The room—virtually silent to that moment—erupted with sustained applause.
“Thank you,” he eventually continued, “for your continued resolve in helping us fight the terrorists plaguing Iraq, which is a struggle to defend our nation’s democracy and our people who aspire to liberty, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. All of those are not Western values; they are universal values for humanity.”
Again, the applause was deafening.
“I know that some of you here question whether Iraq is part of the war on terror,” Maliki noted deeper into the address. “Let me be very clear: This is a battle between true Islam, for which a person’s liberty and rights constitute essential cornerstones, and terrorism, which wraps itself in a fake Islamic cloak; in reality, terrorists are waging a war on Islam and Muslims and values and spread[ing] hatred between humanity. . . . The truth is that terrorism has no religion.”
Maliki was making a point central to the Reformers: that Islam is a religion of peace, and that it had been hijacked by the Radicals.
“It is your duty and our duty to defeat this terror,” the prime minister went on to say. “Iraq is the front line in this struggle, and history will prove that the sacrifices of Iraqis for freedom will not be in vain. Iraqis are your allies in the war on terror. . . . The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq and terror permitted to triumph, then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere. Mr. Speaker, we are building the new Iraq on the foundation of democracy and are erecting it through our belief in the rights of every individual . . . so that future Iraqi generations can live in peace, prosperity, and hope. Iraqis have tasted freedom, and we will defend it absolutely. . . . Our people . . . defied the terrorists every time they were called upon to make a choice, by risking their lives for the ballot box. They have stated over and over again, with their ink-stained fingers waving in pride, that they will always make the same choice.”
Suddenly, a protestor in the visitors’ gallery jumped up and shouted, “Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now! Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now!”
The protestor was promptly removed from the chamber by security, and Maliki continued, directly challenging the notion that Iraqis wanted the American forces to leave soon, much less “now.”
“Let there be no doubt,” he insisted. “Today, Iraq is a democracy which stands firm because of the sacrifices of its people and the sacrifices of all those who stood with us in this crisis from nations and countries. And that’s why—thank you—I would like to thank them very much for all their sacrifices. . . . The journey has been perilous, and the future is not guaranteed. Many around the world underestimated the resolve of Iraq’s people and were sure that we would never reach this stage. Few believed in us. But you, the American people, did, and we are grateful for this.”
I was suddenly on my feet, applauding the prime minister, as was everyone else in the room. It was a deeply emotional moment for me, and it was then that I realized how much it meant to me, and to many Americans, to be thanked by an Iraqi leader, on behalf of the Iraqi people, for what we had done for them.
And the prime minister was right. Many world leaders had not been willing to help liberate Iraq from tyranny. Indeed, many American political leaders in that very room had refused to help the Reformers in their epic struggle against the Resisters and the Radicals. But it had worked. It had not been easy. Much more sacrifice would be necessary. But tremendous progress was being made, and someone had had the decency to say thanks.
“I will not allow Iraq to become a launch pad for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations,” the prime minister insisted, to more well-deserved applause. “I will not allow terror to rob Iraqis of their hopes and dreams. I will not allow terrorists to dictate to us our future.”
He closed by stating his heartfelt belief that Iraq and America “need each other to defeat the terror engulfing the free world,” promising that Iraq, with America’s help, would in time become “the graveyard for terrorism and terrorists for the good of all humanity.”
After all, he said, the truth is that “God has made us free.”
Maliki vs. Clinton
Was it all just a show?
Numerous Washington critics said it was, that Prime Minister Maliki was no real Reformer and was just telling his country’s chief financiers—Congress and the American people—what they wanted to hear while avoiding other important topics.
Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean accused Maliki of being an “anti-Semite” for failing to denounce Hezbollah by name in his speech or in private discussions on Capitol Hill because of the Lebanese terrorist group’s repeated attacks against Israel.484
Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, also sharply criticized Maliki for not singling out Hezbollah in his speech or in subsequent Hill meetings, as did Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, though the prime minister repeatedly denounced “terrorist” groups throughout the region.485
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, became a particularly harsh critic following that speech, as did Senator Hillary Clinton of New York. Indeed, by the following summer, both were calling on the Iraqi parliament to dump Maliki in favor of someone more favorable to their political views and style.
“During his trip to Iraq last week, Senator Levin . . . confirmed that the Iraqi Government’s failures have reinforced the widely held view that the Maliki government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement, because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders,” Senator Clinton said in a statement her office issued on August 22, 2007. “I share Senator Levin’s hope that the Iraqi Parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks.”486
It was an extraordinary development. Here were two high-profile Americans interfering directly in the internal politics of a friendly democracy by calling for a democratically elected prime minister to be deposed because they didn’t like his approach. Some speculated their real beef was that Maliki had strongly supported the Bush-McCain “surge” initiative to put more U.S. military forces into Iraq to help crush the insurgency, when both Senators Clinton and Levin had vehemently opposed the surge. Senator Clinton had said at the time, “Our best hope of fostering political progress in Iraq is to begin the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops.”487
This infuriated many senior Iraqi officials desperately trying to keep their country together, including Maliki, who feared a precipitous withdrawal of American forces could cause the nation to plunge into a full-blown civil war and destroy all the democratic gains they had made thus far.
Maliki wasted no time in punching back. “There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin,” Maliki told Iraqi as well as American journalists. “This is severe interference in our domestic affairs. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton are from the Democratic Party and they must demonstrate democracy.”488 He went on to urge Clinton and her colleagues to “come to their senses” and “respect democracy” and the will of the Iraqi people. What was more, he noted that “leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin have not experienced in their political lives the kind of differences we have in Iraq” and “when they give their judgment they have no knowledge of what reconciliation means.”489
While the jury is still out on how successful Maliki will be as a Reformer, I must confess that, some of my own concerns about the prime minister’s political toughness and savvy notwithstanding, in my mind Maliki’s stock went up significantly that day. He had pushed back hard at two Washington masters of political deadlock and partisan bickering for having the audacity to criticize his difficulties in bringing about unity and political progress in Baghdad, of all places, when the U.S. Senate was getting so little done in its own backyard.
A True Hero of the Revolution
&
nbsp; A few hours after Maliki’s speech, my cell phone rang again.
It was a Jewish acquaintance of mine whom I had met in Israel. She had someone with her she thought I should meet.
“He’s a member of the prime minister’s delegation and helped write the speech,” she explained. “He’s also the only member of the Iraqi parliament who has ever been to Israel. I told him about you and your books and your interest in the future of his country. He would like to meet you, if you have some time.”
I didn’t, actually, but I made some.
Mithal al-Alusi and I met for breakfast the next morning at the Willard InterContinental hotel, just across the street from the White House. As a gift, I brought him a copy of my latest novel, The Copper Scroll, which had just been released. He scanned the back cover, which read, in part, “Saddam Hussein is gone. Yasser Arafat is dead. A new Iraq is rising. But so, too, is a new evil, and now White House advisors Jon Bennett and Erin McCoy find themselves facing a terrifying new threat triggered by an ancient mystery.”
He asked me questions about why my novels had such an uncanny track record of seeming to come true. I briefly shared with him the biblical prophecies upon which they were based, including the prophecies in the books of Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Revelation that indicated Iraq would one day become the wealthiest, most peaceful and powerful nation on the face of the planet. Such prophecies intrigued him, particularly given the fact that as a Sunni Muslim, he had never heard of them before.
We turned to discussing the prime minister’s speech. Alusi did not take credit for it, saying only that he had helped review and edit the speech with the prime minister. I suspect he was just being modest. But he did say that he believed strongly—as did I—that the address to Congress had gone well and had effectively communicated the vision of the new Iraqi leadership.
“I’ve written about such speeches for the fictional leader of Iraq in my novels,” I told him. “But honestly, I’m not sure I ever had enough faith to believe I would see and hear one like that delivered by an actual Iraqi leader.”
In the course of our morning together, and in tracking his career ever since, I have come to believe that Mithal al-Alusi is a true hero of the Revolution, a genuine Jeffersonian democratic Reformer who has pledged his life to build a new, free, and stable Iraq.
Born in 1953, Alusi was just twenty-six years old when Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iraq and Iran, respectively. He knows firsthand what it feels like to live in a Republic of Fear. But now he has breathed free air, and he refuses to let it ever again be taken from him or his people. This is why he founded the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation with a fiercely liberal platform calling for free elections, free speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, and other Jeffersonian ideals. And he is not just the first but, as of this writing, still the only Iraqi member of parliament ever to have visited Israel. This is a distinction in which he takes great pride, but it is also one for which he has paid a terrible price.
In September of 2004, Alusi was invited to speak at a conference in Herzliya, an Israeli city on the Mediterranean coastline just north of Tel Aviv, on how to fight radical Islamic terrorists. Despite objections by friends and colleagues who feared for his safety if the Radicals in Iraq learned about his trip, Alusi accepted, convinced that Iran—not Israel—was the real threat to the security of Iraq and the region. The trip went well. Alusi was warmly welcomed, and he met people he felt were ideological kindred spirits on many levels. He returned to Iraq after a few days feeling affirmed in his conviction that Iraq needed to build a quiet but strong relationship with the Israelis.
But on February 8, 2005, tragedy struck. Islamic extremists tried to assassinate Alusi for his prodemocracy views and his visit to Israel. Radicals ambushed his car in Baghdad. In the firefight that ensued, they murdered both of Alusi’s sons—Ayman, twenty-nine, and Jamal, twenty-two. They also murdered Haidar, his bodyguard. Alusi himself was shot multiple times and lost part of one of his thumbs, but miraculously he survived the attack.
“Again, the ghosts of death are going out,” Alusi told Radio Free Iraq just hours after emerging from the bloody scene. “They are ready to kill a person, ready to kill the peace, ready to kill the victory of Iraqis and their right to life. Again, henchmen of the Ba’ath [Party] and dirty terrorist gangs, al Qaeda and others, are going out convinced that they can determine life and death as they desire. Iraq will not die. My children . . . died as heroes, no differently from other people who find their heroic deaths. But we will not, by God, hand Iraq over to murderers and terrorists. . . . As for the advocates of religious intolerance willing to kill . . . I tell them, ‘Brothers, verily you have made a grave mistake.’ I tell them, ‘There can be no state in Iraq except for one founded on [democratic] institutions and [the rule of] law.’”490
In September 2005, Alusi was invited back to the Israeli counterterrorism conference, and remarkably, he accepted the invitation again.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Nobody can stop me,” he said firmly. “I am not playing a game, my friend. I believe in my goals. To be a democrat doesn’t just mean to go to the elections. To be a democrat, you have to have principles, and you have to be strong in them. For the majority of Iraqis, they believe Iran is the biggest threat in the region, not Israel. I agree with them. And I believe we must work together with the Israelis. I want peace with the Israelis. I want peace with everybody—except the terrorists. There should be no peace with them.”
The Anbar Awakening
In August 2008, I called Alusi to catch up.
So much had happened during the two years since I’d last spoken with him. Iraqi sectarian violence was way down. The threat of Iranian violence in the region was way up. The “surge” had worked. The government led by President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Maliki had not only lasted but seemed to be succeeding in a way that few had predicted.
But I wanted to understand it all from his unique vantage point, as a Sunni Muslim in a Shia-majority government, living in the heart of Baghdad, at the center of the battle between Radicals and Reformers.
“Are you feeling optimistic, my friend?” I asked as we began an hour-long call.
“I am,” he said. “We are trying to find our way forward. We are trying to make progress, to give people a better life. We didn’t succeed through the last eighty years. But I do believe we have the capacity to become a true democracy in the heart of the Middle East. We are willing. And we have the need—it’s not just for fun—to play the role of free people in a clearly extremist atmosphere of Iran, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Mahdi Army, and others. The key is Baghdad. If Baghdad is strong and secure, we will have peace. If Baghdad is lost, all is lost.”491
I asked him to tell me about the success of the “Anbar Awakening” during the summer and fall of 2006, in which hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in the Anbar Province in the western half of Iraq, along the Syrian and Jordanian border—once closely allied with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—chose to turn against AQI, turn in the terrorists to local and national authorities, and join the political progress. It was a remarkable development, and Alusi had been right in the middle of it.
“I’m secular, from a Sunni background, from Anbar, which is the biggest province in Iraq,” he explained. “My people in Anbar, they were the real basis for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The religious fanatics there hate democracy. This was the real stronghold for the Sunni extremists. But the Anbar people understood after a while how dangerous Al Qaeda in Iraq really is. They saw the violence. They were horrified. It was Muslims killing other Muslims in the name of Islam that turned people’s minds and hearts against al Qaeda.”
I was familiar with some of the horrors Alusi was referring to. At one point in 2006, AQI forces murdered and then publicly burned the body of a Sunni cleric in Anbar who was encouraging people in his town to turn terrorists in to the local police. Iraqi Sunnis who had been strong supporters or at least sympathetic t
o AQI were horrified and began accelerating their assistance to the police. Prime Minister Maliki then visited Ramadi, a city of about four hundred thousand Sunnis in the heart of the Anbar Province, to call on the people to turn against AQI. To stop Maliki—remember, a Shia Muslim—and those listening to him, AQI began using chemical weapons in Anbar—notably bombs filled with chlorine gas—in the first half of 2007, trying to massacre Iraqi Sunni Muslim civilians and send a message that Sunni collaboration with the federal Iraqi government instead of with the Radicals would not be tolerated. But this only further inflamed Anbar residents against AQI and awakened more Sunnis to the urgent need to turn against AQI leaders and operatives for the sake of their own lives and those of their children and grandchildren.492
More Iraqi and Coalition forces also moved into Anbar Province, hunting down key Radicals. And Maliki and other Shia leaders continued working with local Sunni tribal chiefs and community leaders, drawing them into the federal political process and showing them they really could have a voice and a significant role in the future of the country.
“What happened in Anbar means that now we have Iraqi experience to deal with a huge area that is controlled by al Qaeda and how to help turn people against the extremists and move in the direction of freedom and security,” Alusi noted.
At the same time, he said, “the extremists were also trying to turn Sunnis against Shias and Shias against Sunnis. But you have to understand that in Iraq, there are no pure Sunni or pure Shia families. Everyone here is mixed. Some have a Shia father but a Sunni mother, or vice versa. Or you have a Sunni cousin or a Shia uncle, or whatever. So it’s hard to divide people who are already so mixed and interwoven.”
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