Iraq and the Clash of Civilizations

Posted 12:31 a.m., June 14, 2004

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This thought-provoking feedback to the May 25 Kevblog column, "Iraq: The Bitter Lessons of History," was sent by my good friend Howard Owens, a conservative California journalist. For several weeks, I have been mulling a response. It follows his original post, received the day my column was published.

Kevin: I think you've struck an overly pessimistic tone. I think you ignore U.S. successes in Iraq, and the subtlety of some of the tactics of the Marines (particularly) in dealing with insurgent forces. Also, I think you over-generalize U.S. troop conduct based on scant evidence.

The whole Huntington thing has also been used extensively by the neocons to support the need for a strong militaristic response to Islamic extremism. It's not enough to recognize that there is a "clash between civilizations." You also must decide what to do about it. One might argue that it's better to kill them before they kill you.

That said, I do not fully embrace Huntington's thesis. I think it overstates the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism and ignores the broader Islamic culture. It presumes that free markets and free minds are incompatible with Islam. I'm not convinced that is true. Islamic societies have, in the distant past, enjoyed periods of reasonable freedom (if you were a Muslim in those societies).

Also, Huntington is wrong to say this all began with the Iranian revolution. It began with the very birth of Islam. There has always been a strain of Islam that is militaristic and has believed in conversion by the sword. Since that time, Islam has attacked the world around it, conquering Syria and Palestine (slaughtering most of the Christians -- then the majority -- it found there). And the same in Egypt, where the Coptics barely survived. Spain also provides a negative example of Islam's discomfort at living in equality and peace with Jews and Christians.

So, Huntington is wrong about the scope of historical conflict; and he is wrong about what it means going forward.

That's what makes success in Iraq so important. We need to establish at the heart of the Arab Muslim world a beacon of hope for the rest of the Arab world. A place of freedom and advancement.

-- Howard Owens, Ventura, Calif.

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Kev Responds:

I'm going to let most of your opening paragraph go. Folks can go back to the original column and make up their minds about that. All I'll say in response is: Duly noted.

I'm going to spend part of my response dealing with the Huntington analysis. If it's true, as you say, that the neocons used Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" essay and subsequent book as justification for trying to remake the Islamic world in the image of Western civilization, then they did it with what I would deem typical shortsightendness.

In other words, it would appear they failed to read the second half of Huntington's statement that might be read as justification for an attempt democratize Islam.

Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred.

The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. (My emphasis.)

-- Samuel P. Huntington,
"The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

Howard, I'm not comfortable with your assertion that "there has always been a strain of Islam that is militaristic and has believed in conversion by the sword." I won't argue about it because I am not a scholar on the subject of Islam, but I will mention that it is not unlikely that many in the Muslim world would say much the same of Christendom's not infrequently violent history.

Huntington does a pretty good job describing that two-way street.

Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Ottoman power declined, Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East.

-- Samuel P. Huntington,
"The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

You say I am overly pessimistic about what is likely to happen in Iraq. Perhaps. Certainly, my attitude has been buoyed since you initially wrote me, because since then an interim Iraqi government has been selected, the Grand Ayotollah al Sistani--a pivotal character--has given it his blessing. Even the radical imam Muqtada al Sadr, who previously has led militia forces against U.S. troops, has given conciliatory sermons in which he seems to back the newly formed government. Today it was announced that he is forming a political party, possibly in an effort to play a legitimate political role in the country.

Those are pleasing, if surprising developments. Surprising, mainly, because the former Governing Council seems to have hijacked the process of selecting a government--President Bush had said that job belonged to the U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who just yesterday resigned from his post in frustration.

(It should be noted that the former Governing Council pretty much selected its own members to become the body to which "full soverignty" will be given--and that its top appointed leaders are members of the same group of long-time exiles that tagged along with the U.S. when forces invaded Iraq. Their level of credibility with the Iraqi street may fairly be questioned.)

I go back to Huntington, who, remember, wrote: "Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces." That was true in '93, and nothing has happened really since then to indicate the forces have shifted. And, in view of that, there are problems lurking in Iraq that keep me worrying:

• First, our soldiers are still being killed. We have 145,000 troops over there, and they're not leaving. Politically, I worry that Americans will not have the will to see this adventure out. And since there are no plans to pull the troops out after the June 30 hand-over, I seriously doubt that Americans are going to view the transition as the end, really, of anything. Pressure to pull out, I think, will mount regardless of who wins the November elections. And a Beirut- or Mogadishu-style pullout by the U.S. would be the worst possible outcome to our long-term interests. Those pullouts were what emboldened al-Qaida in the first place, by convincing terrorists that we have no spine to stand up to resistance.

• Second, as the Huntington analysis suggests, al Sadr's move to form a political party may be a play to pull off what many most fear: the use of the democratic process by a radical Islamist to take power, only then to cancel all future elections and form an Iranian-style, fundamentalist regime.

It may be argued that al Sadr doesn't have the popular base to pull that off, but what of al-Sistani? What do we know of his motives? The U.S. is dependent on the ayotollah as a force for moderation, yet he has steadfastly refused to even speak to Americans. How can we possibly have a read on what he might do?

• Third is the question of the Kurds.

The Kurds have been effectively screwed by history. But they feel they got a big win when the Governing Council last March signed an interim constitution that guarantees them rights to minority powers when a final Iraqi government is formed.

However, in recent days, that has been called seriously into question. As a U.N. resolution supporting the new state was nearing completion recently, Ayotollah al-Sistani denounced the interim constitution as "legislated by an unelected council in the shadow of occupation" and warned the U.N. not to make reference to it in its resolution, or face "grave consequences." The Kurds read that as a play to exclude them from representation in the governing process.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration caved to that demand to keep al-Sistani happy, outraging the Kurds, who have been our only real homegrown allies in the fighting over there. Now the Kurds are threatening to pull out of the new Iraqi state. If the final constitution doesn't guarantee their rights, Kurds say they would "have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan."

Voices of protest are already rising, beseeching the Kurds to stand firm.

The Kurds need to stick to their position without any further concessions other than what they have already made to rejoin Iraq. Now, it is the Arabs' turn to respond to Kurdish demands if they want the Kurds to be part of Iraq once again.

-- Eamad Mazouri, columnist, KurdishMedia.com

This is particularly ominous. Because it not only raises the specter of an unraveling of agreements that would lead to a unified Iraqi state, it raises the even worse proospect of pulling the Turks into a widened conflict. The Turks have a large Kurdish minority to deal with, and it borders the Kurdish area of Iraq. The Turks have been harshly repressive of their Kurdish population.

If the Iraqi Kurds pulled out of an Iraqi state, the Turks would likely feel that they might try to form their own Kurdish state. And a Kurdish state would probably raise the hopes of Turkish Kurds, who might want to add the territory they occupy to an Iraqi Kurdish state. After all, they might reason, they were promised an independent state in the Sevres Treaty of 1920 only to see that promise revoked and replaced by the Lausann Treaty of 1923.

This is my great fear, and why I think we may well come to wish that we had just kept on strangling the Saddam Hussein regime slowly through sanctions, inspections and a military ring around the country, rather than uprooting it suddenly and violently--especially considering how we failed to secure the nation in the shooting war's aftermath, thereby sowing the seeds of insurgency.

Unless the Bush administration's operatives can pull together all these interests and cobble together a genuine Western-style democracy--a tall order for a civilization that might not be able to handle one--then we might be faced with a three-front civil war. Kurds against Shiites, Shiites against Sunnis, Sunnis against Kurds. Everyone against everyone.

It would be utter chaos, into which would spill more terrorists and possibly competing states like Turkey, Syria and Iran, each of which would have interests both in quelling Kurdish uprisings and in exploiting the power vacuum.

Then the question of whether the U.S. can impose stability in the Middle East will be answered definitively.

I'm hoping, Howard, that you are right, and I am wrong. But you are right that I am not optimistic about the prospects.

--Kevin Featherly

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