Ali Alawi at Politics and Prose

Ali Alawi spoke about his new book on occupied Iraq. Allawi left Iraq in exile in the early 1970s with his family. He went to England, studied and then taught at Oxford and became an investment banker. He went back to Baghdad, became Finance Minister and Defense Minister. He got disgusted; he got angry. He wrote this book.

The book has been very well received.

It was pretty depressing. To sum it up: things were bad, people were killed, then there was the invasion, then we had hope, then we screwed it up (we = everyone involved), now things are really tough, but maybe we can still turn it around. But our window is very small. He believes the Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds and of Shiites, and that there have been another several hundred thousand who have died as a result of the invasion and occupation. Then there are a couple of million refugees, mainly in Syria and Jordan. The midddle class is gone. The Shiites and the Kurds are allied. The Sunnis are in trouble. If America gets out without leaving a structure, it will get worse. If they stay, it will get worse.

He believe that, with the advent of the Bush II administration, academics who had been peripheral became core, and they developed this plan for the middle east that had nothing to do with the middle east.

There was no happy ending.