"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Iraq: The Bitter Lessons of History
Posted 12:34 a.m., May 25, 2004
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"[The extremists] have adopted a line difficult in itself to combat, the union of the Shi'ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam. And they are running it for all it's worth. ... There's a lot of semi-religious semi-political preaching ... and the underlying thought is 'out with the infidel.' My belief is that the weightier people are against it--I know some of them are bitterly disgusted--but it's very difficult to stand out against the Islamic cry and the longer it goes on, the more difficult it gets."
Gertrude Bell, "The Uncrowned Queen of Iraq," from a 1920 letter to her father
... "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs (1993)
... ""America's task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy. It is to give strength to a friend. ... There are difficult days ahead. And the way forward sometimes may appear chaotic."
President George W. Bush, Army War College speech, May 24, 2004
Senior European correspondent Tom Fenton has an interesting column on the CBS News Web site that takes a long view on assessing the Iraq war. It's worth reflecting on, now the president has given the first in what is likely to be a series of redundant weekly damage-control speeches, between now and June 30, reciting the non-details of the non-plan plan to hand over non-power, probably to formerly exiled Iraqis.
What Fenton says is not comforting.
Fenton, working in his fourth decade as a CBS News correspondent, begins with a statement that it is no good to ask journalists to assess the outcome of the war. He's probably right. Even those who are knowledgeable enough to issue an opinion--think Tom Friedman--are really best at hair-trigger analysis. And that's often easily wrong, because it usually relies on easy analogies. So we wind up hearing lots about Vietnam and quagmires.
Fenton feels more comfortable placing Iraq in a longer historical context. So he calls on two big-league historians--the French Arab world specialist Henry Laurens, and the American Samuel P. Huntington, whose prescient 1993 article from Foreign Affairs magazine is quoted above.
Laurens draws comparisons to Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801. That conflict, in which the French invaded an Islamic state with the promise of liberating its impoverished, ignorant Arabs from the clutches of a brutal Ottoman dictatorship, went quite well at first. Cairo and Alexandria quickly fell like timbers.
But the French were ham-fisted, offending and violating Egyptian cultural values. An Islamic resistance movement arose, and remnants of the old regime began to wage a guerilla campaign. Cities involved in insurrections had to be violently repressed. Stop me if you've heard any of this before.
The war, Professor Laurens notes, eventually widened. Ultimately, the British and the Ottomans rushed in and tossed the beleaguered French out.
Huntington, meanwhile, pins the roots of the current Mideast crisis to the Iranian revolution of 1979. That conflict, in fact, was "the beginning of a war between the West and Islam that is progressively destabilizing the world."
"[Huntington] says a small group of Islamic militants, organized in networks that strike at Western interests, is globalizing the clash of civilizations. According to Huntington, the American occupation of Afghanistan and of Iraq, has spread, rather than contained, the war."He faults American and Western political leaders for believing that the collapse of communism would usher in a new order in which the rest of the world would embrace freedom, democracy and the liberal culture of the West. That vision, he says, is 'totally false.'"
-- Tom Fenton, CBS NewsDistressingly, Huntington also predicted the current morass in Iraq. Before the war began, Fenton writes, Huntington predicted it would be two wars. Sure, he guessed, we'd dispatch Saddam Hussein and his army quickly. But the war, as Fenton says, against the Iraqi people, is a conflict "the United States will never win."
Is the U.S. waging a war against the Iraqi people? Boy, that sounds harsh to these ears. But think about Abu Ghraib. And think about the mid-April report in the U.K newspaper, the London Telegraph, which quoted an unnamed senior British army officer complaining that American soldiers and commanders had a tendency to view Iraqis as "untermenschen"-literally, "subhuman."
"My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful."The U.S. troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
-- Anonymous senior British army officer, quoted in the London Telegraph
(April 11, 2004)Now I don't know if I buy the British command's critique. Recall that the Brits have been criticized by their American counterparts for a tendency toward squeamishness in the face of the fight.
But, to adopt the role of the easy-analogizing journalist for a moment, the sort of behavior described in the British newspaper and exhibited at Abu Ghraib is what you saw in Vietnam (and among some British regular troops during the guerilla-styled American Revolution, incidentally). It's what happens when soldiers, stuck on dangerous, unfamiliar terrain far from home, grow confused about who is on their side and who isn't. Who is a friend and who an enemy. Who would help them and who might surreptitiously kill them.
Note also that the date of the Telegraph story was weeks before the news out of Abu Ghraib. And while the American people may not know anything about the U.K. story because it was ignored by the American press, be sure that Iraqis know all about it. For many, Abu Ghraib would merely have been confirmation. Which suggests that the president's pledge tonight that we will plow Abu Ghraib prison under may be a bit too little, a bit too late, as welcome a decision as it is.
So history, schmistory, right? Except, maybe reading lessons from the past is more than an exercise in ha-see-I-knew-that-before-you-did-which-proves-I'm-smarter. Recall that it was John Kennedy's reading of history that played a key role in sparing us all from a nuclear holocaust.
The problem with all this is that, as it relates to Iraq, the time to learn instructive lessons from history now may be long past. And from my reading of Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack" that is the one thing that was never attempted in the run up to the war, in stark contrast to the war council during the Cuban Missile Crisis for instance. Everyone in the Bush tribe seems to have asked, 'How can we get this mission done?' No one, at any crucial point, seems to have asked, "Wait, are we absolutely sure this is such a good idea? Could this thing fail?"
So the learning left to be done now would have to come from some history of massively failed policies--and this one in Iraq is a doozey. If the president is in need of such a tome, I can recommend--and deliver my personal copy of-- Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly."
Persistence in error is the problem. Practitioners of government continue down the wrong road as if in thrall to some Merlin with magic power to direct their steps. ... For a chief of state, admitting error is almost out of the question. ... The test comes in recognizing when persistence in error has become self-damaging. A prince, says Machiavelli, ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone has scruples about telling him the truth. What government needs is great askers."
-- Barbara Tuchman, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" (1984)Say the word, White House, and the book is yours. I'll pay the freight.
