Behind the Iraq “surge”

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 14 January

It beggars belief. After nearly four years of occupation, resulting in the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis, the US and its British lapdog have decided that the only remedy for the Iraq debacle is more of the same. Despite a clear-cut desire on the part of the majority of Iraqis for a rapid withdrawal of foreign forces (a desire shared by majorities in both the US and Britain), troop numbers are to be increased. It seems the White House, if no one else, is convinced that the problems that have beset the occupation can be overcome by a further military “surge”.

The proposed escalation poses a major test for the new Democratic Congressional leadership – one they are likely to flunk. Unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge it, the reality is that the Democrats were swept back to power in the November elections principally thanks to the Iraqi resistance, whose actions brought the human cost of the war home to the US electorate. The Democrats’ own feeble and equivocal responses to the misbegotten war on terror would never have done the trick.

Historical analogies are not reassuring. By early 1969, it had become obvious to US policy makers (not to mention the public at large) that the military engagement in Vietnam was a disaster. Nonetheless, that engagement continued for another four years, during which perhaps a million more Vietnamese perished.

One reason for the compounding of error with error was the nature of the explanations of the debacle offered to Americans, which – then as now – tended to stress the US’s “good intentions”, thereby letting America’s collective conscience off the hook and obscuring the roots of the disaster in a long-standing and intrinsically criminal imperial policy.

Thus we are now treated to the obscene spectacle of commentators such as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer – not so long ago among the most super-confident champions of the invasion of Iraq – admitting ruefully that it’s all gone wrong, but placing the blame on the Iraqis themselves, who have somehow proved unworthy of American sacrifices on their behalf. Iraqi culture is now portrayed as endemically sectarian and inimical to democracy. Iraqi leaders are seen as hopelessly weak, factional and corrupt (as opposed, presumably, to the perspicacious and principled public servants who hold power in North America or Western Europe).

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek’s international editor, considered a liberal critic of the Bush regime, takes a somewhat subtler tack, but still divides the blame for the Iraq fiasco between the “ignorance and naivete” of the neo-cons, on one hand, and a deeply flawed Iraqi society, on the other. Iraq’s Sunnis, he states, “have mostly behaved like self-defeating thugs.”

Racist generalisations of this type are commonplace in the US discourse on West Asia (and also, though to a slightly lesser extent, in the British version). They serve as a handy substitute for serious analysis and as a mask for US and British culpability. And they routinely betray a breath-taking ignorance of modern history.

Take Richard Haass, president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, who believes that what he calls the “American era” in the middle east began only with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Zakaria, he is critical of Bush’s foreign policy not because of its unethical neo-colonial premises but because it has led to an erosion of US influence. The answer, he suggests, is less emphasis on “democracy” and more on “economic liberalism”. Similarly, the White House-appointed Iraq Study Group called for a reduction in troop numbers but at the same time recommended immediate privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry. The country’s principal resource would fall into the hands of US corporations, which, of course, is how the US became involved in the region in the first place.

A significant section of the US elite would clearly prefer a military disengagement to the escalation Bush seeks, but at the same time remains strongly in favour of entrenching other forms of US power. It is this soft-focus empire-building that ensures that the wrong lessons are being drawn from the tragedy of the last four years.

Virtually obliterated from the current discussion about what went wrong in Iraq is any mention of the sanctions that took the lives of half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s (a policy rigidly pursued by Bill Clinton), or of US and British support in the 1960s and 70s for any regional force (including Saddam) that would curtail the influence of the secular left, or, going back further, of the forty years of non-sectarian nationalist struggle by Iraqis against British dominance.

It is not the Iraqis whose culture lacks a developed grasp of democracy, but the Americans and the British. Specifically, they have never digested the meaning of colonialism and the democratic impulse to resist it. Where Stalinism and fascism are now rightly recognised as epitomes of inhumanity, the third great nightmare of the 20th century, colonialism, is not, though its victims are at least as numerous. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a reckoning with this historic crime, it is being repeated.