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Estado Unidos no debería confiar en los hombres “yes” de Irak

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Original story found here.

¿Cómo terminamos con tantos aprietos en Irak? Porque hicimos lo que hemos hecho por largo tiempo: Buscamos no a los extranjeros con quienes todavía necesitamos trabajar, sino a los exiliados que fueran más parecidos a nosotros.

La práctica de imponer poderes impopulares no comenzó con esta administración de Bush hijo. Es una que los hacedores de la política de Estados Unidos han venido persiguiendo con diferentes resultados. Pero en un mundo tan complejo como este después del 11/9, los días de seleccionar líderes con caracteres de un nobel a lo Graham Greene, se han ido. Al contrario, nosotros debemos construir relaciones con los extranjeros que tienen apoyo entre su propia gente y dejar de acercarnos a los que meramente nos dicen lo que queremos escuchar.

Los hijos de los extranjeros favoritos a menudo disfrutan de más apoyo en esta nación estadounidense que en la suya, apoyo basado en ilusiones que han venido vendiendo de puerta en puerta y que puede tomar años antes de que sean expuestas. Tal hombre fue el presidente de El Salvador, José Napoleón Duarte, quien una vez disfrutó de un amplio consenso bipartidista en Washington.

Duarte era tan dependiente de nosotros para mantenerse en el poder, que él no solamente escribió su autobiografía cuando todavía era presidente en el contexto de la guerra civil de su país, sino que la escribió y la publicó en inglés para que nosotros la leyéramos, en lugar de su propia gente.

Les tomó cinco años a los políticos de Estados Unidos para que finalmente se dieran cuenta de que Duarte, por todas sus promesas color rosa, había fracasado.

Pero ha tomado solamente un año para la mayoría de políticos el darse cuenta que los iraquíes seleccionados por Estados Unidos, están fracasando. El Pentágono ha favorecido a Ahmad Chalabi, mientras que el Departamento de Estado ha preferido a Adnan Pachachi. Ambos son exiliados que no sentaron sus pies en Irak por más de tres décadas, y tampoco nunca se han unido a algún distrito electoral dentro de Irak.

Pero cada uno de ellos se ve bien en papeles. Fluido en inglés, Chalabi estudió matemáticas antes de convertirse en banquero, y él se describe a sí mismo no en términos religiosos sino como un secular Shia Iraki. Pachachi, quien tiene mejores enlaces en el mundo árabe, es un antiguo diplomático quien una vez representó a Irak en Nueva York, en las Naciones Unidas. Chalabi y su familia estuvieron cerca de la “Iraq’s old British-imposed monarchy”(La pasada monarquía inglesa impuesta sobre Irak), mientras que Pachachi sirvió para “Iraq’s pre-Baathist military regimes”( Los regímenes militares antes de la fundación del partido Baath ). Cuando los diferentes oficiales de la actual administración buscaron sobre el colorido pero confuso paisaje sectario de Irak, estos dos hombres sobresalieron.

Una razón por la que Chalabi se encontró favorito por tanto tiempo es que él, en particular, siempre nos dijo que “sí”. “Yes”, los iraquíes van a alzarse cuando tú invadas, a pesar de que Estados Unidos los traicionó la última vez que ellos se alzaron contra Saddam durante la primer guerra del Golfo Pérsico (el libro de Bob Woodward “Plan de ataque”, reporta que el vicepresidente Dick Cheney no supo hasta después de la invasión que “el trauma” entre Shias iraquíes por esa “traición”, todavía era muy grave). “Yes”, tú podrías explotar el petróleo iraquí por medio de un tratado de dulce corazón con Halliburton, aunque solo unos cuantos iraquíes se beneficien de ello.

“Yes,” Chalabi argumentó, tú podrías usarme para dar forma a un gobierno de tu conveniencia, incluso si los iraquíes no lo eligen. Oh, y no te preocupes acerca de todas esas tensiones religiosas y étnicas, conmigo a cargo, juntos vamos a transcenderlas.

La más grande ficción que Chalabi difundió fue la misma que Duarte, que llevar la democracia a su país era sinónimo de ponerlo a él en el poder. Esta es la gran mentira que la Casa Blanca podría haberse tragado. El mes pasado en Washington, el presidente George W. Bush dijo a los editores de periódicos que él todavía planea llevar la democracia a Irak. Pero lo que Bush todavía no puede entender es que algunas elecciones democráticas no son como para conducir a algún gobierno que él tiene en mente, o elegir a algún líder que él conoce.

Cada uno debería saber por ahora que el futuro de Irak podría bien manejarse sobre la palabra, o vida, de un clerigo de 74 años de edad de la fe Shia Musulmán, Ali Sistani, quien viste un turbante negro calificándolo como un descendiente del profeta Mohammed. Pero solo después de la invasión el año pasado, parecieron los políticos entender que posiblemente pueden necesitar el apoyo de iraquíes no tan familiares de nosotros como este gran “ayatollah”.

Pero, por el contrario, los oficiales administrativos seleccionaron a diferentes iraquíes con los que se sentían más cómodos, y ahora soldados estadounidenses junto a civiles iraquíes están muriendo por sus errores.

Para una nación con tantos enemigos como los que Estados Unidos tiene ahora, nosotros necesitamos más aliados y menos títeres alrededor del mundo.

Frank Smyth es un periodista independiente que está escribiendo un libro sobre los levantamientos de 1991 contra Saddam Hussein. Traducción al español por Catalina Barrera.

U.S. shouldn’t rely on Iraq’s yes men

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Original story found here.

How did we end up in such a fix in Iraq? We did what we have long done abroad: We sought out not the foreigners whom we still need to work with, but the exiles who were most like us.

The practice of imposing unpopular proxies hardly began with this Bush administration. It is one that U.S. policy makers have long been pursuing with mixed results. But, in a world as complex as this one is after 9/11, the days of picking leaders like characters in a Graham Greene novel may be gone. Instead, we must build relationships with foreigners who have support among their own people and stop sidling up to the kind who merely tell us what we want to hear.

Favorite foreign sons often enjoy more support in this nation than in their own, and it may take years before the illusions they have peddled here are exposed. One such man was the late president of El Salvador, José Napoleon Duarte, who once enjoyed a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington.

Duarte was so dependent on us to keep him in power that he not only wrote his autobiography when he was still in office during his nation’s ongoing war, but he wrote and published it in English for us to read – instead of his own people.

It took five years before U.S. policy makers finally realized that Duarte, for all his rosy promises, had failed.

But it has taken only one year for most policy makers to realize that America’s handpicked Iraqis are failing. The Pentagon has favored Ahmad Chalabi while the State Department has preferred Adnan Pachachi. Both are exiles who did not set foot inside Iraq for more than three decades, and neither man has ever enjoyed any sizable constituency inside Iraq.

But they each looked good on paper. Fluent in English, Chalabi studied mathematics before becoming a banker, and he describes himself not in religious terms but as a secular Shia Iraqi. Pachachi, who has better ties to the Arab world, is a former diplomat who once represented Iraq in New York at the United Nations. Chalabi and his family were close to Iraq’s old British-imposed monarchy, while Pachachi served Iraq’s pre-Baathist military regimes. When different administration officials looked out at Iraq’s colorful (and confusing) sectarian landscape, these two men stood out.

One reason Chalabi found favor for so long is that he, in particular, always said yes to us. Yes, Iraqis will rise up when you invade, even though America only betrayed them the last time they rose up. (Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack” reports that Vice President Dick Cheney did not know until after the invasion that “the trauma” among Shi’a Iraqis was still so bad.) Yes, you may exploit Iraqi oil through a sweetheart deal with Halliburton, even if few Iraqis benefit from it.

Yes, Chalabi argued, you may use me to shape a government to your liking, even if Iraqis do not elect it. Oh, and don’t worry about all those messy ethnic and religious tensions — with me in charge together we will transcend them.

The biggest fiction Chalabi spread was the same one Duarte told, that bringing democracy to his country was somehow synonymous with bringing him to power. This is the whopper the White House may have swallowed. Last month in Washington, President George W. Bush told newspaper editors that he still plans to bring democracy to Iraq. But what Bush may not yet get is that any democratic elections there are not likely to lead to any government he has in mind, or elect any leader he knows.

Everyone should know by now that Iraq’s future could well hang on the word, or life, of a 74-year-old cleric of the Shi’a Muslim faith, Ali Sistani, who wears a black turban signifying that he is a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. But only after last year’s invasion did policy makers seem to learn that they might even need support from Iraqis as unfamiliar to us as this grand ayatollah.

Instead, administration officials picked different Iraqis with whom they were most comfortable, and now American soldiers along with Iraqi civilians are dying for their mistakes.

For a nation with as many enemies as America has today, we need more allies and fewer puppets around the world.

Il ricordo di un amico perso nel terrore di Saddam

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Original story found here.

Il rovesciamento del regime di Saddam Hussein in Iraq ha liberato un torrente di ricordi repressi, racconti di torture, sparizioni ed esecuzioni sbrigative. Iracheni in ricerca di parenti e amici dispersi da molto tempo hanno invaso diverse prigioni per poi scoprire cimiteri clandestini e dozzine di tombe comuni.

Alcune famiglie sono riuscite a identificare e disseppellire il corpo di una persona amata rubata via da loro molti anni prima. Ma la maggior parte dei morti rimane inidentificabile, incluso il mio amico fotografo Gad Gross.

Gross è stato ucciso nelle vicinanze di Kirkuk nel 1991 mentre seguiva l’insurrezione kurda, incoraggiata dall’amministrazione Bush, durante e dopo la guerra del Golfo. Ora che il governo di Saddam non controlla più il paese, molti iracheni avranno probabilmente la possibilità di recuperare i resti delle persone che sono scomparse da tanti anni. Con “ottimismo” ora si comincia a sperare che anche i resti di Gad saranno ritrovati e verranno identificati.

Gross, lo vidi l’ultima volta il 28 marzo 1991, ai confini del Kirkuk.

Eravamo in quattro, tre giovani giornalisti occidentali e un giovane guerrigliero kurdo, Bakhtiar Abdel Rahman, la nostra guida. Kirkuk è caduta sotto l’attacco delle forze di Saddam in sette ore. Con un kalashnikov sulle spalle e una pistola appesa nella cinta, Bakhtiar ha guidato Gad, che portava con sé alcune macchine fotografiche, verso alcune case nella vicinanza sotto un pesante bombardamento, mentre io ed un fotografo francese, Alain Buu, siamo saltati dentro una fossa.

Soldati iracheni si accamparono durante tutta la notte intorno a noi. Le loro mitragliatrici spararono su un campo che durante il giorno precedente era occupato da centinaia di kurdi che lasciavano la città, la maggior parte donne, portando con sé i bambini. Poco dopo l’alba, io e Alain abbiamo avvertito un trambusto proveniente dalle case in vicinanza, sembrava che i soldati iracheni stessero catturando delle persone. Dopo alcuni minuti, abbiamo sentito il colpo di un fucile, seguito da un lungo e stordente urlo, placato da un ulteriore colpo.

Aguzzando lo sguardo oltre la fossa, io ed Alain abbiamo osservano alcuni soldati iracheni lasciare la scena, uno dei soldati teneva sulle sue spalle la borsa blu di una delle macchine fotografiche di Gad. Abbiamo continuato a nasconderci fino a quando, un’ora dopo, un soldato ha avvistato Alain, che alzandosi si arrese. Gli iracheni sembravano pronti a sparaci, fino a quando un ufficiale, appena arrivato sulla scena, non è intervenuto.

L’ufficiale vestendo la divisa del partito in commando, Ba’ath, ordinò ai soldati di accompagnarci verso un altro ufficiale iracheno, un capitano delle Forze Speciali, che ci ha ricevuti con parole infuriate: “Il vostro amico si è suicidato. Sapete perché? Perché aveva una pistola.” Io non so se Bakhtiar avesse dato la sua pistola a Gad, quello che so è che accanto al capitano c’era la borsa della macchina fotografica di Gad. Appeso ad esso c’era il suo tesserino stampa, macchiato di sangue.

Le forze irachene hanno rilasciato me ed Alain dopo 18 giorni. Ma i resti di Bakhtiar e di Gad non sono mai stati ritrovati. Gad, come me, era figlio unico. Sua madre, Edith Gross, è una pittrice di etnia germanica nata in Romania, immigrata poi nella Germania occidentale quando suo figlio era ancora adolescente.

Non erano stati benvenuti da alcuni vicini tedeschi, i quali li denigravano per le radici straniere. Gad decise di iscriversi come studente di scambio in una scuola superiore americana e ottenne più tardi una borsa di studio integrale per studiare ad Harvard.

Ritornò in Europa dopo la laurea, e le sue foto dei bambini rumeni che morivano di AIDS arrivarono in prima pagina sul Newsweek. Subito dopo averlo conosciuto, vinse il premio Missouri Award of Excellence per una sua foto di due soldati rumeni seduti su una statua caduta di Lenin.

A quel punto Gad stava organizzando i suoi prossimi passi. Aveva presentato domanda per iscriversi al corso di giurisprudenza dell’università di Yale mentre era in Giordania, aveva intenzione di studiare la protezione dei diritti umani. Ma non è sopravissuto per sapere che era stato accettato nella scuola.

La Germania non riconoscerà la morte di Gad senza il suo corpo, mantenendo Edith senza alcun beneficio. Lei vorrebbe seppellire i suoi resti vicino alla sua casa di Colonia. Con tante tombe comuni in Iraq, non sarà facile ritrovare i resti di Gad.

© 2003 International Herald Tribune 2003

Between Tyranny and Bombs: A Review of “Baghdad Diaries”

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BAGHDAD DIARIES: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile
By Nuha al-Radi
Vintage. 217 pp. Paperback, $12

[NOTE: The Iraqi painter and author of this book, Nuha al-Radi, died not long after her book was published on August 30, 2004 in Beirut.]

Try to imagine yourself or your family living in Baghdad over the past decade, enduring tyranny, privation and wars. What if your family came from the old ruling guard but the quality of your life had only eroded under President Saddam Hussein’s regime? Would you blame him and his cronies for your plight, or blame America for the twin punishments of sanctions and bombings?

The answers to these questions may help explain why at least some Iraqis today seem so ungrateful to the United States. Not long after being liberated from Iraq’s homegrown dictatorship, large crowds began demonstrating against the subsequent U.S. military occupation. The mood soured faster across Iraq than leading U.S. officials or news commentators had expected, but readers of this book will see through a window into Iraq that they missed.

Born in Baghdad during the Second World War, Nuha al-Radi is a Western-educated Iraqi who retains an Eastern outlook. A world-renowned sculptor, ceramist and painter, she is a survivor from a once-thriving cultural community rooted in ancient Mesopotamia, which remains among the most respected artistic traditions in the Arab world. While she was pinned down in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Baghdad, and afterward, while she was in exile in both Eastern and Western countries, this artist stopped working with her hands to speak with her head.

Anyone comfortable with the jingoism passing for journalism on many American television networks may find some passages in “Baghdad Diaries” as hard to digest as green, moldy bread. But if one is wondering how millions among the audience of the Qatar-based satellite television network, Al-Jazeera, today see Iraq, the raw and often bitter passages of this artist’s diary are a good place to start:

“Everyone was preparing and hoarding foodstuffs in their freezers, never imagining that they would bomb us out of electricity. Now the big question is whether to keep the freezer and fridge doors open or closed. If they stay open the rubber seals will dry out, and if closed they smell.”

Nuha al-Radi’s story begins in 1991 with the last Gulf War. She is an unmarried woman, living near her mother and struggling to get by. Another central character is her dog Salvi, named after the Spanish painter Salvador Dali. The artist says they are “well-to-do” Iraqis who live not far from the Mansur neighborhood, where Hussein was filmed walking among supporters in the street after the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The author’s late father was an ambassador back when Iraq was ruled (briefly) by British-backed kings, and her family, like others associated with the old monarchy, waned under Hussein’s regime. “Ma says she feels like Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” writes al-Radi, “except that we are far from starving.”

This is an impressionistic chronicle, and anyone looking to learn more about the rich ethnic and religious mosaic that is Iraq will not find it here. Although its author does not say it, “Baghdad Diaries” is told from the point of view of Iraq’s traditionally privileged minority based in the capital. Compared with most other Iraqis, this elite has long managed to live reasonably well even under so-called revolutionary regimes.

Some of the author’s friends and acquaintances had low-level jobs in Hussein’s government. One of her friends worked for Uday, the more notorious of Hussein’s two sons, and was told to wear “a smart dress and make-up” for work. Another friend’s nanny worked inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. “She said that when someone was caught stealing, they gathered the staff together, brought in a doctor who chopped off this guy’s hand, and immediately dunked it into boiling oil to cauterize it.”

This grisly account is told without commentary; al-Radi saves most of her outrage for America’s apparent disregard for the plight of the Iraqi people. “We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti take-over, yet we have been paying the price for it. Meanwhile Our Leader is alive and well — or not so well, we do not know. We’re living,” she goes on, “like Peter Sellers in [the 1968 film] ‘The Party,’ refusing to die and rising up again and again, another last gasp of the bugle.”

Al-Radi’s narrative possesses a disarming charm. Her snapshots of the strangulation of Iraq play out in the smaller details of daily life: “The birds have taken the worst beating of all. They have sensitive souls which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration [of bombing]. All the caged love-birds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion.”

Al-Radi looks at Iraq like a woman who insists on viewing a canvas only through a magnifying glass, intimately describing its texture while failing to see the wider scene. But however narrow its focus, “Baghdad Diaries” offers an unfiltered perspective on a widely misunderstood world.

Waiting for the Anti-Saddam Revolt: Where Is It?

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Why aren’t more Iraqis rising up against President Saddam Hussein? Most likely, many remember what happened the last time they followed U.S. instructions to rise up against him. As the Gulf War was concluding, then-President George H. W. Bush urged Iraqis “to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Two weeks later, so many Iraqis, in fact, heeded those words to fight their own government that the CIA predicted it would fall.

“Saddam Hussein faces his most serious political challenge in more than 20 years in power,” writes the CIA on March 16, 1991, in a secret report in the middle of the monthlong uprisings. “Time is not on his side.”

The revolt began on February 28, 1991, in Iraq’s southernmost city of Basra when a tank commander in a column of Iraqi troops retreating from previously U.S.-occupied Kuwait pulled away to stop in Sa’ad Square, near Basra’s ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters. In a scene that Pentagon planners now dream would repeat itself, the commander got out of his tank and denounced Saddam before he got back in and blew apart a building-size mural of his image.

The fighting spread to Basra’s old city before it reached the neighborhood of Jamoriya, where an Iraqi army private, Mohammad Honan, lived. He said Ba’ath Party paramilitaries were out in the streets.

“We all heard shooting coming from downtown,” Honan told me at the time. “‘It’s a revolution!’ someone shouted. They were demonstrating — shouting, shooting,” added Honan, who joined the anti-Saddam revolt.

Thousands of regular army soldiers, mostly Shiah Arabs, joined the civilians who overran the Ba’ath Party headquarters and emptied the city’s prisons. Within days the intifada, as countless Iraqis called the uprisings at the time, spread north along the Euphrates River engulfing first Nasiriyah and then Samawah before reaching the two holy Shiah cities of Najaf and Karbala, only 50 miles south of Baghdad. (These are the very same battlegrounds of the current conflict).

So far only the Kurdish part of the 1991 uprisings has ever gotten much press, but “the Shiah uprising in the south was far more dangerous to the regime than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” reads one contemporaneous, formerly classified State Department cable. Across Iraq, 14 of 17 cities were at least partly under anti-Saddam rebel control during the four-week-long uprisings, including every Shiah-dominated city in the south and every Kurdish-dominated city in the north.

The ’91 uprising even flared in Baghdad itself. A secret State Department report issued on March 24, 1991, said: “Discontent was not limited to the insurgencies in the north and south . . . three neighborhoods in Baghdad (one of them named ‘Saddam’) had been sealed off by the military for several days due to anti-regime activities.”

But just as the anti-Saddam intifada was getting under way, U.S. and Iraqi military officers were negotiating the cease-fire accord that formally ended the 1991 Gulf War.

After the first draft of the cease-fire accord, which restricted the flight of Iraqi “fixed-wing” aircraft, had already been printed, Saddam’s generals said they wanted to add a new point: that Iraq be allowed to fly helicopter gunships. Saddam’s generals told the American negotiators that Iraq still needed the helicopters for two reasons: to ferry themselves to the ongoing peace talks, and in order to transport Iraq’s own wounded soldiers.

By the time the uprisings were drowned in blood, the world knew the real intentions of Saddam’s regime were to use the helicopters to massacre the rebels in the north after hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians fled Iraq into neighboring Turkey or Iran in early April 1991. But until then, U.S. officials repeatedly told reporters that they did not know much about the fighting inside Iraq.

Turns out the Americans were also lying. Senior U.S. officials knew just 12 days into the monthlong uprisings that Saddam’s regime was already using his helicopters in violation of at least the spirit of the cease-fire accord. “Throughout Iraq, the military is relying on helicopters to battle the insurgents, often firing indiscriminately on civilian targets in areas of resistance activity,” reads a secret morning briefing paper prepared by the State Department for then-Secretary of State James W. Baker II on March 12, 1991. But the U.S. stood idly by and let the suffocation of the anti-Saddam revolt continue.

I experienced that betrayal at ground level. I can recall one of those days exactly 12 years ago in Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern Iraqi city that remains as coveted today as it was back then. Although Kurdish pesh merga, or “those who face death,” guerrillas managed to hold off Saddam?s elite forces for more than five hours on March 28, 1991, by midday Kirkuk was falling.

At a crossroads on the northern side of the city, thousands of people were walking fast on two roads out of town, as an occasional car, truck or bus packed with more people rushed by in the same direction. No one knew for how long they might be walking, and nearly everyone carried water. Many women wrapped in traditional Kurdish cloth were also carrying or leading children, many of whom were crying, in tow.

Fahdil was a thin, balding pesh merga who was an intelligence officer with the Kurdish wing of the Iraqi Communist Party. “Now it is time to leave Kirkuk,” he told a small group of journalists at the crossroads.

For hours that morning Saddam’s regime only deployed a handful of small helicopters, as pesh merga fired captured government anti-aircraft guns into the sky. But by noon the Soviet-made helicopter gunships suddenly appeared and spread out over the city. With multiple pods on each fixed wing, they fired exploding rockets. Soon everyone in sight began to run.

At the time, many Iraqis across the country were filled with hope. Several different pesh merga in northern Iraq in March 1991 told Western journalists about different Kurdish couples that had just given their newborns the first name “Bush.” But many Iraqi babies died of exposure just weeks later after their families went on the run. No wonder so few Iraqis are rising up alongside U.S.-led forces today.

Frank Smyth, who covered the 1991 Gulf War for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice, is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings.

Battle Cry of Freedom: A Review of Taking Liberties

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How many Americans take their rights for granted? Last month an impressive number of antiwar demonstrators converged on San Francisco and New York in chartered buses. Similarly, more than 30 years ago, various protest organizers chartered buses to bring anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators to Washington. After that peace demonstration, the largest of that war, FBI agents secretly asked private banks to open their proprietary records to identify the people who had signed the checks to pay for the buses. “We found out when a bank clerk called to alert us,” writes Aryeh Neier, who was then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “which allowed us to rush into federal court to halt the practice.”

Born in Nazi Germany to Jewish parents, Aryeh Neier is America’s foremost rights advocate. Today, at 65, he runs the Open Society Institute funded by the philanthropist financier George Soros. Neier previously founded and led Human Rights Watch, a once-small organization that has surpassed even Amnesty International as the world’s most authoritative voice on international human rights. Before that, Neier successfully guided the ACLU through some of its most challenging years, including the recovery of its prestige after the revelation that some previous leaders had secretly collaborated with the FBI during and after America’s “Red scare.”

Anyone looking to learn much more about Aryeh Neier himself will only be disappointed by this book. Instead of being a revealing personal memoir, Taking Liberties, as its subtitle suggests, reads more like an intellectual history of the rights movement in the United States and abroad, as told by a perhaps self-serving but no doubt highly effective protagonist.

Neier was executive director of the New York ACLU before he was elected to run the national organization, and the first issue he confronted was brutality by New York City police officers, including the practice of forced confessions. While at the ACLU, he also exposed abuses in prisons and mental-health asylums, and he was a pioneer in challenging the then-illegality of abortion. But his defense of the right of neo-Nazis to march through a Skokie, Ill., neighborhood whose residents included Holocaust survivors was even more controversial. Although many ACLU members resigned, as widely reported at the time, the drop was only short-lived, and the organization rebounded in the 1980s during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office.

By then, Neier had already left the ACLU to join with others, most notably Robert L. Bernstein, then chairman and chief executive officer of Random House, to form the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee “to protest repression against dissenters in the Soviet Union.” Neier writes that “as one who had followed closely accounts of resistance to Soviet repression since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 . . . I welcomed Bob Bernstein’s call.” Soon the founders of Helsinki Watch added America’s Watch, which battled President Ronald Reagan’s administration over the facts of human-rights cases, first in El Salvador and later elsewhere.

Taking Liberties reminds readers that defenders of rights are ironically indebted to the Reagan administration. Officials such as Elliott Abrams (White House director of Middle East policy today) erroneously argued that only communist regimes committed the worst offenses. When the Watch committees proved him and others wrong, together they established the tenet that human rights deserve a central place in U.S. foreign policy.

Along the way, Neier’s sometimes uncompromising style provoked more than a few internecine conflicts. In Taking Liberties, he avoids reopening old wounds over different strategic approaches. But the book does take some swings at, among others, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his allies on the Supreme Court, who Neier maintains have only eroded our rights.

Today, as director of the well-funded Open Society Institute, Neier has even more latitude to defend rights at home and abroad. He chronicles his own lead role in promoting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. He laments the loss of his friend Fred Cuny, who volunteered to go to Chechnya to help provide health and reconstruction services. “Every day,” writes Neier, “[I] rue my part in [his disappearance].”

But there is one area that this otherwise intrepid activist steps over. Watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch under Neier’s leadership sharply criticized U.S. military aid to many human-rights-abusing countries, but after the Cold War, Human Rights Watch, still under Neier, began to lobby for international military intervention to stop similar abuses by other non-U.S.-backed parties and regimes. Unfortunately, he papers over what he fails to mention was a watershed dispute among human-rights advocates over whether to back U.S. intervention in Somalia. (The last Bush administration began the intervention that the Clinton administration continued.) Aryeh Neier was among those hoping to use the African Horn intervention as a springboard to stopping both alleged and many already proven acts of genocide and other crimes throughout the 1990s in Bosnia and later in Rwanda and Kosovo.

Neier deserves credit for his lead role in helping establish the notion that the same standards that apply to international war crimes also apply to civil conflicts. In the early 1980s, he began promoting accountability for disappearances and other political crimes in Argentina. Two decades later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s ex-president Slobodan Milosevic was indicted at the Hague for humanitarian crimes he had allegedly ordered in his own nation’s southern province of Kosovo.

Taking Liberties tells us more about where we came from than where we are going. But it is a timely story told by one American who never took any right anywhere for granted. *

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has collaborated with many human-rights organizations. He is writing a book about the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Iraq: Telling the Left from the Right

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How many Americans who oppose the looming war know the left from the right when it comes to Iraq? The only two players on the field are not George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. For inside and outside the borders of Iraq there is a political opposition to Saddam — and while some of those opponents are now aligned with the White House, others remain on the political left.

But don’t expect to read or hear much about any Iraqi leftist groups in the mainstream or even the “alternative” press.

In past U.S. foreign-policy conflicts, American activists frequently expressed their solidarity with and support of embattled leftists, whether in Chile, Nicaragua or El Salvador. But in this standoff with Iraq, American leftists seem woefully ignorant of their Iraqi counterparts and, consequently, of their views on the present conflict. And for these Iraqi leftists the current crisis transcends the prevailing American leftist view, which reduces the matter simply to either war or peace.

Today, Iraqi leftists play an important oppositional role against Saddam. Foremost among them is the Iraqi Communist Party, which at one time was that country’s biggest and broadest leftist mass movement, touching the lives of literally millions. Even before Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown in 1958, the Communist Party was organizing trade unions and other civic groups.

The leftist party has also long been Iraq’s most diverse political movement, cutting across traditional population lines to incorporate many disenfranchised majority Shias and minority Kurds. Even though tens of thousands of Communists and other leftists have perished in Saddam’s gulags and are still actively targeted by the ruling Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi CP today maintains a clandestine network across Iraq that experts deem to be of significant scale and political potential.

That network provides some of the best and most detailed reporting on armed resistance and government repression within Iraq. Indeed, human-rights activists, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, rely heavily on the detailed reporting that comes out of Iraq via this network. “[T]he bodies of tens of people from the city of Basra, who were executed by firing squads of the dictatorial regime in late March 1999, are buried in a mass grave in the Burjesiyya district near the town of Zubair, about 20 km southeast of Basra,” reads the Iraqi Communist Party Web site in an article about a brief anti-Saddam uprising three years ago in the Shi’a-dominated, southernmost city. “Some of the victims fell into the hands of security forces after being wounded, or when their ammunition had finished. But most of the arrests took place during the following days when the authorities . . . unleashed an unprecedented campaign of police raids, house searches and detentions.” The report concludes that 400 to 600 people died in this massacre. “The massacre culminated with security men firing their handguns at the [h]eads of their victims,” says the report. “The horrific scene ended with throwing the bodies of victims in a deep pit dug with a bulldozer which was used later to cover up the site in an attempt to hide the traces of the crime.”

Today, Iraqi Communists, and most Iraqi leftists, firmly oppose the Bush administration’s war plans — but not necessarily war itself. Unlike many of their American counterparts, Iraqi leftists offer a policy alternative other than a vague call for “peace.” Instead of a unilateral U.S. invasion, Iraqi leftists want the international community to back an Iraqi-led military uprising against Saddam.

Short of that, Iraqi leftists would most likely support a multilateral military intervention that would not only overthrow Saddam but also hand him over to an international tribunal that would try him on charges of crimes against humanity.

Iraqi leftist groups also favor other positions routinely ignored by most American leftists, including vigorous U.N. human-rights monitoring inside Iraq. Most American anti-war activists also downplay another issue that Iraqi leftists are most worried about. What might a post-Saddam Iraq look like? The Communist Party and other Iraqi leftist groups refused to join the recent U.S.-backed Iraqi opposition meeting in London, pointing out that Washington has only been planning to replace Saddam’s regime with another minority dictatorship. The Iraqis closest to Washington remain deposed aristocrats, although the Bush administration finally dumped the plan, backed by the Pentagon alone, to restore exiled former supporters of the Kingdom of Iraq, which prevailed for [37] years, to power as the Iraqi National Congress.

Instead of the U.S.-backed return of the old ruling class, the Communist Party and Shi’a and Kurdish opposition groups want U.N.-monitored elections inside a post-Saddam Iraq leading to a federal representative government. This is an ongoing struggle yet to be adequately reported, unfortunately, in any U.S. publication, and the issue represents a genuinely democratic frontline with, so far, few if any so-called American progressives on it.

American and Iraqi leftists also differ over whom to blame for any coming war. The Iraqi CP blames not only the Bush administration, but also the Iraqi government. In this regard, the Iraqi Communist Party ironically joins the Bush administration in unequivocally demanding that Saddam fully cooperate with U.N. inspections to prevent his regime from developing more weapons of mass destruction. “The rulers” of “the dictatorial regime in Iraq,” reads an Iraqi CP declaration, put “their selfish interest above the people’s national interest, refusing to allow the [work] of U.N. weapons inspectors, and thus preventing action to spare our people and country looming dangers.”

Any U.S. leftist who even remotely thinks that Saddam’s regime is — beside its heavy-handedness — some sort of socialist alternative had better think again. No matter how much Saddam relies on the Stalinist model for his security services, the Iraqi dictator has never held anything but contempt for Iraqi leftists.

At 22, Saddam Hussein carried out his first assassination plot, against a Communist-backed leader in Baghdad who was the first president of Iraq. In fact, the young man from Tirkit was not accepted into the Ba’ath party until after he and others shot at President Abdel-Karim Qassem, who was backed by the Iraqi Communist Party and many trade unions. President Qassem survived, while Saddam was wounded in the leg.

Instead of leftist principles, Saddam’s ruling Ba’athist ideology unabashedly champions ethnic nationalism in order to build a greater nation based on ethnicity. [The name of h]is Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba’ath party explicitly excludes the one in every five Iraqis who are ethnic Kurds. Moreover, the Ba’athists’ Pan-Arab message is shaped mainly by Arabs of the Sunni Muslim faith like Saddam, and their form of Arab nationalism has little appeal for Arab Muslims of the Shia faith, who constitute three out of five Iraqis. Rather than empower either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or its Kurdish minority, the Ba’ath party merely replaced Iraq’s old rulers, who were Sunni Arab-led monarchists based in Baghdad, with new Sunni Arab-led rulers like Saddam from rural regions north of the capital.

“A ruling class-clan rapidly developed and maintained a tight grip on the army, the Ba’ath party, the bureaucracy, and the business milieus,” writes Faleh A. Jabar, a University of London scholar and former Iraqi Communist Party newspaper editor, in a recent issue of the U.S. monthly The Progressive. “You had either to be with the Ba’ath or you were against it.”

Today most of Kurdish-speaking Iraq, in the north, enjoys U.S.-enforced autonomy from Saddam’s regime, while Shias, in the south, still actively resist rule from Baghdad. Take Basra, where Saddam’s officials routinely bring visiting U.S. peace activists. “We were welcomed warmly into the home of Abu Haider, the father of a young boy who was killed three years ago by a U.S. Tomaha[w]k missile shot from a ship in the Gulf,” reads a pre-Christmas report from Pax Christi, a faith-based group. Pax Christi’s newsletter today says that this U.S. missile attack occurred in Basra in 1998. Undoubtedly true. But missing from that newsletter is that in that same year Saddam’s regime interred dozens of anti-Saddam rebels and others in secret graves in that same city, according to Iraqi Communist sources.

Opposing American imperialism is one thing. But ignoring Iraqi fascism is quite another. In the wake of the Gulf War, and after then-President Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up, mass armed rebellion swept Iraq in the spring of 1991. More than a dozen major cities fell into the hands of the Iraqi rebels. Yet, as American forces stood by with arms crossed, Saddam’s troops and attack helicopters drowned the rebellion in blood, taking at least 100,000 lives. The anti-Saddam opposition was openly and tragically betrayed by Washington.

American leftists and peace activists must not now repeat the same sin. Only a quintessentially American arrogance would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi socialists and leftists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq. And as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans, especially peace activists, should take the trouble to do the same.

Frank Smyth is finishing a book on the 1991 Iraqi uprisings, which he reported on for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice.