Rashid Khalidi - Western Footprints and America's Perilous Past in the Middle East (2004)

Speaker 1: Rashid Khalidi has recently been appointed Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Previously, from 1983 to 2003, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Professor of Middle East History and eventually Director of the Center for International Studies. Professor Khalidi received his BA in History from Yale University in 1970 and his DPhil in Modern History from Oxford University in 1974. His new book, Resurrecting Empire, Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, has been released this month by Beacon Press. His previous book, Palestinian Identity, the Construction of Modern National Consciousness, received the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Harani Award for the best book of 1997. It has already become a classic and is widely considered the standard account of the emergence of Palestinian nationalism in the post-World War I period. In addition, Professor Khalidi has written two other books, co-edited two more, and authored over 75 scholarly articles on Middle East history and politics. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Rockefeller Foundation, and he has received a Fulbright Research Award. Professor Khalidi is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the leading professional organization of scholars who study the region. He currently serves as president of the American Committee on Jerusalem and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. And he was advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. These last positions are among the reasons that Rashid Khalidi is a worthy successor to the late Edward Said, the namesake of the chair he holds as a public intellectual. In addition to his prodigious scholarly work, he has spoken and written on Middle Eastern affairs for a broad range of audiences and media outlets. He is deeply knowledgeable, articulate, witty, and conveys an important, albeit sometimes disturbing, message. I have known Rashid Khalidi for nearly 20 years and regard him as an exemplary scholar, a colleague, and an astute political analyst. I am also proud to call him my friend. Rashid.

Rashid Khalidi: Well, thank you for that very kind introduction, and thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to be here in California. It's always a pleasure to be in California, a particular pleasure to be in Northern California. I have to go to Southern California tomorrow, so you can sympathize with me. And I'm here on a tour organized by my publisher. Every book I've ever written in the past was published by an academic press. This is the first time I ever wrote a book that was published by people who actually are interested in selling it. It's a new experience for me. It's another world. I'm in shock, to tell you the truth. I hope you enjoy the book. I hope you buy it and read it. I felt I had to write this book. I was in Europe during the terrible year 2001, 2002, from just after the 11th of September. And I came back to find the country about to go to war again, this time in Iraq. And I began to speak about the history of the Middle East and how that might be something we ought to pay a little bit of attention to before we launch the war in the Middle East. And my friends in Chicago, where I was still teaching at the time, said to me, you must write a book. You must take these lectures and turn them into a book. So I wrote a completely new set of things, of course, which resulted in this book. I've never written a book under such a sense of duty as I did when I produced this. It was finished well before the war started. I hope you find that its conclusions hold up. I'm going to do a couple things today. I'm going to summarize some of my ideas. I'm going to read you two very short bits of the book, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what I am afraid I foresee in Iraq. Let me start by summarizing what I think are five of the main themes of the book. The first one is that military occupation, which has no international legitimacy, engenders resistance. always and everywhere. I think this is a case that is particularly apt in the Middle East, but it's pretty much true everywhere. Military occupations that are not perceived to be legitimate sooner or later produce resistance to them. This is one reason that the comparison with Germany and Japan, a facile and ahistorical comparison, is not relevant. And I'll come back to that perhaps in questions. The occupations of Germany and Japan were accepted by the German and Japanese peoples very quickly. as legitimate. There was almost no resistance in Japan, none whatsoever. In Germany, very little and ended very soon. And this was partly because these were actions carried out by a coalition of powers known as the United Nations, which then created the United Nations Organization. And I think that it's an important point. We've never been occupied. We don't know what it's like to have tanks in our streets. We don't know what it's like to have helicopters firing. at insurgents or whatever in our cities. We don't know what it's like to have big, tall guys in body armor kicking down doors and talking in foreign languages. Most other parts of the world, they know about it. And I'm telling you something that's a home truth that wouldn't need to be reiterated, except to a country that's been so fortunate as to never have been occupied. The second point I make in the book is that the peoples of the Middle East in particular have strongly resisted Western control over their countries and resources for more than two centuries. The book mainly tries to argue that what is important in the Middle East is not our perception of what we're doing. It's not even our intentions, whether they're good, bad, or indifferent. It is, in very important measure, how what we do is perceived by the people to whom we are doing it. the fact that we think we're doing good, the fact that we may indeed be doing good, or the fact that we may be doing something entirely different, is in the last analysis irrelevant if people very strongly believe something entirely different in view of their own history, in view of their own experiences. And I cannot stress strongly enough that this is a region which over the past 200 years has been invaded and occupied again and again and again and again. It is against that background that people in this region see our occupation of Iraq. And their resources have been taken away from them. And it is against that background that they see much of what we do in Iraq. point that I try and make in this book is that there is a strong tradition in favor of constitutionalism, in favor of the limitation of absolute power of the state, and strong aspirations for democracy in the Middle East. And there have been for well over a century, close to a century and 30, 40 years. There were constitutions in most of the Middle East, much of the Middle East, before there were constitutions in Portugal or Russia or most of southern or eastern Europe. The Ottoman Empire had a constitution in 1876. They had elections in 1877, 1908, 1912, 1914. Iran had a constitution in 1905. Yes, there are powerful absolutist tendencies. Yes, there are terrible authoritarian regimes in this region. But to say they don't know anything about democracy, they have no democratic tradition, they don't know about it, is in fact false. It's not just that there are aspirations for democracy, there are in fact lengthy experiences with democracy. And one of the saddest parts of the story that I try and tell in the book is that, unfortunately, Western powers have done very little to foster democracy. Quite frequently, they were involved in sabotaging it in Iran in 1953 when British and American intelligence overthrew a constitutional, democratic, popular government that had just held a referendum which it won overwhelmingly in support of its nationalization of Iran's oil. The dictatorship that we and the British imposed and the repression that that dictatorship engendered created some of the pressures that exploded in the Iranian revolution of 1978. 1979. Our sabotage of constitutional liberal democracy in Iran helped to produce the terrible reaction of the Iranian Revolution. And Iran is not the only place where this happened. Oil has been controlled by outsiders for most of the 20th century in the Middle East. And this has led to great sensitivity among Middle Eastern peoples about control of their own oil. Oil was first discovered in the Middle East in 1901 in Iran. And almost immediately thereafter, the British government took control of what was then called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It then became Anglo-Iranian. Eventually, it became BP. And from that moment on until the 60s, Middle Eastern peoples did not control how much oil was pumped in their countries, did not control the price of oil, did not control what share of that oil revenue they obtained, did not even control the territory from which the oil was pumped. an outfit called the South Persia Rifles, officered by, paid by, armed by the British, which basically controlled the oil-producing regions of southern Iran. So when we talk about privatizing the Iraqi oil industry, when we talk about, say anything about Iraqi oil, it's against this background that people in that region are judging it, not the purity of the intentions of our president or our secretary of state or anybody else, against their own history. And I must say something about history. We are a people that doesn't pay much attention to history. Some people would say we're ahistorical. Some people would say we're almost amnesiac. I'm not saying that. But we do not have the same regard for history as people in this part of the world have. They have a longer history than anybody else in the world. The first states, the first cities, the first great empires in world history grew out of this very region we're talking about, Mesopotamia and Egypt. These were old cultures, ancient cultures, when Alexander the Great arrived 300 years before Christ. These were cultures that Julius Caesar found had been in existence for thousands of years when he arrived. So for them, history is very important, their own history in particular. They pay a great deal of attention to it. The things I'm talking about are not the history of the pharaohs. They're the history of the last 50 or 100 years. They're the things that adults, people the age of most people in this room, remember well from their youth, things like foreign occupation, things like foreign soldiers kicking down doors in Aden in the 60s, in Algiers in the 60s, not in the 18th century or the 17th century or the 19th century, 40 or 30 or 50 years ago. Fourthly, or rather fifthly, I point out in the book that the question of Palestine has been a major factor in alienating people in the Middle East from the West since 1917, even more so since 1947, since the UN partition resolution, and even more so in the present. As a result of all of these things that I've talked about, the fact that military occupation engenders resistance, the fact that people in this region have resisted Western control, the fact that there is a democratic tradition, the fact that oil has been controlled by outsiders, and the fact that the question of Palestine has alienated people. Folks in the Middle East are apt to judge the West by its actions rather than by the words of Western leaders. Let me give you the example of some of these words. Oh ye Egyptians, They may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion. But tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors." That was Napoleon Bonaparte in his proclamation to the Egyptian people in July 1798, issued in Arabic in Alexandria. Within four months, the population of Cairo had revolted against the French, killed the commander of French forces in Cairo, and it was only the massed artillery of the French expeditionary force in the citadel bombarding Cairo that saved the day for the French occupation of Egypt. Another quotation. Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth. That was General F.S. Maude, the commander of British forces, in the proclamation he issued on his entry into Baghdad in March of 1917. Within three years, the Iraqi people had risen up against the British, had started a rising in a place called Fallujah. in which Sunnis and Shia were soon united. The British killed approximately 10,000 Iraqis, most of them from the air, most of them civilians. They lost 2,000 soldiers, mainly Indian soldiers of the Imperial armies, in putting down that revolt. They had to reoccupy Iraq again in 1941. My last quotation for you. Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate. And the Iraqi people know this. That was our very own Donald Rumsfeld speaking to US troops in Baghdad in April of last year. I suggest that they watch what we see rather than what we say, because they've heard it before. Foreign armies always have told them that they come to liberate, not to conquer. Let me go into the last part of my talk, because what I want to suggest to you is that the United States has now entered an extremely dangerous phase of a very long encounter with the Middle East. Most of us are probably not aware of it, but the United States, in fact, has had warm and friendly relations with the Middle East for the better part of a century. The United States was considered a non-colonial power. Its educational and other efforts were very warmly received. three of the finest universities in the Middle East, the American University of Beirut, where I had the privilege to teach for seven years, the American University in Cairo, and Boise University, formerly Robert College, are the results of American missionary and other efforts. The United States was not just a non-colonial power, not just a disinterested power. The United States was an anti-colonial power. President Wilson's 14 points made the United States so popular that when a commission was sent out to survey which mandatory power people in the Arab world wanted, the Eastern Arab world, overwhelming majority said we want the United States as a mandatory. Throughout the interwar period and into the post-World War II period, The United States kept up that reputation. America forced Russia and Britain to withdraw their troops from Iran after World War II. The United States insisted that the Soviets and the British get their forces out of Libya and help the Libyans achieve independence in 1950. The United States supported the Egyptians in getting British bases out of Egypt in 1954, supported the Algerians in their war against the French. So the United States was positively regarded until well into the 20th century. That changed. If you read the book, you can see why and how. My point, however, is that in this long encounter, we did have a positive image in that part of the world. What we're doing now, however, I think is very dangerous. No power, no power has tried to occupy and refashion a Middle Eastern state since World War I, when the British and the French did it, in among other places, Iraq. I would suggest that this prior experience is extremely relevant, and I would suggest that it is absolutely vital to Middle Eastern perceptions of the United States. The fact that we may have a deaf ear to the valence of a place like Fallujah doesn't mean that the Iraqis do. They not only don't have a deaf ear to it, the man who's triggered off the 1920 revolt, a man by the name of Sheikh Dari, was a national hero. He killed a British colonel in an altercation in Fallujah, which sparked the revolt. His grandson is a leading politician in Iraq today, partly because of the prestige accruing to that family as a result of what happened in 1920. These are things that people there remember. We have to pay attention to them. I would argue that the Bush administration meant the Iraq War as the first step in a new strategic era in which the United States would be unconstrained by allies, by the United Nations, by international law, in which it would force behavior it desired on others if normal forms of coercion failed. There's some extraordinarily ominous language in the new national security doctrine issued by our government in 2002. There's similar language in two of President Bush's State of the Union messages and in some of his addresses in 2001, 2002, and 2003. I suggest you read them very carefully. And I quote them in the book because I really do believe that it is against this background that we must understand what the United States was trying to do in Iraq. And this, in my view, is the core not only of the Bush doctrine but of what we were really trying to do. We were trying to show that we could do certain things completely unconstrained by what anybody else thought and without the help of anybody. I would argue that the true aims of the Bush administration in Iraq were, first of all, this new form of American strategic hegemony in the 21st century, as well as four other things. The second was a desire for military bases in Iraq, something that people in the Pentagon talk about very quietly. But they have talked about it enough to make it clear that they see Iraq as the replacement for the bases we have now abandoned in Saudi Arabia in the past 12 months. Thirdly, I would argue that the Bush administration looked to Iraq as a place where the United States could establish a privileged position in terms of oil. Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves in the Middle East. It probably has more oil than anybody knows about because there's been very little exploration done. And the Iraqi oil industry has been in a parlous state because of sanctions and the misadministration of the Saddam Hussein regime. The people in this administration are not strangers to the oil business. They know a lot about it. Condoleezza Rice has a tanker named for her, for heaven's sakes. The vice president is well known for his connections with the oil industry, as is the president himself. I cannot believe that their sense of how important Iraq was in terms of oil wasn't a part of this. Finally, this administration intended to finish off some of the unfinished business of the Cold War, knocking off a regime that at times had in fact been a client of the United States. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War, the United States helped Iraq measurably to develop poison gas, to develop other weapons, to fight the war against the clerical regime in Tehran. Iraq was a regime that had on occasion defied the United States and had invaded an American ally in 1991. And this administration wanted to finish it off partly to finish off the business of the Cold War, but partly also many people have argued, because as a number of people in this administration saw it, American and Israeli interests are linked. And this would be a positive thing for Israel. It would improve further Israel's strategic environment. I quote a lengthy document produced for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by three of the leading lights of this administration, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, the man behind the occupation of Iraq in the sense that he was in charge of planning for the occupation in the Pentagon. He's the Under Secretary of Defense. And he's the man who's been in charge of running it. And finally, David Wormser, who's Vice President Cheney's National Security Advisor for the Middle East. These three men wrote a prescription for policy for Netanyahu, in which they basically laid out a vision, which this administration has gone on to implement. It was a vision that they saw as helping Israel to establish its hegemony. It's a vision which they see, I think, and others in the administration see will help the United States to establish its hegemony. These reasons, rather than the stated excuses for the war, weapons of mass destruction, the alleged links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda and bin Laden, or a sudden passion for democracy and human rights in Iraq, which nobody in this administration ever showed before in their long, interaction with Iraq, these reasons rather than the stated ones, I think, explain this war. We, I think, need, in order to understand this fiasco that is developing in Iraq, we need to know that this was a war and this has been an occupation which have been undertaken in the almost complete absence of real expertise. It was a war waged and an occupation that has been run by people who rigorously excluded, not just people like me or Joey Bynum, academics who can easily be dismissed, but the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who we have paid for the training of with our tax dollars. We've trained them to learn Arabic and Persian and Turkish. We've sent them to the Middle East to study. We have employed them for decades in the intelligence community, in the uniformed military, in the State Department. None of that advice, none of that advice was welcome at the top in the Bush administration. It was rigorously and systematically excluded. And I'm not talking on the basis of hearsay. I'm talking about what tens of my own students who work in our government have told me. I'm talking on the basis of what people that I meet from the intelligence community, the State Department, the military, tell me. They didn't want to hear what we had to say. They didn't want to know about the things that we had learned in our lengthy encounter with the Middle East. They had ideas about how Iraq functioned, how Iraq could be made to function, how the occupation of Iraq would go, how easy it would be to do things, how the occupation of Iraq would affect the rest of the Middle East, which were based on ignorance. which were based on ideology, which were based on their beliefs, and they were not willing to allow any data coming from anybody, including people within the government, and that's primarily who I'm talking about, to filter up to the top. In my view, this administration in Iraq has run a faith-based, fact-free policy, a policy which... Thank you. Thank you. A policy which could only have functioned in an absolute vacuum with not only data opposing the assumptions of these people, but views opposing the views of these people rigorously excluded. I think that there really is only one important question left as far as Iraq is concerned, and that is how quickly this occupation will end and how bloodily, at what cost to the Iraqis, and at what cost to us. I don't believe there are good options left in Iraq. I believe the options are all bad. If someone is to tell me, well, the United States can't withdraw, things will get worse if we withdraw. I think things are going to get worse if we stay. No matter what we do at this stage, there is no way of turning this into something that will work, no way at all. The tide has turned. If there ever was a possibility, I don't believe that there was. It no longer exists. I argue in this book, even though I wrote it before the war started, that no good could have come of this conflict. No good could have come of this war. It was misbegotten from the very beginning as a result of what I call an unholy union between the muscular nationalists like the Vice President and Secretary Rumsfeld, between the neoconservatives who are the ideologues and the thinkers of this administration, and between the aggressive extremist evangelicals whose good and evil view of the world has permeated this administration, and not only, unfortunately, in its foreign policy. I repeat, no good could have come of this. It was misbegotten from the beginning. Nothing that this administration said about this war proved to be true. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. They, in my view, had no intention of establishing democracy in Iraq. And this was proven when people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon said things like, Iraq, a freely elected democratic Iraq, is going to recognize Israel and open up the oil pipeline to Haifa. If there were a peaceful Middle East, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved, that might happen. But they were expecting it to happen now, in a situation where Israel and the Palestinians are locked in a deadly struggle, where occupation continues, where 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have just died in the last 3 and 1 half years. These people seriously expected an Iraqi government to do that and to do a number of other things, such as withdraw from OPEC, which clearly no freely elected Iraqi government was going to do. So they didn't really intend to help bring about democracy in Iraq. What they intended was to create a pliable regime, which would do as it was told. The kind of people that they backed, people who've been on the government payroll for the better part of a decade, like Ahmed Chelebi, people who have no constituency inside Iraq, people who are personal friends of Paul Wolfowitz from the days when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago, are not very strong reeds on which to build a democracy. This is a man who has no following inside Iraq, a man who's widely loathed by Iraqis, a man who is a convicted criminal. He's an embezzler, bank embezzler, under sentence in Jordan, a man who was found by the accountants for the State Department and the CIA to be unable to account for tens of millions of dollars of our money that he was given in the late 90s, and who long before he began feeding false information to our government in the lead up to this war had already been determined by the Central Intelligence Agency and by the State Department to be a man who was utterly unreliable and a man who was financially suspect. That's something that the Jordanian depositors in Petro Bank had found out many years earlier. In my view, none of the intentions expressed by this administration about this war proved to be sincere, and there is no way this war could have been redeemed. Only competence, only a modicum of competence might have prolonged this occupation. There was no competence. It was the most inept occupation, I think, in modern history. It will go down in the annals of occupation as the worst-run occupation in modern history. As it is, in my view, the maintenance of the U.S. military presence in Iraq will lead only to a greater instability, will lead only to greater insecurity. Unfortunately, there is just no way that this can be turned around, and I'm afraid it will lead only to a greater effusion of anti-Americanism the world over. I perceive our occupation of Iraq today to be a source, the most serious cause of anti-Americanism since the Vietnam War. the world over, not just in the Middle East. In my view, this war has done something even more dangerous. It has not just distracted us from dealing with people who actually attacked the United States, unlike the Iraqi government, which attacked its neighbors but never actually attacked us. It's not only distracted us from dealing with the people who actually attacked us repeatedly, not only in New York and Washington, but attacked our embassies, attacked many, many American facilities the world over. It has provided, in my view, the best possible gift to people who really wish us ill, who really wish to harm us, to terrorists of the most bloodthirsty sort, nurtured in Afghanistan in the jihad against the Soviet Union, people who worked with American intelligence for many, many years, but who are now deadly enemies of the United States This is all they could ever have asked for. The United States, engaging in a war without any support in the Middle East, without any support in the rest of the world, engaged in a military occupation which has succeeded in alienating clear majorities of the Iraqi people. The latest poll numbers are unbelievable out of Iraq. 80% before the prison scandal broke, 80% of Iraqis had a very negative view of the United States. This is a gift to the real terrorists. This is the best thing they could have hoped for. And to my way of thinking, this is a very, very dangerous outcome. There are, in my view, no longer any good options for us in Iraq. We've lost whatever support we had among the Iraqis, and we're now rejected. Our presence is now rejected by an overwhelming majority of them. There is a clear Iraqi national consensus among both the Shia majority and the Sunni Arab minority against us. an overwhelmingly anti-American consensus. And there has been a notable rise, paradoxically, of Sunni-Shia solidarity and opposition to the United States over the past two or three months. They were sending food from the Shia districts of Baghdad up to Fallujah while the fighting was going on there. Now they are sending food from the Sunni districts of Iraq down to Karbala and Najaf, where fighting is going on with US forces. People often say, well, we can't leave. This is an artificial country. It'll fall apart. Of course it's an artificial country, but it's no more artificial than nearly 200 of the states in the United Nations. In fact, it's somewhat less artificial, and it's somewhat less recent, because all of them were established within colonial boundaries. All of them were the creations of European mapmakers. But most of them only became independent well after World War II. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka go through Africa. Most of them became independent in the 60s. Iraq was independent in 1932. It's had a long time to develop a sense of national identity. And I'm not sure that Iraq will be able to hold together. There are very strong forces pulling it apart. But as was evidenced by the Iran-Iraq war, when Iraqi shia fought loyally against shia Iran, there are many clear sources of Iraqi patriotism. In my view, the best alternative today of several very bad alternatives is to declare a withdrawal date, to declare an end to American interference in Iraq, economic as well as political, things like the privatization of the Iraqi airways, which have assets worth $3.5 billion, mainly landing slots in European airports and ownership of the actual real estate on which a number of airports in Iraq are built, handed over 51% to some shadowy private group, basically taken out of the pockets of the Iraqi people and put into the pockets of a bunch of carpetbaggers. declare that all of those measures are null and void, declare that we're leaving, declare that the United States will have no bases in Iraq after its forces leave, and hand it over to the international community. It's not a good alternative, but it is the least bad. Let me leave you with one more short quotation. The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad. Every word is true of our situation in Iraq today. These words were penned by T.E. Lawrence in August of 1920. Thank you very much.

Andrew Ross: Thanks to Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, an author of Resurrecting Empire, Western Footprints, and America's Perilous Past in the Middle East, for his comments today. I'm Andrew Ross, Executive Foreign and National Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I will be moderating today's audience question period. Fortunately, there are no questions, so we can just kidding. I have about 500 questions, and we've got about 20 minutes to answer them, and I think I should remind the radio audience that you're listening to a broadcast from the Commonwealth Club of California. Okay, let's see. John Kerry. Would John Kerry administration make any difference? What could John Kerry do? And if, as you say, America's perception in the world is now so bad, could a Kerry presidency change that?

Rashid Khalidi: Well, I'm not a great fan of the Kerry policy such as it is on Iraq. I don't think very much of it. But I do think that a Kerry presidency would at least change one important thing, the attitude of contempt and disrespect for international law. The attitude that the United Nations is an encumbrance rather than a potential asset. The manifest contempt for the opinions of the rest of the world. The lack of a decent respect for allies would hopefully cease under a Kerry presidency. And there would be an enormous sigh of relief the world over for that reason alone. And so in that regard, in that regard alone, there would certainly be an improvement in a Kerry presidency. And frankly, given that, in my view, these are not incidental matters to the Iraq war. These are central to why the administration fought the war. That would represent a major change. I do not think, however, that simply talking about staying the course is going to solve the problem. As General Zinni said the other day, we are headed for the abyss. What T.E. Lawrence said is true of our situation. There is no possibility of staying the course. Adding troops will only compound the problem. So I think that Senator Kerry is going to have to develop a more serious policy, and I don't think he has very much time, frankly, because the crucial decisions are going to have to be made between now not just now in the election, but now in the inauguration, in my view, by the time whether President Bush is reelected or Senator Kerry is elected and is inaugurated in January, this thing will be decided one way or another, and I think badly, unless some very crucial changes are made.

Andrew Ross: You've, and I'm summing up a couple of questions here and perhaps adding one of my own. You've painted a somewhat bleak picture of the future and you've repeatedly talked about there are really no good options. Is it not conceivable that the Iraqis themselves on the brink of some sort of precipice might sort of look in and say and sort of, I mean, you have talked eloquently about the history of constitutionalism, you know, nationalism, that there is a sort of a past for Iraq to draw upon. Is it not possible that, you know, perhaps miraculously, perhaps it's just a dream that Iraqis themselves could pull back from the precipice and make some sort of a future for themselves? Yes. Presumably without the Americans.

Rashid Khalidi: Yes, I think there is. And it depends on that happening without the Americans. How? The presence of American forces is a lightning rod. for some of the most dangerous forces in the Middle East. We are drawing them like moths to a flame. The presence of the United States exacerbates every problem the Iraqis have at this moment in time. It wasn't that way at the beginning of the occupation. If the occupation had had a completely different tenor, if it had not been an American occupation, if it had been an international action to remove a regime and allow the Iraqis immediately to decide their future, it would have looked entirely different. But as of this moment in time, the problem, to a very large extent, is the occupation. But I am optimistic, not that the Iraqis will definitely get their act together, but that both because of a tradition, a desire for democracy, and a tradition of some form of constitutionalism, and because of the good sense of the majority of Iraqis, if, if is the big if, the United States would get out of the way, there is a possibility of their pulling back from the precipice.

Andrew Ross: Could you just say a little bit more about that? I mean, how do you see the Iraqis pulling back? How could the Iraqis make a future for themselves?

Rashid Khalidi: The first point to make is that Sunni and Shia Iraqis have a remarkably similar vision of a unified Iraq with some kind of autonomy for the Kurds, much less than the Kurds want. In fact, that will be the problem, in my view. They disagree about a number of things. Among themselves, the differences among the Shia are probably as great as the differences between Sunnis and Shia. There are Shia who are secular, who do not want any form of religious rule. There are Shia who believe in a theocracy, just like Iran. There are Shia who want some role for religion but do not want a theocracy. Ayatollah Ali Sistani seems to represent a majority trend in supporting a non-theocratic, which would be democratic and which there would be a role for religion, but which would be very different from the Iranian system where the clerics really control everything. Important. Simply for the Shia to work those things out is going to take a long time. And for the Sunnis and the Shia to get together may take a long time, but they actually have a remarkably similar vision of a unified democratic Iraq. I don't know if they can sort those differences out. If they're allowed to do it, in other words, if there's not this constant pressure of the occupation, they, I think, have a chance. The real problem, I think, will be with the Kurds. And I'm not sure how that can be worked out.

Andrew Ross: For all the alienation in Iraq against the Americans right now, also polls and anecdotal evidence in the street seems to suggest that Iraqis, when asked about the Americans leaving, they're not quite so sure. There's still some concern about the Americans leaving. So, again... They are.

Rashid Khalidi: The same people will say... We're grateful for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. We wish he would leave. We are terribly worried about what will happen in terms of security when Americans leave. So people are capable of, you know, things are not black and white. People are capable of holding two or three contradictory ideas at the same time. And I think that accurately reflects the feelings of many Iraqis. I think what you mustn't underestimate, though, is the degree to which humiliation can push people to feel resentment and anger. We don't see what happens when soldiers come into people's houses in the middle of the night. I'm not blaming soldiers. I'm saying occupation does this. Every Iraqi knows what's been happening in those prisons and has known for a year because it's their brothers and cousins and uncles who are being picked up. Military sources say most of these people are innocent. American military sources say most of the people who've gone through this prison system have been completely innocent bystanders, picked up for no reason but that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a patrol got shot at, and nervous young 21-year-olds, like one of my daughter's classmates who's a Marine in Iraq. are forced to make those kinds of decisions. They don't know any Arabic. They don't know anything about Iraq. They don't know where they are. And they are in a position where they've been shot at. And their orders are fire back and then pick up some suspects. The Iraqis know what's going on in these prisons. They have known. We were the only people who didn't know until finally photographs came out. They know. And these things have caused a resentment that we can't possibly, we cannot possibly imagine. The other thing I have to say is whatever the military says, about collateral damage, we're not trying to target civilians. Again, the Iraqis look at this very differently. The deaths of civilians, which we see as incidental, or our military sees as incidental to military operations, for them are very important. And they know, perhaps, that Muqtada Sadr's men are firing from this mosque, but they also know that we're the ones who hit the mosque. They may know that people in Fallujah are sniping from this neighborhood, but they know that we flattened the neighborhood and that civilians were killed. Everybody's related to everybody in the Middle East. Anybody who's been there can tell you that. Fallujah happens to lie. It's one of the towns on the Euphrates, the bend of the Euphrates, closest to the desert. So if you think of the desert as a sea, it's like a port. And people from northern Saudi Arabia right up to Mosul and Aleppo in Mosul in Iraq, Aleppo in Syria, are related to people in Fallujah. Huge tribal confederations, they're all related. They've been going up and down that sort of desert highway, as it were, for millennia, since long before the British and the French laid down those frontiers. So when General this or Pentagon spokesman that says, foreigners are in Fallujah, foreigners, they're the cousins of these people, for God's sakes. Yeah, sure, they're Saudi passport holders or Syrian passport holders, but they're people who actually can meld right in because they've been coming there, and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have been coming there for millennia. We have a real problem because everybody knows this stuff. When we bomb something, we can say whatever we want, and you may believe what's on Fox, but I promise you, everybody knows in Iraq within a matter of a day or two what the truth is.

Andrew Ross: Another scenario raised by a member of the audience, is civil war in Iraq a reality either with or without U.S. troops?

Rashid Khalidi: It's a possibility. I personally doubt it. I do not think that the majority of Iraqis want that. There are forces that probably would push in that direction, but I actually don't think it will happen. I think there will be a very fierce struggle for power, but the most difficult parts of it will be within the communities, especially within the Shia community. Whether that will lead to a civil war or not, I don't know. I hope not, and I think perhaps not.

Andrew Ross: question again from the audience. Could Arab neighbors help in brokering a peaceful solution, a constructive solution to the problem?

Rashid Khalidi: Arab countries probably could help within the context of an international effort. It probably would be unwise to have the immediate neighbors of Iraq involved, whether Arab or non-Arab, whether Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, or Turkey and Iran, the Arab and non-Arab neighbors. Because each of these countries has important, in some cases vital, interests in Iraq. And it would probably be wiser to keep them out. Other Arab and Muslim countries within the context of an international force, which was not perceived as perpetuating the American occupation or protecting an American occupation, might have a positive role.

Andrew Ross: for our radio audience. A reminder, you're listening to a broadcast from the Commonwealth Club of California. This is Andrew Ross in conversation with Rashid Khalidi, author of Resurrecting Empire, Western Footprints, and America's Perilous Past in the Middle East. Got a number of questions about the Arab world, especially relating to what you'd said about the history and the fact that there was a tradition of constitutionalism and democracy there. Again, I'm summing up, I think, some of the questions that I have here. If that's the case, why are there so few, or some would say no, democracies in the Arab Middle East now? Why are there such bad regimes?

Rashid Khalidi: It's a very good question. Because through the 50s, most Arab countries that were independent actually had some form of democracy. The Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, even Jordan. and Iraq. And what happened is something that analysts are still trying to figure out. The first thing to put aside is this idea that there's something in their genes that makes Muslims anti-democratic. Some of the largest successful democracies in the world are Muslim. They're not in the Middle East, except for Turkey. But Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh are large countries with large Muslim populations. In fact, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. They're all functioning democracies. They've had transfers of power without violence. And so it's certainly not in their genes. I argue in the book that one of the problems has been the prevalence of conflict in the Middle East because of its strategic nature, because of a number of conflicts, not only the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Western Sahara conflict, a number of others. Conflict is not conducive to limiting the power of the executive, limiting the power of the state, putting constitutional structures in place. And I think that has been one of the problems. Another problem is that this is a region with a strong authoritarian tradition, a lengthy tradition, the lengthiest in human history. of strong centralized states, the Egyptian state, different other states, over millennia, not just centuries. And that tradition is at odds with the idea of limiting the power of the ruler, and it asserts itself. It's not a uniquely Middle Eastern problem, but it is a problem that is particular to the Middle East. Finally, the Middle East was a particularly important arena in the Cold War, and both the Soviet Union and the United States in the search for competitive advantage in their rivalry with one another, propped up odious regimes. in order to obtain strategic advantage. I'm not blaming it on the United States or the Soviets. I'm saying that that was a contributing factor. But it is really a good question because certainly it's not a problem in the Muslim world. Most Muslims live under democracies. In fact, the 200 million in India, the 200-something million in Bangladesh, the 300-something million in Indonesia. It is a problem particular to the Arab world and the Arab world in the last 30 or 40 years only.

Andrew Ross: The historian Bernard Lewis, with whom you perhaps, I suspect, might disagree, at least in one of his books looking at the history of the Arab world, says that the decline of the Arab world and the problems that it faces has a lot to do with hatred of Jews and hatred of women. Anything to that?

Rashid Khalidi: In my view, no, nothing whatsoever to do with that. I think the position of women is a serious problem in the Arab world. I don't actually think that hatred of Jews has traditionally been an issue in the Arab or Islamic worlds. You now have, in my view, what is developing into a new form of anti-Semitism, which is a spin-off of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is an entirely new phenomenon. in this part of the world. It's 100 years old. But I don't actually think that that has anything to do with the decline of this region. Quite the contrary. I think that those are issues that, especially the issue of women, that people in Islamic societies are going to have to do a lot to grapple with. But I don't see this as integral to the decline of this region. And I think that, frankly, Bernard Lewis is looking, in many cases, in my view, at historic traditions, which he studied in great detail from the medieval period and the classic period of Islamic civilization, but knows very little about the modern history of the Middle East. He's never studied it. He's never spent a great deal of time in Arab countries. And he's pontificating about the things he knows about, which is the medieval period and the texts that he's studied. I mean, he's an eminent Orientalist and an eminent medievalist. He's not an eminent modern Middle East historian. And he tends to downplay the factors that almost every modern Middle East historian would focus on, The fact, for example, that there was a synthesis amongst Islamic thinkers which decreased the importance of religion in public life. from the early 19th century through the middle of the 20th century for 100, 150 years. Most Muslim thinkers did not think as the radical fundamentalists of today think. My grandfather was a qadi. He would have looked askance at the ideas of people like bin Laden or the ideas of the and other radical offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood. in Egypt. These were not ideas that most Muslim thinkers for most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century would have found congenial. So I really think that saying, oh, it's always been there, these kinds of ideas, is fundamentally untrue. Fundamentalism is a modern reaction to modernity rather than some kind of return of the traditional, in my view at least.

Andrew Ross: It's a question from the audience and I think it's relevant. One of the things that has emerged recently are more independent media voices like Al Jazeera. Question here, does the Arab press cover Arab atrocities with the same enthusiasm that they cover the Americans? For example, how much coverage does the slaughter of families in southern Sudan by Arab nomads in the Sudanese government receive?

Rashid Khalidi: I watch Al Jazeera and I watch some of the other Arab satellite channels. Each of them has a patron. In the case of Al Jazeera, it's Qatar. You're not going to find anything about what's wrong in Qatar on Al Jazeera, any more than you're going to find anything about what's wrong in Saudi Arabia on Al Arabiya. But in fact, one of the things that strikes me about the Arab satellite media, I mean, I don't watch it all the time, but when I have a chance to see it, and I get it at home and we get it in the office, is that in fact, the people who talk about it almost invariably don't know Arabic and have never watched it. and are pontificating on the basis of what they're told by a few really ill-intentioned and really biased media analysts. Al Jazeera does talk, for example, about the southern Sudan and the western Sudan. I mean, I've seen stories about both of those stories, about both of those issues on Al Jazeera. There is a level of polemicism in treating the American occupation of Iraq and in treating the Israeli occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is far from objective. It's nowhere near the level of bias in Fox television. I mean, we're nowhere near that kind of toxic know-nothingism on any Arab medium. You couldn't possibly... get anybody to watch something that was as blindly, blatantly biased as Fox television in the Arab world. It would simply be, nobody would watch it. It would wither on the vine. Al Jazeera is, in fact, often quite inflammatory, but one of the interesting things about it is it can be inflammatory on both sides of the issue. They can actually bring American spokesmen up there.

Speaker 1: And I'm saying to myself, why are they bringing these people?

Rashid Khalidi: Everybody in the Arab world can listen to the United States. They listen to the United States all the time. People have access to a broad range of media. Anybody who can see Al Jazeera can see the BBC in Arabic. You can see five other independent satellite stations, independent in the sense that they're commercial. They each have a government patron in most cases, and can watch the Western media, and in many countries can watch the Israeli media. They can get what the United States says or what Israeli spokesmen say. I'm always surprised when you see Israeli spokesmen on Al Jazeera. You don't see Palestinian spokesmen on Fox, I promise you.

Andrew Ross: You've talked about the Israeli-Palestinian-Israeli conflict as sort of being somewhat related. But again, if you could go a little further, a question for the audience. The connections between the occupations, the American occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of certain Palestinian territories.

Rashid Khalidi: Right. They're obviously very different things. The Israeli occupation is two generations old. It's been going on since 1967. On the 5th of June, it will enter its, I believe, its 38th year, or is it its 37th year? You can count better than I can, perhaps. It will have ended 37 years. Moreover, there are no illegal American settlements, to the best of my knowledge, in Iraq. There's no American intention to annex parts of Iraq. as there is on the part of the governing party of Israel, insofar as parts of the West Bank are concerned. There's no American claim to Iraq. The Israeli government denies that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are even occupied territories, something which international law is clear on, something which the United States has always been clear on until this administration. So there are enormous differences. I will say one thing, though. In the rest of the world, not just in the Arab world, not just in the Islamic world, in the rest of the world, there has been a blurring of these two occupations. People have seen... rightly or wrongly, images. And I mean, I know people who have said to me, sometimes I'm taken aback for a second when I see soldiers kicking down doors and taking away people with hoods and manacles. Are these Israeli soldiers in Qalqilya or Rafah? Or are these American soldiers in Fallujah or Kufa? And there has been, you know, There were days when it was hard to avoid those comparisons. The day when an American helicopter fired at, allegedly, a wedding party, maybe not, in a town on the Syrian border, killing a large number of people who were supposedly civilians, and an Israeli helicopter. They were both American-built, of course. They were both Apaches. Fired at a crowd of demonstrators in Rafah. They are different. But in the eyes of many people in the Arab world, in the eyes of many people in the world, I'm afraid, they're coming to be seen as linked or related.

Andrew Ross: There are some views, and an audience member has sort of expressed it, that sort of Israel's intentions towards the Palestinians are, you know, to sort of prolong the occupation, to take over the ideology, to relocate, presumably expel Palestinians. I mean, your views of Israeli or the Israeli government's motivations...

Rashid Khalidi: There are different Israeli views. A majority of Israelis, according to most polls consistently, have supported the idea of removing most Israeli settlements and, in recent years at least, have accepted the idea of a Palestinian state. That's not the policy of this Israeli government. It's the policy of the Israeli opposition. It was the policy of previous Israeli governments. It never happened. The occupation never ended. Oslo consecrated and strengthened the occupation. More concrete was poured during the 10 years when there was supposedly a peace process going on. More settlers were settled in the West Bank than in the preceding 20 years. The population doubled of Israeli settlers in the West Bank from about 200,000 to about 400,000 between 1991 when the Madrid peace talks began and 2000 when the Second Intifada began, when the Camp David talks broke down and the Second Intifada began. So even though previous Israeli governments were committed to this, it never happened. But it is what most Israelis want. It is not, I think, what this government wants. What this government wants is very clear. It wants to take a very large chunk of the West Bank and annex it to Israel. And that's why Sharon has been building settlements. He didn't build them to take them down. It's painful to him to do so. He says he's going to do it in Gaza. But most of the settlements in the West Bank were put there so as to make a contiguous, sovereign settlement independent Palestinian state in the entirety of the West Bank, an impossibility. And I'm afraid they may have succeeded in doing that. I'm afraid that to some degree that process may be irreversible.

Andrew Ross: Did you feel more positive towards the agreement that was almost reached at Camp David and at Taba?

Rashid Khalidi: At Taba. I think the agreement at Taba was very close to the outlines of a two-state solution, if that is possible. It did not resolve the refugee question. It didn't fully resolve the issue of Jerusalem, though it resolved some aspects of it. But insofar as borders were concerned and some aspects of sovereignty were concerned, I think it would be close to an agreement that might be acceptable to the majorities on both sides. The problem was that President Clinton, in his infinite wisdom, with the poor advice he was getting, from his advisors in the State Department, left all of the hard issues between the Palestinians and the Israelis for the last four months of his eight years in office, and wasted seven and a half years on interim agreements which had nothing to do with the really important issues between the two sides. Jerusalem could not be touched. Refugees could not be touched. Borders could not be touched. Sovereignty could not be touched. Water could not be touched. Settlements could not be touched. Nobody negotiated any one of those issues between 1991 and 2000. They weren't allowed to by the architecture of the negotiations first laid down by Secretary Baker and continued by President Clinton and his two very ineffectual, in my view, secretaries of state. And so in the absence of any adult supervision from a strong president like the first President Bush or a strong secretary of state like Secretary Baker, the kids were allowed to run the reservation. And we had the most abysmal failure, in my view, in that there was an opportunity for an agreement. I mean, I was living in Jerusalem in the summer of 1993. you could have easily overcome the objections on both sides to the kind of agreement that was negotiated at Taba. Because there was a reservoir of goodwill, and there was an enormous weariness after the first intifada. After 10 years of the building of settlements, and after 10 years where Israelis didn't see an improvement, majorities on both sides were no longer so sure. And Arafat had gone from 89% or 90% popularity to 40% popularity. Prime Minister Barak had gone from having a majority in the Knesset to losing his majority. And the president was not even a lame duck. He was close to being a dead duck by the time that these agreements were negotiated. So they were left far too late. And I think that really was the problem with them.

Andrew Ross: One final question. Unfortunately, there are so many more, but I understand there are going to be some books that are coming out for you to sign, so perhaps people may have an opportunity after the show. Let's take a couple more. This could be the final one, at least for this portion of the program. How long will it take for the hatred built up in the Arab world for the U.S. to go away?

Rashid Khalidi: Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is they don't really hate us because of our freedoms. And they don't really hate us because of our values. In fact, they like our values. They like, I'm not saying everybody. There are some terrorists, some of them people we trained, unfortunately, in Afghanistan, who don't like our values, who are not Democrats. But the overwhelming majority of people in the Arab world, in the Middle East, and in the Islamic world do like our values. They like our political values. They like the idea of rule of law. They like the idea of the limitation of power of the executive, something that's not always followed, unfortunately, in Washington. They love the idea of democracy. They like our economic values, the free market system. They like many, not all, of our cultural values. You'll notice that American universities are very popular among Middle Easterners. They can't come here anymore. They can't get visas, but they did when they could. You will notice that American cultural production is extremely popular in the Middle East, from movies to MTV, you name it. Consumerism of the most gross sorts is enthusiastically embraced by people all over the region. So they don't dislike us as people, and they not only don't dislike our values, they really do like our values. They're unhappy when we are not always consistent with our values. when we don't always support democracies, for example. And they don't like our policies. And the people who try and tell us they hate us because of our freedom want to distract you from how obnoxious the policies that they're advocating are in the eyes not only of people in the Arab world, in the Middle East, in the eyes of people in most of the world, unfortunately. Nobody understands our policy on Palestine. Nobody can understand how a country that presumably is in favor of self-determination and democracy can't figure out how to enable the Palestinians to have that and how the Palestinians have to do this and that and the other before they're entitled to what President Wilson said every people is entitled to. They can't understand how we can be so blind in Iraq, how we could have ignored the lessons of history. Notice how British and French public opinion has reacted to Iraq. There are voters in France and Britain who remember what it's like to be shot at by Arabs and what it's like to shoot Arabs. Many of them who are veterans have done that in Aden, in Egypt, in Algeria, in Morocco. And they remember these things bitterly. That's one reason that public opinion in those countries is so strongly against this war. They understood that this wasn't a good idea because of their experience. So I think it'll take time for these things to be overcome in the Arab world. But I think if you change the policies, Given that there is a consonance between our core values and the values of, I think, most people in that region, it might be surprising how quick there could be a turnaround. But we would have to be consistent with our own values, and we would have to look very carefully at our own policies and think what is it that really is in the vital national interest of the United States and what is in the vital national interest of the bottom line of Halliburton or some vision of the American role in the world in the 21st century. I think that if we were able to look at these things and to ask a question, is this country capable of being a republic at home while it's carrying out what is in effect an imperial foreign policy abroad, something which I don't think is consonant with American values and something which I don't think most Americans want, then I think we could win the goodwill of people all over the Middle East and in the rest of the world, frankly.