Washington Post
Idealism in The Days After
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 16, 2003

In its closing rush of war preparations, the Bush administration has finally
begun to grapple with the political context of its expected military victory
in Iraq. This is the final moment to think big, think fast and think through
the dangers of answered prayers that Iraq will soon present.

Desert warfare consumes armaments and personnel at a blinding pace. Middle
East battlefields fell silent in days in 1967 and in weeks in 1973 and 1991.
An invading American army will soon push aside Saddam Hussein's genocidal
regime and bring to power -- what? The answer to that question remains
disturbingly vague at this late date.

Democracy is the broad-brush answer the administration has given, in what I
accept is good faith. Americans have helped create democracy out of
occupation in Japan and Germany, and through sustained contact in South
Korea and Taiwan. But the particular hazards of the Middle East to those
historical analogies cannot be ignored.

"It is hard to remain idealistic once you have a physical presence in the
Middle East," a Russian scholar said the other day, drawing on Moscow's own
bitter, draining experiences in the region. As he suggested, and as European
colonials found, it is easy to sink gradually into the cynicism, corruption
and decay that have long dominated the Arab world's misshapen politics and
that have become quicksand-like defense mechanisms against occupation.

This concern may be at the root of many of the grim predictions that come
from diplomats and scholars who have made their careers in the Arab world.
They prophesy that extended U.S. military intervention in the Middle East
can only end in Vietnam-like disaster. Well, they would. They know firsthand
the deeply corrupting cultural influences to which American forces will be
exposed when fighting ends. American idealism is one of the principal
potential casualties of extended military intervention in Iraq.

That is why it is necessary for the Pentagon to move rapidly and visibly to
turn power over to an interim Iraqi civilian administration as the immediate
battlefield tasks are being accomplished. There must be an Iraqi face on the
transition from the tyranny of the Nazi-like Baathist regime to a
transparent national effort to organize democratic elections in a year or
so. Only this course can thwart the efforts that will be made to portray
this humanitarian intervention as a new crusade or colonial undertaking.

Until now, the administration had tactical reasons for delaying the
establishment of a clear "day after" political context. But the flexibility
it has needed to mount the invasion now must give way to clarity and
coordination with a nascent democratic leadership that has, against
tremendous odds and most expectations, pulled itself together inside Iraq --
only to find immediate help scarce.

"We get no support, no interlocutors on the ground here, no effort to
coordinate with us on defections from the army, on using our contacts in
Baghdad to rise against Saddam, or on establishing communication networks to
broadcast our message during the intervention and its immediate aftermath,"
Ahmed Chalabi, the guiding spirit of the Iraqi National Congress, told me by
satellite phone from an undisclosed secure location in Dahuk in northern
Iraq a few days ago.

"Under U.S. protection, we established a functioning democratic
administration in northern Iraq and started moving the Kurdish body politic
toward becoming truly Iraqi," adds Barham Salih, a senior figure in
Kurdistan's autonomous authority. "We can extend that to a federal structure
of democratization for Iraq that will replace Saddam and enable us to change
the opposition as well -- to eliminate corruption and authoritarianism
wherever it exists."

Salih was in Washington last week for pre-invasion briefings. Kanan Makiya,
a leading intellectual in the Iraqi National Congress who only last month
publicly attacked the administration for not subscribing to the opposition's
democratic ideals, also met last week with senior U.S. officials here.

"They are beginning to structure a relationship with the new leadership
council we have developed. The need for an interim Iraqi authority is
becoming clearer to them," a newly encouraged Makiya told me. "They are
asking the right questions about involving the inside." Other sources said
that a high-level U.S. meeting with Iraqi National Congress leaders will be
held in Turkey this week.

It has been easy and fashionable in some congressional suites, CIA offices
and television studios to deride the efforts of these Iraqis and others as
failing to meet the standards of "Jeffersonian democracy." But they have
risked lives and livelihoods for three decades to fight Saddam Hussein and
are now close to triumph. It is in supporting Iraq's committed democrats
that American idealism will survive this war and its dangerous aftermath.

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