http://democracyrising.us/content/view/658/164/When U.S. Occupation in Iraq Ends the Violence is More Likely to Subside PDF | Print | E-mail
Written by Kevin Zeese
Monday, 04 December 2006
Half Measures Seem Less Dangerous, But Are Often Moreso
An Interview with William Polk, Author of Out of Iraq
William Polk is co-author with George McGovern of Out of Iraq and can be purchased on Amazon and at many other outlets. He taught at Harvard University from 1955 to 1961 when President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the United States Department of State. In 1965, Dr. Polk became Professor of History at the University of Chicago. There he also established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and was a founding director of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. He was called back to the White House briefly during the 1967 Middle Eastern War to write a draft peace treaty and to act as an advisor to McGeorge Bundy, the former head of the National Security Council, who was the president's personal representative during that crisis. Dr. Polk is also the author of a treatise on The United States and the Arab World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, 1969. 1975, 1980 and 1991), Understanding Iraq, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2005) and numerous other books. More information on Dr. Polk can be found at:
http://www.williampolk.com/ and in the article below.
Kevin Zeese: Describe the relevant parts of your background, e.g. connection to Iraq, experience with insurgencies and your study of insurgencies.
William Polk: I visited the Middle East first in 1946 because my older brother George Polk was then the chief CBS correspondent there. On my way back to America, I stopped for some weeks in Baghdad. I was to return there many times over the years. In 1951, as a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, I lived in and began a serious study of Iraq. That resulted in a short book for the American Foreign Policy Association called "What the Arabs Think." I then went on to Oxford where I studied Arabic and Turkish. After Oxford, I taught and did my doctorate at Harvard where I was assistant to the director of the Middle East Studies Center, Sir Hamilton Gibb. From there, President Kennedy appointed me to the Policy Planning Council where I was responsible for most of the Islamic world and took part in a wide range of studies and actions. I was head of the interdepartmental task that helped to end the Algerian war and was a member of the crisis management subcommittee that dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Through my work on Egypt, President Nasser gave me an opportunity to visit, travel extensively in and meet the senior officials in Yemen and then Crown Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia afforded the same opportunity for me to meet with the Yemeni Royalist guerrillas. During that period, I also visited Viet Nam where former Vice President Henry Cabot Lodge allowed me free rein to talk with all the American and Vietnamese officials. Drawing these first-hand experiences together and reading widely on others, I made an extensive study of guerrilla warfare on which I lectured at the National War College. After four exciting and informative years in government, I resigned, partly because of the Viet Nam war which I opposed and (unpopularly) predicted we would lose, and became professor of history and founder-director of the Middle East Studies Center at the University of Chicago.
While at Chicago, I co-chaired (with Evgeni Primakov who later became Russian prime minister) a Pugwash committee on peace in the Middle East, twice lectured at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow and participated in various study groups at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In 1967, I also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs where I participated in a number of studies of guerrilla warfare including those of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan who both began their books on Viet Nam there.
Over the next few years, I often visited Iraq and wrote several books (The United States and the Arab World, The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century, etc.). I visited Iraq a few days before the invasion and discussed with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz how it might have been avoided. I then reported at the School of Advanced International Affairs in Washington what I thought could have accomplished the purposes of the American government while preventing the tragic events that followed the invasion. Obviously, I failed.
But as I read and heard what was being reported, I was appalled by the lack of understanding of Iraq by almost all journalists and most officials. With one outstanding exception, a former student of mine, Ambassador Hume Horan, no one even in Paul Bremer's administration knew Arabic and had a sophisticated understanding of Iraq. So I wrote a primer on the subject entitled Understanding Iraq. After reading that, Senator George McGovern, whom I have long admired as a man of rare integrity, suggested that we write together the book that laid out clearly and succinctly how we got into Iraq, what happened to us, the Iraqis and our position in the world when we did, how we could extricate ourselves with the least possible damage to ourselves, Iraq, and our reputation, and what will happen if we do not. That project became Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (Simon & Schuster, October 2006).
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