A Disappearance in Damascus (29 page)

1.
A Pew Research Center study conducted in late 2007 of 111 journalists from twenty-nine news organizations (all but one US-based) who had worked or were working in Iraq found that a majority said most of the country was too dangerous to visit. More than seven out of ten said that travelling with chase cars and armed security details had become normal. Fifty-seven percent had had at least one of their Iraqi staffers kidnapped or killed over the previous year. “Welcome to the new world of journalism, boys and girls,” one bureau chief stated. “This is where we lost our innocence. Security teams, body armor and armored cars will forever now be pushed in between journalism and stories.” (See “Journalists in Iraq—A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines.”)

2.
Ken Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” A27. Adelman was one of the neoconservative hawks behind the Iraq War. A member of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, chaired by Richard Perle, he was close to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The latter four were key members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank established in 1997. In
They Knew They Were Right
Jacob Heilbrunn writes: PNAC “was essentially a front organization to champion the democratic crusade, and specifically, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein” (217). Ten signatories to PNAC's statement of
principles went on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush; nine members of the Defense Policy Board had ties to defense contractors.
   On September 20, 2001, nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a letter from PNAC signed by forty neoconservatives advised Bush that he had no choice but to remove Saddam Hussein from power “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack.” On September 19–20, the Defense Policy Board, which included Henry Kissinger, met in Rumsfeld's conference room at the Pentagon with Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Shia Muslim Iraqi exile and convicted embezzler who had met Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz in the 1980s while completing his PhD at the University of Chicago (ibid., 250). They had been introduced by leading neoconservative mentor Professor Albert Wohlstetter (ibid., 258), a Cold War theorist who was one of the models for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove
.
   Chalabi, tapped by Cheney and Rumsfeld to lead Iraq after Saddam Hussein, became a key source of the false allegations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that manufactured public support for the invasion. He later served as deputy prime minister of Iraq and was appointed by the Shia-led government to chair the highly destructive de-Baathification commission. As Jonathan Steele notes in the obituary for Ahmed Chalabi in the
Guardian
, “He used the position to purge hundreds of Sunni politicians who wanted to run for parliament in March 2010, thereby paving the way for the sectarian polarisation that provoked the emergence of the extremist Sunni group Islamic State.”

3.
Reported in the
New York Times
, CNN, the
Guardian
, and elsewhere. See, for example, Pamela Hess, “Rumsfeld: Looting Is Transition to Freedom,” April 11, 2003.

4.
Interview with Dr. Matanius Habib, 2007. He refuted the theory that terrorism has no roots in injustice. “The urgent task in front of the international community is to help the Iraqi refugees survive and raise their living standards. That will keep them from crime, terrorism and hate. If not, we will see instability and international terrorism that will affect not only the region but the developed countries.”

5.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a shadow intelligence unit conceived by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld to make the case for invading Iraq. Headed by Douglas Feith and reporting to Dick Cheney, the OSP
manipulated raw intelligence in an attempt to show that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, overriding more credible reports from the CIA and State Department. It relied on information provided by Ahmed Chalabi. (See Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” and Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence.”)
   The OSP was also involved in post-invasion planning. Paul Bremer's orders to “de-Baathify” Iraqi society and disband the Iraqi army were made over objections from more experienced military and intelligence officials who warned of dangerous consequences. Bremer stated that on May 9, 2003, Douglas Feith showed him a draft order for the “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.” Later that day he received his “marching orders” in a memo from Rumsfeld. (Paul Bremer,
My Year in Iraq
, 39, quoted in James P. Pfiffner, “US Blunders in Iraq,” 78.) That same day Rumsfeld approved a draft plan to disband Iraq's security forces and recreate the Iraqi army from scratch. The plan was drafted by Walt Slocombe, a tax attorney who had previously held Rumsfeld's job in the Clinton administration. Slocombe admits to drafting the policy but says, “it was made not only by Bremer but also by Wolfowitz and Feith and other people in the department, including, I assume, Rumsfeld.” (See “Where Did ISIS Come From?”)

6.
Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and head of the Office of Special Plans, worked on the de-Baathification plan with Ahmed Chalabi and presented it to President Bush on March 10, 2003, ten days before the invasion of Iraq. While Paul Bremer said that the order would affect only about 20,000 people, the total was between 85,000 and 100,000. According to former CIA director George Tenet, who resigned in mid-2004 for “personal reasons,” these included “forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined the Baath Party simply to keep their jobs.” For an overview of the de-Baathification debacle, see Pfiffner, “US Blunders in Iraq,” 76–85.

7.
CPA, Order No. 2,
Dissolution of Entities
. While 500,000 is the number commonly cited, the full effect of the order was closer to 700,000. According to Thomas Ricks, this order formally terminated 385,000 people in the armed forces, 285,000 in the Interior Ministry, which included police and domestic security, and 50,000 in presidential security units (
Fiasco
, 162).

8.
See Ned Parker, “Saudis' Role in Iraq Insurgency Outlined.” According to US military figures, the largest number of foreign fighters targeting US military and Iraqi civilians, some 45 percent, came from Saudi Arabia, as did the largest number of suicide bombers. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in US detention facilities in Iraq were Saudi.

9.
See Juan Cole, “Brief History of Islamic State of Iraq.”

10.
Teru Kuwayama notes that fixers would have more “glamorous” job titles if they were North American or European. (“How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) in a War Zone.”)

11.
A Collection of Essays
, 312–313. Orwell goes on to state that “all writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.” (Ibid., 316)

12.
David Kilcullen and Nate Rosenblatt offer a useful overview of the way mass rural migration to Syria's cities “driven by economic necessity and persistent drought” created a vast urban underclass that formed the basis of domestic Syrian resistance to the regime. Such urban villagers do not have the means to wait out the war abroad. They accommodate foreign-funded Islamic militant groups because the Islamists have the money and training to provide economic necessities, services and law enforcement. As the authors note, armed groups have otherwise devoted as much time to fighting one another as they do the Syrian government. “Neighborhood gangs run rampant. Lawlessness is rife. Warlordism is on the rise.” These factors help explain why extremists, including al-Qaeda–linked groups and offshoots such as Islamic State, are thriving: they are well-funded, well-armed and the “least corrupt organizations among opposition groups.” (“The Rise of Syria's Urban Poor,” 33–41.)

13.
Sunni Arabs account for 60 to 65 percent of the rank-and-file of the Syrian army, a near precise correlation to their 65 percent of the total Syrian population. This is a strong indicator of the class-based nature of the conflict. One reason for the high Sunni Arab representation in pro-government forces is the perception of opposition Sunnis as rural, religious and poor, thus having little in common with urban, educated Sunnis. Another reason is their fear of the radical Sunni Islamists who dominate the opposition. If the civil war in Syria was truly sectarian,
Syria's Sunnis would abandon the army and the government would fall. See Chris Zambelis, “Syria's Sunnis and the Regime's Resilience.”

14.
It is a common misconception that all Alawites, who make up about 12 percent of the Syrian population, benefited from the Assad rule. This was not the case. Most Alawites are poor and suffered the same state repression as other groups. They have supported the state rather than the opposition out of fear of Sunni jihadists, who consider Alawites to be heretics and massacre them. Nevertheless Alawites have expressed anger at the stunning death toll of Alawites serving in the Syrian army. Pro-government fighters have suffered the largest proportion of casualties in Syria, according to the opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights. By 2015, as many as a third of the 250,000 Alawite men of military age were dead. See Lauren Williams, “Syria's Alawites Not Deserting Assad Yet, Despite Crackdown,” and Ruth Sherlock, “In Syria's War, Alawites Pay Heavy Price.”

15.
For an in-depth exploration of the outsiders who “hijacked” the Syrian revolution, see Hugh Roberts, “The Hijackers,” 5–10.

16.
Robert L. Bateman, “Iraq and the Problem of Border Security,” 41–47.

17.
See Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.”

18.
See Roger Morris, “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making.” Morris documents the first American regime change in Iraq in 1963, when the CIA under President John F. Kennedy orchestrated the overthrow of Iraqi prime minister Abdel Karim Kassem in collaboration with Saddam Hussein. “Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the CIA.” Kassem, who had overthrown the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy in 1958, was regarded by Washington as a “dangerous leader who must be removed.” In the early 1960s, the CIA organized regime opponents, backing a small anti-Communist group, the Baath Party. “According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the CIA in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein,
then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.” The coup began on February 8, 1963, culminating in Kassem's execution. “Almost certainly a gain for our side,” Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy. In the purge that followed, the Baathists systematically murdered Iraqi elites suspected of communist sympathies using lists the CIA provided. The follow-up 1968 coup that brought Saddam Hussein closer to ultimate power was also backed by the CIA.

19.
Souad Al-Azzawi, “Decline of Iraqi Women Empowerment Through Education Under the American Occupation of Iraq 2003–2011.” Iraqi associate professor Souad Al-Azzawi notes that prior to the First Gulf War in 1991 women made up more than 30 percent of faculty members in Iraqi universities and research centres in Iraq and two-thirds of all teaching staff in primary and secondary schools. Since 2003, with kidnappings and assassinations of academics, teachers, health care specialists and other professionals, “it has become really hard for women to keep up their jobs and education status.”

20.
Phil Williams, “Criminals, Militias, and Insurgents: Organized Crime in Iraq.”

21.
Stephen Glain, “The Arab Street,” 172–173.

22.
Scott Anderson,
Lawrence in Arabia
, 112.

23.
T.E. Lawrence,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, 24.

24.
Margaret MacMillan,
Paris 1919
, 81.

25.
Lawrence, “A Report on Mesopotamia.”

26.
Roberts, “The Hijackers.”

27.
Although an election took place the year the French left with the support of the United States—already engaged in the battle to contain communism in the Middle East—it was handily won by entrenched elites who seemed impervious to American influence. American business interests were soon frustrated with the new Syrian parliament, which stalled on approving a right-of-way for a pipeline that was intended to serve US oil concerns in Saudi Arabia. In
The Game of Nations
, a
New York Times
bestseller published in 1970, CIA agent Miles Copeland, a member of the team behind the 1949 coup, describes how events unfolded. They first befriended the head of the Syrian army, Husni al-Za'im: “The political
action team suggested to Za'im the idea of a coup d'etat, advised him how to go about it, guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it…Za'im was ‘the American boy.' ” One member of the American team, Deane Hinton, was less than enthusiastic about the plan. According to Copeland, Hinton said, “I want to go on record as saying that this is the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in, and that we've started a series of these things that will never end.” Had the coup not taken place, transferring authority from an elected government to the military, it is unlikely that Hafez al-Assad would ever have come to power. Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis tells part of the story for the BBC in “The Baby and the Baath Water.” See also Jörg Michael Dostal, “Post-independence Syria and the Great Powers (1946–1958).”