by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

April 9, 2009

American philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, according to Noah Feldman, remembering and trying too hard not to repeat past mistakes can cause new problems entirely.

That is the lesson Feldman drew from the Iraq war and his experience as a member of the Iraq reconstruction team led by Ambassador Paul Bremer in 2003.

After toppling Saddam Hussein, the United States committed two disastrous errors: It disbanded the Iraqi security forces, thus alienating a massive number of trained fighters, and it expelled almost all Baath Party members from the civil service, stripping the administration of virtually everyone capable of running it.

Feldman, professor of law at Harvard University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke of his time in Baghdad in the April 2 opening address at a two-day conference at Kean University. The theme was Historical Perspectives and Public Policy: How Old Rules Fare in a New World Order.

The event was hosted by Kean’s Jewish Studies Program and the Department of History. Cosponsors included the Holocaust Resource Center, the Human Rights Institute, and the Kean University Historical Society.

Feldman’s topic was Nation Building: Breaking the Paradigm in the Middle East. Addressing around 180 students, teachers, and members of the public, he picked up on the theme spelled out by Dr. Dennis Klein, professor of history and director of the Jewish Studies Program.

Learning the lessons of history is seen “as a prudent way of managing current events,” said Klein, citing Santayana, but too simplistic an approach allows for all kinds of pitfalls.

Feldman, who has been at the center of a number of controversies ranging from his views on Islamic governments to a well publicized run-in with his former Jewish day school, said he sought to warn Bremer about making false historical analogies. Feldman is fluent in Arabic, has degrees in history and law, and is experienced in the interplay of politics, constitutional law, and religion.

While the Iraqi army could be a threat to the democracy the Bush administration was determined to establish, Feldman said he warned in a memo, the United States stood to gain more by cooption than alienation, he said. It wasn’t until General David Petraeus re-employed many of those Sunni fighters to provide supplementary security services that things began to calm down in the country.

“We tend to focus too much on the dangers instead of the upside,” he told the Kean audience. “Bad things also have good sides to them.”

‘We’re not winning’

The same principle applied to the Baath Party. The “de-Baathification” policy was modeled on the post World War II “de-Nazification” of Germany, Feldman said, but in fact, the anti-Nazi policy “was a fraud.” Nazi membership actually ran so deep within German society that had all sympathizers and collaborators been brought to justice, “the country would have fallen apart.”

The Nazi analogy obscured the fact that the Baathists were the only legal party in Saddam’s Iraq and membership was hard to avoid. “Using a false historical analogy — a myth — 100,000 Iraqis were eliminated from the government and the country ground to a halt,” Feldman said.

The memo was leaked to the British leadership in Iraq, which infuriated Bremer and abruptly ended Feldman’s employment on the team.

Iran has been the biggest beneficiary of the American invasion of Iraq, Feldman said. “We invaded the enemy of our enemy,” he said, undermining what was the one counterbalance to Tehran in the region. On the other hand, there is some commonality between what Iran and the United States want in Afghanistan. Iran, he said, wants neighbors who are weak but not chaotic.

With regard to Afghanistan and the Taliban, Feldman said, “We’re not winning and that means we’re losing.” He continued: “The generals are telling Obama that we can win because we ‘won in Iraq,’” arguing for more troops — to mirror the surge in Iraq.

In response to a question from an audience member, Feldman acknowledged the complicating impact of issues like the oil pipeline through Afghanistan and the narcotics trade. But he suggested the United States remains hell-bent on being seen as a benevolent force in the region.

“Since we want to help people, we almost always deeply believe that what we are doing is right. President Bush believed that, President Obama believes that, and our soldiers believe that,” he said. “So we don’t need to learn from historical examples of what can go wrong, because our motives are ‘good.’”

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