U.S. Foreign Policy and the
Mideast
Both economic fundamentals
and the geopolitical environment influence the stock market. What happens
in the Mideast, a major source of the world’s energy, matters. Former Bush White House
press secretary, Scott McClellan reveals in his new book (2008) that the
administration’s major motivation for going to war in Iraq was ideological,
“reshaping the Mideast as a region of peaceful democracies.”
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To be rational in any sphere,
(is) to display good judgement in it... Isaiah
Berlin “Political Judgement”
(1957) The Sense of
Reality
The values of a society determine the feasibility of liberal democracy. Reinhold Niebuhr was a theologian with a profound insight into human nature. Commenting on two disastrous world wars that nearly ended civilization in Europe, he wrote:
…the most significant
distinction between the human and the animal
world
is that the impulses of the former are “spiritualized ” (abstracted)
…The will to live is thus
transmuted into the will to self-realization
(with
others)….On the other hand the will-to-live is spiritually transmuted
into
the will-to-power or into the desire for also “power and glory.”…
The fact that the two impulses
although standing in contradiction to each
other,
are also mixed and compounded with each other on every level
of
human life, makes the simple distinctions between good and evil,
between
selfishness and altruism, which liberal idealism has tried to
estimate
moral and political facts, invalid.1
Contemporary social science research validates his
insight that many human values can be organized along the dimension
survival/self-actualization (which also has collective characteristics), a
dimension that is useful when comparing the values, and therefore the kinds of
governments possible in societies with different economic circumstances and
cultures. In “Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy,” Inglehart and Welzel (2005)
surveyed the effect of economic variables (such as GDP) and cultural history
(such as religion and locale) upon social values. To determine these values,
they asked questions as: Do you give priority to economic and physical security
over self expression and quality of life? Are you happy? Do you trust other
people?
Both Marxism and Liberalism derive from the
Enlightenment, the former a more extreme version of the latter. Marx assumed
that he had discovered the key to human happiness, all that was required was
the removal of class inequities. Liberalism assumes that this answer is always
contingent, as various societal interests compete and
rationally adjust within a framework of institutions and laws that protect
individual rights.
Refuting simple Marxist 2 materialism, Inglehart’s study of sixty four societies found that
economic variables explained 61% of the variation in social values. Cultural
history further accounted for 23% of that variation.
Combined, economic variables and cultural history
variables both accounted for 84% of the variation in social values. 3
The authors therefore concluded that both a country’s economic
development and prior cultural history affect its values and therefore its
movement towards liberal democracy. 4 The role of economic factors is major;
but cultures and their “path dependent” evolutions also matter. The present and
future depend on the past. The argument that economic development will lead to
eventually to liberal democracy because both are congruent is a long-term
argument for many countries.
The value dimension, survival/self actualization, can in
turn describe U.S. foreign policy. Why did the U.S. face no competing
coalitions in the potential anarchy of international politics, leaving the
country “unmatched and unchallenged” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989?
Josef Joffe of Süddeutsche
Zeitung noted:
America is
different. It irks and domineers, but it does not conquer.
It tries to
call the shots and bend the rules, but it does not go to war
for land and glory. 5
9/11, “changed everything;” it suddenly brought out the
administration’s survival instincts – it invaded Iraq in order to make an
example of Saddam Hussein, sanctioned Abu Ghraib, and
branded Iraq, Iran, and North Korea “the Axis of Evil” while trying to disarm
them of nuclear weapons. By overreacting, the administration amplified the main
problem of the Mideast, the cycle of retaliation and revenge. According to the
government’s 4/06 National Intelligence Estimate, “The Iraq conflict has become
the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement
in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist
movement.”
Actions can be self-fulfilling. An effective balance of
power against the United States is beginning to coalesce in the form of radical
Islam. What can the U.S. do?
1) The U.S. should
cease acting like its survival is at stake. The tragedy of 9/11 did not
threaten its survival. The combined might of technologically advanced Germany
and Japan truly did. As Muslim reactions to the Pope’s comments and the
cartoons of Mohammed illustrate, nerves there are on edge. The U.S. should not
further aggravate the situation.
This point can also be inferred from the
NIE report summary.
2) There may be many
other social problems in the Mideast, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict continues
to provide a focus for other grievances. The resolution of this important core
issue matters.
3) Iraq continues
fissure, with the U.S. continuing to have insufficient troops to restore order.
According to Senator Arlen Specter (R-Penn), “the war in Iraq has intensified
Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism…that’s a problem that nobody seems to
have the answer to.” 6
An open-ended “stay the course” strategy is not viable. The chaos in Iraq
is getting worse as casualties continue to mount. At this point, there are only
the least worst alternatives.
It’s useful to describe the role the U.S. has played in
the international system of states. Why was the U.S. able to provide order to
an often anarchic system of states? Joffe writes that
is because the U.S. was like the Roman empire. No
coalition of states rose against it because it was synonymous with the
international order. This allowed states to adjust their interests without war;
thus did the U.S. actualize itself abroad.
The genius
of American diplomacy in the second half of this century was
building institutions that would advance American interests
by serving others.
Who can
count the acronyms made in the U.S.A. – from NATO to GATT,
from OECD to the PFP (NATO’s Partnership for Peace)? 7
To make such a modern system function, dialogue within
the bounds of reasonable discourse is essential. NY Times columnist Thomas L.
Friedman (9/29/06) writes about the need for dialogue not only between Islam
and the rest of the world, but within Islam itself, among “people who’d like to
see a marriage between Islam and modernity,” a dialogue between its past and
the future.
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The U.S. is unable to restore order to Iraq due to these faulty assumptions: that you could invade an Arab country, impose liberal democracy by military force and then treat the post-war administration of the country as a mere afterthought. In “State of Denial,” Washington Post editor Bob Woodward relates this cogent discussion on February, 2003 one month before the invasion of Iraq in March:
At a meeting with Abizaid
and many senior staffers at the Central Command in Qatar that week, Garner
explained that he planned to follow right behind the combat units as they
moved into Iraq (to set up post-war administration). Oh, really, thought one of the staff officers,
Colonel Carol Stewart, the head of Central Command’s intelligence plans
division …“Who’s providing security in Iraq?” Stewart asked. Garner said he
expected the Iraqi police would still be on the job. That didn’t sound
right at all to Stewart…Later that day, in a smaller meeting with Garner
and other senior officers, Stewart spoke a little
more freely. The Central Command intelligence estimate said there would be
no Iraqi police on the job once the U.S. passed through, she stressed. “What do you mean, no police?” one of the generals
asked. “It’s like Panama,” she replied, referring to the
1989 U.S. invasion of that country with some 24,000 troops. When the
Americans had toppled the government and the local army, the police force
had ceased to exist. In Iraq, the same thing was likely to happen. 8
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In the above, the author is asking why the existing
occupation plan wasn’t being implemented. Ricardo Sanchez, former army
commander in Iraq during the invasion, has written a new book called Wiser
in Battle (2008). He thought that CENTCOM had no plans for the
occupation of Iraq.
Now, three years later, I was learning for the first
time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had
originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV (occupation)
activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by
simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job. That decision set up the United States for a failed
first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to
believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew
anything about it?
Apparently within the Administration, the ideologues had
won. Freed of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis would greet the United States with
flowers and set about diligently building their new enlightened society.
Victory would be immediate, just in time for the 2004 elections. All prepared
plans for the occupation were simply ignored.
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2-3 century B.C. Southern Arab, Hellenistic Style Exhibit, Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. Click here for a larger
image. 11/06 - There are many Islamic art exhibits in Washington.
Rearing Horse
The politics of the Mideast is especially complicated.
Situated at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, that area of the world has been ruled
by at least sixteen different empires, beginning with Egypt in 3000 B.C. and
ending with the nation-states founded during the 1920s and thereafter. The
Mideast is continually riven by the major enduring
factors of family, religion, Arabism, and (tribal) power. These complications
are further exacerbated by the area’s political history, where the concept of
nation does not match social realities. “(There is no) common definition of the
(Iraqi) state or a common agenda for its future.” 9 The experience of
the United States with Iraq’s non-institutional society is not unique. Right
before the invasion, the WSJ (3/19/03) wrote:
For two centuries, foreign powers have been
conquering Mideast lands for their own purposes, promising to uplift Arab
societies along the way…. But in nearly every incursion, both sides have
endured a raft of unintended consequences. From Napoleon’s drive into Egypt
through Britain’s rule of Iraq in the 1920s to Israel’s march into Lebanon
in 1982, Middle East nations have tempted conquerors only to send them
reeling. Little wonder that even many Arabs who revile Saddam
Hussein view the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with trepidation.
“Unless the Americans are far more subtle than they’ve ever had the
capacity to be, and more subtle than the [colonial] British, it’s going to
end in tears,” predicts Faisal Istrabadi, an
Iraqi-born lawyer in Michigan who has worked with the State Department on
plans to rebuild Iraq’s judiciary. “The honeymoon will be very brief.” Again and again, Westerners have moved into the
Mideast with confidence that they can impose freedom and modernity through
military force. Along the way they have miscalculated support for their
invasions, both internationally and in the lands they occupy. They have
anointed cooperative minorities to help rule resentful majorities. They
have been mired in occupations that last long after local support has
vanished. They have met with bloody uprisings and put them down with brute
force.
As value investors, we prefer to base our decisions upon
reasonable causes.
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Prior to the invasion of Iraq, where were the political
scientists?
…American political scientists whose business it is to
know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the
March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone
who dared to mention the many findings of academic research of how
democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries
to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now
expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions
favoring it.
William. E. Odom
Former Head of Army Intelligence Director of the
National Security Agency
during the Reagan administration
2/11/07 Washington Post
In developing societies it is often the professionals,
especially those who were educated abroad, who are for democracy; but what
about the grass roots? Globalization, a U.S. CEO who grew up in Kashmir says,
causes all sorts of conflicts in developing societies: economic, with the rule
of law, and with the environment – to mention only a few. He went on to say
that a modernizing country is like a climber of the Himalayas; it is not a good
idea to climb too fast.
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Maremagnum, Port Vell
Barcelona, Spain
Click here for a larger image.
Business and globalization have a wonderful ability to
bridge cultures. How can the U.S. deal with different political cultures, a
more complicated question? Perhaps the best answer is, “ by
constructive engagement.” Politics is enduring and almost always local; a
3/27/07 NYT article illustrates this principle at the extreme:
We are
learning, painfully, that many of the problems in Iraq or Afghanistan –
from violence and state failure to treatment of women – are deeply embedded
in local beliefs, political structures and traumatic histories. Iraqis and
Afghans do not want their country controlled by foreigners and
non-Muslims…We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or
southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign
troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure. “You are
saying,” the politician replies, “That we ought to sit back and do
nothing.” On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies we can. We have no moral obligation to do
what we cannot do.
Political cultures are composed of deeply held attitudes
and beliefs which change but slowly. Why the constant turmoil in the Mideast?
We suggest an explanation that might be useful. Speaking in glitteringly broad
generalities, the West is institutional. Its collective conflicts can be
described as a struggle between institutions: class v.s.
class within the Greek city-states, Church v.s. State during the Middle Ages, and then nation v.s. nation. In contrast, Arab societies are not
institutional, Allen (2006). These societies are, to use an anthropological
term, segmentary. An ahl
is a group of people patrilinealy related to a common
ancestor five generations back. This is a person’s affinity group. Within each
tribe there are different aal, and
they compete furiously against each other and against outsiders. This explains
the disorder in Iraq; even Saddam had to take its tribal structure into account.
(add:) In the 3/23/11 NYT,
Thomas Friedman writes in an article on the Libyan uprising:
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“Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator
against a democratic opposition, or is it a fundamentally a tribal civil
war?” This is the question because there are two kinds of
states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their
territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and
those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states
with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that
have trapped inside their borders, myriad tribes and sects who not only never
volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified
family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq (n.b.), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar
and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial
states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers,
kings or military dictators (Southern Africa also has this problem). They
have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power
are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” – either
my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead. It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions
began in three of the real countries– Iran, Egypt and Tunisia… |
There are many complications when the structure of the
nation-state is superimposed upon societies that are differently organized, a
crucial detail that current democratization theory ignored.* As our adventure
in Iraq clearly illustrates, it is not possible to terraform
other societies.
The paradigm
shift in comparative political analysis of the 1990s effectively obscured
much more of historical reality than it revealed. It encouraged a
voluntarism, an optimism, a Leninist-style
conviction that great ideas and great men could move history. It underwrote
a tendency to discount deep knowledge of specific countries and regions in
favor of gross comparative generalizations. As a result, this branch of the
neo-Wilsonian movement lost sight of the embedded
nature of the many obstacles to democratization and of the dangers that
that could arise in some circumstances should imprudent risks be run.…when
such optimism was taken up by the Bush Doctrine, the experts to act as a
reality check were few and far in between. 10** Tony
Smith (2007)
Professor of Political Science
Comparative Political Analysis Tufts
University
** Our note, they
were probably in the history department.
*(add: 3/21/11) The current
popular uprisings in the Mideast are also fascinating political science
experiments, further testing democratization theory. Can liberal democracy
exist in any society (we don’t think so); or does the success of that democracy
depend crucially upon the level of social trust, a trust that makes possible
power sharing among citizens and their government?
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So what about the future of the U.S. in Iraq? Here’s the situation. Former Iraqi defense minister Ali A. Allawi, previously a professor at Oxford, has written a new book called, The Occupation of Iraq (2007). In this book, he quotes the social psychologist and historian Ali al-Wardi (PhD, University of Texas):
The process
of modernization and urbanization was skin deep in Iraq and (the) tribal
values, born of the experiences of surviving in the harsh environment of
the desert, continued to hold sway for the vast majority of the country’s
inhabitants….Iraq would rapidly shed its civilized veneer and revert to the
culture and values of tribal nomadism…(the governing state of advanced civilizations) stands
in contrast to tribal solidarity as an organizing principle. 11
What happens when the
U.S. tries to impose its foreign form of government upon a fundamentally tribal
society? Allawi writes:
In a nutshell, the
U.S. invaded one of the world’s largest tribal societies, situated on top of
what was probably the world’s largest ammunition dump. It will be a long time before
anyone can restore order to Iraq by any means, and the best the U.S. and other
nations can do is to mitigate the situation*. Iraq is beyond blame.
*War ought truly to be a last resort because, being an
extreme act, it forces agonizing choices and costly tradeoffs: the lives of people v.s. the security of
society, domestic needs v.s. military
requirements. Furthermore, as Berlin (1990) points out, its outcomes are seldom
as expected.
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We wrote the above comments about two years ago. Our emphasis was less on current events, but on the overall philosophy justifying the war in Iraq. As seems increasingly clear, that overall ideology was the primary motivation; the practical details like providing security and governance were given short shrift. As was said at the time, we would be “greeted with flowers.”
Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? In “Plan of Attack,” Bob
Woodward related that George W. Bush simply said, “I think I have to do this.”
Since 2004, little more is known. Richard Haass was
head of the State Department’s Office of Planning from 2001-2003. In his new
book, “War of Necessity, War of Choice (2009)” he wrote:
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What struck me (in 2003) more than anything was how
comfortable Bush was with his decision to attack Iraq…How did George W. Bush
reach this point? I will go to my grave not fully understanding why. There
was no meeting or set of meetings at which the pros and cons were debated and
a formal decision taken. No, this decision happened. It was cumulative. The
issue was on the table from the onset of the administration, but before 9/11,
Iraq was simply one of many concerns on an evolving foreign policy agenda.
After 9/11, the president and those closest to him wanted to send a message
to the world that the United States was willing and able to act decisively…. Iraq was fundamentally different. The president wanted
to destroy an established nemesis of the United States. And he wanted to
change the course of history, transforming not just a country, but the region
of the world that had produced the lion’s share of the world’s terrorists and
had resisted much of modernity.…The arguments put forward for going to
war-non compliance with U.N. resolutions, possession of weapons of mass
destruction-turned out to be essentially window dressing, trotted out to
build domestic and international support for a policy that had been forged
mostly for other reasons….September 11 transformed the administration into
the proverbial hammer looking for a nail. Iraq became that nail. |
At the time a military official, more frankly, said that
the United States went after Saddam because, “he could be rolled.” The
psychology of this is interesting, but the logic is not. The decision to commit
the United States to years of war was a decision made without much intervening
analysis or consultation.
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What was Saddam thinking? According to a 7/3/09 NYT
article, a series of FBI interrogations conducted in 2004 after his capture
revealed that “the United States had many policy options short of war.”
Saddam Hussein told an F.B.I. agent that on the eve
of the 2003 American invasion, Iraq was trapped between United Nations
orders to demonstrate that he had disarmed and a fear that appearing too
weak would invite attack from its powerful neighbor and foe, Iran….
Obsessed with Iran, with which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war
in the 1980s, Mr. Hussein did not take seriously the demands from President
George W. Bush that he prove he had no unconventional weapons. “We did not appreciate how large the threat of Iran
loomed in his thinking,” Mr. Duelfer* said,
calling the United States’ understanding of Iraq in 2003 “cartoonish.” * Charles Duelfer was head
of the Iraq Survey Group, a multinational task force that was sent to find
WMD.
The broad brush of ideology lead
to a foreign policy that was initially devoid of salutary considerations such
as context, situation, and details. The 7/7/09 NYT wrote, Robert S. McNamara “…spent decades thinking
through the lessons of the (Vietnam) war. The greatest of these was to
know one’s enemy – to ‘empathize with him.’”
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After nine years of war, all U.S. combat troops left Iraq
on December 18, 2011. The war cost 4,485 U.S. military lives; tens of thousands
of Iraqi lives; and as Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate, at least $3 trillion dollars. What did we
buy with these sacrifices?
Only a few days after the U.S. left, the Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a
Shiite, brought terrorism charges against Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi who fled to the
Kurdish north. The
12/22/11 NYT reports that a wave of coordinated explosions then shook Baghdad,
killing 63. This is what we bought in Iraq.
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Which leads to a broader point. The market system and political democracy appear to be analogs. They both involve individuals voting their free choice, either with money or with ballots. Why, then, is it much easier for globalization to spread the market system rather than liberal democracy?
Both social phenomena rest upon specific social matrices that general economic theory and political science democratization theory ignore. In "The Wealth of Nations"(1776), Adam Smith described the principle from which arose the division of labor, "It is the necessary...propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another." Our experience in the Istanbul Spice Bazaar illustrates that a simple exchange transaction rests upon a set of social perceptions and assumptions.
Political democracy, only a theoretical analog, involves many more complicated social structures that include custom, path-dependent history, existing institutions, power and - most important - social trust. To approach this issue logically: If democracy requires social trust, then as a logical consequence, no social trust results in no democracy. A necessary condition for spreading democracy is increasing the degree of social trust. That is a socialization that begins in the early years, and which societies must gradually evolve.