* * *
BEFORE THE WAR, at least three million Iraqis lived in exile, and in the second week of December 2002 most of them seemed to turn up at the London Hilton Metropole. It was a garish new hotel on an anonymous stretch of Edgware Road, not far from Paddington Station. The shiny elevators and corridors were jammed with the hundreds of mullahs, monarchists, ex-officers, party bosses, businessmen, intellectuals, and schemers who comprised Iraq’s opposition in exile. In their turbans and robes, their kaffiyehs or business suits, they huddled in conspiratorial-looking groups, bathed in camera lights, clutching cell phones to ears. It struck me how many of them looked nothing like Kanan Makiya’s liberal-minded independents. Some resembled beefy apparatchiks from the old Soviet republics of Central Asia. Others, solemn, bearded Shiite clerics, brought to mind the words “fatwa” and “stoning.” Of the very few women, some were concealed within full hijabs.
Sprinkled among them, palely lurking, were the Americans. There were the discreet emissaries of various government agencies, and the less discreet personalities of the regime change community in Washington. There was Francis Brooke, Chalabi’s smugly smiling PR man. There was Randy Scheuneman, formerly a staff aide to Trent Lott, now of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, and Danielle Pletka, formerly on the staff of Jesse Helms’s Foreign Relations Committee, now vice president of the American Enterprise Institute. There was Laurie Mylroie, a short, blockish freelance scholar, peddling copies of her book that claimed to prove an Iraqi connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which featured a blurb from Paul Wolfowitz. There was a slight, laconic young man in a business suit, named Charles Forrest, who hovered against a wall with an air of possessing some burning secret knowledge. Charles Forrest worked for a government-funded organization in Washington that was preparing a legal case against Saddam Hussein, but his career path through various government and business jobs in the Middle East sounded like the cover story of a spy. “People suddenly see this whole region as a threat to us. The whole thing is inflamed and it’s endangering us,” Charles Forrest exclaimed. “The time has come. The whole thing’s got to change.” There was Senator Sam Brownback, a Christian conservative from Kansas, holding an impromptu press conference with the party leaders of the opposition, whom he compared to Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin. “Democracy is difficult, but ultimately it is the only form of government that allows people to progress,” Senator Brownback declared. “Destiny has called upon these leaders to take on the heavy burden of rebirthing a nation.” These Americans moved through the throng of Iraqi exiles with the glowing and watchful fervor of missionaries among the converted.
A new movie had just been released of Graham Greene’s novel about a young American in Saigon with a shelf of books on democracy and a head full of dangerously innocent ideas, working undercover to create a “Third Force” that would transform Vietnam in America’s image. The Quiet American had been ready for distribution just after September 11, but Miramax’s fears that the movie might be thought unpatriotic delayed the release for more than a year. As it turned out, the timing couldn’t have been better. I was wary of Greene’s anti-Americanism, which was a form of British snobbery, his jaded postures, his love of fallen Catholics in opium dens—the whole Baudelaire-in-Saigon bit. Yet back in 1955 he had seen that America’s capacity for mistakes and crimes was proportionate to its innocence and self-righteousness. It was impossible not to think of these new zealots as the latest generation of quiet Americans.
At the London Hilton Metropole, Kanan Makiya was an anomalous sight, looking rumpled in shirtsleeves, baggy corduroys, and all-weather shoes, his face as always clean shaven. The politicos from the Kurdish, Shiite, and ex-military parties complained that Makiya’s casual appearance lacked respect. The rumored contents of his report, not yet distributed to the conferees or even completely translated into Arabic, troubled them as well. Worst of all was the bluntness with which Makiya kept talking about the need to move beyond the “old politics” of the ethnic parties.
He wanted the conference to vote up or down on his report, and he feared that some of the parties with heavier numbers—especially the Shiite hard-liners—would present their own hastily drafted proposals to head off his. He had spent the days before the conference trying to convince Condoleezza Rice and her envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, that the traditional parties were overrepresented, and that the independent professionals of the INC, whose diversity and ideas were closer to those of Iraqis inside the country, should have their numbers increased. He sent a list of forty or fifty new names to Khalilzad. “We independents … are a noisy, fractious and difficult lot,” he wrote in his cover letter. “But we are solid on the question of the core values that we want to see in Iraq, which are in the end values we have learned from the West. A quarter of a century of my work on Iraq has been devoted to spreading such values among Arabs.”
Khalilzad, the defense intellectual and longtime Wolfowitz aide who had drafted the controversial Defense Planning Guidance in 1992, was in London to make sure the fractious Iraqi opposition presented a unified face to the world. The administration’s own policy on postwar Iraq was far from clear, but Khalilzad let the Iraqis know that no government-in-exile or “transitional authority” was going to be chosen in London. Yet here was Makiya, with powerful backers at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office, refusing to play the game, insisting that he and his friends and fellow independents were the true face of Iraq, that the traditional parties “will unquestionably become the greatest single obstacle to the kind of economic and political renaissance of Iraq that I know the U.S. government wants to see happen.” Makiya and the INC had somehow convinced themselves that they would have no greater enemies in liberated Iraq than State Department bureaucrats and Kurdish and Shiite politicos.
There was furious behind-the-scenes maneuvering. “Who is Kanan Makiya to propose these names?” an official with the ex-military party demanded. Chalabi was flying in from Tehran after cutting a deal with the Kurdish and Shiite parties to form a provisional government in spite of the Americans. Then the Sunni delegates revolted over their scant numbers. Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who understood the bazaar nature of regional politics, brokered the horse trading: Sunnis and independents were added, watering down the Shiite numbers. Makiya was racing to get his 329-page report (dissenting appendixes and all) translated and printed, at a cost to the U.S. government of at least twenty thousand dollars. On the phone he and Tom Warrick, his old nemesis at the State Department, haggled over the price. “I can promise you,” Makiya said with a sigh, “no one is trying to make money off this.”
As a politician, Makiya was his own worst enemy. He brought to the fray the earnest, intense style that made his writing so powerful, and he left even his friends shaking their heads. Perhaps he was out of his depth in the dangerous waters of Iraqi politics; he was a writer, he thought for himself, he had never worried about coalitions and deals. But over the course of 2002 he had eased himself down into the stream and then plunged headfirst and been swept along. He tried to bring this passage of history under his control, but as Randolph Bourne wrote of the American intellectuals who went to war in Europe in 1917 with the highest humanitarian motives, “If it is a question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground.” Makiya was arrogant, he was idealistic, he was reckless, he was courageous. What else could he have done?
One afternoon, he and his friend Sam Chalabi met in Bloomsbury, not far from Makiya’s parents’ flat, across the street from the British Museum at a café next to the Oriental bookshop run by an elderly English widow where Makiya had loved to browse when he was young. Together they surveyed the damage. Chalabi, whose cranial dome and willfully mysterious cool left no doubt whose nephew he was, had been Makiya’s closest collaborator on the document, but over cappuccino he told Makiya that his outsp
okenness was hurting their cause. The Kurdish parties were vehemently opposed to the proposal for nonethnic federalism, which would mean the end of their decade-long experiment in self-rule. They had fought hard to gain recognition and coequal status with the Arabs, and they were not going to relinquish it without a fight. The views of the Shiite party on the section dealing with religion and the state had not been solicited. The Sunnis were unhappiest of all. There had been a lack of inclusiveness.
Makiya nodded. “I’ve begun to hate the word ‘inclusive’ here,” he said. “I know it’s going to mean the lowest common denominator. Nothing will be said that means anything.” He was sweating, the lines deepening in his forehead. I had never seen him so high-strung—he looked exhausted. His cell phone, a new acquisition, was bedeviling him. The months of work, the pressure of his will, the storm that always swirled around him, seemed to be placing him under an intolerable strain.
“They see you as an interloper imposing something on them. Let’s emphasize the parts of the document the others can get behind,” Chalabi, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, said. “Human rights, transitional justice.”
“They want to come out of this as one big happy family. They want to show unity and support for the Americans. I want to win something concrete.” Makiya wanted the opposition to commit itself to a set of principles and force the Americans’ hand before the shooting started and the logic of war took its course. “But I’m afraid we’re fighting a losing battle.”
“I don’t want to give up, or withdraw the document,” Chalabi insisted. “But you have to play it more like a game.”
Makiya looked helplessly at Chalabi, distress etched across his face. “I guess so.”
Chalabi urged him to lower his profile. Makiya relented.
That evening, I went to the offices of the INC in fashionable Knightsbridge. Upstairs, a group of smartly dressed young staffers hovered around a fleshy, balding man in an armchair who was answering e-mails while listening to Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor on CD. It was Ahmad Chalabi, wearing a brown, pin-striped, double-breasted suit and a yellow silk tie done in a Windsor knot. He glanced up and greeted me with the magisterial smile that was his eternal public expression. There was no time to talk; he had just flown in from Tehran and had business that would last into the night.
I went along for a short drive with Chalabi, Makiya, and a few others. At one point Chalabi took a call on his cell phone: He was discussing Jalal Talabani, one of the two Kurdish leaders. “He’s a Marxist, a Groucho Marxist,” Chalabi said with a chuckle. “‘You don’t like my principles? I have some others.’”
Nabil al-Musawi, Chalabi’s right-hand man, turned to me. He was a tall, good-looking former pizzeria manager in a turtleneck and blazer, with a carefully trimmed goatee. “The independents are the leading edge between the politics of the past and the politics of the future. By the politics of the past I mean not just the traditional parties but the State Department, with their cynical thinking that these Arabs can’t have democracy, they need someone strong to control them.” By now I had the argument down cold, but it was striking to spend an hour in Chalabi’s inner circle and feel the breezy certainty, the sense of an elite group riding a giant wave of history into a future that belonged to them.
The world of the London Iraqis could have been created by Conrad: the coffee-shop owner who was founder-president of the Iraq-Israel Friendship Committee, banned in both countries; the newspaper editor who kept pictures of himself with Saddam from the old days and had plans to start a paper called Babylon Times when he returned to Baghdad; the underemployed journalists who worked out of briefcases; the strategy sessions over hummus and kebab in dingy outer London cafeterias, and the nostalgia-drenched conversations in living rooms over late-night chai; the bitter intrigues among men who knew one another too well. Far from their original habitat, they had grown to look more alike than they knew. They had been waiting half their lives for this tremendous event to take place. It was up to the Americans.
Mustafa al-Kadhimi arrived in London in 1999 with nothing except a carved Ottoman window shutter from his family’s house in an old Baghdad neighborhood. When I met him he was thirty-four, but his lean, slightly ravaged face and gray-flecked hair made him appear a decade older. “I have a tragic story,” Mustafa told me matter-of-factly. He was born into a family of wealthy Shiite merchants, but the Baathists confiscated the house, then the businesses, and eventually began arresting Mustafa’s brothers, who, like thousands of Shia, had joined the Khomeini-inspired Dawa Party in the early eighties. Mustafa himself flirted with the Dawa, and when his three best friends were arrested and killed, Mustafa fled Baghdad through the north. It was 1988, and the Anfal was at its height. A family of Kurdish refugees from a destroyed village entrusted their five-year-old daughter to Mustafa’s care, but on his way to the Turkish border an Iraqi Air Force helicopter flew low overhead and startled the horse on which Mustafa and the girl were riding. She fell off and died in his arms—“a picture I cannot get out of my head.”
The girl’s family had gone to Tehran, where Mustafa found them and broke the terrible news. The year he spent in theocratic Iran showed him “the true face of Islamist ideology.” It reminded him of nothing so much as the regime in his own country; he was even jailed for forty days after publishing a newspaper article deemed blasphemous. After 1989, Mustafa began a decade of wandering. He went from Iran to Syria, to Lebanon, and eventually to the Greek islands, where he worked as a waiter at a resort. One day in the mid-1990s, the guest was none other than George H. W. Bush. Serving the ex-president’s table, Mustafa summoned enough courage to lean forward and ask why the American government had left Saddam in power to slaughter rebellious Iraqis after the Gulf War in 1991. When I met him, he was still waiting for the answer. In London, Mustafa became a hotel porter, but soon he fell into the INC circle and met Kanan Makiya, whose books transformed his mind and completed his evolution into a liberal democrat.
I never quite learned how Mustafa made a living (his wife was expecting their first child). He had connections at Radio Free Europe and at the INC weekly paper; his business card read “Iraq Future Affairs Institute.” Two months earlier in Damascus, a cab driver recognized his accent and said, “Congratulations. The Americans are coming to help you. Let’s hope they come to help us afterward.” This, Mustafa assured me, was the true opinion of the Arab street, not the vitriol shown in the Arab media. “The problem with Arabs is we live on our history,” he said. “And the history is a big lie.” Mustafa was ashamed of his English, but he had an epigrammatic way with language. As far as he was concerned, the next president of Iraq should be either a woman or a man without a mustache. Exile had cost him almost everything. His mother, whom he hadn’t seen since 1988, died in Baghdad just a few months before the start of the war that would have reunited them. Mustafa was one of those fugitives from dictatorship whose whole life hangs in suspension until the regime’s fall. He spent a full day driving me around Iraqi London, insisting on paying for everything. When we said goodbye, he warmly kissed my cheeks and promised that we would meet again soon, in Baghdad. It was impossible not to wish it so.
* * *
IN THE GRAND BALLROOM of the London Hilton Metropole, Makiya was sitting at a long table next to Ahmad Chalabi and a few other opposition figures before a throng of journalists. Conspicuous by their absence were the leaders of the ethnic parties. Makiya had promised to say nothing, to let the others speak, to let the document speak for itself, and for a while he kept his word. But when reporters began lobbing questions in his direction, he described what was in the report and, as usual, he grew intense. “It carries forward a completely new idea that doesn’t exist anywhere in the Arab-Muslim world. This is something tremendous, this is something unbelievable. We’re talking above all of an idea of democracy that isn’t only majority rule, an idea of democracy that is about minority rights and group rights and above all individual human rights.”
Murmuring sprea
d among the press corps, a ripple of excitement. Who was this guy? He sounded nothing like the parade of speakers who had been droning on throughout the weekend.
“This is a fighting document, by the way,” Makiya said. “We intend to fight for it on the floor of the conference.”
When the session broke up, the journalists flocked around Makiya. Into the ballroom rushed Hoshyar Zebari, a leader of one of the Kurdish parties, red faced and furious, telling anyone who would listen that Makiya’s document had no authority at the conference.
Later, I asked Zebari what he thought of Makiya’s ideas about federalism, about the ethnic parties, about old and new politics. Zebari (who would become the very capable foreign minister of the new Iraqi government, the first Kurd to hold the office in Iraq’s history) was a bear of a man with a thick black mustache. He smiled through his answer, but he kept thumping me in the chest as he spoke. “We are rooted in the country, we are the ones who have suffered,” he said. “What Kanan Makiya has done, I appreciate his intellectual work, but it’s just an intellectual exercise.”
“Makiya is trying to give it teeth,” I suggested.
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