europe says: "We won't be anti-American so long as you take seriously our uniting Europe."
I would urge America to go first and break the deadlock, both because it is the stronger of the two partners and because, being a single nation-state, it's easier for America to take clear, decisive action. Americans should be bold, and say: "We unequivocally support a uniting Europe (sotto voce: even if some Gaullist French are making trouble). We've supported it since 1945, and don't propose to change now. Europe is the first partner we need in building a free world. We wish there really was one telephone number we could call. Let's sign a declaration of interdependence. Let's make a transatlantic free trade area. Let's talk about better ways of coordinating the policies of the EU as a whole - not just individual European powers - with those of the US. Let's develop that common project for the Middle East."
From time to time, Europeans will have to work with conservative, religious Republican administrations, speaking a political language very different from their own. If we can't manage this, we need to find ourselves another world. But Americans must also see that, after the unilateralism of George Bush's first years in office, after the hubris of the wounded following 9/11, and after the bruising experience of Washington's "divide and rule" in Europe, some mistrust is understandable.
There's also a difficulty that derives simply from the United States' unique plenitude of power. Private Eye has an occasional series of front covers on which the Queen is portrayed asking of prominent visitors: "And what do you do?" When President Bush came on an official visit in 2003, Private Eye showed him answering: "Whatever I goddam like."
In many respects, the hyperpower can do whatever it goddam likes. Most states aim to maximise their power. They try, in a phrase that British diplomats use much too often, to "punch above their weight". I won't say that the challenge now for America is to punch below its weight - that would be silly, especially when the punch is landed in a good cause. But the challenge for America is to exercise a degree of self-restraint.
Respect for international law and organisations is an important sign of self-restraint. Chief among those organisations is Franklin Roosevelt's baby, the United Nations. If Europe understands that it shares the same basic values, goals and long-term interests as America, then America should want Europe to be a benign check and balance on its own solitary hyperpower.
Admittedly, to want someone else to balance as well as complement your own power is a very unusual thing for any state to do, but the US is a very unusual state, the European Union is not a state at all, and both are historic variations of the same dream. After Iraq, America should also go to war again. The enemy to be defeated in this war is not a state, a dictator or an ideology, but extreme poverty and its accompanying plagues of disease, hunger and early death.
The US is spending some $80bn a year on the occupation of Iraq and only $13bn a year on development aid to all other countries. The disparity is grotesque.
A special American responsibility is to reduce its excessive emissions of carbon dioxide. Without American commitment, we shall never reach international agreements that bind emerging industrial giants such as China. And then we'll all be cooked.
I believe that America is capable of taking these steps. If I'd been born in the Middle East, Latin America or south-east Asia, I might be less inclined to believe this.
As a historian, I know that, in the global competition of the cold war and in its pursuit of oil and economic advantage, the US supported undemocratic regimes and licensed oppression. But as an Englishman who has seen at first hand what the US has done for Europe, I still believe it. And when I go to California, as I do every year, I wonder again at the way in which the sons and daughters of immigrants from utterly different cultures, from China, Indonesia, Somalia or Nicaragua, will embrace an ideal that was once proclaimed by the Levellers during the English civil war, at a small church in Putney.
Even Europeans whom many Americans would call "anti-American" are often disappointed lovers, measuring America against its own high ideal of itself. A Europe that likes the idea of America is a better Europe. Indeed, if we confront America with its own better self, we are confronting it, historically speaking, with a vision of a better Europe. And an America that likes the idea of the new Europe is, in turn, supporting another version of itself. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it punchily: "I support united Europe because I think two United States are better than one."
Americans can still do these good things in the world, but they don't have unlimited time. As time goes by, the power of the United States will fade. As time goes by, Americans will be less and less able to shape the world around them. We cannot know how long this time will be, but it may be no more than 20 years. In those 20 years, however, Americans have a historic chance, working with Europeans, to lay the foundations of a free world.
The Road Map for A Sovereign Iraq
Our plan for security and democracy after June 30.
BY PAUL WOLFOWITZWednesday, June 9, 2004 12:01 a.m.
After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi "bloggers," and he wrote on his Web log: "We cannot . . . protect every single person, including our leaders and the higher officials who make favorite targets for the terrorists--but we can make their attempts go in vain by making our leadership 'replaceable.' "
Exercising his newfound freedom of speech via the Internet, Omar addressed what he sees as the terrorists' fundamental misunderstanding about where Iraq is going. Terrorists--whether Saddamists or foreigners--"think in the same way their dictator-masters do," failing to grasp that the idea of leadership by an indispensable strongman applies to totalitarian regimes--not democracies.
That understanding of the stability of representative government was confirmed when council member Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawar assumed the Governing Council presidency. This orderly transfer of leadership showed that the rudiments of a democratic process are already at work in Iraq. The hope for a new Iraq, in which freedom is protected by democracy and the rule of law, rests in such processes.
This hopeful vision is what the enemies of a new Iraq fear the most. Fighting on even after the capture of Saddam Hussein last December, the murderers and torturers of his regime and their terrorist allies, with their perverse ideology of evil, have been seeking with death and destruction to prevent the emergence of a new and free Iraq. In a letter that coalition forces intercepted in January, one of the most notorious of these terrorists, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, wrote to his al Qaeda associates in Afghanistan that democracy in Iraq brings the prospect of "suffocation" for the terrorists, the prospect of Iraqis fighting in their own defense. When the army and police are "linked to the inhabitants of this area by kinship, blood and honor," Zarqawi asks, "how can we fight their cousins and their sons and under what pretext after the Americans pull back? . . . Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter."
President Bush recently outlined a five-step plan for helping Iraqis move beyond occupation to a fully constitutional government, a government that rejects weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, preserves Iraq's territorial integrity and lives peacefully with its neighbors. The plan involves five interdependent phases to build Iraqis' capacity to manage their own affairs successfully.
The first phase of the president's plan will become effective on June 30, when the Coalition Provisional Authority transfers authority to the Interim Iraqi Government, a body that will consist of a president, two deputy presidents, a prime minister, a deputy prime minister and 31 other cabinet ministers. The members of this new government will have responsibility until elections are held in January 2005 for day-to-day governance and will work as a full partner in providing security to Iraq.
The members of the new government, announced on June 2, were chosen through a process of wide-ranging consultations with the Iraqi people, led by Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, the special adviser on Iraq to the U.N. secretary- general. The new president will be Ghazi al-Yawar, the same man who stepped in to fill the place of the murdered Izzedine Salim. The new prime minister--with principal responsibility for the management of the government--is Dr. Iyad Allawi, a physician and a distinguished opponent of Saddam Hussein for many years, who was once the target of an assassination attempt by Saddam's agents.
The new government is not the old Governing Council in a new form--only four of the old 26-member Governing Council are part of the new government. The new cabinet was described by another Iraqi blogger, this one named Zeyad, as an "impressive" group, including six women ministers, "an unprecedented step in the region." "Iraqis need to be optimistic at such a critical moment," Zeyad added, or else they "will be left behind along with the dark forces that insist on killing more Iraqis and disrupting the new changes."
On the occasion of the announcement of the new government, Dr. Allawi spoke to his "dear brothers and sisters" about building a "true national unity" so that we can "forge ahead toward building a society ruled by law, covered by justice, and equality, freedom and respect for human rights" to build "a civilized advanced Iraq to be enjoyed by all Iraqis."
Dr. Allawi also asked "to record our profound gratitude and appreciation to the U.S.-led coalition, which has made great sacrifices for the liberation of Iraq." Then, breaking from his native Arabic, Dr. Allawi added: "I would like to say this in English. I would like to thank the coalition led by the United States for the sacrifices they have provided in the process of the liberation of Iraq."
After Iraq becomes sovereign on June 30, a new U.S. Embassy in Iraq will open for business on July 1 headed by Ambassador John Negroponte, who will be the representative of the United States to the sovereign government of Iraq. The character of our engagement will change, but our commitment will not. Iraqis will make the decisions about how their country is governed. But we are ready to continue as full partners in helping bring democracy and security to Iraq. During this stage, our focus will rest on supporting Iraq's political transition, equipping and training Iraqi security forces, and helping to set the stage for national elections at the end of the year.
Security is the foundation for victory in Iraq--the foundation on which all other successes are built--and the key to that security is enabling Iraqis to take the lead in their own defense. Moreover, Iraqis bring unique advantages against the kind of enemy we are fighting in Iraq today. Iraqis--who have a native knowledge of everything from city neighborhoods and regional accents to religious sensitivities and even local license plates--have advantages over any foreign force in confronting the security problems of Iraq today and its urban environments in particular. One notable recent success occurred on May 30, when Iraqi forces captured Umar Baziyani, a known terrorist and murder suspect believed to be one of Zarqawi's top lieutenants.
There are currently well over 200,000 Iraqis on duty or in training in the five branches of the Iraqi security forces--the new army, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, the Iraqi police, the border guards and the Facilities Protection Service. While the numbers are impressive for forces that didn't exist one year ago, numbers alone can be misleading. Iraqi forces still have significant shortcomings in training, equipment and leadership. No one had any expectation that Iraqi security forces would be ready this past April to stand up to the kind of fighting they encountered in Fallujah and in the Najaf-Karbala region. Not surprisingly, many Iraqi security forces performed poorly in that recent fighting, but many others stood their ground and performed creditably. As one example, when the Government House in Mosul came under a night attack, the governor stayed at his post defended by Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops, who stood their ground effectively until Iraqi police came back on duty. Throughout the fighting, Iraqis knew that Americans were there to help if needed, but as a result they didn't have to call on them. There were other recent examples of effective performance by Iraqi security forces, including those trained by our British coalition partners in the Basra area and those supported by Polish forces in Hilla.
After the lengthy competitive bidding process for contracts under the Iraq Reconstruction Supplemental appropriated by Congress last fall, substantial quantities of equipment are starting to fill the shortages in Iraqi forces. In addition, over the past two months, the Iraqis added another $1 billion of Iraqi funds to meet additional security requirements. Training for Iraqi security forces has now been consolidated under a U.S. three-star general. And we are applying lessons learned from the successes and failures of Iraqi forces in the recent fighting: the importance of good Iraqi leadership, reporting to an Iraqi chain of command backed up and embraced by coalition forces.
Over the next few months, our aim is to prepare Iraqi security forces to assume greater responsibilities from coalition forces--allowing Iraqis to take local control of the cities, even as coalition forces move into a supporting role and provide forces only as needed. We will continue the process of integrating Iraqi officers with coalition forces and embedding coalition officers with Iraqis--the sort of mentorship that will continue to develop more capable Iraqi security leaders. To foster a real sense of unity and independence, Iraqi security forces also need an Iraqi rallying point: Iraqis want to take orders from Iraqis. One of the first tasks of the new ministers of defense and interior will be to build Iraqi chains of command. As these command structures fill in, Iraqi security forces will know that fellow Iraqis lead them from the top.
By next January, we expect the Iraqi army to grow from the current six battalions to 27, or approximately 35,000 soldiers. An Iraqi initiative--a special division called the Iraqi National Task Force--is taking form and the first battalion of that force should be on the streets of Baghdad by July. Plans call for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to reach 45 battalions, or approximately 40,000 personnel, this fall. There are now close to 90,000 serving in the Iraqi police--and tens of thousands more in other Ministry of Interior forces--but many have little or no modern police training. The emphasis in coming months will be to provide the training and the leadership development appropriate for law enforcement in a society that respects the rule of law.
More and more Iraqis seem to feel they can place their trust in their new defense forces. Polls indicate considerable public approval for Iraqi forces even as patience with occupation wears thin. One member of a local district council in Baghdad reflected that sentiment when he said, "Now the people are beginning to understand that [Iraqi forces] are serving the country." The Iraqi general who now leads the all-Iraqi Fallujah brigade, Mohammed Abdul-Latif, recently told a gathering of some 40 sheiks, imams and city council members, "[U.S. troops] were brought here by the acts of one coward who was hunted out of a rat hole, Saddam, who disgraced us all. . . . Let us tell our children that [U.S. troops] came here to protect us. . . . We can help them leave by helping them do their job."
Iraqis are doing more than helping. By our own count, which is probably a significant underestimate, nearly 400 Iraqis have died in the past year for the cause of an Iraq free from tyranny and terror. Despite the enemy's attempts to intimidate them, Iraqis continue to step forward in large numbers to defend their country.
However, U.S. and other coalition forces are indispensable to preserve security while Iraqi forces build their strength. To counter the Saddamists and terrorists who are desperately trying to undermine Iraq's transition to democracy, we will keep our troops in place at whatever level is required. Our commanders in Iraq constantly reassess the numbers of troops they need to meet the mission. As we have often said, and as the president reiterated in his recent address to the nation, if our commanders on the ground ask for more troops, they will get more troops.
The third step in the president's plan for victory in Iraq involves rebuilding Iraq's civil infrastructure--deeply damaged by decades of Saddam's neglect. The majority of the ministries--to include Health, Education, and Public Works and Municipalities--have already been handed over to Iraqis, a process that will be complete by July 1.
Already, through a combination of oil revenues and existing assets, nearly $20 billion of Iraqi funds have gone into the Development Fund for Iraq to finance government operations and reconstruction projects. An additional $8 billion of oil revenues are projected to go into the fund by the end of this year. These funds are paying the salaries of over 350,000 teachers and professors and 100,000 doctors and health workers and have paid for $1.2 billion of improvements to the electricity infrastructure, $300 million for water, sewage and irrigation projects, and $660 million to sustain and expand oil production. Health-care spending in Iraq has increased some 30 times over prewar levels, allowing children to receive crucial vaccinations for the first time in years. Using part of the $800 million in Iraqi assets provided to local governors and local commanders, Coalition forces and local authorities have rehabilitated more than 2,200 schools and 240 hospitals.
Today, the Iraqi economy is also on the path to recovery. The new Iraqi dinar has been introduced and has traded at a stable exchange rate for over four months.
Electricity is one of the most important factors affecting the lives of ordinary Iraqis. At approximately 4,000 megawatts of peak capacity, electricity generation is back to prewar levels, and we are aiming for higher levels this summer. However, with Iraq's increasing prosperity, demand is also growing rapidly, and the electric power system is a principal target of enemy sabotage, so this sector will remain a challenge in coming months.
As the principal source of revenue for the new Iraqi government, oil production is another main target of the enemy. In recent months, production reached the prewar level of about 2.4 million barrels a day. Under Saddam, the revenue from that oil production was used to build palaces and weapons; today it is being used to build schools and vaccinate children.
Iraq could reach production levels of three million barrels of oil a day--a level last seen before Desert Storm--and has the potential to go further. Recently, the Iraqi oil minister proposed a reconstitution of Iraq's national oil company, a move that will help facilitate foreign investment and increase Iraqi revenues further.
The entire international community has a stake in Iraq's success. The fourth step in the president's plan involves enlisting additional international support for Iraq's transition to democracy. The U.N. has already played a critical role in forming the Governing Council last summer, with the heroic assistance of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the special representative of the secretary-general, who gave his life in the process. More recently, Ambassador Brahimi has played the key role on behalf of the U.N. secretary- general this spring in the formation of the Interim Government. A U.N. election team has been in Iraq working on facilitating the forthcoming election process. Three unanimous U.N. Security Council Resolutions, in May, August and October of last year, have provided the basis for coalition efforts in Iraq, including the multinational force under U.S. command. Yesterday the Security Council unanimously endorsed the transition timetable adopted by Iraqis and encouraged other U.N. members to add their support.
Thirty-one nations, in addition to the U.S. and Iraq, have troops that are bravely fighting for a free Iraq, and more than 100 of their soldiers have given their lives. Last fall, 70 nations assembled at the Madrid donors conference and pledged billions of dollars to build a new Iraq. The assistance of the international community will continue to be important for helping Iraq stand on its own feet.
The fifth step in the president's plan involves nurturing Iraq's capacity for representative self-government, leading to a constitutional government by the end of 2005.
When day-to-day governing responsibility is transferred on June 30, work will already be under way on the next phase in the process as defined by the Transitional Administrative Law, a kind of interim constitution written by the Iraqis in March. The Interim Government will serve until the end of 2004, when Iraqis will go to the polls to elect representatives for the first freely elected national government in Iraq's history. Ensuring adequate security for elections will be a major challenge and will require the help of Coalition forces. By the end of 2005, Iraqis are scheduled to vote on a new constitution that protects the rights of all of its citizens, of all religious and ethnic groups.
The killers and torturers who kept Saddam in power all these years and their terrorist allies--who also fear a free Iraq--will do everything they can, through terror and violence, to block that progress. They are experts in sowing death and destruction and they should not be underestimated. But they offer nothing positive for the Iraqi people, and the evil they represent is one that few Iraqis want for themselves or their children. By enabling Iraqis to take the lead in the fight for Iraq's future, we will confront the Saddamists and terrorists with the defeat that Zarqawi fears.
Nothing is more important to world security than defeating the forces of evil by nurturing the seeds of freedom--especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our enemies understand that these are now the central battlegrounds in the war on terrorism. But the burden is not ours alone. In a remarkably short time, Iraqi leaders, for all their diversity, have shown that they are learning the arts of political compromise--and that they are dedicated to their country's unity. Now is the moment when Iraqis must rise to the challenge. Now is the time for Iraqis to take the future of Iraq into their own hands.
The blogger Omar's final reflection in the wake of Izzedine Salim's death is a further indication that Iraqis are ready. "Are we sad?" he wrote in his Web log. "Yes of course, but we're absolutely not discouraged because we know our enemies and we decided to go in this battle to the end. . . . I've tasted freedom, my friends, and I'd rather die fighting to preserve my freedom before I find myself trapped in another nightmare of blood and oppression."
Like Omar, we remain committed, as do the brave young Americans in Iraq. And we remain hopeful. Our own history attests to the fact that democracy can be a hard-won prize. But we also know that the goal is worth the fight.
Mr. Wolfowitz is deputy secretary of defense.
Our plan for security and democracy after June 30.
BY PAUL WOLFOWITZWednesday, June 9, 2004 12:01 a.m.
After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi "bloggers," and he wrote on his Web log: "We cannot . . . protect every single person, including our leaders and the higher officials who make favorite targets for the terrorists--but we can make their attempts go in vain by making our leadership 'replaceable.' "
Exercising his newfound freedom of speech via the Internet, Omar addressed what he sees as the terrorists' fundamental misunderstanding about where Iraq is going. Terrorists--whether Saddamists or foreigners--"think in the same way their dictator-masters do," failing to grasp that the idea of leadership by an indispensable strongman applies to totalitarian regimes--not democracies.
That understanding of the stability of representative government was confirmed when council member Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawar assumed the Governing Council presidency. This orderly transfer of leadership showed that the rudiments of a democratic process are already at work in Iraq. The hope for a new Iraq, in which freedom is protected by democracy and the rule of law, rests in such processes.
This hopeful vision is what the enemies of a new Iraq fear the most. Fighting on even after the capture of Saddam Hussein last December, the murderers and torturers of his regime and their terrorist allies, with their perverse ideology of evil, have been seeking with death and destruction to prevent the emergence of a new and free Iraq. In a letter that coalition forces intercepted in January, one of the most notorious of these terrorists, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, wrote to his al Qaeda associates in Afghanistan that democracy in Iraq brings the prospect of "suffocation" for the terrorists, the prospect of Iraqis fighting in their own defense. When the army and police are "linked to the inhabitants of this area by kinship, blood and honor," Zarqawi asks, "how can we fight their cousins and their sons and under what pretext after the Americans pull back? . . . Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter."
President Bush recently outlined a five-step plan for helping Iraqis move beyond occupation to a fully constitutional government, a government that rejects weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, preserves Iraq's territorial integrity and lives peacefully with its neighbors. The plan involves five interdependent phases to build Iraqis' capacity to manage their own affairs successfully.
The first phase of the president's plan will become effective on June 30, when the Coalition Provisional Authority transfers authority to the Interim Iraqi Government, a body that will consist of a president, two deputy presidents, a prime minister, a deputy prime minister and 31 other cabinet ministers. The members of this new government will have responsibility until elections are held in January 2005 for day-to-day governance and will work as a full partner in providing security to Iraq.
The members of the new government, announced on June 2, were chosen through a process of wide-ranging consultations with the Iraqi people, led by Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, the special adviser on Iraq to the U.N. secretary- general. The new president will be Ghazi al-Yawar, the same man who stepped in to fill the place of the murdered Izzedine Salim. The new prime minister--with principal responsibility for the management of the government--is Dr. Iyad Allawi, a physician and a distinguished opponent of Saddam Hussein for many years, who was once the target of an assassination attempt by Saddam's agents.
The new government is not the old Governing Council in a new form--only four of the old 26-member Governing Council are part of the new government. The new cabinet was described by another Iraqi blogger, this one named Zeyad, as an "impressive" group, including six women ministers, "an unprecedented step in the region." "Iraqis need to be optimistic at such a critical moment," Zeyad added, or else they "will be left behind along with the dark forces that insist on killing more Iraqis and disrupting the new changes."
On the occasion of the announcement of the new government, Dr. Allawi spoke to his "dear brothers and sisters" about building a "true national unity" so that we can "forge ahead toward building a society ruled by law, covered by justice, and equality, freedom and respect for human rights" to build "a civilized advanced Iraq to be enjoyed by all Iraqis."
Dr. Allawi also asked "to record our profound gratitude and appreciation to the U.S.-led coalition, which has made great sacrifices for the liberation of Iraq." Then, breaking from his native Arabic, Dr. Allawi added: "I would like to say this in English. I would like to thank the coalition led by the United States for the sacrifices they have provided in the process of the liberation of Iraq."
After Iraq becomes sovereign on June 30, a new U.S. Embassy in Iraq will open for business on July 1 headed by Ambassador John Negroponte, who will be the representative of the United States to the sovereign government of Iraq. The character of our engagement will change, but our commitment will not. Iraqis will make the decisions about how their country is governed. But we are ready to continue as full partners in helping bring democracy and security to Iraq. During this stage, our focus will rest on supporting Iraq's political transition, equipping and training Iraqi security forces, and helping to set the stage for national elections at the end of the year.
Security is the foundation for victory in Iraq--the foundation on which all other successes are built--and the key to that security is enabling Iraqis to take the lead in their own defense. Moreover, Iraqis bring unique advantages against the kind of enemy we are fighting in Iraq today. Iraqis--who have a native knowledge of everything from city neighborhoods and regional accents to religious sensitivities and even local license plates--have advantages over any foreign force in confronting the security problems of Iraq today and its urban environments in particular. One notable recent success occurred on May 30, when Iraqi forces captured Umar Baziyani, a known terrorist and murder suspect believed to be one of Zarqawi's top lieutenants.
There are currently well over 200,000 Iraqis on duty or in training in the five branches of the Iraqi security forces--the new army, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, the Iraqi police, the border guards and the Facilities Protection Service. While the numbers are impressive for forces that didn't exist one year ago, numbers alone can be misleading. Iraqi forces still have significant shortcomings in training, equipment and leadership. No one had any expectation that Iraqi security forces would be ready this past April to stand up to the kind of fighting they encountered in Fallujah and in the Najaf-Karbala region. Not surprisingly, many Iraqi security forces performed poorly in that recent fighting, but many others stood their ground and performed creditably. As one example, when the Government House in Mosul came under a night attack, the governor stayed at his post defended by Iraqi Civil Defense Corps troops, who stood their ground effectively until Iraqi police came back on duty. Throughout the fighting, Iraqis knew that Americans were there to help if needed, but as a result they didn't have to call on them. There were other recent examples of effective performance by Iraqi security forces, including those trained by our British coalition partners in the Basra area and those supported by Polish forces in Hilla.
After the lengthy competitive bidding process for contracts under the Iraq Reconstruction Supplemental appropriated by Congress last fall, substantial quantities of equipment are starting to fill the shortages in Iraqi forces. In addition, over the past two months, the Iraqis added another $1 billion of Iraqi funds to meet additional security requirements. Training for Iraqi security forces has now been consolidated under a U.S. three-star general. And we are applying lessons learned from the successes and failures of Iraqi forces in the recent fighting: the importance of good Iraqi leadership, reporting to an Iraqi chain of command backed up and embraced by coalition forces.
Over the next few months, our aim is to prepare Iraqi security forces to assume greater responsibilities from coalition forces--allowing Iraqis to take local control of the cities, even as coalition forces move into a supporting role and provide forces only as needed. We will continue the process of integrating Iraqi officers with coalition forces and embedding coalition officers with Iraqis--the sort of mentorship that will continue to develop more capable Iraqi security leaders. To foster a real sense of unity and independence, Iraqi security forces also need an Iraqi rallying point: Iraqis want to take orders from Iraqis. One of the first tasks of the new ministers of defense and interior will be to build Iraqi chains of command. As these command structures fill in, Iraqi security forces will know that fellow Iraqis lead them from the top.
By next January, we expect the Iraqi army to grow from the current six battalions to 27, or approximately 35,000 soldiers. An Iraqi initiative--a special division called the Iraqi National Task Force--is taking form and the first battalion of that force should be on the streets of Baghdad by July. Plans call for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to reach 45 battalions, or approximately 40,000 personnel, this fall. There are now close to 90,000 serving in the Iraqi police--and tens of thousands more in other Ministry of Interior forces--but many have little or no modern police training. The emphasis in coming months will be to provide the training and the leadership development appropriate for law enforcement in a society that respects the rule of law.
More and more Iraqis seem to feel they can place their trust in their new defense forces. Polls indicate considerable public approval for Iraqi forces even as patience with occupation wears thin. One member of a local district council in Baghdad reflected that sentiment when he said, "Now the people are beginning to understand that [Iraqi forces] are serving the country." The Iraqi general who now leads the all-Iraqi Fallujah brigade, Mohammed Abdul-Latif, recently told a gathering of some 40 sheiks, imams and city council members, "[U.S. troops] were brought here by the acts of one coward who was hunted out of a rat hole, Saddam, who disgraced us all. . . . Let us tell our children that [U.S. troops] came here to protect us. . . . We can help them leave by helping them do their job."
Iraqis are doing more than helping. By our own count, which is probably a significant underestimate, nearly 400 Iraqis have died in the past year for the cause of an Iraq free from tyranny and terror. Despite the enemy's attempts to intimidate them, Iraqis continue to step forward in large numbers to defend their country.
However, U.S. and other coalition forces are indispensable to preserve security while Iraqi forces build their strength. To counter the Saddamists and terrorists who are desperately trying to undermine Iraq's transition to democracy, we will keep our troops in place at whatever level is required. Our commanders in Iraq constantly reassess the numbers of troops they need to meet the mission. As we have often said, and as the president reiterated in his recent address to the nation, if our commanders on the ground ask for more troops, they will get more troops.
The third step in the president's plan for victory in Iraq involves rebuilding Iraq's civil infrastructure--deeply damaged by decades of Saddam's neglect. The majority of the ministries--to include Health, Education, and Public Works and Municipalities--have already been handed over to Iraqis, a process that will be complete by July 1.
Already, through a combination of oil revenues and existing assets, nearly $20 billion of Iraqi funds have gone into the Development Fund for Iraq to finance government operations and reconstruction projects. An additional $8 billion of oil revenues are projected to go into the fund by the end of this year. These funds are paying the salaries of over 350,000 teachers and professors and 100,000 doctors and health workers and have paid for $1.2 billion of improvements to the electricity infrastructure, $300 million for water, sewage and irrigation projects, and $660 million to sustain and expand oil production. Health-care spending in Iraq has increased some 30 times over prewar levels, allowing children to receive crucial vaccinations for the first time in years. Using part of the $800 million in Iraqi assets provided to local governors and local commanders, Coalition forces and local authorities have rehabilitated more than 2,200 schools and 240 hospitals.
Today, the Iraqi economy is also on the path to recovery. The new Iraqi dinar has been introduced and has traded at a stable exchange rate for over four months.
Electricity is one of the most important factors affecting the lives of ordinary Iraqis. At approximately 4,000 megawatts of peak capacity, electricity generation is back to prewar levels, and we are aiming for higher levels this summer. However, with Iraq's increasing prosperity, demand is also growing rapidly, and the electric power system is a principal target of enemy sabotage, so this sector will remain a challenge in coming months.
As the principal source of revenue for the new Iraqi government, oil production is another main target of the enemy. In recent months, production reached the prewar level of about 2.4 million barrels a day. Under Saddam, the revenue from that oil production was used to build palaces and weapons; today it is being used to build schools and vaccinate children.
Iraq could reach production levels of three million barrels of oil a day--a level last seen before Desert Storm--and has the potential to go further. Recently, the Iraqi oil minister proposed a reconstitution of Iraq's national oil company, a move that will help facilitate foreign investment and increase Iraqi revenues further.
The entire international community has a stake in Iraq's success. The fourth step in the president's plan involves enlisting additional international support for Iraq's transition to democracy. The U.N. has already played a critical role in forming the Governing Council last summer, with the heroic assistance of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the special representative of the secretary-general, who gave his life in the process. More recently, Ambassador Brahimi has played the key role on behalf of the U.N. secretary- general this spring in the formation of the Interim Government. A U.N. election team has been in Iraq working on facilitating the forthcoming election process. Three unanimous U.N. Security Council Resolutions, in May, August and October of last year, have provided the basis for coalition efforts in Iraq, including the multinational force under U.S. command. Yesterday the Security Council unanimously endorsed the transition timetable adopted by Iraqis and encouraged other U.N. members to add their support.
Thirty-one nations, in addition to the U.S. and Iraq, have troops that are bravely fighting for a free Iraq, and more than 100 of their soldiers have given their lives. Last fall, 70 nations assembled at the Madrid donors conference and pledged billions of dollars to build a new Iraq. The assistance of the international community will continue to be important for helping Iraq stand on its own feet.
The fifth step in the president's plan involves nurturing Iraq's capacity for representative self-government, leading to a constitutional government by the end of 2005.
When day-to-day governing responsibility is transferred on June 30, work will already be under way on the next phase in the process as defined by the Transitional Administrative Law, a kind of interim constitution written by the Iraqis in March. The Interim Government will serve until the end of 2004, when Iraqis will go to the polls to elect representatives for the first freely elected national government in Iraq's history. Ensuring adequate security for elections will be a major challenge and will require the help of Coalition forces. By the end of 2005, Iraqis are scheduled to vote on a new constitution that protects the rights of all of its citizens, of all religious and ethnic groups.
The killers and torturers who kept Saddam in power all these years and their terrorist allies--who also fear a free Iraq--will do everything they can, through terror and violence, to block that progress. They are experts in sowing death and destruction and they should not be underestimated. But they offer nothing positive for the Iraqi people, and the evil they represent is one that few Iraqis want for themselves or their children. By enabling Iraqis to take the lead in the fight for Iraq's future, we will confront the Saddamists and terrorists with the defeat that Zarqawi fears.
Nothing is more important to world security than defeating the forces of evil by nurturing the seeds of freedom--especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our enemies understand that these are now the central battlegrounds in the war on terrorism. But the burden is not ours alone. In a remarkably short time, Iraqi leaders, for all their diversity, have shown that they are learning the arts of political compromise--and that they are dedicated to their country's unity. Now is the moment when Iraqis must rise to the challenge. Now is the time for Iraqis to take the future of Iraq into their own hands.
The blogger Omar's final reflection in the wake of Izzedine Salim's death is a further indication that Iraqis are ready. "Are we sad?" he wrote in his Web log. "Yes of course, but we're absolutely not discouraged because we know our enemies and we decided to go in this battle to the end. . . . I've tasted freedom, my friends, and I'd rather die fighting to preserve my freedom before I find myself trapped in another nightmare of blood and oppression."
Like Omar, we remain committed, as do the brave young Americans in Iraq. And we remain hopeful. Our own history attests to the fact that democracy can be a hard-won prize. But we also know that the goal is worth the fight.
Mr. Wolfowitz is deputy secretary of defense.
Saudi poll: Wide support for bin Laden
By Henry Schuster
CNN
(CNN) -- Almost half of all Saudis said in a poll conducted last year that they have a favorable view of Osama bin Laden's sermons and rhetoric, but fewer than 5 percent thought it was a good idea for bin Laden to rule the Arabian Peninsula.
The poll involved interviews with more than 15,000 Saudis and was overseen by Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi national security consultant.
It was conducted between August and November 2003, after simultaneous suicide attacks in May 2003 when 36 people were killed in Riyadh.
Obaid said he only recently decided to reveal the poll results because he felt the public needed to know about them.
"I was surprised [at the results], especially after the bombings," Obaid told CNN. The question put to Saudi citizens was "What is your opinion of Osama bin Laden's sermons and rhetoric?"
"They like what he said about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or about America and the Zionist conspiracy. But what he does, that's where you see the huge drop," said Obaid, referring to the bombings that had already begun taking place inside Saudi Arabia at the time the poll was conducted.
He also said he would like to update the poll numbers in the wake of the recent series of terrorist attacks that have taken place in Saudi Arabia.
Forty-one percent said they favored strong and close relations with America, while only 39 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the Saudi armed forces, both results that Obaid also termed "surprising."
"They don't trust their army," said Obaid, who noted that the security forces fared far better.
He noted that less than a third of Saudis polled had a positive opinion of militant clerics, although government-appointed religious figures did better.
The poll showed strong support for political reforms and allowing women to play a greater role in society. Almost two-thirds said they favored allowing women to drive, something they are currently banned from doing.
While support for political reforms, particularly elections, was high, few Saudis viewed liberal reformers with much favor.
Obaid said he shared the poll results -- some of which were published today in The Washington Post -- with members of the Interior and Foreign ministries, as well as the royal court.
Some were "a bit wary" about the questions, Obaid said, particularly the ones relating to bin Laden, but he received support from the government when he conducted the poll.
The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
By Henry Schuster
CNN
(CNN) -- Almost half of all Saudis said in a poll conducted last year that they have a favorable view of Osama bin Laden's sermons and rhetoric, but fewer than 5 percent thought it was a good idea for bin Laden to rule the Arabian Peninsula.
The poll involved interviews with more than 15,000 Saudis and was overseen by Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi national security consultant.
It was conducted between August and November 2003, after simultaneous suicide attacks in May 2003 when 36 people were killed in Riyadh.
Obaid said he only recently decided to reveal the poll results because he felt the public needed to know about them.
"I was surprised [at the results], especially after the bombings," Obaid told CNN. The question put to Saudi citizens was "What is your opinion of Osama bin Laden's sermons and rhetoric?"
"They like what he said about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or about America and the Zionist conspiracy. But what he does, that's where you see the huge drop," said Obaid, referring to the bombings that had already begun taking place inside Saudi Arabia at the time the poll was conducted.
He also said he would like to update the poll numbers in the wake of the recent series of terrorist attacks that have taken place in Saudi Arabia.
Forty-one percent said they favored strong and close relations with America, while only 39 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the Saudi armed forces, both results that Obaid also termed "surprising."
"They don't trust their army," said Obaid, who noted that the security forces fared far better.
He noted that less than a third of Saudis polled had a positive opinion of militant clerics, although government-appointed religious figures did better.
The poll showed strong support for political reforms and allowing women to play a greater role in society. Almost two-thirds said they favored allowing women to drive, something they are currently banned from doing.
While support for political reforms, particularly elections, was high, few Saudis viewed liberal reformers with much favor.
Obaid said he shared the poll results -- some of which were published today in The Washington Post -- with members of the Interior and Foreign ministries, as well as the royal court.
Some were "a bit wary" about the questions, Obaid said, particularly the ones relating to bin Laden, but he received support from the government when he conducted the poll.
The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Well well, what do you know! They're finally waking up from their dirty dreams, poor souls! Saudis are shocked to find out that the Islamist Fascists are out to get them. It was fine as long the treatment was reserved to others
For Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda Threat Is Now Hitting Home
Kingdom Itself Seen as a Target
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A18
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Concrete barriers, razor wire and armored vehicles buttress the high walls of the sprawling residential compounds here that house American workers and thousands of other Westerners, an extra layer of protection designed to thwart suicide bombers.
Recently, similar defenses have been installed at dozens of other sites in this capital city that were once considered unlikely terrorist targets: large government office buildings, palaces belonging to the royal family and the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, a giant inverted pyramid that houses the military and internal security agencies.
As these countermeasures show, it is becoming increasingly clear to the government and many Saudis that the campaign of violence that erupted here a year ago is aimed not only at Westerners long reviled by Islamic radicals, but at the royal House of Saud as well.
If the truck bombing of the main police station here seven weeks ago didn't make that plain, the message was delivered again May 29, when an al Qaeda-inspired group took hostages and killed 22 people at a compound for foreigners in Khobar, along the Persian Gulf.
Afterward, the organization calling itself al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula released a stream of statements on the Internet, denouncing members of the royal family as "tyrants," accusing them of plundering the nation's oil wealth and serving notice that their grip on power was under serious challenge.
On Monday, the same group released another statement warning of pending attacks on Western airlines and other targets. Saudi officials said the same militants were responsible for an attack on a BBC crew in Riyadh on Sunday that left a cameraman dead and a correspondent seriously wounded.
The brewing conflict between the government and the militants has forced many people here to reassess where they stand. In a nation where large segments of society support native son Osama bin Laden's efforts to destroy the United States and its Western allies, mainstream Saudis who cheered him are starting to realize that the government bin Laden and his followers really wanted to topple all along was their own.
"Many people thought that this was just talk, people saying extremist things, but that's it, just talk," said Abdul Muhsen Akkas, a member of the Saudi consultative council, a group that advises the royal family. "Somehow, we had the belief that our people would never cross that bridge" and attack the kingdom's economy and social structure.
Khalil Khalil, a professor at Imam University in Riyadh, said he used to warn fellow Saudis that bin Laden's primary desire was to oust the royal family that exiled him a decade ago, but that few wanted to listen. Khalil described one woman who told him God would make him suffer for saying such things, adding that she admired and loved bin Laden so much for fighting the United States that she was willing to leave her husband and four children to serve him.
Recently, however, that woman and many others have been expressing second thoughts, Khalil said. Since May 2003, the revolt by al Qaeda loyalists has resulted in 85 deaths and more than 300 wounded, with many Saudis and other Muslims among the casualties.
"I often said we should try to fight bin Laden together and clean the world of these dangerous extremists," Khalil said. "But until a year ago, no one would have thought that here. Many people like what bin Laden says. His actions are not what they are all about, but his slogans, yes. That is the question we have in Saudi Arabia: How do we deal with the people who like bin Laden's slogans, his ideas? It's hard."
The ruling family has vowed to wipe out the insurgency and shows no sign of losing its hold on power. But its members have become sufficiently concerned that some are making a renewed effort to retain the allegiance of their subjects.
In a column published last week in the government newspaper al-Watan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington exhorted the public to "mobilize for war" against the militants, urging Saudis to reject al Qaeda's charges that the government has become corrupt and too cozy with the West.
"We have a religious and national obligation not to be tempted into following those who have misled us, [those who are trying] to persuade us that the flaw lies with us, as a state and as a people, and that this terrorist phenomenon is the result of the cultural situation in which we are living," wrote Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority -- a committee controlled by the government -- issued an edict stating that it was every citizen's moral duty to report or turn in suspected extremists. The declaration contrasted sharply with government policy during the 1980s, when thousands of Saudis were encouraged to travel to Afghanistan to join a U.S.- and Saudi-financed Islamic insurgency against Soviet occupation forces. Many of them attended bin Laden's guerrilla training camps, and hundreds of millions of Saudi dollars financed radical Islamic causes around the world.
The royal family has been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat presented by bin Laden's followers and Islamic militants. In November 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister whose agency is now surrounded by barricades, bluntly declared that no al Qaeda cells existed in the kingdom.
Six months later, on May 12, 2003, suicide bombers attacked a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh, killing 35, including the assailants, and wounding about 200 people. Six months after that, an al Qaeda gang bombed another compound in Riyadh within sight of a royal palace, this time resulting in 17 deaths and 122 people wounded.
The government says it has foiled dozens of other terrorist attacks in the making, arresting hundreds of suspected militants and seizing large caches of explosives and ammunition.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to London and former intelligence chief, said in a speech last week that 75 percent of all militants believed to be operating in Saudi Arabia had been killed or captured. Other government leaders confidently assert that the insurgency is wobbling and will collapse after its last few leaders are rounded up.
But for now, the bombings and assassinations are having their desired effect. Westerners are leaving the country, depriving the Saudi economy of expertise needed to run operations from oil wells to dental clinics. Oil prices worldwide have soared, in part because of concerns that terrorists might blow up a pipeline or a major petroleum installation.
The frequency of attacks is also on the rise. Last week, gunmen fired on a pair of U.S. soldiers in Riyadh, while two other militants were killed in a firefight with security forces in Taif, in the western part of the kingdom. Two weeks ago, a German was gunned down while visiting an automated teller machine in the capital.
At times, the government's response has appeared weak and ineffective. In December, officials released a list of the kingdom's 26 most-wanted terrorism suspects. Only eight have been apprehended.
In last week's hostage-taking in Khobar, three of the four gunmen escaped even though they were surrounded by hundreds of Saudi security forces. At first, Saudi officials suggested that they were able to flee by using some of the hostages as shields. Later, other officials said the gunmen were allowed to escape after they threatened to blow up a building by remote control unless they were given free passage.
Whatever the reason, the fact that three of the perpetrators remain on the loose has given the group a huge propaganda victory.
"They are euphoric. They've done what almost nobody has done in the history of hostage-taking: They got away with it," said Saad Fagih, a Saudi exile in London who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a group that advocates greater freedoms in the kingdom and the downfall of the monarchy. "It was pure incompetence on the part of the Saudi security system. Hopeless incompetence."
Few people are predicting that the insurgency will cause the House of Saud to collapse, but worries about the kingdom's stability are growing.
Alex Standish, editor of the London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest, said the situation in Saudi Arabia has strong parallels to the fall of the shah of Iran, another U.S. ally, who was toppled in his country's Islamic revolution in 1979.
"I think the Saudi royal family has been in denial for far too long," Standish said. "In the past, their tendency was to buy off critics. But they can't do that here. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this organization is gathering strength."
The royal family is also hobbled by factionalism and aging leaders. King Fahd has been incapacitated for years by a stroke. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, was born in 1924. His half-brother, Prince Sultan, the next in line, is 76. It is unclear who will emerge from the next generation to take their places.
"The regime in Saudi Arabia today is a regime of old men. It is like the Soviet days," said Ferhad Ibrahim, a political science professor and Middle East specialist at the Free University of Berlin. "They don't have a strategy against the terrorists. They have a crisis. The whole political system has a hard time functioning."
Even so, some Saudi intellectuals say, the attacks have renewed popular support for the government and sparked a backlash against the militants. They say many Saudis are afraid that al Qaeda is trying to ruin the nation's economy and isolate the kingdom from the rest of the world.
"It's a great shock to people. They never expected such a thing to be carried out on Saudi soil, by Saudis," said Abdul Aziz I. Fayez, another member of the consultative council. "Here you have a society that for three years now has been accused of being a breeding ground for terrorists. Now people are seeing that we are victims of terrorism as well."
For Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda Threat Is Now Hitting Home
Kingdom Itself Seen as a Target
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A18
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Concrete barriers, razor wire and armored vehicles buttress the high walls of the sprawling residential compounds here that house American workers and thousands of other Westerners, an extra layer of protection designed to thwart suicide bombers.
Recently, similar defenses have been installed at dozens of other sites in this capital city that were once considered unlikely terrorist targets: large government office buildings, palaces belonging to the royal family and the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, a giant inverted pyramid that houses the military and internal security agencies.
As these countermeasures show, it is becoming increasingly clear to the government and many Saudis that the campaign of violence that erupted here a year ago is aimed not only at Westerners long reviled by Islamic radicals, but at the royal House of Saud as well.
If the truck bombing of the main police station here seven weeks ago didn't make that plain, the message was delivered again May 29, when an al Qaeda-inspired group took hostages and killed 22 people at a compound for foreigners in Khobar, along the Persian Gulf.
Afterward, the organization calling itself al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula released a stream of statements on the Internet, denouncing members of the royal family as "tyrants," accusing them of plundering the nation's oil wealth and serving notice that their grip on power was under serious challenge.
On Monday, the same group released another statement warning of pending attacks on Western airlines and other targets. Saudi officials said the same militants were responsible for an attack on a BBC crew in Riyadh on Sunday that left a cameraman dead and a correspondent seriously wounded.
The brewing conflict between the government and the militants has forced many people here to reassess where they stand. In a nation where large segments of society support native son Osama bin Laden's efforts to destroy the United States and its Western allies, mainstream Saudis who cheered him are starting to realize that the government bin Laden and his followers really wanted to topple all along was their own.
"Many people thought that this was just talk, people saying extremist things, but that's it, just talk," said Abdul Muhsen Akkas, a member of the Saudi consultative council, a group that advises the royal family. "Somehow, we had the belief that our people would never cross that bridge" and attack the kingdom's economy and social structure.
Khalil Khalil, a professor at Imam University in Riyadh, said he used to warn fellow Saudis that bin Laden's primary desire was to oust the royal family that exiled him a decade ago, but that few wanted to listen. Khalil described one woman who told him God would make him suffer for saying such things, adding that she admired and loved bin Laden so much for fighting the United States that she was willing to leave her husband and four children to serve him.
Recently, however, that woman and many others have been expressing second thoughts, Khalil said. Since May 2003, the revolt by al Qaeda loyalists has resulted in 85 deaths and more than 300 wounded, with many Saudis and other Muslims among the casualties.
"I often said we should try to fight bin Laden together and clean the world of these dangerous extremists," Khalil said. "But until a year ago, no one would have thought that here. Many people like what bin Laden says. His actions are not what they are all about, but his slogans, yes. That is the question we have in Saudi Arabia: How do we deal with the people who like bin Laden's slogans, his ideas? It's hard."
The ruling family has vowed to wipe out the insurgency and shows no sign of losing its hold on power. But its members have become sufficiently concerned that some are making a renewed effort to retain the allegiance of their subjects.
In a column published last week in the government newspaper al-Watan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington exhorted the public to "mobilize for war" against the militants, urging Saudis to reject al Qaeda's charges that the government has become corrupt and too cozy with the West.
"We have a religious and national obligation not to be tempted into following those who have misled us, [those who are trying] to persuade us that the flaw lies with us, as a state and as a people, and that this terrorist phenomenon is the result of the cultural situation in which we are living," wrote Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority -- a committee controlled by the government -- issued an edict stating that it was every citizen's moral duty to report or turn in suspected extremists. The declaration contrasted sharply with government policy during the 1980s, when thousands of Saudis were encouraged to travel to Afghanistan to join a U.S.- and Saudi-financed Islamic insurgency against Soviet occupation forces. Many of them attended bin Laden's guerrilla training camps, and hundreds of millions of Saudi dollars financed radical Islamic causes around the world.
The royal family has been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat presented by bin Laden's followers and Islamic militants. In November 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister whose agency is now surrounded by barricades, bluntly declared that no al Qaeda cells existed in the kingdom.
Six months later, on May 12, 2003, suicide bombers attacked a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh, killing 35, including the assailants, and wounding about 200 people. Six months after that, an al Qaeda gang bombed another compound in Riyadh within sight of a royal palace, this time resulting in 17 deaths and 122 people wounded.
The government says it has foiled dozens of other terrorist attacks in the making, arresting hundreds of suspected militants and seizing large caches of explosives and ammunition.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to London and former intelligence chief, said in a speech last week that 75 percent of all militants believed to be operating in Saudi Arabia had been killed or captured. Other government leaders confidently assert that the insurgency is wobbling and will collapse after its last few leaders are rounded up.
But for now, the bombings and assassinations are having their desired effect. Westerners are leaving the country, depriving the Saudi economy of expertise needed to run operations from oil wells to dental clinics. Oil prices worldwide have soared, in part because of concerns that terrorists might blow up a pipeline or a major petroleum installation.
The frequency of attacks is also on the rise. Last week, gunmen fired on a pair of U.S. soldiers in Riyadh, while two other militants were killed in a firefight with security forces in Taif, in the western part of the kingdom. Two weeks ago, a German was gunned down while visiting an automated teller machine in the capital.
At times, the government's response has appeared weak and ineffective. In December, officials released a list of the kingdom's 26 most-wanted terrorism suspects. Only eight have been apprehended.
In last week's hostage-taking in Khobar, three of the four gunmen escaped even though they were surrounded by hundreds of Saudi security forces. At first, Saudi officials suggested that they were able to flee by using some of the hostages as shields. Later, other officials said the gunmen were allowed to escape after they threatened to blow up a building by remote control unless they were given free passage.
Whatever the reason, the fact that three of the perpetrators remain on the loose has given the group a huge propaganda victory.
"They are euphoric. They've done what almost nobody has done in the history of hostage-taking: They got away with it," said Saad Fagih, a Saudi exile in London who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a group that advocates greater freedoms in the kingdom and the downfall of the monarchy. "It was pure incompetence on the part of the Saudi security system. Hopeless incompetence."
Few people are predicting that the insurgency will cause the House of Saud to collapse, but worries about the kingdom's stability are growing.
Alex Standish, editor of the London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest, said the situation in Saudi Arabia has strong parallels to the fall of the shah of Iran, another U.S. ally, who was toppled in his country's Islamic revolution in 1979.
"I think the Saudi royal family has been in denial for far too long," Standish said. "In the past, their tendency was to buy off critics. But they can't do that here. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this organization is gathering strength."
The royal family is also hobbled by factionalism and aging leaders. King Fahd has been incapacitated for years by a stroke. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, was born in 1924. His half-brother, Prince Sultan, the next in line, is 76. It is unclear who will emerge from the next generation to take their places.
"The regime in Saudi Arabia today is a regime of old men. It is like the Soviet days," said Ferhad Ibrahim, a political science professor and Middle East specialist at the Free University of Berlin. "They don't have a strategy against the terrorists. They have a crisis. The whole political system has a hard time functioning."
Even so, some Saudi intellectuals say, the attacks have renewed popular support for the government and sparked a backlash against the militants. They say many Saudis are afraid that al Qaeda is trying to ruin the nation's economy and isolate the kingdom from the rest of the world.
"It's a great shock to people. They never expected such a thing to be carried out on Saudi soil, by Saudis," said Abdul Aziz I. Fayez, another member of the consultative council. "Here you have a society that for three years now has been accused of being a breeding ground for terrorists. Now people are seeing that we are victims of terrorism as well."
Iraqi Gratitude
The new government is thanking America and Bush. Why are the media silent?
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
A myth has developed that Iraqis aren't grateful for their liberation from Saddam. So it's worth noting that the leaders of Iraq's new interim government have been explicit and gracious in their thanks, not that you've heard this from the U.S. media.
First in Arabic and then in English, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in his inaugural address to the Iraqi people last Tuesday that "I would like to record our profound gratitude and appreciation to the U.S.-led international coalition, which has made great sacrifices for the liberation of Iraq." In his own remarks, President Ghazi al-Yawer said: "Before I end my speech, I would like us to remember our martyrs who fell in defense of freedom and honor, as well as our friends who fell in the battle for the liberation of Iraq."
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the U.N. Security Council much the same thing last Thursday: "We Iraqis are grateful to the coalition who helped liberate us from the persecution of Saddam Hussein's regime. We thank President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for their dedication and commitment."
We thought our readers might like to know.
The new government is thanking America and Bush. Why are the media silent?
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
A myth has developed that Iraqis aren't grateful for their liberation from Saddam. So it's worth noting that the leaders of Iraq's new interim government have been explicit and gracious in their thanks, not that you've heard this from the U.S. media.
First in Arabic and then in English, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in his inaugural address to the Iraqi people last Tuesday that "I would like to record our profound gratitude and appreciation to the U.S.-led international coalition, which has made great sacrifices for the liberation of Iraq." In his own remarks, President Ghazi al-Yawer said: "Before I end my speech, I would like us to remember our martyrs who fell in defense of freedom and honor, as well as our friends who fell in the battle for the liberation of Iraq."
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the U.N. Security Council much the same thing last Thursday: "We Iraqis are grateful to the coalition who helped liberate us from the persecution of Saddam Hussein's regime. We thank President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for their dedication and commitment."
We thought our readers might like to know.
