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COMMENTARY
December 3, 2003
Whatever
Don't listen to Richard Boucher. The spokesman for the U.S. State Department told journalists in Washington yesterday that the U.S. is insisting Iraq's Governing Council stick to the U.S. schedule and plan for creating a full provisional government by June. This he said includes a plan to elect the delegates through 18 regional caucuses. It is controversial because it flies in the face of Grand Ayatollah Sistani the leading cleric for Iraq's majority Shia community. Sistani instead demands a full popular election even before reliable voters' lists can be created which would in turn leave the decision open to undue influence from Iraq's Shia clerics mobilizing voters through the mosques. Mr. Boucher's remarks left the extremely counter-productive impression that the U.S. is dictating the future of Iraq. Whereas it is not. He's the spokesman for the U.S. State Department not for the U.S. government. The sad reality is that different U.S. departments might as well be different countries when it comes to getting messages straight. And this is not President Bush's fault -- at least not entirely. He inherited vast bureaucracies that came pre-equipped with mindsets. The people with serious career paths in State CIA and elsewhere arrive in their jobs and live out their professional lives with the same sorts of assumptions and delusions that animate the people who live at e.g. the New York Times. It would be hard to find a single person in either of these bureaucracies who does not truly believe he knows better than the President how U.S. foreign policy should be conducted. These "Ivy Leaguers" also tend to believe that the national interest is identical with their departmental interests. And the President is not in a political or even legal position to fire them all. That is why I believe Mr. Bush had to end-run all his bureaucracies and personally signal his position to four leading members of the Iraqi Governing Council at Baghdad airport last Thursday. What he wanted to convey is that the U.S. -- which is to say his administration in the person of Mr. Bush himself -- does not think if it ever thought it can create a democracy in Iraq. It is up to Iraqi leaders to accomplish this. The U.S. can only start the process and assure some security by doing its best to track down and kill Saddamite and foreign terrorists who are the enemies of Americans and Iraqis alike. This is what I call my "whatever" hypothesis. At a pregnant moment with negotiations falling apart within the Governing Council and all parties looking to the U.S. for hints on what to do Mr. Bush tells them Whatever . That is he tells them that they must sort out what they will do among themselves and do it fast -- for the U.S. cannot govern their country for them indefinitely. Indeed Mr. Bush himself has the most acute political motives for having an independent Iraqi government up and running before the next U.S. presidential election. His administration is thus retreating from the State Department-led effort to micromanage the future of Iraq. And the good news is that since Mr. Bush 's visit last Thursday the Iraqi principals have themselves been wrestling with the loose ends. They are now resisting Sistani's demands not because the Yankees have told them to do so but because they themselves fear Sistani has too much power. Yet the conflict over ground rules for Iraqi elections and over the background question of "mosque and state" in the new Iraq is still a dispute between gentlemen. Sistani has been misrepresented in the West as an ayatollah on the radical Iranian model. He certainly demands that Islam be paid lip service in the new Iraqi constitution but has also said clearly that clerics should not seek political power. His very aloofness from the political struggle has engendered misunderstandings. The Shia community in Iraq is not a solid block of "religious crazies" -- far from it. Ahmed Chalabi the leading secular politician and himself a Shia Muslim commands with like-minded colleagues the support of a large body of Shias who do not do their political thinking in the mosque and who would be as alarmed as Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds if Shia clerics came to dominate the new political order. There is in other words plenty of ground for reasonable compromise in the negotiations now taking place. But they have to be allowed to happen. The U.S. removed the Saddam regime it did not defeat Iraq. The Americans are thus in no position to dictate how Iraq should rebuild itself only to help. I think President Bush despite some of his rhetoric understands this fairly clearly. I doubt that his State Department can ever understand it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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