[Mb-civic] Iraqis' Broken Dreams - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Iraqis' Broken Dreams

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, October 10, 2005; Page A19

Three years ago Kanan Makiya and Rend Rahim were among the most 
persuasive advocates of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Both liberal Iraqi 
intellectuals and eloquent English speakers, they made the case that 
Saddam Hussein's removal was a cause to be embraced on moral and human 
rights grounds, and that its result could be the replacement of the Arab 
world's most brutal dictatorship by its first genuine democracy.

They were widely heard in Washington. Once, over dinner, I watched as 
they argued passionately to a senior administration official -- one of 
the architects of the then-approaching war -- that the Bush 
administration should stop focusing on Hussein's supposed weapons of 
mass destruction and openly justify intervention on grounds of democracy 
and human rights. The official was clearly moved, but demurred. Iraq's 
WMD, he replied, was the single motivating factor that united the 
administration's own factions and constituencies.

I found the two compelling. They reminded me of Central European 
dissidents, such as Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel, who challenged Soviet 
totalitarianism on the same grounds -- and who, that fall of 2002, also 
chose to endorse intervention in Iraq. We all knew Iraq would be 
different and more difficult than Poland or Czechoslovakia. But Makiya 
and Rahim, among other liberal Iraqis, nurtured the dream that there, 
too, a democracy could arise out of the rubble of dictatorship.

That's why it was so sobering to encounter Makiya and Rahim again last 
week -- and to hear them speak with brutal honesty about their "dashed 
hopes and broken dreams," as Makiya put it. The occasion was a 
conference on Iraq sponsored by the conservative American Enterprise 
Institute, which did so much to lay the intellectual groundwork for the 
war. A similar AEI conference three years ago this month resounded with 
upbeat predictions about the democratic, federal and liberal Iraq that 
could follow Saddam Hussein. This one, led off by Makiya and Rahim, 
sounded a lot like its funeral.

Makiya began with a stark conclusion: "Instead of the fledgling 
democracy that back then we said was possible, instead of that dream, we 
have the reality of a virulent insurgency whose efficiency is only 
rivaled by the barbarous tactics it uses." The violence, he said, "is 
destroying the very idea or the very possibility of Iraq."

The Iraqi liberals can fairly blame the Bush administration for not 
listening to them: for failing to deploy enough troops, for refusing to 
quickly install the provisional government they advocated, for rejecting 
the Iraqi fighters they offered to help impose order immediately after 
the invasion. But Makiya, a former adviser to the Iraqi government in 
exile who now heads the Iraq Memory Foundation, instead scrupulously 
dissected "our Iraqi failures." Chief among these, he said, was an 
underestimation of the rootedness of Hussein's Baath Party inside Iraq's 
Sunni community and its latent ability to mobilize the insurgency that 
has bedeviled reconstruction while dividing the country along ethnic and 
religious lines.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/09/AR2005100900496.html
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