One of the questions those of us who advocate regime change in Iraq hear most often is “why Iraq, why now?” It’s a fair question, and one that deserves a good and a thorough answer. That, then, is what is in store for you this evening.

Allow me to throw my premise out into the room right now and build toward why, wherefore and how throughout the course of this talk. If we change the regime in Iraq (and when I say “change the regime” I am not embracing the idea of a coup d’etat euphemistically, as I think President Clinton did when he coined the phrase) . . . if we change the regime in Iraq by removing Saddam Hussein, those around him, the current instruments of government of the Republic of Iraq, if we excise everything about the Ba’ath party that currently pervades every aspect of Iraqi life, and we bring change, it could mean a new Middle East.

Let’s start at the end, with the question of why changing the Middle East is necessary at all. Allow me to paint you a picture with statistics for a region that includes some 300 million people. I am not an economist, and I think in largely political terms. I have traveled widely throughout the Middle East and notwithstanding; I was flabbergasted by these numbers, many of which come from the Arab Human Development Report released earlier this year by the United Nations.

(Parenthetically, I should note that because many of theses statistics come from the Arab Human Development Report, they do not factor in Israel, which makes the numbers much more revealing.)

Consider these disparate facts: 61 percent of the world's oil reserves and 21 percent of gas reserves are in the Middle East. This is a blessing that has been showered upon a tiny, and if I may say, undeserving elite. But even the elites today have less than they did in years past.

In the 1950s, per capita income in South Korea and Egypt were roughly similar. Today, Egypt’s GDP per capita is less than 20 percent of South Korea’s. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia had a higher GDP than Taiwan; today it is less than 50 percent.

Trade exports from the Middle East, 70 percent of which are oil and oil related, grew at 1.5 percent per annum in the booming 1990s. Compare that to global export growth rates of six percent. Then figure that non-oil exports from the Middle East and North Africa are about $40 billion, approximately equal to Finland’s annual exports. Only Finland has one fiftieth the population of the Middle East and North Africa.

The population of the region is roughly that of the European Union, but the total GDP of the region--including oil--is less than half of the UK or France. In fact it is closer to Canada or Mexico. Remember, that’s all of the Middle East and North Africa’s gross national product, marginally above that of Mexico.

But it’s not just that the region isn’t producing or exporting anything that doesn’t shoot out of a well. They haven’t met minimal standards of development. In fact, nearly one third of all Arab nations lose more than nine years of life expectancy to disabilities that begin at birth.

65 million adult Arabs are illiterate and women make up two thirds of that figure.

According to UNESCO, illiteracy rates have dropped to 39.9 percent in 2000. So, 40 percent of people in the region are illiterate. In least developed countries, the corresponding rate of illiteracy is 48 percent. Now compare that figure to a global rate of illiteracy of 20 percent, or a rate of 1.8 percent for Europe.

Now here’s why: 10 million children in the Arab world between the ages of 6 and 15 years are currently out of school, and that number is projected to increase by 40 percent by 2015 if the trends remain the same. Average secondary school enrollment is about 65 percent, vs. 70-75 percent for middle income developing countries and 96 percent for high-income countries.

Thus, it is little surprise that in 1999, a girl in the region was only slightly more likely to be literate than a girl in sub Saharan Africa despite higher rates of spending on education than in any other developing region.

People aren’t just ill educated; they are in dire poverty. The absolute number of poor in the 1990s in the Middle East and North Africa increased in the 1990s, a time when the reverse was taking place in much of the world. According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 1999 28 million more people in the region were added to the numbers living on less than $2 a day. 30 percent of the population lives on less than $2 day. In Yemen in 1990, 14.9 percent of people lived on $2 a day. By 1998 that percentage had increased to 45.2 percent

The region has the lowest percentage of women in the economy in the world, 26 percent. It also has the highest unemployment rates in the world, and those figures are only going to get worse. Average growth in the labor force is 3-4 percent--twice as high as in all other developing regions--but GDP growth is not expected to exceed 3-4 percent in the coming decade.

Meanwhile, the number of foreign laborers in the Gulf States increased fivefold between 1970 and 1990. In 1999 alone, 25% of Saudi Arabia's population consisted of non-Saudis--and I don’t mean Kuwaitis and Americans. Therefore it isn’t a lack of jobs--at least in Saudi Arabia--just a lack of people willing or able to do them.

Nor is the education system helping make them more able. Despite high spending on education in the Arab world, the United Nations notes that there is little evidence that that education contributes to economic growth. In other words, people are going to school but they aren’t learning anything useful.

Looking into the 21st century, we can note with some despair that Arabs represent 0.5 percent of all internet users. Only 0.6 percent of Arabs have access to the Internet and the personal computer penetration rate is 1.2 percent. The Arab world rates below sub-Saharan Africa on the information technology scales used by the World Bank.

People are not using computers, nor are they doing the basic work of any vibrant culture: They are not researching or investing in science. You have heard, perhaps, that more books were translated into Greek than into Arabic in the last decade. According to the World Bank, in terms of scientific papers per million inhabitants, average R&D output totals 2 percent of that of industrialized countries.

Total regional investment in research and development amounts to 0.5 percent of aggregate gross national product (that’s slightly more that one-fifth of what developed countries invest in R&D).

Even the minimal business that does get done costs over and above what we would pay in the west. A survey done for the CFR reported that 20 percent of those surveyed in the Arab world stated that bribes averaged 2-9 percent of the value of consignments.

Clearly, on what we might call the “pursuit of happiness” scale, life is not good in the Middle East--except perhaps for whoever is raking in those bribes. But on the “liberty” scale, things are much worse. According to many sources, the United Nations included, Arab nations held the lowest freedom score out of seven world regions throughout the late 1990s. For the United Nations, the freedom scores are based on "voice and accountability" indicators (i.e., civil liberties, political rights, media independence, etc. . . . ).

Arabs don’t like their lack of freedom; unlike so many others who lack fundamental freedoms however, they also lack opportunity. In China, one could argue that political oppression has been accompanied by limited economic opening. It’s not enough to compensate for the ruthless oppressiveness of the government, but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is what the Arab world offers its youth.

Polls taken of young people also show that their two greatest concerns are education and job opportunity. Of the older group, 45 percent were most concerned with jobs, and 23 percent were most concerned with education; among younger people, 25 percent were most concerned with education and 23 percent with jobs.

Do you know what people without jobs and without education do? They learn in madrassas and they hang around mosques. Not all, but enough to imbibe the virulence that is feeding a generation of terrorists and their sympathizers.

Last statistic: In the same poll in which we learn that people are worried about jobs and education, we learn that 51% of older youths communicated a desire to emigrate to another country.

Wouldn’t you?

For these, and so many more reasons, I am stunned when people insist that we must work to preserve the status quo in the Middle East. The status quo is lousy for all but a few, and let’s be blunt: The status quo is lousy for the United States.

In terms that are far more familiar to me, a glance across the region is a study in totalitarianism, authoritarianism at best, in corruption and cruelty, in oppression and lost opportunity. Political players like to put a premium on stability. It is true that prior to the rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, there were multiple coups. So too in Syria prior to the rule of Hafez and now Bashar el Assad. But in the Middle East, “stability” is synonymous with tyranny.

Nor are these benevolent tyrannies. To the contrary, in Syria, one of the most “stable” states, 20,000 inhabitants of a town were massacred in 1984 during the course of one week. Their crime was to be a center of Islamic opposition to the rule of the Syrian Ba’ath party.

Another paragon of stability in the region--Iraq’s Saddam Hussein--massacred more than 100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in 1988. In that attack, he used chemical and perhaps biological weapons against a civilian population.

In Saudi Arabia, following Shi’ite riots in the oil-rich Eastern province in 1979, 20,000 national guard troops moved in and did untold damage. Accounts vary as to how many were killed. Suffice it to say that city blocks were razed.

In the better places like Egypt, President Mubarak was reelected with 97 percent of the vote. He recently put an American citizen in prison for seven years because he didn’t like the man’s questioning the transparency of Egypt’s elections. The country has been in a “state of emergency” for some 35 years, which allows the suspension of theoretical rights unknown to most Egyptians, the supremacy of security laws and the operation--largely without accountability--of military courts.

Who would assert that the 300 million people of this region don’t deserve better?

We could go on with a litany of the crimes of Arab and Iranian leaders against their own people and against their neighbors forever and you could say that I am a bleeding heart for worrying about it. After all, in the realpolitik world some inhabit, we should ask how this matters to us here in the United States. But of course, you know the answer: Terrorism, financing of terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

I would like to outline briefly what we know about the things going on in the Middle East that concern our own national security. Iran is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. The Islamic extremist regime that is in power in Tehran could be two years away from a weapon or they could be five years away from a weapon. It is not likely to be much more than that. But I wouldn’t rely on U.S. intelligence prognostications in order to sleep better at night. After all, 12 years ago we predicted that Iraq was years away from a nuclear weapon only to discover after the Gulf war that they were six months away.

Iran is also the leading state sponsor of terrorism. They fund and arm the terrorist organization Hezbollah, responsible for the death of dozens of Americans; they fund Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others. They coordinate among terror groups to teach better effectiveness. The missiles shot at the Israeli charter jet in Kenya last week likely came from Iran. Iran was also behind the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed 19 US servicemen.

Iran has a robust chemical weapons program and likely also has a biological weapons program. It is also pursuing intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range missiles with the capability of delivering non-conventional warheads.

Syria is another state sponsor of terror. It hosts and serves as a conduit for planning and arming numerous terror groups, including groups with so-called global reach--in other words, groups that don’t just kill Israelis. Syria also has a missile program and a chemical weapons program. In addition, Syria is Saddam Hussein’s largest illegal trading partner, and is responsible for billions of dollars in oil profits going straight into the coffers of Saddam Hussein, unaccountable to the United Nations and the international community. All this has been going on, by the way, while Syria enjoys its two-year rotation as a member of the United Nations Security Council.

Before we get back to Iraq, let’s address one more state that is a threat to our national security, though it has not been thought of as such in the past. Saudi Arabia is a troubled nation. Wealth is distributed among a very few; and because there is less wealth, and the few wish to maintain the levels of luxury they have come to enjoy, there is less to share with the Saudi public. As a result, fewer Saudi children are educated abroad. More and more must be educated through religious schools that teach them little about the modern world and a great deal about the evils of the west. Make no mistake, they are taught not only to revere Allah, but to revile the freedoms and liberties that characterize our way of life.

At home in Saudi Arabia, children are being taught to hate the west, to hate and fear Christians and Jews. Is it any wonder that Saudis made up 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11? But it is worse than just a problem at home: The Saudi government has for years subsidized the export its own brand of Islamism--to schools, mosques and other centers of learning throughout the world. This is Saudi Arabia’s idea of foreign aid, and is the foreign policy objective to which Saudi Arabia has put to use its massive oil revenues over the last three decades.

Wahhabi Islam, at odds with even the limited modernity of mainstream Islam, is being proselytized throughout the world, and in particular in vulnerable areas such as Chechnya, Islamic Africa and Islamic central Asia. Because there is cash behind this brand of Islam, local clerics are shut out, and their message of moderate Islam goes unheard. We have only begun to pay attention to this problem in earnest since September 11, but it has existed for years.

Right about now you’re probably beginning to ask yourself whether you did in fact come to a talk on Iraq. Fair enough. I hope I have driven home the point that preserving the status quo in the Middle East is not necessarily a worthy goal in and of itself. So any argument that a war on Iraq could ignite a conflagration that could forever change that status quo is far from a persuasive argument against such a war.

Here’s the question of the day: Why go to war in Iraq? The proximate cause will be Saddam Hussein’s failure to cooperate with the United Nations weapons inspectors. Whether that lack of cooperation will be something universally agreed upon is an open question, and if I had to speculate now, I would guess not. After all, one of the nice things about this whole minuet with Iraq and the United nations is that we have done it before dozens of times. Inspectors go in, inspectors inspect, inspectors press, inspectors are stonewalled. We argue, they leave, and the international community caves to a more determined player, i.e. Saddam.

This time the more determined player, I hope, is the President of the United States.

The immediate question before us is disarmament, and the most important thing to understand is that in this day and age, disarmament is not possible without the cooperation of the disarm-ee. In a country the size of Iraq, with the vast resources and the knowledge base necessary to the production of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver those weapons, you must rely on full disclosure and on complete cooperation in order to have a hope of effective disarmament. In the face of a determined foe and a practiced liar, we are all but lost. After all, it doesn’t take more than one nuclear weapon, more than a tiny bag of anthrax or a vial of small pox, more than a few bottles full of VX to devastate a population, poison a water supply and infect millions.

It is also important to understand that Saddam Hussein the man is indistinguishable from the weapons his regime desires, and has desired for decades. Unless he is gone, we cannot truly be certain Iraq is not pursuing WMD.

And unless his entire regime is gone, we cannot be certain that whoever takes his place does not embrace similar goals. That leaves the United States and its allies with a serious job ahead. The removal of Saddam, I believe, will not be daunting. We are a superior fighting force and he is a man who rules through fear. Once the people around him are certain he is going to go, their loyalty will evaporate.

I do no service to the American military by making light of possible casualties, and I don’t want to predict that war in Iraq will be simple. But it will, at least, be simpler than some suppose. Remember, the Iraqi people have lived with this tyrant for decades and there are few who wish to see him go more than they. No, the real challenge ahead is less toppling Saddam than putting something better in his place.

In truth, the United States has not engaged in concerted nation-building--yes, I am willing to use the dreaded words--since World War II. Rebuilding Iraq will be a daunting task, and one that requires the kind of commitment the United States has not liked to make. It will require political, diplomatic and military commitment for some years, because we will need to help the people of Iraq build a modern state that has not--for most intents and purposes--existed since Iraqi independence.

Iraq is a complex state, divided largely among Shiites (who form 65 percent of the population), Kurds (who make up 25 percent) and Sunni Muslims. There are other significant minorities as well: Turcomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans and others. There are also seven million expatriate Iraqis around the world, many of whom maintain a key interest in their native country.

What we should want for Iraq is the nearest approximation of representative democracy that can be achieved in a country and a region with few democratic traditions. Others more qualified than I, Kanan Makiya, the eminent Iraqi author in particular, have laid out a vision for a federalized Iraq in which the nation is divided not according to ethnicity or religion, but according to regions and subregions, each of which could enjoy a measure of autonomy and a measure of influence in a federal government.

In a nation in which intra-Kurdish warfare has been a staple for centuries, and Sunni-Shia tensions have risen, the only hopes of avoiding civil war and factional fighting are in giving all Iraqis a vested interest in the future of their state.

That won’t be easy. First of all, the nation’s oil resources have not benefited most Iraqis. Do those Iraqis who sit on top of important oil fields have special rights? Should oil be privatized? Is it right that Kurds have a say over Shia and vice versa? Of course, the answer to that last question is yes, why not? After all, two California senators have say over what our Senate does, and our President hails from Texas.

Understanding why our nation works will help us understand what will make Iraq work--institutions and rule of law are the imperatives. Individuals come and go, some good, some bad, but if the underlying structure is solid, it can withstand the worst of leaders.

Putting decent structures in place will require an enormous amount of work, and the United States ought to be toiling away right now. Frankly speaking, we are not doing nearly enough for reasons that are utterly inexplicable to me. Success will not be easy in Iraq, and proponents of war and regime change--of which I am one--should understand that the onus will be on them to defend this exercise.

Part of the problem with the United States and planning for the future of Iraq is that the very people who should be charged with planning are the people who have fought most aggressively within the government against the policy of regime change--the Department of State.

In an ideal world, our government would have been working with local opponents of Saddam Hussein for years, planning a new government and drafting a new constitution. We would have been funneling them support, organizing, and cultivating allies for the future. But that doesn’t happen in a totalitarian state. There is no domestic opposition, there are no local allies. We have worked with the Kurds, who have a modicum of independence and autonomy under the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1991. But even there, we have not done enough to cultivate a trusting relationship. Kurds will long remember that the first President Bush encouraged an uprising and then watched them be crushed by Saddam. We have labored intermittently to build a democratic system for the Kurds, and to work through intra-Kurdish fighting. But we have never done so in the context of a longer term plan to protect the Kurds (or any other Iraqis) from Saddam nor with any view to the big picture of Kurdish survival post sanctions.

So how does the United States instill confidence in the people of Iraq that we are not simply interested in ridding them of one dictator, only to replace him with another? The President has repeatedly asserted that the fruits of liberty shouldn’t be denied to the citizens of the Arab world. But thus far, those have been empty words. They can only be given meaning if we begin to work soon toward a different Iraq.

The way you do that is by working with the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein to fashion a post-Saddam transition to democracy. This isn’t a “just add water” formula. We cannot arrive in Baghdad and embrace the first likely Iraqi on the street. We have long needed a coherent opposition strategy that forces the opposition parties to work together--yes, oddly enough, expatriate Iraqis in politics are much like everyone else in politics . . . they too hate to share power.

There are several major opposition groups, and I will give you a brief thumbnail sketch, just to familiarize you with the terrain. There are two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the PUK. They have traditionally been an integral part of anti-Saddam movements outside Iraq, and they will be enormously important to the future of Iraq. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the Kurds, and Kurdish independence, are anathema to America’s most vital Muslim ally, Turkey. For that and other reasons, the Kurds should be subsumed into a larger group of opposition parties.

The Shi’ite opposition--and remember that Shi’ites are the overwhelming majority in Iraq--have traditionally been represented by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The SCIRI is a Tehran based group; it is fundamentalist in orientation, and though it is the most coherent Shiite group, I would be reluctant to say that it actually represents most Iraqi Shiites.

There is little organized Sunni opposition to Saddam. The most politically active Sunni is Sherif Ali bin Hussein of the Constitutional Monarchist Movement. And then there are others, for example the Iraqi National Accord, the Iraqi National Movement and several smaller officer movements.

To my mind, none of these individual groups is, in and of itself, sufficiently broad-based to ease into the role of a transitional governing committee for Iraq. Yes, all of them are nominally supportive of democracy, even the military types. All of them pay lip service to ending weapons programs, redressing war crimes and so on. But when these groups are not united behind one idea, and one group of leaders, they are so weak as to be almost irrelevant.

It is for these reasons and more that for many years members of congress and others have supported a group called the Iraqi National Congress. The INC was designed to be an umbrella group for all the disparate Iraqis in opposition, including those who are not attached to any particular group. In part because of its success, and in part because of infighting, the INC has had to fight to keep all of its members on board. I believe that problem is improving, and I hope that a conference of the Iraqi opposition in London next week will focus everyone on the importance of opposing Saddam and not opposing each other.

Now, anyone who has paid any attention at all to the intricacies of US Iraq policy will have heard something about each of the groups I listed. Some are good, some are bad, some are power mad, some are corrupt. A few points about the Iraqi opposition--and this is true of any opposition group in any country in any era.

They want power. They are not in this for virtue. They are self interested. They are interested in promoting their own vision. They want policies that will benefit their own people. To those for whom this is shocking, I can only ask what cave you have been living in.

The problem with the Iraqi opposition is not that the groups don’t have people back on the ground in Iraq. In a totalitarian state no one has people on the ground. It is not that they can’t agree. It is not that they are selfish or self-interested. It is that the benefactor that ought to bring them together, whose responsibility it is to ensure a transition post-Saddam and who should be putting the whole force of its diplomatic and moral might behind a democratic opposition to Saddam--in other words the United States--has not at the highest levels agreed what the future of Iraq should look like.

This is a disaster.

If the Department of State doesn’t agree with the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t agree with the National Security Council, how should--forgive me--a bunch of expat Iraqis with no government and no funds and no power do better?

Iraq will have serious matters to deal with once Saddam is gone. They will include not only the obvious matters of justice for war crimes and reconstruction and deBaathification and demobilization of the military. They will also include restructuring government from the local level up, rethinking school curricula, ensuring fair treatment for all Iraqis and so much more.

These things can be done, and once Saddam is gone there will be Iraqis currently in Iraq who will be part of that process. But to hold up all thinking about just how these things should happen in order to avoid offending “legitimate” Iraqis on the ground. . . . To consider instead the ridiculous possibility of a US military government a la post World War II Japan. . . . These suggestions are preposterous.

There are some who suggest that the United States managed “just fine” in Afghanistan flying by the seat of our pants and picking Hamid Karzai at the last moment. First, I would argue that wasn’t “just fine”. Second, few would refute the argument that we would have done just “finer” had we planned for a post-Taliban future prior to September 11--and had we perhaps done something to help the Afghan opposition fight the Taliban.

Under the circumstances in 2001, perhaps we did as well as one could hope with the rapid fire reaction to the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and the crumbling of the Taliban. But this is not 2001 and we are meant to be planning for Iraq. We should not plan every moment of an invasion only to arrive in Baghdad with our mouths hanging open.

Rather, the United States should bring all the Iraqi opposition together and compel them to sing from a choir book of our own writing. Anyone who wishes to sing a different tune should feel free to do so elsewhere. After all, the people who will form a transition are not the future of Iraq; they are the road to the future. They are a symbol of what can be, but they are not the end of the story.

But let’s imagine that this all goes well. Let’s imagine that the opposition and our own government decide that the moment to stop fooling around has come. Think to yourselves what could be. Is there a reason Iraq should not be democratic, or closer to democracy than many others in the Arab world? Is there a reason the United States cannot shepherd in a better era for that nation? You know, we helped do that for the Soviet Union and its captive states. We helped do it for Japan and for Germany. We are capable, but we must also be willing.

The fruits of success would be--could be--overwhelming. Never before have we said, and meant, the Arabs deserve democracy. Picture students in Iran or political prisoners in Syria or democracy activists in Egypt: What message do they take from commitment to freedom for the Iraqi people?

They recognize that it is possible, and that we the United States will back our ideals with force and with money and political capital. Not every regime needs to be overthrown, though Iran is clearly headed that way. Some can move slowly in the direction of freedom of expression and domestic political reform. But each dictator of the region, petty or grand, will not want this to happen. Until they see we mean business in Iraq, they will not budge.

Success could mean new horizons, and failure is a condemnation to these downtrodden people.

If you think I am living in what my kids call la la land, perhaps it’s a fair accusation. After all, if past is prologue, the United States is not committed to a democratic crusade. We don’t like nation building, and we’re only really good at it when we thoroughly comprehend its importance.

On the other hand, if you accept that September 11 changed the way that we look at the world, and you recognize that inaction dooms us to more September 11ths, then perhaps you can accept that in this different world fighting for greater ideals and winning just could be possible.

Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.