Suleimaniya city cen­ter(® 2002 Christo­pher Allbritton)

Three mem­bers of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion move­ment showed up at Colum­bia University’s Polit­i­cal Union to make the case for war. They appealed to the hearts of the audi­ence — a mainly sym­pa­thetic one — but unfor­tu­nately not the minds.
The speak­ers were:

• Dr. Ala Fa’ik, vice pres­i­dent for the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy, for­merly of Bagh­dad and a mem­ber of the steer­ing com­mit­tee of the Inter­faith Coun­cil for Peace & Justice,
• Qubad Tal­a­bany, the deputy U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, who works closely as a liai­son with both the White House and Con­gress, and
• Feisal al-Istrabadi, esq., a found­ing mem­ber of the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy, who is an activist on var­i­ous human­i­tar­ian issues relat­ing to Iraq. Istra­badi is also a mem­ber of the plan­ning com­mit­tee for the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, serv­ing on its Tran­si­tional Jus­tice and Demo­c­ra­tic Prin­ci­ples work­ing groups.

All three men told us that Sad­dam was wicked. All three gave a litany of evils that Sad­dam had inflicted on the peo­ple of Iraq. And all three made the case that Sad­dam should be removed because he’s a bad man. Jef­frey A. Klein, who writes for Kur​dish​Me​dia​.net, summed it up best: “Sad­dam Hus­sein is one of the great crim­i­nals of our era. He has taken Mesopotamia, the cra­dle of civ­i­liza­tion, and turned it into a giant con­cen­tra­tion camp.“
There is no doubt about that, but are the “human­i­tar­ian issues,” as Istra­badi claimed, the best rea­son for going into Iraq? “The human­i­tar­ian rea­sons are stronger than the rea­sons for going into Kosovo,” Istra­badi told one ques­tioner. “The United States missed an oppor­tu­nity by focus­ing on the weapons of mass destruc­tion instead.“
Tal­a­bany agreed: “Weapons of mass destruc­tion and the ter­ror ties are excel­lent rea­sons for oth­erthrow­ing the Sad­dam regime,” he said, “But there are other rea­sons. Most impor­tant is the desire of my peo­ple to sow the seeds of democ­racy in the soil of the tyrant. The time has come to bring peace to Iraq. The time has come to lib­er­ate Iraq.“
As to argu­ments from anti-war activists that the loom­ing Iraq war is “all about oil,” he said: “I do not believe the US and the coali­tion of the will­ing will go to war for oil. I do believe there are eas­ier ways for these gov­ern­ments to get oil than to go to war. But Iraqis in Basra, Bagh­dad and Suleimanya don’t care why the U.S. wants to lib­er­ate them. If it’s oil, then so be it.“
Fa’ik, as a peace activist, called for a restora­tion of the “one­ness” of Iraq, and claimed that through­out all its his­tory, Iraq had been an open, tol­er­ant soci­ety. “I stud­ied my his­tory very well,” he said. “You walk into the museum and go into the Mesopotamian exhibit and you will see my face there. I am Sumer­ian, I am Chaldean, I am Assyr­ian, I am Arab, I am Mus­lim. Iraq is an open soci­ety.
“We have to bring back that one­ness of Iraq. We have to bring back what’s been bro­ken by that regime.“
Of the three speak­ers, Fa’ik was the least cred­i­ble, if only because of his rosy-eyed view of the his­tory of Iraq. Iraq was ruled for cen­turies by the Ottomans, with tribal dif­fer­ences held in place by a com­bi­na­tion of enlight­ened provin­cial rule and Turk­ish scim­i­tars. After the British con­quered it in 1915, it was a colo­nial state until 1958 when a coup brought Col. Qasim to power. Fa’ik’s vision of a peace­ful, open Iraq is dis­cred­ited even as recently as 1995 when the Kurds in the north fought a vicious civil war.
In essence, the speak­ers were beg­ging the United States for lib­er­a­tion. The mood among the speak­ers and the audi­ence, which was heavy with Arab and Iraqi stu­dents, was dark when the sub­ject of France and Ger­many arose. The speak­ers also sought to reas­sure the audi­ence that Amer­i­can troops would be wel­comed.
“Rest assured that Iraqis will wel­come an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary pres­ence because they will be seen as lib­er­a­tors, not as occu­piers,” said Tal­a­bany. “If there is any anti-American sen­ti­ment it will be because we felt you let us down in 1991.“
The occu­pa­tion, he said, will be more like Italy after World War II rather than Ger­many or Japan — pre­sum­ably, short and sweet. Now we know who the White House has been lis­ten­ing to as it makes its occu­pa­tion plans.
“Overnight, Iraq will not trans­form into a func­tional democ­racy,” said Tal­a­bany. “But we have shown in the north that will proper resources you can give power to the peo­ple. And a free Iraq will be a major player in the Mid­dle East and a reli­able Amer­i­can ally. We will work to have an Iraq that will not be anti-Israel. We hope to have an Iraq that can play a con­struc­tive role in the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity. Upon lib­er­a­tion there will be an end to the war that the Ba’ath party has been wag­ing on the peo­ple of Iraq.“
Istra­badi was per­haps the most dog­matic of the speak­ers. Lay­ing out his points in his lawyerly way, he opened his part of the pro­gram with this:

1. “There will be mil­i­tary action soon, by which I think by the first of March. With­out it, there is no point in talk­ing about democracy.”

2. “If this regime sur­vives, then the Kurds will not accept rein­te­gra­tion and they should not. If you believe in the ter­ri­to­r­ial integrity of Iraq, you should act now.“
3. “This war will tar­get ter­ror infra­struc­ture of the regime, not the civil­ian one as in 1991.”

He then attempted to dis­pel the ideas that Iraq is the “Arab Yugoslavia,” liable to fall apart into war­ring tribes the moment Sad­dam is removed, an idea pro­moted by Peter W. Gal­braith which he called “non­sense.“
“You have had too fre­quently in Iraq geno­cide and eth­nic cleans­ing,” Istra­badi said. “But with one excep­tion, there is not an exam­ple in the mod­ern his­tory of Iraq in which the Kurds rose to mas­sacre the Arabs of a vil­lage or vice versa.“
What geno­cide had gone on had been com­mit­ted by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment against eth­nic groups it believed were in revolt, he said. “This says Iraqis have a high sense of cohe­sive­ness. Left to their own, they will be able to rebuild their coun­try.“
His fur­ther made his case to act now and not wait for a coup or a change of Saddam’s heart by rip­ping apart Fa’ik’s vision of Iraq as one big happy fam­ily. “One of the rea­sons I feel it is nec­es­sary for the United States to inter­vene, is if there is a coup, blood will run in the streets of Bagh­dad as peo­ple take vengeance,” he said. “There is much vengeance to be had in Iraq after 35 years.“
Only the United States mil­i­tary can pre­vent that, he said. (On this he’s prob­a­bly right.)
He went on to detail his vision of a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment. It would last two to three years at most, must pro­vide imme­di­ate ben­e­fits to the peo­ple of Iraq, would hold munic­i­pal elec­tions within six months and regional elec­tions within another six months after that and begin imme­di­ate crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions. The other duties must be to ful­fill oblig­a­tions to the U.N. regard­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion, he said, and human rights agree­ments must be adhered to. “It’s crit­i­cal to me that the tran­si­tional period not be seen as a final sta­tus,” he said. “I don’t think the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment should be the gov­ern­ment that signs a peace treaty with Israel. That should be the per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment.“
And most impor­tant, he said, the United Nations should not lift the sanc­tions. Instead they should be sus­pended so that the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment doesn’t gain con­trol of the country’s trea­sury and the per­ma­nent lift­ing of sanc­tions is an incen­tive to democ­ra­tize.
“If you want to ensure the tran­si­tional fig­ures do not become tran­si­tional in the Iraqi sense of the word — by that I mean last­ing 40 years — you can­not hand over the purse strings of Iraq,” he said. “Sad­dam did not imme­di­ately rule by fear. He co-opted the elite dur­ing the 1960s and ‘70s by drown­ing them in cash.“
The gen­eral con­sen­sus was that if pro­test­ers are anti-war, they are pro-Saddam, even if the pro­test­ers do not con­sider them­selves so. One Saudi woman asked if the United States shouldn’t take the Arab street into account, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that inno­cent Iraqis will die. Istra­badi said, as an Iraqi, he didn’t care what “some guy in Cairo” thought. Tal­a­bany said that peo­ple danced in the streets in Afghanistan when the Amer­i­cans came. Fa’ik fully admit­ted to hav­ing a nar­row view on the sub­ject and only cared about Iraq.
Istra­badi deplored “col­lat­eral dam­age,” as he put it, but said it was a weak argu­ment to say, “Inno­cent peo­ple will be die because of Amer­i­can bombs, so it is immoral to bomb.“
“Peo­ple are dying now!” he replied.
Istra­badi and the oth­ers missed a key point, how­ever. Through­out this evening, I heard them say sev­eral times, “The Iraqi peo­ple are all that mat­ter.” Well, actu­ally, the Amer­i­can peo­ple mat­ter, too, since the Iraqi oppo­si­tion is ask­ing our sol­diers — and pos­si­bly our civil­ians — to die for them. It mat­ters very much what “some guy in Cairo” thinks because if he teaches his sons that the infi­dels came into Iraq and con­quered it — and there will be peo­ple who think that regard­less of how well it goes — those sons could come to New York and kill peo­ple here. Maybe with a sub­way bomb. Maybe with some­thing worse. The “col­lat­eral dam­age” might not be lim­ited to Bagh­dad, and blood will flow in the streets of New York, Wash­ing­ton, Chicago…
There are only two really valid rea­sons for Amer­ica to take mil­i­tary action against another coun­try and that is to pro­tect the national inter­ests of the United States and to pro­tect the lives of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. One can argue that invad­ing Iraq will do both. One can also argue it will do nei­ther. I fall into the lat­ter camp and believe Fa’ik, Tal­a­bany and Istra­badi, as well-meaning as they are, as ask­ing the United States to place its own cit­i­zens in dan­ger from ret­ribu­tive ter­ror attacks so that they can free them­selves from Sad­dam. Lib­erty and democ­racy are wor­thy goals, and the United States should pro­mote them, but at the expense of lives here at home? I’m not sure if I could sup­port that.
But per­haps I could. As I wrote once before,

This cuts to the heart of my own ambiva­lence on the mat­ter of Iraq. I don’t trust the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to act in any but the most venal, self-serving man­ner. I don’t believe in going to war and killing inno­cent peo­ple if there’s no greater goal than access to oil and some slip­pery geopo­lit­i­cal goal of “benign” hege­mony that no one will admit to on the record. But if there were a real com­mit­ment to democ­racy and a free Iraq that was truly lib­er­ated not just from Saddam’s thug­gery but from the United States’ ambi­tions as well, then I might just con­sider that some­thing worth fight­ing for.

I have a great affec­tion for the Kurds. I hope they find their inde­pen­dence and free­dom. I really do. But like large swaths of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, I’m not con­vinced that the Bush White House is com­mit­ted to a demo­c­ra­tic Iraq. It is sell­ing out the Kurds, has shut down pro-democracy radio sta­tions and told Kuwaitis not to worry about a Shi’ite state.
Moti­va­tions mat­ter when a coun­try goes to war. Moti­va­tions — whether lib­er­a­tion or plun­der — deter­mine how the day after the war goes. What hap­pens if Iraqis, hun­gry for lib­er­a­tion, find them­selves under a petit-Saddam or a new Hashemite king backed up by Amer­i­cans troops based in their coun­try for decades?
Are we pre­pared to find out?