Robert Kagan and the Situation in Iraq

Has America lost its way? Is US power and influence on the wane? Mr Robert Kagan says Europe and the USA are “two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets”, and that the main cause is a “crisis of legitimacy” following the Cold War and the end of the Soviet threat. But my explanation is simpler than Mr Kagan’s: it’s that America’s present troubles come mainly from US military action in Iraq.

* * *

Anyone keen to see the end of American hegemony, however, should choose their next hegemon with care. First of all they should take a long and thoughtful look at the ruined face of Mr Victor Yushchenko. The political culture that produced that face, and that views the dioxin poisoning of opponents as the way to win, is the same that provided the only serious alternative to the USA for half a century.

Though perhaps you prefer China? The Chinese are managing their currency, watching US developments, and hedging their bets on the outcome in Iraq. But look closely at the faces of the numerous political prisoners in Chinese jails (something we are barred from doing of course), or at the grim clandestine procedures by which the Chinese Communist Party ensures its monopoly of power, before throwing your vote that way.

Or will Europe now take up its responsibilities? Yet Europe has for years been almost a free rider in the security arrangements of the West, and still is. The plain fact is that whatever its faults, and whatever its mistakes, America remains the one unassailable fortress of freedom in the world, generously ensuring the independent survival of nations whose economic fecklessness and dubious political habits hardly deserve a cent. It saved Europe twice from its own follies. And it may yet have to save it again.

But Iraq is something else. And since the present conflict may well be just the beginning of Middle Eastern Wars II, III, IV, ad infinitum, and the entire Iraq episode now playing out may even appear in retrospect little more than a sideshow, here are some things we don’t want to see next time around:

Shock and awe

“Hey guys—we won!” But what did we win? And what sort of victory is it that leaves the enemy undefeated, with 90% of Iraqi personnel untouched so they can melt away, remove their uniforms, and live to fight another day? Technically dazzling pyrotechnic displays, without destroying the enemy troops themselves, have roughly the effect of a bunch of picadors wandering through a herd of fierce Miura bulls and jabbing them into a rage—in this case bulls capable of camouflage, organization, guerrilla cunning, and deadly revenge.

Mixed in with this have been facile socio-economic comparisons drawn from World War II. But Germany, Italy, and Japan are largely irrelevant. In those cases the armies were destroyed, demoralized, and exhausted. Each country still had a modern industrial economy that needed only to be rebuilt and redirected in time of peace. Most important of all, Germany, Italy, and Japan already possessed high and very distinguished cultures which had, by grievous miscalculation and bad luck, been taken over by militaristic brutes. None of this is true of Iraq. In Iraq we’re starting from scratch.

Understanding Iraqis

Both London and Washington have shown little insight. If we are losing the Iraqi people it is partly because robust assertions that “everybody wants freedom”, or the belief that everyone wants liberal democracy plus market economics as soon as possible, are far too naïve.

The westernised élites in the region do indeed value personal and intellectual liberty—these being the Arabs westerners cultivate and talk to, speaking mainly in English of course. But for most uneducated and semi-literate Muslims, as for most uneducated and semi-literate Christians 200 years ago, “intellectual freedom” means little but religious heresy, endangered morals, and the fear of cultural dissolution. It makes them bristle; it makes them take up arms. As for our more libertine excesses, the full-frontal sexual mores of the West are as disturbing to orthodox Muslims as they are repugnant.

Yes: people want freedom—but not at any price. Yes: people want democracy—but not if much of the nation’s social fabric is destroyed. Yes: people want consumer goods—but not if establishing a market economy means that half the existing buildings in the country are flattened first. Doubtless they want peace too—but not a Carthaginian peace of the kind represented by the taking of Fallujah.

Clash of civilizations—not

The people with whom we are at war do not represent a civilization. Sorry—but that’s the simple truth. The Talibandidos, or al Qaeda, or the next Palestinian youngster to strap plastic explosive around his waist, come mostly from environments of almost unbelievable cultural sterility—barren, hopeless, empty, backward, ignorant, trapped within the Arabic language and its understandings, resentful, destructive, fanatical and forlorn. Their typical leaders are the blind mullah who first tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in New York, or ‘Captain Hook’, the demented Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri of London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, or the semi-literate peasant Mullah Omar, sidekick of bin Laden himself.

Wahhabis yearning for the world of the 7^th or 8^th century are yearning for precivilized society, for the bare bones of a social order, for the embryonic rudiments of Islamic civilization before it was fleshed out with art and science and philosophy… And a thousand years before the complications of modernity set in. Their movement is a barbaric reaction against civilization today and all it stands for. Islamic fundamentalists are today’s “terrible simplifiers”, unable to cope with urban confusion, moral uncertainty, and the constant changes modern life requires.

But isn’t there something to the theory of civilizational clash? Yes indeed there is. This once-dynamic religion spread globally before beginning its long cultural decline. As a result the impoverished psychological wreckage from which its terrible simplifiers are drawn runs into millions: no recruiting base for any guerrilla movement has been as large.

Murder incorporated

Who exactly is the enemy? It is tempting to dismiss the Zarquawi squad as little but a bunch of vicious psychopaths. But they’re a good deal more than that. He and his men represent a throwback to another, earlier, religious era—a thousand-year throwback to a time when religious zeal and killing went hand in hand, when a holy blend of spiritual exaltation and homicidal violence were entirely compatible… to the era of the Crusades.

Probably a larger number however consist of Iraqis genuinely affronted by any foreign troops on Arab land, and whose fury is directly proportional to the size of the occupation force. For them, resistance is a matter of pride and dignity, and they will kill foreign soldiers as long as there are any left in Iraq to kill. It would be interesting to know the consequence of depopulating Fallujah. Of the 200,000 who left the city, how many people will return to try and peacefully rebuild their lives, and how many will have been converted from passive sympathy to active support for the insurgency?

It is also not impossible that the longer this goes on, the more we are going to see something resembling the “armies” of Africa—illiterate unemployed youths who find shooting and bombing more exciting than their normally empty days. They crave attention, and in the Arab world they are delighted to find that, with an occupying army to be resented and abused, and foreign soldiers to be shot at, both the religious authority of the mullahs, and the social authority of their families and clans, gladly endorse such activities. Almost the only outside information they are exposed to is the 24/7 hate campaign of the radio network al-Manar, a full-time terrorist recruiting operation run by Hezbollah said to reach up to 15 million a day in the Middle East, and the television network al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera tells them that they can kill on camera and win instant notoriety. Or even be honored as martyrs.

Shooting soldiers is fun

No: not all people value freedom, democracy, and shopping malls. Some find riding around with a big cannon on the back of a pickup heaps more fun, shooting soldiers fun, blowing up mess-tents fun, catching girls and raping women fun, trying to bring down aircraft fun… Hugely satisfying in fact. Anyone familiar with the underside of American cities and the downside of American culture must surely know the attraction, for amoral and directionless young men, of sociopathic violence of a broadly similar kind. (Or if anyone doesn’t know it by now they certainly should.)

In parts of the Arab world terroristic violence is becoming a fulfilling life in itself: civilized people, and civilized westerners especially, forget the natural tendency of unsocialized males to revert to savagery. Internationally, these lawless elements increasingly represent a loosely organized Murder Incorporated for whom there is no future and no tomorrow—and with little but anti-western mayhem on their minds.

* * *

We hope the outcome of the campaign in Iraq will be a democratic polity. We expect to see elections take place before too long. We trust that tribalism and sectarianism will eventually diminish. It is no criticism of the troops, bound as they are to the remorseless logic of battle, that the outcome of the assault on Fallujah should remind one of Cicero’s comment: “they make a desert, and call it peace”. At present the allied endeavour may constitute the most daring application of tough love ever devised—being cruel only to be kind—but whether the Iraqis come to reciprocate this demanding form of goodwill, or instead develop a hatred as implacable as it is enduring, only time will tell.

December 2004