Kanan Makiya held a press conference in mid-October in Washington D.C. We’ve adapted and excerpted his opening statement and a few of the more pointed exchanges between Makiya and his interlocutors. Makiya’s comments on the Baathist ‘resistance’, the constitutional process and the issues raised by Ayatolla Sistani’s fatwa provide deep background for understanding current and future developments in Iraq.
(Anyone who dismisses the anti-racist component of the Coalition’s mission might want to consider the passages below where Makiya invokes the intense debate that made the current South African Constitution real to everyday people in that country and urges that Iraqis ’emulate’ it).
MR. MAKIYA: Let me begin with a very strong impression that I get coming back to the United States. The fact is the Iraq that I’ve just come from isn’t the one that is being portrayed in the media and talked about so much these days. I simply don’t connect with the discourse that is going on here about Iraq.
Not that I’m about to paint a very rosy picture of how wonderful things are compared to how badly they’re being portrayed by the media; no, I’m not trying to deny that there are very serious problems in Iraq. But they’re not the problems that people are talking about here. There are all kinds of very important issues and grave questions that we need to deal with, but I don’t see them being discussed in the press here, and that is really troubling.
Now I’m going to speak for myself in terms of discussing those problems as I see them Some of those problems — I will admit — stem from what I personally and what many of my compatriots did not quite realize before the war about the very peculiar and terrible state of the Arab Socialist Party in Iraq.
Speaking for myself, I admit I did not realize the full extent of the rot that had corroded the entire state system in Iraq before the war. There’s a part of me back then that kept on insisting that the state that the coalition forces so rightly took out in April of this year was still the one I had described in Republic of Fear. But the fact is it was not.
That state had changed. A totalitarian state described in Republic of Fear had metamorphosed into a full-fledged criminal state, and by that I mean that institutions designed and perfected for violence, but nonetheless still institutions, and ministries and structures that were set up to run this terrorist state had changed or had rotted from within to the point that when the war finally came and toppled this edifice, it turned out there was nothing much of substance there.
Let me make this point by way of a couple of figures that were being discussed in the governing council of Iraq about three weeks ago, four weeks ago, which I think highlight the point I’m trying to make.
It transpired we now know from the budget — the Iraqi budget between February 2002 and February 2003 — that Saddam Hussein spent about $1.9 billion on the Republican Guard. We also know that for the entire educational sector of Iraq, leaving out salaries, he spent $3.5 million during that same period.
And I’m just going to add one more figure, $6.5 million on the health sector for 25 million people. Think for a moment what those figures imply.– they explain the rotting away of the state, the criminal enterprise that the Baath had become.
And when the war actually transpired, these criminals robbed the banks, quite literally emptied the vaults of dollars and dinars — and melted away into the populace. They didn’t fight the war, they did what criminals do, they undertake the kind of operations that we now see them financing — a hand grenade here, a rocket attack there, and doing all of this in precisely the criminal mode to which they were accustomed and to which their politics have evolved from the totalitarian style politics that I described in Republic of Fear.
Now is this metamorphosis from, as I said, a totalitarian state to a criminal state, an argument for not having gone to war? Not in my judgment. But the question of whether or not the war was justified is at this point in time a historical one; it’s something for scholars to discuss, but it is not the question we now face.
There is no alternative but to making this story a success story, no alternative it seems to me to the United States, no alternative for peoples of the Middle East themselves.
I.
I could speak a bit on the constitutional process and lay out some of the actual discussions that are going on there because that, too, is part of the future. Let me describe what the deliberations of the constitutional committee have been.
From very early on, a committee of 25 people was selected by members of the governing council. It is a body selected entirely by Iraqis. That body’s mandate was limited to the mechanics of the convening of the constitutional convention. (It is not yet a body mandated to discuss the contents of the constitution or to draft any kind of text.)
There’s a consensus that the convention will consist of some 250-odd people. That figure, incidentally, comes from a formula that is widely accepted in the governing council and amongst all members of the constitutional committee; namely, that every 100,000 Iraqis should somehow have a representative at the convention; that if you assume Iraq’s population is about 25 million people, that’s a body of about 250 persons. There’s also a consensus that those 250 people should be broadly, geographically representative of the country as a whole.
So in a city of Mosul with, say, a million people, there should be about ten delegates. The city of Baghdad has about 5 million people so there would be about fifty delegates, and so on. There is no disagreement of any significance that I am aware about the size of the body that that we’re talking about here or the principle of geographical representation. But there is a serious discussion over how you go about convening that body.
We met over two months to discuss this question and three basic positions have evolved. Let me describe them to you.
The first position, which I emphasize is a minority position, is that the body should be selected much as the constitutional committee itself was selected. Perhaps by the governing council consulting with professional organizations, and — up and down the country — with minority communities, with national groups, and so on. A massive process of consultation that eventually leads to a sifting out of names that produces 250 people that meet the criteria I previously described. That’s one point of view — a very small minority point of view.
Another point of view — much more strongly represented in the constitutional committee and championed at the moment by, let us say, the Kurdish members of the constitutional committee — is that we should arrive at the constitutional convention through a mixture of selection and election.
The third point of view, which has the strong support of the majority of Shiites in the constitutional convention, emanates from a fatwa that came from the Ayatollah Sistani. I’m now going to spell out his argument at some length because we spent most of our time in the constitutional committee discussing its pros and cons.
He argues that because we have not had a permanent constitution in Iraq since 1958 or even a basic set of laws (because the very nature of the Baath system is such as to have made that foreign to Iraqis) that the idea of a constitution needs to be resuscitated, revived. It’s something that Iraqis have to adopt as a very important principle.
For these reasons, more time needs to be given to the constitutional process and greater participation is needed in the selection of the delegates to the constitutional convention. And so, he says, it is not enough to get the head of a particular professional association — say, the lawyers association of the City of Mosul — to appoint a number of people. It’s necessary for all members of the lawyers association to be able to at least vote for the delegates that the City of Mosul will end up sending to the constitutional convention.
That case for direct elections across the board, across the country faces a number of obstacles, principally the fact that the Iraqi body politic is, in many people’s opinion, not ready for elections. After all, this is a country that has for 30 years lived under a closed autarchic system; it is discovering politics even as we speak. It is like an infant, you could say, learning to walk — finding its political identity, its parties, its structures, its ways of articulating what it wants out of life. It’s too early, this counter argument goes, for elections to mean very much in the very turbulent and constantly changing world of Iraqi politics today.
So that is, I think, the strongest argument for not holding these elections. There’s a technical argument that the security situation perhaps may not allow for the kind of elections that, let us be clear, the Ayatollah himself wants.
I should note that there is nothing in the Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwa that indicates any kind of an Islamic rationale for his particular position. There is simply nothing — and we questioned him on this when the constitutional committee met with the Ayatollah in Najaf at his home. This is an argument based on democratic principles.
And also, I should point out that he was for international supervision of these elections, He did not trust even Iraqis themselves to run them. He’s not looking for some sort of populist campaign, he is looking for careful, internationally supervised, directed and observed elections.
Now I want to observe here an argument that one does not hear in public, but one does hear very much in private amongst prominent Shiites who are propounding this idea of direct elections as a way of establishing a constituent assembly (because that is in effect what we would be talking about if we went for elections up and down the country) and that argument goes like this:
Elections are what we — clerics for instance — need in order to be able to support some kind of secular constitution. In order to essentially cover ourselves, we need the most Iraqi-based — the most transparent — kind of process by which this constitutional assembly could come into being. And for that, elections are the best answer and that way we would be able to rebuff all critic and also, more importantly, we would be able to engage larger and larger numbers of people.
The argument that [Sistani] made quite directly and exactly in these terms is why should a young man of 19 or 20 go along with what his father wants in terms of a candidate for the constituent assembly? That is surely a thing of the past, as he put it. We live in a world where that young man has the right to somehow feel that his vote has influenced the process. It’s very hard to rebut that kind of argument.
Coming from him and in the absence of any purely religious argument — it represents, quite a powerful case that many, many people are finding hard to resist. Even the Kurds, when they attended the private meeting with him, found themselves at a loss for words almost as the argument developed between the members of the committee and [Sistani] sitting, you know, on the floor around his house. They came out nonplussed and there was a period when positions changed and then changed back again.
I’m boring you with perhaps too many details here, but those are the main lines that are emerging in the debate over the constitution. The report that finally went to the governing council contained those three options. We were not able as a committee to decide — and we chose not to vote in favor of one particular option. I actually wanted it to be left as three options so the governing council would have to choose, and that is where the subject lies.
I should add that in the course of the deliberations of the constitutional committee, three or four very important things need to be noted:
First, experts from the Ministry of Planning did come in and talk about the feasibility of having quick elections; how do you actually go about getting a population count? In the beginning, we had to deal with an argument that said they could not have elections before there was a full census of the country. The last census that is accepted by virtually all Iraqis is a 1957 census.
So the imperative of having a census was hotly argued for awhile in the early stages of the discussion, and later on the Kurds were very insistent on this point, and the Shiites to some extent, both agreed to something that we called a population count — something less than a census but, say, more than just an electoral register. I was arguing that any operation that involves going house to house to establish a registry is a time-consuming process and will delay the constitution. So we labored hard over the issue of the mechanics of holding an election and we did consult experts.
Also when the constitutional committee broke up into small groups that went and visited the different provinces of Iraq, the experiences that we had were/are extremely telling.
First, there was widespread interest in the constitutional process. In Basra alone, 2,500 people came to the meeting. Unheard of. Nobody in recent memory can remember any such a meeting taking place in Basra before. The meetings were never less than 300 or 400 people strong. There would be two or three members of the constitutional committee going out to the provinces, talking to people and telling, as I have done here, about the deliberations inside the constitutional committee. Then listening to what people had to say
Only one little incident marred this, and it is of some relevance to mention this — and that happened in Hellah when supporters of Moqtadr al-Sadr blocked the delegation, saying there’s no point for you to even come here, we know what we want. We don’t want to hear what you have — the fatwa of Sistani decides everything. These people pretended to be acting under a mandate from Sistani, but Sistani’s office said they were under no such mandate and they would deal with it. That is not how he operates. But these were thugs trying to stop a meeting from taking place.
They didn’t succeed, but they then behaved atrociously and stopped anybody else from speaking. About 50 people walked out and afterwards caught up with the members of the constitutional committee and they told them that many of these club wielders, which is what they were, had come from the outer environs — they’d been recruited for this particular job, they were not really bona fide citizens of the City of Hellah. Then complaints were lodged with various parties.
But apart from that one incident, the visits to the different provinces went well and the overwhelming feeling was that this is an issue in which the population of Iraq is deeply interested. So we’re not going to have a rubber stamp type of situation; it’s going to be a very exciting process to watch in the months to come.
I think I will end there and just open it up for discussion.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It certainly appears to be the consensus here in Washington is that they’d rather have a selected constitutional assembly than an elected one if for no other reason they believe it would be quicker.
MR. MAKIYA: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: From what you’ve just said, it would appear to me that you sort of agree with that view. One, do you? And two, do you think it’s possible to get Sistani to walk back his position? I mean, a fatwa may have a little bit of maneuvering room in it, but all six lines of it seem to be pretty clear.
MR. MAKIYA: Exactly.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Do you think that he can be walked back and do you think it’s wise to ignore his position?
MR. MAKIYA: I’ll start with the last one. I do not think it is wise to ignore his position. He was the absent presence in our meetings throughout. What I learnt in the course of my work on this committee is that he is an important moral force in the country and potentially a force for the good and in the direction of stability and in the direction of the kind of constitution that I think we would all like to see.
His influence is simply enormous. It would be very interesting to trace how it grew so fast, but every element imaginable tries to speak in his name. I’d say that it is important to approach him in the right way and talk with him. I don’t think he will reverse his fatwa. I entertained such thoughts in the beginning, but I realized he won’t. But given his influence, I think it’s important to work with him for the smoothness of the process — for something that would be truly dramatic when it ends.
Now I realize there are real problems and schedule is one of them, and perhaps he can be made aware of the mechanics and the difficulties of the elections. But my own view on this has been changing. I’ll be absolutely honest with you. I always believed that the constitutional process will benefit from time. At the end of the day, it’s not just about the piece of paper. It’s about the piece of paper taking root in hearts and minds and, therefore, the process is all important.
Now — given the long history of disregard for law in Iraq — it’s very necessary to resurrect that idea, to cultivate it, and there are some very complex questions, like federalism, for instance, involved here. These are not going to be easy to communicate to large numbers of people. Work has to be done in advance.
Delaying things, or appearing to delay things, may not mean no work is done on the content of the constitution. We can use that time fruitfully in all kinds of very useful ways to open up that public discourse.
We have a problem though, and this brings me back to the Sistani issue. I very much like the way it was done in South Africa. Unfortunately, we can’t quite work to that model.
In South Africa, because of the character of Nelson Mandela — because of who he was — a very small group of people put together the first draft of what was going to become the South African constitution. Three parties — the Liberal Party, I think, and the ANC and the ruling party at the time. And then a public debate erupted. It was very intense throughout South Africa, and it was important to cementing the ideas of that constitution amongst South Africans.
It’s a very long document. Actually, that’s a problem. It’s over a hundred pages. But putting that question aside, they had an important, intense public debate, which the evidence suggests we can have also in Iraq. But what I don’t want to have is a debate with nothing there. At the end of the day, the final South African constitution is not all that different from the thing they started with. The debate went on about lots of little clauses, changes and so forth, but at the end of the day nothing of great substance was changed. But the debate took place — I wish we could emulate that.
Now you need characters with the moral authority to pull that off. Here’s where you come back to Sistani. I want a debate on the constitution. It’s essential to the future of the country, but we need it with the backing of some of these hidden players. With that we could have something truly interesting happen here. So how to finesse this is the critical question as I see it.
Also, I might say on the matter of finessing, federalism, too, needs to be finessed. It’s not enough to stand back from it the way the United States has done. It’s necessary to get in there and engage — it’s a geopolitical question, it’s a question that involves surrounding countries, it’s a question that interests a lot of people other than just Iraqis.
So there has to be real work with — for instance, the Kurds, — ground work before the question erupts in public. This is very, very important . Otherwise, it could become a mess and opinions could go all over the place. So we need to contain that and the way to do that is to have some working principles in place and have those debated and discussed to frame the discussion.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Iraq being Islamic, what does this mean to different Muslims and how are non-Muslims reacting to this? And has the work done in Afghanistan and Palestine on their constitutions played a role or had any influence on Iraq’s constitutional work? And then Sharia and Islamic law, how many Iraqis want this?
MR. MAKIYA: Regarding — first of all, we don’t have a constitution that actually says anything about Islam yet. But it does seem like a majority — an overwhelming majority of people in the committee would support some reference to Islam or the main religions of Iraq as being a source of inspiration for the laws and so on of the country, but left in that very general phraseology.
And so from various discussions that have taken place, although this is not the mandate of the committee, I suspect some such formula will be all that is required to satisfy the overwhelming majority of people in Iraq. And the idea of Sharia law being present in the constitution is, I think, a non-starter. There’s too much opposition to it; it reminds people of the Iranian experience which none of them want to see replicated in Iraq, even Shiite Iraqis.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible] the U.N. role?
MR. MAKIYA: My — you’re asking my personal view on what the U.N. role should be?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yes.
MR. MAKIYA: I think that if you want a dramatic break with the past — in the direction of some of the things I’ve been talking about, then we have made progress and things should be left for the Coalition to sort out on the political front. The U.N. would introduce an element of delay, it would be inclined as an institution to make the future Iraq more like an improved version of one of the Arab states. Personally, I don’t want that.
So involvement of the U.N. is from my point of view an invitation to keep Iraq closer to what the norm is in that part of the world. I suspect that that would be the consequence. I prefer to see the U.N. supervising elections and distributing aid, all of which I think are great functions for it in Iraq, and I’m all for that.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Kanan, currently the process that you’re describing is fascinating. I mean, this is the first time in the Arab world in years, if ever, that there’s this intellectual bubbling debate about what the future will be. Do you have any indications of how peoples in the surrounding countries view this? I don’t mean the governments, I mean the peoples, and how intensely are they watching this?
MR. MAKIYA: I’m glad you made that distinction between the countries and the governments. And you should add a third party, the satellite stations and the Arab media. The Arab populations that I run into, say, in Jordan or in Kuwait, see something new going on. They’re riddled with feelings of guilt, why didn’t we. since there’s no doubt about the criminality of Saddam, for instance.
But the old ideologies still hang in and there isn’t an alternative to that way of thinking that, okay, true, he was a criminal and maybe I misjudged how bad a criminal he was, and maybe we should show what he did to the Kurds, and maybe we should start showing all that stuff, not hiding it.
But after all, he’s an Arab and after all this is the West. The ideology stays and it’s cemented, unfortunately, by — I have to be absolutely frank here — the very negative role that the Arab media is playing in the whole Iraq crisis.
That having been said, some stations are occasionally putting out some extremely good material. For instance, Lebanon’s LBC, while they really did a number on me personally, have been regularly putting out a series on the crimes of the former regime. That’s new. That never happened in Arab media before.
Even one of the worst offenders, Aladabia, has access to some of the videotapes of the regime’s own barbarous acts that it keeps on putting out from time to time. But the overwhelming message is negative and anti what the coalition is trying to do and what Iraqis are trying to do.
From October, 2003