Letter to Senator Lugar on US Occupation of Iraq
by David Keppel
The Honorable Richard G. Lugar
1180 Market Tower
10 West Market Street
Indianapolis, IN 46204
Dear Senator Lugar:
As a member of the delegation of Indiana citizens meeting Lesley Reser on
October 9th to discuss Iraq, I would like to thank you for your interest in
our views. We greatly appreciate Lesley's continued receptivity and
kindness, and we know these reflect your own commitment to internationalism
rooted in public support.
On behalf of MoveOn.org., of which we are members, we would like to express
our opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq on its current terms. We urge
you to attach conditions to President Bush's request for $87 billion (a sum
which follows the $166 billion already spent on the war). First, the effort
must come under true United Nations control - with a much swifter transfer
of power to Iraqis. Secondly, it is time to hold accountable those who
misled the nation into war, among them Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy
Secretary Wolfowitz.
Even though you voted to authorize force, I know that you had doubts about
the Administration's post-war planning. These doubts have proven to be
prescient. I gather that you now support the President's budget request
because you fear that hasty U.S. withdrawal would leave a vacuum, making
Iraq a terrorist haven. Yet you must also weigh the risk that our
occupation is itself a magnet for terrorism and anti-American hatred.
I agree with you that the United States cannot wash its hands of Iraq's
current plight. We have inflicted war; we were instrumental in imposing a
decade of devastating sanctions; and, in the more distant past, we share
responsibility for having once supported Saddam Hussein.
Yet our very real responsibility does not justify an occupation conducted on
terms that Iraqis and many others see as starkly imperialist. We cannot
afford to dismiss this resentment as just a matter of wounded Arab psyche -
as Administration apologists are prone to do. Instead the resentment
springs from specific mistakes by the U.S. occupation.
By his sweeping decree excluding former Baathists from power (a decree that
extends far beyond those persons formerly involved in crimes of state
terror), Paul Bremer won us the opposition of a large group of educated and
talented Iraqis, particularly in the Sunni center. Not only did this seal
their enmity; it also deprived the wounded nation of their vital expertise,
just at the moment it needed to restore key services such as electricity,
water, sanitation, and health care.
Instead, the Bush Administration has installed as its collaborators a group
of exiles with dubious, sometimes criminal, records, who understandably
enjoy little respect in Iraq. It is a measure of our mismanagement that our
own dependents on the fig-leaf Governing Council have now openly criticized
many of Mr. Bremer's policies and practices. The occupation reeks of crony
capitalism awarded to companies with close ties to the Bush Administration.
Finance Minister Kamel Kilani's sweeping privatization decree, issued at our
behest at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai, permits
virtually unlimited takeover of Iraqi industry, commerce, and finance. It
is likely to produce an even worse case of corruption than appeared in
post-Communist Russia. It will marginalize the Iraqi merchant class and
thus add it to the growing list of our enemies. (See Jeff Madrick, "Hazards
in the New Economic Plan." The New York Times, October 3, 2003.)
We must take seriously President Putin's warning that occupying Iraq could
damage the United States as much as occupying Afghanistan damaged the late
Soviet Union. We cannot be deaf to the voice of many of our friends at the
United Nations. (Those foolish enough to call France an enemy show only
their own arrogance and provincialism.) Though we claim to have a
"coalition of the willing," it is really a coalition of the unwelcome. A
short history lesson suffices to explain Iraqis' fear of Turkish troops. As
for our Romanian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian allies, you no doubt noted Mr.
Putin's biting reference to rape and plunder by certain foreign occupying
troops.
I agree with you that it would be unfair to charge our occupation against
Iraq's faltering oil revenues. Iraqis would rightly see that as simply
another form of theft. Yet that does not mean that President Bush's $87
billion request is either justified or fair.
The bulk of this money is of course military, and it is unfortunate that it
is the part usually exempt from controversy. For until control of Iraq is
legitimately international, we will simply be fueling the resistance we then
have to fight.
International control - as Presidents Putin and Chirac, as well as Secretary
General Annan, insist - must swiftly restore true Iraqi sovereignty. The
single most constructive step - as many have suggested - might be to use the
1958 Constitution as the framework for early elections. One suspects that
the Bush Administration rejects that because it wants to use a new
Constitution to set in stone not only a democratic government, but also a
Thatcherite one; and it wants to keep careful control of who is permitted to
run for office. Democracy - our avowed goal - is of course not a synonym
for a rigged game that "freely" favors a regime pliant to Washington.
It is also time to reckon honestly with why a near cabal in the
Administration took us to war. The search for weapons of mass destruction
must continue under United Nations auspices - or it will lack all
legitimacy. But even the Kay report is enough to show that while Saddam
Hussein may have intended to acquire weapons of mass destruction, he did not
pose anything like the imminent threat that the President and others
claimed. There was no valid reason - and certainly not the one given -- to
break with the inspection regime under Hans Blix. You should use the power
of the purse to insist on the departure of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr.
Feith, Mr. Abrams, and Mr. Libby. If you failed to hold accountable those
who misled Congress, you would further weaken the balance of powers
provided under the Constitution.
If the real purpose of attacking and occupying Iraq was to transform the
Middle East to our advantage, it has proven a disastrous miscalculation.
Instead it is reinforcing the most hostile among Arab and Muslim perceptions
of our motives. Chief among these - however much we may deny it - are our
lopsided support for Israel and our desire to control oil.
Particularly disastrous in this context is the collapse of
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Israel's recent attack on Syria.
President Bush was most unwise to support that. The recent flare of
violence, including the tragic and inexcusable Haifa bombing, was an
entirely predicable consequence of Mr. Bush's failure to curb Prime Minister
Sharon. If we were true friends of Israel, we would insist on an end to the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - an occupation which can lead only to
apartheid, war, or ethnic cleansing. Though President Arafat is not
perfect, it is absurd to make him a scapegoat - and thereby destroy the
Palestine Liberation Organization to the profit of Hamas. Nor can
"dismantling terrorist infrastructure" mean abolishing all the civil
services which today, alas, Hamas is the only organization intact enough to
provide. Only in the context of a political solution will Palestinians
themselves support necessary security measures.
It is a sad irony that our crusade for "democracy" in Iraq has come at the
expense of American democracy. The cost is both financial and political.
As one who understands how deficits threaten our future, you should
reconsider your opposition to rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthiest
Americans. And as one who understands the vital role of public support to
internationalist foreign policy, you must insist that the Administration
deal honestly with the urgent problems in whose name we went to war.
As you know, we face looming crises with Iran and North Korea. Nothing
could be more dangerous than a one-sided and military response to these
nations. Iraq shows us how disastrous even "victory" would be - and here
victory might come with actual use of U.S. nuclear weapons. That would
unleash global revulsion on a scale we can hardly imagine. It would also
spur nuclear terrorism. It is thus vital that we find a negotiated
solution, one which includes curbs on our own appetite for new nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons.
The fundamental problem lies in President Bush's instinct for unilateral
control. This instinct led him to invade Iraq in quest of a regional
platform from which to intimidate Syria and Iran. It led him to deceive the
nation about his reasons for war. It leads him to a bitter occupation, in
which he marginalizes both the United Nations and Iraqis themselves. It
leads him to pursue the very weapons we condemn, thus spurring a global arms
race that outpaces any schedule of preemptive wars.
The tragedy is that this formidably misguided if sincere President has used
the power of his office and his country to thwart those at home and abroad
who have a better balanced and more cooperative view. Yet not even the
President has power to make such a simplistic model succeed in the 21st
Century. It will bring only ruin to Iraq, the Middle East, the world, and
the United States. I strongly urge you to be bolder in asserting the need
for an alternative.
With best wishes,
Respectfully yours,
David Keppel keppel@sbcglobal.net
David Keppel is a writer living in Indiana. He writes Op-Ed pieces for the Indianapolis Star and his letters have been published by the London Times and the New York Times. He is a frequent contributor to this website and works with MoveOn in Indiana.
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