By Jim Hoagland Sunday, October 19, 2003; Page B07
American and European intellectuals have a history of distrusting
politicians and thinkers from oppressed countries who clamor for the same
political and economic freedoms that our savants enjoy. The clamorers cannot
represent authentic nationalism if all they want is to be just like us, the
reasoning seems to go.
I can understand les profs at the Sorbonne and would-be
apparatchiks in the administrations-in-waiting at the Brookings Institution and
Harvard's Kennedy School upholding this reverse spin on Groucho Marx's old saw:
He refused to join any club that would have him as a member. The savants will
not take in members who approve so heartily of the free-market club they
inhabit.
But it is much harder for me to understand why President Bush and some
senior members of his administration take so readily to that kind of distrust of
pro-democracy advocates when it comes to Iraq. This is not an intellectual bent
they come by naturally.
Bush has at times deliberately ruled out specific support to Iraqis who
have lived under and fully understand Western democracy and who can promote its
values in their own country. He has, I am told, accepted the argument made by
Jordan's king, Egypt's president, the CIA and others that Iraqis who lived
outside the borders of the Baathist terrorist rule are terminally "out of touch"
and should not be given any advantages in organizing the country's political
future.
That reasoning led to the disastrous U.S. decision not to train large
numbers of exiles to serve as interpreters, guides and military police officers
arriving with the March invasion force.
It is now a chief cause of the floundering of Bush postwar policy. Day
after day, administration spokesmen make it clear the White House is being told
-- and is agreeing -- that it must not trust the Iraqis whom U.S. forces fought
to liberate. Some officials trash the Governing Council that the administration
put in place, evidently to avoid having to give it real power anytime
soon.
"The Governing Council is not seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people.
They're not ready to take power," according to an unnamed senior official quoted
by the State Department correspondent of the New York Times earlier this month.
Talk about disloyal leaks from the upper echelons. How would you like
to be dodging bombs in Baghdad while trying to write a constitution so that
Colin Powell's people can deliberately undermine you in complete
anonymity?
The reasons for this distrust are varied. But much of it stems from the
prominent role that Iraqi exiles such as Ayad Alawi, Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan
Pachachi and Abdul Aziz Hakim play on the Governing Council. Bitter foes as they
fought for scarce external support while they were living abroad, they have
forged a relatively good working relationship since they came home. But a
lingering prejudice in Iraq against political exiles blocks significant
recognition of this positive development.
Vladimir Nabokov called attention to the West's ingrained distrust of
emigres in a reproachful letter he sent to Edmund Wilson, the essayist who had
extravagantly praised Lenin's regime, which may have had a hand in the
assassination of Nabokov's father in Berlin in 1922:
American commentators "saw us merely as villainous generals, oil
magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes" who had only selfish and base
motives for opposing Lenin. That stereotyping made their testimony unwelcome and
unweighed, the great Russian novelist regretfully wrote to his future
ex-friend.
Martin Amis quotes Nabokov's letter in his recent book, "Koba the
Dread," and then argues that "the emigres were very broadly the intelligentsia.
They were the civil society," which was crushed and forced into exile by the
professional revolutionaries of Bolshevism, who were perversely lionized by many
in the chattering classes in the West.
Raymond Aron, an outstanding French intellectual of the 20th century,
would recognize today's strange postwar climate. Western writers, Washington
politicians and Arab monarchs who never bothered to issue a single critical word
about Saddam Hussein as he killed or tortured millions of Arabs and Iranians
harp upon the failings and "illegitimate" nature of the Governing Council. Some
of them feign moral outrage over (trumped up) embezzling charges against
Chalabi.
Writing in the 1950s, Aron denounced intellectuals who were "merciless
toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as
long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines." They have
survived even the end of the Cold War. It would be tragic if Bush and his team
were to give them comfort and legitimacy by sharing the savants' reflexive
disdain for people who gave up their homeland for so long in order to regain it
in freedom.
