How the U.S. can still save Iraq

It's time for the U.S. to listen to secular Iraqis like Omar Fekeiki, a passionate journalist with a bold and original plan to put Iraq together again.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

Jonathan Finer

Washington Post reporter Omar Fekeiki interviewing an Iraqi while embedded with the Marines in Fallujah, 2005.

March 11, 2008 | As the debate over Iraq has raged in America, one group has been conspicuously absent: the Iraqis themselves. Neither war supporters nor opponents seem very interested in the opinions of the people most directly affected by the invasion. This fact reflects the moral confusion and blind spots that have haunted both sides of the debate, ones that stem from the profoundly ambiguous nature of Bush's war.

Which is why I was grateful to hear from Omar Fekeiki. I met Fekeiki two months ago in a class on magazine journalism I co-teach at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It felt a little peculiar to be teaching journalism to him. Although he is only 29 years old, he has worked for three years as a translator and reporter in Iraq for the Washington Post. He has talked his way past checkpoints where he could be killed simply because of his name, and continued doing interviews on the street even when his sources warned him he was about to be killed. These are not things they teach in J-school.

I had seen Fekeiki in Charles Ferguson's documentary "No End in Sight," with his face obscured to protect him because he was still in Iraq. He was clearly an intelligent and courageous man. When I talked to Fekeiki, I realized he was also exceptionally well-informed about both the political situation in Iraq and the mood of the Iraqi people. Equally important, he doesn't have any obvious axes to grind. Of mixed sectarian and ethnic heritage, he has no biases or allegiances to any group. He is unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration's blunders, yet refuses to exonerate his countrymen for their share of responsibility for the dreadful state of Iraq. He calls U.S. soldiers "my brothers," in gratitude for the sacrifices they have made, but says that unless America makes a radical break with its current doomed approach, the troops should go home.

Most important, Fekeiki has a plan that he believes can save Iraq. He is firm but not arrogant in his convictions. "When I start talking about what should happen now, I enter this Iraqi mood, and I don't assume Americans will understand," Fekeiki said. "But I'm talking from an Iraqi point of view and I know what my country needs."

He said that because of Iraq's sectarian divisions, no religious government, including the current one of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, will ever succeed. Instead, he said, the United States should replace the Maliki regime with an iron-fist secular government that would impose martial law and basically lock the country down for a year. Convicted terrorists would be executed. At the same time, the new regime must build housing to give ordinary Iraqis a stake in its success. At the end of a year, elections would be held. If Iraqis didn't like the secular regime, they could vote in another government. Fekeiki has sent his plan (found on his blog, 24 Steps to Liberty,) to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi but has not heard back from her office.

There are reasons to be skeptical of Fekeiki's plan. It assumes that enough Iraqis can get beyond sectarian hatred to create a viable judiciary and trustworthy security forces. It assumes that potential spoilers like Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army can be marginalized. It might require a grand bargain with Tehran to prevent the Iranians from sabotaging the plan, and no U.S. administration has shown that it is willing, let alone that it possesses the diplomatic vision or skill, to pull that off. Above all, it rests on an implicit belief that Iraqis are ready and willing to turn the page on the horrific violence and religious fanaticism that has racked their country.

But the United States doesn't have the luxury of ignoring any plan that offers a chance of salvaging something from the Iraq nightmare. The current political debate is a useless stalemate. John McCain is committed to following Bush's doomed strategy, while the Democratic candidates say they will simply pull the troops out. The Democratic position makes more sense because there is no reason to keep squandering American lives and money for nothing -- worse than nothing, in fact, since our presence in Iraq is a gigantic recruiting poster for jihadis. But a U.S. withdrawal is likely to result in a horrific bloodbath, even worse than anything Iraq has previously endured. That is not an outcome anyone, whether pro-war or antiwar, can contemplate with equanimity.

Fekeiki realizes his plan is bold and provocative. But his voice is important and original, given how seldom we hear from native Iraqis about the fate of their own country. And when it comes to life on the Iraq streets, few speak with more experience. In June 2006, Fekeiki figured he would never get the chance to say a word again. He stumbled into the Washington Post's translator-reporter job right after the invasion. One night as he was leaving work, a maroon BMW sedan appeared behind his car, flashing its lights and refusing to go past him. Fekeiki pulled over. "I just wanted to see them," he told me. "Either you kill me or you don't. I didn't want to lead them to my house. I didn't want my family to die. So I thought, if they want to kill me, they should kill me now." But the two men in the BMW just waited behind him.

Fekeiki managed to shake off his pursuers, but the maroon BMW reappeared in front of his home in the Jamiya neighborhood of Baghdad. This meant they already knew where he lived.

Fekeiki had been working under extremely dangerous conditions for more than three years, conducting interviews in public, and his instincts had never let him down. He had already fled Baghdad once before after being threatened, choosing the comparative safety of embedding with the Marines in their assault on Fallujah. The two men in the BMW didn't kill him that night, but he knew they were going to. That night he packed his suitcases. The Post offered to send an armored car to pick him up, but he refused because his neighbors would notice and his family would be at risk. The next day he had one of his brothers drive him to the Post's office, ducking down out of sight until he got out of his neighborhood.

"It was very scary because the next day, my neighborhood was shut down. Blocked. It was sealed," Fekeiki said. "Usually the al-Qaida people seal the neighborhood when they want to kill someone. So I thought they sealed it because of me. I have no idea if it's true."

He lived in the office for three days, until a flight to Jordan was available. Two months later he was in Berkeley.

Fekeiki grew up in the upscale Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, on the Tigris River. It's a mostly Shiite neighborhood, but those labels didn't mean anything to Fekeiki growing up -- nor, he said, did they mean anything to most Iraqis. "My mother is a Sunni Kurd, and my father is from a Shiite family. I say 'from a Shiite family' because he doesn't care; he's a very secular guy. And I have a Sunni brother and a Shiite brother. I'm none. 'I'm Omar,' I tell people."

Resolving the sectarian conflict is the key to fixing Iraq, but Fekeiki said that Americans lack a fundamental understanding of that conflict -- and don't grasp that they are largely responsible for creating it. Before the invasion, he said, it was considered bad taste in Iraq to ask which sect you belonged to. "It was taboo," he said. "It was very insulting, very demeaning, to ask such questions. Which is very sad now, because the first question you ask in Iraq is, Are you Sunni or Shiite? It's totally foreign to us. I always say it's a phase and we're going to get through it. Maybe it's going to take a long time, maybe not in my lifetime. But it will change. Iraq was always secular, and it will always stay secular."

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