Iraq’s new prime minister will do whatever needs doing to impose order on the current chaos. Let’s not pretend he’s a nascent democrat
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 4:50 p.m. ET June 29, 2004
June 29 - Iraqis don’t grow bananas, but why should that keep the Bush administration from treating Iraq like a banana republic? The overwhelming invasion, the ill-conceived occupation, the obliviousness to what’s thought of as native culture, and the tendency to trust only those folks who know how to talk and act (and make us think they think) like us—hey, that’s the way we’ve been coming and going in the fever ports of Central America and the Caribbean for well over a century.
So, too, the handover of paper sovereignty yesterday, which took place ahead of schedule and in semi-secrecy, as if departing pro-consul Paul “Jerry” Bremer was embarrassed by what he’d done for the last year, or afraid for his life, or both. “Let freedom reign!” President Bush wrote in the margins of Condoleezza Rice's handwritten note about the handover. But is this any way to treat a great, sovereign nation?
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Left in charge as prime minister is a smooth-talking former Baathist, Ayad Allawi, groomed in exile by the Central Intelligence Agency since the early 1990s. Unlike his erstwhile rival, Ahmad Chalabi (who was groomed by the Defense Department, but always remained a bit too much the wily oriental gentleman for American public tastes), Allawi comes across as more of a regular guy, maybe even a potential golfing partner. He understands what the Americans want, and as long as we’re behind him with our troops and our billions, he may be able to get it. But let’s not pretend he’s a nascent democrat, even if he manages to hold some cosmetic elections.
Allawi is best understood as the anointed dictator in waiting. His job is to do whatever needs doing to impose order on the current chaos. Martial law, ruthless repression, you name it. With American firepower to back him up, he’s more than ready to take the blame for any rough stuff. Allawi’s defense minister proudly vows to chop off the hands and heads of terrorists. As Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have said about an infamous Nicaraguan dictator, “He’s a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.”
Problem is, these SOBs, once they’ve solved our immediate problems, create new ones. They aren’t ours at all. They’re in this for themselves. And they become the vehicles of disillusionment with everything that we Americans think we represent.
Our many SOBs in Latin America, for instance, from Somoza to Pinochet, led successive generations to hate the yanqui. They were told our Monroe Doctrine was supposed to protect democracy by keeping those bad old colonial Europeans out of our hemisphere, but learned through bitter experience the doctrine and its corollaries were only meant to protect America’s interest in its so-called back yard.
By the 1950s, when we figured the whole world was our back yard, and we had to keep the communists out, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam became our SOB Ditto the Shah in Iran. Strategic fears and strategic greed were the deciding factors. Could “our” guy impose order and keep our enemies at bay? Would he cut deals with the American military? And American business? Democracy was always an afterthought, although it was always talked about and elections, of one sort or another, were always held.
• Dickey: Digging Through Dusty Iraqi Files Is there credible evidence tying Hussein to 9/11? Absolutely not. Were there good reasons to worry about his links to radical Islamists. Yes, indeed.
• Dickey: Our Terror Stats Can't Be Trusted For most Americans, the 9/11 attacks came out of the blue. But the commission's report shows that the threat was right in front of their eyes for almost a decade
If I’d started thinking there was anything really new under the Iraqi sun, the papers I’m digging out of the boxes in NEWSWEEK’s new Paris office have convinced me there’s not. Even the threat of radical Islam is nothing new. The week I was born in 1951, a cover line on Newsweek read “Grand Mufti: Archvillain of the Mideast.” Evidence at a trial in Jordan, it says, “gave a sudden glimpse into the vast underworld of assassins, terrorists, religious fanatics, nationalist revolutionaries, and Communist agents that keep the Middle East in turmoil. And the evidence pointed to a single, sinister figure at the center of the web—the Mufti of Jerusalem.” The Bin Laden, or perhaps the Zarqawi of his day. (In the event, the mufti lived on until 1974, and died largely forgotten outside Israel, where he’s still remembered, and still hated.)
Nazis, Communism, Islamism—the threats varied, but the responses were the same down through the decades. After our SOB the Shah was overthrown by radical Islamists in 1979, we started looking for a new strongman who would stand with us against the commies and the Islamic tide now represented, not by the mufti, Haj Amin Husseini, but by the Ayatollah Khomeini. That new SOB, you might recall, was Saddam Hussein.
I’d like to think we could break out of this cycle, and that’s precisely what President Bush says he wants to do: stop supporting dictators just because they say we share the same enemies; start to build real democracies (after the enemy is eliminated, and a few hands and feet are cut off). But we shouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the world remains deeply skeptical. We may have forgotten all this history. But they haven’t. And when they look at it, the phrase that leaps to mind is not “let freedom reign.” It’s “yanqui go home.”
