Speakers:
Juan Cole
Professor of History, University of Michigan
Kenneth Katzman
Specialist in Middle East Affairs, Congressional Research Service
Karim Sadjadpour
Analyst, International Crisis Group
Ray Takeyh
Senior Fellow, Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Moderator/Discussant:
Chas. W. Freeman, Jr.
President, Middle East Policy Council
U.S. Capitol
Washington, D.C.
October 14, 2005
Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, DC
CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.: Okay, I think we should call this to order, and I will provide the usual introduction, following which we will have some serious discussion.
I'm Chas. Freeman. It's my honor and sometimes pleasure to be president of the Middle East Policy Council, a small, struggling organization in Washington, which for 25 years has tried to perform a gadfly role. We come up here to the "heart of darkness" on Capitol Hill to raise politically incorrect questions for public debate. We don't take positions; we just ask questions, and we have a pretty good batting average, I would say, of being well ahead of the curve in identifying issues that later become matters of wider concern.
In addition to these sessions we publish a quarterly, Middle East Policy. The first item in this is always the edited transcript of the last session. The last session was on the three insurgencies and four civil wars currently underway in Iraq under our supervision, and I encourage you, if you haven't read the last issue of Middle East Policy, to do so.
Finally, outside, beyond the beltway, out there in the real world - which as we all know doesn't count - we perform a useful service of training high school teachers about how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We've trained some 18,000 teachers. We thus reach about 1.4 million high school kids a year and confuse them with a fact or two that they otherwise would never have encountered in their passage through our splendid public educational system.
So these are the three things we do. To do them we require money. We never have any. We're in the middle of a drive to gain an endowment, and I'm very pleased to report, for those of you who are interested, that we have made a bit of progress this year, most recently in the form of a generous pledge of ongoing support over the next five years from Alwaleed bin Talal. His Royal Highness, it turns out, is a subscriber to Middle East Policy, one of the few people who pay their subscription on time - (laughter) - and we're very appreciative of his interest in keeping us from going under, which we may do at any time, but have not done yet.
This brings me to this morning's events. For those of you who are familiar with the format of these discussions, they're always the same. We have four panelists representing different perspectives on the issue of discussion. Each gets about 10 to 12 minutes to make a presentation. When they exceed 10 to 12 minutes, I get up, and if they go over 12 I physically eject them from the podium, or in this case rip the microphone off the wire. But I hope that won't be necessary today.
The session then turns to comments and questions. I would encourage you to simply raise your hand or otherwise give me a signal if you want to make a comment or a question. I'll note you down, you know, handsome man, third from the left - beautiful woman, whatever. Well, I won't describe my note-taking secrets - (laughter) - but I will call you. When you come to the microphone please identify yourself, and be as succinct as you can in making whatever comment or question you wish to make. I think usually this part of the program is the most interesting, and I always look forward to it.
The situation in Iraq, which we're discussing today, has become serious enough so that something almost unprecedented happened a couple of weeks ago, namely the Saudi foreign minister issued a public statement. Saudi press releases are oxymorons, as rare as unicorns in the woods, to be found only by virgins in the light of the full moon. (Laughter.) But Saud al-Faisal expressed his concern on two scores, one of which is of much wider concern than simply to Saudi Arabia, and that is that Iraq and the instability in Iraq and the multiple civil wars in Iraq may in fact be coming to resemble the 30-years' war in Central Europe, a struggle within Islam with the possibility of igniting a wider struggle throughout the fifth of the human race that adheres to the Muslim faith. Or, to put it a different way, that this may turn out to be, if it is not managed correctly, a 21st century version of the Spanish Civil War in which Spaniards, for their own reasons, began to kill each other, then drew in the support of others, and began a proxy war and rehearsal for a wider conflict in that case to define civilization within Christendom - in this case, possibly within the realm of Islam.
But the Saudis clearly also, despite their own fine relationship with Tehran, are concerned about a second issue, which is the possibility of Iranian domination of a weak and divided Shi'a-dominated Iraq. In a recent visit to the region, in fact, I found a dominant concern in the Gulf countries to be the possibility that the United States, by intervening as we did in Iraq, may inadvertently be creating a Shi'a crescent in the northern tier of the Arab world, which could offer Iran unique opportunities that it has not had for many years, to exercise a dominant role, and to exercise that role in ways that may be destabilizing to others.
What does the liberation of the Shi'a in Iraq - after all, they are the majority - what does this mean for Iraq? What does it mean for countries like Bahrain, which have Sunni rulers but a Shi'a majority population, or for regions of other countries like Saudi Arabia's Al Hasa, which is predominantly Shi'a, or for Kuwait for that matter, which has its own substantial Shi'a minority? What does it mean for the United States, for the region, for Israel, for our friends the Turks and others?
I think we've assembled really a splendid panel today to talk about this, and by some accident of fate they will actually speak in the order that was on the program. This happens once in a while through divine intervention. So the first speaker will be Juan Cole. To anybody who is on the Internet, he needs no introduction because he runs what is by far the most informative blog on the issues of the day. He has also got a cell phone that he hasn't turned off. (Laughter.) He also is a renowned professor and author, and his biography, like the biography of all the speakers and panelists, appears on the back of the program so I'm not going to recapitulate it.
Ken Katzman is one of the national treasures hiding in the Congressional Research Service, a real expert on Iran and on Shi'a matters. And Juan will talk about internal Iraqi Shi'a matters; Ken will take that to a broader stage involving Iran as well as Iraq.
Karim Sadjadpour, again, very well known, now with the International Crisis Group. He has written very widely on Iranian society and politics, and he's going to talk about the Iranian perspective on these events as he appreciates it.
And finally, Ray Takeyh, who is no stranger to the Middle East Policy Council - we actually arranged his marriage in good Middle Eastern fashion - (laughter) - through the council. He is now at the Council on Foreign Relations where he is in charge of the Middle East, and therefore ultimately accountable for everything that's happening there. (Laughter.) Ray is going to talk about U.S. policy, particularly toward Iran but toward the region in light of these developments.
Speakers may stand up, sit down, as you wish. I think the cameraman prefers you to sit, so - but you don't have to listen to him if you don't want to.
Juan, would you like to lead off?
JUAN COLE: Thank you very much. Well, thanks for the warm introduction. I want to just, in 10 minutes, march rather smartly through the Shi'a politics in contemporary Iraq. These politics have become now quite well known. They were extremely obscure before the overthrow of Saddam. And behind the scenes on the ground in Iraq a remarkable thing happened in the Ba'ath period, which was that the Iraqi Shi'ite population became much more urban. There was a lot of immigration from the countryside. Become more urban does not mean being better off, because they ended up often confined in huge slums in these cities that they settled in, and some of them were refugees from the marsh areas that Saddam had drained. So Amara, for instance, in the south, becomes a kind of marsh Arab outpost. A lot of rural Shi'ites went to east Baghdad to what began as Madinat Thawra or Revolution Township and ultimately is now Sadr City.
And as they went to the cities and urbanized - and to some extent the Ba'ath Party apparatus was successful before the U.N. sanctions in the '90s in increasing literacy. The Iraqi Shi'ites became more like the Iranian ones. In the earlier 20th century they had been more rural, more tribal, more traditional in their religion and not so oriented towards clerical scholastic kinds of faith. The holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which housed the seminaries and where the seat of authority was, were always centers of religious authority and practice. People did pilgrimages to them. The clergy there had respect. But I don't think their writ ran very far in the first half of the 20th century among most rural Iraqi Shi'ites who, after all, being illiterate and rural would have had very little idea of what the clergy in Najaf were saying. And it was a different world for them.
But by the 1990s you have a generation of young Shi'ites in these urban festering slums who become oriented very much towards the clerics as their leaders, and of course Saddam Hussein had destroyed a great many mediating institutions in Iraqi civil society so that the clergy in a sense were the last men standing in that regard. And so Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who emerged as the leading clerical authority after the death of Abul-Qassim Khoei in 1992, gradually consolidated his position as a leader in the quietest Najaf tradition, not involved in politics in the Saddam period, and had a rival in Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who may initially have been promoted by Saddam as a local Arab cleric as an alternative to the Iranian tradition in Shi'aism.
But gradually it turned out that Saddam had things backwards, that Sistani, the Iranian, was anti-Khomenist and relatively quietist, and Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was coded as Arab - although the Sadrs have branches on both sides, Iran and Iraq, became increasingly militant. And he put forward what he called the "third way" between Khomenism and the Najaf tradition, but it looked to me an awful lot like Khomeinism. So although it's the third way, I think it tilts towards Khomeini in the sense that his vision of the good society was very, very strict puritan Islamic law imposed on everyone. So he gave a fatwa that Christian women have to veil. And he would upbraid his followers for wearing Western clothes. Some of his followers showed up at a mosque event in the '90s; their children were wearing OshKosh B'Gosh clothing. And he said, why are you giving money to the imperialists? Don't you know they're trying to destroy us? And so Sadeq al-Sadr set up this network of Hezbollah-style clinics and mosques and social services, and was extremely critical of the regime. And of course in 1999 he was killed, he and his two older sons, for defying Saddam.
So when the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam, what it really did was to push the lid off of a situation which was underneath already boiling. You had clerical politics in the form of Sistani and Sadeq al-Sadr. You also had the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an expatriate organization formed in 1982 in Tehran under the auspices of Khomeini, which grouped a number of Iraqi Shi'ite militant organizations that had fled Saddam's crackdown on them from 1980 forward, and they had formed the Badr Corps, a paramilitary organization, which I think we would tend to code as terrorist in other circumstances, but because they were coming over and hitting the Ba'ath Party, they're not usually referred to in that way.
But they established strong roots in Baquba, in Basra and places that they went through to attack Saddam. And you had the Dawa Party, the oldest of the Shi'ite religious organizations which began in the late '50s and which was perhaps the first Muslim party to envisage an Islamic state. And the Dawa Party vision is not clerical rule; it allows for lay leadership, but it does see Islamic law as important in being the law of the land. And the parliament or the Consultative Council, the Shura Council, really would be reduced to passing regulations that went beyond the holy law in some respects but could never contradict it.
When Saddam fell, these various Shi'ite currents came into play, and they had the opportunity, for the first time in a long time, to organize freely, and they appear to have amongst them geniuses at grassroots campaigning that make Karl Rove look like a piker. By the time of the January 30th elections, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had been in exile in Tehran for two decades, was able to win the elections in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces, including Baghdad Province. Baghdad Province was won by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This advent of the Supreme Council to power in Baghdad Province and in eight other southern Shi'ite provinces was like a dream that had been dreamt of back in the early '80s by Khomeini and others, that Saddam would be gone and the Supreme Council would be in charge.
The Dawa Party, although it didn't do as well on the provincial level, did have a substantial representation in parliament, and of course the prime minister was chosen from its ranks, Ibrahim Ja'afari. Behind the scenes, Dawa is organized in cells. These parties tend to be Stalinist in structure, even if they're Shi'ite religious parties, and it has hospitals, it has services, it has a paramilitary, and it's very quiet. If you go to the Dawa Party website you will find that you can't discover very much about the Dawa Party there. It's a covert party still in many ways. And the Sadrists have made the most noise because they organized openly in the slums. And they are a ghetto movement. When you talk about the Mahdi army, their paramilitary, these are just ghetto Shi'ite youth with guns. I once compared Muqtada al-Sadr to a rapper. I mean, there is a gangster element here.
As we go forward it seems clear that there are severe tensions between the Sadr organization and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. These tensions are in part class tensions. The Sadr movement is the lumpens, the lumpen proletariat, the ghetto-dwellers. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq increasingly is the party of choice for the Shi'ite bourgeoisie, for the shopkeepers and the entrepreneurs, and the fighting that we've had between the two in Najaf is very much about control of the pilgrim trade and control of very large amounts of money that come through that trade, and the shopkeepers I think are voting for SCIRI.
The mystery is why the Dawa Party hasn't done better. It looks like the Supreme Council and the Dawa Party are going to run separately for the December elections, which will be on a district-based system. I expect the Sadr movement will have a big representation in parliament on that basis. I think SCIRI will also continue to be a big influence in Iraqi politics, and I think there is some possibility that Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq will use its control of the nine provinces to play machine politics. So I expect them to do well again in the next elections, and I think the likelihood is that Shi'ite religious politics are going to be a dominant force in Iraq for some years to come.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Admirable, and a very good introduction to the complexities of Shi'ite politics in Iraq, which I think, as you say, are bound to be a dominant factor regardless of what else may happen. Over the course of my diplomatic career I had many opportunities to deal with societies where part of the society operated in a very democratic way while other parts of it were excluded. So I think that your statement stands regardless of the outcome. I'm thinking of South Africa, or Israel for that matter, where there have been vigorous democracies for some people while others were not allowed to play quite such a vigorous role.
We turn now to Ken Katzman, who will talk about the broader pattern of Shi'a politics in the region and U.S. policy toward that phenomenon.
KEN KATZMAN: Thank you, Ambassador Freeman. Thank you, Middle East Policy Council. I have some copies of my presentation available because since I work on the Hill, the tradition is everything needs to be in writing. So I've tried to follow that tradition today.
U.S. relations with Shi'a Islam, in my view, have come full circle. It was the radicalism of Shi'a Islamic fundamentalism in Iran that first put Islamic fundamentalists on the radar screen to begin with. Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution, there was very little thinking about radical Islam or political Islam. The key strategic threat to the U.S. at the time was the Soviet Union, communist dictatorships linked to the Soviet Union. In the Middle East, pro-Soviet groups, left-wing groups such as the PLO were viewed as major terrorist threats.
During the 1980s, it was the Shi'a Islamist groups that were the main terrorism threat to the United States. Hezbollah was obviously the most closely watched, having formed in 1982, becoming capable enough the following year to blow up the U.S. embassy in Beirut, the Marine barracks, obviously. Hezbollah held the U.S. hostages in Lebanon, demonstrating the limits of U.S. power and U.S. military might.
The Lebanon hostage holders and the hijackers of TWA 847 in 1985 demanded, in return for the captives' release, the freedom of 17 prisoners from the Dawa Party, which Professor Cole has just talked about the Dawa Party, Shi'a Islamist party with many linkages, even to this day, to Hezbollah, which is active on the other side of the Middle East. Dawa of course was an opposition movement in Iraq, as we've heard, but it also conducted attacks in Kuwait in 1983, bombing the French and U.S. embassies in December of that year and nearly successful assassination attempt against the emir of Kuwait in May 1985. My first week in government was May 1985 and I was assigned to deal with the nearly successful attack on the emir of Kuwait that week. It was quite a shock.
The Reagan and Bush administrations viewed the threat from Iran and Iranian-inspired Shi'a extremism as so acute that the administrations were willing to put aside their distaste for Saddam Hussein's regime and back him in the Iran-Iraq War. The hope was that Saddam would win the war and force a retrenchment of Tehran and Shi'a Islamic fundamentalism.
Militarily speaking, Saddam did win, and Tehran was humbled militarily, although the post-Iran-Iraq War political structure of the Gulf had tilted too far in Saddam's favor and he apparently perceived the U.S. would tolerate Iraqi hegemony. Even after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, Sunni Islamic radical groups such as the Islamic group al-Jihad, which were responsible for Sadat's assassination, barely registered on the U.S. policy radar screen at all. In fact, so inattentive was the U.S. to the potential threat from radical Sunni Islamic groups that the U.S. gave material support to the Afghan Mujahideen, the most active of which was Sunni radical Islamist parties, including one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who remains at large somewhere today. I wish I knew where he was but I don't.
As the 1990s unfolded, Sunni extremism rose in the U.S. calculation and Shi'a extremism appeared to recede. Hezbollah became less active in international terrorism. Iran's revolutionary fervor appeared to cool. The late 1990s revealed a growing threat from the Sunni Islamic groups that were gathering into a grand al Qaeda coalition. At the same time, the U.S. began to reach out to Shi'a Islamist movements that were perceived as useful in the effort to destabilize Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War. The best example is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, which was essentially, as we heard, assembled in Tehran in 1982.
It was in the interest of this larger objective of destabilizing Saddam that led the first Bush administration and then the Clinton administration to downplay the terrorist past of Dawa and SCIRI and to recruit these parties into a broader anti-Saddam umbrella. Despite U.S. efforts to reach out to SCIRI, particularly in the 1990s, SCIRI was skeptical of entering too close a relationship with the United States, and in fact it publicly refused to accept U.S. money that was provided to help the opposition - not covert funding; this was overt economic support funds, ESF funds.
The September 11th, 2001 attacks obviously accelerated the trend. After September 11 it was obviously the Sunni Islamic extremists as the primary U.S. adversary. The threat from Iranian-assisted Shi'a-Islamic extremist movements was viewed as "so yesterday," nothing to worry about. This lowered threat perception about Shi'a extremism fit well with the Bush administration's decision to militarily overthrow Saddam Hussein after the war against the Taliban wound down.
Iran had been helpful in the war against the Taliban, and the tacit U.S.-Iran alignment on that front had actually produced the first U.S.-Iran direct talks since the Iran Contra affair, if you can count that. The administration certainly knew that taking out Saddam Hussein's regime would strengthen Iran and the Shi'a Islamist movements in Iraq that were supported by Iran, but this danger seemed minimal to the administration.
This brings us to post-Saddam Iraq. The U.S. has clearly defined the Sunni insurgents, both Iraqi and imported, as the enemy. The very same Shi'a Islamist parties that led the U.S. to tilt towards Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War are now the U.S's closest allies in Iraq. The U.S. has become essentially the protector of the Shi'a Islamist parties. The long-term stalwart U.S. ally, Kuwait, now lives next to an Iraqi government whose prime minister, Ibrahim Ja'afari, is of the same party that tried to assassinate the emir in 1985. Perhaps more critical to the long-term U.S. position, in my view, is that the U.S. has begun, or is now viewed as picking winners between Sunni and Shi'a. In the view of Iraq Sunnis, the U.S. has chosen the Shi'a over them. This perception is not lost on peoples and governments in the region - Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria no doubt - which explains why all three, and others, have been reluctant to cooperate with U.S. efforts to bolster the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi government.
Iraq Sunnis also believe that the Shi'a of Iraq betrayed them and the Iraqi nation by calling in a foreign power to overturn the existing sectarian order in Iraq. This sense of betrayal, in my view, is the key source of what I consider to be the nascent Sunni-driven civil war that is engulfing Iraq right under the noses and beyond the control of the now-154,000 - did I see today? - U.S. forces in Iraq. It is not easily reversed, not by assembly elections, not by a referendum on a constitution, and not by U.S.-led combat.
The difficulty of centering U.S. policy in Iraq on the Shi'a community, particularly Shi'a Islamist parties, has already been proven. With their Kurdish allies, the Shi'a Islamist parties engineered a winner-take-all draft constitution that has embittered the Sunnis ever further, whether or not it is adopted. The Shi'a Islamist militia parties have virtually displaced the national police force in areas where they are strong, particularly Basra. U.S. policymakers apparently felt that if Saddam were overthrown there would be this flowering of intellectually driven liberal pro-Western parties that would create vibrant democracy. These hopes were dashed almost immediately, and all the troubles in Iraq, in my view, have flowed from that faulty expectation. What has resulted instead is the creeping takeover of Iraq by pro-Iranian Shi'a Islamist parties for now and with the possible exception of Sadr - Muqtada al-Sadr, who we heard about, these parties are cooperating with the U.S. because doing so is in their interest. However, their patience with U.S. mentoring is running thin, and the Shi'a Islamist parties are likely to try to structure post-Saddam Iraq to their ideology, not to the specifications of U.S. policymakers.
There is not more instructive example of how near-total U.S. reliance on the Shi'a Islamist parties can backfire in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. One day he supports the legitimate political process; the next day his Mahdi army attacks and kills British soldiers in Basra. He agrees to a truce one day then reaches out to Sunni insurgents the next day. This said, in my view he is a clever politician and not to be underestimated. He has kept virtually every conceivable option open for himself: inclusion in the political process, violent rebellion against the political process, or even peaceful rebellion against the political process.
However, he is a vivid reminder of how U.S. relations with the Shi'a Islamists groups can turn on a dime. He has launched two major rebellions against U.S. forces and I believe he would not hesitate to rebel again if he thought that doing so were in his interest. His next rebellion, if there is one, might draw in more disillusioned Shi'as, possibly joined by Sunnis, and it might become harder and harder for the U.S. or other Shi'a politicians such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani to contain him.
Was Muqtada al-Sadr the type of leader who the U.S. might have wanted for Iraq when it decided to oust Saddam Hussein? I doubt it. Thank you very much.
MR. FREEMAN: Excellent. Thank you very much. I think these two presentations and the discussion of the background of the Shi'a parties in Iraq, their past history of international activity, are a sobering reminder that there has been plenty of precedents of U.S. policy - for example, our assistance to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which was for a very good cause, ultimately producing results that many regret. I hope that's not the case in Iraq but I fear it may be.
I just take one issue with you, Ken, and that is you've referred to Afghanistan as winding down. As far as I know, it's still going on - 18,000 American troops combating an indigenous group of misguided Islamists, who as far as I know did nothing directly to the United States. One wonders how much punishment of the Taliban is enough and when and how we will be able to say "mission accomplished" in Afghanistan.
This brings us of course to Iran, which, as Ken pointed out, is quite pleased by the result of American action in Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban. That removed Iran's enemies on one front. We then removed Iran's enemies on its other front. I guess that just leaves us as the enemy. I don't know what Iran is going to do about that, but perhaps, Karim, you can enlighten us.
KARIM SADJADPOUR: Thank you very much. Thank you all very much for coming. It's really a privilege to be among such a distinguished panel. I've read so much from the writings of all my fellow panelists, and in fact Juan Cole was actually my undergraduate professor at the University of Michigan. I got a B in his class. I'm not sure if he remembered me but - (laughter).
MR. COLE: It's not easy to get a B from me.
MR. SADJADPOUR: I've spent the bulk of the last two-and-a-half years living in Iran and Lebanon, so what I wanted to talk about today was kind of the view from Tehran, not only the view from Tehran vis-à-vis Iraq but also the rest of the region. And if there is time afterwards I would like to talk a little bit about Shi'ite popular sentiment in the region. I think I'm the only Shi'ite member of this panel, unless Katzman is a Shi'ite name - (laughter) - so I wanted to talk a little bit about the Shi'ite popular condition.
So, looking at the view from Tehran I would start off immediately by saying that I don't believe Iran is interested in creating an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, you know, the Valerieta Fari (ph) system. And numerous conversations with the Iranian officials - and we did a very long report about Iran's role in Iraq that can be found on our website, International Crisis Group. But I think Iranian officials are cognizant of the fact that Iraq is a very heterogeneous society, you know, both ethnically, religiously, and the same type of system that works in Iran is not likely to be sustainable in Iraq. So I think they are sober to this view.
I would like to go back into the aftermath of the war when President Bush said, you know, official combat is over - I believe that was Spring 2003 - and fast-forward and look at the time period then and running up to the elections last January. And I think people can generally agree that Iran's policy was - we described it as one of managed chaos. So on one hand they didn't want to see the Americans succeed in Iraq. They're very concerned that, you know, American success in Iraq would embolden the Americans to transfer this policy of regime change to Iran next.
So on one hand they did want to see the Americans - teach the Americans an expensive lesson. At the same time they were concerned about a total breakdown in Iraq, and this is in the form of a civil war. Iran experienced - there was a civil war in Afghanistan for over two decades and it created about 2 million Afghan refugees in Iran. So they were concerned about the situation, and also by the prospects of a territorial breakdown in Iraq, the prospect particularly of an independent Kurdistan. As we all know, Iran has their own Kurdish community and they were concerned that this could possibly create a domino effect.
So there was this balancing act for many months, but I would say up to the run-up of the January 30th elections - January 30th 2005 Iraq elections - there was this recognition in Iran that we have to kind of turn the corner. And I think then, you know, from the viewpoint of the Iranian regime there was two main priorities. The first priority is they wanted their Shi'ite friends to have power, as Mr. Katzman said. I remember there was an Iranian official who I thought summed this up aptly, and the Iranian worldview, and he said, just as they say democracies don't fight democracies, we believe Shi'ites don't fight Shi'ites. So this very much influenced the Iranian worldview. They fought either years of a very bloody war with Iraq and they're very concerned about the prospect of Sunni Ba'athists or an ideological regime coming to power.
And what was amazing during that time following the Iranian media - I'm sure Ray followed it as well - is that even Iranian newspapers like Kayhan, which are the most fascist of newspapers and would issue death threats to people who called for democracy in Iran, were calling for free and fair elections in Iraq. All of a sudden they became Jeffersonian Democrats because they really believed that given a one-person-one-vote election, Iraq - demographics of Iraq are going to be in Iran's interest.
The second priority after having this Shi'ite-led Iraq I think is, from the Iranian viewpoint, is to get the Americans out of Iraq. They very much wanted to see the Iraqis take over their own country, and I think they understood that to achieve this they did need a certain degree of stability. And I think we could agree that Iran actually has been operating with a certain amount of restraint, in light of all the attacks from Sunni insurgents on Iraq Shi'ites, that Iraqi Shi'ites have displayed a considerable amount of restraint.
So now I wanted to fast-forward to the current debate on the constitution. As Ken Katzman said very aptly, there is concerns right now that Iran stands to benefit the most from the current drafting of this constitution, and in fact pan-Arab dailies have been writing that this is a constitution - this document has been co-written by the Americans and the Iranians. And I think that if we look at this federal system - federalist system that's being proposed in Iraq, actually it's a double-edged sword for Iran. Okay, on one hand this idea of - it's assumed by the Arabs that - and especially the Saudis - that the idea of a Shi'ite regime is in Iran's interest, but as I mentioned earlier, this idea of a federalist system is double-edged in the sense that also if there is this federalist system, the potential of an independent Kurdistan has very strong implications for Iran. Iranian Kurdistan has been experiencing a lot of unrest. Kurds compose around 10 percent of Iran's population, and there is a lot of concern that if the Kurds do try to break out, this could cause a potential domino effect on Iranian Kurds.
And I think - the view from Tehran, I would argue, is that if we can actually have the Shi'ites come to power and control the entire country via the ballot box, why do we want to just have them control the south? And I think that also Iran's leadership does believe at the same time that a federalist system would probably be less costly for them than it would be for the Turks and for Saudi Arabia.
So now I wanted to talk - to take a broader view of the region - not just Iran's view of Iraq but Iran's view of the entire region. And I think that there is one consistent message that consistently comes out of Iran and consistently comes out in my conversations with Iranian officials, and that is this desire for regional hegemony, to be the regional power in the Middle East. And I think Iranians, as they see it, it's a very natural role for them, based on their strategic location, the country's natural resources, human capital, the country's culture, the history, and I would argue that opposed to the early days of the revolution they don't hope to achieve this regional hegemony by trying to instigate Islamic revolutions throughout the region in order to create this Shi'ite crescent that we're talking about.
I would argue that what they do want to see is to have their Shi'ite friends in as many positions of leadership as possible, and not just Iraq, but throughout the region. This doesn't mean taking over; I mean, there - realize Shi'ites compose about 10 percent of the Saudi regime, so I - you know, obviously they don't believe that there is potential Saudi Arabia could ever become a Shi'ite country, but just in the sense that they want to see their Shi'ite friends in positions of leadership because I do believe, from their viewpoint - from their viewpoint, having Shi'ite leadership in the region will allow these countries to be more acquiescent to Iran's ambitions for regional hegemony. But I think it's very interesting if we take note of how Iran has evolved from the early days of the revolution. You know, there has been this evolution from ideological interests to national interests. And I would just mention one example, and that is the issue of the Persian Gulf. I mean, at the beginning of the revolution, they actually proposed to rename it the Islamic Gulf to reach out to their Arab friends. And now if you don't say the word Persian in front of gulf, it causes a diplomatic crisis, so this is very interesting.
I would just end on talking about Ahmadinejad's election and what possible impacts this is going to have on Iran's regional policy and Iran's policy in Iraq. I know my friend Ray is going to talk more about that so I will keep my comments brief. I would argue that it is very unlikely that Iran will ever go back as I said to these early days of the revolution, this ideological isolationist policy. At the same time, this new administration, Ahmadinejad's administration is not going to reach out to - I don't see them being like Khatami's administration, reaching out to Saudi Arabia, reaching out to the Europeans, et cetera.
I think the concern I have and the concern that many people have is that these groups that supported Ahmadinejad, namely the revolutionary guards, the Sepah (sp) Pasdaran, they feel somewhat as they have a mandate to do after the like after this victory. Ahmadinejad himself is a product of the revolutionary guards, and there is a concern that they are going to be undertaking extracurricular activities, freelance activities, not only in Iran, but elsewhere in the region. I think we have seen recent examples of this with the accusations from the British that there has been Iranian support for the killing of British soldiers. And we also saw this - we are seeing this also with relations with Saudi Arabia starting to deteriorate, that Iran is actually - is not trying to reach out to the Saudis to alleviate the concerns of some of the Sunni countries in the region.
I will leave it at that but I look forward to the questions. Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. And I am particularly glad that you mentioned the Kurds, the lovable Kurds who were betrayed four times in the last century, and who seem to me to be headed for yet another betrayal as the 21st century begins. I don't understand - speaking very candidly -- what the merits of an American policy that encourages the degree of Kurdish autonomy or independence that is unacceptable to Turkey, Iran, or other citizens of Iraq can be because this seems to me to lead inevitably to the another instance sort of tragedy that is at the heart of modern Kurdish history.
I am glad you mentioned the Iranian concern about this. One might find even greater concern I think in Turkey, particularly given the history of PKK terrorism in Turkey. I hope as we get into the discussion perhaps we can return to this issue, which is very difficult to deal with because the Kurds, as I say, are underdogs, they are brave, they are mountain people, they exemplify many virtues that we admire, and yet history has not perhaps prepared them for the role that they believe they should have. So, Ray, please.
RAY TAKEYH: To be the last speaker on a panel of four, I could just merely say I agree - (laughter) - it's soon to tell. Questions. But I will try to fill in some of the gaps to the extent that they were left.
There is this sort of alarmist discussion taking place here and elsewhere that the rise of a new reactionary government in Iran constitutes, as Karim was saying, the resurgence of revolution as a basis of Iranian policy, regional policy. To some extent, I actually like to suggest that the new Iranian government's approach to its region is marked, and even nuclear negotiations is even marked by a greater degree of continuity than change. To be sure this is a very different cast of characters that have come to power.
For them the most salient experience is not necessarily the revolution itself, but the prolonged war with Iraq, their isolation from the United States, their suspicion of the international community that tolerated the employment of chemical weapons against Iran with impunity, and their devotion to the revolution's original mandate - tends to define their ideology. They tend to be rather dogmatic in their ideology, rather earnest in their belief that the Islamic Republic has something to offer, and rather simplistic in their assertion that all problems can be resolved if you go back to the roots of the revolution, whatever that means.
In terms of international relations, there is something that is going around talking about an Eastern orientation, which I think is - as it becomes exposed and analyzed will prove to be more of a slogan than a policy, and what does Eastern orientation mean in the era of globalization. But nevertheless, it is the conception of foreign policy that they are coming into, namely for them they will suggest that globalization does not constitute capitulation to the United States, or for that matter the Europeans, but cultivating a relationship with other emerging global actors whether - and those emerging global actors, those emerging industrial powers are situated mostly in the Eastern bloc, whether it is India, certainly China, Russia, or what have you, so that in that particular sense, you don't necessarily require relations with the United States.
The Khatami period that was mentioned briefly had its own international orientation. Namely it suggested that Iran should develop a relationship with all critical actors: the EU, Russia, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, all critical regional and international actors, and therefore it would be the United States and not Iran that would be isolated in the international arena. So actually it was a coalition of willing approach.
The new regime does not necessarily reject that framework of international relations, but it just privileges certain actors over others, in this particular case, the Eastern actors. After a quarter-century of hostility, wars, sanctions, Iran's emerging leadership class is looking East, where it is hoped that its human rights records, proliferation tendencies would not necessarily be disturbing to its prospective commercial partners. But, again, there is, as you can see, some degree of continuity, not necessarily change.
Iran's foreign policy has changed under Khatami, a much maligned, unnecessarily maligned I would suggest Khatami fundamentally, irrevocably, and irretrievably changed the Iran foreign policy, in a sense that there is really no longer a return to the roots of the revolution in terms of instigation the revolutionary upheavals elsewhere and mostly again resorting to terrorism as a primary, if not the exclusive instrument of policy. So in that particular sense the Iranian's regime, whomever succeeds him, including these younger reactionaries that have succeeded him cannot necessarily reverse that particular foreign policy, which enjoys widespread support across the political spectrum.
To be sure, Iran's new rulers have dispensed with a dialogue of civilization rhetoric. They are unlikely to essentially want to have a relationship with the United States. For the older generation of Iranians, those who were present at the creation of the revolution, the United States was essential predominant actor. For Khatami and the hardliners it was the source of all of their problems. For the reforms and pragmatists, it was solution to all of their dilemmas.
The new Iranian leadership is refreshingly indifferent to the United States. And I am not quite sure if that is a bad thing. For them, the United States is just another actor, a pernicious, sinister one to be sure - (chuckles) - but just another country on the global landscape. They don't have that fascination, that unhealthy obsession with the United States and things American. And I suspect that also has some aspect of their negotiations on the nuclear issue, which can't come up - I won't deal with that in this.
Is there a Shi'ite crescent, the question that needs to be answered? I think there may be one in the Persian Gulf region. I am not smart enough to deal with the entire landscape of the Middle East, but certainly you begin to see certain changes taking place in the Persian Gulf, where that sub-region of the Middle East is beginning to be polarized, not so much on our conservative revolutionary alliance, revolutionary Islam versus status-quo power, but along sectarian lines. Their political alignments of that region are beginning to change in a dramatic way.
Today we are beginning to see the contours of what a future Iraqi state may look like. It is likely to be a federated state, it is likely to have a weakened central government and strong if not autonomous promises that are governed by contending ethnic sectarian groups. For a long time it was said that the tension between Iran and Iraq is inevitable. They both have aspirations to emerge as a preeminent power in the Gulf, they have some territorial disputes historically.
But I would suggest is if it is those objections and aspirations that have divided Iran and Iraq, then how do we account for a prolonged period of peace and stability between the two countries from the time Iraq became formerly independent, which I believe was 1932, all the way to 1958 when you had the first republican and subsequently Ba'athist revolution. During that time the two countries managed to contain their differences, resolve their disputes in a reasonable fashion, and even cooperate on issues of common concern.
Therefore I would suggest it is not regional aspirations or territorial disputes that have historically divided two countries, but the nature of their political systems. It was incompatibility of the political systems that actually divided them. When both of them were governed by conservative monarchies, they had reasonable relationship. However, the Ba'athist Iraqi government found the Pahlavi Dynasty as objectionable as Iran's theocratic elite found Saddam reprehensible. But there was the division along the nature of the domestic system that generated much of their tensions, and it essentially made disputes and disagreements between the two countries to be irresolvable.
Well, that is no longer the case, as has been mentioned. So what does the Gulf security look like from here on? In the 1970s, there was a discussion of twin pillars where the United States would rely on its allies, the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the 1980s, there was a discussion where the United States would favor Iraq against Iran, and in 1990s, policy of dual containment with strong American presence in the region would contained both Iran and Iraq. I would suggest that we're beginning to see emergence of a dual pillar policy again, but it's the Shi'ite pillar, where you begin to see Iran and Iraq in a greater degree of cooperation as their strategic interests prove to coincide with one another.
And the party that seems to be out and perhaps marginalized, pressured, certainly anxious would be Saudi Arabia. Saudi's Sunni militancy is certainly not looked upon with favor upon its northern Shi'ite neighbors. And unlike the smaller Gulf states, I don't necessarily believe the Saudis have the option of once again subsuming themselves under the American security umbrella, simply because that security umbrella is domestically provocative and unacceptable within the internal politics of Saudi Arabia.
The smaller Gulf states, Bahrains, and Kuwaits, and so on, they will continue to balance their relations with the Shi'ite states and their relationship with the external empire of the United States, whose presence in the Gulf would inevitably recede to perhaps an offshore presence as it was the case before, the situation of Saudi Arabia, the geopolitical condition of Saudi Arabia is likely to suffer. And quite possibly one of the important achievements of Khatami period, namely reconciliation of relations between the two states might not necessarily be reversed by certainly chilled.
For those who suggested that the United States can intervene in Iraq and it would temper Sunni militancy, isolate, if not overthrow Iran somehow, transform the region, if not the entire Middle East, into a pro-American domestic bastion, to suggest that the opposite is emerging is to understate the case and I'll stop there. Thanks.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, though you didn't explain how our actions are preventing the formation of a new caliphate, which I assume we will come to in the discussion. I think this has been a very rich discussion. We turn now to question and comment. Please come to the mike, young lady. It's here in the center.
And as you are coming there, I would just remark that from the point of view of the Gulf Arabs generally the preference has been for a balance of power between Iran and Iraq buttressed as need be by outside power. With Iraq either in a state of anarchy or civil war, or under the best of circumstances with a weak central government and strong regions, it is clear that Iraq can no longer play that role.
Therefore, the Gulf states confront a dilemma. Either they continue their reliance on the United States with all of the political irritation that that entails, or they find other partners. Other partners might present themselves in the form of Pakistan for example, which needs money from the Gulf, and which needs the strategic depth that the Gulf could provide. So I think we are looking at a very unstable regional security situation. And as you said, Ray, when one looks at what was promised as we entered this adventure, to say that we failed to achieve it is to make a gross understatement.
Please, tell use who you are.
Q: Hi, my name is Elena (sp) and I am from the Brookings Institution. And I'll start with a little anecdote and then I actually have a serious question for Mr. Sadjadpour. I hope I pronounce that correctly. If you go to Google and you type in Arabian Gulf, you will find that the first page that pops up is a page that is supposedly supported by the Iranian government that says - it is a satire on the this-page-cannot-be displayed. It says the Arabian Gulf does not exist. Please try Persian Gulf. (Laughter.) And if you think that the Arabian Gulf still exists, you should read some more history books. So, now all of us will try that, and - it is really quite humorous.
My question was - I was wondering if you all could speak a little bit more in depth about Saudi Arabia and specifically their Shi'a population, and what kind of relations they may have with Iran and how they may change. And I am specifically thinking back to the situation in '79, '80, where it is determined I suppose that Iran might have had a hand in the uprising during that period, and whether that - whether Saudi has concerns regarding that and how valid those may be. Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Who would like to start? Juan.
MR. COLE: The Saudi Shi'ite community is largely in eastern province, al Hasa. And the majority of them are Usuli (sp) Shi'ites who follow Grand Ayatollah Sistani. And I have been in contact with researchers who have been there recently and Sistani is clearly the dominant influence. For the Saudi regime, I think this is a double-edged sword in the sense that probably they prefer if somebody has to be influential there that it be Sistani rather than Qom (sp) in Iran. On the other hand, Sistani has been calling for Parliamentary democracy and the exercise of the will of the people and to get the Shi'ites in al Hasa stirred up about that is maybe not the most preferable from Riyadh's point of view. Moreover, it does - I mean, Sistani's ideology of the popular will would imply that the Shi'ites have a much bigger claim on Saudi oil resources than they actually get. I mean, the oil is mainly under areas that traditionally are Shi'ite but they haven't benefited from it as much as the rest of the country.
There is also a sectarian element to the Saudi Shi'ite community, which is the -movement founded by - in the late 18th, early 19th century. And the Sheikhi (sp), founded by Sheikh al Asdi (sp) in the late 18th, early 19th century. And the Sheikhis have a significant presence not only in al Hasa, but also in Kuwait, and in Basra. There are about 200,000 Sheikhis in Basra. Their leader is Ali al Hasawai (sp). And the Basra community has very strong links to the al Hasa community in this regard. The Sheikhis of Basra are politically relatively quietist, but they act as a corporate group and have sometimes been militant. They organized last year to expel Marsh Arab tribes from Basra who were being rowdy and shooting up things and smuggling, and so forth, and the formed a Sheikhi militia and chased the Marsh Arabs out of Basra.
So I think from a Saudi point of view, Iran is always a danger and the Shi'ites of Saudi Arabia are always viewed as potentially fifth column for Iran. But what is more worrisome from a Saudi point of view I think is the very strong links of the al Hasa Shi'a to Iraq because in the 19th century there were times when the Kayamahkob (sp) of al Hasa reported - his reporting line went through the governor, the Ottoman governor of Basra. And this I think - this configuration helps to explain the extreme Saudi alarm about the rise of Shi'ite Iraq.
MR. FREEMAN: Ken?
MR. KATZMAN: Just very briefly, I think we did see some noise here about - well, it's almost nine years, the Khobar Towers events obviously raised renewed - at that time, renewed fears that there was some Shi'a activism in Saudi Arabia. And that was a surprise because there had been a 1993 reconciliation between the government and the Shi'a community that allowed many of those in exile to return to the Eastern province and resume publishing and resume their jobs.
Since Khobar, though, I think there were obviously many arrests and I think it has been fairly quiet. There have been some more reconciliation moves between the government and the Shi'a community, and I don't think we have seen too much unrest in the East.
MR. FREEMAN: Karim.
MR. SADJADPOUR: I don't want to keep promoting my International Crisis Group's work, but one of my colleagues actually wrote a wonderful report just recently about the Shi'ites in Saudi Arabia all based on primary research from Saudi Arabia.
Talking about the popular perception, when I think about the Shi'ites of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but particularly the Shi'ites of Saudi Arabia, there is a Persian proverb that comes to mind. We say - (in Arabic) - that means I sit in between two chairs, meaning that they are not totally accepted in their own country in fact. They are oftentimes considered heretics by their Wahhabi compatriots. They are often looked with suspicion as Iran sympathizers.
But then when they come to Iran, anyone who is familiar with the Iranian cultures knows that there is this Persian chauvinism vis-à-vis the Arabs, especially the Halige (sp) Arabs, and they are somewhat looked down upon. And I think they see firsthand that this Shi'ite solidarity definitely does not transcend the Persian-Arab cultural divide. (Laughter.) So I think this is a problem that domestically in Saudi America - and this were the recommendations of this International Crisis Group report that they need to be more included but not only politically but culturally.
MR. FREEMAN: That was an ambiguous gesture. Were you volunteering?
MR. TAKEYH: Oh, no, that is fine.
MR. FREEMAN: Sir?
Q: Good morning. My name is Tom Lippman. I am with the Middle East Institute here in Washington. I really appreciate the very succinct presentation that you have all given of this amazing number of moving parts that we have in the region at the same time. But it seems to me that there is a last chapter of this study group report that has to be written here and that is policy recommendations for the United States. What should we do now?
MR. FREEMAN: Yes, thank you.
MR. COLE: Well, you know, Muqtada al-Sadr formed this militia in the summer of 2003. And ultimately it came into conflict with the Marines in the spring of 2004. And Muqtada was in a difficult position, and he went to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and he said to the Grand Ayatollah, he said, if you give the order, I will dissolve this militia. So Sistani is a canny old man and he knew he was being drawn into something, and he didn't want to. He said, well, you didn't ask me before you formed the militia - (scattered laughter) - so I have the same feeling about this question about what we should do.
Personally, I think there is a contradiction at the heart of U.S. - of Bush administration policy with regard to Iraq, which is that it wanted to recreate Iraq as a pro-American government with private enterprise and democracy and a glowing view of Washington, but it also I think genuinely did want to unleash democratic forces in the society as a means to that goal. And the problem for the Bush administration is that the political forces on the ground in Iraq - not necessarily terribly democratic, and to the extent that they are, they are not necessarily in line with Washington goals.
So the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq won nine of 18 provinces. That clearly wasn't what the Bush administration would have predicted or what it was going for in 2003. And I'm amused sometimes; journalists ask me what I think the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq wants. I suggest that they think about the name of the organization. (Laughter). And while it is true that perhaps their ideology has been moderated by the events of the past two years and by their success in parliamentary politics, I don't think the United States has much choice but to continue to support the democratic process in Iraq. And that inevitably leads it into an alliance with the main parties that are in play there, whatever they may be.
I think there will be a temptation for the United States to tinker with the December 15th elections and to throw money around and to try to get the Allawi group back into power. That is clearly the horse on which Washington bet initially. It is the horse that felt behind and came in last the last time. I think that is a very dangerous mistake. If the United States - if there is even any hint the United States is behind the scenes putting a sort of secular anti-Iranian, anti-Sistani government in power in Baghdad, it's going to destabilize the whole country.
So I am afraid that the best thing for the U.S. to do is to continue to support some sort of democratic process in Iraq and let the chips fall where they may.
MR. FREEMAN: When confronted with policy dilemmas of this kind, there are two sound bits of advice to which one can refer. One is the slogan of the National Bureaucratic Party candidate for president some years ago who said when in charge ponder; when in trouble delegate; and when in doubt mumble. (Laughter.)
And in this there is a further bit of advice, which I think begins to get to Tom's question and follows on what Juan has just said. This was offered in connection with Bosnia. The question is what rules should you do when tempted to intervene in a civil war -- because we are in the middle of a civil war in Iraq now? And the first bit of advice is, don't. Second, if you do, pick the side that can win. And, third, make sure they win fast and win decisively.
And that argues for letting the Shi'ia majority craft the future in Iraq, and that is very unfortunate for everybody else. But then as many of you who have attended these sessions know, the theme song of these events as Iraq has unfolded has been that we invaded not Iraq but the Iraq of our dreams, a country that didn't exist, that we didn't understand. And it is therefore not surprising that we knocked the kaleidoscope into a new pattern that we find surprising. The ignorant are always surprised.
Ken.
MR. KATZMAN: Thank you. I think the Iraq issue is going to be a case study that is studied by students of foreign policy for generations, the key question being do you use the military to restructure internal politics in a country or a state. And I think that is the key question. Now, in my view, the U.S. is now perceived as basically the protectors of the Shi'ite and Kurdish alliance.
And the U.S. has been hoping - we have tried two things. One is to crush the Sunnis and show them they cannot win and they either must capitulate and join the political process or they will be defeated. That has not worked. The second track we have tried is to convince the Sunnis the train is leaving the station; get on board the political process now because the train is about to leave, and if you don't participate, you will be left behind. That I believe has not succeeded either.
The Sunnis have not shown an attraction to that argument either. They have kept fighting. I see no evidence that the insurgency is any weaker. No U.S. military leader says the insurgency is any weaker than it was a year ago. The Sunnis have not been crushed. They are not about to be crushed. I think the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. military have tried to change tact to their credit I think. They have tried to negotiate with key Sunnis. I think the key is the Muslim Clerics Association, Harith al-Dhari, Abd al-Salam al-Kubaisi. These are key figures. They have refused to negotiate with the United States to date because they insist on a timetable for withdrawal. I think those are key leaders. I think maybe to be approached and to try to negotiate with them because they do have respect of the insurgents.
But basically the idea is those approaches of crushing the Sunnis or convincing them that they are going to be dealt out have not worked, and I think the U.S. Embassy to its credit is trying these new approaches with the Sunnis and to promote political reconciliation. And I think that that might work. But the problem I see is that the trust has - there is so much mistrust, and I think at this point it is going to be so hard to bring the Sunnis into this structure that I wonder whether it's too late for that strategy.
MR. SADJADPOUR: I would focus my policy recommendations on U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran. I know this is very, very difficult, but I would just argue that it is going to be very difficult to stabilize and democratize Iraq while simultaneously antagonizing Iran, a country which arguable enjoys the greatest amount of influence of Iraq. I would very much emphasize that dialogue and in no way equals appeasement, but by not talking to Iran, we're both letting the Iraq issue fester, the nuclear issue fester, and quite frankly we are not doing anything about improving the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran.
MR. TAKEYH: I'll just ask to speak to simply say I don't know. (Scattered laughter.) I have been thinking about what the Gulf security architecture will look like now. And the best-case scenario, if you want to be optimistic and hopeful, is that the internal constituencies in Iraq will somehow find some sort of an accommodation. And you begin to see that in the constitutional process - is that the Shi'a community and the Kurdish community are beginning to have some degree of understanding and compact, which is leave the other guys out. And maybe that somehow stabilizes the fragmentary fractious Iraqi society.
The emergence of federated Iraq with a strong Shi'a component will I think diminish the divisiveness between Iran and Iraq. I am not sure if that is the disinterest of Iran, Iraq, or the United States. And a situation where American presence in that self regulating regional lessons is not necessarily a bad thing given the fact that American presence has proven inflammatory and the source of division.
So I think we may be optimistically enough coming into an era where potentially the Gulf can stabilize itself without the necessity of external empires, whether it's the British Empire and later on the American one, having a dominant voice in the deliberations of this region. There will be some people who will be anxious and even isolated. I particularly think of the house of Saud, but that just might be the way things evolve.
And let me just say one last thing, I'm not quite sure if there is anything the United States can do to prevent these indigenous trends from evolving, and I'm not sure in an artificial way it should try.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. I think it is fair to say, going back to Juan's original somewhat facetious response to this very serious question that we weren't consulted when we went in and therefore it's rather strange to be consulted on how we should get out.
MR. COLE: I think we are still not being consulted.
MR. FREEMAN: We are still not being consulted of course. But I just wanted to point out a very interesting thing, and that is, in the current issue of Middle East Policy, there is an article called "A Responsible Exit Strategy." The author of that, Gareth Porter, originally was asked - we discussed this because it was shocking to me that no one was writing exit strategies. He was asked to do a survey of exit strategies and then provide his own ideas. Well, the fact is, nobody had written an exit strategy when he wrote this. This was the first. Now there are several others.
What they all have in common when you look at them is some effort to involve Iraq's neighbors who have the largest stake in Iraqi stability, whether they are Iran or Syria, or Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Jordan, or other major players in the Arab world, and to implicate them in a conference and set of agreements that would bolster rather than detract from Iraqi security and stability, in other words, using a positive form of internationalization to prevent the further internationalization of the struggles going on inside Iraq. But when you consider how disparate the interests of these players are, that is a very tall order indeed.
Sir.
Q: Mustafa Al Malik (sp) is my name, and I am a journalist. My first question that was touched on by Ambassador Freeman about the Kurdish issue - now we all know that the 60,000 peshmerga the Americans did not insist on the disarmament. They are being built since the Gulf War began and Israel has a very strong interest in keeping Kurdistan over there.
The second thing is the American plan to build 14 bases is not going to work out in the Shi'ite or Sunni regions. And there is a strong possibility America would want those bases, some of those bases in the Kurdish area. So the question is if the Allawi - (inaudible) - particularly goes for the independence movement, would the Americans bomb?
The second thing is are we going to have in the south a (strategic ?) war between the American Muslim - (inaudible) - between Shi'ites and Sunnis. And it is very relevant about the Shi'ite region. From my conversation I understand it is not only Southern Iraqis but 65 percent of the Bahrainis are Shi'ite. They are being ruled by Sunni regime, although 11 percent of Saudi - they are 70 percent of the workers of the Saudi Arabian oil field, and a quarter of Qataris and Kuwaitis are Shi'a.
So what I am saying - America I think - how relevant is the American advice? Are we going to have a Shi'a-Sunni kind of - you know, 30-years war, whatever it is, and the borders that were set up after the first war, what are they are going to change? So Kurdish issue and then the Shi'a-Sunni situation. Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Ken, would you like to lead on the Shi'a issue? But before you do, on the Kurdish issue, I would just point out that you can't get to Iraqi Kurdistan except through Turkey or Arab Iraq. And if Kurdistan becomes independent or declares independence, I think the Turks will have their own reaction, and I wouldn't give you a nickel for the lives of the 60,000 peshmerga under that circumstance. I would note also that that peshmerga are now in some cases dressed in Iraqi National Army uniforms. They are being used in places like Tall Afar to sweep through Turkmen and Arab regions. In my view, that does not help the prospects for future peace and stability in Iraq. Others may have other comments on Kurdistan.
MR. TAKEYH: I would just say briefly, the one place where the United States could probably get base rights is in Kurdistan - (chuckles) - and I think privately the Kurds are actually promising that to their American interlocutors. I mean, that is just going to be another sources of instability because I don't believe that you can reverse this sort of autonomy and even independence that Kurdistan enjoys. Perhaps it won't get to formal independence, but you also begin to see ramifications of Kurdish autonomy already. You have Kurdish disturbances in Iran. You have similar effects in - and that is just another instability that has been created. Maybe overtime it will settle into some sort of a pattern of functional independence without necessarily assertion of it in a formal diplomatic manner, but that is the best you can hope for.
MR. SADJADPOUR: I would agree with Ray's comments. I spoke to a Kurdish official -- an Iraqi Kurdish official a few weeks ago in a conference in Europe and I asked them -- because every Iraqi Kurd you come across, the vast, vast majority - I think even in opinion polls upwards of 90 percent -- say they prefer independence. And I asked them, how do you reconcile this? And he actually - his analysis was quite sober. He said, okay, you know, obviously we - all Kurds would like to have an independent state, but look at that state. We'd have no access to water whatsoever - no access to water - and we'd be surrounded by four very hostile neighbors: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. So, you know, even if they do have oil resources, how are they going to be able to exploit them? And, you want to take the Shi'ite question now?
MR. SADJADPOUR: Actually do you want to talk about the Kurdish issue?
MR. COLE: I would just say that this constitution that we're having the referendum on tomorrow - it makes it unnecessary for the Kurds to declare independence because it gives them everything that they could possibly have wanted. The constitution is a little vague on these matters because it does say that some things will be settled by parliamentary statute later on. But it appears to say that the provinces of Iraq may confederate. This is called federalism in the American press, but actually it's much more than that. And it's confederalism. So it's as though Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico could form a confederacy, and they could tell the federal government here in Washington, well, you'll not going to be nearly as much money from taxes on our oil industry as you used to because we're going to keep that money here in our confederacy. And then if you have any business with Austin or Santa Fe, you're going to have to go through our confederal parliament and prime minister from now on.
Well, the last time we had a confederacy here in North America, it caused a lot of trouble. And the Iraqi Constitution actually provides for the formation of these confederacies, which then will have a claim on some proportion of natural resources, which is to say petroleum revenues. Probably around a fourth of the Kirkuk fields will stay in Kurdistan. Around a fourth of the Rumaila revenues will stay in whatever Shi'ite confederacy is formed in the south. And then there's a provision that 100 percent of all future finds will stay in the regional confederacies, and then the geologists think, you know, southern Iraq is like floating in petroleum. Well, if the future petroleum industry in southern Iraq is going to be owned by this confederation and that confederation of provinces - and Baghdad isn't even going to get much of a share of it - then the degree of autonomy that it gives the regions is just enormous. And of course the Kurds benefit from this in their region as well. So I don't - you know, what's left for Baghdad to do would be a little bit of foreign policy. I guess the prime minister can, you know, visit Riyad and Tehran from time to time, but aside from that I'm not sure what's left for the federal government to do.
MR. FREEMAN: Ken.
MR. KATZMAN: Yes, I would agree with everything that's been said. On the Sunni-Shi'a issue, I see very little prospect for reconciliation right now. As I said in my talk, in my view, I think one problem the U.S. has had is it has greatly misread Sunni hatred and resentment at what has happened. In my view the Sunnis have not accepted anything that has happened to them since March 19th, 2003. And the governments - most of the governments around Iraq are as committed as the Sunnis in Iraq to overturning what has happened to them since March 19th, 2003. And the U.S. has therefore, I think, misread the intentions of the neighbors, which I think is to reverse what has happened. And again that sense of betrayal - the Sunnis - their view is, you, Shi'a and Kurds, you didn't have the courage or the guts to rise up against Saddam. You called in the United States to do your work for you. This sense of betrayal, I think, has been greatly underestimated here.
MR. FREEMAN: Sir. Could you tell us who you are?
Q: I'm Bill Royce from Voice of America. I have a question - a comment and a question. My comment is I think today Takeyh and Sadjadpour have raised a very important issue, which would be a topic for a future conference soon, which could be Iran as a regional power because so often in the Middle East and Washington, you reflect around fear and Iran is ignored. And I think we should do this, and I think that more interesting was Sadjadpour's comment which was echoed in Takeyh's talk that national interest, rather than international interest, is something we're going to see with this - (inaudible). Now for a question for Juan and Ken - you know, we had all this talk about the Shi'a politics in Iraq, but we had nothing at all about a Shi'ite feeling that they've been treated terribly unjustly by whatever government there was. And I think - and maybe Karim could in Iraq too - not in Iraq, sorry, in Lebanon - do the Shi'ites in Lebanon feel at all excluded, mistreated by the Sunnis because somehow we can't ignore this feeling? I mean I remember under Saddam when they were really slaughtering people in the marsh Arabs and in - only Amnesty had one or two little alerts, but it looked as if the world didn't give a damn, you know. And I think people felt that way. So on one had, this sense of the Sunnis - it is very unjust - was preceded by, I think, a feeling by the Shi'ites that America was very unjust. And as a result, we're in a very rough situation. And I'd like comments, and I like to especially hear about the Shi'a in Lebanon. Okay thanks.
MR. COLE: Well, there is a great deal of resentment still, as you know, among the Shi'ites of Iraq that the United States stood by and allowed Saddam to put down the 1991 uprising when 16 of 18 provinces went out of the hands of the Ba'ath and the U.S. could have interdicted the helicopter gun-ships that Saddam used to put that rebellion down and did not. This feeling of resentment has been voiced by Grand Ayatollah Bashir Najafi, who's in line to succeed Sistani. He clearly still smarts and has anti-American feelings about that episode. He has given sermons about it in Najaf. And that whole episode is then exacerbated from the point of view of Shi'ite opinion by the recent comments of the Saudi foreign minister, who, addressing the United States, said words to the effect that - why are you now turning Iraq over to the Iranians? We, the Saudis and the Americans, fought a war after the Gulf War to prevent the Iranians from taking over Iraq. And he seemed to be saying that the United States and Saudi Arabia actively collaborated with Saddam in killing 60,000 Shi'ites in Iraq because they coded them as agents of Iranian influence. I think he must have been exaggerating, but I know for a fact because I was called from Baghdad for Radio Sawa there for a discussion about this in Arabic. And the Iraqi Shi'a were jumping up and down mad about this. And of course the interior minister responded to Saud al-Faisal by saying that Iraqis had invented writing and civilization and didn't need any lectures on democracy from some Bedouin on a camelback.
The Shi'ites in southern Lebanon are the poorest part of the population in Lebanon with the possible exception of the Palestinian refugees. They have a real sense of being deprived. They're Harakat al-Mahrumin. They're the movement of the deprived. And this is especially played to by the Hizbullah, which is what it is in part because of its social services and the way in which it has gotten clinics and other services to the poor in southern Lebanon. However, I wouldn't actually say that the resentments among the Shi'a in southern Lebanon are formulated in particular with regard to Sunni Arabs. They've had resentments about the Palestinians poaching on their resources. They've had resentments occasionally against the Maronite elite. In Lebanon, you know, it's a kaleidoscope. Sometimes these groups will be allied with one another. Then sometimes they'll switch off and not. But the main rhetoric has been to focus on Israel. I think Hizbullah has benefited from the Iraq situation. It has a old - in fact, Hizbullah in some ways was formed under the tutelage of the Iraqi Da'awa party. It has old and long-standing relationships with the Iraqi Shi'ite religious groups. If the Iraqis get - if the Iraqi Shi'a get rich because they capture the Rumaila oil field moneys, some of that patronage is going to go straight to the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon. So I think Hizbullah and Amal, the Shi'ite groups in Lebanon, are in a much strengthened position - and you can see it in the recent elections in Lebanon - as a result of the Iraq misadventure.
MR. FREEMAN: I would like to make a brief intervention with regard to what Prince Saud said and how it may have been misread. I was the American ambassador in Riyad during the time that these events took place. And I can assure you that Saud and his brother Turki, who was the head of the Istakhbarat (ph), the foreign intelligence service, were both pressing very hard, as was the king, for American intervention on behalf of the Iraqi Shi'a against Saddam, contrary to what the American press was reporting on a conjectural basis. So whatever Saud said, I think in this regard that reading is incorrect. It may be that he was referring to support for Iraq as a balancer against Iran in the earlier context. There certainly there was a measure of collusion with Baghdad about that. But there was not in the matter of the suppression of the Shi'a, who in the Saudi view at that time had shown themselves to be Arabs and Iraqis first and Shi'a third through eight years of heroic struggle in the war with Iran. Ken.
MR. KATZMAN: Thank you. In response to Bill's question, yes, clearly there were obviously very legitimate Shi'a grievances in Iraq. That's no question. But I get back to the question though - the U.S. went to war to create democracy, not to just simply replace Shi'a grievances with Sunni grievances. And that's the key question I'm trying to ask. What is the proper use of U.S. military power? It seems to me what we've done is we've replaced an oppressive Sunni regime now with perhaps an oppressive Shi'a led regime against the Sunnis. And I think that was not the outcome that was desired from the use of major U.S. military action. And this is why I get - I think this is going to be a case study for many generations to come.
MR. SADJADPOUR: Very good question. Yeah, very briefly about the Shi'ites in Lebanon - I think this idea of victimization does fit into the Shi'ite identity to an extent. But I would argue that the Shi'ites of Lebanon have made tremendous strides over the last two decades to the extent, actually, that if you go to south Lebanon, I've heard even a lot of Shi'ites say, you know, activists say that there's been so much talk about the south - the south, you know, it's so poor - that actually the north has been neglected to an extent. Sur, I would argue, is more economically - is doing much better economically than Tripoli to the north. And I think that if you ask, you know, all of Lebanon's 17 different sects which sect right now is the most powerful, I think the vast majority of them would say the Shi'ites.
MR. TAKEYH: I'll just say about this - if Ken is correct in a sense that the Sunni population with its aspirations cannot be accommodated in an Iraqi state, whatever that Iraqi state looks like, that will have ramifications way beyond Iraq. And it may once again - you'll begin to see the radicalization of Sunni politics as a destabilizing factor for internal situation of states such as Egypt, such as Algeria, such as Saudi Arabia. And that's when you being to see Middle East polarized along religious lines, where it's no longer a division between conservative states, national states, whatever. Now the religion is a source of division. Not that there will be massive suicide bombers crossing the Saudi border going into the Iraqi state, but average Egyptian political parties and activists will say to the Egyptian government, there are Sunnis being disenfranchised and slaughtered. What are you doing about it? Even non-representative governments have to be sensitive to public opinion in some form. So the question then becomes, how does the majority Sunni government such as - even distant from Iraq - Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia respond to that popular question.
MR. FREEMAN: Actually, it's beyond the Arab world. It affects Indonesia. It affects Pakistan, India.
MR. TAKEYH: How do they respond to that popular pressure? How do they respond to ameliorating Sunni grievances? And that's going to be a very difficult thing for the region.
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. FREEMAN: We must move on. I think there is ample injustice and humiliation for all in the Middle East. And of course this is the source of terrorism. It is not economic deprivation or education in religious schools. It is a sense of injustice and humiliation that drives people to terrorism. Therefore, if we have succeeded in infected both Sunnis and Shi'as with this sense, we've done something fairly consequential.
Rolling Stone. Tell us who you are.
Q: Yeah I'm Bob Dreyfus. I'm a journalist here in town. I do write for Rolling Stone, and I also have a book coming out about the history of U.S. relationship with political Islam over the decades. But what troubles me about this discussion so far is that everyone is assuming almost this Sunni versus Shi'a polarization as an inevitable, permanent fact of life. And I've talked to many, many Iraqis over many years - true, not in the marshes but - in, you know, hotel coffee shops. But still many of them, most of them say that Iraq was a beacon of secularism and of education and somewhat sophistication and not followers of crusty, bearded old ayatollahs here and there. And so I mean I recognize that our intervention into Iraq may have angered and polarized people who then cluster and follow this or that religious party, whether it's the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iraqi Islamic Party. So my question is, maybe as Juan says, that Allawi is not the right vehicle. But I have to believe that there's a significant constituency among the Iraqi Shi'a as well as other groups for a non-religious party, for a non-, you know, Sciri or Da'awa based kind of fanaticism.
And no one here has addressed that, and that leads to the sort of second part of my question - I'll be very quick - is what did we know, and when did we know it? As a journalist I talked to a lot of people about WMD and Al-Qaeda and everything else before the war. No one said to me, hey, Mr. Journalist, you ought to be worried about Shi'ite theocracy by the way. So I mean, did we miss that entirely? Let's leave aside the neocons and their fantasies, but did our intelligence system miss entirely the fact that these Shi'ites were about to take over? Bush had Hakim in the oval office before the war, as I remember. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but he has certainly talked about it. And he's called him a Shi'a fellow and so forth. No I mean it's literally what he said. Did we miss this before the war? Was that yet another intelligence failure?
MR. FREEMAN: Ken, start. By the way, the Congressional Research Service, although it works on an unclassified basis, is part of the intelligence community.
MR. KATZMAN: No, this was not missed. Look, somebody could look up papers that I wrote when I was there on Sciri and things like this. This was known. It's just come out this week, in fact, Richard Kerr did a review of U.S. intelligence, and it was demonstrated that indeed CIA was warning about this very thing but that it was not sufficiently taken into account by policy makers who were more focused on WMD and links to Al-Qaeda. So I would give a resounding no. This was not missed by the community, by the analysts.
MR. FREEMAN: I think it's fair to say the policymakers were focused on making the case for war, and whatever facts could be used to that end they touted. And whatever facts were unhelpful in that regard they ignored. They looked at the intelligence as the basis of speechwriting, not as a source of information or planning.
MR. COLE: Could I say something about the sort of secular middleclass in Iraq and this image of Iraq as a country in which sectarian divisions weren't so important. That's both true and not true. Actually if you go back in 20th century Iraqi history, there haven't been big Sunni-Shi'a riots or a lot of bloodshed on a sectarian basis in the past. It's not - I mean it happened from time to time in the medieval period, but as a 20th century phenomenon it hasn't been a keynote for modern Iraq. So there was a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism and even to some extent an appeal of general Arab nationalism. And there was a rhetoric of Iraqi unity across these lines, and there was a good deal of intermarriage, of in migration. There were a million Sunnis in the Shi'ite south. There are Kurds - a million Kurds in the Baghdad area and so forth. But I would argue that the late Saddam period was a period in which that salience of that political unity broke down. And the people in Fallujah came under the influence of Jordanian Salafism, and Saddam allowed that in a way that he hadn't before because he was so weak and he felt he needed their support. And the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Da'awa party, the Sudras captured the political loyalty of most of the southern Shi'ites. And I think all of this was going on in the '90s under the radar so that I think it's over with.
I mean I think the elections of January 30th are eloquent as to where peoples' heads are at in Iraq. The Alawi list was supposed to be the secular middleclass list. Even people who knew Iraq well like Anthony Shadid expected it to do very well in Basra. In fact, it got 14 percent of seats in parliament, and I think that's about how many people support secular nationalism at this point. Peoples' heads are at a religious place in Iraq now. There's a religious revival going on.
MR. FREEMAN: Sir.
Q: Hello, my name is Timothy Reuter, and I'm with the Office of Iraq Reconstruction at USAID. I read the letter between Zawahiri and Zarqawi with a good deal of fascination and came away with the impression that Al-Qaeda's success rests not just on its strategic use of violence, but on some pretty sophisticated political analysis. And one of the points that comes up that I found particularly interesting was Zawahiri's criticism in the land of the two rivers approached the Shi'a. And what he really advocates is, you know, stop using violence. But what we need is generations of education to change the minds of these people who misunderstand Islam as far as he sees it. Now, I mean one could see that as, you know, merely strategic. But I mean do you think this presages some real change in thinking about how Sunni insurgents view the Shi'a or how the larger Al-Qaeda movement views approaching the Shi'a.
MR. FREEMAN: I must say at the outset that there is some doubt about the authenticity of that letter, which has some internal contradictions that suggest it may not in fact be from Mr. Zawahiri. It may not be what it purports to be, but still your point is a valid one. And I'd like to ask for comments.
MR. COLE: The letter in my view is a fraud. It begins by - the very first line of it is the salutation of the prophet Mohammed. And you know Sunnis mostly in the Arab world would say al-salah wa al-salam `ala rasuli'llahi. And Shi'ites say al-salah wa al-salam `ala rasuli'llahi wa a-lihi wa sahbihi. This one says wa alihi. It says a Shi'ite, and it goes on and on the companions - wa sahbihi. I am sorry to do the Arabic linguistic stuff in front of you, but the main point that I'm making is I don't know of any Egyptians who use that form of the salutation, and I don't know anybody in Al-Qaeda who would. And I certainly wouldn't, if I were Zawahiri, use it writing to Zarqawi, who has talked about the Shi'ites as rafadas, as rejectionists and wretched heretics and wants to kill them and so forth. And then when it mentions the past heroes of Islam who sacrificed and compared Zarqawi to them, it mentions Al-Imam Al-Hussein. He talks about Hussein, the grandson of the prophet who's martyred and his shrine is at Karbala, who is the Shi'ite hero. He is respected by a lot of Sunnis, but he calles him Al-Imam, which is the Shi'ite way of referring to Hussein. This letter, it seems to me from the linguistic evidence, is written by a Shi'ite pretending to be a Salafi or a Sunni who isn't canny enough to realize what would be the false notes in a Salafi tradition. I mean I've had fundamentalist Sunnis say to me, well, maybe Hussein was wrong and Yazid was right, you know. So this is a very odd piece of writing to represent itself as coming from Al-Qaeda.
And when Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, you know, the Taliban massacred the Shi'ites in the Hazara regions. And Al-Qaeda never complained about that. It helped. The Sipah-e-Sahaba, the fundamentalist Sunni group in northern Pakistan which has mounted a campaign of assassination against Shi'ites was being trained in Al-Qaeda camps. So neither the sentiments in the letter nor the linguistic form of it are convincing to me. I think it's a fraud. And the really interesting question me is where the fraud comes from because it could be Iran. It could be Iraqi Shi'ites or it could be the U.S. government.
Q: My name is Tammam Al-Barazi from Al-Watan al-Arabi magazine. About the Shi'a percentage in Iraq - everybody take it as granted, you know, that 60 percent. I mean the first - you know in '83 when I came to this country, the human rights report, the country report, which the State Department publish here for every year - between '83 until almost '90, they said Saddam Hussein the dictator should give the minority Shi'ite their rights. And suddenly when they invaded Kuwait, they became 50 percent exactly. They didn't say the 60 percent. When America went into Iraq, it now becomes 60 percent, and no academic, you know, challenged this. And this is really serious. I mean when I ask the now-DCM, David Sutterfield - in interview I asked him about that - he said, oh, Al-Watan al-Arabi and you are pro-Saddam. You know, he don't want to even to answer this. So secondly, what about the fertile, you know, the Shi'ite fertile crescent. I thought the crescent doesn't extend into Syria and Lebanon. I mean we are talking about a crescent. I mean nobody went beyond the Gulf and Iran. Irak and the Gulf is a straight line. What about the crescent?
MR. FREEMAN: I think there were comments about Lebanon - Hizbullah - and some comments about Syria as well. But I turn to the two of you for demographic instruction.
MR. COLE: Well, there's been no census by sect in Iraq, and so everything is guesswork. I have to say people like Hana Batatu, who is a great scholar of Iraq, was convinced of a firm Shi'ite majority, which he believes was formed in the 19th century as the southern Arab tribes converted to Shi'ism. And so the idea that they were a minority or 50 percent or something - you know the great scholars of Iraq like Batatu have challenged that for some time. And personally I think the January 30th elections were dispositive in this regard because the Shi'ite parties won close to 70 percent of the seats. The Kurdish parties won 25 percent. On a proportional system, the only way to make sense of those statistics is that the Sunnis are about 20 percent and that that would have pushed back the proportions on both sides. But you can't have 70 percent of the seats in parliament filled on a proportional basis with the kind of turnouts that we had if the Shi'ites are a minority. So I think there are a lot - and also you could just go through the 1987 census or the 1997 census. If you just go through the populations of the various provinces, it's very clear that the Shi'a majority provinces, if you add them all up along with the mixed ones, that they're the majority of the population. And I think 60 percent is a fair guess.
MR. SADJADPOUR: You mentioned when you first came to the U.S. in the 1980s, but I mean I don't know - I can't tell you with precision obviously about Iraqi demographics. But I think by all accounts the Shi'ite birthrates have been much higher. And this has been a phenomenon throughout the regions, and it's probably affiliated with socioeconomic status as well. Saudi Arabia I find very interesting - the Shi'ite headcount because, you know, a study I read a few years ago estimated about 500,000 (Shi'ites). A study I read just a few days ago estimated about 2 million. So the birthrates are much higher, and it's a lot more difficult to blame that on birthrates. About Syria, I mean we're talking about an Alawi regime. I think, you know, very few Shi'ites to speak of in Syria so this idea of a crescent I don't think carries much weight, you know, going to Syria.
Q: Hi, my name is Jacquelyn Owens (sp) from Old Dominion University. Good morning. First of all, I would like to say that some very interesting questions have been raised, questions that I would have liked have asked. I would like to address my comments to Mr. Katzman. You mentioned some very interesting points about during the Reagan administration, him supporting Saddam in spite of the Shi'ites. And I think this is where the polarization began. So I would like to know how do you feel that this monologue about dialogue can continue, and do you feel that this situation can be reversed, these antics about fraudulent letters, you know, dispolarization, beating the Americans at their own game by defining these two groups. And do you think this process can be reversed?
MR. KATZMAN: You know I think it's difficult. We talked about an exit strategy. You know, I think part of the healing process begins with what is the outcome in Iraq, you know, which is still yet to be determined. I have certain views on how it's going to come out. I think I've been very clear about that today, but it could be that I', completely wrong. It could be that many Sunnis - it could be true that many Sunnis just want to go on with their lives and will make some accommodation to their new situation and accept it and participate in future elections and the insurgency might drop off two months from now. I don't know. I doubt it, but it's possible. You know, I think a lot of this is going to turn on how things turn out in Iraq. My own view is the defeat of the Taliban was an important step. It was a very successful step. I do differ somewhat with Ambassador Freeman. I think Afghanistan is well on the road to democracy and healing and success. I think it has had largely uninterrupted success since the Taliban were defeated. I also think that had the U.S. perhaps turned its attention after that to the Arab-Israeli dispute, that might have been a fruitful use of time. The Iraq issue has clearly created a wound, which is still bleeding, and it's going to be very difficult. But, you know, the administration is trying things. And the ambassador is trying things and promoting dialogue, trying to promote national reconciliation. And I think the prospects are difficult, but it may turn out. It may turn out.
MR. FREEMAN: Sorry. I have about - for the gentleman standing behind you, I have four people ahead of you. So if you'd like to take your seat, I will call you in order. But please.
Q: Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service. I basically have three quick, quickly asked questions in light, particularly, of Ambassador Freeman's prefatory remarks about the possibility of a Spanish Civil War scenario. The first one is, what are the implications of a possible breakdown in Syria or destabilization of neighboring Syria on what you're talking about? The second is, how do you believe that Israel sees Iraq's future, and how coordinated is it with the U.S. view and what interests might it have? And third, which is slightly different, do our - does our growing reliance on the Shi'a parties in Iraq - will that affect any decision? And if so, how whether or not the Bush administration may feel it necessary to conduct an attack against nuclear targets in Iran?
MR. FREEMAN: Ray, would you like to lead?
MR. TAKEYH: Yeah on the issue of the Shi'ites, one of the things that surprised me - it goes back to previous question regarding whether one anticipated this resurgence of Shi'a identity. We all - many thought that given what has happened to the Shi'ite community with Saddam's onslaught that it would take a long time for them to rebuild the clerical networks, and it would him a long to reemerge, and so on. The fact that there was this sort of a subterranean almost Shi'ite political organization and it just came up to the surface to restore order - that actually surprised many people. Second of all, I will say if this conversation was taking place at AEI and at places like that, they would say that emergence of Shi'ite community is good because that would be a pro-American community that can be deployed against Iran with their playing clerical politics and so forth. So it wasn't unforeseen. It was viewed as many things in Iran, but to the advantage of the United States.
And in terms of where Israel sees it - (inaudible) - I think is really present and Kurdistan is very strong. And maybe that's a region of a proxy war between Iran and Israel. On the issue of nuclear strike on Iran - nuclear issue and whether reliance on Shi'ite communities as such will constitute some sort of a restraint, I don't necessarily anticipate a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, but that certainly will be a provocative view in the region among the Shi'ite community and even elsewhere beyond the Middle East within the European Community and so on. So I don't think that's an immediate thing that one has to worry about, particularly given the intelligence assessments that have come about regarding the Iranian nuclear facilities. I think in 2002 we thought they were more sophisticated and advanced, and then subsequent IEA inspection process has yielded the fact that perhaps they're not as far advanced as we initially thought. And there's certainly some room for caution and perhaps even diplomacy to rest this issue.
MR. TAKEYH: Three very good questions, very difficult questions. I will just take the last one, I think, about U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Iran nuclear issue and what are the implications in Iraq. I think the Iranians have made it somewhat clear that, you know, if there were to be, for example, a surgical strike on Iran's nuclear facilities that they would most likely respond in Iraq. I don't believe actually that they would respond via Hizbullah in Israel, depending on who actually carried out the strikes, whether it's Israel or the U.S. But I think that, you know, from the world view of the Iranian regime they definitely feel like the wind is at their back right now with oil prices as they are and Iraq as chaotic as it is, that, you know, they feel emboldened on this nuclear front. The vote of India at the IEA I think was somewhat of a wakeup call - very important. But I still do feel that, you know, right now the current administration in Iran feels like the U.S. needs them more than they need the U.S. to help stabilize the situation in Iraq.
MR. COLE: If the United States destabilized the Syrian regime, in my view the most likely successor would be a Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni fundamentalist regime. I think it's very likely that it would hook up with the Sunni Salafis in Iraq with Zarqawi and his group and with the general population of Ramadi and elsewhere so you would have a Sunni crescent. And I think it would be extremely destabilizing to the region. I think a Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Syria would also make a play for the allegiance of the Jordanians. The people in Maan are already in revolt against the Hashemi regime. And I think that that kind of scenario would then feed into the possibility of a Spanish Civil War sort of situation in Iraq, where Iraq becomes an arena for the Iranian revolutionary guards, the Saudi volunteers, Jordanian and Syrian Sunni volunteers to be fighting one another. I think there's a very severe danger that oil pipeline sabotage has emerged as a major tool in the Iraq war would then spread to Iran and Saudi Arabia. And you could see 20 percent of world petroleum production knocked offline. I think that would certainly produce a world depression. So I think a very great deal is at stake here, and I think the idea of certain quarters in Washington that it's good to destabilize places like Syria is very, very dangerous to us all.
MR. FREEMAN: On the question of U.S. strikes on targets on Iran or elsewhere, I simply want to register what I think is an obvious point; namely that what 9/11 showed is that if we bomb people, they bomb back. The invulnerability of our homeland, which we could take with some assurance during the Cold War, given the restraining power of the Soviet Union on its clients, its desire to avoid a disastrous nuclear exchange, that invulnerability is no more. That doesn't mean that in some circumstances we should not use force, but it means that we must take into account the possibility that there will be reprisals against us on our own territory.
Ken?
MR. KATZMAN: Thank you. To take a little bit of a different tack on that issue, Iran and North Korea are often viewed as similar crisis-type situations. North Korea has conventional military options; Iran does not. Iran is very weak in terms of conventional capability. Iran, in my view, is genuinely afraid of U.S. conventional power and has very little to answer it.
I'm in the camp that believes that the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved because of Russian conventional inferiority in the Caribbean; not nuclear inferiority. And in my view, there - it is reasonable to ask is there a place for military options in the case of the Iranian nuclear program. I'm not recommending it, I'm not suggesting it; I'm just posing a question: Is that an arena where military power or the threat of military power could make realistic difference in the situation? And I think that has to be considered.
MR. FREEMAN: I think I agree with you, but I think as you consider military options, you have to consider what might fly back in your own direction.
Tell us who you are, Michelle (sp).
Q: Michelle Steinberg from EIR magazine. Last week or so President Bush gave a speech, which I know we all heard about or heard in which he spoke in a - in kind of new terms that have been floating around about Islamism as an enemy for the next decades or whatever, comparing it to the Cold War, fascism and communism.
So far, as far as I can tell, the more serious intelligentsia in the United States has not answered this idea, and I'd like to know from this panel, starting with Ambassador Freeman, what do you think he means by that, and how is it seen by Syria and Iran in particular, and the fact that the president again issued warnings to Syria and Iran. How did that affect what the Arab League is trying to do in encouraging a regional stability? Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Well, if I wanted to explain the president, I would work in the White House. I'm not sure I understand very much of what he says under any circumstances - (laughter) - but I note this is the seventh different rationale for the Iraq War that he has come out with. We had weapons of mass destruction; that didn't work out quite the way he had expected. We then had regime change. Well, we did regime removal, but we didn't replace the regime so there was no regime change. Then we had democratization, which turned out to be desecularization under the force of occupation. Then we had terrorism, and it turns out that what we've built is a terrorist-generating incubator rather than the fly paper to catch terrorists that was envisaged. And then we had some business about - well, I'm losing track here - (scattered laughter) - but anyway, I think there was something about creating a model for the region, and then - (pause) - well, now we have preventing a new caliphate, You know, I talk to a lot of Muslims around the world, and I don't find many of them quaking in their slippers over the prospect that there will be a new caliphate any time soon. So if this is a real possibility, going back to the analogy that was implicit in Saud al Faisal's expression of concern; namely that we may be headed into some sort of 30-years war between Sunnis and Shi'as, then - you know, I note with some - I note that the Muslim world sat out the original 30-Year War between Protestants and Catholics. They didn't get involved in that. If the Christians wanted to tear Christendom apart, probably a lot of Muslims said, fine, let them do it. And you know, I wonder why it wouldn't be equally wise to take a somewhat detached view of civil strife within the Dar al Islam (ph) if you're not Muslim.
I don't understand what the president was saying. Others here probably do.
MR. TAKEYH: I'll just say one thing. When the president talks about sort of the neighboring countries intensifying the problems in Iraq - and there's a subtext of that, is the media misrepresentation of progress. It's sort of analogous - when Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia and started blaming Walter Cronkite, you know he was in trouble in Vietnam - (chuckles) - so I mean, when you start blaming outside powers and lack of media honest and veracity on this issue, you know the situation on the ground is not going particularly well.
MR. FREEMAN: Tex?
Q: Tex Harris, Foreign Service officer, retired. Gentlemen, thank you.
Starting from Ray going down the panel, I'd like to put this discussion in context. I think it's fitting that we're in the Mansfield Room because the discussion is informed, it's elegant, and it's soft-spoken. My question is what are you doing and what is your organization doing, and thirdly, the normative question: what should be done in order to broaden the kind of information base to project the complexity, to reframe the issue that we are discussing now, which is a major concern in the United States, but one which is being discussed, thought of, imagined, in very different terms than those terms which have been presented so eloquently by you gentlemen today. Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Infomercials - very brief.
MR. TAKEYH: I work for a nonpartisan membership organization, and if you're a member, you probably get invited to many of our events. But we do have a newly revitalized, redesigned website that is supposed to be the sort of a foreign affairs library on line, the sort of Google of foreign affairs where you can find everything you want, so you may access that, but otherwise, that's all I can say about the institution I work for.
MR. SADJADPOUR: I work with International Crisis Group. It's dedicated to preventing and resolving violent conflict. First - it was born kind of in the '90s during the Bosnia-Kosovo crisis. I think the rationale was that it's kind of a cross between journalism and analytical or academic work; you know, rather than - it's all primary research, so rather than sit from Washington or New York writing about what's going on in Iraq -
MR.TAKEYH: Not that there's anything wrong with that -
MR. SADJADPOUR: No, I don't think there's anything wrong with that - (laughter) - but it is - I think, you know, I would say the substance of my job is similar to a reporter; you know, talking to people on the ground, and I would say by far I am the least intelligent and accomplished of my colleagues in the region. We have people in Egypt and in the Gulf, in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, and there are some very, very intelligent people creating very excellent reports, and they're all free of charge, so if you go to the website you can see them.
MR. FREEMAN: The Middle East Policy Council attempts to improve the quality of the policy discussion by convening events like this, by helping Americans to understand the Arab perspective and the Islamic perspective on issues, and by giving people like Ken Katzman - who is otherwise hidden in the corners of Congressional Research Service - (laughter) -- an opportunity to enlighten the masses who are present here today.
MR. KATZMAN: Thank you very much. No, I work for the Congress. If they tell me to sit at that chair over there, that's what I do. If they tell me to go over there, that's what I do. (Laughter.) Our reports are for the Congress. If somebody calls me from outside, I'm allowed to send our products; there's no restriction, but I can't - we don't have a mailing list, and our website is restricted to the Congress. And there's been a debate over that, and we don't know how it will play out.
But you know, if somebody knows me, I am allowed to send my reports to them on a personal basis.
MR. KATZMAN: After - later, later.
MR. FREEMAN: Juan?
MR. COLE: Well, of course I'm just a Midwestern college teacher at the University of Michigan, but aside from that, I am trying to form a 501(c)(3) philanthropic organization with a particular goal that has something to do with our conversation today. I'm an Arabist and also know Persian and Urdu, and spent a lot of time in the Muslim world, and I have been long concerned that the publishing system in the Arab world in particular, but throughout the region does not produce knowledge about the United States.
You know how you could go to Border's and buy a little paperback of Thomas Jefferson's most famous speeches and so forth - essays - and you would think you might be able to get such a book in Arabic at Madboulis (ph) in Cairo, but like if you went to Madboulis you wouldn't be able to get it.
Books are often published in the Arab world in runs of 500 to 1,000 copies. There is no American studies program at any Arabic-speaking university in the region. There are five place where American studies are taught. There's one person at Cairo University, there are three people at Quds University. There's one at Eiman (ph), and so - unlike Japan, say, which - where every good university has an American studies program, these things don't exist in the Middle East, and publishing about American history, American political thought is almost non-existent.
So I'm trying to form what is called the Global Americana Institute, which will have as its goal to subsidize the publication and translation of an American library, basically, in the Middle East - inexpensive paperbacks - in which people really could read what Jefferson had to say. And by the way, there's no collection of Martin Luther King's works, Susan B. Anthony - I've looked in big databases, and they're not there.
So this is my hope - is that the publication may be a wedge to maybe some endowed posts at Arabic-speaking universities in American studies, and hopefully eventually we can spread around this knowledge.
MR. FREEMAN: We have, after you, you, sir, and then the gentleman in the back who has been so patient.
Q: I'll be very prompt. Bob Copaken (ph), a former energy analyst with the U.S. government.
My question is to Juan Cole. You suggested that the draft constitution upon which they are about to vote suggests that the states can - or the provinces can confederate and that perhaps one-quarter of the oil revenues could be retained. What does that say about the prospects for equitable distribution of oil revenues, and what, if anything, can be done about it? That's the question.
MR. COLE: The implication of the provisions for provincial confederation and retention of petroleum revenues in the localities are that the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are screwed. They were probably receiving 80 percent of those revenues in the old days, and the likelihood is that their total share from the federal government would be reduced to on the order of 5 to 10 percent because they have no petroleum revenues - at the moment at least - in their areas.
The geologists think there is, I think, a low-grade field off of Faluja, so if they ever settle down, they might be able to get a little bit. But the really rich future strikes are in the south probably, and that's even more worrisome because the provision is that a hundred percent of future strikes would be owned by these regional confederations, which means that Baghdad would get very little of it and therefore wouldn't be in a position to share it out to Anbar and to Salah ad-Din and to Nineveh where the Sunni Arabs live.
So I would argue that, you know, a Gulf oil state is a rentier state in the sense that - like our politics are based on taxation. Everything in American politics is about how much the government is going to tax each of us and then how many services it's going to give back to whom from those taxes. In rentier states, the petroleum money pays for things so much that the government doesn't have to tax people very much.
Then the question is what kind of bargain can the state strike with people, and usually the Gulf bargain has been people get free health care, they get free education to the Ph.D, they get three percent mortgages on huge mansions, and so on and so forth, but in return, they should be quiet.
And basically it seems to me this constitution breaks that rule. It says to the Sunni Arabs of Iraq you're not going to get your fair share, we're not going to bargain with you. And the Sunni Arabs are going to reply, as you would in that system, well, we're not going to be quiet. And the bombs that are going off are the signs of lack of quietness. So I would say that this constitution, if it is passed tomorrow, is a guarantee of a decade or more of at least low-intensity guerilla war.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you.
Q: My name is Vincent. I'm from Senator Wyden's office, and I was just wondering what each of you think about staying the course versus of course change in Iraq in terms of U.S. policy and what we're doing militarily.
MR. FREEMAN: The question really is what is the course that we're staying? We are involved in what the military called fourth-generation warfare, which is warfare - which can be of a conventional or guerilla nature, but is distinguished by its focus on the mind of the adversary, the political decisions of the adversary, and its conclusion that the center of gravity on the adversary's side is the mind of its leadership.
Apparently, we've never won such a war. Vietnam was a classic instance of this. Somalia was ano |
