I wish O admitted he’d been wrong re- (and that guy is right re Rummy’s sense of humor -and Johnny Mac had some humor too… ) Problem is – not too many people in American political culture – on the left or right – are real easy about allowing they haven’t been all right…I think O’s instincts are better than most pols on this front – he actually has a pretty good public record of allowing that somebody on the “other” side might have a point – see most recently his distancing himself from the Betrayus ads…- But he’s not distinguishing himself right now on that front. Instead, as per Teresita, he’s proving (once again) that he’s a pretty smart pol who understands forture favors the brave – Maliki (and W.) are enabling him to brazen it out…Since I’m talking up those who allow they made mistakes on Iraq – here’s how I did it myself in the intro to the section of pieces on Iraq in the new book FIRST OF THE YEAR: 2008.
FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY
The Iraq war is the subject of this section.
“So far everyone has been wrong about something,” wrote British journalist David Aaronovitch soon after the fall of Baghdad. I’ll come clean about one of my failings on this front since evidence of it isn’t in this set of pieces and I wouldn’t want readers to suspect a cover-up.
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, citing a Times report about how the Saddam Fedayeen had just cut someone’s tongue out as a gift for Qusay Hussein, I argued in First the choice now came down to “War or Torture.” If only it had been a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib who turned that into a false opposition. But the shaming had just begun. It would get worse when I read Tony Lagouranis’s Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, which describes how U.S. army interrogators found it impossible keep luxuriant releases of rage in check once Defense Department officials gave them license to go wilding.
That was all supposed to be on the down-low but the Iraqi government went public with its derelictions of duty when they allowed Moqutar Sadr’s militia to turn Saddam’s execution into a sectarian hate-fest. It was a humiliating moment for most of us who had spoken up for the justice of removing Saddam from power. In the days following Saddam’s hanging, Jalal Talabani – the famously gregarious tribune of the Kurds (and a man who had been in the struggle against Saddam for generations) – reportedly locked himself in a hotel room and refused to see anyone.
Talabani acts his way out of guilt. (He recently caused a crisis in the Iraq’s governing coalition by refusing to sign death warrants for lower-level Baathists.) But the Iraq War has produced some suspect self-laceration. The narrative of George Packer’s “definitive” book on the invasion and occupation, The Assassins’ Gate (2005), slid around set-pieces of disillusionment that felt contrived. While it was easy to identify with Packer’s disdain for the Bush Administration’s “criminal incompetence,” there was something off about his aggrieved tone and the new journalistic animus he directed toward Kanan Makiya. Packer blamed Makiya (though he claimed to “love” him) for providing rationales that caused his own heart to rise as he contemplated the invasion of Iraq. Yet, “sweets and flowers” notwithstanding, Makiya was much more realistic about the prospects for democracy in Iraq than Packer lets on. At the end of chapter called “Exiles,” Packer quoted lines from a pre-invasion email that Makiya wrote from Kurdistan, finding in them his friend’s true voice – “the fearless voice of his books” – rather than the compromised sound of Makiya banging drums for war. But the email by Makiya that Packer cited was addressed not (as The Assassins’ Gate suggests) “to a few friends” but to “every Iraqi democrat in the world.” Makiya distributed it through various e-mail listservs and then published it in The New Republic. The email wasn’t a sign the pure Makiya had momentarily re-surfaced; it was another political act. And a pretty prophetic one.
Makiya began by telling how a fellow member of the Iraqi opposition had threatened to “wipe him off the face of the earth” after fantasizing a slight. This was a genuine threat from a deeply disturbed man. But Makiya wasn’t out to make himself appear heroically embattled. He invoked the threat because it came from someone who was an ally – a person “who had suffered as much as any human being at the hands of the Baath party…at one point he weighed 30 kilos.” Makiya asked his readers to see this man feelingly – “try to imagine the worst and you will not come close to what this man has suffered in his life” – and then recognize – “this is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for…”
“Every day for the last five weeks, I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy, and ravaged land.”
Makiya had developed the impression:
“Some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream.”
Makiya elaborated on his warning and as he came to the end of his note he anticipated a future of disillusion.
“The United States…is bound to let you down if you think you can ask her for too much. Actually, if you think about it hard enough, it is not the U.S. that is letting you down, nor is it President Bush or even his CIA and his State Department…it is you, who by coming face to face with your own illusions, will end up letting yourselves down the most, and it is you and all those Iraqis who have put their faith in you, who will end up paying the biggest price of all.”
Packer left this passage from Makiya’s pre-war message out of The Assasins’ Gate. The timing of Makiya’s prediction about what lay ahead for his side (and himself!) didn’t quite fit the arc of Packer’s story. What counts now is not that Makiya was right on, (He wasn’t done being wrong yet.) What matters is that he was thinking hard, offering Iraqis who had put their faith in him not certainties but a chance to join his search for moral precision.
Millions of Iraqis came along on that search on January 30, 2005. Makiya celebrated Iraq’s first election with them:
“Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one’s own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out.”
That memory soon seemed like a lie to many Iraqis. (Though Makiya underscored there were no guarantees in his post-election analysis: “the nature of great historical turning points, and the source of the wonder and beauty they bring into the world, is that we can’t predict their outcome.”) The country’s democratic momentum stalled as sectarian violence ruled. But there is still “no final word on Iraq.” To borrow a phrase that jumped out at me at the end of a long piece last summer in Der Spiegel by two German reporters who allowed they’d been surprised to find evidence the Surge was working. Their report – and others like it – go against the narrative of the war preferred by WE WERE RIGHT leftists such as the Nation’s Katha Pollitt. Pollitt et. al. should call it as they see it but she needs to get her own story straight. Responding to Michael Ignatieff’s recent mea-culpa – “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me about Political Judgment” – Pollitt recently insisted “Bush’s stated reason for war was not the liberation of the Iraqi people.” But she’s shading the truth there. A few weeks before the invasion, Pollitt pointed out in her own column that Makiya and Iraqi democrats had rejected a State Department blueprint for an authoritarian regime in post-war Iraq:
“In a remarkable cry of despair published in the February16 London Observer Makiya rages that U.S. plans for post-invasion Iraq include the betrayal of the Kurds, the sidelining of the Iraqi National Congress and, beneath a top layer of U.S. military brass, the continued hegemony of the Baath party – Baathism without Saddam.”
Yet later that February, Pollitt went missing when Bush publicly committed himself to establishing democracy in Iraq, reassured Kurds by speaking of a future “federation” and even State Department officials began talking up de-Baathification. Pollitt failed to alert her readers the Administration seemed to have heard Makiya’s No in Thunder (after it was amplified by the Turkish parliament’s refusal to facilitate the U.S. Military’s invasion plans). She left Nationists with the impression Iraqi democrats had bought out of “Bush’s War.” And she’s still dissembling. The next section includes a transcript of a pre-invasion speech by Barham Saleh, the former Prime Minister of Kurdistan (who has gone on to become a major figure in Iraq’s governments since the handover of sovereignty) that calls attention to democratic political forces Pollitt was content to marginalize.
Take the following set of writings as a First draft of recent history – a sketch of public movements of mind on the left about the Iraq War. While I’m wary of associating our tiny writers’ collective with world historical events, the uniqueness of First’s politics of culture was underscored during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. I can’t think of another American publication on the left that would have printed in the same issue (as First did) Makiya’s pro-war, NYU talk (see p. ) and Tim Shorrock’s detailed critique of Paul Wolfowitz’s reactionary diplomatic record in Asia, which leads off this section. Makiya’s and Shorrock’s voices and the others in this mix implicitly call each other out. As I hear them in my head now, I’m struck (again) by how First has tried to be a “device” that would let argument breathe.
