Iran vows to help Iraq with security

By Edmund Blair
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
Published November 28, 2006
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TEHRAN -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would do whatever it could to help provide security to Iraq amid warnings the country was on the brink of civil war.
Mr. Ahmadinejad made the pledge at the start of a visit to Iran by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, whose trip was delayed for two days because of a curfew imposed after bombings Thursday that killed 202 persons in a Shi'ite Muslim stronghold. The curfew was lifted yesterday.
The United States is facing calls to engage Tehran in direct talks to help end the bloodshed, which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said had pushed Iraq closer to civil war.
"The Iranian nation and government will definitely stand beside their brother, Iraq, and any help the government and nation of Iran can give to strengthen security in Iraq will be given," Mr. Ahmadinejad said, Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) reported.
"We have no limitation for cooperation in any field," he said.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was speaking shortly after Mr. Talabani's arrival and just before the two presidents held formal talks.
Mr. Talabani said he would discuss improving ties between the neighbors, which fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.
"In this trip, we will also talk about Iraq's security file because Iraq needs the comprehensive assistance of Iran to fight terrorism and create stability," ISNA quoted Mr. Talabani as saying.
Political analysts said Iran might try to use talks with Mr. Talabani to show off its influence to the United States and bolster its position ahead of any talks with its old enemy. They also said Iran's ability to stem the bloodshed was limited.
U.S. officials have said the violence is being spurred by Iran's backing for Shi'ite groups and its weapons exports. Iran dismisses the charges.
Mr. Annan, making a rare comment on the Iraq situation, said he thought the country was nearly in civil war -- something Iraqi and U.S. politicians have refused to say despite mounting deaths.
"Given the developments on the ground, unless something is done drastically and urgently to arrest the deteriorating situation, we could be there. In fact, we are almost there," Mr. Annan told reporters in response to a civil war question.
Earlier, King Abdullah II of Jordan, who will host a summit in Amman between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Bush this week, said "something dramatic" must come out of it because Iraq was "beginning to spiral out of control."
The New York Times said a draft report to be debated by the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, would urge an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative to include direct talks with Iran and Syria.
The group's recommendations will be sent to the White House, which is considering a change in strategy in Iraq to allow the U.S. to start pulling out some of its 140,000 troops.
Britain, the United States' main ally in Iraq, said yesterday it hoped to withdraw thousands of troops by December 2007, while Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said the last Italian troops would leave next month.
But Poland appeared to push back the deadline for withdrawal of its 900 troops from Iraq, saying the force would leave by the end of 2007, not by mid-2007 as previously stated.

Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions Jane Stromseth Georgetown University, Washington DC David Wippman Cornell University, New York Rosa Brooks University of Virginia Paperback (ISBN-13: 9780521678018 | ISBN-10: 0521678013) Also available in Hardback | eBook format Published September 2006 | 416 pages | 228 x 152 mm In stock $29.99 (G) Lecturers can request examination copies for course consideration. View Excerpt as PDF (173KB) CHAPTER ONE Introduction: A New Imperialism? It is hard to find anything good to say about imperialism. Fueled by greed and an easy assumption of racial and cultural superiority, the imperialism of the 19th-century European powers left in its wake embittered subject populations and despoiled landscapes. Traditional governance structures (some just, some unjust) were displaced by European implants, indigenous cultural practices suppressed, and natural resources ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of colonial elites and distant European overlords. Although imperialist ideologies and practices were frequently justified by reference to lofty ideals (the need to bring civilization, industry, or Christian values to more primitive nations, for instance), today there are few who would defend imperialism. Until quite recently, most scholars were content to declare that the age of imperialism was over and good riddance to it. After World War II, strong international norms emerged favoring self-determination, democracy, and human rights and condemning wars of expansion and aggression. In the 1950s and 1960s, independence movements in colonized regions gained strength and moral credibility. As the possession of colonies increasingly became a political liability, most of the former imperial powers divested themselves of the trappings of empire. Some did so with almost unseemly haste, with a quick election, a ceremonial changing of the flag, and a series of bows and handshakes sufficing to transfer governmental power from foreign hands to those of the indigenous leaders. By the time the Cold War ended, imperialism seemed a relic of a bygone era. The term remained handy as a disparaging metaphor used by those inclined to criticize American foreign policy muscle-flexing, but for the most part, imperialism seemed to be as extinct as the dodo bird: it had collapsed under its own weight, a victim of greed, sloth, and insufficient brainpower. Although the former imperialist powers continued to dominate the world stage militarily and economically, they had gone out of the business of invading and exercising permanent military control over foreign lands. But something odd happened in the years since the early 1990s. For reasons that are complex, many of the same powerful western states that contritely rejected imperialism a few short decades ago today are increasingly resorting to military force to intervene in the territories of other states, and in many cases, they are remaining on as de facto governments years after the fighting ends. Consider the past decade’s interventions in Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Ironically, these recent military interventions have generally been made in the name of the very same values that led to the rapid dismantling of imperialist structures in the second half of the 20th century: human rights, democracy, and a rejection of the use of aggressive war as an instrument of foreign policy. Although most of the recent interventions have been engaged in on behalf of “the international community,” or at least some sizeable subset thereof, most of the intervening states have been western states – mainly the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers. Not entirely coincidentally, most of the states intervened in (the “failed states” like Sierra Leone and the “rogue” states like Iraq) have been states formerly subject to imperialist rule. Some of these recent interventions are usually seen as having been essentially humanitarian in nature (Kosovo, East Timor). Others were motivated primarily by national and international security considerations, with humanitarian concerns very much a secondary motive (Afghanistan, Iraq). Each of these recent interventions has had both passionate defenders and passionate detractors, and there is little question that from the perspective of international law, some recent interventions have been more justifiable than others. Nonetheless, whether they are justifiable or unjustifiable, wise or unwise, such military interventions will almost certainly be a fact of life for some time to come. The “international community” – and the United States, as the most significant military and economic power in the world today – will likely engage in, or assist, many more such interventions, at least in instances where there appears to be a clear threat to U.S. security. In part, this is because the events of September 11, 2001 left the United States and many of its NATO allies determined to root out terrorism and other global security threats wherever they can be found, through the use of military force when necessary. The desire to incapacitate the terrorist al-Qaeda network drove the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan; the perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction was the primary driver of the subsequent U.S.-dominated intervention in Iraq. Military interventions (and the deployment of peacekeeping forces) will also continue to be motivated in part by broader humanitarian concerns, such as the need to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities and the need to restore peace and stability in regions devastated by civil war. Frequently, of course, the motives behind military interventions will be complex and mixed. In Haiti, for instance, U.S. military interventions (both in 1994 and in 2004) were motivated partly by humanitarian considerations (a concern about political repression and indiscriminate bloodshed) and partly by more pragmatic (and self-interested) considerations: the desire to prevent a massive influx of refugees from Haiti to the United States, for instance. In the age of globalization, there can often be no neat distinction between “humanitarian” concerns and “security” concerns. Repression, poverty, and injustice can fuel terrorism, instability, civil war, and organized crime, and these in turn can lead to still more repression, poverty, and injustice. In the future, many military interventions are likely to arise jointly out of humanitarian concerns and security concerns. The military interventions driven by interwoven humanitarian and security concerns have often been compared – and contrasted – to traditional imperialism. Indeed, many commentators – some approving, some less so – have referred to recent interventions as “liberal imperialism” or “the new imperialism.” Unlike earlier imperial powers, those western states and regional powers that have backed recent military interventions have explicitly (and, on the whole, credibly) disclaimed any desire to exercise permanent control over defeated populations and territories or to gain economically from their military ventures. Also, today’s interventions tend to be multilateral in nature, often (though not always) authorized by the United Nations (UN) or parallel regional structures. But like earlier imperial powers, today’s interventionists find themselves acting as de facto governments in dysfunctional and war-torn states. This may be inevitable. Creating durable solutions to humanitarian and security problems requires a long-term commitment to rebuilding and reforming repressive or conflict-ridden societies. In particular, long-term solutions require rebuilding (or building from scratch) the rule of law: fostering effective, inclusive, and transparent indigenous governance structures; creating fair and independent judicial systems and responsible security forces; reforming and updating legal codes; and creating a widely shared public commitment to human rights and to using the new or reformed civic structures rather than relying on violence or self-help to resolve problems . Yet these tasks often cannot simply be left entirely to local populations, because in the immediate wake of interventions, such societies usually continue to be riven by the same conflicts and problems that motivated the intervention in the first place. After genocide, ethnic cleansing, or war, few societies are immediately able to “get back on their feet.” Most need – and many demand – substantial outside assistance in reestablishing security and reconstructing governance and economic institutions. Post-conflict reconstruction is slow, expensive, and fraught with difficulty, and in part for that reason, today’s “liberal imperialists” are often somewhat reluctant imperialists. If the main goals of the old imperialists were territorial expansion and economic gain, and imperialist governing elites enjoyed broad support from their domestic constituencies, the architects of today’s military interventions find themselves in a far different situation. Interventions are a costly and dangerous business, diverting government resources away from domestic priorities and risking the lives of the intervening power’s soldiers. The electorates of western nations are often loathe to support expensive, risky foreign ventures that offer few clear short-term domestic dividends. Because modern international and domestic norms forbid interventions designed explicitly to exploit the resources of other states, today’s interventionists must generally make a public commitment to building just, democratic, peaceful, and prosperous societies in the areas that they control, if they are to avoid worldwide condemnation. Yet building just and prosperous societies is complex and requires intervening powers to make virtually open-ended commitments of resources and people to post-intervention societies – which is, again, likely to be less than popular with domestic constituencies concerned about how their tax dollars are spent. Thus, while a potentially critical world watches events unfold in real time on the Internet and CNN, today’s “new imperialists” must pledge themselves to ensuring peace and stability, rebuilding damaged infrastructures and economies, protecting vulnerable populations, nurturing a strong civil society, fostering legitimate indigenous leaders, and supporting democratic state institutions. Since today’s interventionists generally intervene in the name of global order and “the rule of law,” they must consequently strive to build the rule of law in the societies in which they intervene, at risk of losing their own global credibility. They must work closely with regional and international organizations and with a wide range of nongovernmental actors (from human rights groups to humanitarian aid organizations). At the same time, they must satisfy domestic constituencies concerned about costs and domestic social and economic priorities. This is no easy task. Building the rule of law is no simple matter, although triumphal interventionist rhetoric occasionally implies that it is. The idea of the rule of law is often used as a handy shorthand way to describe the extremely complex bundle of cultural commitments and institutional structures that support peace, human rights, democracy, and prosperity. On the institutional level, the rule of law involves courts, legislatures, statutes, executive agencies, elections, a strong educational system, a free press, and independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as bar associations, civic associations, political parties, and the like. On the cultural level, the rule of law requires human beings who are willing to give their labor and their loyalty to these institutions, eschewing self-help solutions and violence in favor of democratic and civil participation. Especially in societies in which state institutions and the law itself have been deeply discredited by repressive or ineffectual governments, persuading people to buy into rule of law ideals is difficult. Both institutionally and culturally, building the rule of law also requires extensive human and financial resources, careful policy coordination between numerous international actors and national players, and at the same time an ability to respond quickly, creatively, and sensitively to unpredictable developments on the ground. Today’s interventionism presents a mix of old and new problems. In the age of human rights, what goals, if any, justify military interventions? In what ways do the values and methods of the new interventionism constrain and complicate the process of achieving the new imperialism’s goals? Just what is it that we mean when we talk about “the rule of law”? Concretely, how does one go about creating the rule of law? How can one tell when the rule of law has successfully been established? At what stage do interveners have an obligation to stick around, and at what stage do they instead have an obligation to go home and leave local actors to determine their own destinies? These are difficult questions, and none of them can be easily answered. We believe, however, that answers need to be attempted nonetheless. The new interventionism will probably be a feature of the global order for years to come, and the stakes are too high to shrug off the hard questions as unanswerable, or to continue to address these dilemmas in an ad hoc and ill-considered fashion. This book was initially conceptualized in early 2001, before the events of September 11 shook up the global legal order. In the first months of 2001, looking back on the recent international interventions in Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone, it seemed to us that a book on humanitarian interventions would make a useful contribution to U.S. and international policy debates. We initially planned to write a book that would focus in part on establishing clear legal and pragmatic criteria for humanitarian interventions and in part on the issue of post-intervention efforts to rebuild the rule of law in conflict-ridden societies. When we first began to plan this book, we took it for granted that most humanitarian interventions would have broad, if not universal, international support and that the intervening powers would also enjoy a reasonably high degree of support from the local population in post-conflict societies. The events that followed the September 11 terrorist attacks challenged these assumptions. Although the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had humanitarian dimensions (ousting the repressive and murderous Taliban and Baathist regimes), both interventions were motivated mainly by perceived national security imperatives (eliminating terrorist bases in Afghanistan and preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq). For the most part the international community supported the intervention in Afghanistan and accepted the invasion’s legality. In the case of Iraq, however, there was no such acquiescence; the invasion’s legal legitimacy rested on a highly contested claim of authority. Even many traditional U.S. allies openly criticized it, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan publicly called it illegal. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq found only limited and ambivalent international support, and global skepticism of the intervention has only been exacerbated by the subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction within Iraq, despite the prewar claims of the U.S. government. All this has fed a popular perception in the greater Middle East that the U.S. intervention was motivated by little more than a desire for regional domination and control of Iraqi oil resources. Inside Iraq, public attitudes toward the intervention vary substantially among the different segments of the population. Although most Iraqis are happy to see Saddam Hussein gone, there has been widespread criticism of American inability to restore basic security in key parts of Iraq. Iraqi mistrust of the U.S.-led intervention has been further exacerbated by popular perceptions of U.S. military heavy-handedness, combined with the global scandal sparked by revelations about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. These two post–9/11 interventions posed a dilemma for our initial conception of this book. After 9/11, a book focusing entirely on humanitarian interventions no longer seemed to make much sense, because the U.S. and international discourse had moved on to a very different place. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq seemed like a far cry from the international humanitarian interventions in places like Kosovo and East Timor. Nonetheless, as events in Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded, it became increasingly clear to us that however different these various military interventions were on the front end, post-conflict issues in Afghanistan and Iraq had a great deal in common with post-conflict issues in Kosovo, East Timor, or any of the other societies subject to international humanitarian interventions before 9/11. Regardless of the motivations behind particular past military interventions – regardless of whether they were justifiable or unjustifiable, popular or unpopular, wise or unwise – all post-intervention societies face many similar challenges. Although Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq are dramatically different societies, for instance, with divergent histories and cultures, they all had similar needs when the main phase of the fighting ended. All had damaged infrastructures – bombed roads, burnt-out homes and offices, devastated electrical and sanitation systems. All had significant populations in desperate need of humanitarian assistance such as food, shelter, and medical care. All had public institutions that either barely functioned or entirely lacked popular credibility and a population that had to one extent or another been cut off from access to critical skills or the outside world. All faced the challenge of ensuring accountability for past human rights abuses and preventing future abuses. In a broad sense, then, there is much that all these post-intervention societies have in common. As a result, intervening powers face grave and similar responsibilities when the bombs stop falling, regardless of the intervention’s underlying legitimacy or motives. Interveners may be tempted to cut and run after the initial military phase of an intervention ends, getting out with as little loss of life and money as possible. Yet both moral and pragmatic considerations suggest that taking a longer-term view is better in the end. In part, this is because even the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, needs to maintain some degree of international legitimacy and support. Although the United States may be willing and able to accept the costs of going it alone (or almost alone) when it comes to perceived national security imperatives, the United States still faces significant political and diplomatic pressure to be a good global neighbor and a responsible superpower. U.S. domestic and international commitments to democracy and human rights force even reluctant American politicians to promise that American power will be used for the benefit of the people in post-intervention societies, as well as for U.S. benefit. In addition, military interventions that do not ultimately rebuild the rule of law in post-conflict societies are doomed to undermine their own goals. This is true whether the interventions were undertaken initially for humanitarian reasons, security reasons, or a complicated mix of the two. Unless the rule of law can be created in post-intervention societies, military interventions will not fully eradicate the dysfunctional conditions that necessitated intervention in the first place. Without the rule of law, human rights abuses and violence will recur and continue unchecked, posing ongoing threats not only to residents of post-conflict societies but also to global peace and security – and perhaps necessitating another intervention a few years down the road. Haiti is a case in point: ten years after sending in U.S. and UN troops to restore a democratically elected leader to power, the United States recently found itself, ironically, complicit in removing the very same leader and forced to send in troops to ensure a peaceful transition to a new government. Had the United States and the international community made a more sustained investment in rebuilding the rule of law in Haiti and maintained the pressure for reform, many abuses might have been prevented, and there might have been no need to send in the Marines a second time around. As of this writing, there is little reason to believe that the United States has yet learned this lesson from the first U.S.-led intervention in Haiti: once again, U.S. troops were quickly withdrawn, and U.S. promises of meaningful reconstruction assistance have amounted to little. East Timor provides another recent example. Just one year after the termination of the UN peacekeeping operation sent to restore order and establish democratic institutions, the newly independent state was forced in May 2006 to declare a state of emergency and invite a new international peacekeeping force back into the country to stop rapidly escalating local violence. The inability of the Timorese government to maintain order on its own revealed the fragility of its democratic institutions and political culture, and exposed fault lines and grievances within Timorese society that will continue to fester if left unaddressed. It also highlighted the failure of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and other international actors to create adequate preconditions for stability and the rule of law during the period in which all legislative, administrative, and executive power rested with the interveners. As in Haiti, interveners scaled back their commitment too soon, and so were forced to return. Unfortunately, Haiti and East Timor are hardly atypical. Time and again, interveners have underestimated the time, effort, and resources needed for the rule of law to take root. The temptation to undertake interventions “on the cheap” has undercut longer-term policy goals for the United States and other major international and regional powers. Resource and other constraints often lead to a reluctance to intervene in the early stages of a humanitarian or security crisis, even when all the warning signs point to the dangers of remaining passive. Military interventions – especially those primarily humanitarian in nature – often involve too little force, too late, followed by an even more minimal commitment of resources to the post-intervention rebuilding phase. When the “immediate crisis” is past, public attention dwindles, and so does donor support; post-conflict, interveners often then find it difficult to provide enough troops, civilian police, reconstruction funds, and so on to make much of a dent in post-conflict problems. The lack of resources in turn often comes to shape post-intervention aims, as initially ambitious reconstruction plans are scaled down to reflect diminishing resources. This often forces unappealing compromises with local power-brokers or “spoilers” (such as warlords in Afghanistan or the KLA in Kosovo), who must be relied on to “make the trains run on time” in the absence of viable alternatives structures, abandoned because they cost too much. Needless to say, compromises with spoilers and conflict entrepreneurs usually come back to haunt interveners a short way down the road, and conflict may well ultimately break out again – requiring another cycle of interventions, lofty promises, and a rapid retreat from initial commitments. Thus, even if moral considerations are insufficient to persuade some policymakers of the importance of building the rule of law in post-conflict settings, Haiti and similar examples should suggest that what goes around, comes around: the failure to invest adequately in interventions to build the rule of law in the first place has long-term negative consequences for human rights, human security, and global security. This book consequently proceeds from two premises. The first is that the United States and the international community will continue to engage in military interventions followed by post-conflict efforts to rebuild the rule of law. The second is that all post-conflict reconstruction efforts face many similar challenges, regardless of the rationale behind the original intervention. In this book, we thus try to analyze the common lessons that interventions from Bosnia to Iraq hold for future post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Concretely, this book seeks to examine what we know and what we don’t know about rebuilding the rule of law in the wake of military interventions. The bad news, which will come as no surprise either to foreign policy professionals or to careful newspaper readers, is that the track record of the international community in general, and the United States in particular, is not very impressive. From Bosnia and Haiti to Afghanistan and Iraq, post-intervention efforts to build the rule of law have been haphazard, underresourced, and at times internally contradictory, with as many failures as successes. This is in part because post-conflict societies tend to be inhospitable environments for efforts to promote the rule of law. Post-conflict societies are often characterized by high levels of violence and human need, damaged physical and civic infrastructures, and sometimes little or no historical rule of law traditions. But to some degree, the poor track record of rule of law promotion efforts is due to the failure of interveners to appreciate the complexities of the project of creating the rule of law. The good news is that the international community is finally beginning to have a sense of “best practices,” an increasingly nuanced understanding of what works and what doesn’t in post-conflict settings. The Iraq experience has underlined the critical importance of immediately reestablishing basic security in the wake of military interventions. This in turn requires that the international community plan in advance for the rapid deployment of civilian police in the post-conflict period – something that was neglected in Iraq, with costs that continue to be felt today. The Iraq experience also underlines the fact that effectively reestablishing security means far more than simply ensuring that looting and violent crime are kept in check: it also involves ensuring that basic daily needs are met and that people have adequate food, water, shelter, medical care, and so on. After more than a decade of well-intentioned but flawed interventions, it has become increasingly clear that the various aspects of post-conflict reconstruction must be addressed in a coordinated way: when security, economic issues, civil society, and governmental issues are all dealt with by separate offices operating on more or less separate tracks, confusion and problems easily multiply. Perhaps most critically of all, we know from past failures that there is no “one size fits all” template for rebuilding the rule of law in post-conflict settings: to be successful, programs to rebuild the rule of law must respect and respond to the unique cultural characteristics and needs of each post-intervention society. Much of this may sound obvious, and on some level it is. Nonetheless, the international community and the U.S. foreign policy establishment have been slow to learn these lessons, and slower still to turn abstract insight into concrete policy changes. Much has already been written on the subject of post-conflict reconstruction, but this book strives to fill a need that still remains unmet: to have a single volume available that pulls together the disparate bits of knowledge we have gained in the past decade, particularly regarding the central challenge of building the rule of law, broadly construed to include both the operation of the law itself and the background social and political institutions required to stabilize and promote it. Our goal in this book is to offer enough theoretical, legal, and historical background to enable readers to contextualize and understand the basic dilemmas inherent in interventions designed to build the rule of law, while also offering concrete suggestions for getting it right in the future. This book is not a how-to manual, but its focus is fundamentally pragmatic: we are less concerned with political and legal theory than with what seems to work on the ground, and what does not. Nonetheless, when it come to creating “the rule of law” in post-intervention settings, we are convinced that understanding what does and doesn’t work requires some basic historical and theoretical insights. We present those insights here in what we hope is a straightforward and readable manner before moving on to a detailed analysis of concrete challenges and positive practices. Although building the rule of law may seem like a rather abstract idea, it can be useful to think of it in the same way we think about building a house. To build a house – and not just any house, but a house that will be sturdy, functional, beautiful, affordable, and appropriate to its geographic and cultural setting – one needs a mix of different insights and skills. First of all, one needs some historical and theoretical background: one will want to know at least a bit about the various ways in which people have designed houses in the past; one will want to understand that houses can be built in many different styles. One will want to understand what the other houses in the area look like: if they all have peaked roofs, there may be a good reason (to enable heavy snow to slide off the roofs easily, for instance). One needs to understand the trade-offs between, for instance, letting in lots of light and ensuring that the house is neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer. One also needs to know a bit about the physics of houses: how much weight can be borne by walls of different materials? How big of a furnace is necessary to heat a particular space? At some point, such insights and questions lead to a basic conception of the kind of house it makes sense to build in a particular place. From this more abstract kind of knowledge, one must move through some very practical steps. An architect must create a design for the house: a preliminary blueprint showing how the different rooms will fit together, what will go where, and so on. Good building materials must be obtained as well: solid wood or bricks and mortar and the like. One also needs enough money to pay for the whole edifice, and a contractor who can work well with various subcontractors, with the architect, and with the future occupants. And, most obviously, one must convince the future occupants that this new house is a useful thing to have in the first place – and that being patient during the lengthy construction process is worth the wait.

Velvet Revolution in Iran?

by
Martin Beck Matuštík

November 17 marks seventeen years since the Czech Civic Forum and the Slovak Public against Violence choreographed the demise of one of the last Soviet-orbit regimes. In kind, there are three anniversaries coming up in 2007—the centennial of Jan Pato?ka's birth; thirty years since his death; and the thirtieth anniversary of “Charta 77.” That bold Czechoslovak Manifesto for human rights issued in January 1977 by Václav Havel, Jan Pato?ka, and Ji?í Hájek, Charta 77 paved the way to the events of the “Velvet Revolution” of November 17, 1989. Pato?ka’s birth and his Socratic death (in March 1977, he suffered brain hemorrhaging during his interrogation at the hands of the Czech secret service and was left untreated at the police station) will be commemorated in Prague 22-28 April 2007.[i]

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” famously wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent’,” said Václav Havel in 1978 in “The Power of the Powerless.” Jacques Derrida prophesied in his 1994 Specters of Marx about “a spectrology of Marx” that continues to haunt us even after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989.

Indeed the specter of “velvet revolution” continues to haunt, perhaps nowhere so much as in the Islamic Republic of Iran of today.

***

Not unlike the Czech philosopher-dissident Pato?ka, the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo is an intellectual in deep trouble with the ruling regime. And just like Havel in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Jahanbegloo has become part of a democratic, nonviolent movement of the Iranian powerless. On April 27, 2006, the Iranian philosopher was detained at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, and shortly after was accused of actively preparing to take part in a “velvet revolution” in Iran. This polyglot thinker did his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne while Western Marxism was demanding the impossible, but elected to write his doctoral dissertation on Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent change, Satyagraha. Jahanbegloo continued to espouse nonviolence after returning from the West to his homeland. The question of violence looms large in Iran, whose regime was born of the convulsions of 1979. The Iranian Revolution contained several currents of thought—it included Marxist anti-imperialists and Third-Worldists as well as liberal-democratic nationalists and feminists. Yet in the end it was overtaken by the anti-modernist Islamists, and so became a conservative-clerical revolution rather than a democratic one. On one of his many trips to India, Jahanbegloo met with the Dalai Lama, who in turn has made frequent visits to Prague to meet with Havel since 1989. All such links reinforce suspicion among Iran’s clerical rulers that “the velvet revolution” is at hand.

Rasool Nafisi has suggested that the main reason for Jahanbegloo’s arrest was his research project for the German Marshall Fund in which he compared the Iran’s democratic dissidents with their East-Central European predecessors.[ii] This line of comparative inquiry analyzed the balance of political power between Iranian civil society and the governing clerical regime. While Jahanbegloo sat in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, eminent international figures—among them Havel and Habermas—sent an Open Letter to Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad protesting the philosopher’s detention. The Iranian minister of the interior, Hojjatoleslam Qolamhoseyn Mosheni Eyhe’I, said in a July interview that Jahanbegloo was arrested on suspicion that he had been assisting the US to provoke “a velvet revolution in Iran,” an activity that, according to him, seems to be the US’s main business these days. The irony, of course, being that nonviolence has not exactly been the modus operandi of US foreign policy strategy: that the empire should be accused of fomenting nonviolence is rich in paradox.

Meanwhile, the reaction of Tehran’s clerical regime to this Iranian dissident was as if taken out of the (secular) Soviet cook book. The state-run press, Kayhan and Resalat, and the student agency, Isna, proclaimed the good news of Ramin’s video “confession” in which he uttered mea culpa for his sins: he was to be used by foreign agents (the CIA and Mossad) in order to act against the regime which was once called by the head of the Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, “the most divine and heavenly” in the world. The confession was at first observed by the Revolutionary Cultural Committee, whose members are appointed by Iran’s supreme religious leader, (today Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, before him the inventor of the clerical regime, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei) and whose task it is to supervise the ideological correctness of all cultural and educational programs in the land. Just as during the Soviet-era witch hunts on domestic spies and Zionists, or during the Joseph McCarthy-era witch hunts of Communists in every closet, so also in Iran today, Ramin Jahanbegloo is far from alone in being compelled to “confess” to appease the regime. Such confessions have been prepared for a televised public propaganda.[iii] Just as in the Soviet bloc, so also in Iran assassinations and torture are gradually being replaced by “softer” methods of psychological and economic repression. The Iranian regime uses now more varied threats to keep would-be dissidents in line: threats of financial reprisals, loss of home or medical care, forced exile, or repeated arrest. When Jahanbegloo was released on August 30 of this year, he was given a valid passport, but he had to place as bail both his house and the house of his mother as a guarantee that he would not speak about the tortured origin of his confession or otherwise against the regime.

***

Who’s afraid of the “velvet revolution”? Fearful are those who don’t understand civil society or non-governmental initiatives. Such fears nowadays strike Central East Europe itself, where among the most vocal and persistent critics of Charta 77 and of the entire era of Central-East European dissent and today’s NGOs is Havel’s nemesis, the current Czech President, Václav Klaus. His and similar revisionist voices of the dissident history and of the role that civil society played in 1989 arise as if they were taken from another cook book—that of the Great Leader, by whom I do not mean the Soviet cult of personality but the Supreme Iranian cleric. If Timothy Garton Ash is correct that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah “Khomenei was both the Lenin and the Stalin of Iran’s Islamic revolution,”[iv] then the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei is the one who tries to suppress and normalize all mounting dissent against it.

Consider this irony: both the Islamists and the Klaus-type revisionists cannot be right. Klaus would like his cronies to believe that the dissidents were a bunch of elitist losers; that the Actually Existing socialist regimes collapsed of their own overweight; and that it is the unfettered pro-market forces that played the main role in the overthrow of Communism and should play the leading role in post-Communist societies. Dissidents, with the exception of Havel and at the beginning also of the Polish Solidarity leaders, were effectively pushed aside after 1989. The market entrepreneurs and party technocrats took over. Klaus heard Lenin’s question loud and clear already when he worked at the top Prague Communist think-tank, the Prognostic Institute: What is to be done? He formed the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) soon after 1989, which proved to be more effective than the dissident Civic Forum that facilitated the velvet transfer of power, and Klaus thus took power.

Yet can both Central-East European revisionists and the Iranian clerics be right about dissidents and civil society? When unlearned lessons of history repeat themselves, they return as farce. Enter the first farce: the clerical regime fears that it will suffer something that Klaus claims never happened in the first place. Then comes the second farce: the conservative religionists in Iran and the conservative market ideologues of Central-Eastern Europe rally—as the Communist apparatchiks before them—agitate against civil society. Klaus, who likes to portray himself as a student of American democracy and of Margaret Thatcher, invented and introduced derogatory anglicized neologisms into Czech political discourse, such as “NGOism” and “humanrightism,” so as to poke fun of the very civil and non-governmental initiatives in his country that Toqueville once identified as the heart of American democracy.

Here comes the third farce: the reactionary Islamist regime recruits former agents who spied on anti-Communist dissidents but were left unemployed by the fall of the Berlin Wall; they collaborate on figuring out how to prevent democratic dissent from turning into “velvet revolution.”[v]

***

The specter of nonviolent democratic Islam is haunting the suicide bombers and religious zealots of every stripe. The fear of democratic civil society among Islamist fundamentalists grips the entire Middle East region with the realization that the Iranian dissidents have outgrown both the ultra-left and the religious right—the two forces responsible for the anti-democratic subversion of the 1979 revolution’s emancipatory promise. It is possible this might only apply to Iran, and that the situation in other Islamic countries is more complex, especially regarding the relationship between Islamism, civil society and democracy; yet crucial for my point is that the Iranian dissidents, within the framework of Islam, now embrace nonviolent change and what Karl Popper and George Soros call the open society. Iranian dissent has become, like the Central-East European and Soviet underground before it, the laboratory for imagining another possibility, a future world that would wed the most spiritual resources of religious life with the most advanced forms of democratic and economically-just institutions. This is the fear that the Prague Spring of 1968 shares with the Velvet Revolution of 1989—and both share with the current global situation: the pro-democracy yet deeply religiously-inflected dissent in Iran is underscored by its radical nonviolence and opposition to all religious terror (whether by a totalitarian state or by religious fanatics). Yet it is likewise opposed to the notion of a permanent war on terror, which is perceptively unmasked by the proponents of nonviolent change as the Jacobin variant of all aggressive wars and modern revolutions.

Any violent foreign intervention in Iran would mean the end of the democratic movement. Even Condoleezza Rice’s offer of 75 million dollars to support the opposition forces in Iran is in this situation the kiss of death (and was dead on arrival—the dissidents don’t want a dime of it). The Islamist regime fears the velvet of dissidents as much as they fear the mystical dance of the Sufis, whose prayer gathering was attacked by a state-sponsored gang in February 2006. Both the Iranian dissidents and the Sufis embody dangerous ideas that another world is possible. Just as in 19th-century Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard protested from within Christianity that in Christendom there were hardly any Christians left (the uneven length of Kierkegaard’s pants was then the only Danish religious caricature), so today the devout Muslim dissidents ask where are Muslims in Islamdom? Along with the secular critical modernists, Jahanbegloo chief among them, theirs has been the voice sorely missing from the entire equation! Should suicide bombers and authoritarian clerical regimes be confused with Islam any more than in our post-Christendom Christianity or democracy with what Noam Chomsky calls military humanism?

Saturated by the suffering at the hands of the Islamic Republic, the democracy movement in Iran has been tested by the fires of its own incredibly accelerated modernity. The result is the post-Jacobin realization that it is impossible to impose democracy and freedom by force. Religious dissent in Iran is to Islam today what Kierkegaard was to Christianity in Denmark. The major world conflicts are not, as Samuel Huntington claims, among world civilizations or between the secular and religious worlds, but rather they arise between religious-political fundamentalisms and open societies. This conflict exists today as much within as among existing civilizations, including within the developed Western societies. The global question before us is this: shall we learn how to share public and open space in which, as the Mayans in Chiapas say, “many worlds could coexist”? Afraid of a “velvet revolution” are those who do not want to live in an open space of many secular and sacred worlds.

***

“Reading philosophy in Iran is like reading Pato?ka and Husserl in Prague in the late 1970s,” Jahanbegloo said in his interview with Danny Postel in these pages.[vi] This entirely astonishing comparison resounded with even greater truth during the presidency of the Iran’s reformist Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005). Just as the Central-East European dissidents during the 1970-80s gathered in their apartments in order to hold underground seminars with philosophers visiting from the West, so too Jahanbegloo has organized international conferences and interfaith debates, publishing books and essays, and attracting a great number of thinkers to Tehran, among them Richard Rorty, Agnes Heller, Adam Michnik, Ashis Nandy, Antonio Negri, Michael Ignatieff, and the late Paul Ricoeur. Ramin has published more than twenty books, numerous articles on topic ranging from tradition and modernity, nonviolence, to studies of Kant, Machiavelli, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tagore and books of conversation with Isaiah Berlin, George Steiner, and Nandy. Some of Ramin’s seminars on Kant and Hegel were attended by more than four thousand students.

Having awakened intellectually in Prague during the totalitarian period of the early 1970s, I feel a certain envy about the intellectual hunger and omnivorous literacy of the Iran’s youth: they remind me of my own famished soul thirsting for conversation and books during the post-1968 normalization of my native Czechoslovakia. The new regime of President Ahmadinejad—he has famously denied the Holocaust (he organized an exhibit of caricatures about the Holocaust in Tehran—which virtually no Iranians attended) and unleashed a crackdown on intellectuals and journalists—has effectively ended those reformist hopes. The current period in Iran is somewhat comparable to the Czechoslovak normalization era after the Soviet invasion in the late 1970-80s with the birth of Charta 77 in 1977 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Postel’s interview with Ramin was conducted via email in the weeks before his April arrest.[vii] When I wrote my book Postnational Identity (Guilford Press, 1993) and placed alongside each other in the subtitle the names of Havel, Habermas, and Kierkegaard, who could have imagined that in today’s Iran Havel and Habermas would join forces in becoming intellectual stars? What do Habermas and Havel bring in common to the Iranian pro-democracy movement? I put this question to the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji during a recent dialogue between him and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago on September 28, 2006.

Ganji is perhaps the best known Iranian dissident and journalist. He was sentenced to six years in prison for writing a series of articles in which he exposed the roles of high-level Iranian officials in committing political murders of intellectuals and writers. On May 11 2005, Ganji began a hunger strike from his cell in Evin prison, both against the conditions of his imprisonment and for his unconditional release. That fast lasted incredibly long: double the full length of Ramadan (and with no food consumed either before or after sundown). Upon his release from prison, Ganji embarked upon a sojourn through Europe and the US in the fall of 2006. He fully expects to return to prison directly from the airport upon returning to Tehran. Ganji was fasting during his dialogue with Nussbaum, as it was the first week of Ramadan, and he is a deeply devout Muslim. At dinner we continued our conversation about Havel and Habermas.

Havel and Charta 77—these days both under assault in the home of their origin by those in power who have no dissident credentials—are for the Iranian dissidents symbols of nonviolent democratic change. The clerical regime has not yet managed to become thoroughly totalitarian and, as with Charta 77, the pro-democracy movement gathers many different strata of the society, from former Marxists and leftists to secular liberals to religious believers and Muslim feminists and many students. Habermas represents for the young generation perhaps the most attractive model of open, deliberative, and communicative democracy. He was treated as a rock star during his visit in Tehran in 2002. The Masarykean-humanist Havel and the left-liberal Habermas have thus become two axes of the Iranian democratic imaginary integrated into, what after Kierkegaard, I would call an existentially transformed Islamic religiosity suited to open society.

My all-too-idyllic imaginary comparison compels me to leave aside three glaring anomalies, though I am prepared to mount a small defense for each one of them. First, Heidegger, who also inspired, along with Husserl and Pato?ka, the Czech dissidents (including Havel himself), enjoys popularity in Iran today among conservative clerics. (Yet the Czechoslovak Communist regime could stomach neither Husserl, nor Heidegger, nor Pato?ka, who was also hated by the Nazis, nor the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Lévinas, who was read by Czech dissidents along with Heidegger.) Second, Habermas supported the first Persian Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia. (Yet with the US invasion of Iraq, Habermas articulated a highly forceful critique of Bush and US foreign policy more generally.) Third, Havel, unlike Habermas, supported the US invasion of Iraq. (Yet Havel also warned the U.S. in an ironic comment addressed to a NATO conference in Prague that the allies could easily end up hated like the Soviets with their brotherly invasion of Czechoslovakia.)

Indeed, there is a fourth anomaly that could not be easily ignored or excused if it were not acknowledged: Ganji, sometimes called the Havel of Iran, was as a teen a fervent Iranian revolutionary who helped to form the Revolutionary Guards that were to protect Iran during its war with Iraq but turned into an instrument of repression at home, a fixture of the Islamic Republic’s domestic security apparatus.

In an interview, “Islam and Democracy,”[viii] Ganji voiced the view that “revolution cannot create democracy.” The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either. The American revolution of independence avoided the Jacobin variant of the French revolutionary model of founding. Enter an epiphany of a political holy trinity: Jefferson, Habermas, and Havel. In today’s Iran, the struggle is not about religious orthodoxy but power. Ganji thinks that many clerics in power, just as among the late Communist nomenclatura, no longer “believe” in anything but their own power, and that’s why such a regime becomes what Max Weber called “sultanist.” This is one more reason why the relation between civil society and the established powers in present-day Iran is comparable to the life in the 1980s in the Soviet bloc. Ganji has always worried about the fascist reading of religion and wrote about clerical fascism twenty years ago, for which he was sentenced to jail time. For his reporting on then Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and the murders of dissidents he earned a six-year prison sentence. He expects a third sentencing upon his imminent return home.

At our dinner in Chicago our table debated the Iranian nuclear program. Ganji worried about the Libyan model: the US and EU would compromise with the authoritarian Iranian regime about the end or control of the nuclear program and receive assurances for the preservation of the regime. One could also call it the Soviet post-Yalta model or perhaps the Saudi cheap-oil model. Paradoxically, from an entirely different barrel, the question of the nonviolent transfer of power from the Communists to the dissidents and the preservation of certain sinister post-Communist continuities after 1989 will haunt the legacy of the Velvet Revolution for many years precisely for its non-ultra, nonviolent, or “orange” handling of the deposed regime. That revolution, some say, was no revolution—it lacked the Jacobin or Bolshevik edge and neither executed its enemies nor ate its own children, it only pushed aside the majority of dissidents whose story today it wishes to revise. Not only do fascist regimes desire to destroy civil society, as the Iranian dissidents are keenly aware, but no authoritarian politician or party can tolerate private citizen initiatives. Ganji, who declined an invitation from the White House, has on his current trip met with Habermas and with Havel during a fall conference in Geneva. (He has also met with Chomsky, Rorty, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Anthony Dworkin, and Nancy Fraser.) He was a bit surprised when I told him how a great number of former dissidents and student participants in the events of November 1989 think that something had been robbed from the Czecho-Slovak Velvet Revolution. But if Ganji is right that we are creators of our future in the way we act in the present, then, I proposed to him, he should ask Havel how the story of Charta 77 ended: what happened to the East European dissidents (whether ushered overnight into political power or again becoming powerless) and civil society? Ask Havel, I said: given the Central-East European experience, what should Iranian dissidents be thinking about today—already? Whether or not Havel and Ganji did discuss this topic we might learn when a new chapter, about which one dreams Iranian “velvet” dreams, is written.[ix]

Notes

[i] While a first-year student at Charles University, at age nineteen, I signed Charta 77. I became a political refugee in August of that same year.

[ii] Rasool Nafisi, “Ramin Jahanbegloo: a repressive release,” openDemocracy, 1 September 2006 (www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_3867.jsp), and Nafisi, “The meaning of Ramin Jahanbegloo’s arrest,” openDemocracy, 16 May 2006 (www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_3545.jsp)

[iii] See Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of California Press, 1999)

[iv] Timothy Garton Ash, “Soldiers of the Hidden Imam,” The New York Review of Books, 3 November, 2005.

[v] Cf. Timothy Garton Ash, “Cedar revolution,“ The Guardian (3 March 2005); Ash and Timothy Snyder, “The Orange Revolution,” The New York Review of Books, 28 April 2005.

[vi] Danny Postel, “Ideas whose time has come: A Conversation with Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo” Logos 5.2 - spring/summer 2006 (www.logosjournal.com/issue_5.2/jahanbegloo_interview.htm)

[vii] The interview now appears as well in Postel’s book Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006).

[viii] “Islam and Democracy: Conversation with Akbar Ganji,” 10 August 2006 (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Ganji/ganji-con0.html)

[ix] This essay is published simultaneously in Czech, “Sametová demokracie v Iránu?” Literární noviny (Prague, 13 November 2006), also on line at www.literarky.cz. On a related topic, see also Matuštík, “Sametová demokracie a jiné zm?ny režim?,” Literární noviny, 15 November 2004, in English as “From ‘velvet revolution’ to ‘velvet jihad’?” openDemocracy, 18 November 2004 (www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/article_2231.jsp). I am thankful to Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi for helpful editorial comments.

Martin Beck Matuštík is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (1993); Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order (1998); Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (2001), and co-editor with Merold Westphal of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (1995). He is currently working on a book titled The Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations on Radical Evil.

Iraqi group builds 'mini-city' in Kurdistan
AFP

November 27, 2006

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Iraqi developers said Monday that they have launched a $350-million project to build a lush "mini-city" in the relative safety of the war-wracked country's northern Kurdish region.

The development of "Empire World" in the Kurdish capital of Arbil is designed to "show some hope and some opportunities" in Iraqi Kurdistan, said Michel Hebert, CEO of the Iraqi-owned group Empire Holdings, which is behind the venture.

Empire World, which broke ground in June, covers 750,000 square meters (8 million square feet) of integrated commercial, residential, hotel, and leisure facilities in a "mini-city" all-inclusive environment, Canadian-born Hebert told reporters in Dubai.

"The site is designed to provide its users with the latest and most sophisticated technology and services," and will feature two towers, one providing office space and the other housing a luxury hotel, Hebert said.

The project will cost $350 million over eight years, he said, describing Kurdistan as "safe and secure, with a booming investment environment and a diversified economy."

Empire Holdings president Shwan Al Mulla emphasized the favorable nature of the investment climate in Iraqi Kurdistan, "in particular the recent enactment of the investment promotion law that offers attractive incentives for investment and guarantees equal treatment for both domestic and foreign investors."

Iraqi Kurdistan, which encompasses the provinces of Arbil, Dohuk, and Sulaimaniyah, was largely deprived of economic development under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In 1991, the region became virtually autonomous after Saddam was defeated in the Gulf War and the victorious US-led allies made the area a no-go zone for the Iraqi dictator's forces.

Since then, it has seen progress on the economic front and has largely been spared the insurgency and sectarian violence that have plagued the rest of Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.

POPULATION SUPPORT RATIO

I have started to more seriously focus on the immigration issue in the United States. Building a fence does not seem to be a solution to me, but I do think the borders have to be controlled. We need to know who is in our country. I am not sure some politicians realize how important immigration is to the future of the United States and developed nations in general, especially Western Europe and Japan. We are just not having the births necessary to support our future senior citizens.

The United Nations has a term "population support ratio" (PSR) that I think is helpful. I am reading the Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett. He makes the following point: The big hitch is this: Current U.N. projections say that by 2050, the potential support ratio (psr, or people aged 15-to-64 per one person 65-and-older) in the advanced economies will have dropped from 5-to-1 to 2-to-1, while in the least developed regions the psr still will stand at roughly 10-to-1. That means that worker-to-retiree ratios in the Core will plummet just as the retirement burden there skyrockets - unless the Gap's "youth bulges" flow toward the older Core states. Japan will require more than half a million immigrants per year to maintain its current workforce size, while the European Union will need to increase its current immigrant flow roughly fivefold - but both have great difficulty acceding to that need.

Immigrants (legal or illegal) are helping keep America's PSR higher--it is not what it should be, but the US is much better off than Japan and some European countries if you are looking at 2050. The UN has a chart projecting the percentage of the population 60 or older. By 2050 41% of the population of Italy will be over 60; for Japan 42% of the population will be over 60; for the US 26% will be over 60. The average for developed countries is 32%.