Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-288)
MR YAHIA
SAID AND
MR ZAKI
CHEHAB
29 MARCH 2006
Q280 Chairman: The picture you are
painting is much bleaker than I thought when I was there in January.
I was quite pessimistic when I came back in January. Is there
anything significant that can be done to break this political
deadlock? The elections were in December; we are almost into April
and we still do not have a government. Is there something that
the international community, the coalition, the UN or anybody
can do to push something that will change the dynamics or do we
have to rely on the internal Iraqi politicians to go through an
interminable process and come up with the right answer?
Mr Said: The Iraqi political process
has strayed off the right track quite a while ago. It is impossible
to sit back and allow these Iraqis to work at their problems together.
I must caveat that. The outbursts of violence do every now and
then shock Iraqi politicians into some responsible action but
even then, most recently, the events in the so-called mosque where
US military forces attacked a certain militia in Baghdad, the
response of the Iraqi politicians is to boycott the government
forming negotiations. The country is burning and they get upset
with the Americans and punish the Iraqi people. Clearly we have
a problem with the Iraqi political classes. However, the international
community has leverage. Most of these politicians, as all politicians
do, crave recognition and acceptance by the international community.
They crave support and the membership of a club of the free markets.
The international community will not accept an Iraq of desperate
cantons. The international community will not accept an Iraq with
a dysfunctional federal government. There could be pressure put
on them to amend the constitution—and this is one of the
key elements we have not addressed yet—in a way that would
produce viable federalism as opposed to a loose club of regions.
There is definitely a need for robust action on the Iraqi armed
forces, Iraqi rogue security forces and militias. Lastly, there
is a need to increase and ratchet up work to protect civilians.
It is not acceptable for a multinational force whose very mandate
is the protection of Iraqi civilians to sit back and say, "We
will let the Iraqis sort it out."
Mr Chehab: The American ambassador
and Baghdad have delivered a message to Al Hakim that the Americans
have no interest in seeing Al Jaafari back in power. They are
more in favour of Adela Bumathi, who is number two in the Al Hakim
party. He is well known for his good relationship with the Kurds,
the Americans and some other Iraqis. He is ex-Baathist. He was
a Communist before, so they are hoping that his liberal open-mindedness
will make a little bit of a change in terms of dealing with the
others. These are the kind of approaches we are seeing which led
to the chaos. It was like trial and error from day one. Otherwise
we would have saved three years. Somebody asked a question about
the attitude of the American or British forces on the ground.
Believe me; I was there from day one and the majority of Iraqis
have welcomed the American and British forces, but the kind of
mistakes, the attitude, starts building up. Many decisions have
been taken and now we talk about sectarianism. It is a danger.
We have encouraged it. Zalmaka himself has encouraged it, even
from his days in London when he was looking after the operation
in London. He decided to give power to Sunnis and the Kurds. That
is the kind of attitude that the Americans started from day one.
It is a danger and we have to avoid it. If one talks about sectarianism,
Shiite in general, they do not want it because they know that
if they want to go into war with Sunnis they will end up in the
south and start fighting each other. One single incident happened
a few weeks ago. Al Sadr, when he heard of a call by Al Hakim
for Iran to intervene so that they can negotiate with the Americans
to have some kind of dialogue, Al Jaafari and Al Sadr were not
happy with that. They know that if they want to end up fighting
the others and having their own corner in the south they will
end up fighting each other. They have an interest in being part
of the whole country. If you ask any Sunni, "Do you want
to see American forces leaving Iraq?" they will say no. In
terms of the media, there is a large number of media organisations
and so many radio stations, television stations and newspapers,
but still it is very important. I cannot rely on a correspondent
who is based in Baghdad who is a Shia to go and travel to the
Sunni areas. He has no access; he is not trusted. The same things
would also be applied to a Kurd or a Sunni if he wants to travel.
For me as an outsider, to have a real picture about what is going
on, I have to look at the story from three different angles to
see what the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds are saying about it.
The trouble with most NGOs outside is they have their own people.
In the north they have Kurds. In the Sunni triangle they have
Sunnis. In the south they have Shiites. Even when they work together,
each one reflects his own area, not looking at Iraq as a country
that is united. There is a need even in this regard to bring these
people who are working in the same organisations, to get them
used to each other, to get them to understand each other and work
to build something. When you talk about the security organisations,
the police and the army, if you visit the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Baghdad, you hardly find someone who speaks Arabic
because all the security people are Kurds. If you go to the Ministry
of the Interior, they are all Shia. If you go to the Ministry
of Defence, you will find Sunnis. That is the kind of institutional
thing in this country today.
Q281 Mr Purchase: You paint a most
awful picture of what is happening there. In other circumstances,
we frequently talk about confidence building measures between
communities to develop a level which might allow a proper political
process to come into being and ultimately for a government to
be formed. The picture you paint is so bad that we are not even
at a point, are we, where people would sit down and agree what
they ought to be working towards? In those circumstances, is there
much point in the Americans and the British and other allied forces
remaining for very much longer, if there is no willingness in
Iraqi society to move forward at all, as seems to be the case?
Mr Chehab: I still believe there
are means to pressurise them to get together. If you withdraw,
you are just handing a victory to al Qaeda and militancy and all
these elements.
Q282 Mr Purchase: We make the battle
ground against al Qaeda Iraq?
Mr Chehab: It seems so. We have
given al Qaeda the environment to grow. The recruitment of suicide
bombers in Iraq in the last few months has been at its best. If
you look at what is happening every day, to see 10 or fifteen
suicide bombers a day, if it reflects one thing it reflects how
these militant organisations have large numbers who are willing
to die. Otherwise the kind of volunteers are very limited. They
will not send fifteen to be killed in one day but there is a large
number that can easily be recruited. Either they have been promised
they will go to heaven or they are angry or some of their relatives
have been killed.
Q283 Mr Purchase: In this battle
that you suggest is going on anyway, how on earth do we keep on
side the moderate Iraqi who desperately wants peace, wants to
build a society fit for their children? How can that be so if
the west is recognising de facto that there is a battle
against al Qaeda being fought out in Iraq? How do we keep other
people on side?
Mr Chehab: The biggest mistake
is we relied on people we knew. We tried to rely on the opposition
figures who were living here. We never went for people who were
influential in their own country. I do not expect an influential
Sunni tribal leader who lives in Al Amghar with a very large tribe
of 15,000 men behind him to wait at the gates of the American
and English embassies to ask for a role in this country. We have
relied on a group of people who lived here, who have no popularity
there, who have money and support from outside. We have invested
too much with them. If I want to invest in Allawi, how many seats
in Parliament did he manage to get? 20. Al Bachali? All the money
we have paid, all the support, and he did not even secure a single
seat for himself in Parliament. Those are the kind of people we
have invested in and we hope that they are moderate, that they
will be pro-western and they have open minds. It does not mean
that the Iraqis or the tribes there are extreme. They are not.
People have respect and dignity.
Mr Said: What you could do to
keep the Iraqis on side, the ones who want a peaceful and united
nation, is to protect them. What Iraqis have not seen from the
multinational forces in Iraq is enough protection. Indeed, if
the multinational forces are protecting anyone in Iraq, they are
protecting the political elite. These are the guys who get the
escort and the 24 hour electricity, water and so on, but there
are Iraqis who are committed to a national project, just below
the surface of the top level of power, who need empowerment and
protection. These are the key to preventing the worst from happening,
but this will require a complete rethinking of the posture and
the role of the multinational forces.
Q284 Mr Purchase: I agree with you.
How on earth however, in these circumstances, do you build the
physical infrastructure and the personnel expertise to offer that
protection to the every day Iraqi who desperately wants to move
on? We cannot protect the institutions that are working to develop
that human and physical infrastructure, let alone deliver the
service.
Mr Said: I am not suggesting there
is an easy answer to this. Obviously, the posture and the profile
of the forces in Iraq with 8,000 British troops among three or
four million Iraqis means there is not enough footprint there
to provide security for everyone. However, one can start small.
Just to give you a comparison of the situation in Iraq today,
think of Iraq today as the early days of the war in Bosnia. Do
you really want to leave? That is when everybody was calling for
the international community to intervene, to stop the bloodshed.
It is a situation similar in other ways. This is sectarian bloodshed
that is being heralded through free elections. The war in Yugoslavia
started after a set of free elections and referenda that brought
nationalists to power. We are facing very similar dilemmas. One
way to approach this is not to remove the political echelons that
have been legitimately elected and brought to power but to punish
those who clearly violate the rules of the game. The Minister
of the Interior has been accused in successive UN reports and
state department reports of running a terror campaign. Why are
the multinational forces, who are in charge of security and ultimately
responsible for security in Iraq, not taking action against that
man?
Q285 Mr Heathcoat-Amory: Is a secular
democracy as we understand it possible in Iraq? The civic institutions
are very weak. Democracy is seen by some as a western import anyway.
We are spending all this effort in building up political parties,
a Parliament, ministries, a government. Is there not another perhaps
less ambitious way to try and recognise the religious situation
there, to try and achieve some reconciliation so we will not leave
behind a functional parliamentary democracy but maybe something
else? In other words, are we not misconceived in the ambition
that we have for the country which is unrealisable?
Mr Said: The format of democracy
is not the matter here. To follow your line of argument, maybe
the rush to have elections, constitutions and referenda was a
mistake in an atmosphere of insecurity, foreign occupation, tension
and terrorism. However, ultimately what democracy is about is
human rights and the international community cannot leave a country,
regardless of the regime that ends up in power, where there are
pervasive human rights violations, whether it is a religious democracy
or a sectarian country. While the final format of the political
regime in Iraq may defer from a parliamentary secular democracy,
at the end it will have to be a format that respects human rights.
That is the ultimate goal. Iraqis have shown by their enthusiastic
support for the elections and the constitutional process that
they are prepared for even more than that, for a more formal democratic
regime. It is just a question of how you create the environment
for that process. One of the main problems with the intervention
in Iraq was an attempt to micro-manage the process, to determine
the outcomes, the very structure, everything from A to Z of the
process. What the international community should have focused
on is creating the conditions and the environment of security,
most importantly, within which Iraqis can live.
Q286 Chairman: US$32 billion has
been pledged since 2003. Most of it is American money but there
has been a huge expenditure, much of it on construction, water
supplies and trying to deal with the infrastructure which was
neglected for over 35 years, particularly in the south of the
country. In the current situation, is that all irrelevant? Do
the Iraqi people recognise that? Do they appreciate that? Is there
any purpose in pushing more money into a dysfunctional society
or should the international community be doing something else?
Mr Said: There were several problems
with the drive to invest massively in Iraq from day one. First
of all, a lot of the projects that were designed and had money
spent on them were long term projects which should have been left
to the Iraqis to decide about. There have been some silly decisions
made about things. For example, much of the power generating capacity
was designed to work on natural gas which is environmentally correct,
but it is a fuel that is not available in Iraq. Some of the new
power stations now rely on imported fuel. These are the nicest
power stations you can have and probably in the future Iraq would
have benefited from them but they are not providing immediate
relief. Generally, most of the large, big ticket projects did
not produce immediate relief to Iraqis. However, one cannot ignore
this picture. A lot of the aid should be targeted at policy and
at helping Iraqis develop policies for the development of their
economy, for dealing with immediate needs, rather than investing
in large, big ticket projects. After all, Iraq has a lot of its
own resources. The Central Bank of Iraq has $10 billion in its
coffers. Iraq is not necessarily a capital deficient country.
What Iraq needs is a smarter investment and development policy.
Again, it brings us back to the political process. It requires
a political process that will manage the country's resources in
a more efficient, equitable, transparent way.
Q287 Richard Younger-Ross: What do
you see as being the main constraints on progress in reconstruction?
How much of it is incompetence in Iraqi structures? How much of
it is misguided policy by the coalition? How much of it is just
straight corruption?
Mr Said: It is all the above.
The problem in Iraq is you need to start with the politics. Development
is all about politics. In Britain when you build a road or divert
a road or a bypass, it takes a very lengthy consultation process.
It takes a long, extensive feasibility study and analysis before
a decision like that can be taken. In Iraq, decisions about major
construction and development have been taken on the back of an
envelope by army engineers. A lot of these projects were misguided
and ended up in wastage. The amount of cash that was pumped into
the Iraqi economy after the drought of the sanctions was immense.
Tens of billions of dollars poured onto Iraqi streets immediately
after the invasion. Of course, that is a great motivation for
corruption. It creates great incentives and conditions for corruption
and it has contributed to the exacerbation of conditions of corruption.
Again, the solution here lies at the political and policy level.
You need robust Iraqi institutions to design and decide what projects
to follow. If Iraq is short of capital for those, then you can
bring in aid money.
Q288 Richard Younger-Ross: Do you
believe there is much corruption within the present political
parties?
Mr Said: The present political
parties are very corrupt. They were very corrupt from day one.
For example, thousands of Iraqis have been reinstated in their
jobs after they lost them under Saddam's regime for political
reasons. In Iraq now with the paralysis of the economy, government
employment is the main source of income for the majority of Iraqi
families. Everybody in Iraq knew that they needed to go to one
of the political parties and get a paper saying they were a prosecuted
member of that party, to get reinstated at the Ministry of Health
or Education and so on. I had a driver in Baghdad who had three
papers from three parties to support his claim to go back to teach
at secondary school.
Mr Purchase: We have that. We call them
Liberal Democrats.
Chairman: We are very grateful. We have
covered a lot of ground. Thank you for coming along and giving
us a perspective we do not always get from other people and for
being so realistic, honest and frank in your answers.
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