[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 120 (Thursday, September 22, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H8332-H8337]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Sodrel). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. 
McDermott) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I cannot think how we could have had two 
better speeches than that of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), 
which he just made, and mine. My real sadness about this House is that 
this is not being done in a debate where all the Members are talking 
and listening about this very, very important issue.
  The question that I think the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) well 
raises is, why are we in Iraq? Now, I recently was in Jordan, and I was 
confronted by many of the Iraqis who have fled from Baghdad and other 
parts of Iraq. There are about a million Iraqis of middle class and 
above all living in Amman. The prices of real estate have gone up. It 
is very hard to find a hotel room. They have left.
  I sat at dinner with a number of them, and the question that many of 
them asked me was, why is the United States in Iraq? And I sort of 
dismissed the ideas that have been advanced at various times in this 
Hall, that we are there for weapons of mass destruction, or we are 
there because of al Qaeda. Many people say we are there for oil. I 
think that is way too simplistic an explanation for what is going on.
  Are we there to stop terrorism? Well, it is very hard to look at what 
is going on in Iraq and say that what we have done is to end terror. 
Rather, it seems like we have become a breeding ground and a training 
ground for terrorists.
  After I had exhausted my ideas about what it might be about, I asked 
the Iraqis to tell me what they thought this was about. And they said, 
well, it is pretty clear that what your goal was, and you succeeded 
almost at this point, in dividing Iraq into three pieces and destroying 
Iraq as ever being an Arab nation. That was your goal from the start; 
and you have, by every decision you have made, you have worked in that 
direction.
  Now, it was not a design that was clear. People have not understood 
this, in large measure because it was never enunciated in a public way 
by public figures saying we are going into Iraq to destroy it. We have 
talked about liberty, we have talked about democracy, we have talked 
about every other thing under the sun except the fact that the effect 
of our actions have been to destroy Iraq.
  Now I will take you back to the appointment of the first governor of 
Iraq. Most people, if you ask them who that was, they cannot remember 
the name. It was a retired army general by the name of Jay Garner. He 
was appointed and he went over there, and he had the idea that perhaps 
the Iraqis should begin to take their own existence, now that Baghdad 
had fallen and with the Americans in control militarily, let the Iraqis 
put their country back together.

[[Page H8333]]

  What happened to him? Anybody know? Well, I will tell you what 
happened to him. He was immediately relieved. He was taken out of the 
situation and Paul Bremer was brought in because Garner was not 
following the script, and they knew that Bremer would.
  Now, just take a couple of things very early that Bremer did and you 
understand why the Iraqis feel the way they do about the situation 
today. The first thing he did was to dismantle an army. He disbanded an 
army of 500,000 people or so, all of whom had families, had homes, had 
children, had grandparents, had all the responsibilities of citizens of 
Iraq. They had salaries. They could pay for their families' food. They 
could pay for their families' housing. All of this was what they had 
been accustomed to.
  Surely they had worked for Saddam Hussein. But to think that they all 
were bad and, therefore, should be disbanded and thrown to the winds 
was a terrible miscalculation about the attitude of the average soldier 
in the Iraqi Army. And what that action did was to send 500,000 Iraqis 
underground with a rifle and a grudge. We created 500,000 insurgents 
instantly by that action.
  Now, why would you do that? Why would you want to go into a country 
that has an army that is functioning and not take off just the top 
layer, no, no, no; not take off the first couple of layers, maybe down 
to the sergeants or something, but to fire everyone and take away their 
income, their whole existence, if you thought that was in the best 
interest of the Iraqis?
  But if you want chaos, put 500,000 people out on the street with guns 
and a grudge.
  The second thing that we did, equally disruptive and equally 
destabilizing, was the decision to de-Baathize the government. Now, the 
Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein, which is secular, not 
religious, but a secular party of Arab nationalism, basically, and the 
decision to say that everybody in Iraq who belonged to the Baath Party 
was suddenly out of a job and out of government took another hundreds 
of thousands of people who were simply public servants who ran the 
utilities, ran the electric company, ran the sewage system, taught in 
the schools, did the marriage licenses, recorded land deeds, and 
whatever public servants in a society do. We suddenly said, if you are 
a member of the Baath Party, you are out of here.

                              {time}  1800

  We absolutely denuded this country of any government whatsoever. Now, 
you would not have to be older than about a seventh grade kid in this 
country to realize if you take away the Army and take away the 
government, you have chaos. If you go into the schools and you take 
away the teacher, take away the principal, the hall monitors, the kids 
are not going to run a very reasonable operation. That is what the 
educational system is about. Well, we did that to a whole society.
  You can say we know, and you are standing down there in the well 
talking about this, but you never wanted to go to war in the first 
place.
  One of the interesting things that I have done over the course of 
time since this all began was to read widely in the international 
press. It is very often difficult in this country, either in the press 
or in the media, to get anything like a comprehensive view of what is 
going on in Iraq and why we have so much difficulty. We have the 
strongest Army in the world. There is no question about that. We have 
the bravest, the best trained, the most able people in the world are 
over there representing in the United States Army and Marines, and Navy 
and Air Force. That has never been the problem or the question.
  The question has been after the gunfire stops, what do you do? How do 
you run things? And from the very start, the administration has been 
dominated by people whose intention was to destabilize Iraq, in fact, 
into destabilizing very wide portions of the country. Not many of you 
have probably ever read the Jordan Times. That is the main newspaper in 
the city of Amman which is the capital of Jordan.
  On August 10, 2005, an article appeared called, ``The Triumph of 
Neoconservatives in Iraq,'' and which I will include for the Record.
  The article was written by a man named Abbas J. Ali. He is a 
professor and director of the School of International Management at 
Indiana University of Pennsylvania; obviously an Iraqi living in the 
United States, and he wrote this article.
  If you read just this one article, and I wish I could get it into the 
head of every Member of Congress, part of the reason for putting it in 
the Congressional Record is people can get it and read it and see it. 
You do not need to Google it. It will be in the Congressional Record. 
He begins by saying that three recent developments in the Iraqi 
political arena reaffirm the growing fear of destabilization and things 
are becoming worse. First, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald 
Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12 years. The 
New York Times reported on June 30 that a type of federalism, as 
supported by Washington, where each region in Iraq gains power 
approaching true sovereignty, and that means creating three separate 
countries.
  Mr. Speaker, our goal or what we are actually doing right now is 
creating three separate countries. We are not creating Iraq. We are 
going to put some shine on it and try and say it has a constitution, 
but the pieces will be sovereign from one another.
  The third thing he says that happens is the appointment of Zalamy 
Khalilzad as Ambassador, who is a neocon and will do the neocon bidding 
from the start.
  Now, this did not start with George Bush the second. This is not 
something new. I do not think you can lay it all off on the present 
occupant of the White House.
  Dr. Ali writes that back in the 1970s, the neoconservatives 
recognized Iraq constituted a threat to their design for the Middle 
East, not because Iraq had ample natural resources, especially oil and 
water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and cultured 
people displaying pride, patriotism and independent thinking. It had 
the best water system in the Middle East, it had the best sewage system 
in the Middle East, it had the best health care system in the Middle 
East. It was really a functioning country. For whatever you want to say 
about Saddam Hussein, and no one wants to say a good thing about him 
and we should not, his actions as a leader were awful, but when he was 
dealing with the running of the state, he did a reasonable job.
  Now at that time in the 1970s, General Shinseki, then the U.S. Army 
Chief of Staff, pointed out, and remember Shinseki was the guy they 
fired because he gave them the truth about how many people this would 
take, Shinseki pointed out that in 2002 Paul Wolfowitz, and remember 
that name, now the head of the World Bank, as a young Pentagon analyst 
and a neoconservative, designated Iraq in 1979 as a menace that must be 
dealt with. Since then the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been 
primarily a neoconservative venture. The neocons have wanted this and 
that is why this article was entitled ``The Triumph of the Neocons in 
Iraq.''
  If Wolfowitz was not enough, in 1982 a man named Oded Yinon 
accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with Iraq to 
foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. He notice that in the short 
run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel 
and that a division of Iraq into provinces along ethnic religious lines 
is possible. So three more states will exist around the major cities: 
Basra in the south; Baghdad in the middle; Mosul in the north; and 
Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish 
north.
  This is 1982, people were laying this out.
  It is for this reason that the neoconservatives have made a very 
powerful argument, he goes on to say, and he quotes a man named Michael 
Ledeen, who is not just some newspaper reporter or somebody drifting in 
off the street. He was the former U.S. Under Secretary of State and he 
stated, ``Stability is an unworthy American mission.'' This is a man 
who was in the State Department, saying that stability is an unworthy 
American mission and a misleading concept to boot. He said we do not 
want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or even Saudi Arabia. We 
want things to change. The issue is not whether but how to destabilize.

[[Page H8334]]

  Think about that. The minds in the State Department, and this is an 
Under Secretary of State saying we want to destabilize.
  Now there have been books. Lawrence Kaplan and Bill Kristol, they 
asserted in their book ``The War Over Iraq'' that this is more about 
even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror, it is 
about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world 
in the 21st century. They argue that the only plausible and sensible 
mission is to persistently supply American might in these parts of the 
world that constitute a threat to American interests.
  And the mission, Michael Ledeen goes on to say, is ensure the total 
submission of the people in the region. He stated this in 2001. We have 
gone from 1979 all of the way up to 2001. We will not be sated, and 
this is an Under Secretary of State saying we will not be sated until 
we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle 
East and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, 
imam, sheik, ayatollah either singing the praises of the United States 
or pumping gasoline for a dime a gallon on American bases in the Arctic 
Circle. Gasoline is not a dime a gallon.
  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ledeen and his men have worked and been very 
consistent and very determined. We are talking about a 25-year effort 
from 1979 to the present. But in the Bush second term, this article 
goes on, the neoconservatives appear to have secured indisputable 
domination in designating American foreign policy. They have situated 
themselves at the core of the three primary agencies responsible for 
foreign affairs: the National Security Council, and State and Defense 
Departments. Now, with Ambassador Khalilzad in Baghdad, they have him 
in position to carry this out from the green zone.

  They are building the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad. Why 
would you be building an embassy of that size for a country of several 
tens of millions of people unless you had some grand design, strategy 
into the future?
  Now, if you look at this, you say to yourself, why? We have 
sacrificed 1,900 of our young men and women in this war. They have 
died. For what? To destabilize Iraq? That is what the people in the 
State Department and in this government are up to. It is why it has 
never made any sense.
  We have had thousands of people come home to Walter Reed Hospital. I 
have been up there. I was a physician in the Vietnam era. I dealt with 
casualties coming back from Vietnam, 1968 to 1970. You do not have that 
experience and forget it. That is what got me into politics. I was 
going to be a doctor, a research doctor. I thought my life would be 
spent in medicine. But that experience of dealing with those casualties 
and realizing what the government did by its foreign policy, what it 
did to all of the people of this country, brings me to the floor today 
to talk about what we are doing in Iraq.
  We have been misled in many, many, many ways. I do not go to these 
secret briefings they have in the House, because I know that the people 
who led us into this war are not going to tell us the truth even when 
the doors are locked when we are in private. They simply are not 
leveling with the American people.
  The President says we are going to stay the course, and we put our 
governor in there, Mr. Bremer. We destabilized everything and things 
fell apart, and now we say oh, they are all coming over the border from 
Syria. There are only two places where they can come in where there are 
roads. It is very difficult to get in from that side. They are not 
capturing these people. They are killing people and they identify them 
just as they did in the Vietnam War. We have killed so many soldiers. 
The body count in Iraq is people who have died. That is okay. They have 
died, but they are not insurgents coming from somewhere else. By and 
large, the insurgency in this country of Iraq was created by sending 
500,000 soldiers underground with weapons and a grudge. We are tasting 
the fruit of our planting those vines. Unfortunately, we have also in 
the process killed I do not know how many thousand because no one will 
count the number of Iraqis. It is as though they do not matter.

                              {time}  1815

  Nor do we talk about the number of them that are injured. When we 
look at that situation and we see what we are doing, we have to ask 
ourselves how much longer can we persist in staying there. The 
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) and I might disagree at this point 
because he thinks that it is just going to be the end. Well, my belief 
is that we are already in a lose-lose situation.
  Let me explain why I say that. We have gone into a country that was a 
secular country. People did not think of themselves as Catholics and 
Protestants like Northern Ireland. They did not fight about that kind 
of stuff. They thought of themselves as being tribal: I belong to this 
tribe; you belong to that tribe. We take care of our tribe; you take 
care of your tribe. We work out an arrangement. You get some; we get 
some. And that is basically how Iraq has run for thousands of years.
  So the Americans came in, and suddenly we whipped up this business 
that is understandable in this country about religion. Shi'a do not 
like Sunni and Sunni do not like Shi'a. There is a much bigger force at 
work here that people simply, I think, maybe because it is complex, and 
I have got an hour, so I can talk about it a little bit and explain it, 
but simply do not understand the makeup of the Middle East.
  There are two large groups of Muslim people. Iraq had Muslims from 
Shi'a and Muslims from Sunni. They also had Christians living there. 
They had Jews living there. They had Kurds living there. They were a 
secular society that did not go around checking people's religious card 
to see what they were. Our attempts, as we have gone in there, to 
create this chaos and turn it loose and say, well, you Shi'a have 
always been under the control of the Sunnis forever here, you are the 
majority. This is your chance to be the majority. So we have gotten 
them fighting. It is an old, old strategy. The British Empire used to 
use it all the time: let you and him fight and I stand by and watch and 
I control what is going on.
  So we have gotten the Sunni and the Shi'a to fight each other. But 
what we do not understand is there is more than one kind of Shi'a. Some 
of the Shi'a are those living in Iraq. They are Arab in background. 
They are Arab tribal people who are Shi'a. And then there are the Shi'a 
who live in Iran. Iran, before it was called Iran, was called Persia. 
So in Iraq, people talk about Arabs and Persians. And the fight between 
these two countries is not about Sunni versus Shi'a. It is about 
whether those Persians are going to come in and take over our country. 
If this situation that we are setting up where we are going to have one 
part being Shi'a in the south and a little bit of Sunni here in the 
middle and the Kurds in the north, if that three-part government is set 
up, we will have set Persia, Iran, with a chance to invade. And as some 
of us said many, many months ago, the danger of this war is we are 
going to wind up with two Irans, one next to the other.
  Now, one can say whatever they want about that; but, of course, Iran 
has been the source of a lot of tumult and terrorism and all kinds of 
stuff. So the question of having two of them does not sound like that 
makes things better in the Middle East. But that is what we are driving 
toward right now. We are driving in that direction.
  What will derail it and the name people see on television once in a 
while, it is a young man and his name is Muqtada al-Sadr, S-a-d-r. 
Muqtada al-Sadr is a young flamethrower of a Shi'a, but he is Arab. And 
he, last week, turned out 200,000 people on the streets in Iraq to 
protest this constitution, which is going to give the control of the 
country to the Shi'a. He himself, Shi'a, that does not matter. What 
matters is he is Arab; so he is now aligning himself sort of 
imperceptibly, at least as far as Americans seem to be knowledgeable, 
with the Sunnis. The Sunni army that was sent underground is now 
aligning itself with Muqtada al-Sadr.
  We then have created two equal forces. And every Iraqi I met said 
almost the same thing one way or other. They would say, If you succeed 
in pushing that constitution you people are pushing, and you wrote it 
and you gave it to those people and said pass it, there was never any 
agreement on it. They just passed it and brought it out.

[[Page H8335]]

They are going to put it out for referendum in October. If you succeed 
in passing that, you will have civil war in this country for 15 years 
or more. That constitution will not serve as a governing document for 
the Iraq of today because you have created so much dissension and given 
the Iranians such a chance to come in.
  Now, we hear our President say, well, not only are they coming in 
from the west, from Syria; they are coming in from Iran. Of course they 
are. The leading spokesman for the Shi'a in Baghdad to whom everyone 
listens and is the one that our government responds to is a man named 
al-Sistani. Al-Sistani is a Persian. Someone told me, and I am not sure 
because I have not had a chance to check, that he did not actually vote 
in that Iraq election before because he was not a citizen of Iraq. He 
is a citizen of Iran. So the main spokesman with whom we have been 
dealing, and people will see his name, we call him a moderate, that he 
is a moderate Shi'a and all this. We have built him up. Well, he is a 
Persian and he is connected to all the Persians.
  And Muqtada al-Sadr, of course we can see. I mean we have had plays 
from the Greek times of Oedipus Rex. We have got the old man and the 
young kid and they are fighting. Whatever the reasons are, the Shi'a-
ness does not hold them together. Certainly their Arab-Persian thing is 
pushing these two apart, and Muqtada al-Sadr is going with the Sunnis.
  Now, the Kurds sit up in the north; and for the first time since the 
World War I, they have been promised over and over again, and they have 
been let down over and over and over and over again, that they are 
going to have their own state. There are about 40 million Kurds. Most 
of them will live in Iraq, but large numbers of them live in Turkey to 
the north and Syria to the west and in Iran to the east.
  And they are a fierce, independent people who are Sunni by religion; 
and the Shi'a, who are writing the constitution, say the Kurds' army, 
which are called Peshmurga, the Peshmurga has to come into the Iraq 
army. We cannot have an army in Kurdistan and an army in the rest of 
Iraq. It has got to be one army. Well, the Kurds say, I do not know how 
thick the ice is going to be on hell before that happens because we are 
never going to allow any army to come into the territory we have in 
Kurdistan. We are prepared to die because we finally have our own 
country.
  They have a parliament that functions. They have two factions there 
that fight with each other, and it is like every other country. There 
are Democrats and Republicans. That is fine. They need that for 
government to work. But they have put down their arms against one 
another and are dealing with the outside world and saying, no, we will 
be a part of Iraq. We certainly will. We have oil up here in Kirkuk in 
the north, and we think we are entitled to some of the revenue from the 
oil, and we will run our area and we will educate our children and we 
will send them to the United States for medical school. There are a lot 
of Kurds in the United States going to school. They are very bright, 
very hard-working, very tough people. They have gone through a lot in 
the last 85 years since World War I when they were promised that they 
would have their own land.

  If we look at that situation, we have the Kurds and we have the 
Sunnis and we have the Shi'a. One says to himself, gosh, you have just 
now painted a picture that you are saying a constitution will not bring 
them together. Well, let me say there is some hope. There is hope in 
this. But what it requires is the United States and the people, the 
neocons who think they have won, to recognize that they have not won 
anything. They have created a horrible, horrible costly mess that has 
cost us at least $240 billion so far and God knows how much more it is 
going to cost us, and it made us incapable of responding to our own 
people when problems came in New Orleans.
  Part of the Governor of Louisiana's problem was that 13,000 of her 
National Guard were in Iraq. She could not call them out, to get their 
trucks and go out, help people, put sandbags, do whatever they do in 
that kind of situation. They were not there. That is just one element 
of what went on. Because we were enmeshed in this war in Iraq, we were 
unable to respond to them.
  Now, God forbid that we are waiting for another hurricane, Rita, to 
hit the coast of Texas. We do not know what it is going to do. Are the 
Texans ready? How could they have gotten ready since what went on over 
here in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama? Do people think they 
have suddenly magically gotten ready for Texas? The Texas National 
Guardsmen who are over in Iraq, they are not home to take care of their 
people.
  And we simply have a President who says we are going to stay the 
course, that we are going to keep doing the same thing we are doing in 
Iraq because it is the right thing to do and we are going to keep doing 
it. Well, there is an old joke in psychiatry about the definition of 
mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again and 
expecting a different result each time. We get the same result.
  We are doing the same thing. We go into a town like Fallujah. We 
flatten it. Now we have gotten rid of those terrorists. We go away. And 
lo and behold, they come springing up again, coming back into the town. 
They know where we are. They just run off and hide. They are not going 
to confront our military head on head. That is not guerilla warfare. 
Guerilla warfare is to let the enemy figure that they have got it made 
and then get them when they are not paying attention. That is what they 
have done all over the country. We do not control any part of Iraq at 
the moment, except the Green Zone where we have a fence and barbed wire 
and razor wire and everything else. And the only way we are going to 
manage to undo this situation is for our administration to find some 
way, some way, to honestly say we are not going to establish permanent 
bases in Iraq.

                              {time}  1830

  When I suggested that to the Iraqis I talked to, they laughed. They 
said, your President is not going to say that. But our administration 
is going to have to say something like that, and then do a second 
thing. Because they have to say, we are not going to have permanent 
bases and we are going to leave the country in some orderly period in 
an orderly way. But before we go, we want to set up, and I suggest, and 
I do not know, maybe there is another place to do it; maybe Paris or 
some place, but Amman in Jordan, not very far away; it would be a place 
to convene an Arab summit made up of Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turk men, Turk 
men are people who came from Turkey and have settled in this basic 
area; and have them go to a peace place and sit down and work this out 
among themselves.
  They do not want their families killed. They do not want to have this 
continuing warfare. I mean, they are like everybody else. They want a 
place, a house for their family, they want food for their kids and 
their wife or their mother or their father, whoever; they want schools, 
they want health care, they do not want this continuing warfare with 
the people dying in the streets and the awful pictures we see. They do 
not want somebody falling down with a bridge, because there is a threat 
of some sort, people run out on a bridge and it collapses. They are not 
looking for that.
  If we would get that summit going where everybody who had a stake 
would come and sit down and say, let us have a cease-fire in Iraq while 
we work on the problem here and see if we cannot come up with a way to 
govern a new country without Saddam. Everybody is glad he is gone. You 
do not find many people who say, boy, I sure wish Saddam was around. 
There is not anybody.
  So it is not that they want to bring Saddam back at all. Some people 
say, oh, you are just talking about bringing Saddam back. No. These 
groups can sit down and work it out. Arabs have worked things out in 
their culture for thousands of years.
  Now, there are also parties that would be interested in being 
helpful, perhaps, because my colleagues will remember we talked about 
Iraq has got Shia and Sunni in it. Well, what do we have in Syria? It 
is all Sunni. What do we have in Jordan? Almost all Sunni. What do we 
have in Saudi Arabia? Almost all Sunni. What do we have in Turkey? 
Almost all Sunni. These other countries have a huge stake in this not 
becoming a second Shia Persian threat

[[Page H8336]]

to their way of life, because they think, well, take Saudi Arabia. The 
area around the oil fields from which we get our oil, or the world gets 
its oil, the biggest oil fields in the world are right in the middle of 
a Shia area. So, if you have Iran and Iraq, and you moved on into Saudi 
Arabia, which is not very far, you suddenly have a crescent of Shia 
control of almost all the oil in the area. A big threat to everybody; 
to the Sunnis, certainly, to the Americans, to the Europeans. Everybody 
has a stake in this. And if you get a conference going where you have 
people sitting down talking and not killing each other, then they can 
work out an equitable arrangement and find a way to resolve this.
  It cannot be dictated by the United States. Unfortunately, what 
happens again and again is that we have these parliaments. We have 
elected a parliament, and then we go in and tell them what they have to 
do. Here is what it has to look like. It has to have this provision, 
that provision, we do not like this, you take that out. We, by our 
heavy-handedness, have really tried to run everything in this 
situation. And it can be ended. It can be ended, if we will allow a 
process to begin in which Arabs can sit down among themselves and solve 
it.
  Now, I tell my colleagues this because let me tell my colleagues how 
it works. I have a very good friend, a Jordanian, who told me a story 
that he knows. And this is Arab culture. A man was driving a cab and he 
drove the cab and he hit a man and killed him. Well, that means you are 
responsible, and the crowd was about to get him. This guy ran up the 
street and ran into the home of a young man and demanded that he be 
given sanctuary. That is the Arabic custom. You will give sanctuary. In 
fact, the young man, when the police came and when people came, he 
said, I never saw this guy you are talking about. I do not know what 
you are talking about. The crowd went away. He called his brother and 
said, take this man and take him home, so the man went home, was taken 
to a safe place. Then he went down in the street and discovered that 
the man that had been killed was his father. So now he has a legitimate 
cultural right to exact a price for his father's death. What would you 
do? You now know where the guy lives; you can go over to his house and 
kill him. He did not do that. He just left it alone. He met him in the 
street some months later, about four years later, met him in the street 
and he said, the guy knew who it was and he was frightened and he said, 
look, you and I will have coffee together. So they had coffee together. 
And he said, the man whose father had been killed said, you must put on 
a feast for our family in memory of my father. So the man put the feast 
on and the issue was gone.
  People in this Arab culture have a long history of certainly 
violence, but also of peacefully resolving situations. And what we are 
doing by continually bombing; one of the things the Iraqi said to me 
was, you have to stop this business of kicking in the door of a guy's 
house and going in and dragging his wife out of bed and embarrassing 
her and him and making him look weak and impotent and all the rest, you 
have to stop that. You keep doing that, you keep making Iraqis angrier 
and angrier, and yet we continue to do these things. As long as we 
continue to do war and do not allow a peace process to begin to spring 
up, actually, the King Ab'dullah was here in the city today talking at 
the prayer breakfast. He, or his uncle, the Crown Prince al-Hasan, or 
there are other people who are trusted by both Shia and Sunni who could 
be seen as an honest broker.
  But we must take the first step. We have to allow that to happen. If 
we continue to do what we are doing and stimulate, this will go on 
until probably the next election or beyond, until one day we do what we 
did, and that image, the very famous picture in Vietnam of that 
helicopter lifting off that building, it was not the embassy actually, 
it was a hotel down the street where people are hanging on the skids of 
this helicopter as it lifts off the ground, that is going to be our 
fate in Iraq if we continue on this path. Because we cannot win it with 
military might.
  The time has come to talk. And we have never been able to get the 
gunfire down to the point where this constitutional process that was 
supposed to lead to peace, that was supposed to be a peace conference 
under other names, but the Sunnis did not participate in it. So you 
cannot have it be that way. It cannot come out with a peace if one of 
the groups has boycotted it. You can say, oh, it was stupid for them to 
boycott it, they should not have done that. You can blame all you want. 
But it did happen that way. They did not participate. So the only way 
you are going to get it is a conference some place where you can get 
all the parties sitting down and saying, all right, look, how are we 
going to work this thing out? We have oil revenue, we are a rich 
country, there is no reason for us to be in poverty like we are in; we 
can use that wealth for everybody, not just for one group or another 
group. We will let everybody have a part of it, and we will make this 
again the country that it was. This country has a long tradition of 
being a place of refinement and intelligence and civil society, and it 
can be that again if we will allow that to happen.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope that you will ask the President to reconsider the 
advice he is getting. I know it is very difficult to be President of 
the United States and you do not know everything that you are going to 
face. Certainly, one can have empathy for the President having suddenly 
been confronted by 9/11 and all the rest. But the advice that he has 
been listening to and following is leading him deeper and deeper into 
chaos, and it is time for the President to lead us out of that chaos by 
taking the role of saying, I believe it is time for us to convene a 
peace conference somewhere. We will not have any part of it, but we 
think it ought to happen over there, and maybe so-and-so could be the 
leader. I mean, maybe it would be better if the President did not 
suggest anybody, because it would probably work better if he just said 
to the Arabs, who would be the one to convene the conference? Let them 
decide. If we want peace and we want democracy and we want liberal 
treatment of women, and if we want all of those things for the Iraqi 
people, we have got to change our policy.

                The Triumph of Neoconservatives in Iraq

                           (By Abbas J. Ali)

       In his speech on June 28, President George W. Bush 
     accurately characterized the situation in Iraq as 
     ``horrifying, and the suffering is real.'' Previously, Bush 
     had described the invasion of Iraq as a ``catastrophic 
     success.'' Foreign affairs analysts agree that in both cases, 
     Bush accurately captured the reality of the Iraq mess, but 
     were equally surprised by his insistence on staying the 
     course. The fear is that Iraq hardship and bloodshed may be 
     deepened and reversing the state of disorder is a remote 
     possibility.
       Three recent developments in the Iraq political arena 
     reaffirm the growing fear. US Secretary of Defense Donald 
     Rumsfeld predicts that the mess in Iraq could go on for 12 
     years, The New York Times reported (June 30) that a type of 
     federalism is supported by Washington, where each region in 
     Iraq gains power approaching true sovereignty, and Zalamy 
     Khalilzad assumed his position as the American ambassador in 
     Baghdad. The last two developments are interrelated and are 
     certain to turn the transformation of Iraq into a bloody 
     mess.
       In particular, Khalilzad is a pivotal factor in the Iraqi 
     equation. Khalilzad was a member of the team that planned the 
     invasion of Iraq and aggressively promoted a vision for Iraq 
     where the Iraqis play only on advisory role in determining 
     the future of their country. As a hard line neoconservative, 
     he is an adamant advocate of the virtue of perpetual war and 
     the use of forceful approaches to world problems. When Henry 
     Kissinger, a neoconservative strategist, in November 2001 
     articulated a plan for creating ``a central Kabul government 
     of limited reach, with tribal automany prevailing in various 
     regions,'' in Afghanistan, it was Khalilzad who translated it 
     into a reality.
       Back in 1970s, the neoconservatives recognized that Iraq 
     constituted a threat to their design for the Middle East. Not 
     because Iraq has ample natural resources, especially oil and 
     water, but because the Iraqis were considered a spirited and 
     cultured people, displaying pride, patriotism, and 
     independent thinking. General Eric Shinseki, then the US army 
     chief of staff, pointed out in 2002 that Paul Wolfowitz, as a 
     young Pentagon analyst and a neoconservative, designated Iraq 
     in 1979 as a menace that must be dealt with. Since then, the 
     invasion and occupation of Iraq has been primarily a 
     neoconservative venture.
       In targeting Iraq, the neoconservatives envision war and 
     military intervention as instrumental in the polarization of 
     Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions and ultimately ending 
     Iraqi Arab identity. For example, in 1982, Oded Yinon 
     accentuated the usefulness of internal strife and war with 
     Iraq to foster the demise of Iraq as an Arab state. Yinon 
     noticed that: ``In the short run it is Iraqi

[[Page H8337]]

     power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel'' and 
     that a division of Iraq ``into provinces along ethnic/
     religious lines . . . is possible. So three (or more) states 
     will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and 
     Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the 
     Sunni and Kurdish north.''
       Critics and political commentators agree that the 
     neoconservatives are obsessed with a grand design to 
     militarize the globe and globalize fear. Knowledgeable 
     observers, however, acknowledge that the core of the 
     neoconservatives' thinking revolves around the Middle East 
     and the role of Israel. Unlike Bush, the neoconservatives 
     harbour the belief that freedom for the Arab people, 
     prosperity, and cultural renaissance are a threat to Israeli 
     security and vitality. It is for this reason that 
     neoconservatives make a powerful argument for creating 
     instability and chaos in the Middle East. This was well 
     expressed by Michael Ledeen former US undersecretary of state 
     and a leading neoconservative, when he stated: ``Stability is 
     an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to 
     boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, 
     and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real 
     issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.''
       Indeed, the neoconservatives have been exceptionally 
     successful in promoting four primary propositions:
       1. The welfare of American people and the prestige of the 
     US in the world are contingent upon the ability to dominate 
     the world and especially the Middle East.
       2. The U.S. invasion of and military presence in Iraq 
     ensures American safety, security and world peace,
       3. The U.S. goals coincide with Israeli goals. Therefore, 
     the invasion of Iraq served the interests of both countries.
       4. The Arab people are inherently anti-American and a 
     threat to American interests. Thus, the presence of American 
     forces in the region is an imperative necessity and is 
     essential for world peace.
       Neoconservative thinkers Lawrence Kaplan and William 
     Kristol assert in their book, The War over Iraq, that the 
     decision about what course to take in dealing with Iraq, ``is 
     about more even than the future of the Middle East and the 
     war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United 
     States intends to play in the world in the 21st century.'' 
     They argue that the only plausible and sensible mission is to 
     persistently apply American might in these parts of the world 
     that constitute a threat to American interests and foresee 
     Iraq as a starting stage; the ``mission begins in Baghdad, 
     but it does not end there.''
       The mission, as Michael Ledeen defines it, is to ensure the 
     total submission of the people in the region. He stated in 
     2001, ``we will not be sated until we have had the blood of 
     every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East . . . and 
     every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, 
     imam, sheik, and ayatellah is either singing the praises of 
     the United States of America or pumping gasoline for a dime a 
     gallon on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.''
       From the beginning, the neoconservatives viewed the 
     invasion of Iraq either as a staging ground for their 
     perpetual war or securing its instability. While the 
     introduction of economic sanctions against Iraq in August 
     1990 and the subsequent attack in 1991 along with the 
     presence of an oppressive regime have tremendously weakened 
     Iraq and demoralised its people, it was the invasion in March 
     2003 that enabled the neoconservatives to directly manage 
     Iraqi affairs and put their vision into practice.
       Contrary to their claim of nation-building in Iraq and 
     nurturing democratic institutions, the neoconservatives have 
     made sure that every effort must be made to prevent the 
     Iraqis from exercising their rights to run their own country 
     and establish an open and free country. When General Jay 
     Garner attempted, in early 2003, to allow Iraqis to chart 
     their own destiny, he was immediately replaced. His 
     successor, Paul Bremer, closely followed the 
     neoconservatives' agenda.
       The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported (June 3, 2005) that 
     the occupational authority has institutionalised corruption. 
     The corruption has paralysed the economy and fostered the 
     creation of dysfunctional institutions. This, along with the 
     ever rising new trend of terrorism, constitutes a threat to 
     Iraq's social fabric. Indeed, a growing number of Iraqis 
     question the virtue of the decision taken by the occupational 
     authority in mid-2003 to dissolve the Iraqi border police and 
     leave the Iraqi borders open for extremists. The Iraqis also 
     question the reluctance of the occupational forces to train 
     the newly-established Iraqi army and police and supply them 
     with adequate weapons to defend themselves and their country.
       In a radical but alarming move, the neoconservatives have 
     espoused a sectarian and ethnic policy in conducting 
     government and political affairs in Iraq. The policy is 
     contrary to America's officially pronounced goal of nation 
     building and constitutes a formidable obstacle to Bush's 
     vision of a democratic and unified Iraq. In fact, the policy 
     has devastating consequences and may lead to the ruin of 
     Iraq. It should be mentioned that, in practice, Saddam 
     Hussein espoused a sectarian and racial outlook after 1978. 
     But this was never acknowledged as a guiding principle and 
     was disliked by the majority of the population.
       In Bush's second term, the neoconservatives appear to have 
     secured undisputed domination in designing American foreign 
     policy. They have situated themselves at the core of the 
     three primary agencies responsible for foreign affairs: The 
     National Security Council, and the state and defence 
     departments. With the presence of Ambassador Zalamy Khalilzad 
     in Baghdad, the neoconservatives are positioned to pursue 
     their vision for Iraq with zeal, confidence, and energy.
       Middle East experts and responsible international observers 
     make a strong point that the neoconservatives are 
     progressing with unexpected ease in translating their 
     vision for Iraq into practical steps, which will 
     eventually change the fate of Iraq profoundly. In 
     particular, the neoconservatives have strengthened and 
     widened their network of influence well beyond their 
     traditional allies (e.g. Ahmed Chalabi, Masood Barzani, 
     Barhem Saleh, Ayhem Al Samarai, Meshaan Al Jabory, Moufaq 
     Al Rebuey, etc.) and include powerful individuals and 
     newly emerging organizations inside and outside Iraq that 
     actively promote and espouse the neoconservative design 
     for fragmenting Iraq and creating semi-independent 
     sectarian/ethnic units in place.
       The presence of terrorism and extremism in Iraq is a 
     development that accompanies the occupation. Its threat is 
     real with predictable consequences, especially the sudden and 
     mass exodus of whatever is left of the middle class. 
     Nevertheless, once the Iraqis are free and are in charge of 
     their destiny, they will more likely be able to uproot 
     terrorism and extremism. The kindling and 
     institutionalisation of sectarian and ethnic discord, 
     however, have unpredictable and frightening consequences. For 
     many decades sectarianism and racial discrimination were 
     almost alien concepts for the majority of Iraqis. Since the 
     invasion, sectarian and divisional ethnic terminologies have 
     become conspicuously common in daily political discourse.
       Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing debate concerning 
     the constitution, the neoconservatives have already inflicted 
     damage to the fabric of Iraqi society.
       Fragmenting Iraq and kindling sectarian/ethnic discords are 
     weapons of cultural and national destruction, a menace to 
     civilization. They represent a threat to American interests 
     and to regional stability. More importantly, they evidence a 
     purposeful activation of the clash of civilizations.

                          ____________________