Inside the Bush administration, the war over whether to go war is over. But the war over the war's aftermath is just beginning. On the question of how, or even whether, democracy should be established in Iraq, no two members of the Bush team seem to agree. The president only appeared to settle the issue last week when he said that he envisioned Iraqis "moving toward democracy and living in freedom" and recalled that, in the past, Americans "did not leave behind occupying armies; we left constitutions and parliaments."
Despite the president's admonition, it is precisely occupying armies, not constitutions or parliaments, which the State Department plans to leave behind in Iraq. The latest outline that America's diplomatic corps has drawn up for postwar Iraq proves the devil really does lie in the details. The plan calls for an American military governor to rule the country for up to two years, while American officers take control of Iraqi government ministries. It does call for Iraqis to participate in their country's reconstruction, but the Iraqis to whom American officials anticipate delegating this responsibility will mostly be former employees of Saddam Hussein. As for the leaders of Iraq's democratic opposition, aside from serving on a powerless "consultative council" for an indeterminate period of time, they will have virtually no say in how their country is governed. Thus, the Bush team has instructed leading Iraqi dissidents to shelve their plans for a federal political structure, in which different regions of the country would enjoy a measure of autonomy. Rather than allowing Iraqis to create a federal state—which is to say, a democratic one—Foggy Bottom, which lost the argument over whether to topple an authoritarian central government in Baghdad, has settled for the next best thing: an authoritarian central government under U.S. control.
Although the task of administering postwar Iraq will fall to the U.S. military, the task of designing the occupation has fallen mostly to Foggy Bottom. Partly this is because Defense Department officials have been discouraged from addressing postwar political arrangements, lest a press leak create the impression that the president has already made a decision to go to war. Mostly, though, it is because dissecting Iraqi politics is the State Department's job—and it is a topic about which American diplomats hold deeply felt convictions.
The CIA and the State Department have spent the better part of a decade feuding with Iraq's democratic opposition. "The enemies of a democratic Iraq lie within the CIA and the State Department," said leading liberal Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya. The enmity between the Iraqi opposition on the one hand and the CIA and State Department on the other dates back to 1995, when opposition forces acting under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) launched an offensive against the Iraqi military, only to be denied U.S. support. State Department officials promptly spun the move as a calculated decision based on the ineptitude of the opposition forces. "These guys are a feckless bunch who couldn't hold up a 7-Eleven," said one official at the time.
INC Chairman Ahmed Chalabi responded by publicly attacking the CIA and the State Department. During the years that followed, both the CIA and Foggy Bottom sidelined the INC in favor of repeated attempts to sponsor a coup from within Saddam's regime. The State Department would not even discharge the funds allotted the INC by the 1998 congressional Iraq Liberation Act. Now, faced with the prospect of these same Iraqi dissidents seizing power in Baghdad, Foggy Bottom worries that its long-feared nightmare could soon come to life.
But the animus toward Iraq's democratic opposition is about more than bureaucratic pique. For years, the greatest fear of the diplomatic corps has been what former Secretary of State James Baker once called the "Lebanonization of Iraq." As they did prior to the 1991 Gulf war, officials at the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau (NEA) make the case against federalism in Iraq by echoing Colin Powell's wisdom that it "would not contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd political entities." Specifically, Foggy Bottom fears that if a Shia- and Kurd-dominated opposition alienates Central Iraq's Sunnis by, say, overthrowing Saddam, Iraq may be splintered by internecine strife and invite all sorts of regional mischief. (Hence, too, their preference for a palace coup.) "The State Department always emphasizes stability, irrespective of the character of regimes," explains the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Patrick Clawson, editor of How to Build a New Iraq After Saddam. "That is the case in spades when it comes to Iraq, where their perception is that democracy is dangerous."
So Foggy Bottom has launched a worldwide search for a Sunni replacement for Saddam, has sought to disabuse the opposition of its commitment to Iraqi federalism, and, above all else, intends to retain a unitary central government in Baghdad. It is this obsession with central authority that has led the State Department to propose a modest and halfhearted plan for the removal of Saddam loyalists. The current State Department blueprint being peddled by Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House's Iraq point man, calls merely for the removal of the top three officials in each Iraqi government ministry. Internal State Department documents, summarized by administration officials, give only passing mention to vetting officials for past ties to Saddam, and, when they do, the memos create the impression that "de-Baathification" should be implemented neither deeply nor widely and that American administrators should move quickly beyond this phase. What's more, the State Department has designated an outspoken foe of the Iraqi democracy movement from the Clinton years, NEA's Thomas Warrick, as its chief "vetter" of Iraqi officials. At a gathering of Iraqi democrats in December, Warrick, along with the CIA's Ben Miller, stood in the doorway of the meeting and literally tried to block leading pro-democracy dissidents from entering. INC representative Entifadh Qanbar, who was himself prevented from getting through the door, recounts, "Warrick said, 'You can't get in, and I'll have the guards help you out.'" And, according to senior administration officials, just as much energy has been devoted to how to protect Saddam's aides from "score-settling" as to how to keep them out of power.
On several occasions, Foggy Bottom has taken its crusade to keep power out of democratic hands to truly bizarre lengths. For months prior to a Powell speech on democratization and the Arab world last December, NEA waged a battle to omit the word "democracy" from the administration's official pronouncements about the region. And, when President Bush employed the magic word during last week's speech, several State Department officials claim NEA's Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, James Lorocco, was alarmed by the address. Meanwhile, Khalilzad, having helped scuttle their attempt to create a provisional government, has spent most of the past month lobbying Iraqi opposition leaders to focus on reconstruction rather than political reform, arguing against the creation of a governing council for postwar Iraq, and trying to ban Chalabi from participating in it (before being overruled by the White House). In a similar vein, after commissioning and then trying to water down a report by the Iraqi Democratic Principles Working Group, State Department officials shelved the document. Foggy Bottom's animus toward the democracy movement has become so intense that, when a few of its leaders met with Dick Cheney recently, the meeting had to be arranged without the State Department's prior knowledge.
The irony is that, by undermining the prospects for Iraqi federalism, the State Department may be contributing to the very instability it intends to avert. That's because, in the absence of a federal system, each ethnic group is bound to fear domination of the center by another. By centralizing power in Baghdad, the United States encourages a zero-sum game in which the winner takes all. By contrast, under the vision of "administrative federalism" championed by Pentagon officials, which creates several territorial units per ethnic group, each group will have a say in its own governance no matter what happens in Baghdad. But the case for federalism is not merely utilitarian. Iraqi federalism amounts to a precondition for Iraqi democracy. Federalism, as the Democratic Principles Working Group report puts it, "is an extension of the principle of the separation of powers ... the first step towards a state system resting on the principle that the rights of the part, or the minority, should never be sacrificed to the will of the majority."
The United States has a selfish interest in a federal Iraq, too. Absent an early and concrete demonstration of America's commitment to a federal state, the entire enterprise could collapse, transforming American soldiers from liberators into targets and creating the impression, fair or not, that the United States has substituted one strongman for another. This is particularly true of the Kurds, who have enjoyed the fruits of semi-autonomy since 1991 under an umbrella of U.S. air patrols—establishing municipal governments, an educational system, a law enforcement apparatus, a democratically elected assembly, and much else besides. "Look to the people of northern Iraq," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told an audience of Arab-Americans last week, as a model that proves "democracy is possible in Iraq."
The problem is, the Bush administration stands poised to rescind that model. According both to members of Bush's team and to Kurdish leaders, Khalilzad has instructed leading Iraqi Kurds and members of the broader Iraqi opposition movement that they should shelve their plans for a federal government. Foggy Bottom, which not long ago was hunting for a Pashtun octogenarian to rule Afghanistan, has launched a search for a Sunni octogenarian to head up a strong central government in Iraq. And the Bush team has been looking in some awfully strange places. One is the United Arab Emirates, where Khalilzad deplaned recently to woo Adnan Pachachi, Iraq's 80-year-old former foreign minister, who has alleged, among other things, that the Bush team's hawks belong to a "Zionist lobby." Then there is the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a ragtag band of mostly ex-Baath officials and aides to Saddam who the State Department has been championing for years as an alternative to the INC. Initially touted as possible fomenters of a coup against Saddam, the INA, too, has become an integral part of Foggy Bottom's vision for a postwar Iraq.
Ultimately, of course, the question of what role Iraqis play in postwar Baghdad depends on what role Americans play. Hence, the State Department would like a U.S. military government to remain in place for as long as two years, because this jibes neatly with the aim of a strong Iraqi center. Another possibility that several administration officials anticipate is that Powell will lobby for a U.N. resolution that transfers power to a U.N. administrator or high commissioner in the war's aftermath, which would accomplish the same end.
As for the Pentagon's view of America's role in postwar Iraq, there are actually two views. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld opposes a lengthy military occupation. Despite the inclinations of his aides, he has no use for either democratization or nation-building, which he sees as a waste of military resources. In fact, he has discouraged his subordinates from using the term "democracy" in policy papers—preferring the phrase "representative government." For the same reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Command chief Tommy Franks also want out of Iraq as quickly as possible. As for the Pentagon's civilian INC supporters, such as Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, they oppose a long-term U.S. military presence for a very different reason: They believe it will retard the growth of Iraqi democracy. Echoing Chalabi's contention that a prolonged occupation "is predicated on keeping Saddam's existing structures of government, administration, and security in place," these officials argue that a U.S. occupation of the sort envisioned by the State Department would rob Iraqis of any consent in how they are governed. Hence, they want the levers of Iraqi power turned over to the country's democratic exiles within months.
The optimal solution probably lies somewhere between these positions. Because political life will begin anew as soon as the first statue of Saddam comes crashing down, it makes no sense for the U.S. military to wield absolute political power in a new Iraq. Given America's repeated claims that it intends to wage war partly on behalf of Iraq's long-suffering people, it is in America's interest to grant them a say in their own governance as soon as possible, particularly given the Arab world's suspicions about American motives. Within several months—the length of time administration officials predict it will take before Iraqis begin to view Americans less as liberators than as occupiers—the United States should begin to cede a measure of political control to the Iraqi people. This need not manifest itself in a call for immediate national elections but might come in the form of progress toward a constitution and national assembly, the establishment of an Iraqi governing council that American administrators actually listen to, municipal elections, and a commitment to devolving power from the Iraqi center.
But neither is it realistic to imagine that American forces will be able to withdraw from Iraq any time soon, much less withdraw and then refuse to hand over power to an international force. The Iraqi opposition seems to grasp this contradiction better than anyone else. As Iraqi dissident Emad Dhia put it, "We told [Wolfowitz] that we opposed a military government run by the United States. ... But Iraqis would love to see the U.S. [military] helping Iraqis run the country." The Iraqi opposition has no objection to American forces providing security, patrolling Iraq's borders, rebuilding infrastructure, and hunting for weapons of mass destruction. What they do oppose is a system that prolongs their disenfranchisement, in which case Makiya predicts the "Iraqi opposition is going to become anti-American the day after liberation." "What Iraqis really need is control over their own political sphere," says Danielle Pletka, a founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, "not the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild a country that sits on top of the world's second-largest oil reserves." But there is no reason both aims cannot be achieved simultaneously. So long as the forces patrolling and paving Iraq's roads confine themselves to just that, the duration of their stay and their country of origin become issues of secondary importance.
All this may seem like a struggle over means rather than ends. It is not. The battle over federalism versus unitary central government and an American military occupation combined with Iraqi democratic rule versus an all-out American occupation is a conflict about whether, not when, to democratize Iraq. For behind the State Department's hand-wringing lurks a narrow realpolitik, brought to us by the same Metternichs who in the name of "stability" insisted that we not upset the Iraqi order a decade ago. To heed their advice once again would fuel the suspicion that this is a war of national egoism, create the justified impression of American hypocrisy, and abort the Bush team's campaign to democratize the Arab world before it even begins.
This would amount to a betrayal of the Iraqi people, the avowed purpose of the war, and this country's most cherished ideals. The president says the coming war in Iraq is about much more than just Iraq. But, if some of his advisers get their way, it may end up being about even less.
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