Insurrection in Iraq: Is Democracy Possible in the Middle East?

PETER HICKMAN: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming. Welcome to the National Press Club and another NPC Morning Newsmaker. My name is Peter Hickman and I’m vice chairman of the club’s Newsmaker Committee, a free-lance journalist, and former USA Foreign Service officer.

Before introducing this morning’s newsmakers, let me make the usual announcements. One, there will be a sound file, an audio file, of this Newsmaker, as with all of them, posted on the club’s website later today, which is Press.org, and it’ll be there for about 30 days, or you can buy a cassette from the library up front. And the Federal News Service is recording us, so they will sell you a transcript if you wish. Also, please turn off any of the usual things: sound – I mean – what do I mean? Cell phones -- thank you, Ron – walkie-talkies, whatever. Three, there is a list of other speakers and events coming up on the table outside -- I hope you might like to come to some of those – and some material related to this morning’s newsmakers.

And those newsmakers, as you know, are Dr. Daniel Brumberg on my far left, senior associate for the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here in Washington, and also an associate professor at Georgetown University; and Dr. Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and an occasional advisor to Ambassador Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Gentlemen, welcome to you both. Glad you’re here. I want to point out that both of our newsmakers are speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of any of the institutions with which they are associated. And I also want to acknowledge someone who suggested and moved a few mountains to help arrange this morning’s Newsmaker, Ms. Cara Santos Pianesi, sitting modesty in the third row, communications manager at the Carnegie. Thank you, Cara.

Well, copies of our newsmakers’ CVs are available outside, and you may already have them, so I won’t go into details of their background. However, let me just mention that both have extensive Middle East experience and have co-edited a recently published book called “Islam and Democracy in the Middle East,” published by Johns Hopkins Press.

And today, as you know, their topic is, “Insurrection in Iraq: Is Democracy Possible in the Middle East?” This comes as the Bush administration is launching a diplomatic campaign to seek regional support for its Greater Middle East initiative, which will be followed by talks by NATO, EU, and the Group of Eight nations.

After our newsmakers speak they’ll take your questions, and please let them know your name and affiliation when you ask them, and when you do have a question, if you’ll give me a signal I will call on your in turn, as many of you as time permits.

And finally, if you haven’t already done so, as you leave please add your name to the sign-in sheet outside. Thank you very much.

Gentlemen, who’s going first? Mr. Diamond?

LARRY DIAMOND: Well, we thought we’d go from the specific to the more general, so I’m going to say a few words more specifically about Iraq and where I think we stand now, which is obviously a very fateful moment. I will just indicate that I was most recently in Iraq for three weeks during the last three weeks of March and came back here at the beginning of April. Primarily I’ve been working on democracy programs in Iraq, advising on our effort to foster, in a variety of ways, the transition to democracy there. And let me say that one of the lessons I think we’ve learned as scholars of democracy as well as promoters of democracy in the last decade is that it’s not enough to have very good plans and strategies to promote democracy, and I think we have been doing in Iraq some very exciting, important and morally worth things to assist and empower civil society organizations.

I’ve worked particularly closely with women’s organizations, which are gathered together into something called the Iraqi Higher Women’s Council, which has mobilized very innovative, and I might say rather successfully, to improve the status of women and fortify that status in the political and constitutional process, which is why you have now a constitutional obligation in the interim arrangement to have 25 percent of the seats in the transitional national assembly filled by women. We’ve had a very extensive civic education campaign underway to promote democratic attitudes, ideas and values, as well as understanding of the transitional law that’s recently been developed.

Beginning early this year we have reached out to the United Nations in a way that has begun to involve them again crucially in the political process, and as you know, I’ll be glad to discuss it at greater length. Ambassador Brahimi is there now, consulting on a means of constituting an interim government. That’s actually only one of two United Nations teams that are in Iraq now consulting on the standing up of a more inclusive and representative political process. The other is a team of electoral specialists that are working to identify both an electoral system for Iraq and a system of electoral administration for Iraq.

So all of this, I think, is quite exciting and quite elaborate, and there’s a growing amount of resources going into it, not only by the U.S. government but by a plethora of non-governmental organizations, both totally nongovernmental and the quasi-governmental network that is led by the National Endowment for Democracy.

But the additional point I want to stress is that you can’t have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has as monopoly on the means of violence, and that has of course not been the case in Iraq since the end of the war, where we’ve had a growing problem of heavily armed and anti-democratic non-state actors. There are a number of militias in Iraq, which in many provinces have, in total number of fighters, well more than the total number of Iraqi armed forces, police, armies, civil defense corps, and so on, and certainly in some areas of Iraq outgunned them enormously.

Now, not all of these are determinedly opposed to democracy, but some of them are. What we have needed for a long time, and what we have resolved upon more recently, is a plan to negotiate the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration into the economy, society and formal architecture of the Iraqi armed forces. Those militias that are willing to play by the emerging rules of the democratic game. And negotiations have been underway since January for a comprehensive DDR process that I think has some considerable promise: disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. It’s actually a very conceptually impressive and comprehensive plan that was to have been announced, and I think probably still will be within the next few weeks. But the problem is you can’t get some militias to demobilize unless all militias demobilize because no one is going to disarm unilaterally in the face of potentially very dangerous enemies.

Any transition in a post-conflict situation faces some spoilers. Some elements that are heavily armed seek power and will not play by the rules of the democratic game. If those forces cannot be brought in, then you need to disarm them and demobilize them with force. I have believed for some time, and I can tell you many civilian officials who are working in Iraq in a variety of capacities have believed, that Muqtada Sadr is such a force; such a spoiling, anti-democratic force who ultimately would need to be confronted one way or another.

And I want to tell you a little bit about Muqtada Sadr’s army, the Al-Madhi army, and what it’s been up to in the last few months, during which this loose political and military movement has been growing alarmingly in size, muscle, and daring. They have seized public buildings, beaten up university professors and deans, taken over classrooms and departments, forced women to wear the hijab, set up illegal Sharia courts, set up illegal detention centers where people have been brutally tortured, imposed their own heavy penalties outside the rule of law, and made themselves, in fact, a law unto themselves.

All of this street action and thuggery has had a kind of fascistic quality to it, to intimidate and cow opponents to create the sense of an unstoppable force, really to strike absolute fear into the hearts of people who would seek to play by nonviolent, peaceful rules of the democratic game.

You may have heard that on March 12 th, the Madhi army marched into a gypsy village called Khalia (sp) and razed it to the ground in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing, which again has been reported but I’d be glad to say more about if you have questions. I think this was a worrisome harbinger of what was to come if this army was not demobilized and taken out of the political struggle for power. You, I’m sure, have heard that for months now we have had sealed arrest warrants for Muqtada Sadr and about a dozen of his top deputies for the murder a year ago of one of Iraq’s most important democratically oriented moderate Shi’ite clerics, Ayatollah Khoei, and we’ve been sitting on those arrest warrants while he has been growing in boldness and militancy.

So I have a somewhat different take on this than those who say that we should have just let this sit; we should’ve just used political means. I think there is no political negotiating with this fellow ultimately if you wanted anything like a democratic system of government in Iraq ultimately. Sometimes you do have to use force to face down anti-democratic elements. And doing this, if we do it in a way that doesn’t overreact and doesn’t make the mistake of using overwhelming force against sacred religious shrines and locations, for example in Najaf, but if we do it in an intelligent way and put the Madhi army out of business, I think we will have struck a blow for democracy in Iraq.

Now, I just want to conclude by saying that there has to be a military element to building security and implementing peace in a post-conflict situation, but the military element obviously is not nearly enough. There has to be a comprehensive political element as well. I’ve told you that with most of the armed militias in Iraq, the way we are seeking to deal with them is to negotiate arrangements by which they become demobilized and reintegrated into various aspects of society and the state. In addition, we have to have a political strategy, and we’re coming to a very fateful moment in that regard, to widen the political game and prepare for the transfer of governing authority to the representatives of the Iraqi people on June 30 th.

I am much more hopeful about that process than many of the skeptics. There is certainly no possibility that June 30 th could be delayed without an extremely counterproductive set of consequences in Iraq. The Iraqi people have been waiting anxiously for this transfer of authority. They do not abide occupation happily. And I think one of the things that has kept Iraq stable relatively to date has been the commitment on the part of the coalition, clearly and without any signal of wavering, to transfer authority on June 30 th. My own view is if this date is significantly postponed, there will be disastrous political consequences in Iraq among many Iraqis who still harbor suspicions that we’re there for other reasons: to begin to find a way to obtain permanent military bases, to get permanent control of their oil, to somehow manipulate the country. There are a thousand suspicions and rumors out there and it’s very important that we not feed them by postponing this date.

Those who say that we don’t have a plan to hand over power on June 30 th I think miss the important fact that we have taken a very positive step forward by welcoming in Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations and his team precisely to consult very broadly to identify a plan to constitute a government that will have significantly more legitimacy than the current Iraqi Governing Council has. And Ambassador Brahimi has been there now I think for probably two weeks and has been engaged in very intensive negotiations and consultations. This is his second visit there. He has a team of people, some of whom had been there the previous year, working under Sergio de Mello, so the know the country well, and I actually have some considerable confidence that they will come up with a plan that will constitute a government from a much broader base of Iraqi society, drawing in many elements, including, I might add, disaffected Sunni elements that are not well represented in the current Governing Council and that will create a wider base of political authority that will renew to some extent political hope an stability in the country.

We are in a very dangerous moment now. I’m an academic primarily; I am not going to stand here and delude you into thinking that everything is well and good, but I do want to underscore that it is also not the case that everything is lost, and I think we are beginning to turn a corner on the Muqtada Sadr insurgency, which does not have very broad support among the Shi’ite population of Iraq, and if we can avoid backing ourselves into a corner by a necessary escalation of these insurgencies, then I think we still have a reasonable hope of producing some kind of legitimate and inclusive political process.

Now I’m going to turn it over to my colleague, Dan Brumberg, who’s going to briefly discuss some of the broader implications for the Middle East.

DAN BRUMBERG: Thanks very much, Larry. Good morning to all of you. Thanks for coming. I want to elaborate on one point that Larry was making about this question of international involvement in the nation-building process in Iraq and then draw out a few points about the implications of what’s going on there for the Arab world. I have never been to Iraq, unlike my colleague who has spent time there, although I have lived in the Arab world and speak Arabic and have a good sense of the importance of the Iraq drama to the wider region.

I want to say that in terms of the point that Larry made about the internationalization of this whole political process, in a fundamental way, the problem in Iraq is that it’s a severely divided society. I think the divisions between the Kurds, the Shi’a and the Sunni are still profound and in that sense when I look at Iraq I see Kosovo, I see the Balkans, I see Bosnia, I see Lebanon, and I think the implications of this is that you really cannot establish an Iraq, an Iraqi military that’s going to have coherence and nationalist credibility for years. It’s going to take a long, long time to do that. And the military will always be subject to the centrifugal forces of ethno-religious conflict. As a consequence of that, in effect the international community will have to substitute for the state in Iraq for a long time.

The state-building process will go hand in hand with the role that the international community plays as, in effect, a partner to and a substitute for that state itself. And to the extent that the United States has played the leading role – and with all due respect to our NATO partners in this process, it is still viewed as an American occupation. And this fundamental fact fuels Muqtada Sadr, fuels Arab nationalist response, fuels radical Islam in a way that will continue irregardless of whether we quash Muqtada Sadr or not. We have a fundamental structural problem, and that is the perception that this is the perception that this is an act of occupation and not liberation. And the international community, not merely in terms of the role that Brahimi has to play politically, but the international community long term, for many years, will be involved in holding this state together. And the United States cannot lead that role ultimately. Initially it has to, it’s had no choice, but unless there’s an internationalization of the whole process, not only in terms of the political but the military process – because we will in effect, the international community, substitute for a state which cannot be coherent and will not have the kind of discipline it has to have for a monopoly of the means of violence for a long time.

The military will always be subject to these for a long time – not always; for a long time will be subject to these forces. And we saw what happened recently in the conflict in Najaf and in Baghdad and elsewhere, where military units simply dissolved. And I think that to the extent that we are going to repeat – and if you followed the reports in the Times and elsewhere, American officers feel that absent a political solution, the situation we’ve just seen will be repeated periodically over the next six months to a year. Every time this happens we feed the nationalist Islamist response. To the extent that this is a U.S.-led endeavor that pits the Americans against the Iraqis, in the perception of many Iraqis I think that is a fatally flawed approach, and in that sense I remain somewhat more pessimistic than Larry. I think that it has to be a basic and rapid internationalization of this whole process beyond simply the political.

But I certainly agree with Larry completely that the U.N. and Brahimi – it’s absolutely fundamental that it succeed in really becoming a major partner, if not the major player in the political process, and that the U.N. takes on this role, and what I’ve seen from the reports, from Kofi Annan so far, is they’re still hesitant to do so, given the security situation. So there’s a real conundrum there, and we can only keep our fingers crossed but I’m not overly optimistic.

Let me say that as far as the Iraq situation is concerned – of course, for the Bush administration – and Bush made this very clear, or reasonably clear last night in his press conference – for the Bush administration, in many respects, the whole democratization project that it has elaborated for the Middle East hinges on success or failure in Iraq, because if you look at the essence of our democracy projects, the kinds of projects that have been proposed for the democracy aid community, they are fundamentally in line with the kinds of democracy aid programs we’ve had for more than a decade. These programs focus on supporting civil society groups, enhancing women’s participation, and really focus on what’s called a kind demand side push from below for democratization.

None of them really question, fundamentally, the role of the state. Our partnership with autocratic states in the region remains strong, and in part because we have to pursue this war on terrorism. So the United States is not really toying with the fundamental problem in the Arab world, and that is the nature of the autocratic state. It’s really left alone, and there’s this perennial hope that somehow by pushing from below we can get democratization. We’re very hesitant, really, to address the fundamental issue, which is the nature of these Arab states themselves.

A consequence of that is that we’ve really hitched all our hopes on the Iraq sort of situation. The Iraq situation is the one place where obviously we took on the state and we decapitated the state, and there is this hope that by building a democratic Iraq, that somehow there will be this trickle-down effect on the Arab world, and I think that hope is, in some sense, misplaced in two fundamental ways. First of all, the Arab world is not a – most Arab states are not the kind of despotic states that President Bush has often described in his press conferences, and other administration officials. Most Arab states have a remarkable degree of kind of de facto political pluralism. They allow for openness – a kind of openness that is monitored by the state, controlled by the state, but allows for a great deal of flexibility. It’s an enormously ingenious system by which countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Jordan function, and that system is not going to be profoundly changed by the reality of progress in Iraq, but it will certainly be shaken by failure in Iraq. I have no doubt about that.

So I have a sense that we’ve hitched our wagon to a very iffy process in Iraq without an answer about how the rest of the democratization project will succeed, particularly if the Iraq gambit fails. And on this score my feeling is – I’ve written a recent piece for the Wilson Quarterly on this – that unless we find another candidate for a real democratization program in the Arab world, we’re going to be in serious trouble. And my feeling is that we should look on the other side of the Arab world, look to Morocco as at least one possible place we can talk about a real democratization strategy and not the same old sort of liberalization programs that have been at the heart of the American democracy aid programs for a lot of time. We really have to put our money where our mouth is. I don’t think we’re doing that.

And the second point is – then I’ll leave it at that and we can go to questions – I think we’re living in la-la land completely and totally if we think that we can push the democratization strategy such as it is and push for the transformation of Iraq into a democratic, liberal state if we leave the Palestinian and Israeli conflict to stew and to periodically blow up. There is really a total disconnect in the administration as far as I’m concerned – and here I’m speaking personally – between the notion of democratization and the absence of any kind of real readiness to push both sides, Palestinians and Israelis, towards a two-state solution. And time is running out. Time is running out. The possibilities for that kind of a solution are rapidly disappearing. And I have no confidence that a unilateral withdrawal, as Prime Minister Sharon has proposed, is going to be the first step to a two-state solution. On the contrary, it could be the first step to blocking such a solution.

So the administration has to demonstrate in words, and most importantly in deeds, that it is as serious about democracy for Palestinians as it is for Iraqis, and that is simply absent from the administration’s actions – not from its rhetoric but from its actions. And so long as that is the case, the democracy project that the United States proposes for the region has very little to no credibility.

And the final point is that of course events in the Palestinian-Israeli arena directly affect events in Iraq. Muqtada Sadr launched his sort of offensive against the United States on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He threatened to open up offices of both organizations. I'm sure that Hezbollah is very active in Iraq already; there’s plenty of indications of that. But clearly events in the Palestinian-Israeli theater fuel anti-Americanism and fuel anti-Americanism in Iraq in particular.

And so, our credibility is on the line. And the administration is not ready; it doesn’t have the political will to address this issue. My sense is that to talk about democracy in the region is really kind of exercised to echo the point of view of a number of my colleagues at Carnegie in a kind of abstract logic that has no real – will have no real positive implications for the region.

Thank you.

MR. HICKMAN: Thank you, Dr. Brumberg.

We are open for questions now. Please state your name and affiliation and state to whom your question is directed. Ron then Joel. And, gentlemen, would you speak into the microphone when you talk.

Q: Okay. Ron Vagents (ph), Kuwait News Agency. If you could just briefly touch on what’s the idea behind Sadr doing the things he’s doing, the timing? I guess an idealist might say, why doesn’t he wait until after June 30 th and see what happens? Is the idea that they don’t believe in the transfer of sovereignty concept at all? Are they trying to just establish a more powerful position prior to that? Or is it just to kill Americans and that’s good enough? Or whatever; you guys can just – well, why now? Why the timing of this activity on the –

MR. DIAMOND: Well, keep in mind that the descent into a confrontation with the coalition provisional authority began on March 28 th when Ambassador Bremer ordered the closure of Al-Hawza, his weekly newspaper, which was a really vicious, incendiary publication. Instead of moving comprehensively with a strategic plan to completely disable his operation, including the military aspect of it, we closed down the newspaper and then we paused, thinking that he would receive a message and draw back. The message he took from that was that it was time for him to escalate all of his plans to grab pieces of power and violently undermine the transition to democracy that I think he otherwise would have launched after June 30 th.

So why now is because the confrontation was deepening, and there was an action taken and he decided to respond by launching what I think clearly was a kind of revolutionary attempt to seize pieces of power. And I’ve said before, publicly, I think we made a serious tactical mistake by going only after his newspaper and not comprehensively after his whole operation.

MR. BRUMBERG: Yeah, as a scholar of Iran as well I may just add that from the very beginning – and Larry alluded to this -- Muqtada Sadr’s approach is really to emulate the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by setting up a series of networks and an alternative government, and to really infuse this with a kind of capacity for a mobilization that would in effect be able to substitute for any kind of other government that would emerge. And of course I think that Muqtada Sadr’s popularity comes in part from the fact that he does, in some sense, echo Khomeini’s legacy and he wants to sort of revive it in Iraq, and he has support for that endeavor from hardliners in Tehran; he has support for that in Hezbollah, but I think the other point to keep in mind is – and here’s there’s an interesting echo of the second intifada in Israel. We have, I think, underestimated the extent to which the lack of security in Iraq over the last year has really fed growing despair. People are backing Muqtada Sadr, not necessarily because they are ideologically supporting him but because they are simply despairing of their situation and are desperate. And it’s an issue of economic development, of security.

And so the numbers of people willing to support him grew in a way that we were not fully aware of in the last six months. And beyond that, of course, the way we took on Muqtada Sadr, by drawing out this process, really, as Larry said, enhanced his capacity to stand up and pose himself as “the” sort of leader of the resistance to the United States. So the combination of factors really made it possible for him to draw on support, and I imagine he was even surprised about the extent of support. To the extent that we can address the economic, social and security issues that created a willingness to back him for reasons that have very little to do with ideology, we can enhance the stature of this whole process and isolate him.

MR. HICKMAN: Joel?

Q: Joel – (off mike) – Reports. I guess it must have been about five months ago I asked, at a State Department press briefing, Secretary Powell – it was just at the time that Afghanistan and the Taliban had burnt a school, saying girls couldn’t go to school, shouldn’t go to school. I said, would you be appointing any type of individual or body to talk to Islamic leaders both in the Middle East and in Asia? And it appears that the State Department seems to talk government to government, meaning the United States will talk government to government but will never talk to, I guess, intermediaries in public. Now, it’s only recently, I suppose, they’re talking to Sistani, only because they have to.

What is the effect of such entities as Al-Jazeera, Al-Hurra, the TV station that’s now being broadcast out of Springfield, Virginia, sponsored by the United States, Radio Sawa, and such, to get a media message out to the various people. Of course, they’ve got satellite dishes, radios and such. And it’s like they never will get American media or even European media, for that matter, but it’s this radicalness that’s reached the airwaves.

MR. DIAMOND: Well, you’re really asked a couple of questions. First of all let me say that the problem with Ayatollah Sistani has not been that we weren’t willing to talk to him; it has been that he was so opposed to the American-led occupation that he wouldn’t talk to us directly at all. So we’ve only been able to communicate with him through intermediaries, but believe me, we have tried a number of times. And I personally think that some of the problems, some of the political problems in the transition process have resulted from the inadequacy of reliable and clear communication with him. After all, he sits in a fairly isolated place in Najaf. There are layers and layers of people you have to go through to get to him.

But we’ve been reaching out to a variety of nongovernmental and even nonpolitical actors in Iraq, and, you know, people at every level of the CPA have engaged them, I think, in a very positive way. Ambassador Bremer has made something of a priority of this. The extent to which we do this around the world is another question, and I think the implication of your question is valid.

We have not had a very effective strategic communication effort in Iraq, I can tell you that. Dan, I think, really should address this more broadly throughout the Middle East. But we are very clumsy in the way that we have done this, and our efforts so far, even the Arabic language efforts, I’d say have partial success and legitimacy at best. And I think that there has been a tension in the transition in Iraq and a tension in our broader communication efforts between the need for legitimacy, which means authenticity, which means ownership, which means effective Arabic and Iraqi voices and the impulse for control.

And I’d say what’s true overall about the transition now is also true about our communication efforts. We’re going to have to give up some of this impulse for control and allow more authentic and even critical voices to be heard in these communication efforts if they’re going to have credibility and therefore resonance and legitimacy. And I think that if we have media efforts that are, on some days in some respects, criticizing what we do, because they’re truly and completely independent, they will get more listenership, and then when there is a rumor out there that is patently false, they will have more credibility when they say that it is.

MR. BRUMBERG: Two points. On the issue of Ayatollah Sistani, I mean, I think that the problem we face with Sistani in terms of his role is that while he has tremendous authority in the clerical community, he doesn’t – he comes from a tradition of Shi’a quietism, which really means that he doesn’t have a political ideology, and that’s both a good and bad thing. The murder of Khoei last April was the murder not simply of an important Shi’ite leader, but of a Shi’ite liberal who had some sort of coherent notion of aligning his religious beliefs with a political agenda that has a certain coherence, and for that reason he was murdered.

And then of course, Muqtada Sadr’s people went after Sistani and surrounded his home. And anybody who thinks that ultimately this battle between these two forces, that it’s going to be somehow negotiated, I think they’re wrong. I mean, for Muqtada Sadr, he ultimately wants to preempt and remove Sistani’s authority.

We need, from the Shi’a community, religious leaders who are not simply quietists and say, well, let’s distance politics from religion, but some sort of coherent argument for a more pluralist state. And the murder of Khoei was a disaster in that regard because it removed that sort of voice from the political spectrum, and I think it was a tremendous – I recall the day vividly. For the history of Iraq it was a very sad day because it really removed an important voice.

I am skeptical that the Radio Sawa, Al-Hurra television network can really change the basic climate in the region. I am very skeptical. I don’t see – I agree with Larry that there needs to be more readiness to invest in the Arab and Iraqi resources to create a more credible indigenous voice. Of course, there are already dozens of Iraqi newspapers, and that itself is a problem because to sell newspapers they compete in rumors and what you get is kind of a yellow political journalism that undermines the whole effort. Muqtada Sadr’s newspaper is only one example of that problem. It wasn’t limited to his newspaper.

So I think that this approach of the administration of looking for some sort of silver bullet in terms of public relations is in some sense a way of getting around some of the more fundamental problems in our credibility, as I was alluding to a few minutes ago, and I think that unless there is a more comprehensive approach to the region, I think that our credibility will remain low and all the news networks and the television networks and the effort to build a public diplomacy program and get more people who speak Arabic, and all this that the administration has been talking to, is, again, blowing the wind until we have a more comprehensive approach to the region that, as I said before, addresses the Palestinian-Israeli issue in a more forthright manner.

Q: (Off mike) – Democracy. Two questions, really. One, is there any prospect of revising the TAL in a way that would be acceptable to both Sistani and the Kurds? And is this on Ayatollah Brahimi’s agenda, do you think?

And secondly, in terms of the Governing Council, why have, should we say, the secular elements on the Governing Council failed to develop any kind of a political base? I mean, one hears, for example, of the Communist Party developing embryonic labor unions and so on, but where are the secular democratic forces in Iraqi society? We’ve heard a lot about the religious and militia.

MR. DIAMOND: Briefly, on the first question regarding the interim constitution, the Transitional Administrative Law, it is the view of the CPA that that has now been settled in the negotiations and that the objections that Ayatollah Sistani and others have raised to some of the key provisions of it, such as the veto that any three provinces can have in the referendum on the entire constitution -- and of course there are three predominantly Kurdish provinces – that those can now only be addressed by the process that’s provided for in the transitional law for its amendment by a three-quarters vote of the transitional National Assembly, which of course won’t be elected probably until January, and by unanimous agreement of all three presidents.

So it’s, frankly, almost impossible to change the transitional law except through absolute consensus if you follow those procedures. I do want to say, however, that there is going to be negotiated in the next two and a half months an annex to the transitional law -- in fact, it may be completed within the next six to eight weeks – that will define the method for choosing and structuring the interim government that will take power on June 30 th before elections in December or January. Some people think some of the objections could be addressed in that annex but the CPA leadership is quite adamantly opposed to it.

On the second question, I think that two things need to be recognized. One is that some members of the Governing Council really have failed to take the steps that any adroit politician would have taken to cultivate natural constituencies and build political bases. Many of these people have been busy traveling throughout the Middle East and the world rather than busy traveling through Iraq, building up political movement and constituency.

However, I also want to underscore the enormous political disadvantage that incipient secular democratic political parties have had as a result of the fact that they have no money while money has been pouring in to Iranian-backed Islamist parties – pouring in, and while Saudi Arabia as well has been sticking its finger into the political pie by funding certain political parties based more in the Sunni heartland. And this has created an extremely unlevel political playing field, which to my mind needs to be addressed at some point if there’s going to be democracy.

MR. BRUMBERG: To elaborate on that last point, the situation in Iraq in some respects reminds me of the situation in Algeria in 1988, ’89 leading up to the first elections. That is, the most powerful parties, under those circumstances, were the Islamic parties, particularly the Fies (ph), and the secular parties, there were like 30 of them. Every fellow and his cousin was a party. There were like 45 parties, each with three people.

So when I hear that the communists have a party, I’m sure they have a party. They’ve got 39 guys in the party, or 49 or 59 – or 200 or 1,000. Yeah, they may have 3,000, but what will happen to the secularists is they’re going to divide up along liberal, communist, Ba’athist, socialist, god knows what lines, and they will not form a coherent coalition that can provide balance to the inevitable domination that the religious parties will have. We cannot get around that.

So the object here must be to recognize in part that the religious and ethno-religious parties will play the leading role, and to find some way, some mechanism of encouraging the secular parties, who will inevitably divide up among themselves to cooperate, and to do so under the present conditions, under the present economic and military conditions, to speak of finding a way of these leaders to get together and build coalitions and mobilize is very difficult to imagine.

But absent that, I can easily see an election in which the secularists, even if numerically they represent 30 or 35 or 40 percent of the population – they probably do – won’t find the capacity to compete with the organizational talents of the Islamists, and under those circumstances that’s going to really be a very difficult set of conditions to promote democracy.

MR. HICKMAN: The gentleman in the second row and then this gentleman.

Q: (Off mike.) This is a question for Larry. Can you say a little bit more about what the CPR’s plans are for the post-June 30 transition in terms of trying to give the interim government some sort of legitimacy and making sure that this handover isn’t seen as simply pomp and circumstance?

MR. DIAMOND: It’s hard to answer that, Derrick (sp), because the plans are not clearly formulated yet because the annex to the transitional law hasn’t been written, and the annex is going to define not only how the transitional government is going to be chosen, but what its powers are going to be.

My own view on this is that if there is a sufficiently representative process for choosing the transitional – excuse me, interim government to take power on June 30 th – and I’ll just say flatly, keeping the current Governing Council and simply adding another 25 members to it is not a sufficiently representative process and will result in the body being stillborn at birth in terms of legitimacy.

But if we consult widely around the country and can use the structures that you’re familiar with of provincial councils, local councils, which in many areas do have some representativeness and some legitimacy, professional associations and so on, to elect delegates to a more broadly inclusive body that would then chose a technocratic prime minister, who I think should be banned from bidding for office after the interim period, then I think it’s quite conceivable that this body could begin to rally some popular support and approval, and I think that it obviously needs to be given wide governing authority to make decisions to form budgets, to pass in a very limited way laws. You don’t want a runaway un-elected legislature. You’ll have an elected legislature soon enough.

But I think the really crucial question is how it’s going to be chosen and to what extent it is seen as more broadly representative and inclusive of Iraqi society.

Q: (Off mike.) Secretary Powell told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday that the leading horse right now is for some type of an expanded Governing Council as a transition. I was wondering, is that your view? Is that what you see is likely to come out of this thing? And I guess maybe in part just to ask the other question was how do you infer the minds of Iraqis’ legitimacy on that Governing Council? I think you may just want to prove your answer.

MR. DIAMOND: Well, I think Secretary Powell indicated that that is what’s being imagined now among many American government circles. I am speaking now as an academic, but I am telling you as an academic, this will not be successful. And if we do not endeavor more widely to broaden the base of governing authority – I’m not saying that the Governing Council should necessarily be jettisoned, though, believe me, in Iraq there are people who would like to see that happen, and they are not few in number – but simply adding another 25 people, particularly largely chosen by the Governing Council themselves, I think would replicate the current legitimacy gap. And I will tell you flatly the United Nations is in the lead on this, not the U.S. government. And I don’t think they’re going to make that mistake.

MR. BRUMBERG: Yeah, that’s a really important point, because as long as it’s the Governing Council, however big or small, that’s negotiating with the United States and making concessions, it won’t have any credibility. It’s really critical that Brahimi’s efforts succeed in that regard, so the negotiations that do take place are with the United Nations and the international community. I think that’s really vital.

Q: Well, what I took from Secretary Powell’s comments was he said he’d been talking to Brahimi, and he made this comment about an expanded, more representative --but maybe through the strictures you’re talking about, the Governing Council was – when he said that a leading horse right now – (inaudible) -- he had said that after he talked to Brahimi. What are your views or what are you hearing from this coming from Brahimi and his take on this entire thing? Is it similar to yours?

MR. DIAMOND: I am not going to speculate on what specifically Ambassador Brahimi and his team are going to come up with, because I think they are owed the respect of doing their consultations and coming up with it. But I’m just going to make a deduction for you. I am quite convinced, having traveled around the country and engaged a number of different Iraqi audiences of various types in different parts of the country, that the Iraqi Governing Council, as now constituted, has very limited and I think declining support and legitimacy in the country.

Ironically enough, it is probably increased in the last few days as some members of the Governing Council have come out and criticized the U.S. more vigorously. But nevertheless given that and given the fact that the UN team is – has its ear close to the ground, is knowledgeable about the country and so on and so forth, I think – I’m speculating, without any direct knowledge, that what they recommend will be more – will be broader, more representative, and more legitimate than a very limited and narrow expansion of the current Governing Council would be.

MR. HICKMAN: Joel?

Q: Since we’re in a very strange, unique period of time -- we’ve just held the 9/11 Commission hearings; now we’re watching that here in the states, but obviously they are too in the Middle East as well as in Asia. How does the Arab world interpret those hearings, in addition to the speech, a portion of which was I guess 16, 17 minutes last night, by President Bush, and then the aftermath of his press conference? And how does that extend clear maybe even to the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden might be entrenched and hiding?

MR. BRUMBERG: Well, I mean, everything that we’ve heard on the whole question of the 9/11 hearings -- weapons of mass destruction, the original rationale for going into Iraq -- has fed the perception that the United States had invented an excuse and a rationale for going into Iraq and imposing its will politically. No matter how much we believe that we are doing the right thing, and we are trying to assist the Iraqi people in developing a democracy, the perception in the Arab world is this is essentially an imperialist gambit.

And the kinds of words that, with all due respect, President Bush used last night – bringing freedom, this is our task, this is our mission, this is our goal, this is our – speaking of public diplomacy, if we think that that kind of rhetoric is going to convince the Arab world of our intentions, then we are living on the planet Mars. We really are. I mean, it’s an extraordinary unreal gap in what we think – the message we think we are conveying and the perception of that message in the Arab world. It couldn’t be more night and day, black and white.

And so rather than – I mean, the message was essentially for the domestic audience from President Bush last night, but it will get – it’s already been fed to the Arab world, translated, and people will look at this speech, and particularly, it is true that Bush avoided the word crusade. (Chuckles.) Okay, that was a positive development. But so much of the rhetoric, in English or translated into Arabic, is going to come across as the United States, again the U.S. on this mission to change and transform the world. And to the extent that it’s seen as imposed from outside and doesn’t have indigenous roots, it is seen as it’s going to feed nationalist, Islamist sort of sentiments, and only reinforce opposition to the project, hostility towards the project.

Now, there are plenty of secular intellectuals who will support it, but they are isolated, and they are to some extent discredited by this sort of rhetoric. We make life more difficult for them when we get up there and use this simplistic, cowboy rhetoric of bringing a democracy to the region. So I think that if anything, it is very unlikely that we did our cause much good last night through that press conference. It’s really – the mood in the region is so bad and getting worse all the time, and recent events in Iraq – the analogy made by many Arab intellectuals and journalists between the siege in Iraq and the siege of Jenin feeds this notion that this is an imperialist gambit. I don’t believe that for a moment that’s the case. It’s not. But perceptions count tremendously, and our credibility’s at stake. So I’m really concerned about how that message that was delivered last night will be received.

MR. HICKMAN: Any more questions? If not, then – yes, Aaron?

Q: Aaron Williams, Research – (inaudible). In addition to the instrumental role that you’ve described that the UN obviously will play in Iraq, do you think there’s any hope that any other moderate Arab nation, leader might step forward and play a role in supporting the work that the United States is trying to do in conjunction with the United Nations in Iraq and in the broader Middle East?

MR. BRUMBERG: Well, I mean, I think that our main partners in the region are doing their best to support us under difficult circumstances. I think that Brahimi carries a lot of weight, because Brahimi’s played an important role as an international negotiator. He has – he comes from a family of intellectuals and political activists in Algeria, Sunni intellectuals and Islamists. That is an important player in the Algerian political situation. So I think that to the extent that Brahimi has a sort of symbolic value, there’s great concern in the Arab world about the emergence of a Shi’ite radical state or even a Shi’ite democratic state.

And it’s interesting to note that the reemergence of the Shi’a in Iraq has had interesting repercussions already, not only in terms of reinvigorating the aspirations of Hezbollah in Lebanon, but creating tensions between the Shi’a and the Sunnis in Kuwait, for example. This has been a major issue in Kuwait for the last six weeks, seven weeks. So to the extent that Brahimi is – and then we have this issue of the Sunni and where they stand in the whole Iraqi project. They stand to be the losers of any democratic process, to the extent that Brahimi comes from an important family and is a Sunni intellectual, political activist, who can address those concerns.

I think the Arab world sees more than simply the UN. It’s not just a matter of the UN. Brahimi himself has a kind of credibility that is very important, so his success personally and professionally in terms of his links to the UN and the role of Algeria as a kind of intermediary all these years. These all come together, so in that sense, his initiative will go some way to building credibility among our Arab partners.

But again, I mean, look at the overall structural situation in terms of our credibility and the way things have been going. It is not easy for our friends in the region, leaders of Arab states, to make the case to their own publics for this endeavor. And at the same time, most of these if not all of these leaders are presiding over autocratic states, and we have this democratic mission, and that only complicates our efforts to sort of do these two things – get their support, at the same time promote the democracy project. But I think Brahimi’s role is really critical in the ways I’ve described it.

MR. HICKMAN: Ron.

Q: I’m sorry, just the whole thing – I guess, Dr. Diamond, I kind of wanted to hear your thing about – given the recent remarks by Kofi Annan expressing basically, we all see enough security to feel like we can do what we’re probably going to be asked to do, and then given this – well, I don’t know if it’s a perception, but it seemed like we’ve hitched our wagon to Brahimi and it’s pretty much up to him to pull all these different factions together in a very short time.

My question is, isn’t it a very real possibility that this is going to flop, and that Brahimi will not be able to pull all these people together by June 30 th, and that Kofi Annan will not feel like he can say anything positive and specific about the UN going in at a certain time? And if this happens, how can the administration put a smiley face on this -- or maybe that’s not the right phrase. How can we say, yes, this is working, if it becomes obvious that it’s not?

MR. DIAMOND: Let me distinguish between two different political roles for the United Nations, maybe even three. Again, you have two UN missions there now. One mission led by Ambassador Brahimi is specifically charged with consulting on the means for choosing an interim government and helping to define its structure. This is a project, a set of consultations, that I think could be more inclusive and wide-ranging in terms of just physically being able to move around the country or not.

They could wind up getting more consensus among key political actors or not, but even if it fails to achieve all of its aspirations for getting consensus among key political actors, I think Ambassador Brahimi will make a recommendation and come up with a plan that will have more legitimacy than anything that would be unilaterally decided upon by the United States-led coalition or that would be decided upon only by the CPA and the Governing Council.

So it seems to me whatever Ambassador Brahimi and his team do to recommend a plan in this regard is going to be better and more sustainable and, let’s put it this way, less illegitimate among the Iraqi people than something that would be largely – at least largely appear to be American-crafted. Then there is the separate process by which Carina Perelli and her United Nations team are identifying a structure for a transitional electoral administration and a set of rules for electing the members of Parliament. We need an electoral system in order to have an election.

So those two things I think are going to go on no matter what, even if the security situation is not very good. The broader question I think at least that you imply and one on many minds is whether there is any prospect that the United Nations might begin to consider a broader engagement in Iraq even approaching the level that they had before the August 19 th bombing. And that is where I think security is an intense concern of Secretary General Kofi Annan and of many other people in the United Nations. And I think that scale of involvement with literally dozens of UN people is probably not going to happen unless the security situation significantly improves. But even short of that, I think the UN, in its more limited Baghdad-based consulting roles and relatively smaller teams, can still make very important contributions.

MR. HICKMAN: Thank you. Any more questions?

Q: Yes, sir. (Inaudible) – what is your most honest guess as to where it’s going to sit in six months?

MR. DIAMOND: Where it will be in six months? You know, I think that there is such a range of possible outcomes I’ll let Dan, who’s maybe slightly freer to answer this in a brutally candid way, say so. But I will define the range for you. I think at one end, we could have a failure so comprehensive that there will be nothing left for us, except to withdraw and the demand on the part of an interim government that we do withdraw as soon as possible militarily. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but you know, it has to be acknowledged that that is at the negative end of the spectrum as a not-unimaginable scenario within six months.

And at the other end, I think we could be in a situation where we have recovered from the political and military blows over the last couple months; we have negotiated a comprehensive agreement on the militias that leads to their disarmament and reintegration; we gradually, partly through that process, build up a more effective Iraqi army and police; and we have an interim government that begins to get some traction and popular support; and we move down the road toward elections with significantly lower levels of violence than we have now.

The short answer to your question is we could lose this in the next six months. There’s no way we can win it in six months because winning involves too much of a protracted process of political transition, but I think we could correct our – the situation to the point where we could go back on track toward a, you know, a transition to at least a somewhat democratic form of government.

MR. BRUMBERG: Well, that’s a very hard question to answer. I think if there’s rapid progress on the political front, such that we can restore some hope that there’s a future there -- because what you have is a lot of young people who have a sense that they have no future and are ready under those circumstances as I said to back these more radical militias -- if we can get progress on that, that will be critical. If we are forced once again to use military force in some sort of confrontation, every time we do that and we only reinforce the perception that this is an American imperialist sort of gambit, feed the nationalists, feed the Islamists, and undermine our credibility. So unless we are able to rapidly prevail on the military level, we’re in serious trouble.

And as I said before, the problem is that prevailing under the circumstances that we are in now always means the United States. With all due respect to the Polish force, the El Salvador force, and so on, it’s perceived as an American-Iraqi confrontation. And I don’t know in the long term whether we can really address this fundamental flaw. It’s a structural flaw that was at the heart of how we went about this whole gambit from the start, and for that reason, as I said at the outset of my remarks, I remain fairly pessimistic, not only about the medium term, but the long term. To keep Iraq together as a national state will require a level of international commitment and involvement that will be – that we haven’t seen yet. And we have to overcome a lot of legacies in terms of the American approach to do so. That’s why I remain really hopeful in a kind of desperate way that Brahimi’s gambit for the UN will succeed. If it doesn’t, we’re really in serious trouble.

MR. HICKMAN: Any final questions? If not, don’t forget to sign in if you didn’t already, and I thank our speakers very much. Do you have some more comments?

MR. DIAMOND: No, I don’t. I was just kind of –

MR. HICKMAN: All right. Very good, guys. Thank you.

(END)

Transcript by Federal News Service ( PDF)