In some ways Vietnam and Iraq cannot be more different. The Vietnamese had a 2,000 year history of resistance to foreign powers. They had a strong sense of national identity, cultural pride and unity. Iraq, or Mesopotamia, has a longer history than any other civilization. But their recent history has been one of subjugation, humiliation, and divisiveness. Under Ottoman rule the territory was divided into three provinces. Following World War One the country was created as a British mandate and occupied under the leadership of Lawrence of Arabia. After oil was discovered near Kirkuk in 1927 the British continued to dominate Iraq’s internal affairs until 1958 when the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown and a republic was declared.
From 1958 until 1979, when Saddam Hussein was officially recognized as the leader of the country, Iraq was convulsed with coups, assassinations, internal revolts (particularly from the Kurds), and border disputes with Iran and Kuwait. In spite of this, the period saw some excellent economic growth and modernization.
For many observers, Iraq in the seventies represented a model for a secular Arab state. In 1970, the Iraqi Provisional Constitution was drafted. The Constitution provided for equal rights for women. Women’s rights to vote, attend school, run for political office, and own property were all enshrined in law.
Such rights were in sharp contrast to the experiences of Arab women in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iranian women would see their rights eroded dramatically.
But, if Iraq in the seventies seemed to be an enlightened and economically vibrant country, this covered up some intractable fissures in their society.
While we tend to associate the Shi’a branch of Islam with Ayotollah Khomeini and Iran, the majority of the Iraqi population is Shi’a and the holiest cities of Shi’ism are all in Iraq. The traditional center of Shi’a religious study is Najaf.
Najaf, Kufa, and Kerbala are the all major pilgrimage destinations for Shi’a muslims. This has been both a blessing and a curse. The holy cities are a tremendous tourism draw, but Iraq has been ruled for centuries by adherents of the dominant Sunni branch of Islam.
Saddam Hussein and the Sunni dominated Ba’athists never trusted the religious leadership in the holy cities, and restrictions were periodically placed on the Shi’as freedom of religious observation.
You may remember that at the outset of the Iranian revolution Ayotollah Khomeini returned to Iran from France. What you might not remember is that Khomeini was only in France because Saddam Hussein had expelled him from Najaf at the Shah’s request.
The combination of a rebellious Kurdish population in the north, a religiously oppressed majority population in the south, and a heavy-handed secular Sunni minority holding the reins of power, prevented Iraq from coalescing into a unified country with a common sense of national identity, culture, and pride.
And things only got more complicated in 1979-1980. The Iranian Revolution was an inspiration to all Muslims, Sunnis included. Seeing Iran stand up to the United States and successfully throw us out of the country threatened to lead to uprisings in other Muslim countries. This was of particular concern to the Sunni elites in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia because each country had a large population of Shi’a. A decision was made to wage war on the Iranians using the Iraqi army and Saudi and Kuwaiti funding.
From the beginning the loyalty of the Iraqi Shi’a and the Iraqi Kurds was considered suspect. And there were examples of treachery during the conflict. Even so, the nine-year war probably did more to create a sense of national feeling and unity than anything before it. This unity would be damaged at the end of the war when Saddam used gas on the Kurds, and it would be shattered in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War when Saddam resorted to genocide on the Shi’a to put down a widespread rebellion and maintain his grip on power.
If we miscalculated in Vietnam by underestimating the cohesion and national pride of the Vietnamese society, we miscalculated in Iraq by underestimating the lack of cohesion and national feeling in Iraqi society.
Most of all, we failed to anticipate the resistance we would face from an effort to undo centuries of Sunni rule. We failed to understand that the secular nature of Iraqi society was only possible as long as the seminarians in Najaf were kept in subjugation, and that the Kurdish problem could not be easily solved through negotiation.
Just as we had no excuse for failing to sufficiently study and understand the history of Vietnam, we failed to study and understand the history of Iraq.
It’s not as if there weren’t people warning this administration about the fractious nature of Iraqi society. But those voices were overwhelmed by the pollyannish proclamations of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.
The great mystery is just how deluded the neo-cons were. Did they really think they could create a democratic government (thereby bringing the Shi’a to power) that would not bring an end to the secular nature of Iraq?
Did they think that they could take away the Sunni’s control of the second biggest oil fields in the world without creating a virulent radical fundamentalist murderous backlash?
Can they really have been so stupid? Or were they so evil as to not care? No matter the answer, removal from office seems to be the minimal remedy for their colossal error.
Do you think they thought this?
“Hey, Saddam kept them all under his thumb. Do you really think it’d be any problem if we have tens of thousands of troops in the country?! Come on. It’ll be a piece of cake. Drive the Humvee around regularly, and they’ll all go along … they’re used to it.”
I don’t know. Just trying to imagine WHAT IN THE FUCK they were thinking, so besotted with HUBRIS they were.
Susan, these ppl we are refering to here, arenot thinking ppl. They are manipulaters of their own opinion and doings. They have a one track mind and they are not able to see outside their box. They refuse to accept the qualifiers of said situation. What blows my mind is the military officers, leaders, if y ou may, that are with them. They are not tought that way of thinking. It just blows my mind all together!
You’re correct, of course. And they carefully select only those for their inner circle who are compadres with thuggish, brutish tendencies, hard-wired for domination and violence. That means that that inner circle is, really, a mob, and we all knwo how mobs behave.
Absolutely. It is becoming a real eveident to the ppl now. What I think I am seeing is the reversal of the thought process in the moderate republican populace. This is strange…..but I want to believe them so much; however I am a little leary of them…I am very suspicious…ppl like Hagel…I want to think he is tired of this process and that he knows better…but I am very suspious of them, him.
Where are the democrats ont is line of thinking????? They should be there 100% and no they are talking heads like biden that are nto listening to the ppl..but yet he is bidding for the job in the WH??!!%#$W%^^* What is he thinking???!!!! What a BUTTHEAD
Susanhu, I think that when you characterize the Neo-cons as having “thuggish, brutish tendencies, hard-wired for domination and violence” you are eliminating your own ability to understand and counter them.
These are people who come from a Cold War anti-Communist culture which, as inhuman as it might seem, was necessary to counter the similar hardliners in the USSR. They don’t see themselve in the terms you describe. Instead they see themselves as the finest and strongest defenders of the American culture, and they see the people who reject them (and use the terms you just did for the purpose of rejecting them) as weak and in need of their defense.
It is my opinion that by rejecting them personally in the terms you use you actually strengthen them. To counter them you have to understand them in their own terms, then recognize what about their ideas has allowed them to gain power. Only then can they be countered.
Not, mind you, that I disagree with your characterization of them. I just think it is counter productive if the goal is correcting or defeating them.
You make an excellent point – we like to give ourselves credit for not demonizing / dehumanizing others.
So suppose we take the moral high ground and say “These are poor deluded aging cold warriors?” What’s the next step? How do we say “This isn’t the cold war, so get over it?” without opening ourselves to the charge of being “soft on terror?” Perhaps by saying that the answer isn’t a military one so much as an effort “to win hearts and minds” in the Arab world? That might have the added advantage of forcing our foreign policy to live up to its rhetoric…
I’m not sure how to actually deal with them. They seem to have effective personal defenses against dealing with any any hint of criticism. My main point is that by addressing them in such terms you really underate their capabilities. That is exactly their central failing as they approached the invasion of Iraq.
These are people who come from a Cold War anti-Communist culture which, as inhuman as it might seem, was necessary to counter the similar hardliners in the USSR.
Actually a number of them are former lefties, even Bolsheviks. Of those who are old cold warriors — like Perle and Gaffney, for instance — they so completely miscalculated the Soviet threat that they ended up costing this country billions in unnecessary military expenditures, oblivious to the actual state of the USSR economy and capability. I bring it up, only to underscore the legacy of wrong-headedness and failure that characterizes what Pat Buchanan calls the “war party.” I also think thuggish and brutish gives them way too much credit. The only one with any actual fighting experience is Rumsfeld, and that was as a college wrestler. He explicitly avoided joining the military when there was an actual war on. These folks are only thugs when they get someone else to provide the muscle. The most apt description I ever read of the neo-con cabal was a comparison to Don Quixote. They think they understand warfare because they read about it in books. To defeat the neo-cons is to understand that what they really are is a bunch of pencil-pushing bureaucrats, who have gotten very good and back-room dealings, and that all they really care about is power. It’s not about ideals or patriotism or democracy or even oil, except in as much as they are tools to insuring global hegemony. To understand them is to fully recognize that they are weak, insecure men who must have all the toys to feel powerful, and that such men either fade into obscurity or become tyrants.
You don’t get to the rank of General without being a bit of a politician. And, those Generals who have disagreed with the war party have been punished. Look at what happened to Shinseki for saying the obvious — that we’d need far more boots on the ground to secure the post-war. General Zinni (Ret) was quickly marginalized, and even though he is one of the most respected Marines of all time, he was slandered by the neo-cons and called an anti-Semite. I have my own suspicions about what happened with General Byrnes — supposedly fired over adultery. It is known that he did not get along with Rummy, who wanted to deny him 4 Star. Not a lot of Generals are real out-of-the-box thinkers, and the ones who are don’t last long with this bunch, in the Pentagon.
I happen to agree with everything you have just said.
America, with all it’s arrogence, has never studied the history of it’s enemy.
As our arrogence continues as a government, it will certainly be US, the ppl, this time, that will be the doomed. It seems to me that it is our government against us. I am so angry over this developement. They seems to be going to against our consutitution at ever turn of the way. Sometime soon, we will be no better than a third world nation if we continute in this regard.
Our geography and our size works against us … we’re far too isolated from the rest of the world to know enough about other cultures and tribes and nationalities.
It’s a rare American who is well-traveled (and not on cruise ships).
I know what youare refering to here; however, the ppl in our government are not that way. The proffessional politician in government and the military person are/should be well read and involved in study of said evidence.
That’s “Should be” but most emphatically NOT “are” — I seem to recall reading somewhere that approximately 1 in 3 members of the Legislature holds a passport. The rest do not and never have because they’ve never left the US, bar perhaps a few drunken college trips down to the Mexican border…
Redefines provincial, doesn’t it?
My impression is that the politicians who do know history are rejected by an ignorant and anti-inellectual set of voters who do not like to feel “talked down to”.
But Americans don’t study history, period. As I recall I was required to take American and Texas history. World history was optional. Then, the pablum provided in American and Texas history is primarily propaganda provided to teach the children of immigrants how great America is. It is mostly a set of myths designed to strengthen American nationalism.
The closest we get to study of “history” is the teachings of evangelical preachers attempting to sell their specific cults. That is, of course, designed to demonstrate the development of human culture as directed by God, rather than by historical forces. The nationalistic propaganda that passes for history in America doesn’t dare counter that religious propaganda, does it?
But even that is mostly irrelevant because America looks to the future rather than the dead past. At least that is the attitude we are taught to take. Of course, that protects the position of those currently in power.
It is hard to find real history in American textbooks. Just dates, facts and myths designed to foster American nationalism.
My impression is that the politicians who do know history are rejected by an ignorant and anti-intellectual set of voters who do not like to feel “talked down to”.
Supposedly Harry Truman was well read in history, without coming across as an intellectual snob. It’s possible (OK, maybe not common) to be well informed and not arrogant.
You make an interesting point about history classes being more myth than substance. The problem is that any history class of a manageable size is going to have some bias, some “myth” as it were, running through it as an undercurrent, because both the author of the text and the teacher are going to have a worldview that they bring to the selection and presentation of their material.
I was fortunate enough in high school to have had an AP history class that took the perspective of “historiography,” the study of the biases in different presentations of history – we read several authors presentations of various episodes in American history, as well as source materials. What I got out of it as a teenager is that you need to read multiple viewpoints – multiple myths – to get even in the same ballpark as reality, and for something as amorphous as history “truth” in the scientific sense may be impossible to identify – all we may have are a series of interrelated, sometimes consistent, sometimes contradictory, myths. But that not be a fatal problem, as myths are simply “true” in a different sense than science, and the participation of the reader in the “myth” is part of determining the degree to which it is “true” for him or her…
Yes, history as commonly taught in public schools is specifically designed to foster the national mythos – and it has been so for the last century, as a means of assimilating waves immigrants into the society. It’s job isn’t to present facts, despite what is claimed: it’s to foster a unified populace against a common foe, be it the Germans, the Soviets, or the Arabs…
When I was in high school (in 1975) I met the German immigrant grandfather of a friend of mine. He happend to ask what we were talking about in History, and it happened to be WWI. He asked us about the sinking of the Lusitania. Oh yes, terrible thing the Prussians did, killing all those innocent people, forcing us into the war. He proceeded to tell us that the American history books were a whitewash, that the Lusitania was secretly carrying arms to England. I later found out he was dead-on right and I had been lied to. Combine that with coming of age during Vietnam/Watergate, and I’ve never trusted anyone’s version of history since (well, OK, maybe Booman’s…).
One more anecdote – my son went away to college, where his view of American history ran into that of a certain Howard Zinn… He became a Socialist, and bought me a copy of Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.” I read it, squirming uncomfortably throughout, but then remembered that even Zinn’s got his own mythos he’s plugging… When he asked what I thought of it, I told him “It’s good as far as it goes, but it fails to properly cover the impacts of technological innovation and innovators on history…”
And so it goes. We’re all left like the gaggle of blind experts trying to describe the elephant when it comes to history…
You were lucky in your AP history class. Here in Texas textbooks have to be approved by the Texas Board of Public Education or whatever it is called – it’s filled by low-turnout elections which gives partisan groups a lot of leverage. Every interest group gets involved, and the result is the lowest common denominator of acceptable facts and dates with almost all rough edges of personality or cause and effect removed.
The result is as boring a class period as can possibly be imagined. Which is no doubt why so many coaches teach it as they work to become head coach and get paid more then the school principal who might have actually known something. But this is Texas, the land of the ignorant and the religious fanatics.
It is probably even worse now that all teaching is towards the TAKS tests required to pass to higher grades.
I couldn’t stand history as a subject until I got the Army to send me to Germany for three years and began to see the results of Roman occupation and the invasion of Napoleon on the rest of Europe. Of course, I have had the same reaction to the idiocy that Southern Baptists and fundamentalists spread in their corruption of Christianity. Needless to say, I do not like being the subject of heavy doses of propaganda.
Harry Truman could get away with reading a lot of history. He didn’t have a degree and got his real education as an artillery Captain in WW I and later as a politician.
I think a lot of people (formerly) in government (like Joseph Wilson or Richard… (oh jeez, I’m drawing a blank) the ex-CIA analyst had at least some understanding of the issues and risks involved. They just were forbidden to speak truth (or even facts) by Cheney, Rumsfeld et.al. (and their enablers, the Perles and Wolfowitzes).
Susan, did you get to see CNN’s production on intel last night?
The Bush Administration built its own reality because if they observed the truth the USA would have never invaded Iraq with the inadequate forces at hand.
Juan Cole lists Ten Things Congress Could Demand from Bush on Iraq. The problem with Juan Cole and the Democrats is there is no more time left. The current deployment of a battalion of the elite 82nd Airborne as prison guards shows how close to collapse of the US Army has come. There are simply not enough US troops do to the tasks the Iraq occupation demands. Lifers will retire rather than deploy for their third and fourth tours. Pulling back into enclaves is not feasible because they need to be re-supplied, the current cause of most of the causalities. No army officer will allow the perimeter to be un-patrolled while insurgents have a free hand to mortar their positions.
The only real option is a radical partition of Iraq in to three spheres of influence between Turkey, Iran and the Arab League. This may keep the oil flowing at a huge costs in lives.
even the partition will not succeed in either ending the bloodshed, or keeping the oil flowing.
And it will still threaten to destabilize the Gulf States.
Consider: A landlocked and atrophied Kurdistan is not viable as a neighbor of either Turkey, Iran, or Syria. And no solution on Kirkuk is possible.
A central landlocked Sunni state without oilfields is not viable.
And a southern Shi’a dominated theocracy has the potential to radicalize Shi’a in Kuwait, and especially in the northern oilfields of Saudi Arabia, thereby widening the conflict and leading to more significant disruptions to oil and gas flow.
This type of disruption has the potential to do nasty things like wipe out all our 401(k)’s and impoverish wide swaths of the first world’s most vulnerable.
The potential pitfalls are so bad that that is why you are seeing people like Biden holding on for dear life, hoping against hope that we can hold Iraq together.
Of course you are correct. But, as surely as the Vietnam War destroyed the US Army for over a decade, the Iraq Occupation will destroy the US Army forever. No Airborne officer or trooper will long be willing to be a prison guard watching their men and buddies being killed for no good reason. French paratroopers revolted in 1961 in Algeria under similar circumstances. Don’t believe it couldn’t happen to the USA.
If Turkey, Iran and the Arab League flood their respective areas with troops with EU and Chinese logistic support and an agreed to withdrawal dates for US troops; just maybe, the world economy won’t self destruct.
The Dallas Morning News published Sunday a version of this scenario from The Messopotamian.
The main problem that I see with it is that even if we stay, we aren’t preventing most of the same set of disasters. The triple-bombing of Baghdad civilians last week was an example of the civil war already being fought there. Then there is this from The Washington Post yesterday. It describes how the Shiite and Kurdish militias are acting as members of the Iraqi Defense Forces to fight their civil war.
Biden may hope we can hold Iraq together. The indications suggest that it has already broken apart even though we are there with as much military force as we have. As for that force, here is Lawrence Korb on that subject:
Is keeping the Gulf States stabilized and the oil flowing enough motivation for the Bush administration to take the clearly politically unpalatable actions required to place enough troops into Iraq to prevent the collapse that is slowly occurring right now?
Does anyone really think the Bush administration has the foresight to predict the disaster they have set into place and try to prevent it? Oh, and has anyone had the courage to tell G.W. Bush?
I doubt it. Cheney won’t believe it until it happens. Bush will reject anyone who tries to tell him Iraq is collapsing. Rove will focus entirely on the American political repercussions of taking actions to prevent the collapse on the 2006 election – as much as he can when facing the distraction of likely indictment by Fitzgerald and the Grand Jury. No one else can present negative information to those three, and they are the acting triumverate ruling America today.
Which taken altogether explains why the Republican Party is beginning to bail out on the White House. Iraq is a disaster which has already occurred. The results are unfolding slowly, and the Bush White HOuse has no clue how to deal with it. Neither does Joe Biden. But then, who does?
Excellent post! Let me offer my relatively uninformed opinion on your final statements:
When we look at the Neo-cons, we see people who are enamored more with ideas than with the reality behind them. Leo Straus was a student of philosophy and a critic of the writers of others, not really a person who reached out to raw facts to create theory. He was a critic of existing theories.
American conservatives in general make a political point that they are NOT poll-driven. If they do not adjust to polls, they are assuming that their theory is so perfect that when contradictory evidence and events appear, the problem is assumed to be failure to properly apply the theory, not a failure of the theory to describe reality.
Then they have this American superiority complex. America is the ultimate, finest product of human development and the rest of the world is merely in earlier stages attempting to reach what we already have.
Finally, the Neo-cons were an outgrowth of the hardline anti-Communists surrounding Sen. Scoop Jackson. This is important for two reasons. First, they believed that you counter a threat to Ameica by extreme power politics methods. Second, the hardline Communists of the USSR also had a similar love of theory over reality, and gave power to the strongest ideologues rather than to the most successful leaders. This was a characteristic the Neo-Cons also possessed, and still do.
I don’t think the Noe-cons are either stupid or evil. They take the Platonic idea that there is an ideal condition that reality needs to conform to, and they expend massive amounts of energy to achieve that ideal.
The problem in this case is that thay assume that all questions regarding the goals have been previously settled. n addition, they assume thatthe idea is so powerful that the historical and local conditions in an Islamic nation are irrelevant. They then focus their energies on accomplishing those goals.
When you are working to accomplish a goal, going back to question the goal itself is a severe interference. It is natural to resist rethinking the goals. These are high-energy idea implementers who assume that the goals are fixed in stone. They stronglyresist rethinking the goals, and reject people who attempt to get them to do so as interferences to the real work of accomplishing the goals.
That the goals are not reality based in the first place is not a consideration. Everyone wants to come to America or to become American. Just ask the conservative in general.
That’s not a mindset that’s uncommon in America. When their efforts to implement an idea or set of ideas work, we call them visionaries.
Religious differences certainly did not play a major role in the Vietnam war. But here, with a Christian nation trying to impose its will on an Islamic country, religious hatred and prejudice most certainly is something that should have been considered.
Religion was not as bad a problem in Viet Nam, but you might recall the Catholic Kleptocracy which was in power in Buddhist South Viet Nam after the French left. This was in some ways similar to the Sunni kleptrocacy the British left in control of Iraq, and caused similar problems, preventing a feeling of South Vietnamese nationalism.
I suspect that our Neo-Cons are sufficiently secular and so imbued with the idea that America represents the future of all human culture that they simply discounted the religous sympathies of the various groups in Iraq as the mythologies of primitive people. Those mythologies would be swept away by the clearly superior ideas brought in by the Americans.
The use of too few American troops and the utter stupidity of disbanding the Iraqi army meant that the only remaining power was going to be the Iranians. Since the disbanding of the army and the deBaathification of Iraq was under the control of Ahmed Chalabi, very likely an Iranian agent, I suspect our entire invasion and its’ failure has been a case in which the Wiley Old Gentlemen of Iran have suckered the barbarians from the west into doing what they wanted done.
Nice diary Booman, I think historical diaries like this one are very important to keeping the discourse on the blogs broad and encompassing instead of just focusing on the immediate news. Or rather, to put the current events in context.
I also find the pre-Saddam 70’s Iraq an interesting topic. I think it shows that aversion to democracy is not in anyone’s genetics, but the appeal to anti-Westernism is strong. It’s actually something I agreed with Tom Friendman on.. the idea that even Saddam appeals to some, not because they like his brutal policies, but because he stood against the West.
Hey who is all this “we” that didn’t calculate these things, white man? 😉
Fantastic diary… I’m always a fan of putting things in historical context.
What’s interesting is just why those cities of Najaf, Kufa and Karbala are such holy places for Shi’a Islam. You can read Wikipedia or if you prefer a more colorful description, I recommend the War Nerd.
As this wonderful documentary shows, most Americans are pretty ignorant of Islam. And they’re ten times more ignorant of Shi’ia Islam if that’s even possible…
Pax
I like this article BUT I have a problem with this:
This unity would be damaged at the end of the war when Saddam used gas on the Kurds,
Since to say he gased the Kurds is not stating the full case, since he was gassing Kurd guerrillas, along with Iranain backers, and YES, he also got many kurdish civilians as collateral damage.
Even Juan Cole fails to explain the presence of Kurds that were exposed to blood agents in his posts (unless he has written anything compelling since the posts I have read that say “Because I say so!” without any real evidence), a type of chemical weapon that Iraq admittedly did not have.
A more likely account would be that the Kurdish civilians were collateral damage in attacks, first by Iraq against the Kurds and Iranians that were “occupying” towns in Northern Iraq, and second by Iranians on the Kurds and Iraquis.
News reports, and photograghs, and observers accounts of the dead in Halabja support this line of reasoning strongly. To simply say that Saddam gassed Kurds is an unlikely and, IMHO, erroneous statement.
………..and what is it that the war colleges teach????? Are we missing something here??????? Are we being mislead by someone[s] who do actually know better!!!!!!?????????? I happen to understand that the war colleges do teach and discuss such things as history of said enemy. That is how they plan stratagey and tactic. Tey are not any dumb bunny that come in off the street here…they are to be the best and brightest of the military and the civilian command. Where are their minds??
Started off well, but quibbling:
“Just as we had no excuse for failing to sufficiently study and understand the history of Vietnam”
We knew damn well what the history of French Indochina was. The electeds at the time simply didn’t care. Further, we didn’t miscalulate the cohesion, we simply backed a neo-colonial regime intent on retaining power, against a revolutionary force seeking national unification.
As to your question, I don’t believe their actions were based on stupidity so much sheer arrogance. Yes, they were indeed so evil they didn’t care. The administration obviously equated a limited engagement and success in Afghanistan – where the people were somewhat supportive of the effort – with a “painless” and rapid win in Iraq.
Tactically correct; strategically insane; morally reprehensible.