Here's a little pop quiz to refresh the memory of those readers who refuse to believe that the old habits of a big power die hard: When was the first time the US worked covertly, disbursing millions of dollars under the table and deploying sundry CIA agents, to engineer the emergence of a government in an Arab country guaranteed to behave as Washington thought an Arab government should? And when was the last? The answer: Syria in July 1956, and Iraq in January 2005.
Okay, granted, the machinations in Syria took place almost half a century ago, and should be seen against the backdrop of the Cold War, when if you did not side with the US you were seen as actively allying yourself with its enemy, the Soviet Union. No such thing as being an innocent bystander or indifferent (“nonaligned” was the fashionable term then) to the conflict between the two superpowers was tolerated.
The US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, did not mince words at the time. “Neutrality,” he proclaimed, “has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.”
So Washington sent Kermit Roosevelt, its top Middle Eastern CIA agent (the very man who, with a handful of local agitators and conspirators in Iran, overthrew the duly elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh) to Damascus to try their hand at stage-managing a coup, or at least the elections, to insure that the leftists, communists and supporters of the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party, otherwise known to us today as the Baath Party, did not come to power. (The beneficiary of all this was to be Adib Shishakly, former rightwing dictator of Syria, living covertly in Lebanon.)
The operation failed when the authorities in Damascus uncovered the plot and declared Roosevelt and his second hand man, the brash Howard (“Rocky”) Stone, persona non grata, and expelled them from the country in August.
Footnote: As Stone, who had helped Roosevelt overthrow the Iranian government three years earlier, drove his car to the Lebanese border, he ran his Syrian motorcycle escort off the road and hollered at the fallen cop that Col. Sarraj, the Syrian intelligence chief, “and his commie friends” should be told that “I would beat the [expletive] out of them with one hand tied behind my back if they ever crossed my path again.”
Just as in those days the ingrained, knee-jerk reflex of American policy makers was to see communism as representing a clandestine force lurking behind every expression of nationalist pride by formerly colonized people, stirring up the hydra of revolution, so it is today that Islam has become demonized, though it is for Arabs the one faith that had grown out of the very bosom of their history, culture, language and traditions. A faith natural for them to embrace, or return to, after all other secular ideologies, from Baathism to Nasserism, pan-Arabism to socialism, had failed them.
Enter Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner (for his expose of the Mei Lei massacre in Vietnam) with an article in the current issue of the New Yorker, about Washington’s attempts to covertly manipulate the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
“The administration was confronted with a basic dilemma,” he writes. “The likely winner of a direct and open election would be a Shiite religious party. The Shiites were bitter opponents of Saddam’s regime, and suffered under it, but many Shiite religious and political leaders are allied, to varying degrees, with the mullahs of Iran. As the election neared, the Administration repeatedly sought ways — including covert action — to manipulate the outcome and reduce the religious Shiite influence.”
It wasn’t meant to be that way. Larry Diamond, an academic who served briefly as a senior adviser to the CPA, told Hersh in an interview that in meetings with political leaders in Iraq, “I said, matter-of-factly, that of course the United States could not operate the way we did in the Cold War. We had to be fair and transparent in everything we did, if we were really interested in promoting democracy. I took it simply as an act of faith.”
Still, the Americans wanted people like Iyad Allawi, who was seen as close to the US and hostile to Iran, to win, not the bad guys.
A former senior intelligence official told the investigative reporter: “The election clock was running down, and people were panicking. The polls showed that the Shiites were going to run off with the store. The Administration had to do something.”
To be sure, there was a strong possibility that Iraqis themselves would resort to voter fraud, with or without US assistance — and there were several documented instances of that. And as far as the scope and method of the US covert action is concerned, that, according to Hersh, is hard to discern exactly. Current and former intelligence officials who spoke to him about the election plot, however, “were unable or unwilling to give precise details about who did what and where on Election Day.” These sources say they heard reports of “voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, bribery, and the falsification of returns.”
Suffice it to say that 12 days after the voting, there were surprises and anomalies to reckon with: The pro-Iranian Shiites did worse than anticipated, with 48 percent of the vote, giving them far less than the two-thirds of the assembly seats needed to form a government, and thus control over the writing of the constitution.
In the end, the efforts by the US to actively and in places covertly engage in reducing the Shiite bad guys’ plurality delayed their ability to form a stable government, “contributing to the instability and disillusionment that have benefited the insurgency in recent months.”
In virtually all Washington’s misadventures around the world, from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957 to the Congo in 1960, and from Chile in 1973 to Australia in 1975, the tables were turned against the CIA. History and its implacable imperatives, have a way of tricking the trickster. But, hey, old habits die hard.
