CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
by GEORGE PACKER

Will moderate Iraqis embrace democracy--or Islamist radicalism?

part three of three

As the June 30th deadline approaches, with no Iraqi interim government in sight, the United States has turned reluctantly to the United Nations. Until recently, Washington consistently prevented the U.N. from establishing any real authority in Iraq (the words "United Nations" appear nowhere in the November 15th agreement). But the Administration now finds that the C.P.A. and the Governing Council have so little legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis--including Ayatollah Sistani--that the transfer of sovereignty can't occur without outside help. Enter Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.'s envoy to Iraq, and an Algerian diplomat who was Secretary-General Kofi Annan's representative in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. In April, Brahimi and his team travelled to Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra to meet with groups of Iraqis and begin preparations for an interim government. The senior Administration official told me, "Brahimi has identified--unlike the ivory-tower C.P.A.--a lot of passionate, talented Iraqis who want the same things we want: freedom, democracy, liberty."

Fairly quickly, Brahimi concluded that the Governing Council should not be part of the new Iraqi government. "The Governing Council in its current constitution doesn't have the confidence of most Iraqis," his spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, told me. At the end of April, Brahimi briefed the U.N. Security Council, in New York; he called for a caretaker government of technocrats, whose main purpose will be to prepare the country for elections by January, 2005. "We are reaching out to the professional associations, the trade unions, the universities, and asking them to give us the best of their crop," Fawzi said. "The best five lawyers, the best five doctors, the best five accountants, the best five engineers, to form a short list acceptable to all for a short-term interim government." A Prime Minister and a cabinet will be chosen by Brahimi, Bremer, and the Governing Council by the end of May. It seems inevitable that some of Iraq's leading politicians, including members of the Governing Council, will end up with positions in the interim government, though this will surely be the subject of intense negotiations between rival factions. Brahimi, who oversaw Afghanistan's loya jirga, imagines Iraqis from all sectors of society gathering in a national conference soon after June 30th to choose an advisory body, or rump parliament. The conference could be the first chance for ordinary Iraqis to feel that they have a stake in the country's political future. 

It's not clear that a U.S. Administration with a history of pronounced hostility to the U.N. will relinquish real authority in Iraq to it, even now. The senior official said, "There are people in this Administration who have led me to believe that the U.N. is a greater clear and present danger to the United States than any foreign enemy, including Osama bin Laden." Robert Blackwill, a director at the National Security Council, will be Washington's point man in the process; according to the senior official, Blackwill will keep the pressure on Bremer to accept Brahimi's recommendations. Will the U.N., for its part, having been so badly undermined by the Administration on Iraq, return in force now, when things are going so poorly? "Kofi's going to have a really hard time looking at this and saying, 'Do I want a piece of this?'" the senior official said.

Annan and Brahimi, perhaps sensing that the U.N. is being set up to take the fall for what is bound to be an unstable, tumultuous period before elections, have tried to lower expectations about the organization's role in Iraq. Brahimi cannot answer some of the most important questions about the transition--such as how extensive Iraqi sovereignty will be, and what the relationship will be between the interim government and the U.S. military. Ahmed Fawzi expressed the hope that a sovereign Iraqi government will take the steam out of the insurgency. In the meantime, another U.N. official told me, the security situation in Iraq is so perilous that "it's going to be very difficult for any full-scale engagement of the U.N. in Iraq for the next couple of months." He added, "We're expected to take the lead--and we're not the lead. We're helping to do what we can. But the political reality is that the Americans are the biggest player in Iraq, and they're going to be before and after June 30th."

The only good reason left for the invasion of Iraq, and for an ongoing war involving a hundred and thirty-five thousand American troops, is the creation of a decent Iraqi government. The National Democratic Institute is an organization funded largely by the U.S. government and affiliated with the Democratic Party; it operates with relative independence, under the direction of the National Endowment for Democracy. The institute's purpose is to find what Mahmoud Othman called "the simple citizens" in a place like Iraq, and help them to participate in democratic political life. This tends to be obscure, poorly funded work--but the Bush Administration wants to pour half a billion dollars into Iraq for "democracy-building" programs before the transfer of sovereignty and national elections. The effort is floundering, however, because the escalation of violence has made it hard to spend the money.

Early one morning in mid-March, I drove to Hilla, which is ninety minutes south of Baghdad, with a group of Iraqis and Americans working for N.D.I. We travelled in non-armored vehicles, without guards. In the back seat of one of the sedans, wearing a navy-blue suit, a salmon-colored tie, and glasses, was David Dettman, a pale, chain-smoking political consultant from Ohio. For many years, Dettman, who is thirty-three and has the nervous, self-deprecating sense of humor of a Jack Lemmon character, worked successfully as a campaign consultant in Washington. Then he ran for the Ohio state legislature as a Democrat, got creamed, and had an epiphany. "What got me charged up is that I really believed in the process," he told me. He decided to leave his job, and he became one of N.D.I.'s democratization missionaries, posted in Ukraine. To the dismay of his wife, his mother, and his boss, Dettman had come to Iraq for two weeks to train groups of aspiring political-party activists in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Hilla.

The workshop in Hilla took place in the city's former secret-police headquarters, which has become a human-rights center. Forty Iraqis--including a political-science professor and an unemployed sports instructor--had travelled at some risk to attend the class. They listened intently and took careful notes as Dettman stood before a flip chart and presented a ten-step program on message development and voter contact. Mayasa al-Naimy, an Iraqi staff member of N.D.I., gamely translated the exotic campaign terminology: "earned media," "communications strategy," "wedge and base issues." (Dettman had told me earlier, "Politics is the art of getting people to vote for you. It's applicable all over the world. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have a job.")

After two hours of discussion, an Iraqi raised his hand. "This shows me we're making a transition from dictatorship to democracy," he said. "That makes me feel good. But this is the question: Will the American Administration leave it to us? Or just throw someone on us? Will all these efforts be lost?"

Outside, in the distance, there was an explosion--mortar fire--and then a second, closer one, which was followed by gunfire. Dettman glanced out the window and grinned with alarm.

"Does that answer your question?" someone asked.

"I'm not the government," Dettman said. "I'm N.D.I. We have to eat lunch. Can we talk about this later?"

After lunch, Dettman returned to the question. "My opinion is if America invaded Iraq for nothing other than to have a friendly dictator, then all of the American and Iraqi lives that were lost will have been wasted," he said. "I supported the invasion because I'm in the democratization business. I don't know anything about W.M.D.--I don't know if anyone was telling the truth or not--but I do know the Iraqi people deserve freedom. I can't say the Americans won't do anything wrong, because they already have done many things wrong in this occupation. And I'm sorry. But there's a reason N.D.I. is here now, and there's a reason we didn't bring a tank. We're the least armed Americans in Hilla. We're here trusting your hospitality. Because democracy is good and right." He went on, "If this traumatic war was fought for anything other than that, I'm gonna be mad. Here's the problem: I can't do much. I'm just the arrogant American in a suit standing up in front of you. I haven't suffered as much as you have. Only you can build democracy here. But if I just thought America was going to steal the freedom we fought for I would have stayed home with my wife and had a lovely time."

"Aren't you having a lovely time here?" someone asked.

"I am having a lovely time. But I miss my wife."

It was a heartfelt speech, and it was received with scattered applause. Then a man sitting near me muttered to himself, "A British guy named Hempher laid plans decades ago for Presidents to take turns ruling Iraq."

The people in the room belonged to Shaker's "middle level of mind." They were neither mullahs nor militiamen, and some of the parties they belonged to counted no more than several hundred members. One of the participants was Jawdet al-Obeidi, a former Army officer from Hilla. He fled Iraq after taking part in the Shiite uprising in 1991, and ended up in Portland, Oregon. He started a small limousine company there, and last year he sold it and returned to Iraq, as a member of a militia aligned with the U.S. invasion force. Since then, Obeidi has poured a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of his savings into building a coalition of almost two hundred small political parties that can challenge the larger parties in parliamentary elections. (Already, there are some three hundred political parties in Iraq.) The coalition's platform combines a moderate Muslim agenda with Iraqi nationalism and a respect for individual rights--a deliberately mild mixture that seems designed to have broad support. Obeidi, a balding, middle-aged man with a salesman's cheerfulness, has received death threats, and his brother-in-law survived three bullets in the head.

Also at the meeting was a married couple from Mahawil, a village of dirt roads and salt marshes near Hilla: Emad Dawood, who worked in a shop selling construction materials, and his wife, Saad, who had received a business degree in Baghdad but was unable to find work, and was now raising their three children. She was one of only three women at the meeting; like the others, she wore a hijab.

Her husband explained to me, "We go everywhere together."

"Any educated couple would do this," Saad said.

"Of course, we have religion, and we go by the rules," Emad added. "The Islamic religion doesn't say women can't mix with other men, but everything has to do with limits."

Saad pointed out that Islam doesn't deny women the right to participate in politics: "They should have a role in everything."

In Hilla, the repression of the 1991 Shiite uprising was particularly brutal, and, last year, mass graves containing thousands of victims were uncovered on the periphery of the town. Saad and Emad had each lost a brother, and many friends. The couple had only the vaguest notion of what was in Iraq's new interim constitution, but they knew very well what it was like to live under Saddam. "It's like a hammer on your head every day," Emad said, "and then they take it away."

The Dawoods had once seen the Americans as heroic liberators, but the feeling was short-lived. According to Emad, as the occupation ground on, with constant power outages and rampant crime, ordinary unhappiness was turning into a kind of insanity. "Things are just getting worse here," Saad added. "Of course, if there was democracy things would change."

"But democracy needs a long period of time, because we've been living so long under Saddam," Emad said.

"Most people do not get the idea of democracy," Saad said. "Ask anybody about democracy, and you'd find most people would say, 'What am I going to do with democracy? Give me security first.'"

Emad told me, "I know a guy who shot two bullets at random. He said, 'Isn't this freedom?'"

As for Dettman's presentation, it clearly meant something to this couple that Americans had come to meet with them in Hilla. Dettman had given them a lot of helpful information, they felt. Their only complaint was that there was no exam at the end, to test how much they'd learned about democracy. 

The failures of the occupation and the violence of the insurgency have stranded moderate Iraqis like those who attended the meeting in Hilla. Lakhdar Brahimi wants to bring such Iraqis onto the national political stage, but, considering the disproportionate power of groups represented on the Governing Council and backed by foreign states, the chances for success are poor. Marina Ottaway, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that, after the fall of dictatorships, "you always have a lot of political parties forming, and they never get anywhere." N.D.I., she concluded, is "bravely doing something that is completely futile."

Of course, electoral success isn't the only measure of what organizations like N.D.I. are trying to do. In Hilla, it felt like an achievement simply to hold a discussion, amid gunfire, about democracy, in which there was a genuine give-and-take between Iraqis and foreigners. The fact that Hempher, the supposed British spy blamed for so much trouble in the Muslim world, was invoked at the Hilla workshop was a less hopeful sign. The Americans' mistakes in Iraq have been only part of the story of disappointment. Many Iraqis--damaged beyond imagining by the cruelty of Saddam's rule, and afflicted with outsized expectations and suspicions of America--have fallen back on aspects of their culture and faith that offer a blind resistance to the new world that has been thrown open before them. In the past year, Iraq has undergone not just a war but a revolution. It's no wonder that Iraqis have responded not only with hope but with confusion, rage, and despair; the wonder is that Americans expected anything else. 

We left Hilla just before dark, and set out for Baghdad. An hour later, on a nearby road, three people--an American woman working with Iraqi women's groups, a C.P.A. press officer, and their Iraqi translator--were ambushed and shot to death by men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. It was the start of a wave of attacks on foreign civilians and the Iraqis who worked with them. The violence had still not subsided by early May, and most of the non-governmental groups and contractors working for democracy in Iraq had evacuated their foreign employees. Les Campbell, the Middle East director of N.D.I., recently told me that the organization's foreign staff was in Amman, Jordan, waiting for the violence to diminish before returning to Baghdad, where the Iraqi staff continues to work. Meanwhile, Campbell is talking with private security firms, and looking for the right armored car.

He has not lost his optimism altogether. "Even with all the problems in Iraq, there is already far more civil-society space and party organizing than in any other Arab country," he said. He described how N.D.I.'s Iraqi staff members, such as Mayasa al-Naimy, have begun to blossom intellectually. "Even in the midst of the killings, which are terrible, and even though the planning and administration continue to be a joke, something interesting is going on here," Campbell said. "It makes me sort of sick to think it might not work."

Three days after the trip to Hilla, I paid another visit to Dr. Shaker at his house in Sadr City. His brother Samir had just come back from a demonstration against the interim constitution, led by one of Moqtada al-Sadr's top aides, in Firdus Square, the same spot where Saddam's statue was pulled down a year ago. "The Kurds have more rights than the others," Samir said. "They can veto anything we decide, but we don't have the right to veto."

Ali had watched a Shiite politician on television who said that Arabs could refuse the Kurds' demands for federalism. "We don't know anything about the constitution," Ali said. "It was written, handed over to the Governing Council to sign, and then shown to the people, who never saw it before."

As for Shaker, the controversy filled him with foreboding. He doubted that Iraq would remain intact. The Shia, the Kurds, and the Sunnis had agendas that could never be reconciled. "The story will be like Lebanon," Shaker told me. "A civil war."

Arab against Kurd? "A strong possibility." Shiite against Sunni? "It's a possibility," he said. "The constitution will be the starting point, and then the event will be gradually increased." I asked if he envisioned rival armies fighting each other. "That is how I imagine it," he said. But, the likeliest scenario of all, he added, was a civil war among his own people, the Shia. 

It was my last visit to the house. Afterward, neighbors belonging to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army warned Shaker against having any more American visitors. 

It was a few weeks later, on March 28th, that Moqtada's uprising began, and Sadr City exploded in days and nights of firefights between militiamen and American soldiers. I spoke with the doctor by phone. He had spent days trapped at home, unable to go to the morgue, while the uprising continued. Twelve of his friends in the neighborhood had died in crossfire. His brothers, Ali and Samir, wanted to join the Mahdi Army and fight the Americans, but he had stopped them. The scale of the violence shocked him, but not its outbreak, which he had seen coming. The bravery of the young militiamen, standing up to tanks with small arms, impressed him, and though he deplored their tactics, he sympathized with their goal--"real Islamic democracy."

Shaker said, "My idea of the situation now: the Americans are at the high level and Moqtada is down at the bottom, and they can't understand each other. They should be in the middle." He added, "The Americans have to use the political way. Bremer must be more diplomatic, more flexible. He needs to go through the middle level of mind--as I told you. He must speak to people like me."

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