, former member of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council spoke to Omayma Abdel-Latif about the American experience on how not to build a nation in Iraq does little to hide a growing sense of bitterness and frustration at how his mission in Iraq has shifted away from its intended course. "I felt that we were swiftly sliding from the status of democrats working with a democratic ally to build a democratic Iraq into collaborators with an occupation force," Alkhafaji told Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday, in the first press interview he gave to an Arab newspaper after submitting his resignation from the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC) two weeks ago. It was precisely the failure of the US administration to manage the Iraqi scene, coupled with the fact that US officials have reneged on their previous promises to give the Iraqi people a say in running post-war Iraq, that promoted Alkhafaji to submit his resignation. Such a move, he stressed, was intended to "send a message to Washington" that all was not well on the Iraqi front. And he is not alone. Alkhafaji's views and frustrations are shared by a number of senior IRDC members. "There are some among the influential lot within the council who are seized by the same sense of frustration and alarm over the way in which Iraqi affairs are being handled by the American administration," said Alkhafaji who would not elaborate on whether or not others will follow suit. Alkhafaji insisted that his resignation was not just a dispute over questions regarding the role that the IRDC can assume. "I am more interested in the roles which the Iraqi people can and should assume in rebuilding their country. This is what de-Ba'athification was about; to allow Iraqis a participatory role in the Iraqi state," said Alkhafaji who, with another colleague, coined the term. The 53-year-old Alkhafaji, a Political Economy professor by training who held various consultancy positions with international organisations such as the World Bank and UNDP, was hand-picked by the Pentagon along with some 140 Iraqi experts on nation building last February to establish the IRDC. The IRDC was meant to be an apolitical body with advisory powers. Last April the team was flown to Kuwait where it worked under the former US Civil Administrator Jay Garner. It entered Baghdad during the first week of May. Some -- including Alkhafaji -- were flown directly to Baghdad Airport. The declared task of the IRDC, according to its blueprint outlined by Alkhafaji in coordination with a few other experts, was to rebuild the structures of a government that would then be handed over to the new Iraqi authorities. Three months after the fall of Saddam's regime, however, realities on the ground proved disappointing to Alkhafaji and his colleagues. "We were meant to be the Iraqi experts who would assist in re-establishing the Iraqi state in terms of public services, ministries, municipalities and governorates in order to bring them back to at least 70 per cent of their pre- war performance," he said. "But we gradually realised that there was in fact no advisory role for us. Our role was confined to implementing orders, going to ministries to single out the Ba'athists and the criminals and do administrative work. We were not asked for advice or sat on committees. The result was a situation on the ground which is getting worse by the day." Alkhafaji's resignation comes at a time when the US administration's schemes in Iraq have been heavily criticised both in the Arab world and in the United States itself. The pressure is mounting on the Bush administration as the killing of American soldiers has become a daily occurrence in Iraq. Military operations conducted by what Iraqis believe to be resistance forces and what the Americans claim to be remnants of the Ba'ath Party have claimed the lives of 52 American soldiers since President Bush declared the end of combat operations in Iraq on 1 May. Tension and discontent among ordinary Iraqis are also simmering over the failure of the US occupying forces to restore order and basic public services to their pre-war performance. But what triggered the mess currently unfolding in Iraq, according to Alkhafaji, was primarily the US approach to post-war administration. "The problem," he explained, "is that there is no real interest on the part of the Americans to listen to the Iraqis. There is no approach to talk to them, seek their advice and know what the real problems were." Far from being party to the nascent nation-building project Alkhafaji sees the equation as one of dominance and dismissal. "We were simply the victims of a sweeping American victory," he stated. Such frustrations were routinely raised with American officials. They were even made public at various levels of the administration, including Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator for Iraq and his superiors in Washington. However, due to what Alkhafaji calls "tribal infighting within every US department", those complaints appear to have fallen on deaf ears. "Some of those officials would agree with our frustration and promise to look into how things were being handled, but nothing changed," he said. Only when the American forces became a target of systematic military operations did the US administration realise that something was going seriously wrong in Iraq. Alkhafaji is dismissive of the idea that military operations against the US occupation forces are part of a popular resistance movement. "This is not Vietnam," Alkhafaji stressed. Alkhafaji explained that the reasons behind such attacks were the soaring unemployment which reached 70 per cent among Iraqis, the dissolution of some 400,000 well-trained armed men who composed the Iraqi army as well as the existence of some groups like Saddam's Feda'iyeen and Special Guard units who have no stake in any future system. "There have been many complaints from Iraqis that these people are still left at large and that the US military officials seek the help of real criminals and former intelligence officers." Alkhafaji, however, acknowledged that such operations have promoted a quick response by the Coalition Forces which came in the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Alkhafaji is pessimistic about the future of the IGC and the kind of changes it could introduce to the Iraqi political scene. He criticised the criteria upon which council membership has been established as it reflects what he refers to as "a process of primordialising Iraqi society". The IGC, argues Alkhafaji, is based on a reductionist view of Iraqi society. According to this view, the representatives of the Shi'ites must be religious men and those of the Sunni population are the tribesmen. "The issue here is not Shi'ites versus Sunnis. The real issue has to do with the question of whether or not the council members truly represent the will of the Iraqi people? The majority of the members are Iraqi exiles who have no real constituency on the ground, so it is almost inevitable that they will be played against each other," he said. In order for the IGC to be more effective and reflect the will of the Iraqi people, Alkhafaji thinks that the IGC members should agree on a common platform and act as a pressure group that could initiate a process of political reorganisation. Alkhafagi lamented the fact that the year- long work of prominent Iraqi researchers and intellectuals -- which was produced even before IRDC was formulated -- tackled all aspects of post-Saddam Iraq, including issues of water, oil and transitional justice have been completely wasted. "Nobody inside the US administration ruling in Baghdad wants to make use of those studies to understand the situation in Iraq," he claimed. "I am not saying that what we have done is perfect but there is a sense that nobody wants to use them even as groundwork for the policies that should be adopted." In lieu of a solid implementation of IRDC's meticulous work, done by various workgroups and in different workshops, stereotypical assumptions thus became the criteria with which the Americans judge the Iraqi scene, according to Alkhafaji. Alkhafaji believes that the Americans will not overstay their welcome in Iraq due to the enormous costs of their presence ($3.9 billion per month). They will not, however, according to his reading, leave Iraq before they are guaranteed that what they left behind is an Iraq whose infrastructure, economic resources and political class are tied to the US. This, however, was not the original scenario for Iraq, Alkhafaji stated. "Both the State Department and the CIA did not want to go far in terms of encouraging democracy in Iraq," he said. "They wanted to bring in an authoritarian regime, an abolished Ba'athism without the name. But now they have gone beyond this thought." American ideologues such as Deputy Secretary for Defence Paul Wolfowitz think that they can end up with a model of South Korea, where the average citizen has a stake in keeping close ties with the West and the US in particular. "In the Iraqi case this means that they have to go much deeper in tying the Iraqi society and economy to the West, perhaps far deeper than what is happening in the rest of the Middle Eastern countries which [have already] tied themselves to the West," he stated.
