Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Eugene Rogan, and as director of the Media Centre,
it is my great pleasure to welcome you all in person and online for the Reza Hussein Memorial Lecture.
This is an event which we have long looked forward to hosting because of the ways in which events in the U.N. compound in Baghdad 20 years and a bit
ago so affected those whose lives were dedicated to trying to restore peace and order to post-invasion Iraq and those who from the academic community,
as well as the diplomatic community,
were caught up in events that no one had anticipated and were to prove so transformative to the lives of all involved,
none perhaps more so than to our colleague Arzu Hasan.
Arzu is a director of the Invisible East program here at the University of Oxford.
She actually has her offices here in the Middle East Centre.
This is a team focussed project that looks at both documentation supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council,
Council and the Go Local project, funded by the European Research Fund,
which involves a study of documents of literary sources and material culture from Afghanistan and from Central Asia.
Arzu, before joining academic academia, had served as a U.N. peacekeeper in the Balkans, in Timor-Leste and other hotspots around the world.
So the shift to academic life was following on a career with the United Nations.
She received her dphil here at Oxford, after which she co-directed the Arts and Cultural Heritage Project, funded by the Living Trust.
Arzu was a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Birmingham from 2013 to 2019.
She is an author of several works that derive directly from her original research.
Her first book, Sacred Landscapes of Medieval Afghanistan, was published by Autry in 2013,
and she co-authored for both annotated translation with commentary Introduction of the Oldest Surviving History bulk in Afghanistan.
This event would not have happened had it not been for our initiative,
and I would like her to come to the podium to explain more about this special event today.
First place. First of all, thank you so much, Eugene, for this very kind introduction.
Thank you so much to all of you for coming to this event.
Thank you so much for agreeing to attend.
I'm really touched.
I have in this room, I'm looking around and I see friends from Oxford, local friends, academics, scholars who know me as a medieval historian.
And in the corner, friends and colleagues who I worked with at the United Nations in East Timor and Iraq.
In Geneva. In your family?
My sister just walked in fashionably late. And so it's it's a real, really special, very special moment for me that we are here together.
And I really thank you from the bottom of my heart, Eugene, really for for agreeing to do this,
which is a little bit different, I think a little bit unusual.
And I wanted to tell you a little bit about me only in relation to this afternoon.
This lecture is named. And I wondered if we could have a picture.
No, I don't think you can. And keep. That's fine.
That's actually I can sure scream. It'll be interesting. Now, don't worry.
We might show you a picture. But he was. He was a wonderful man.
And I'm actually wearing a scarf that he gave me 20 years ago.
And Reza and I, we met in Timor, where we worked with Sergio Vieira de Mello at the U.N. and was at that time was working with IOM,
the International Organisation for Migration,
which at that time was not part of the United Nations in West Timor, which was still part of Indonesia, was still part of Indonesia.
And then he managed to get an international posting because he had come from Iran, where he was an Iranian,
he was born in Iran and he had managed to come to West Timor as a local staff in Iran who was given the chance to be international for three months.
And then he managed to go to East Timor, where he worked for the IOM, as I said,
and then eventually he ended up going to Baghdad to join my colleagues here and DeMello and other colleagues in Iraq in 2003.
Well, we will hear a lot about what happened that day and what has happened since.
So I, I will skip that. But I just wanted to say that obviously two years have passed.
On August 19, it was the 20th anniversary.
Um, and there have been books written about what's what happened that day and what's happened since.
There have been movies produced, Netflix movies, and there's been a lot of thinking about what happened in that room.
But I thought and of course, it was a real reality check, I think,
for the West in terms of its its interference if you want to intervention interventions, but also for the U.N.,
I mean, the U.N., I think I see not I mean,
we we were we thought we were untouchable in the sense that we were in a safe space and this would not happen to us, of course.
It wasn't the first time. It wasn't and it's not the last time that the U.N. has been attacked, but it was never attacked in such a major way.
22 colleagues lost their lives that day. Colleagues, many dozens of colleagues were injured, some severely injured and still bearing the scars.
I think we were at an event 20 years ago in August for the 20th anniversary of Geneva,
and there was a very moving talk by somebody, I think, who spent ten years really recovering, going from hospital to hospital.
So it's still very alive for the survivors.
But for today, the purpose is to offer I think I wanted to offer students, faculty, but also friends,
a moment to reflect a little bit deeper on what happens when we intervene in these countries.
We, the West, intervene in these countries.
But I wanted to come as a personal account.
So Professor Solomon, who will be properly introduced to you shortly, is I mean,
I couldn't have thought of a better person to invite as our inaugural speaker for this lecture which series which we want to be.
I want it to be a lecture series that will run every year.
Um, Selam is not only an academic, but he's also.
A field worker. He was in Iraq himself when the bomb struck and he had met himself.
So I couldn't think of a better person to to invite.
And I think I'm going to leave it at that.
And just again, thank you very much for coming.
And I really look forward to this lecture and I look forward to what I think this lecture does that I haven't yet heard in my 28 years.
Now that I've been in Oxford,
which is really linking the past of the Middle East to the present of the Middle East and and bringing these sort of academic worlds.
Together and also hearing very personal stories.
Hence the subtitle of the series, which are stories to connect.
Because I think when we hear personal stories, we connect to the events.
Even if they were 20 years ago or even hundreds of years ago, we connect to them better.
And so we want to have lectures where sometimes we hear modern subjects,
sometimes we hear historical subjects, and where it's more historical, we hear it through documents.
So texts that were written by normal people, not necessarily by the.
By the rules and so on. So we want to really bring in this voice.
If you want from the ground. And with that, I'm going to leave you and I will pass back to our speaker.
Thank you. Thank you, Arzu.
And yes, thanks for giving a context within which to understand why we're holding this event today.
We're grateful to you for bringing this to us.
We're also grateful for the opportunity this has given us to invite an old friend to the Middle East Centre.
Back to the Middle East Centre after far too many years.
I remember the last time we met. We both had dark hair, as some indicated.
His Excellency Professor Hassan Salameh, Professor of international Relations at your school in Paris,
and the founding Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs.
From 2000 to 2003, he served his country, Lebanon, as Minister of Culture in charge of National heritage and the arts.
He was political advisor to the U.N. mission in Iraq fatally in 2003 as senior
advisor to the United Nations Security General from 23 to 25 and again in 2012.
He served as vice chairman of the Board of the International Crisis Group and sits on the Board of the Open Society Institute.
Institutions that have made such material contributions to trying to bring democracy and and the attention of the world
through well-informed research to the crises that challenge democracy and the freedom of the seas and of the individual.
He was given the Phoenix, the Adelphi and the ADC Awards, as well as the May Day of the Academy's concerns in 2003.
He was made in 17 of the Legion d'Honneur in 2004, and in that same year was named the Arab Cultural Personality of the Year.
With such strong accolades, to his credit, to have a sense that I'll be returned to Oxford to be honoured,
I would say any speaker tonight is truly one of those pleasures and honours that makes one's life as an academic exciting and fun.
Welcome back. Thank you for being here tonight.
It was a very hot day that. But it's not the fact the lady was representing.
One of the Iraqi minorities came to visit us at the mission.
And Sergio was not very keen, but she insisted on having it for.
So we pleaded that he comes to see her.
Please don't take her in my. Which he did.
And then all of a sudden he didn't look at her too much, but he looked at a big map of the East.
And he was in love and he was thinking of a honeymoon.
So he started looking at looks, etc. When he wants to go, you know, she'll sit.
And. The second point is that I want that my son in my office.
You don't need. I said, it's all yours.
So he took off his shoes. Well, he threw the chair and started right and removed the mat.
I went as well to help him, but it was very strongly attached to that.
So I said, you know, I badly need this map and if I don't have it, what do you think of exchanging our offices?
Because there was also another map, you know, quite detailed.
He also showed. I said, okay.
He was half joking. But if we had traded our places, they would have in.
Because my office was on the floor. The building was like giving you my office word on the floor.
And his office was on the road with this huge amount of.
So I didn't know exactly, but I saw a number of like groups that.
I remember we had two or three who I love myself and two bodyguards.
Two of the bodyguards were allowed to remain on the site.
So. So Farhad, who was assisting me then.
I took my jacket. And my phone.
And we started taking the rubble with our own hands, the three of us and the first came back, one of the NFL players.
So that was about that. August 19th, a few minutes before 430.
That day was supposed to end. There's one famous quote, obviously the.
Too poor to know what he should do with the food.
And when Sobel tried to explain to him that the dinner could not take place.
It took him some time to understand how serious the situation.
I think that that day was probably the birthday of guys.
Well, we discovered later that some of the Army officers who used to come and see me.
Have been the founding or some of the founding leaders of that organisation.
And in fact, after us, is there a recovery group who probably did it, did a number of other big attacks and they did it against Jordanian and the.
But that. So that was an important day that went way beyond the Canada Day where we have to.
And here comes the first question. Why were you there?
We were there because we have decided that we didn't want to be within the Green Zone because we thought
that the U.N. should remain independent from the occupying force and not to go and little by force.
So it was a very noble reason.
But it was a very risky. Iraq.
Iraq is very important to understand how the international system is.
I would like to see how. If you look at what happened, you will see that you had a war against Iraq led by a gentleman named Bush in 1990.
That was the target after Saddam Hussein.
And in the year 2003, you had another war against Iraq that also a certain Mr. Bush.
Some. Although the leader of the coalition in both cases was the same country.
Also, the president of that country was the Bush in two cases, although the target was the same country, Iraq.
Nothing could be more different than the difference between they might be like the war and the Jews who fell.
And this tells us a lot about the evolution of the international system.
In the year 1990. That is the year when the Cold War ended.
And for the very first time of its history, the United Nations was given an opportunity to implement its basic mission,
which is to be an organisation for collective security.
And it worked that way. 66 countries, including countries like Egypt or Syria, joined in the coalition to extract Saddam from Kuwait.
But. More countries were ready to join.
And the Security Council for the first time operated the way it should always look at it with unanimity,
although the Arab representatives did not participate in the.
But unanimity China, Russia and the U.S., the two others voting.
And if you look at the register of the U.N. Security Council resolutions, you start with Resolution 660.
It was taken the very day of the invasion and then five days later, Resolution 661 and then a dozen other resolutions.
You you'll find that it is a textbook example of the collective security organisation.
Everything. The sanctions, the humanitarian, everything was discussed and decided unanimously in the Security Council.
And the coalition operated according to the rules.
And one of the rules was that it was a war to liberate Kuwait, not to attack Iraq in Iraq.
And therefore, yes, the coalition did not follow the Iraqi troops into Baghdad.
Look at 2003. Security Council entirely divided.
Two countries, UK and the US supporting the war.
Three other countries Russia, China and France for opposing that war.
Not to mention other members of the Security Council like Germany.
Add to that the Pope himself was entirely against the war.
A war of choice, not legitimate.
Well, think of the general who said once on BBC that it was an illegal war and they didn't report it.
Kofi Annan. It's the war that had the same phobia led by another Bush.
But then it completely different. And I would say.
That the so-called post-Cold War era of the international system started with the first Iraq war and somehow ended with the second.
And I will try to explain. That's why Iraq is important.
The two wars in Iraq and the big opposition between the two wars, despite the superficial similarities.
Is this. The first war.
Basic intention was to re-establish the sovereignty of a country that has been invaded and annexed by an.
So it was in full contradiction with the Department for Torture, and it was against international law.
The 2003 war had a number of justifications, and the more the wars sort of evolved and the post-World War,
you were looking for new justification for it because it had no real legal foundation.
Therefore, you need to produce justifications.
But the basic idea was regime change. And the very first lesson we can learn from that war has to do with regime change.
There is an illusion that you can change regimes in a very innocent way.
You can look. And white.
Because you have. Regimes in that part of the world, at least,
that are so intertwined with the state bureaucracy that the moment you change the regime, the regime collapses.
Yes, the state disintegrates in the same gesture.
So the regime change brings the state deconstruction, but the state reconstruction brings something else that is much worse is social decomposition.
The society implodes. Why?
Because the regime was holding the state and the state was somehow holding the society.
So what we learn from Iraq is that once you think you are changing the regime, like you are changing your necktie in the morning.
You don't understand anything about that part of the world or you do not want to see.
How these regimes operate. So to say that I am doing a regime change can mean and often means I'm starting a civil war and becomes
the target because the regime change brings us to the state position and the regime change is important.
Another reason? When you have regime change.
You better think of the death. There were 25 volumes in the State Department on the day after.
But nobody of those we used to meet in Baghdad at random or knowing what is in there was in them,
for example, who should go and guard the National Museum because looting will take place.
Nobody that left alone. You should not really go into against anybody who has been in the Baath Party for some important reasons.
I've come back. They did exactly that on May 15.
The first decision taken by. In fact,
the regime and the state were so intertwined that it was very difficult for you
to push your career up in the system unless you were a member of that party.
So it was like. Almost compulsive to be part of the.
At some point, the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, sent me to Washington to explain how this applies to education,
because I had told him in one particular governorate of Iraq then that.
The co-chairs to the building of the Education Directorate that became the head of the
directorate because all the top people had been members of the Baath Party and were excluded.
And they took a militiaman who was guarding the building.
And so I went to the Pentagon because Kofi Annan insisted that I tell this particular story,
and I explained it to the then deputy secretary of Defence.
You just left me out after heard that story.
I wanted to tell him that the regime and the state are too intertwined and other places in the health hospital, for example.
It was very difficult to have the hospital work unless you keep the director and deputy director, etc., of the hospital.
Of course, they were in the vast part, of course.
But do you want the hospital to operate in this situation?
For all we want punished to punish someone because in order to get promoted, he accepted the part.
So the de-Ba'athification story. Well, but there is a saying in French that says that experience is like the toothpaste.
It serves only once. We repeated the same stupid thing in Libya.
They issued the legislation in Libya in 2003 that says who ever was serving in the regime?
Well, I was doctor. I was a lawyer. I was the.
I mean, I cannot hold an official position in Libya.
And Libya was deprived of its best people by technocrats because they did exactly the same error.
And that is based on the conceptual misreading, the idea that the regime is something you can extract innocently from the state and from the society.
This is the first lesson I want to. Drew from.
Iraqi experience. The second is a proposition.
And. You are not necessarily in agreement with this position.
But let me tell you that very often, while in Baghdad, I thought that the future of the country could go differently despite.
Were it not for the way the country was handed after.
Which was even worse than the war itself.
I remember seeing people moving around in the Green Zone with books on how Germany and Japan went by in 1945.
So it was useless to tell them this is neither Japan nor Germany.
But those who were in the famous CPA had one obsession.
By the way, I don't want to be nice in particular to the U.K., but the U.K. representative then was not of that opinion.
He supported us. The idea that we need to have a big Nuremberg minimum.
That's the idea. Hey, this is not the story here.
You had the Iraq-Iran war and then you had the war for Kuwait.
The two wars had produced plus 2003.
Hundreds of thousands of widows. And those widows had a point.
They wanted if paper recognise that their husband has passed away not only for the inheritance or for a potential new marriage,
but that this was a very legitimate thing.
So we kept telling Americans what you need is a judiciary to decide for these hundreds of thousands of widows to give them the paper they need.
You know, we need, in judicial terms, the root of that.
We need to bring Saddam Hussein, put him for that and condemn him.
Of course, he should be condemned. And the last man to defend him, I always have refused visits to Baghdad as long as it did.
But that was not the needs of the society at that point.
I'm giving the example of the I can say the same about private property.
You could see people getting killed before our own eyes.
You remember. So because the same piece of land has been disputed by various owners.
From the regime, from after the regime, etc. You needed a judiciary for that?
No, we wanted a big movement in order to judge Saddam Hussein.
So the second thing I would like to say is that if you go into this kind of intervention,
you should put ideology aside and look for competent people and look for also people who are ready to see the situation as it is.
There. And that's what the Iraq war.
So that is why I tend to believe that the work would have been somehow digested by the Iraqis were it not for the way it was ruled in the immediate.
Which was a bush.
A incompetent. Insensitive.
And. Another example that is somehow more dramatic.
I used to receive a number of officers in my office of the U.N. from the Iraqi army.
The Iraqi army had been dissolved almost the same day the Baath Party was installed.
But as officers of the Iraqi army, they had contributed for 15, 20, 25 years.
Part of their monthly salary for their retirement.
So they had contributed from their salaries. So when the army was dissolved.
They were told you can't have in.
It's okay, but at least give me back the money I contributed.
If you don't want to pay me as a retiree. And.
I took this personally and I went like ten times after they came to see me.
Generally, I mean, not. At the very end.
One day, Mr. Brennan told me, You are right.
You are going to give them something, the country like that.
$100 for the gym. $80 for the cover.
80. 70 for the captain and the yacht.
Not like 50. So I they came.
I told them, well, that's what I would snatch for you. I can promise you.
I said, Look. Two days later, we saw a statement saying it's a one time contribution.
It's not a new salary. It's a one time contribution.
So imagine somebody who has spent like 30 years of his life in the Iraqi army giving $100.
Once and for all. So they came back and they told me, Thank you, you have done what you can, but we don't want this 100 votes.
And I looked at one of my assistants. Then I told him I saw bullets in their eyes.
They never came back. When I. Goodbye.
They said,
if tomorrow you hear that on the highway between Baghdad and then a number of military officers have stopped the cars and robbed the people.
It's going to be tough. We are going to do that.
Later, I learned that one of them was one of the founders of that bank.
That is a conceptual mistake at the beginning.
The idea that you can.
Just go and operate according to your ideology rather than what is true.
The third lesson I have in mind is to ask ourselves.
What kind of regime we want when we.
This is a big question. The easy answer is a democracy.
The reality is never like that. No.
In fact, here again, that is a conceptual mistake.
And the big one. If you decide that you have friends and enemies in any country, you try to punish your friends,
to punish your enemies, but you also tend to be kind with your friends.
My two other friends. Very often.
You brought them with you from abroad.
And they could not get into power by their own means.
So they use American tenants for that. And then what?
Do you lose them? They become your allies against that.
The war on terror. Started in Iraq in the year 2003.
And ended up. Producing kleptocracy in many countries with the West found people who were ready to be on his side in the war on terror,
and nobody was asking them what they are doing with the money they are.
Or Steve. In the case of Afghanistan, there is a joke concerning the famous Thursday evening flight from Kabul to Dubai,
because usually they took all the money and put it in Dubai on Friday and then get back to Kabul.
In Libya, you can't imagine the creativity of the kleptocrats.
And I want to remind everybody that in my country, Lebanon, there are a few of them as well, who destroyed the whole banking system.
So we should ask ourselves, Yeah, we don't want terrorists.
We don't want autocrats, a lot of them.
But do we really want thieves through these countries, or do we need to be equally regarding in the behaviour of those who are there?
Well, Iraq is a country that is being plundered before our eyes to be plundered.
London, Libya is being plunged.
The building had been planned. The joke I used to use in Libya was that Lebanese were stupid enough to commit suicide with the other people money.
But you were even more stupid because you are committing suicide with your own money.
Well, these countries are being plundered, so we are building up the new networks of terrorism that is inspired by the behaviour of
the political class we are imposing in those countries where we are fighting terrorism.
And while we need to fight terrorism, we also need to look at the political behaviour of the political class.
We consider our. On July 14th.
2014. What is it then?
The city of Mosul. Fell. In a few hours in the hands of a few hundred people from Dallas.
11,000 Iraqi soldiers were in the city that day.
So what kind of army did we build between 2004 and 2014 so that it was defeated by a few hundreds,
possibly a few dozens of Daesh militants in one night and moved into some.
These guys who are in the Iraqi army probably think that it's useless to die
in order to protect the political class that doesn't deserve to be protected.
So they left that positions. And you could see that in many a country.
Therefore, regime change is something that I'm ready to consider.
If you tell me what kind of regime you have in mind, if this is the kind of regime you have in mind.
I'm not sure what spaces. Then what about the society?
And this is another lesson of this lesson. And studying plural societies like Iraq and.
Syria, other societies like that.
There are various schools and it's not in Oxford that they need to impede that because some of them have been produced in this place.
One way is to say, in plural societies, civil wars happen and they happen.
And that's where the various schools differ from each other.
Some one school says it's engine hatreds.
They hate each other from time immemorial. So there is nothing that can be done to.
Separate them in different countries if you can put them in air conditioned buses and send them to somewhere else because it's like a motor fever,
it comes back, it keeps coming back. So there is nothing that can be done.
We call the school the primordial school.
Those who believe that differences are basically intractable and unbridgeable.
But there are other schools. One of them says it doesn't happen by accident, that plural societies have long periods of peace,
civil peace, or in the marriage of partnership in the bazaar.
So why do they fight against each other in some parts of their long history?
It's something that needs to be studied, but it is not based on history.
Otherwise, ancient history should inspire them to go into a permanent civil war, which is not the case.
They can live for decades and decades of civil peace. So this second school says there are civil war entrepreneurs who at a certain time use the
differences between people for their own purposes in order to mobilise on sectarian lines,
for example, or ethnic lines, and in order to impose themselves as leaders of that country.
This is a second school that is different. That's more optimistic somehow.
So you need to isolate this war enterprise and you need to address the civil society in general in order to have it on your side.
On the side.
I don't want to give you a class on civil wars, but what was clear in Iraq in 2003 was that those who occupied the country will pay mortgages.
And whenever they met an Iraqi, you could see from Bremmer to the Ottoman posts on the ground.
Hello. What's your name? Ahmed. Oh, Brett Bachmann.
And he was Sunni. Shia. So Ahmed would say, well, let me tell you, my father is Sunni, but my mother is Shia.
However, my father, he divorced my first my mother and married one who is good and but my cousin is married.
I don't want to hear all that. Tell me, are you Sunni, Shia or good?
I accused the occupying powers of having hate and the sectarian feelings of the Iraqi.
Because the whole city of Baghdad was full of people intermarried, business partners, etc.
And by being primordial, again, it conceptual.
It conceptual. It's not the practical, operationally a conceptual mistake and the way you look at the society that led to basically ethnic cleansing.
Three years later in Baghdad. But that is very different today.
And to Baghdad, then the Baghdad north of Saddam Hussein declared that the sea level.
Well for many centuries now that is very sectarian in the in the colour of its neighbour is.
And it did not happen on its own.
It was held by. That is a lesson I would like to draw.
That has to do with zero. Which is more related to the international system than to the Iraqis itself.
You know,
it is not an accident that we teachers of international relations have been completely unable to give a name to the era in which we live now.
So we call it not because we are lazy, but because we are not creative enough.
We call it the post-Cold War era. The Cold War has ended, my friends, 23 years ago and didn't find a name to call the period we are in.
So there should be a reason for the reason for that, in my view, is the fact that what's happened since the end of the cold.
Is a mixture of contradictory terms that prevent us from saying this is the paradigm through which we need to look at the international system today.
A paradigm has not appeared that is constant enough and strong enough to define the period.
So end of history was dead.
One or two years after the clash of civilisation appeared and passed away and other paradigms were offered, they didn't survive.
Why? Because since the end of the Cold War, there is a lot of uncertainty on power distribution in the world.
We don't know if the system is unipolar, bipolar, multipolar.
We don't know for West who how many great powers do have?
Three, four, five, six, seven. Only one. You have a huge debate going on about all these issues.
But one thing, Iraq played an important role. If you look at this post-Cold War era that started in the 1990 and we are now in 2023.
You see that it is, in fact divided into two quite different.
You have the post-Cold War era between 1998 and 2003.
And you have the international system since 2003 and the period between 1990 and 202,003.
You certainly had the number of civil wars in the Balkans, in Africa.
But the force was to a large extent regulated when used by the great.
And I suppose. The big question then was the following.
Do we intervene in the Balkans in order to help save the Bosniaks or the.
Kosovar or we don't intervene. That was the question.
And you had two lines in Washington, two lines in London, Two lines.
That is a. But nobody was rushing to intervene.
There was some reluctance, especially after Somalia. Well, some reluctance to intervene.
On the other hand, you had a number of good news for those who want to regulate force.
First, the number of nuclear warheads went down from like 40,000 for each of the two superpowers to less than 5000 for each.
Then all the conventional forces of the Soviet Union disappeared from.
Then you had an agreement in order to freeze any nuclear tests.
Then you had a prorogation. Probation?
Yes. Of the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, forever.
And all non-nuclear powers simply say they conceded that forever they will not try to have a nuclear bomb.
Then you had the International Criminal Court in 1999 through the Rome Treaty.
So you had a number of agreements that regulate the force.
And when force was used with the exception of was the one I feel like mine, no great power would return to it without first asking the authorities.
In 2003, a new era of 70 years started, which I call the era of giving the nation the force.
Not only the war itself was not allowed, but the Security Council.
But it was emulated by other powers in 2008 and Asia at Dr. Georgia.
Then in 2014 attacked Ukraine, 2015 in Syria.
Then other countries, mid-sized powers like Turkey, intervened in Djibouti,
Libya and Syria and Iraq and keeps intervening like Iran, intervening in many countries.
So there was a huge invasion force.
And China thinks of intervening possibly against Taiwan.
That is why this period is divided into two.
Before the war in Iraq and after the war before the war in Iraq, deregulation of course,
was dominant but not dominant to the point of having all these wars stopped.
Some little civil wars still took place left and right.
But after 2003, the great powers did not hesitate to use force.
And they didn't ask the Security Council for authorisation.
And when the Security Council met, they used the need to sort.
Doesn't allow them to or compel them to stop the intervention.
So Iraq is important for that as well for our reading of the international system,
because the war in Iraq in 2003 divides that era of 33 years into two, 13 years of promising and 20 years that are much more problematic.
And what is happening in my part of the world today is not something that would contradict this.
Deregulation will force. Finally.
That is a lesson that concerns the. When.
The first three resolution of the post-war was adopted by the Security Council Resolution four.
Was adopted. The British government and a few other governments, the Spaniards as well, because they were part of the coalition that.
And the few other countries insisted on a role for the U.N. in the post-war Iraq.
So if you read that resolution, you will discover in paragraph in the introduction that considering that the Council has
decided to give the United Nations and quoting a vital role in the reconstruction of Iraq,
vital role in the reconstruction. And then comes Article eight of that famous resolution that details what the U.N. can do.
And in fact, it says the U.N. should do everything in cooperation with the occupying power.
So on the one hand, the U.N. was given a vital role.
On the other hand, the U.N. could do nothing without coordinating with the occupying power.
The contradiction was clear. I'm not going to name names, but senior advisers to Kofi Annan then said, You better resign than implement that.
Why? Because the United Nations should not operate in a situation where legally you are saying that it's a military occupation.
Legally, it's not something it's not the sort of polemical, the attribution.
Legally, you are saying it's an occupation with rights and duties for any occupying power, according to international law.
The U.N. should not insert itself into this kind of situation.
When I arrived in Baghdad, I discovered that every day before going to bed, I was asking myself the same question.
Was it right or not right for the U.N. to be present?
Because there were days where you felt that you are useless.
What a mission of 30 or 40 guys would do in a country that is ruled by its are
living in Saddam's own residence and given powers that even Saddam didn't get,
didn't have. And an army look paying army of 140,000 people at his service.
What a group of 30 or 40, even if they are creative minds we thought we were out of.
Uh, what could they do in a situation like that?
So it's a challenge. So there were days when you thought.
There is something wrong with this. Like, for example,
this famous resolution 1483 says that the occupying power cannot spend a single
penny without the monitoring and advisory board made of four institutions.
You know, the IMF, World Bank, the Arab Fund in Kuwait and the United Nations.
Well, while we were in Baghdad, Mr. Bremer spent $7 billion without asking my advice.
So when you have this and Sanju was very, very, very nervous about this issue, very nervous.
He considered that if we fail in that and that role as advisory and monitoring and custodians basically of the Iraqi money, we're custodians.
If we fail in that we cannot succeed in other. So these were the days where you thought that it was a mistake.
And that senior adviser to Kofi was right in saying we should not.
But there were days where really useful.
Ayatollah Sistani would not talk to the Americans, but he talked to us.
The former regime officers would not talk to the Americans because the Americans would not talk to them.
But we were ready to talk to them. And if we were given enough power, we would probably have prevented them from moving into the Islamist opposition.
There were days where we were able to introduce a communist non-sectarian against Mr. Bremmer views into the transitional governing institutions.
So we were happy because he was not sectarian, it was murder and he was communists, but he was not.
The communists didn't like it. But when we had some complicity from even the idea that.
The Iraqis should recapture their sovereignty as soon as possible.
It was something that said Israel was very, very formidable and that we developed across the country all the time.
In fact, the day famous day, we were bombed.
We were preparing for the following day, a visit to Mosul.
In order to preach that idea, the power to be returned to the Iraqis as soon as possible.
That was that was theological for saying that it should take place now.
Anytime it would an occupation should stop as soon as.
So we felt then useful. For example.
Sistani had the fatwa, his first things, but it was against one law firm in New York writing the Iraqi.
So I remember we were visiting it was a Saturday and we were visiting and there's a.
Sergio and myself and the translators and.
I remember he had long fingers said.
If the Constitution is not written by elected Iraqis, I would raise [INAUDIBLE] against them across the country.
I said, Are you going to issue a fatwa? He said, I have already written.
I said, And when I want to issue this, he said, This guy, he named 1 million famous lawyers because he wrote books about it in New York.
And he said, I am told that he would give the draft to the State Department.
So he was informed, uh, next Wednesday.
So I issued a fatwa on Tuesday, and it was Saturday.
So we went back to our cars was setting. So he said, okay, that was a fine day.
We met happy. Then I suddenly then had to be out of the club.
Uh. Uh, but the meeting, Mrs. Daniels.
And the festival was for Tuesday. So I thought, we better not pull back.
Let's go and tell. But he better put constitutional graft in his job.
Otherwise, you are. He said, okay, that's good.
We went to see them. So Sagittarius to be explained.
You have to listen to me.
This guy has a few million behind it. So if he issued a fatwa against you, you will have them in the streets before the office.
So you better listen to him and put that constitutional draft written by lawyer and into.
What is this Pharisee old guy telling me?
Yeah, I said, You better listen to that old guy when he talks to you.
And he called us to Niger in order, I think, to convey that message.
So you better listen to.
So sometimes there were days where we were very useful because he retracted and that constitutional draft was thrown into the bin,
which is a good thing. So there were days when we thought that the U.N. was doing a useful.
And there were days where we had doubts.
Says, you know, I have doubts. The other members of the mission had also doubts about mediation under occupation.
That's what we were. It was not mediation in abstract.
It wasn't the nation under occupation. That day 19th of August 2003.
Half an hour before the explosion I was sitting with was reviewing our visits the next day and also doing something else.
Reading again, a draft column he had written for The New York Times.
That was his first book. First time he wrote something.
And that draft still exists. And he was defining the role of the UN because we were at the end.
It was almost a daily battle with the. So he was trying to say that we lacked strength and power, but we have.
An exception. Source of strength that is, without us.
There is no legitimacy for whatever is being done in Iraq.
That was the gist of the article. This article was never published.
Was that after an interview? Was. And the explosion.
And at the end of that very long day after finding probably the last bullets you see, they went back to the hotel one.
I asked myself. All that. So there is a lesson.
In Iraq 2000 and. Thank you. Professor Salami.
I don't say just out of politics, but you have given this audience,
without doubt the best analysis we have heard of the consequences of the American invasion on Iraq itself.
We've had no end of conversation with people who are intimately involved.
But you've just told us things. You've given us a cold sighted analysis that I think, you know,
looking at my own notes and imagining what you've all taken from it will make us rethink the events and the historic significance.
And then your positioning of yourself, of Sergio, obviously, of Reza as well, of all those who were in what was to prove such an impossible mission.
You asked earlier in your talk, you know, what were we doing here?
And in a sense, I was waiting for the analysis you gave in your final lesson.
What are we doing here? Not so much outside of the Green Zone where we were vulnerable to attack, but what was the United Nations doing?
Cleaning up a mess made by America without the UN's consent?
And I think that in talking about the ways in which the U.N. was able to actually make a difference, even under those constraints,
you can see what would motivate people, high minded people, people with values to commit to such a mission,
even when you knew at some very deep level that it was an illegitimate mission,
that the resolution that defined your mission was one that actually was not really
in keeping with the terms of the charter or the mission of the United Nations.
And so with that, I think we come away with a sense of redoubled sense of tragedy in the loss on that day,
but also a redoubled sense of admiration for all of you who took on this failing hope of being able to turn around a regime
change that was in the process of decomposing the Iraqi society into what would prove to be the birthplace of many,
a nihilistic movement like the one you keep invoking.
I will ask one question before I open to your audience, but I don't recall ever learning who was responsible for the bombing.
Well, what do I answer now? Yeah, if you would.
And just to set it in the context, if the bombing was in some sense a response to the legitimacy problems the UN mission faced in Baghdad,
I mean, that was the communique that was issued by Al Qaida for four people from a guy arrested.
I think one of the leaders was Egyptian, I think.
And he he he had been he had been a ball boy in a golf club in Milan, and he was mistreated by the club.
So he radicalised and joined Al Qaida. That's the story we we heard like a month or two later.
And four people were arrested. But later, when ISIS was created in 2005, I would say the founders, many of not all, not all,
but many of the founders were former officers of the Iraqi army who had gone through a
sort of transition and radicalisation because of the way they were they were treated.
I should I wasn't clear enough in what they said. These officers were ready to cooperate with the Americans,
but I need to say that they were they wanted to remain in the army even if the country was occupied.
They, they said, okay, we defeated, the regime has collapsed, but we are ready to remain in the army and to serve our country.
And they were rejected. So it was it was point for them.
It was accepted. They couldn't understand why they show that level of cooperation and they are rejected.
And that allowed me to say if the after war had been handled differently, the war would have been disastrous.
Let me put another question to you, though, because you talked about those that come on the bandwagon of the occupying power.
The Americans didn't come to Iraq on their own.
They took the lessons on what they would find and what they would do, largely from the Iraqi National Council for an Iraqi National Congress.
Yes. And I. I wonder whether there's not part of the analysis that also must go to the wilful distortion of how the
Iraqi people would respond to liberation that was being peddled by Ahmed Chalabi and those around him,
and that the Americans,
given the choice of listening to people like you or listening to people like them, felt they were the people they knew and were in that way,
drawing down a pathway towards de-Baathification, trying to promote people who came from the mahajot, from, you know, despotism over the diaspora.
Look, I we shouldn't look at these people in there and put them in December.
I can say that the two main Kurdish leaders of that time were really, really, I mean.
Enslavement near Halabja. Talabani was something in.
It'll be a left hook that's old or something. Not then.
So I won't say this way out of the game on the.
I mean, they were helped by the Americans. They were helped by other European countries, but they really represented.
They really represent the constituencies, really. The big surprise was the others.
You named Ahmed Chalabi? Ahmed tried to steal the show very early on by organising a big sort of caravanserai in what's the name of the city.
What went on with the whole Ahmed? I built the city on the leave.
That was not really necessary. So he told everybody it was just starting to get interested in Iraq, then said, Seriously.
So I heard it from everybody that you see like.
Sea of Iraqis coming to Nasiriya to upload Ahmed Chalabi as the next prime minister.
There were 2000. 2000.
So this is different. It's a puzzle. This is different.
This is. And in fact, that's the day the Americans decided that we must be permanent because he failed.
That's what they told us. They don't want to be. They told us that they discovered that the misjudge.
But there were leaders with so many leaders, there were people where in politics and the post-war politics who would not even when they were doing it.
Americans are giving us the country and you are here and I need to.
Defending on rights and all these things is none of your business yet,
though there is one will be prime minister later who refused to see us until we were excluded.
He was the only one of the 25. He used to see us and one other who was very famous.
I will not name the names wanted to deal with, said you.
And they sentence had you almost killed for a power generation plant in the north of the country that was built by the UN.
Be finished. They wanted to buy it for like $200 or something like that from the NDP.
So this kind of things and. So these are not serious people.
So I would not put everybody in the same basket at the end.
Who would represent that minority? We couldn't find anything and find a way with us.
John So-and-so was representing the founding lady who was the British before he joined the intelligence and the intelligence of your country.
But it was then that the British premier.
But it ten times more sense of the race to be fair lunch for the whole bar.
So someone's discovered the lady and she had put in her see me to represent that minority, that she cooks them better.
By the way, this was the lady we met on that morning.
Did you test her? I mean, this is her credential on her CV.
Did you at least.