Students and professors gathered in Cohen Audiotrium last night to attend the opening of a three-day symposium: "Iraq: Moving Forward."
The forum is sponsored by the Institute for Global Leadership in collaboration with The Project on Justice in Times of Transition and is the inaugural event of the Robert and JoAnn Bendetson Global Public Policy Initiative.
The purpose of the symposium is to bring together several high-profile speakers to address the future of Iraq.
"It's an effort to try to think boldly about not necessary reconciliation, but about pursuing a different type of politics than we're used to today," Director of the Institute for Global Leadership Sherman Teichman said.
Former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor John Shattuck moderated the event and set the tone for the evening with an urgent call to action.
"There are many ways to look back, and looking back is painful and difficult, but we're here to look forward," he said. "Unless the parties to the conflict and many outside players can help pull back from the vortex [they are] in now there will be evermore massive killings."
Ali A. Allawi, a senior advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who previously served as Iraq's first postwar civilian Minister of Defense, a member of the Transitional National Assembly, and as Minister of Finance, provided some historical context for the conflict.
He spoke of the formation of Middle Eastern states after World War I, a process that colonial powers undertook while largely ignoring the fractious racial and religious fault lines coursing through the region that laid the framework for current unrest.
In the post-Saddam power vacuum of Iraq, Allawi said that Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish Iraqis have all asserted claims to power, fuelling a seemingly intractable conflict of "how to reconcile apparently mutually exclusive conceptions of power" in the face of unpunctuated violence and crumbling institutions, he said.
Further contributing to instability, Allawi said, is the "absence of a political culture that defines loyalty outside of a sectarian framework," leading the three disparate groups to put their respective interests before that of the fragmented nation.
In light of this absence, several members of the forum questioned the viability of Iraq's continued existence as a political entity.
Peter Gallbraith, a former staff member of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee who has documented ethnic conflict, said the nation has already divided into ethnically polarized regions, most notably in semi-autonomous Kurdistan to the north and a Shiite stronghold in the south.
Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Isaiah Wilson III, a U.S. Army Academy Professor who served in Iraq, said that Iraqi citizens must question their commitment to maintaining a single state and ask whether "the Iraqi state is worth preserving, and if so, can it be preserved?"
Wilson also noted the lack of a more candid assessment of the potential for a stable democracy in Iraq by the Bush administration. He called it "a very suspicious proposition to begin with" considering the United States and its own tumultuous experience in building a democracy after the American Revolution.
Gallbraith referred to Iraq as "the most ambitious and most incompetently executed attempt at nation building in the history of the U.S." He criticized the fallacy of Bush's assumption that the United States can look to the Iraqi police to help rein in violence, saying that they and the military are not neutral, but themselves combatants in the civil war.
Gallbraith spoke out against the proposed troop surge, referring to it as "not only an escalation of troops, but an escalation of mission without the resources."
Still, Haider al-Abadi, a member on the Iraqi Council of Representatives, maintained the importance of continuing to pursue democracy despite the setbacks his nation has endured, necessitating unswerving commitment from the United States and the international community at large.
"Whatever happens here in the U.S. gets reflected in the Iraqi streets," he said. This support must put Iraqis at the helm of governing the country and allow them to accept responsibility for their country, he explained.
The symposium continues today at 2 p.m. in the Balch Arena Theater.
