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Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again
and Expecting a Different Result in Iraq
House of Representatives - September 21, 2005

Mr. Speaker, I cannot think how we could have had two better speeches than that of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), which he just made, and mine. My real sadness about this House is that this is not being done in a debate where all the Members are talking and listening about this very, very important issue.

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The question that I think the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) well raises is, why are we in Iraq? Now, I recently was in Jordan, and I was confronted by many of the Iraqis who have fled from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. There are about a million Iraqis of middle class and above all living in Amman. The prices of real estate have gone up. It is very hard to find a hotel room. They have left.

I sat at dinner with a number of them, and the question that many of them asked me was, why is the United States in Iraq? And I sort of dismissed the ideas that have been advanced at various times in this Hall, that we are there for weapons of mass destruction, or we are there because of al Qaeda. Many people say we are there for oil. I think that is way too simplistic an explanation for what is going on.

Are we there to stop terrorism? Well, it is very hard to look at what is going on in Iraq and say that what we have done is to end terror. Rather, it seems like we have become a breeding ground and a training ground for terrorists.

After I had exhausted my ideas about what it might be about, I asked the Iraqis to tell me what they thought this was about. And they said, well, it is pretty clear that what your goal was, and you succeeded almost at this point, in dividing Iraq into three pieces and destroying Iraq as ever being an Arab nation. That was your goal from the start; and you have, by every decision you have made, you have worked in that direction.

Now, it was not a design that was clear. People have not understood this, in large measure because it was never enunciated in a public way by public figures saying we are going into Iraq to destroy it. We have talked about liberty, we have talked about democracy, we have talked about every other thing under the sun except the fact that the effect of our actions have been to destroy Iraq.

Now I will take you back to the appointment of the first governor of Iraq. Most people, if you ask them who that was, they cannot remember the name. It was a retired army general by the name of Jay Garner. He was appointed and he went over there, and he had the idea that perhaps the Iraqis should begin to take their own existence, now that Baghdad had fallen and with the Americans in control militarily, let the Iraqis put their country back together.

What happened to him? Anybody know? Well, I will tell you what happened to him. He was immediately relieved. He was taken out of the situation and Paul Bremer was brought in because Garner was not following the script, and they knew that Bremer would.

Now, just take a couple of things very early that Bremer did and you understand why the Iraqis feel the way they do about the situation today. The first thing he did was to dismantle an army. He disbanded an army of 500,000 people or so, all of whom had families, had homes, had children, had grandparents, had all the responsibilities of citizens of Iraq. They had salaries. They could pay for their families' food. They could pay for their families' housing. All of this was what they had been accustomed to.

Surely they had worked for Saddam Hussein. But to think that they all were bad and, therefore, should be disbanded and thrown to the winds was a terrible miscalculation about the attitude of the average soldier in the Iraqi Army. And what that action did was to send 500,000 Iraqis underground with a rifle and a grudge. We created 500,000 insurgents instantly by that action.

Now, why would you do that? Why would you want to go into a country that has an army that is functioning and not take off just the top layer, no, no, no; not take off the first couple of layers, maybe down to the sergeants or something, but to fire everyone and take away their income, their whole existence, if you thought that was in the best interest of the Iraqis?

But if you want chaos, put 500,000 people out on the street with guns and a grudge.

The second thing that we did, equally disruptive and equally destabilizing, was the decision to de-Baathize the government. Now, the Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein, which is secular, not religious, but a secular party of Arab nationalism, basically, and the decision to say that everybody in Iraq who belonged to the Baath Party was suddenly out of a job and out of government took another hundreds of thousands of people who were simply public servants who ran the utilities, ran the electric company, ran the sewage system, taught in the schools, did the marriage licenses, recorded land deeds, and whatever public servants in a society do. We suddenly said, if you are a member of the Baath Party, you are out of here.

We absolutely denuded this country of any government whatsoever. Now, you would not have to be older than about a seventh grade kid in this country to realize if you take away the Army and take away the government, you have chaos. If you go into the schools and you take away the teacher, take away the principal, the hall monitors, the kids are not going to run a very reasonable operation. That is what the educational system is about. Well, we did that to a whole society.

You can say we know, and you are standing down there in the well talking about this, but you never wanted to go to war in the first place.

One of the interesting things that I have done over the course of time since this all began was to read widely in the international press. It is very often difficult in this country, either in the press or in the media, to get anything like a comprehensive view of what is going on in Iraq and why we have so much difficulty. We have the strongest Army in the world. There is no question about that. We have the bravest, the best trained, the most able people in the world are over there representing in the United States Army and Marines, and Navy and Air Force. That has never been the problem or the question.

The question has been after the gunfire stops, what do you do? How do you run things? And from the very start, the administration has been dominated by people whose intention was to destabilize Iraq, in fact, into destabilizing very wide portions of the country. Not many of you have probably ever read the Jordan Times. That is the main newspaper in the city of Amman which is the capital of Jordan.

On August 10, 2005, an article appeared called, "The Triumph of Neoconservatives in Iraq," (see article below) and which I will include for the Record.

The article was written by a man named Abbas J. Ali. He is a professor and director of the School of International Management at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; obviously an Iraqi living in the United States, and he wrote this article.

If you read just this one article, and I wish I could get it into the head of every Member of Congress, part of the reason for putting it in the Congressional Record is people can get it and read it and see it. You do not need to Google it. It will be in the Congressional Record. He begins by saying that three recent developments in the Iraqi political arena reaffirm the growing fear of destabilization and things are becoming worse. First, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12 years. The New York Times reported on June 30 that a type of federalism, as supported by Washington, where each region in Iraq gains power approaching true sovereignty, and that means creating three separate countries.

Mr. Speaker, our goal or what we are actually doing right now is creating three separate countries. We are not creating Iraq. We are going to put some shine on it and try and say it has a constitution, but the pieces will be sovereign from one another.

The third thing he says that happens is the appointment of Zalamy Khalilzad as Ambassador, who is a neocon and will do the neocon bidding from the start.

Now, this did not start with George Bush the second. This is not something new. I do not think you can lay it all off on the present occupant of the White House.

Dr. Ali writes that back in the 1970s, the neoconservatives recognized Iraq constituted a threat to their design for the Middle East, not because Iraq had ample natural resources, especially oil and water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and cultured people displaying pride, patriotism and independent thinking. It had the best water system in the Middle East, it had the best sewage system in the Middle East, it had the best health care system in the Middle East. It was really a functioning country. For whatever you want to say about Saddam Hussein, and no one wants to say a good thing about him and we should not, his actions as a leader were awful, but when he was dealing with the running of the state, he did a reasonable job.

Now at that time in the 1970s, General Shinseki, then the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, pointed out, and remember Shinseki was the guy they fired because he gave them the truth about how many people this would take, Shinseki pointed out that in 2002 Paul Wolfowitz, and remember that name, now the head of the World Bank, as a young Pentagon analyst and a neoconservative, designated Iraq in 1979 as a menace that must be dealt with. Since then the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been primarily a neoconservative venture. The neocons have wanted this and that is why this article was entitled "The Triumph of the Neocons in Iraq."

If Wolfowitz was not enough, in 1982 a man named Oded Yinon accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with Iraq to foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. He notice that in the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel and that a division of Iraq into provinces along ethnic religious lines is possible. So three more states will exist around the major cities: Basra in the south; Baghdad in the middle; Mosul in the north; and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.

This is 1982, people were laying this out.

It is for this reason that the neoconservatives have made a very powerful argument, he goes on to say, and he quotes a man named Michael Ledeen, who is not just some newspaper reporter or somebody drifting in off the street. He was the former U.S. Under Secretary of State and he stated, "Stability is an unworthy American mission." This is a man who was in the State Department, saying that stability is an unworthy American mission and a misleading concept to boot. He said we do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or even Saudi Arabia. We want things to change. The issue is not whether but how to destabilize.

Think about that. The minds in the State Department, and this is an Under Secretary of State saying we want to destabilize.

Now there have been books. Lawrence Kaplan and Bill Kristol, they asserted in their book "The War Over Iraq" that this is more about even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror, it is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the 21st century. They argue that the only plausible and sensible mission is to persistently supply American might in these parts of the world that constitute a threat to American interests.

And the mission, Michael Ledeen goes on to say, is ensure the total submission of the people in the region. He stated this in 2001. We have gone from 1979 all of the way up to 2001. We will not be sated, and this is an Under Secretary of State saying we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheik, ayatollah either singing the praises of the United States or pumping gasoline for a dime a gallon on American bases in the Arctic Circle. Gasoline is not a dime a gallon.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ledeen and his men have worked and been very consistent and very determined. We are talking about a 25-year effort from 1979 to the present. But in the Bush second term, this article goes on, the neo.con.serva.tives appear to have secured indisputable domination in designating American foreign policy. They have situated themselves at the core of the three primary agencies responsible for foreign affairs: the National Security Council, and State and Defense Departments. Now, with Ambassador Khalilzad in Baghdad, they have him in position to carry this out from the green zone.

They are building the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad. Why would you be building an embassy of that size for a country of several tens of millions of people unless you had some grand design, strategy into the future?

Now, if you look at this, you say to yourself, why? We have sacrificed 1,900 of our young men and women in this war. They have died. For what? To destabilize Iraq? That is what the people in the State Department and in this government are up to. It is why it has never made any sense.

We have had thousands of people come home to Walter Reed Hospital. I have been up there. I was a physician in the Vietnam era. I dealt with casualties coming back from Vietnam, 1968 to 1970. You do not have that experience and forget it. That is what got me into politics. I was going to be a doctor, a research doctor. I thought my life would be spent in medicine. But that experience of dealing with those casualties and realizing what the government did by its foreign policy, what it did to all of the people of this country, brings me to the floor today to talk about what we are doing in Iraq.

We have been misled in many, many, many ways. I do not go to these secret briefings they have in the House, because I know that the people who led us into this war are not going to tell us the truth even when the doors are locked when we are in private. They simply are not leveling with the American people.

The President says we are going to stay the course, and we put our governor in there, Mr. Bremer. We destabilized everything and things fell apart, and now we say oh, they are all coming over the border from Syria. There are only two places where they can come in where there are roads. It is very difficult to get in from that side. They are not capturing these people. They are killing people and they identify them just as they did in the Vietnam War. We have killed so many soldiers. The body count in Iraq is people who have died. That is okay. They have died, but they are not insurgents coming from somewhere else. By and large, the insurgency in this country of Iraq was created by sending 500,000 soldiers underground with weapons and a grudge. We are tasting the fruit of our planting those vines. Unfortunately, we have also in the process killed I do not know how many thousand because no one will count the number of Iraqis. It is as though they do not matter.

Nor do we talk about the number of them that are injured. When we look at that situation and we see what we are doing, we have to ask ourselves how much longer can we persist in staying there. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) and I might disagree at this point because he thinks that it is just going to be the end. Well, my belief is that we are already in a lose-lose situation.

Let me explain why I say that. We have gone into a country that was a secular country. People did not think of themselves as Catholics and Protestants like Northern Ireland. They did not fight about that kind of stuff. They thought of themselves as being tribal: I belong to this tribe; you belong to that tribe. We take care of our tribe; you take care of your tribe. We work out an arrangement. You get some; we get some. And that is basically how Iraq has run for thousands of years.

So the Americans came in, and suddenly we whipped up this business that is understandable in this country about religion. Shi'a do not like Sunni and Sunni do not like Shi'a. There is a much bigger force at work here that people simply, I think, maybe because it is complex, and I have got an hour, so I can talk about it a little bit and explain it, but simply do not understand the makeup of the Middle East.

There are two large groups of Muslim people. Iraq had Muslims from Shi'a and Muslims from Sunni. They also had Christians living there. They had Jews living there. They had Kurds living there. They were a secular society that did not go around checking people's religious card to see what they were. Our attempts, as we have gone in there, to create this chaos and turn it loose and say, well, you Shi'a have always been under the control of the Sunnis forever here, you are the majority. This is your chance to be the majority. So we have gotten them fighting. It is an old, old strategy. The British Empire used to use it all the time: let you and him fight and I stand by and watch and I control what is going on.

So we have gotten the Sunni and the Shi'a to fight each other. But what we do not understand is there is more than one kind of Shi'a. Some of the Shi'a are those living in Iraq. They are Arab in background. They are Arab tribal people who are Shi'a. And then there are the Shi'a who live in Iran. Iran, before it was called Iran, was called Persia. So in Iraq, people talk about Arabs and Persians. And the fight between these two countries is not about Sunni versus Shi'a. It is about whether those Persians are going to come in and take over our country. If this situation that we are setting up where we are going to have one part being Shi'a in the south and a little bit of Sunni here in the middle and the Kurds in the north, if that three-part government is set up, we will have set Persia, Iran, with a chance to invade. And as some of us said many, many months ago, the danger of this war is we are going to wind up with two Irans, one next to the other.

Now, one can say whatever they want about that; but, of course, Iran has been the source of a lot of tumult and terrorism and all kinds of stuff. So the question of having two of them does not sound like that makes things better in the Middle East. But that is what we are driving toward right now. We are driving in that direction.

What will derail it and the name people see on television once in a while, it is a young man and his name is Muqtada al-Sadr, S-a-d-r. Muqtada al-Sadr is a young flamethrower of a Shi'a, but he is Arab. And he, last week, turned out 200,000 people on the streets in Iraq to protest this constitution, which is going to give the control of the country to the Shi'a. He himself, Shi'a, that does not matter. What matters is he is Arab; so he is now aligning himself sort of imperceptibly, at least as far as Americans seem to be knowledgeable, with the Sunnis. The Sunni army that was sent underground is now aligning itself with Muqtada al-Sadr.

We then have created two equal forces. And every Iraqi I met said almost the same thing one way or other. They would say, If you succeed in pushing that constitution you people are pushing, and you wrote it and you gave it to those people and said pass it, there was never any agreement on it. They just passed it and brought it out.

They are going to put it out for referendum in October. If you succeed in passing that, you will have civil war in this country for 15 years or more. That constitution will not serve as a governing document for the Iraq of today because you have created so much dissension and given the Iranians such a chance to come in.

Now, we hear our President say, well, not only are they coming in from the west, from Syria; they are coming in from Iran. Of course they are. The leading spokesman for the Shi'a in Baghdad to whom everyone listens and is the one that our government responds to is a man named al-Sistani. Al-Sistani is a Persian. Someone told me, and I am not sure because I have not had a chance to check, that he did not actually vote in that Iraq election before because he was not a citizen of Iraq. He is a citizen of Iran. So the main spokesman with whom we have been dealing, and people will see his name, we call him a moderate, that he is a moderate Shi'a and all this. We have built him up. Well, he is a Persian and he is connected to all the Persians.

And Muqtada al-Sadr, of course we can see. I mean we have had plays from the Greek times of Oedipus Rex. We have got the old man and the young kid and they are fighting. Whatever the reasons are, the Shi'a-ness does not hold them together. Certainly their Arab-Persian thing is pushing these two apart, and Muqtada al-Sadr is going with the Sunnis.

Now, the Kurds sit up in the north; and for the first time since the World War I, they have been promised over and over again, and they have been let down over and over and over and over again, that they are going to have their own state. There are about 40 million Kurds. Most of them will live in Iraq, but large numbers of them live in Turkey to the north and Syria to the west and in Iran to the east.

And they are a fierce, independent people who are Sunni by religion; and the Shi'a, who are writing the constitution, say the Kurds' army, which are called Peshmurga, the Peshmurga has to come into the Iraq army. We cannot have an army in Kurdistan and an army in the rest of Iraq. It has got to be one army. Well, the Kurds say, I do not know how thick the ice is going to be on hell before that happens because we are never going to allow any army to come into the territory we have in Kurdistan. We are prepared to die because we finally have our own country.

They have a parliament that functions. They have two factions there that fight with each other, and it is like every other country. There are Democrats and Republicans. That is fine. They need that for government to work. But they have put down their arms against one another and are dealing with the outside world and saying, no, we will be a part of Iraq. We certainly will. We have oil up here in Kirkuk in the north, and we think we are entitled to some of the revenue from the oil, and we will run our area and we will educate our children and we will send them to the United States for medical school. There are a lot of Kurds in the United States going to school. They are very bright, very hard-working, very tough people.

They have gone through a lot in the last 85 years since World War I when they were promised that they would have their own land.

If we look at that situation, we have the Kurds and we have the Sunnis and we have the Shi'a. One says to himself, gosh, you have just now painted a picture that you are saying a constitution will not bring them together. Well, let me say there is some hope. There is hope in this. But what it requires is the United States and the people, the neocons who think they have won, to recognize that they have not won anything. They have created a horrible, horrible costly mess that has cost us at least $240 billion so far and God knows how much more it is going to cost us, and it made us incapable of responding to our own people when problems came in New Orleans.

Part of the Governor of Louisiana's problem was that 13,000 of her National Guard were in Iraq. She could not call them out, to get their trucks and go out, help people, put sandbags, do whatever they do in that kind of situation. They were not there. That is just one element of what went on. Because we were enmeshed in this war in Iraq, we were unable to respond to them.

Now, God forbid that we are waiting for another hurricane, Rita, to hit the coast of Texas. We do not know what it is going to do. Are the Texans ready? How could they have gotten ready since what went on over here in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama? Do people think they have suddenly magically gotten ready for Texas? The Texas National Guardsmen who are over in Iraq, they are not home to take care of their people.

And we simply have a President who says we are going to stay the course, that we are going to keep doing the same thing we are doing in Iraq because it is the right thing to do and we are going to keep doing it. Well, there is an old joke in psychiatry about the definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. We get the same result.

We are doing the same thing. We go into a town like Fallujah. We flatten it. Now we have gotten rid of those terrorists. We go away. And lo and behold, they come springing up again, coming back into the town. They know where we are. They just run off and hide. They are not going to confront our military head on head. That is not guerilla warfare. Guerilla warfare is to let the enemy figure that they have got it made and then get them when they are not paying attention. That is what they have done all over the country.

We do not control any part of Iraq at the moment, except the Green Zone where we have a fence and barbed wire and razor wire and everything else. And the only way we are going to manage to undo this situation is for our administration to find some way, some way, to honestly say we are not going to establish permanent bases in Iraq.

When I suggested that to the Iraqis I talked to, they laughed. They said, your President is not going to say that. But our administration is going to have to say something like that, and then do a second thing. Because they have to say, we are not going to have permanent bases and we are going to leave the country in some orderly period in an orderly way. But before we go, we want to set up, and I suggest, and I do not know, maybe there is another place to do it; maybe Paris or some place, but Amman in Jordan, not very far away; it would be a place to convene an Arab summit made up of Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turk men, Turk men are people who came from Turkey and have settled in this basic area; and have them go to a peace place and sit down and work this out among themselves.

They do not want their families killed. They do not want to have this continuing warfare. I mean, they are like everybody else. They want a place, a house for their family, they want food for their kids and their wife or their mother or their father, whoever; they want schools, they want health care, they do not want this continuing warfare with the people dying in the streets and the awful pictures we see. They do not want somebody falling down with a bridge, because there is a threat of some sort, people run out on a bridge and it collapses. They are not looking for that.

If we would get that summit going where everybody who had a stake would come and sit down and say, let us have a cease-fire in Iraq while we work on the problem here and see if we cannot come up with a way to govern a new country without Saddam. Everybody is glad he is gone. You do not find many people who say, boy, I sure wish Saddam was around. There is not anybody.

So it is not that they want to bring Saddam back at all. Some people say, oh, you are just talking about bringing Saddam back. No. These groups can sit down and work it out. Arabs have worked things out in their culture for thousands of years.

Now, there are also parties that would be interested in being helpful, perhaps, because my colleagues will remember we talked about Iraq has got Shia and Sunni in it. Well, what do we have in Syria? It is all Sunni. What do we have in Jordan? Almost all Sunni. What do we have in Saudi Arabia? Almost all Sunni. What do we have in Turkey? Almost all Sunni. These other countries have a huge stake in this not becoming a second Shia Persian threat to their way of life, because they think, well, take Saudi Arabia.

The area around the oil fields from which we get our oil, or the world gets its oil, the biggest oil fields in the world are right in the middle of a Shia area. So, if you have Iran and Iraq, and you moved on into Saudi Arabia, which is not very far, you suddenly have a crescent of Shia control of almost all the oil in the area. A big threat to everybody; to the Sunnis, certainly, to the Americans, to the Europeans. Everybody has a stake in this. And if you get a conference going where you have people sitting down talking and not killing each other, then they can work out an equitable arrangement and find a way to resolve this.

It cannot be dictated by the United States. Unfortunately, what happens again and again is that we have these parliaments. We have elected a parliament, and then we go in and tell them what they have to do. Here is what it has to look like. It has to have this provision, that provision, we do not like this, you take that out. We, by our heavy-handedness, have really tried to run everything in this situation. And it can be ended. It can be ended, if we will allow a process to begin in which Arabs can sit down among themselves and solve it.

Now, I tell my colleagues this because let me tell my colleagues how it works. I have a very good friend, a Jordanian, who told me a story that he knows. And this is Arab culture. A man was driving a cab and he drove the cab and he hit a man and killed him. Well, that means you are responsible, and the crowd was about to get him. This guy ran up the street and ran into the home of a young man and demanded that he be given sanctuary. That is the Arabic custom. You will give sanctuary. In fact, the young man, when the police came and when people came, he said, I never saw this guy you are talking about. I do not know what you are talking about. The crowd went away. He called his brother and said, take this man and take him home, so the man went home, was taken to a safe place.

Then he went down in the street and discovered that the man that had been killed was his father. So now he has a legitimate cultural right to exact a price for his father's death. What would you do? You now know where the guy lives; you can go over to his house and kill him. He did not do that. He just left it alone. He met him in the street some months later, about four years later, met him in the street and he said, the guy knew who it was and he was frightened and he said, look, you and I will have coffee together. So they had coffee together. And he said, the man whose father had been killed said, you must put on a feast for our family in memory of my father. So the man put the feast on and the issue was gone.

People in this Arab culture have a long history of certainly violence, but also of peacefully resolving situations. And what we are doing by continually bombing; one of the things the Iraqi said to me was, you have to stop this business of kicking in the door of a guy's house and going in and dragging his wife out of bed and embarrassing her and him and making him look weak and impotent and all the rest, you have to stop that. You keep doing that, you keep making Iraqis angrier and angrier, and yet we continue to do these things.

As long as we continue to do war and do not allow a peace process to begin to spring up, actually, the King Ab'dullah was here in the city today talking at the prayer breakfast. He, or his uncle, the Crown Prince al-Hasan, or there are other people who are trusted by both Shia and Sunni who could be seen as an honest broker. But we must take the first step.

We have to allow that to happen. If we continue to do what we are doing and stimulate, this will go on until probably the next election or beyond, until one day we do what we did, and that image, the very famous picture in Vietnam of that helicopter lifting off that building, it was not the embassy actually, it was a hotel down the street where people are hanging on the skids of this helicopter as it lifts off the ground, that is going to be our fate in Iraq if we continue on this path. Because we cannot win it with military might.

The time has come to talk. And we have never been able to get the gunfire down to the point where this constitutional process that was supposed to lead to peace, that was supposed to be a peace conference under other names, but the Sunnis did not participate in it. So you cannot have it be that way. It cannot come out with a peace if one of the groups has boycotted it. You can say, oh, it was stupid for them to boycott it, they should not have done that. You can blame all you want. But it did happen that way. They did not participate. So the only way you are going to get it is a conference some place where you can get all the parties sitting down and saying, all right, look, how are we going to work this thing out?

We have oil revenue, we are a rich country, there is no reason for us to be in poverty like we are in; we can use that wealth for everybody, not just for one group or another group. We will let everybody have a part of it, and we will make this again the country that it was. This country has a long tradition of being a place of refinement and intelligence and civil society, and it can be that again if we will allow that to happen.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that you will ask the President to reconsider the advice he is getting. I know it is very difficult to be President of the United States and you do not know everything that you are going to face. Certainly, one can have empathy for the President having suddenly been confronted by 9/11 and all the rest. But the advice that he has been listening to and following is leading him deeper and deeper into chaos, and it is time for the President to lead us out of that chaos by taking the role of saying, I believe it is time for us to convene a peace conference somewhere. We will not have any part of it, but we think it ought to happen over there, and maybe so-and-so could be the leader. I mean, maybe it would be better if the President did not suggest anybody, because it would probably work better if he just said to the Arabs, who would be the one to convene the conference?

Let them decide. If we want peace and we want democracy and we want liberal treatment of women, and if we want all of those things for the Iraqi people, we have got to change our policy.

The Triumph of Neoconservatives in Iraq
By Abbas J. Ali
August 10, 2005
(Entered into the Congressional Record by Congressman McDermott)

In his speech on June 28, President George W. Bush accurately characterized the situation in Iraq as "horrifying, and the suffering is real." Previously, Bush had described the invasion of Iraq as a "catastrophic success." Foreign affairs analysts agree that in both cases, Bush accurately captured the reality of the Iraq mess, but were equally surprised by his insistence on staying the course. The fear is that Iraq hardship and bloodshed may be deepened and reversing the state of disorder is a remote possibility.

Three recent developments in the Iraq political arena reaffirm the growing fear. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12 years, The New York Times reported (June 30) that a type of federalism is supported by Washington, where each region in Iraq gains power approaching true sovereignty, and Zalamy Khalilzad assumed his position as the American ambassador in Baghdad. The last two developments are interrelated and are certain to turn the transformation of Iraq into a bloody mess.

In particular, Khalilzad is a pivotal factor in the Iraqi equation. Khalilzad was a member of the team that planned the invasion of Iraq and aggressively promoted a vision for Iraq where the Iraqis play only on advisory role in determining the future of their country. As a hard line neoconservative, he is an adamant advocate of the virtue of perpetual war and the use of forceful approaches to world problems. When Henry Kissinger, a neoconservative strategist, in November 2001 articulated a plan for creating "a central Kabul government of limited reach, with tribal autonomy prevailing in various regions," in Afghanistan, it was Khalilzad who translated it into a reality.

Back in 1970s, the neoconservatives recognized that Iraq constituted a threat to their design for the Middle East. Not because Iraq has ample natural resources, especially oil and water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and cultured people, displaying pride, patriotism, and independent thinking. General Eric Shinseki, then the US army chief of staff, pointed out in 2002 that Paul Wolfowitz, as a young Pentagon analyst and a neoconservative, designated Iraq in 1979 as a menace that must be dealt with. Since then, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been primarily a neoconservative venture.

In targeting Iraq, the neoconservatives envision war and military intervention as instrumental in the polarization of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions and ultimately ending Iraqi Arab identity. For example, in 1982, Oded Yinon accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with Iraq to foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. Yinon noticed that: "In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel" and that a division of Iraq "into provinces along ethnic/religious lines ..... is possible. So three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

Critics and political commentators agree that the neoconservatives are obsessed with a grand design to militarize the globe and globalize fear. Knowledgeable observers, however, acknowledge that the core of the neoconservatives' thinking revolves around the Middle East and the role of Israel. Unlike Bush, the neoconservatives harbour the belief that freedom for the Arab people, prosperity, and cultural renaissance are a threat to Israeli security and vitality. It is for this reason that neoconservatives make a powerful argument for creating instability and chaos in the Middle East. This was well expressed by Michael Ledeen former US undersecretary of state and a leading neoconservative, when he stated: "Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize."

Indeed, the neoconservatives have been exceptionally successful in promoting four primary propositions:
1. The welfare of American people and the prestige of the US in the world are contingent upon the ability to dominate the world and especially the Middle East.
2. The U.S. invasion of and military presence in Iraq ensures American safety, security and world peace,
3. The U.S. goals coincide with Israeli goals. Therefore, the invasion of Iraq served the interests of both countries.
4. The Arab people are inherently anti-American and a threat to American interests. Thus, the presence of American forces in the region is an imperative necessity and is essential for world peace.

Neoconservative thinkers Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol assert in their book, The War over Iraq, that the decision about what course to take in dealing with Iraq, "is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the 21st century." They argue that the only plausible and sensible mission is to persistently apply American might in these parts of the world that constitute a threat to American interests and foresee Iraq as a starting stage; the "mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there."

The mission, as Michael Ledeen defines it, is to ensure the total submission of the people in the region. He stated in 2001, "we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East ..... and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheik, and ayatellah is either singing the praises of the United States of America or pumping gasoline for a dime a gallon on an American military base near the Arctic Circle."

From the beginning, the neoconservatives viewed the invasion of Iraq either as a staging ground for their perpetual war or securing its instability. While the introduction of economic sanctions against Iraq in August 1990 and the subsequent attack in 1991 along with the presence of an oppressive regime have tremendously weakened Iraq and demoralized its people, it was the invasion in March 2003 that enabled the neo.con.ser.va.tives to directly manage Iraqi affairs and put their vision into practice.

Contrary to their claim of nation-building in Iraq and nurturing democratic institutions, the neoconservatives have made sure that every effort must be made to prevent the Iraqis from exercising their rights to run their own country and establish an open and free country. When General Jay Garner attempted, in early 2003, to allow Iraqis to chart their own destiny, he was immediately replaced. His successor, Paul Bremer, closely followed the neoconservatives' agenda.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported (June 3, 2005) that the occupational authority has institutionalized corruption. The corruption has paralyzed the economy and fostered the creation of dysfunctional institutions. This, along with the ever rising new trend of terrorism, constitutes a threat to Iraq's social fabric. Indeed, a growing number of Iraqis question the virtue of the decision taken by the occupational authority in mid-2003 to dissolve the Iraqi border police and leave the Iraqi borders open for extremists. The Iraqis also question the reluctance of the occupational forces to train the newly-established Iraqi army and police and supply them with adequate weapons to defend themselves and their country.

In a radical but alarming move, the neoconservatives have espoused a sectarian and ethnic policy in conducting government and political affairs in Iraq. The policy is contrary to America's officially pronounced goal of nation building and constitutes a formidable obstacle to Bush's vision of a democratic and unified Iraq. In fact, the policy has devastating consequences and may lead to the ruin of Iraq. It should be mentioned that, in practice, Saddam Hussein espoused a sectarian and racial outlook after 1978. But this was never acknowledged as a guiding principle and was disliked by the majority of the population.

In Bush's second term, the neoconservatives appear to have secured undisputed domination in designing American foreign policy. They have situated themselves at the core of the three primary agencies responsible for foreign affairs: The National Security Council, and the state and defence departments. With the presence of Ambassador Zalamy Khalilzad in Baghdad, the neoconservatives are positioned to pursue their vision for Iraq with zeal, confidence, and energy.

Middle East experts and responsible international observers make a strong point that the neoconservatives are progressing with unexpected ease in translating their vision for Iraq into practical steps, which will eventually change the fate of Iraq profoundly. In particular, the neo.con.ser.va.tives have strengthened and widened their network of influence well beyond their traditional allies (e.g. Ahmed Chalabi, Masood Barzani, Barhem Saleh, Ayhem Al Samarai, Meshaan Al Jabory, Moufaq Al Rebuey, etc.) and include powerful individuals and newly emerging organizations inside and outside Iraq that actively promote and espouse the neoconservative design for fragmenting Iraq and creating semi-independent sectarian/ethnic units in place.

The presence of terrorism and extremism in Iraq is a development that accompanies the occupation. Its threat is real with predictable consequences, especially the sudden and mass exodus of whatever is left of the middle class. Nevertheless, once the Iraqis are free and are in charge of their destiny, they will more likely be able to uproot terrorism and extremism. The kindling and institutionalization of sectarian and ethnic discord, however, have unpredictable and frightening consequences. For many decades sectarianism and racial discrimination were almost alien concepts for the majority of Iraqis. Since the invasion, sectarian and divisional ethnic terminologies have become conspicuously common in daily political discourse.

Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing debate concerning the constitution, the neoconservatives have already inflicted damage to the fabric of Iraqi society.

Fragmenting Iraq and kindling sectarian/ethnic discords are weapons of cultural and national destruction, a menace to civilization. They represent a threat to American interests and to regional stability. More importantly, they evidence a purposeful activation of the clash of civilizations.