The Loom of Time, page 32
I sometimes think that had the United States not invaded Iraq, Iraq would have fallen apart anyway in the course of the Arab Spring eight years later, as Syria did, with a similar loss of life. In that case the younger Bush would have been blamed by the Washington elite for not toppling Saddam when he had the chance. It is an interesting counterfactual. But at the end of the day I realize I am stuck with history as it has actually happened.
Washington went through relatively little soul-searching. Those who were far more identified than me with the decision to invade Iraq blamed what happened on bad officials and some bad generals, as if their abstract conceptions of remaking the Middle East had little to do with it. America, being so rich, powerful, and geographically blessed, can simply shrug off failed wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, so that the consequences for the country are mitigated. Following the Iraq debacle, people who supported invading Iraq henceforth advocated different forms of military intervention in Libya and Syria: two other states nearly as internally divided by tribe, ethnic, and sectarian group as Iraq—and just as artificially created—where the only unifying glue was also a severe form of authoritarianism. It was as if Iraq had never happened. At the root of it all was a breathtaking lack of curiosity and imagination regarding the history and ground-level reality of all those distant places. They had little interest in Libyan tribes or Syrian sects or the other factors that made those states barely states at all. Again, it was as though America’s own historical experience mattered much more to them than the historical and cultural experiences of those countries themselves. Thus, in an intellectual sense, they suffered from a form of isolationism, even as it went by the name of interventionism.
But I am talking here of only one part of the East Coast foreign policy elite. As regards the Middle East, there was another part. These were the people who had clairvoyantly predicted exactly what would happen in Iraq, and who were consequently opposed to the war from the beginning. The Middle East was a mystery to many of them, too. But at least they admitted as much, and consequently they knew enough to want to exercise restraint in dealing with the region. Unfortunately, these people did not channel their clairvoyance into any sort of a positive vision for the region: a vision that held out hope for the countries themselves and a sustainable policy direction for America, without the need of large-scale military intervention. Rather, they simply rested on their laurels of getting the Iraq War right and, in the wake of that disaster, merely projected a form of restraint worldwide for the United States to follow.
Former secretary of defense Chuck Hagel, a veteran of the Vietnam War who had opposed the Iraq War, once told me that whereas Vietnam changed America, Iraq changed only the Washington elite. Iraq, he went on, which engaged an all-volunteer army rather than a mass conscription one, did not unleash mass demonstrations across the country and a counterculture the way that Vietnam did. But the Iraq debacle did establish for many years two opposing camps within the policy elite in the American capital and its intellectual hinterlands. The lines of debate changed from Democrats versus Republicans to interventionists versus restrainers; or to put it another way, Wilsonians versus neo-isolationists. The Wilsonians believed that because the United States had had such an historically transformative experience with mass democracy, its system—or a variation of it—was destined for every country in the world to enjoy, whereas the neo-isolationists believed that America should be a light unto the nations but no more, and persuade by example rather than by force or active engagement in other countries’ affairs. The Republican Party was split between interventionists and restrainers, just as the Democratic Party was. Thus, talk of bipartisanship and party divides was irrelevant in the post–Iraq War years when this debate raged.
In particular, the Iraq War forever shattered the tenuous Reaganite alliance within the Republican Party that existed between old-fashioned moderate realists such as Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker III and muscular interventionists such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. To see photos of all five of these men chummily collaborating in 1990 and 1991 during the First Gulf War in the administration of George H. W. Bush is to experience a wave of nostalgia for a well-functioning bygone age, compared to the hatreds between them as a result of the Second Gulf War twelve years later, when the younger Bush’s invasion of Iraq put a veritable Berlin Wall between the two groups and helped rupture Washington in the process.
States and empires weaken or collapse when their elites fall into division, and the Iraq War, by splitting the elite and fraying the tissue of intangibles that held together a soft imperial-like aura for America in the Middle East, ended the American empire there. It was not an economic burden that undermined the United States in the Middle East—a typical cause of imperial decline—but the intellectual failure of important sections of the American policy elite, detached as they were from the intractable realities of Middle Eastern countries themselves.
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Iraq was an original mistake, meaning that intervening in a large and complicated Islamic country with the aim of remaking society had never actually been tried previously by the United States and therefore, at least in a theoretical sense, nobody could be sure the effort would fail. But the toppling in 2011 of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was an unoriginal and therefore, in a sense, an even less forgivable mistake, since the recent example of Iraq should have warned off the interventionists, whose actions created chaos in a strategically located oil-producing state on the Mediterranean, leading to the deaths of thousands and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of livelihoods at a minimum, in addition to sowing more chaos throughout the countries of the Sahara and Sahelian Africa. Gaddafi, whose bizarre behavior and even more bizarre costumes, reminiscent as they were of the ancient Carthaginians in Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel Salammbô, had been steadily evolving into a pro-Western tyrant who held together a country that was not really a country, but rather an amorphous cartographic blank space whose western region, Tripolitania, had traditionally been oriented toward Greater Carthage and Tunisia, and whose eastern region, Cyrenaica, had traditionally been oriented toward Alexandria in Egypt. There was absolutely no tactical or strategic rationale to remove him. National interest dictated that we leave him in place.
Then there was Syria, another abject, unoriginal failure of imagination, where the lessons of what had just happened in neighboring, fellow Ba‘athist and fellow Arab Iraq made little impact upon many in Washington. Arguably the most knowledgeable area specialist on Syria in the United States is Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of the influential blog Syria Comment. Landis, educated at Harvard and Princeton, speaks Arabic and lived for years in Syria. When most Washington policymakers, as well as the U.S. intelligence community,[40] were predicting Bashar al-Assad’s imminent demise early in the civil war, Landis warned that the younger Assad would survive—and in fact, he did.
When the Washington policy nomenklatura was demanding military intervention to erect a better Syria, Landis reflected that “the liberal, pro-Western class in Syria was small. It would be quickly destroyed between the hammer of Islamist groups and the anvil of Assad’s security apparatus.” Furthermore, there was “no ‘Syrian people,’ ” he said. In an echo of Freya Stark, “Syrians are deeply divided along religious, ethnic, class and regional lines.” The number of militias was in the “thousands.” The notion of Washington think-tankers that the Obama administration should have funded the moderate militias “is bunkum.” The “radicals got money because they were successful. They fought better, had better strategic vision and were more popular,” Landis patiently explained. “The so-called moderates were simply local strongmen who gathered around themselves cousins, clan members, and fighters from their village and the village next to theirs. But go two or three villages away, and they were viewed as foreigners and troublemakers, who were venal and predatory.”[41]
Given that in Syria different armed groups began to form soon after the first demonstrations of the Arab Spring in early 2011, and given that, as Landis noted, “thousands” of such militias would eventually form, there was never a possibility of putting Syria at peace except by occupying the country with armed forces, and that was something the United States was simply never going to do, or even to take the lead in doing. Remember that this was a regional war, with the Iranians, Saudis, Turks, Qataris, and others all backing various armed elements inside Syria. Thus, to solve Syria meant essentially assuaging the various fault lines of the Muslim Middle East.
There is more.
Witness the fact that from the very beginning the Syrian uprising suffered from an acute lack of central control or any coherent leadership whatsoever. It quickly devolved into a conservative Sunni revolt, which is what drew the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis, Qataris, and Turks into the conflict in the first place. As Landis reports, primordial loyalties to clan and religion quickly took over, since it was only such loyalties that could deal with the suffering. Indeed, once the regime began to falter, what remained was less a hope than “the state of nature,” observes Jonathan Spyer, an Israel-based journalist with much experience on the ground in war-torn Syria and Iraq.[42]
Thousands of miles away from the actual fighting, humanitarian and imperial-sounding voices would not be deterred, however. The most articulate and arguably most prominent of them was Leon Wieseltier, who was at the time the literary editor of The New Republic. Referring to the incoherent Syrian opposition, he said that “we can help them to cohere.” After all, “moral responsibility” requires that a great power be “bold.” And given that “the overwhelming majority of Americans have not experienced the effects” of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (around 50,000 American dead and wounded out of an American population of 330 million), “I am of the party of American energy, which believes that America can never be tired, because the stakes for the world are too high.”[43] Wieseltier, who had supported the Iraq War with similar arguments, made a direct appeal to historical responsibility. Facts, according to this worldview, were things to be overcome rather than practically absorbed and considered. Whereas someone like Wieseltier had the luxury of beautiful intellectual formulas, policymakers were stuck with the bureaucratic consequences and blame—as someone like former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, whose worldview was close to Wieseltier’s, knows only too well.
Yet, all the arguments supporting military intervention in Syria—establishing no-fly zones, setting up civilian protection corridors and safe zones, cratering runways, arming friendly militias, removing Assad outright, and so forth—left President Barack Obama cold.[*12] (I was not convinced by these arguments either.) Though in the conventional wisdom of Washington elites, Obama’s failure to intervene in Syria is a blight on his record, in fact, as Landis observes, it was a “success”; since Obama “kept his foot on the brakes” and resisted what, in effect, was a replay of the run-up to the Iraq War, even if Iraq was not falling apart prior to our intervention as Syria was.[44] While no one was asking Obama to send in hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate Syria and make it a democracy, the effect of the various measures being recommended to him, whether establishing safe zones or cratering runways, or such, would have certainly risked drawing the United States deep into what was already a quagmire beyond its means to ultimately resolve. This would have been especially true if some of those recommended actions—undermined, as one might expect, by the fog and confusion of a complex, internecine war—failed to achieve their purpose, in which case the United States would either have had to escalate further or suffer a humiliating failure.
The irony is that while the Washington conventional wisdom maintains the Iraq War was to blame for making Obama gun-shy about saving a large number of lives in Syria, the truth may be the opposite: that the failure of the Iraq War did serve one useful purpose. It kept the United State largely out of Syria.
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In the post-imperial history of the Fertile Crescent, only one ruler kept order for decades while at least trying to obey certain limits: Hafez al-Assad. Admittedly, the standards here are extremely low. Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of people, not counting those killed in the Iran-Iraq War that he began. Bashar al-Assad killed hundreds of thousands in the course of a civil war that he did not begin. By contrast, the elder Assad is guilty of killing tens of thousands in the midst of a sectarian insurrection launched against him. The fact that we can label the elder Assad the Syria-and-Iraq region’s least bloody and most stable ruler demonstrates just how utterly impossible to rule, on account of such artificial borders and weak state identities, the principal geographic entities of the Fertile Crescent really are. Alas, it is still better than anarchy. Syria and Iraq were always happier as loci of far-flung empires, or as imperial possessions of other empires, than as modern states themselves.
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century there was no real sense of civilization as we understand it in the principal political geographies of the Fertile Crescent: Iraq and Syria. Secular totalitarianism, best typified by Saddam Hussein, had “bulldozed” the past, freeing young men of traditional constraints and exposing them to radical religious forces. The collective memories of kindness and tolerance that came naturally to cosmopolitan cultures such as the Ottoman Empire had been wiped away by Ba‘athist rule.[45] Rather, there was a concoction of postmodern technology such as the internet and videotapes, intermingled with barbarity—torture and decapitations—exemplified by the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (the Levant or Greater Syria). And yet while ISIS spiritually existed outside of geography, its formation and rule depended on the anarchic void that was created by decades of Ba‘athism and an American invasion. Ba‘athism had led inexorably to ISIS, in other words. Under Saddam, the Sunnis had dominated. Now that the state had fallen away, too many Sunnis continued to run riot as Salafists. Unlike the Iranian Revolution, which had tiers-mondiste and even some Western philosophical elements to enrich it, making the birth of a Shi‘ite clerical state a truly world-historical event, ISIS offered no ideology or useful interpretation of the past. Thus, it was sterile in a way that not even the essentially blue-collar Iranian Revolution was. ISIS, which featured beheadings, sex slaves, and the utter subjugation of women, registered the end of the line for Syria and Iraq.
Beyond ISIS lay no great vision or ideology, no salvation, merely the wreckage of all dreams and grand schemes. And the end of the line for Syria and Iraq now meant not annihilation, but the tedious requirement of reinventing basic governance—and building from scratch some sort of social contract. How can we exist without killing each other, and how can we do so in the face of lower prices for our oil and gas in an age of renewables? Only such an attitude could stave off the territorial appetites of outside powers like those of the postmodern Iranians, Turks, and Russians, ready with their own imperial dreams to carve up the carcass of two failed and artificial states. As I write, Syria is barely a state and Iraq faces perhaps a new era of violent internal explosions due to the failure of democratic governance. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Fertile Crescent was at the beginning of time.
Skip Notes
*1 Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) foresaw many of the problems in the developing world, just as his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993) foresaw the era beginning with 9/11. Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) foresaw China in the starkest terms as the future great power rival of the United States.
*2 In the end, at a meeting on December 1, 1918, in London, before the start of the Paris Peace Conference following World War I, British prime minister David Lloyd George and French prime minister Georges Clemenceau kept the spirit of the Sykes-Picot Agreement while adjusting some of its features. They agreed that the Mosul region would go over to British control, allowing for the formation of British Iraq with Baghdad as its capital. The whole of Palestine and Transjordan would also be controlled by the British, rather than under international administration. Meanwhile, the whole of Syria north of Palestine, including Lebanon, would fall under French rule. Allawi, Faisal I of Iraq, p. 179.
*3 The tribes in the 1920s and 1930s owned several times more rifles than the government. Dawisha, Iraq, p. 33.
*4 Nuri Pasha al-Sa’id is well worth a biography in his own right. Born in 1888 in Baghdad, he got his start in Ottoman Tripolitania resisting the Italian occupation of Libya. A prisoner in Egypt, he fought alongside Faisal and T. E. Lawrence throughout the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in the desert of the Hejaz. As the Ottomans retreated from Damascus in 1918, Nuri led Faisal’s Arab forces into the city. He also played a role in Faisal’s discussions with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. (There is a famous photo of Nuri, Faisal, and Lawrence together at the Paris Peace Conference.) Helping Faisal I rule Syria under the early French mandate, he went with Faisal to British Iraq following Faisal’s ouster from Damascus by the French. Thereafter Nuri was a permanent fixture in Iraqi governments for three and a half decades, helping to lead the police and the army, and serving countless times as prime minister. In 1958, when an Arab nationalist coup toppled Faisal II and killed members of the royal family, Nuri escaped dressed as a woman. The next day he was captured, executed, buried, and dug up; his body was then dragged through the streets of Baghdad, burned, and mutilated by a mob. Nuri was the ultimate and capable intriguer and administrator, an early Arab nationalist who later was sympathetic to the British. His was not a life of great and abstract ideals, but of the real and the possible under increasingly difficult and brutal circumstances. Rather than a visionary, he was a pragmatist and master of technique. Iraq could have done much worse than to have his like in power in the monstrous decades following his death.
