.Iraq Can Teach the U.S. How To Fight Future Wars
Beyond the bitter partisan arguments, the Iraq war is America's first strategic and military conflict since the collapse of communism. Given America's status as the world's only superpower, other conflicts almost certainly will follow.
It is not too soon, then, to examine the lessons of Iraq and what they foreshadow for future efforts to fracture dictatorships without destroying the countries hosting them.
One premise in need of revision is that all oppressed societies will naturally flock to freedom once their "Berlin Wall" is torn down, as was the case in Eastern Europe.
It is now clear that this did not happen in Iraq, nor is it likely to in the other failed states of the Muslim Middle and Near East.
One hypothesis for the failure of the Iraq war is that success requires a minimum of "common denominators" shared by liberator and liberated.
Indeed, the totalitarian police states of Eastern Europe shared many attributes with the West: a culture of intense secularism, advanced technological and scientific conditions, a basic equality of the sexes, universally good education, and — on a social level at least — a fair amount of liberalism, complete with a vast measure of sexual liberation. In the end, these elements formed the necessary "bridge" for a transition without too much fracture.
Almost none of these attributes can be found in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.
What seems to have happened in Iraq, and what will certainly reproduce itself in other Muslim countries when their time comes, is a springboard effect. After a long repression, the oppressed segments of these societies, just like the children of the abused, turn around and oppress others.
Today in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, Shiite Muslims who have long been humiliated by Sunni Muslims or Maronite Christians, are settling accounts using death squads, torture, and the eradication of the pseudo-secularism that was the only good hallmark of the rule of Saddam Hussein, the shah of Iran, and the Westernized elites of Lebanon.
In the European communist system, a sense of general equality prevailed, albeit in misery and the absence of freedom of expression for all, but it was without tribal, ethnic, or factional division.
By contrast, Arab and Muslim regimes always have an elite — be it Sunni, Shiite, Maronite, Arab nationalist, or simply a family, royal or otherwise — that dominates. Before the 1975–90 civil war, for instance, Maronite Christians ran the show in Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, early in the last century the Al Saud tribe wiped out everyone else, then created a pecking order with the royals at the top, the non-royal sycophants next, then the Wahhabi religious establishment, and Shiites all the way at the bottom. In Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, the so-called Arab nationalists and army officers that disguised family cliques such as the Assads, the Mubaraks, and the Gadhafis have ruled since the 1950s.
In the past few years, many in the West must have asked themselves how, after the overthrow of Saddam, any Iraqi could opt to replace the man's obscenely tribal, sectarian, and divisive rule with a carbon copy. But that is precisely what the Shiites are striving for today, with the help of Shiite Iran and its Alawite state proxy, Syria.
A Berlin Wall, standing or not, is of no interest to these factions because they never thought in terms of the "whole" of society being liberated, just one segment.
It is imperative that when the powerful thought engines of the West — academia, the military, the intelligence communities — churn out their studies and analyses of what went wrong in Iraq, they not be limited by narrow-minded partisan arguments.
The real task is to have a better understanding of the undertow pulling such societies back into the open sea whenever a shoreline looms on their horizon or a savior nears their shores.
For future campaigns to make this a more decent planet, a necessary companion of that task is to redefine "universal values" into a formula that a broader coalition of powers, along with America, can expect to enforce around the globe. Clearly, these will not be America's values, but a modicum of decency exists out there, one on which today's major powers — America, China, Russia, and Europe — can agree.
NYSun
It is not too soon, then, to examine the lessons of Iraq and what they foreshadow for future efforts to fracture dictatorships without destroying the countries hosting them.
One premise in need of revision is that all oppressed societies will naturally flock to freedom once their "Berlin Wall" is torn down, as was the case in Eastern Europe.
It is now clear that this did not happen in Iraq, nor is it likely to in the other failed states of the Muslim Middle and Near East.
One hypothesis for the failure of the Iraq war is that success requires a minimum of "common denominators" shared by liberator and liberated.
Indeed, the totalitarian police states of Eastern Europe shared many attributes with the West: a culture of intense secularism, advanced technological and scientific conditions, a basic equality of the sexes, universally good education, and — on a social level at least — a fair amount of liberalism, complete with a vast measure of sexual liberation. In the end, these elements formed the necessary "bridge" for a transition without too much fracture.
Almost none of these attributes can be found in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.
What seems to have happened in Iraq, and what will certainly reproduce itself in other Muslim countries when their time comes, is a springboard effect. After a long repression, the oppressed segments of these societies, just like the children of the abused, turn around and oppress others.
Today in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, Shiite Muslims who have long been humiliated by Sunni Muslims or Maronite Christians, are settling accounts using death squads, torture, and the eradication of the pseudo-secularism that was the only good hallmark of the rule of Saddam Hussein, the shah of Iran, and the Westernized elites of Lebanon.
In the European communist system, a sense of general equality prevailed, albeit in misery and the absence of freedom of expression for all, but it was without tribal, ethnic, or factional division.
By contrast, Arab and Muslim regimes always have an elite — be it Sunni, Shiite, Maronite, Arab nationalist, or simply a family, royal or otherwise — that dominates. Before the 1975–90 civil war, for instance, Maronite Christians ran the show in Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, early in the last century the Al Saud tribe wiped out everyone else, then created a pecking order with the royals at the top, the non-royal sycophants next, then the Wahhabi religious establishment, and Shiites all the way at the bottom. In Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, the so-called Arab nationalists and army officers that disguised family cliques such as the Assads, the Mubaraks, and the Gadhafis have ruled since the 1950s.
In the past few years, many in the West must have asked themselves how, after the overthrow of Saddam, any Iraqi could opt to replace the man's obscenely tribal, sectarian, and divisive rule with a carbon copy. But that is precisely what the Shiites are striving for today, with the help of Shiite Iran and its Alawite state proxy, Syria.
A Berlin Wall, standing or not, is of no interest to these factions because they never thought in terms of the "whole" of society being liberated, just one segment.
It is imperative that when the powerful thought engines of the West — academia, the military, the intelligence communities — churn out their studies and analyses of what went wrong in Iraq, they not be limited by narrow-minded partisan arguments.
The real task is to have a better understanding of the undertow pulling such societies back into the open sea whenever a shoreline looms on their horizon or a savior nears their shores.
For future campaigns to make this a more decent planet, a necessary companion of that task is to redefine "universal values" into a formula that a broader coalition of powers, along with America, can expect to enforce around the globe. Clearly, these will not be America's values, but a modicum of decency exists out there, one on which today's major powers — America, China, Russia, and Europe — can agree.
NYSun
posted by madtom at 12:16 PM
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