The Future Of Iraq

[Ed Note: This post was/is actually written to respond to the comments from billy bob and Left Coast Rob to my previous post. I wrote it three times as a response to those comments but each time something went wrong either at my end or blogger and it didn't get posted, so I thought I'd try to do it at an original post].

From Bill to billy bob and Rob (that's a heck of a lot of B's isn't it?):

I am rarely very far from my e-mail, so I actually saw your comments fairly soon after they came in. I hesitated to respond, though, becuase it was not at all clear what I wanted to say. billy bob asked (perhaps rhetorically, but I will ignore that possibility) whether I "have any thoughts?" Sure. Lots of them. But they are so confused and conflicting that they rarely make much sense even to me. That is hardly a good starting point from which to write something (although that sort of problem does not seem to be a deterrent for many people).

The aswer to one of billy bob's question does seem clear to me, though: we will not be using 100,000+ troops for anything in Iraq for very much longer. The American people are simply not going to put up with the sort of investment in life and lucre that entails IOT (he he) "help" a people who do not want to be "helped". (I put "help" in quotes to indicate that our idea of what "helps" the Iraqis is pretty ethnocentric.)

In terms of our troop presence in Iraq, I see two possibilities. First, Bush may succumb to pressure exerted by members of his own his own Party who are terrified by the prospect of having to stand for re-election this year. If so, we will soon begin to hear how our mission in Iraq has now been accomplished (again) and a significant draw down of troops will begin prior to the elections. Second, (and I actually think this is more likely given his character) Bush may "stay the course," in which case the drubbing the Republicans will take in November will be even worse than it already appears likely to be. In either event, we will start to see a significant "reduction in force" in Iraq within the next 6 to 12 months.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that offers much comfort to billy bob personally. After all, from his personal point of view, the timing and magnitude of the draw down is far less important than its order. Unless there are some unique factors that justify withdrawing the 34th BCT before those who have been there longer, billy bob may well end up doing his full tour (at least, God forbid). After all, someone has to hold the door open while the rest of the troops leave.

Rob, I don't disagree that the cause of this mess is, at least in part, a result of the fact that we have (once again) assigned to our armed forces a "task" for which they were not designed, equipped, or trained. I would quibble a bit with the idea that the modern US Army is incapable of doing more than "crushing other armies." That, of course, is what they are really, really good at (as they keep demonstrating), but I have come to believe that they are sufficiently competent, intelligent and dedicated to give us reason to believe they can "pull our fat out of the fire" even when we misuse them. In fact, I tend to think that the armed forces are SO damn capable, that they are their own worst enemy: their sheer competence allows us to delude ourselves into beliving that there is nothing they can't do. (As you can tell, I am a HUGE fan of our armed forces, Abu Grahib etc. notwithstanding. )

In this case though, the task we have assigned them -- building a stable, western-leaning, liberal democratic society in the heart of the Arab world -- is simply beyond the pale, unachievable by any organization no matter how competent and dedicated. We might as well have asked them to build us a stairway to heaven.

Let's take one element of that goal: western-leaning. It takes a lot of self-delusion to suppose that you can make a country your friend by conquering and occupying it. In WWI, did the Gemans come to love the British and the French? In WWII, did the French, Polish, Austrians, Czechs, Romanians, etc., etc, come to love the Germans; did the Ethiopians and Albanians come to love the Italians; did the Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians and Burmese come to love the Japanese? More recently, did the Palestinians come to love the Israelis or the Kosovars the Serbs? Why, then, would we expect the Iraqis to come to love us?

The contrary examples provided by the reconstruction of Japan, Germany and Italy after WWiI get frequently cited as examples of the conquered coming to align themselves with their counquerors. But there are some core differences that make these the exceptions that prove the rule.

First, the people in these countries all had to recognize, at least at some level, that they were the ones who "started it" and that, therefore, they had to some extent brought their troubles on themselves. It's hard to see how to make that case to the Iraqis. After all, they didn't attack us. We attacked them.

Second, and even more important, by the end of the WWII, the former Axis powers felt far more threatened by the East (Russia and China) than they did by their occupation by the West. It is much easier to align yourself with one conqueror when there is another even more fearsome conqueror sitting on your border against whom you are utterly defensless without the aid of the conqueror you already have. There is no comparable countervailing threat facing the Iraqis. To the contrary, the other powers in the region (Iran, Syria, Jordan) look to the Iraqis more like friends than enemies. The Iraqis, in short, are much more like the inumerable peoples who have loathed and resisted their occupiers than they are like the Germans, Japanese and Italians after WWII.

Another goal we have set for oursleves is to create a liberal democratic society in Iraq. This goal is perhaps even more fanciful than the goal of winning frends through conquest. "Deomcracy" we may be able to establish, at least for a while. But democracy, in the sense of free and fair elections, is pretty easy to arrange and, despite all the rhetoric, is not really what we are about. After all, both Iran and the Palestinian Authority are thoroughly democratic, yet their regimes are hardly what we hope to establish in Iraq. On the other hand, Jordan and Egypt are hardly models of democracy, but we would give our eye-teeth at this point if Iraq could end up like either one of those. Democracy may be a part of the "end-state" we want to reach, but it is at most a step along the way. The true end-state we are pursuing, almost without knowing it, is liberalism (in the clssic sense). Liberalism in this sense includes such things as the rights guaranteed by the US First Amedment (freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion and petition) as well as the right to be free from unreasonable intrusions by the government into our private lives. But what lies at the bottom of all of these freedoms -- what is essential to make such freedoms real and what we are really trying to achieve in Iraq-- is tolerance: a willingness, indeed commitment to, letting others think, believe and (within limits) act as they see fit even though we ourselves believe such thoughts, beliefs or actions are msiguided or simply wrong. Unless a people develops a shared commitment to such tolerance, liberalism (i.e. freedom) cannot exist. And this is exactly what makes the hope of establishing liberal democracy in Iraq -- or indeed anywhere in the Arab world -- such a pipe dream. The Arab world is simply not ready to be tolerant of people who think, believe and act differently from what they believe to be "right."

Finally, there is the even more fundamental illusion: that we can establish Iraq as a country. The problem here is that there is no such thing as "Iraq" except in the minds of the West and some Iraqis who have spent so much time in the West that they are more American or European than they are Iraqi. Indeed, except in the minds of the West, there is are no such things as Iraqis. There are only people who live in an area that, by convention, we call Iraq. If you ask most of these people what they "are," they will tell you they are members of a given tribe or that they are Kurds, of Sunnis or Shiites, long before they will tell you they are Iraqis. The people whom we want to call Iraqi actaully identify much more with their own tribes and religions than they do with what we choose to think of as their state.

In this regard, the Iraqis are much like pre-civil war Americans. If, in 1860, you had asked Robert E. Lee what he "was," he would have told you he was, first and foremost, a Virginian. Certainly that was true of most Southerners and probably it was true of most Northerners as well. Prior to the Civil War, people identified much more with their States than they did with their Nation. It took a civil war and its aftermath to create the idea that people were Americans first and Ohioans, or Virginians, or Minnesotans, or Texans second. And, the way that happened was this. The Civil War forced the residents of states to recognize, and give their allegience to, a larger entity: the Union in the North and the Confederacy in the South. Once the war was over, the allegience to the larger-than-state entity remained. It took another hundred years before the residents of the South became willing to transfer their allegience yet again from the Confederacy to the Union, but on both sides, the Civil War killed, once and for all, the notion that one's first loyalty was to one's state rather than to a larger entity.

It is this more than anything else that convinces me that our prospects of building an Iraq -- much less a western-leaning, liberal democratic Iraq -- are essentially nil. It may be that, by overthrowing Saddam, we kicked off a process that may eventually lead to an Iraqi nation-state. But I suspect that this process will take at least as long in Iraq as it did in America, and that it will involve at least as much bloodshed. Even then, though, I think the prospects are dim. The formation of America as a nation rather than an amalgamation of states required "only" that the citizens subordinate their loyalties to a political entity (their State). In Iraq, it will require the subordination of tribal and religious allegiences. In this reagrd, the Balkans would appear to provide a better -- and far more depressing -- analogy even in a millenial time frame, to say nothing of the year or so we have left to make a difference.

Now that I have started, I actually find I have more I want to say about all of this. But I have run out of time and steam. So I will post this and pick up tomorrow.