The Iraq Delusion

by tristero

What is it about the Bush/Iraq War that makes so many people stupid? In reading this interview, I don’t get the sense of a bad person the way, say Cheney is bad. It’s more like Rory Stewart stops firing on all cylinders when he considers Iraq and simply ends up cuckoo, deluded. But he clearly has plenty of experience:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

So he obviously is an experienced observer/participant in Iraq. But consider how he describes his decision to leave Iraq for Kabul:

The experience that I had in Iraq was a disillusioning one. Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, “What has the coalition ever done for us?” And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

There were only two projects we did that I thought had some kind of impact: one of them was the restoration of the bazaar in al-Amara, the capital of Maysan province, and the other was the creation of a carpentry school for street children in Nasiriyah [Funding was stopped for the carpentry school. It no longer exists.]…

So coming to Afghanistan again in 2005, I saw that a quarter of the historic city of Kabul was due to be demolished again…Afghans wanted jobs, incomes, and a renewed sense of national identity. I sensed that restoring the traditional commercial center of the city and creating a crafts center that would make furniture, ceramics, and textiles would not only be good for the economy but would also catch imaginations. I could not undertake this kind of project in Baghdad. Those are some of the things that came together to make me do it…

Is it possible that he has no idea he sounds like Nigel Bruce in a pith helmet? Yes, I think it’s quite possible. I honestly think he wasn’t listening to himself. But what’s worse than this rather crudely obvious expression of white man’s burden is the following muddle, where he clearly perceives the situation quite well, and then draws totally unwarranted conclusions:

What would I do in Iraq now? I am not an expert, but I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system…

…without intending to, we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis. We have created a situation in which many Iraqis now feel that the only way to keep security is to bring back a strongman. They are extremely skeptical of our programs and suggestions for development.

Whew! Where to begin. I think he makes two mistakes here. First, he exaggerates the influence and power of the recognized “central government” in Iraq, which neither has much central government and indeed barely any status as a government throughout wide swaths of the country. Secondly, in an all too typical narcissism, he grossly overestimates the impact of the West on Iraqi politicians about whose motives and motivations Stewart – and I’m being kind here – has no clue.

And then there’s the infantilzing he perceives. What? Infantilize? Where? When ten million bucks a month are being delivered to an Iraqi province in nicely sealed packages, Iraqi politicians are acting the way mature politicians always act everywhere – they grab as much of that swag as they can before it stops and before anyone else can get it. I recognize that by “infantilize” Stewart really means “becoming increasingly dependent upon” the largesse of the Big Daddys from the West, but he wrongly, and lazily, pop-psychologizes a situation which is simply one of politics as usual. When the money from America dries up, they’ll just find someplace else to bleed. It’s nothing special to Iraq – can you spell Katrina Cleanup? – and it certainly isn’t infantile behavior.

The infantilization framework not only stinks of ethnocentrism but is clearly incoherent even to Stewart himself, as the passage directly following the above makes clear. But having such a frame – sorry, it’s a good word, “frame,” and the most appropriate metaphor for this context – leads Stewart into a spectacular error of judgment:

I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge [ie, not infantilized!]. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite–Sunni divisions. [!] Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise.[!!!!] In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve…

If the West is infantilizing Iraq, as Stewart asserts, then Stewart, as the West’s provincial governor, must think he is acting in loco parentis and indeed, his words reek of loco parenting. His children are, in fact, competent even if it doesn’t look that way. And Sunni and Shia can rise above their differences to understand they’re all Iraqis in the same playground.

I don’t think so. From what I can tell, Iraqi nationalism, at least as Americans understand nationalism, is weak to non-existent, always has been, while political/cultural adherence to a religious group easily trumps that. Add to this the simple fact that the Sunni are vastly outnumbered and are easy pickins for ghettoizing and massacre and the conclusion is well nigh inescapable that political compromise is completely out of the question. Yes, they would be weaker if occupying troops withdraw, but when people feel weak – especially in a situation as unhinged as Iraq with its class and religious hatreds not to mention its egregious population imbalance – they don’t compromise, they quickly arm themselves to the fucking teeth. I can only conclude, based on the reality of the situation as it has been reported and on common sense, that Stewart’s belief in Iraqi nationalism is delusional. He has an irrational hope that his “children,” left to their own devices, will grow up the way he hopes they will.

They won’t, not because they’d be acting like children, but because they’d be acting the way humans always act in similar situations. It is remotely conceivable that, given a sober and sensible head of the US government acting in concert with an international coalition, that somehow something could happen to make the withdrawal from Iraq a slightly less horrific withdrawal. But Bush? Even if he ever was disposed to withdraw, he’d screw it up horribly.

In other words, step one of any approach to the debacle in Iraq with even an outside chance of a relatively decent outcome requires the removal of the Bush adminsitration from power. Step two is an implementation of a plan that calls for a rapid withdrawal of all occupying forces. That Stewart fails to acknowledge the fundamental problem that is the current American policy and policy makers, but rather comes close to calling the Iraqis ungrateful children, is simply incredible.

But here, I completely agree with Stewart:

Whatever government emerges after our departure is likely to be Islamist and authoritarian. People talk sometimes too easily about choosing between lesser evils. In this case the choices may be genuinely evil. But I am certain that our presence is not improving things. Despite some claims to the contrary, there is not a single indicator of significant, overall improvement I know of over the last four years, neither in electricity, nor in education, nor in police training, nor in the military…

Does this argue for an immediate withdrawal? Indeed it does, in two steps. First, withdraw the Bush administration from power. Then, draw up and implement a plan to withdraw the troops. The troops will not leave under Bush, period. And if, by some bizarre chain of events, they did, I can only say this: Anyone who thinks they’re hedging their bets and says they “believe” things will improve given action X while Bush is in office still hasn’t grasped the full depth of the Bush administration’s stupidity and malevolence. (It goes without saying – or should – that there are competent military personnel who are honorable to a fault. The stupidity and malevolence lies at the top, not necessarily with troops on the ground and their immediate commanders.)

Then, Stewart gets a currently trendy question, which has a fairly straightforward answer, a version of which I’ll provide later. But Stewart, in the grip of the Iraq Delusion, can’t wrap his mind around it:

Moderator: What about the danger that the civil war, or whatever you want to call it, escalates to the point that the general public in the United States and Great Britain says it’s unacceptable, we have to go back? Or it escalates into a larger regional war with the Sunni powers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, seeing their brethren being massacred and decide that they need to invade, and Iran invades in turn?

This is a very difficult question and there are three different elements to it. One of them is the question about public perception; one is a humanitarian question; and one is a question about national security.

Concerning the national security question, which could involve the invasion by Iran and neighboring countries,I’m pretty convinced that our experience in Iraq is sufficient to dissuade any neighboring country from wishing to attempt a military occupation in the country[!!!]…an intervention in Iraq for humanitarian reasons and in order to stop the civil war would differ significantly from the situation we’re in at the moment. We’re not perceived on the ground as a neutral peacekeeping force there to stop a civil war. We’re perceived by many people as a foreign military occupation…

Can you believe it? “[O]ur experience in Iraq is sufficient to dissuade any neighboring country from wishing to attempt a military occupation in the country.” Holy Jeebus!!!! I can’t believe I read that, and in the New York Review of Books, no less! This is on the hallucinated level of, “I believe we’ll be greeted as liberators.” Why, you ask?

Ok. Very slowly now, here are three main reasons a neighboring country might invade Iraq:

1. Oil
2. Oil
3. Oil

But wait, there’s more! Aside from the religious/cultural axis, there’s another reason. US failure in Iraq does not have much importance to the leaders of Iran (except of course as a splendid opportunity to advance their own interests). The US had to fail for many reasons as they see it, starting with the fact that not only is the US not Islamic, but no one in the US military ever bothered to learn Arabic.* And their president’s a total moron who’d rather be catching bass in his Seement Pond than figgerin out the difference between a Shia and a Sunni. And there are many more. As Iran must certainly see it, the reasons for American failure don’t have much to do with Iran’s situation and therefore in no way impact the chances of Iran succeeding with a military invasion. Whether or not Iran will do so is anyone’s guess right now. But to think they’d be deterred because of the bad example “we” set? That’s madness.

As for a reinvasion by the US being perceived as a humanitarian mission – in your dreams. Of course, it can only be perceived in the following way: The US only withdrew temporarily, with every intention of coming back, a classic divide and conquer strategy. Y’see, America assumed that the factions in Iraq – whose violent hatred of each other was deliberately inflamed by the Americans – would quickly turn to slaughter each other once they were gone. The Americans got us to do their dirty work for them! And their own troops were completely out of harms way. Call it “self-pacification.” Now, they claim they’re reinvadinng for humanitarian reasons, after they permitted unspeakable atrocities to take place! There’s no end to their self-centered and ignorant arrogance!

And now, let’s answer that question – What about reinvasion in the future if the situation deteriorates into a severe humanitarian crisis? – in the only way it should be answered. It is impossible realistically to plan that far ahead. Right now, there’s not even a remote prospect of a withdrawal given the reluctance of the American Congress, and the people of the country to toss Bush out on his ass. And you want to discuss the pros and and cons a reinvasionl? Ridiculous. Especially so here, since Stewart’s present-day focus is so incomplete and distorted the importance of the Bush administration’s incompetence isn’t so much as mentioned.

Finally, Stewart ends with what must be one of the most bizarre comments I’ve read about this war, a war that breaks all records for eliciting bizarre comments. He starts off reasonably enough and then something, somewhere misfires in his head:

The problems in Iraq are now so deep, complex, and intractable that they cannot be solved by surges or new tactics. They can only be solved by Iraqi political leadership and Iraqi political processes. We can provide diplomatic and economic support. We can continue to protect ourselves against terrorist attacks on our home soil through intelligence and special forces operations in Iraq. But we cannot win through an indefinite blanket occupation because we lack the will, the resources, the legitimacy, and also the consent necessary to play such a role. My instinct is that Iraqis can overcome their problems and create a functioning nation. But even if I’m wrong, I believe that what good we can do we have done. We should leave now.

That’s painful to read. “But even if I’m wrong, I believe that what good we can do we have done.” That epitomizes the kind of deranged narcissitic psychopathy that led to this debacle. And you know what’s the worst thing about it?

Tragically, Stewart’s reasoning is the reasoning of the only Good Guys acceptable to mainstream discussion. He’s not a Bush or a Cheney and he’s even unequivocally pro-withdrawal. He’s, more or less, reciting the mainstream understanding and emphases of the present situation. For instance, I’ve seen that idiotic question about reinvasion come up several times recently and all the responses I’ve seen are essentially variants of what Stewart said – if “we” re-invade and re-conquer Iraq , “we’ll” be perceived as humanitarians.

Many of you will have noticed that Stewart is a liberal hawk – wrong about the war from before the start. But what Stewart makes abundantly clear, and the reason I’ve gone on at such length to rant at him, is that the liberal hawks are still wrong, profoundly wrong in understanding the situation, profoundly wrong in understanding the most fundamental steps that will need to happen to have a chance of relieving the misery of the Iraqi people. And despite the fact they are completely wrong, only they and far-right ideologues have important microphones. Those of us who were absolutely right from the start are excluded. We understood, long before the bodies started to pile up to heaven, that Bush/Iraq was insane, not “worth a chance.” And we were absolutely right.

Today, many of us understand that the relationship between the Iraqis and their occupiers cannot be reduced to a cheap psycological cliche of a stern parent that is infantilizing the gorvernment and the people. We see the relationship for exactly what it is, a very adult confrontation among equally self-interested groups of actors over the acquisition of billions of dollars and oceans of oil. We see the withdrawal as most certainly necessary AND as requiring intelligence and careful planning from competent American leadership. A call for withdrawal of troops is dishonest if it fails to take into account who is expected to plan the withdrawing – and since it won’t be Bush, withdrawal simply will have to wait until he is removed from power.

Yes, Iraq’s fiendishly complicated, but it doesn’t take anything close to rocket science, just very smart, reasonable people prepared to think. The problem is that Stewart’s errors, and by extension all the liberal hawks, are so terribly easy to catch. They are not only wrong, but obviously wrong, the way folks who reported a UFO behind Hale Bopp were wrong. They are not perceiving reality but rather only the projection of their own overheated delusions. They deserve little to no public standing in a serious discussion. Infantilizing? Doing as much good as can be done? My God, what a waste of time it is to take such crap seriously! But taken seriously it most certainly is – you don’t merit an entire page in the New York Review of Books because the editors think you’re an intellectual or cultural lightweight.

There’s something about Iraq that creates cognitive distortions. Until there are voices in the regular American public discourse on a regular basis who are not prone to such distortions, the road out of Iraq will surely be blood-red. It makes me physically sick to think about it. God knows if an even worse bloodbath can be prevented even by the finest minds alive. But when those minds are systematically excluded from serious consideration or power – the group I’m thinking of includes Tuchman Mathews, Cirincione, Gore, Brady Kiesling, you can add and subtract your own – the conclusion is all but foregone.

*Okay, technically speaking, I’m pretty sure 3 or 4 soldiers speak fluent Arabic. You’ve heard of a fifth? Fine, there’s actually five Arabic speakers in the US military. You wanna add Abizaid to that list? That’s fine, too. Six Arabic speakers. I hope you feel more confident now. (Yes, of course I’m exaggerating, the tragedy is that it’s not by much. I’d guess there’s much less than 10,000 fluent in Arabic. That sounds like a minimal number given the goal articulated by Bush, essentially the conquest of the entire Middle East. And how many Persian speakers are there in the US military, by the way? Just asking.)