Iraq in 1920

Is this the same British Army that got demolished in Afghanistan?

I can’t say with certainty that it’s Different Now, but it isn’t altogether crazy to think that it might be.

Yes, indeed. Only an ignoramus could fail to see the striking similarity between the Kurds’ reaction to Coaltion Forces now and their reaction to the British 85 years ago.

nat – What point are you trying to make? Please be explicit.

Sure, nat, because there are so few constants in history.

For example, who would dare say that every society in history has resented being ruled and exploited by outsiders? There is presumably some example, somewhere, if you look hard enough, where this was not the case, and who knows, maybe Iraq will be another such case?

But it sure doesn’t look that way right now,

Ok, ok, I overreacted there. It’s not “empty cynicism” (one of my favorite phrases these days), since all you did was “point out” the similarity, but I recommend the link I mentioned above anyway.

Maynard Handley wrote:

“For example, who would dare say that every society in history has resented being ruled and exploited by outsiders? There is presumably some example, somewhere, if you look hard enough, where this was not the case, and who knows, maybe Iraq will be another such case?
But it sure doesn’t look that way right now”

I agree that Iraq will not provide such a case. In order for it to provide such a case, the Coalition would have to be “exploiting” Iraq in the first place.

Well, at least he didn’t make any Vietnam comparisons.

Chris, that sounds a bit… disingenuous. You linked to an article where the author forcefully stated:

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised.

So I think it’s safe to say that by explicitly pointing out a passage that points out the similarity, by the law of transitivity you pointed out the similarity.

What an odd reaction by Ferguson. His conversation was not with someone at State, and didn’t occur prior to the decision to invade. It was a conversation with a mid-level official in the Treasury Department. Charged with examining how to rebuild the Iraqi economy, they did just that. They didn’t examine the relative merits of invasion. They didn’t examine whatever policies the British pursued to build the Iraqi economy in 1920 (those policies–surprisingly?–weren’t mentioned by Ferguson. They looked at recent examples of countries where the economy had been crippled by totalitarian government, which government was suddenly overthrown. Sounds entirely reasonable to me.

But those who oppose the war can still stand on the sidelines saying they oppose the war. That’s fine, but it is entirely irrelevant to the question of which methods work best, based on recent empirical experience. We see Ferguson guided by his ideology, while the mid-level official at Treasury seems entirely guided, contrary to Ferguson’s suggestion, by empirical evidence.

We see Ferguson guided by his ideology

Last I checked Ferguson was a conservative by anyone’s lights, so attacking his anti-Bush administration views for being ideologically driven is a little odd.

Brian–It is no odder than saying that Pat Buchanan’s anti-Bush administration views are ideologically driven. To describe someone as a conservative is not to say they are Republican, a supporter of the Bush administration, or even a conservative in the American political sense.

In this case, Ferguson is determined to put the actions of this mid-level official into his larger narrative, regardless of whether the facts fit. Meanwhile, this mid-level Treasury official is working to solve a problem based on recent experience. That’s the point on ideology.

Actually, in his latest book, Colossus, Ferguson recommends that the US stay in Iraq for the next twenty years at least, reducing it to a colony. The analogy he uses there is with Egypt in the 1880s.

However, the point he is making is not empty. It is pretty plain. The black flags of the Shiites are mounted over columns relieving the besieged population of Sunni in Falluja. In Kirkuk, which the Kurds, at least, are claiming as Kurdish, riots were suppressed by the Americans at the cost of twenty lives this week. The riots were in support of the Shiite intifada. So far, of the three major ethnics that the US is depending on to rule in Iraq, we’ve pissed off the Sunnis, are well on our way to alienating the Shia — after pictures of the Chenchny-ification of Falluja, that process will be 2/3rds done, and have not yet alienated the Kurds. In fact, one of the reasons the Kurds like us should be noted — we hardly occupy Kurdistan. Funny, our popularity seems to increase with the absense of our soldiers in the streets and our helicopters in the sky. Wonder why that is?

Oops — sorry. That rhetorical question was cheap and empty cynicism. Only terrorists would object to a healthy massacre of the occupying forces, now and then. Got to show them the boot, kill the sons — turn em back at the city limits into a city that is being systematically crushed by machine gun fire and rockets launched from helicopters — pile the corpses on the soccer field where they rot — you have to do this, you see, or they get all uppity. Besides, they are barbarians with no respect for human life.

Just to pre-empt an expected rejoinder: when I said Iraqis “cannot be convinced of our good intentions” I regard this as a failure of the US, not a failure of the Iraqi mindset.

Rajeev,
Well, I didn’t know I’d burped in the country club of argument. So sorry about that, gents. Pass the sherry…
No. That isn’t enough. When you write — “Empty cynicism” also applies to those who call the reconstruction in Iraq an unqualified disaster or fiasco, or to those who see every bad event in the country as further confirmation that “they were right” without thinking about how to constructively proceed” I think you are avoiding the question of agency big time. Who is doing this constructive proceeding? When I see what is happening in Falluja — when I see the CPA misunderstand democracy’s essense — which is in the competition of ideas — by suppressing Sadr’s paper, instead of simply pointing out its mistakes and errors in another paper, or caricaturing him, or doing the thousand things that occur in democracies — when I see the CPA cynically outlaw militias while simultaneously paying Chalabi to sustain his — then I have to say that constructive proceeding sounds suspiciously like the rhetoric that used to be used in the Soviet Union — a rhetoric that promotes an ever onward to a greater goal, and underneath that rhetoric insinuates the beady eyes and the paid enthusiasms of the secret police.

Nat,
no, I don’t think that is quite accurate. From the accounts I’ve read about what is happening in Baghdad, the Shi’ites who are providing supplies for the population of Falluja are pretty much the broad spectrum. One of the Shi’ite Governing council members has met with Sadr, it is true, true members have resigned, and the man who sat next to Laura Bush at the last Bush state of the Union address, Adnan Pachachi, is calling the assault criminal.

As for the Kurds — interesting question, that of causation. One of the things the U.S. did right — at the urging, it should be said, in 92, of the French — was to create a zone of practical Kurdish autonomy. Guess what happened? A mini civil war. But the U.S. didn’t send in troops to bring it to a conclusion. It was a bloody thing — thousands were killed — and the violence between sides still isn’t over. But the Kurds have organized themselves through it.

But your last phrase is the crucial one:

“That maybe we need fewer soldiers in the streets and fewer helicopters in the sky in Kurdistan because the Kurds aren’t trying to kill us?”

This is the doubleness of goal that has, I think, destroyed the validity of the occupying power. Our reasons for having soldiers in the streets hasn’t been about the killing of “us” — the Americans — but the protection of “them” — the Iraqis. There’s an interesting article by Lisa Wedeen, at the University of Chicago, Seeing like a Citizen, that explains the dynamic here. In essence, Wedeen argues something like this: a governing power that exerts both too much force — acting in direct violence against its opponents — and too little power — in securing its citizens from various harms — is creating a mechanism of destabilization, forging the blade that will be pressed to its own throat. Her example is Yemen. The CPA is a perfect example of another kind — on the one hand, protecting “us” to the extent of razing Falluja, and on the other neglecting “them” to the extent of not being able to protect Iraqis from explosions such as those that have punctuated Iraq’s urban life since January. Kurdistan has plenty of problems with warlords. However, since we aren’t using our heavy hand to “help them” solve those problems — we are simply pumping aid into the region — they love us. Or like us. Even that, however, can change.

Wow – you’ve actually read my blog? I’ve increased my readership by 25 percent, then.

As to the comparison with the Soviet Union — actually, I think there is a deepseated community of vision between Leninism and the CPA. In both, there is a disregard for the plurality and specificity of culture, for the situations in which activity is embedded, in favor of the idea that human beings can be fundamentally re-engineered — we’ll just make Americans out of Iraqis. And when this is objected to, the objection is beaten down by saying, surely you aren’t saying that Iraqis aren’t capable of democracy? When of course the objection is quite different — it is that an unelected, unrepresentative force is incapable of installing it, and incapable of understanding the culture in which they are installing it. Democracies aren’t synthesized in laboratories, and handed out in pill form to a grateful populace. At best, the CPA can help create the conditions that make for the people themselves creating representative legislature, an independent judiciary, and the right to contract. And what that means, further, is that progress isn’t a univocal and unidirectional process, defined by the occupiers.
This demands an extraordinary high level of trust in the occupiers — a trust that the last week has betrayed. It doesn’t take much to see what the Iraqis see — an army that claims to be ‘securing” Iraqi safety, and that responds cautiously and/or badly to the huge number of Iraqi civilian deaths (and to be more constructive, Rajeev — that has spent an astonishingly few resources trying to secure the ammunition dumps from which the bombers are getting their munitions — an elementary thing, one would think) but that responds massively and without measure to American deaths.
As to what to do… well, I thought I had a vague idea before this last week. Now I haven’t a clue.

ps — Rajeev,
I’ve been thinking about the problem of distance you mentioned — that this is “our” problem, not just the CPAs. While it sounds obvious — okay, we are in this together — there is a problem with starting off like that. To my mind, the problem in Iraq is a vision problem — neither the CPA nor the American media have much concept of what “seeing like an Iraqi” means. True, they take funny polls, and Newspaper journalists, in the time honored way of newspaper journalists, commit bad sociology and interview random groups of Iraqis to see what they will say — usually with an interpreter telling them, and the story having some colorful decor, and no history. But something as simple as asking — what does it look like to an Iraqi that the US revenges its own deaths with a force a hundred times more powerful than it operates to revenge the death of the Iraqis who are supposedly being killed by “bandits” or Al Qaeda members — just never occurs to us. And the premise of that “our problem” embeds a deeper premise — that we are “well intentioned.” Myself, I think intentions are found on the ground, in what happens. And I certainly don’t think you will understand the vision thing if you pre-determine the terms with phrases like “well intentioned” — I presume, with Socrates, that everyone operates for the “good,” but the problem is: what is the “good”? Unfortunately, most of the mistakes of the CPA arise from that original premise of their good intentions, since it automatically means that those who oppose them have bad intentions. And against the bad intentioned you can do anything. Hence the completely stupid attempt to over-rule Sistani’s very reasonable suggestions about the constitution — at least, about the power accorded to a minority to block laws — and the elections.

Rajeev, I don’t really think think the set of conceptual dispositions that go into Leninism go into Sadrism — little as I know about the latter. The mindset that could justify taking away human rights in order to bring electrification to the countryside isn’t working with the same goals, or the same sense of history, that Sadr is — but again, I am not sure what Sadr is all about.

However, I do know certain things about installing democracy. For instance, I know that an essential ingredient of it is preserving the autonomy of the judiciary, and not using it as a tool of whatever rulers are in the executive branch. That form of selective punishment brings absolute discredit on the judiciary. It is a sign of a collapsing, and not a rising, regime. The way in which the CPA arranged the issuing of the murder charge against Sadr — holding it in secret for a long period of time in order to pressure him, and getting it from an Iraqi judge who is either completely blind or bribed, seeing as how accusing Sadr of the crimes of his militia, while the very Council contains at least two members — Chalabi and Abdul Azizal-Hakim, the head of Sciri — who have done the same things — is a classic instance of the selective use of the judiciary for political purposes. You shouldn’t do this. If the CPA begins to start trying, at least, to see like an Iraqi citizen, rather than a D.C. consultant, I do think they could avoid a lot of mistakes. It would have been better, even, to arbitrarily arrest Sadr as an enemy of the CPA, rather than dress that accusation up through the court system. That has taken an arbitrary act of force and made it into something worse — a symptom of corruption. What would you think, if, say, you were an Iraqi who had a runin with one of Chalabi’s militia men, about going to the court, now?

Yet more wishful thinking Chris?

Rajeev,
I have comments about what I think of as the “intentional fallacy” later, but first–

I’ve tried to add comments, but alas, every time I do, the weblog takes forever to load. Maybe I’ll try it again — this weekend. I changed the template, and maybe it will be easier.
Thanks for the advice.