JUAN COLE: The Sunni Arabs need to be reassured that they are not going to be the low people on the totem pole in the new Iraq. They're very capable people. They were the officer corps. They know where the hidden munitions are. They can make a lot of trouble. They were the managerial class. If they are not mollified, this guerrilla war will go on. So the U.S. needs to exercise its good offices and to combat this commitment to de-Ba'athification that the current government has, if the Sunni Arabs are going to be drawn into the new government.
Likewise, it must be the case that the next elections are held on a district basis so that people are electing members of parliament from their localities so as to ensure that the Sunni Arabs can send members of parliament to parliament. In the last elections it was proportional. The Sunni Arabs were largely excluded from parliament: Only 17 got seats in a 275-member parliament. That must be avoided, if the Sunni Arabs are ever going to be drawn in.
And so these are the kinds of things that I think that could be done to move the situation forward. I don't believe that merely having a constitution on paper is a solution. I think there are things happening on the ground militarily and politically that the Bush administration is not addressing. And I believe Congress really has the responsibility to step in now, because it's been two years of really Keystone Cops kinds of policies in Iraq. The U.S. -- the Bush administration -- has been responsible for throwing that country into very substantial chaos and to endangering not only Iraq, but the entire Gulf region. That part of the Middle East is volatile, and all of us, including the poor and workers, depend heavily on the petroleum that comes out of that region. If it falls into massive war, that petroleum supply would be in doubt, and the world could be thrown another Great Depression.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Juan Cole, who teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, laying out ten things Congress could demand from Bush on Iraq. What about laws in this country around U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq?
JUAN COLE: Right. Well, the American public is generally ill-informed about U.S. foreign aid policies. First of all, they think we give a lot of money to foreign countries. We don't. We give a very small amount. Opinion polls show that Americans think we give a quarter of our federal budget to foreign aid, and it's less than 1 percent. And the way that the foreign aid is typically set up is that Congress puts riders into the foreign aid that requires, where possible, that the other country use American companies and American material. There have been instances in which concrete has been imported from the United States because of these kinds of laws.
Well, that kind of language should be excised from the reconstruction aid for Iraq. The money should not be going to American companies, which do things in an expensive way, in a way that Iraqis frankly find difficult to keep up with afterwards. Different kinds of techniques are used in the electricity and so forth. And the money should be spent directly on Iraqi firms. And this would help to jumpstart the Iraqi economy. The best estimates are that unemployment is above 50 percent in that country. In our Great Depression, unemployment was 25 percent. So this is a horrible situation that people are living through in Iraq.
And the U.S. aid is not getting to the people. It's not having the effect that everyone had hoped, because a large amount of it is being spent on very pricey security firms, sort of private commandos getting $120,000 a year; and then much of the reconstruction money is going to U.S. companies that skim off a very large amount of it and then subcontract to Iraqi companies anyway, so that the Iraqi companies get paid much less than the U.S. ones. So I think that direct aid to Iraqi concerns is the way to go here, and again, this ties into my earlier point, which is that some of the more capable firms in Iraq probably have Baath ties. But they should not be excluded unless their owners can be shown to have done something criminal.
AMY GOODMAN: And Juan Cole, you talk about U.S. joining regular meetings of foreign ministers of the Arab world and Iran.
JUAN COLE: Well, the specific thing that I was referring to is that there have been regular meetings of Iraq plus its six neighbors, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The foreign ministers have met regularly to discuss matters of concern. I believe the United States and Russia should join those meetings so that they would be six-plus-two meetings of the neighbors, with Iraq, and should use -- Russia and the United States should use their influence -- the United States with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Russia with Iran and Syria -- to work towards a greater stability in Iraq. All of the neighbors have a stake in a unified and stable Iraq. Trouble there could easily spill over onto them. They also are tempted by the opportunities that the new situation represents.
The United States’ refusal to deal with Syria or Iran on these issues in a diplomatic way, the launching of threats at Damascus and Tehran that we're simply going to bomb them or overthrow them has alienated them, has made it less likely that they will be cooperative. We need a 180-degree turn in this regard. The United States needs to return to diplomacy. And I think the foreign ministers’ meeting of the Iraqi neighbors would be a very good place to exercise that diplomacy. And I think Russia needs to be brought in. It is a traditional power in the Middle East. It has traditional relations with Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern countries, including Iran. And just the United States by itself can’t get the job done.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cole, you’ve laid out your ten things Congress could demand of Bush on Iraq. Now the question is, do you think President Bush is near any of your points? He has said in Salt Lake City, addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, policy of retreat and isolation will not bring us safety. He has rejected a timetable.
JUAN COLE: Well, I don't insist on a timetable. A timetable is, in my view, in and of itself, not very useful. For one thing, there's no guarantee that you could adhere to it. So if you announce that you're going to be down to 75,000 men in Iraq by March of 2006, and a major figure is assassinated and a city goes into turmoil and you can’t possibly withdraw the troops, then you won't have met that deadline, and people will hold it against you, and so forth. So, I don't see the point of announcing a deadline, but a determination behind the scenes to draw down the troops is -- would be all to the good.
I can’t read the Bush administration on these matters. They're not transparent. They never have been. We have no idea why they went to Iraq or what they're doing there or what their ultimate goals are. So, I can’t predict how President Bush will behave in the future. I suspect that the Bush administration is much more eager to draw down the troops than it lets on in public. I think it's certainly the case that they need this level of troops and maybe more through December, if there are to be further parliamentary elections, as they're scheduled in December of this year.
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