The dynamic of occupation.

• Author: Bishara, Azmi
• Position: Thinking Politically

Given the mountain of written words coming out about Iraq, it sometimes seems as if writers outnumber soldiers by some 1,000-to-one. Yet it is the outpourings of researchers and intellectuals affiliated with the US administration that are most astonishing and, unfortunately, far more significant than the flood of information coming out of Iraq. Many of these people produced one book after another in the 1980s as they climbed up the academic ladder. Now they find themselves advising the occupation authorities in Baghdad. They are in a rare position for academics: they can put their theories into practice. Washington's voracious appetite for ideology has given these academics-cum-advisors a chance to dictate approaches to the Greater Middle East.

These administration-affiliated academics conveniently define the Middle East as that area designated as such by US Central Command. Such a glib formulation saves any speculation on whether the Middle East is Arab or not, or on why it should include Pakistan and not Turkey, etc.

If any good comes from all this twaddle it is to be found in the sudden realization that the academic machine and the whirlwind of conferences and seminars it spawns is pointless. Professor Larry Diamond of Stanford University is a good example. Diamond has advised the administration to act swiftly against Al-Sadr's movement and to disarm its militia. His argument is that democracy will never materialize in the presence of militias.

What Diamond conveniently omits is any reference to the militias operated by parties participating in the Governing Council, perhaps because the latter symbolize the sectarian federalism on which the Americans are so keen. It makes one regret ever reading the books Diamond penned, one after another, on democracy and the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s.

Abstraction serves the status quo. The professional theorists who dwell in academia and propagate notions of the abstract truly believe that dictatorship is something that lacks roots. They are stunned when the collapse of a dictatorship leads to the collapse of other structures. They truly believe that dictatorship is a naked force that, once smashed, would make room for democracy pure and simple.

According to the theorists this can happen without democrats, without the middle classes. It is the result of a relentless imperial quest that breaks the country into pieces and gives the nation a foretaste of sectarianism.

It is...