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« Back to Iraq: The Bullet and the Ballot, Part One main page    Transcript for: Iraq: The Bullet and the Ballot, Part OneIRAQ #1306 “Iraq: The Bullet and the Ballot, Part One”MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In January of 2005, Iraqis headed to the polls for their first free elections in half a century. But as the new government takes shape, a violent insurgency and ethnic tensions continue to threaten hopes for a stable Iraq. What is the future of Iraqi democracy? What are the implications for the broader Middle East? What are the stakes for America? To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by Reuel Marc Gerecht, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, former CIA analyst, and author of “The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy.” The topic before the house: Iraq: The Bullet and the Ballot, Part One, this week on Think Tank. MR. WATTENBERG: Reuel Marc Gerecht, welcome to Think Tank. I wondered if we could begin with a short biography. Where were you born and then I want to get to the sort of - the sexy part; your role at the CIA, but just where’d you go to school? I know you went to school in Cairo among other places but... MR. GERECHT: Well, I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. MR. WATTENBERG: Really? MR. GERECHT: I am a Midwestern boy and I grew up there until I wandered off to college at eighteen. And I started – I mean I sort of bounced around colleges but I started at Johns Hopkins and then I went to and studied at the Muir Institute at the University of Edinburgh; it’s an Islamic study – Islamic study center, one of the older... MR. WATTENBERG: That was your field all along – was Islamic studies. MR. GERECHT: Yes. I mean, I knew it fairly early – I knew it fairly early on. I actually started out in medieval European history and I was seduced by a professor of Arabic into doing Islamic history. MR. WATTENBERG: And then you went to school in Cairo also. MR. GERECHT: And then I went to – I went to the American University of Cairo and Cairo University and then I came back and I went to – I was at Princeton where I was doing a doctorate on – on medieval Islam actually, on the rise of radical Shiism in Iran and I was studying with Martin Dixon and Burton Lewis and then I just decided that I didn’t want to be an academic and as it turned out I won’t name – some of my professors were former intelligence officers. MR. WATTENBERG: When did you join the agency? MR. GERECHT: In 19 – I actually entered in 1985. MR. WATTENBERG: And how long did you stay? MR. GERECHT: Nine years. MR. WATTENBERG: Nine years. And you were a Middle Eastern analyst? I mean was that your... MR. GERECHT: Well I was a case officer. I was an operative and my primary bailiwick was the Middle East and the subset... MR. WATTENBERG: What does that mean – a case officer? Meaning that you’re getting information from agents and... MR. GERECHT: That’s correct. Your objective is to – you’re overseas... MR. WATTENBERG: From getting intelligence from humans... MR. GERECHT: Human intelligence from actual foreign sources. You – you go out, you meet them, you recruit them or they volunteer, you run them. In the case – I mean I was primarily working on Iran but I worked on other – other targets as well and you would collect intelligence from them and – good or bad – and then you would, you know, send that and distribute it back to headquarters and other places. MR. WATTENBERG: And since the war in Iraq began, I mean, within the last couple years you’ve been to Iraq as well. MR. GERECHT: Yes. Yes. Yes. No, I was in Iraq about a year and a half ago and I spent most of my time actually down south in the Shiite zone, primarily in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. MR. WATTENBERG: I’ve been reading your articles obviously in preparation for this. Early in 2005 in the Weekly Standard, your pieces – I don’t want to call them gloomy but it was – there was a lot in there that was clear that you were saying this whole thing is going to implode or might implode and then I read your piece in February of 2005 and it’s obviously much more optimistic and what impressed me most ‘cause it’s the kind of thing that I’m very interested in is the importance of the role that you ascribe to image to the television - to the televised recording of what went on there. I mean, waving the purple finger and going out to Al Jazeera and Al Arabia, I guess. Is that how it’s pronounced, Al Arabia? And you are suggesting that the United States, through C-SPAN, broadcast all the deliberations of the new assembly. Is that right? MR. GERECHT: Yes. Yes. I think that would be a very – very good use of funds to ensure that all discussions of the national parliament and the constituent assembly that will write the Iraqi constitution are televised so that anybody can pick them up free by satellite television in the Middle East. MR. WATTENBERG: So it would be like having a seat in – during the deliberation for the constitution of the United States in the late 18th century? MR. GERECHT: Exactly. MR. WATTENBERG: The day after the elections I read the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Times and there were three – I don’t want to say diametrically opposite views of what happened but very, very different views of – of what the actual results are and I guess it will be known better over a process of time but generally speaking, what do you think happened? MR. GERECHT: I think it was a pretty good result. I mean, you certainly saw both the Shia and the Kurdish communities come out in significant numbers to vote, in some cases at great risk. You saw some much smaller percentage of the Sunni come out – Sunni Arabs come out and vote. MR. GERECHT: I would say it was almost probably an ideal outcome. I mean, what you had is the... MR. WATTENBERG: Ideal from the American point of view? MR. GERECHT: From American point of view; also from the – from the Iraqi point of view. I think they’re almost indistinguishable here. The – what has happened is the United Iraqi alliance, so-called Shiite list, captured almost fifty percent of the vote; they will have just a little bit over fifty percent of the seats in the new national assembly because of the way they worked the slate party list. The Kurds captured around twenty-five percent of the vote. You had the Prime Minister Allawi capturing roughly thirteen/fourteen percent of the vote and then various little... MR. WATTENBERG: Allawi as I pronounce it, was originally quotes, “our guy”, right? MR. GERECHT: Yes, he was up until the very end. In fact, what was quiet striking is just before the election I mean, I was talking to several officials who handle Iraq inside of the American government and they were still hopeful that he would, in fact, win and... MR. WATTENBERG: Right up to the end? MR. GERECHT: Yes. Right up to the end. They were actually anticipating him doing very, very well. I found that surprising and still even today I mean, have had some contact with officials and they’re sort of reverse engineering the election returns believing that... MR. WATTENBERG: That’s our favorite sport. MR. GERECHT: Believing that... MR. WATTENBERG: We do it in our own elections; why shouldn’t we do it in theirs? MR. GERECHT: ... that Allawi will and actually somehow come out to be the very powerful figure twelve months down the road with the next round of elections. I doubt that. I actually think it’s a very good thing… MR. WATTENBERG: And then there are all these mystery stories about our – our friend Achmed or Ahmed Chalabi as to who was at one point the – the favorite of the neoconservatives but was hated by the State Department and what’s going to happen to him? MR. GERECHT: Chalabi actually may be on the verge of doing one of the great comebacks of modern Middle Eastern history. We’ll see. It’s not clear yet. He’s certainly trying strenuously to gain a preeminent position in the national parliament and it appears also to become the next prime minister. Whether he is successful in that quest I’m not sure yet. There’s a lot of horse-trading going on and we will see. MR. WATTENBERG: That Chalabi might become the next prime minister? MR. GERECHT: Yes. He certainly – he is certainly a contender. MR. WATTENBERG: People are writing that there is still a chance of a civil war? Do you believe that? MR. GERECHT: I’m skeptical. I mean, I think – I think if you would – one thing that’s been very, very clear is actually the lack of that so far. The lack of revenge killing. I mean, given the horrors that Saddam Hussein’s regime which was overwhelmingly dominated by Sunnis and within the Sunni community by groups like the Tikritis, etcetera, that we look at the lack of revenge killing by Kurds against the Sunnis; by the Shia against the Sunnis, it’s striking; it’s astonishing. Because I mean, revenge killing is a leitmotif of Iraqi-Arab culture. MR. WATTENBERG: What are the differences, I mean, to the westerner, you hear Shiite and you hear Sunni and what are they arguing about? What’s, what’s – I mean, can you explain as a scholar, as a CIA analyst, as whatever hat you want to wear, what’s – what’s the difference? MR. GERECHT: Well, they’re – the - culturally actually I think the differences are not significant. I mean, that I think has been a very much unreported part of the Iraqi story, that culturally the Arab Sunnis and the Shiite Arabs are in fact essentially one family, and that the cultural differences among them are not large. I think we’ll begin to see that quite clearly. There is this tendency for example to look at Sunni Arabs and say they are more secular than Shiite Arabs. I’m not sure that’s true. We may actually start to see that many Sunni Arabs... MR. WATTENBERG: That the Shiites are more secular than the Sunnis? MR. GERECHT: Well, people tend to view the Sunni Arabs as being more secular than the – than the Shiite Arabs; that the Shiite Arabs tend to be more religious... MR. WATTENBERG: Would that translate into more modern, more western, that kind of... MR. GERECHT: Yes. Yes. And I’m not sure that’s – that’s true and we – I think we’ll – we’ll start to see that that may not be as true as some people think; that in fact religious identity may actually be a bond between the Sunni Arab community and the Shiite Arab community in Iraq, not a divisive point. MR. WATTENBERG: Is that right? MR. GERECHT: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: That’s very interesting. Now, in the Arab world, which countries are dominated by the Sunnis and which by the Shia? MR. GERECHT: Well basically the – the Sunni Arabs more or less dominate everywhere except in Lebanon, where the Shia are more than fifty percent of the population. They are more – it’s easily more than fifty percent of the population in Bahrain, but a Sunni family dominates the – the politics. MR. WATTENBERG: So Iraq, by being sixty percent Shia and twenty percent Kurd, I mean, is very unusual for an Arab country. MR. GERECHT: Oh, absolutely. MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, it’s the odd man out. MR. GERECHT: Absolutely, I mean it has – it is fair to say that the general reflex in the Sunni Arab world has been one of dismissiveness of Arab Shia; they are sort of the invisible member of the family, the black sheep. MR. WATTENBERG: The leader of the Shia in Iraq is the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is that correct? MR. GERECHT: That’s correct. MR. WATTENBERG: And he, as I understand it, outranks – I mean, there’s – all the Mullahs everywhere in the Arab world. I mean, there’s an actual ranking system. MR. GERECHT: Well, I mean all this is informally done within the Shia community. It’s done sort of by voluntary association and it is expressed through tithing that the senior clerics receive funds from the faithful and they also have students come to them and there is this exchange that takes place where people – cleric will acquire a reputation as being an accomplished legal scholar; he will attract students; in the process of attracting students he will also attract tithing and eventually there is a consensus developed within the religious community of who is the senior cleric and who is in fact the most senior cleric. And Iraq, it’s quite clear that Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the most senior cleric. MR. WATTENBERG: And he supported the elections. MR. GERECHT: Very much so. In fact I would say that his statements in favor of the elections, in favor of democracy and Shiite history are truly revolutionary. MR. WATTENBERG: And yet he would be for a religious state... I don’t want to call it a theocracy. MR. GERECHT: No, he would not – I don’t think it would be for a religious or a theocratic state at all. I think he is certainly in favor of the incorporation of certain Islamic values inside the society, but he’s quite clear in his belief that one man, one vote is the ultimate political expression and not the holy law. If you go back to say, the Iranian revolution and the theocracy that was established there, it’s quite clear there that Khomeini believed that clerics were the ultimate judges and that they either on their own or through looking at the holy law could determine the fate of a country; that democracy was in fact an illegitimate principle. Now there’s some democratic element in Iran that is quite clear the clergy believe they are the ultimate authority and they can check... MR. WATTENBERG: In Iran. MR. GERECHT: Iran. They can check popular will. Sistani has been very explicit in taking issue with that. MR. WATTENBERG: So it’s what’s render under God – what’s God’s and render, I mean... MR. GERECHT: Well, I mean it’s not a clear separation of church and state, however, what it is very clearly is a reduction in the status of the holy law. Now, the clergy know they’re going into uncharted territory here. They’re well aware that they are as you might say going through a reformation at light speed. Now, this has been a long process... MR. WATTENBERG: Reformation in the old Protestant sense... MR. GERECHT: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: of the church that was done hundreds of years ago. MR. GERECHT: Right. Right. Now I would say, and I would strongly argue, that this process has actually been going on a long time and one of the reasons the – the Arab Shia in Iraq are sort of politically on the cutting edge of the Arab world is because Khomeini sort of forced evolution, because the Iranian revolution has failed, because everyone in Iraq is aware and they are very much aware of the failure of the clerical system in Iran, of the strong popular discontent, they do not want to go down that path and they have witnessed what has happened in Iran and that is, I believe, not the road they want to follow. MR. WATTENBERG: Where I really want to get to in this discussion is why should Americans really care about getting democracy established in Iraq? I mean, it’s one thing to say as I have said, and let me just play devil’s advocate for a moment, but that it’s important for American views and values to be extended or, I mean so far as they can be around the world and it’s good – good for America; it makes us feel good; it makes for – for a better world, but when you start getting into wars and people getting killed on both sides or all three sides or all four sides, why is this – why do you think it’s important to America? MR. GERECHT: 9/11. I mean, the President actually, I think, summed it up very, very well and to his credit he understood that the Middle East has become politically dysfunctional and that what hit us on September 11th is in fact a product of this perverse nexus between tyranny in the Middle East and Islamic extremism. MR. WATTENBERG: But the case was made by all the antiwar people that al Qaeda and the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein were not playing in the same ball yard. MR. GERECHT: No, but overall what you do have – I mean there are many reasons for why the United States went to war in Iraq. I think most of those reasons are quite good. When it comes down to the issue of democracy, however, the objective here is to open up the system because you’re going to have to actually allow people to participate. It’s through that participation, through democracy, that you are going to finally kill off bin Laden-ism. And what you want to see develop in the Middle East, if you were to use a Western parallel, is you want to see a reformation. You want to – you want to begin to see fundamentalists, people who are religiously oriented, start participating in the political process, to start making arguments. Bin Laden-ism for example, doesn’t really have an argument that’s one of its strengths, actually, as a terrorist organization. It doesn’t really have a game plan. It doesn’t have an argument. It doesn’t tell you how it’s going to actually, you know, run the country; how, in fact, it’s going to make ends meet. It essentially says to you, “Listen; I am the alternative to the dictatorships you see before you; I am the alternative to the failed forms of westernization whether it be socialism, fascism or communism.” And it doesn’t really go much beyond that. What you want to do is to get other people participating, particularly fundamentalists, participating in the democratic process. You start evolution. If you look at Iran, Iran is a good example of this. Twenty-five/twenty years ago – twenty-five years ago, it would be impossible to find any country more infected with a jihadist, anti-American spirit than Iran. MR. WATTENBERG: This was while the Shah was still in power. MR. GERECHT: That – right. At the end when – in ’78-’79. At the boiling point – at the boiling point of the Iranian/Islamic revolution. Now what has happened in the intervening twenty-five years, and that’s not a very long time, is that the revolution has completely collapsed; the jihadist culture has completely collapsed and Iran... MR. WATTENBERG: Ayatollah Khomeini’s government or establishment... MR. GERECHT: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: That has collapsed. MR. GERECHT: It has – I mean, no one really believes in the Islamic revolution anymore in Iraq and in Iran. You do not have – I mean, once upon a time you really did have legions of young men who went out to die in the Iran-Iraq war; they wanted to die; they were death-wish believers. If they could have had the opportunity and chance to die fighting the United States, they probably would have taken that, too. That is no longer the case. You now have in the case of in Iran, we probably have the most - arguably the most pro-American country in the region. As the revolution has collapsed, as it has become ever clearer that in fact, theocracy does not work, you’ve had… MR. WATTENBERG: The mullahs and the ayatollahs are not pro-American, but 90-percent of the people, if there were ever a truly free election, they would be pro-American, in your judgment… MR. GERECHT: Yes. I mean, they would be vastly more pro-American say, than the people of Egypt where you have nominally a pro-American leadership. They would be vastly more pro-American than in Jordan where you again, nominally have supposedly a pro-American king on top of that country. I mean, Bernard Lewis made the point immediately after 9/11, and I think it was an astute observation, that wherever you have pro-American dictatorships, you have anti-American populations. And wherever you have anti-American dictatorships you have – you tend to have more pro-American populations. MR. WATTENBERG: And the classic case of that point of course is Egypt, isn’t it? I mean... MR. GERECHT: Oh, Egypt. Absolutely. MR. WATTENBERG: And Egypt is the keystone country of... MR. GERECHT: Absolutely. MR. WATTENBERG: ... almost half the population of the Arab world is in Egypt. MR. GERECHT: We’re never going to get out of this cul-de-sac if the United States continues to support the regime that you see in Egypt; continues to support dictatorships and kingdoms which deny the possibility of political opening and democracy. MR. WATTENBERG: What is the impact going to be of this upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein? I mean, here we found him, in a hole, and we saw all these pictures of him, people looking in his mouth, and now he’s sort of dressed up in a suit and he’s got a lawyer and he’s going to make a case. That, too, will play out on Arab television… MR. GERECHT: Oh yes, I think it will be quite gripping television, and again it is difficult to measure the cumulative effect of these things, but that is another good outcome of the election. If Allawi the current prime minister, had won, I think there was certainly on his side a desire not to have a long trial, not to go into a full historical discussion of the Baath Party, because Prime Minister Allawi and his organization, the Iraqi National Accord, are full of ex-Baathists. That is not the way they wanted to approach a post-Saddam society. They wanted to sort of get past that and more or less brush it under the carpet. The United Iraqi Alliance, the so-called Shiite List, and the Kurds have a different view of this. I think there’ll be demand to have a much longer trial, to have a much more historical trial, and to go in-depth on the horrors of the Baath party. The simple fact is that a lot of Saddam Hussein’s regime is not dissimilar to regimes elsewhere in the Middle East. And the echo effect I think of that should not be underestimated. And also, there is a process of reflection. There are a lot of people in the Middle East, who said, and also in the West, who at one time said very, very complimentary things about Saddam Hussein. I have a feeling that those complimentary statements of Saddam Hussein will be put up for historical review, and discussed quite vocally. MR. WATTENBERG: OK, on that note, we do have to end. Reuel Marc Gerecht, thank you very much, and thank you. Please, remember to join us for a second episode about Iraq, with Reuel Marc Gerecht. And remember too, to send us your comments via email. It makes, we think, for a better program. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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