|
Introduction:
Sanda Kaufman, professor of planning and public administration at
the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, suggests that understanding
the situation in Iraq and the sentiments of those who live there
requires an awareness of what it means to live in a dictatorship. In
her view, abstaining from war would not have meant peace for the people of Iraq.
| |
This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Authoritarian Regime: Iraq and War
Sanda Kaufman
Professor of Planning and Public Administration at the Levin College of Urban
Affairs, Cleveland State University
| |
Q: What are things that we should consider about the information that we get
when formulating opinions about an authoritarian regime?
...
A: Romania, where I was born, was at the time when I lived there a
dictatorship that was very close to what I pictured and what I understood based
on information coming out to be the case in Iraq. So I experienced a lot of
frustration trying to explain to people who are born in freedom what it means to
live in such a dictatorship and I kept trying because I thought that not
understanding had diminished our understanding of what was happening in Iraq. At
the same time I was very happy for people who couldn't understand. It's a happy
situation when somebody can't understand such extreme situations. It's good for
them.
...
A: >Living in a dictatorship is unfathomable to
people born in freedom who expected to hear things from Iraq or understand
things about Iraq that were impossible through this freedom lens. So people
expected to hear what Iraqis thought about it. And of course anybody who's lived
in such a situation knows that it's at the peril of your life that you trust
anybody but the closest family and tell anyone what you think or what you would
like to see happen or any of these things that we take for granted that can be
communicated in a free society. As things happened and Americans were not
received with flowers and so on, people I think mistakenly interpreted this to
have been a sign that the Iraqis were not happy that war has happened in their
country. But I have to wonder about it, through my experience.
Q: So you think if people who were in favor of more negotiations and a
non-violent solution to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq knew
more what it was like to live under a dictatorship and under an authoritarian
regime, that they might have reconsidered their position?
A: I don't know that they would reconsider because I find that these are very
heartfelt ideas and people are attached to these ideas, so I don't know.
...
The other thing,
though, that I find interesting, and I don't know if it's part of this question,
is that people who advocated negotiation because war is wrong seem to me to have
the underlying assumption that the opposite of war is peace, that if you don't
have war then you have peace, which seemed to me to be the wrong reference
point. If you did not have war, you had actually a pretty hellish life in Iraq.
It was not peace. Not at least as experienced by those people, who were dying at
an incredible rate per year. I heard a figure of something like 60,000 children
a year dying, and you know, you can go back and forth on the numbers, but the
point is the absence of war would not have meant peace. This does not address,
of course, the concerns of what will happen next, which nobody knows, and this
is yet another argument. But the people who were on principle against war
because war is wrong under all circumstances, were wrong about what the
alternative is that prevails, as well as wrong on how people in Iraq felt about
it, I think.
|
