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Foreign Affairs
January 2003 - February 2003
Iraq and the Arabs' Future
by Fouad Ajami
THE ROAD TO MODERNITY
There should be no illusions about the sort of Arab landscape that America
is destined to find if, or when, it embarks on a war against the Iraqi regime.
There would be no "hearts and minds" to be won in the Arab world, no public
diplomacy that would convince the overwhelming majority of Arabs that this
war would be a just war. An American expedition in the wake of thwarted un
inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach
into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure
control over Iraq's oil. No hearing would be given to the great foreign power.
America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal
of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world -- the
congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its
self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the
political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those
settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better
way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects.
Above and beyond toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein and dismantling its
deadly weapons, the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq
and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world. The great
indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible
harvest -- for the Arabs themselves, and for an America implicated in their
affairs. It is cruel and unfair but true: the fight between Arab rulers and
insurgents is for now an American concern.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, the political and economic edifice of the Arab
world began to give way. Explosive demographic trends overwhelmed what had
been built in the postindependence era, and then a furious Islamism blew
in like a deadly wind. It offered solace, seduced the young, and provided
the means and the language of resentment and refusal. For a while, the failures
of that world were confined to its own terrain, but migration and transnational
terror altered all that. The fire that began in the Arab world spread to
other shores, with the United States itself the principal target of an aggrieved
people who no longer believed that justice could be secured in one's own
land, from one's own rulers. It was September 11 and its shattering surprise,
in turn, that tipped the balance on Iraq away from containment and toward
regime change and "rollback."
A reforming zeal must thus be loaded up with the baggage and the gear. No
great apologies ought to be made for America's "unilateralism." The region
can live with and use that unilateralism. The considerable power now at America's
disposal can be used by one and all as a justification for going along with
American goals. The drapery of a unanimous Security Council resolution authorizing
Iraq's disarmament -- signed by the Syrian regime, no less -- will grant
the Arab rulers the room they need to claim that they had simply bowed to
the inevitable, and that Saddam had gotten the war he had called up.
In the end, the battle for a secular, modernist order in the Arab world is
an endeavor for the Arabs themselves. But power matters, and a great power's
will and prestige can help tip the scales in favor of modernity and change.
"The Americans are coming," the Islamists proclaimed after the swift defeat
of the Taliban. They scrambled for cover as their "charities," their incitement,
and their networks of finance and recruitment came under new scrutiny.
The Islamists' apparent resurgence in recent months was born of their hope
that the United States may have lost the sense of righteous violation that
drove it after September 11, and that the American push in the region may
have lost its steam. These Islamists are supremely political and calculating
people; they probe the resolve of their enemies. The "axis of evil" speech
of President George W. Bush last January had caused among the Islamists genuine
panic. A measure of relief came in the months that followed. They drew new
courage from the bureaucratic struggles in Washington and from the attention
that the fight between Israel and the Yasir Arafat regime attracted some
months later.
A successful war in Iraq would be true to this pattern. It would embolden
those who wish for the Arab world deliverance from retrogression and political
decay. Thus far, the United States has been simultaneously an agent of political
reaction and a promoter of social revolution in the Arab-Muslim world. Its
example has been nothing short of revolutionary, but from one end of the
Arab world to the other, its power has invariably been on the side of political
reaction and a stagnant status quo. A new war should come with the promise
that the United States is now on the side of reform.
America's open backers will be Kuwait and Qatar -- the first because of the
trauma and violation it endured in 1990-91 at the hands of Iraq, the second
because it has taken a generally assertive and novel approach in diplomacy
as well as a willingness to associate openly with American power. In the
main, however, the ruling order in the Arab world will duck for cover and
hope to be spared. Rather than Desert Storm, the Arab rulers will want the
perfect storm: a swift war, few casualties, as little exposure by themselves
as possible, and the opportunity to be rid of Saddam without riding in broad
daylight with the Americans or being brought to account by their people.
The political world rarely grants this kind of good fortune, but such is
the dilemma of hugely unpopular rulers who have never taken their populations
into their confidence, who have lived with American patronage while winking
at the most malignant strands of anti-Americanism. Those rulers know that
a war against Iraq would be the first war in their midst waged in the era
of the satellite channels, at a time when everyone is "wired" and choices
are difficult to conceal.
A new campaign against Iraq would find a deeply divided verdict in the region
on the Iraqi menace. There are those who, if only out of feelings of historical
inadequacy about the Arabs' technical skills, will doubt that the ruler in
Baghdad and his military apparatus have at their disposal weapons of mass
destruction. Others will see Iraq's weapons as proof that Arabs have come
of age in the modern world, and that the powers beyond are bent on subjugating
them, stripping them of the same weapons that represent modernity and scientific
and military advance in a Hobbesian world of hierarchy and inequality.
Given the belligerence and self-pity in Arab life, its retreat from modernist
culture, and its embrace of conspiracy theories, there are justifiable grounds
for believing there are no native liberal or secular traditions to embrace
the United States and use its victory to build an alternative to despotic
rule. Few Arabs would believe this effort to be a Wilsonian campaign to spread
the reign of liberty in the Arab world. They are to be forgiven their doubts,
for American power, either by design or by default, has been built on relationships
with military rulers and monarchs without popular mandates. America has not
known or trusted the middle classes and the professionals in these lands.
Rather, it has settled for relationships of convenience with the autocracies
in the saddle, tolerating the cultural and political malignancies of the
Arab world. A new American role in the region will have to break with this
history.
LONELY AT THE TOP
The solitude of the United States is more acute than it was during the Persian
Gulf War in 1990-91. In that expedition, there was local cover for what was
in truth an imperial campaign against an Iraqi state that threatened to shred
the balance of power in the gulf. There were even Muslim jurists in Saudi
Arabia and Egypt who issued fatwas that sanctioned the expedition of the
foreign power.
The three powers of consequence -- Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia -- were
arrayed against Saddam Hussein. The last was directly menaced, while Egypt
and Syria were given substantial economic rewards for covering the flanks
of the gulf states, denying the Iraqi ruler the chance to depict the struggle
as a standoff between the haves and the have-nots in the Arab world. Saddam
had been particularly obtuse: he had broken the code of the ruling Arab order
for which he had posed as a trusted warrior against the Iranian revolutionary
state. But for the vast majority of Arabs, Operation Desert Storm was an
Anglo-American campaign of hegemony. A predator had risen in the region and
a great foreign power, the inheritor of Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf,
had checked his bid for hegemony.
Saddam had sacked a country, but there was an odd popular identification
with him, and crowds saw him as the bearer of a lofty Arab endeavor. The
gullible saw him as a Robin Hood, an avenging Saladin fighting "the Franks"
and their local collaborators, erasing the colonial boundaries imposed after
World War I. It may be heretical to suggest it, but the Iraqi ruler would
have won a "free" election among Arabs in 1990-91. The dynasties he was warring
against were unloved in their world. From Amman to Nablus to Casablanca,
the crowds gave their approval to the night of terror that he unleashed on
the region. He was a revisionist at odds with the order around him, and in
a thwarted world the bandit acts out the yearnings of subdued but resentful
crowds.
No great Arab hopes are pinned on the Iraqi ruler this time around. This
is the other side of the ledger, for the fickle crowd makes and breaks these
kinds of attachments with brigands and false redeemers with great frequency.
Saddam had lost his bid; he had treated a world steeped in defeats to yet
another calamity. The crowd that had fallen for Osama bin Laden was the same
floating crowd that had once trusted its scores with the world would be settled
by the Iraqi ruler. The struggle against him is a different matter now. The
crowd may shout itself hoarse against the Americans, but its bonds with the
Iraqi ruler have been weakened.
One particular but pivotal Arab realm is calmer this time around. In 1990-91,
all the currents of political revisionism, the envy of the poorer Arab lands
toward the oil states, the bitter sense that history has dealt the Arabs
a terrible hand, seemed to converge on Jordan. It was in that country, more
than in any other in the Arab world, that the Iraqi dictator was both an
avenger and would-be redeemer. He had rujula (manhood), he had money to throw
around, and he held out the promise that the oil dynasties would be brought
down. It was that radicalism that had forced King Hussein to stay a step
ahead of the crowd, breaking with the Persian Gulf powers and the United
States to side with Iraq. A group of religious scholars, the Conference of
the Ulama of the Sharia (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), has issued
a fatwa banning any assistance to the Americans, such as "opening airports
and harbors to them, providing their planes and vehicles with fuel, offering
them intelligence for their war against Muslims." It is impermissible, the
fatwa added, "to sell the American aggressor a piece of bread or to offer
him a drink of water." This time, however, the monarchy has drawn a line,
and wise Jordanians have put the word out that a short war and a reconstructed
Iraq would work to the advantage of their poorer and smaller domain.
For American power, there are two ways in the Arab world. One is restraint,
pessimistic about the possibility of changing that stubborn world, reticent
about the uses of American power. In this vision of things, the United States
would either spare the Iraqi dictator or wage a war with limited political
goals for Iraq and for the region as a whole. The other choice, more ambitious,
would envisage a more profound American role in Arab political life: the
spearheading of a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform
the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies
an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies and
failures have been on cruel display.
The first option would hark back to Desert Storm. After a campaign imbued
with high moral purpose came reticence. There was no incentive to push deeper
into Iraq or into Arab politics. The balance of power had been restored,
and the internal order of the Arab states did not concern George H.W. Bush.
Indeed, Bush appeared to have a kind of benign affection for the Arab monarchies.
His attitude toward the gulf states resembled what the British took to distant
realms of their empire before "reform" caught up: love of pageantry, a fascination
with exotic style, and a tolerance for time-honored traditions of rule.
The authority that the United States gained in the aftermath of Desert Storm
was used to bring together Arabs and Israelis at Madrid in 1991. George H.W.
Bush had resisted "linkage" between the Persian Gulf and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, but he was to make it the cornerstone of U.S. strategy after the
guns had fallen silent. The internal order of the House of Saud and the governance
of Kuwait were left to the rulers of those lands. True, some liberal secularists
there had thought that the United States would press for internal reforms
-- in Kuwait in particular. But democracy is not a foreigner's gift, nor
was its export a prospect that Bush ever entertained.
For Iraq itself, there was to be no Wilsonian redemption. Bush had called
upon the Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands." His call had been
answered in the hills of Kurdistan and in the southern part of the country,
where rebellion erupted in Basra, then spreading into the Shi'ite holy cities
of Najaf and Karbala. For a brief moment, the mastery of the regime cracked
as prisons were emptied, and the insurgents were joined by soldiers straggling
in from the front. But with the help of the regime's helicopter gunships,
the rebellions were crushed with unspeakable cruelty.
Some key players within the Bush administration were eager for a "clean break"
from the war. This was particularly true of the then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. "Neither revolt had a chance," Powell would
later write of the Kurdish and Shi'a rebellions. "Nor, frankly, was their
success a goal of our policy." It was a cruel ending for a campaign billed
as the opening act of a new international order. The reordering of Iraq had
not been a goal of the war.
In the intervening years, however, the ground has shifted in the Arab world,
and the stakes for the United States have risen. The Iraqi dictator has hung
on, outlasting and mocking his countless obituaries. And the familiar balance
of power in the region sent America's way the terror of September 11. The
United States has been caught in the crossfire between the regimes in the
saddle and the Islamic insurgents. These insurgents could not win in Algeria,
Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria, or on the Arabian Peninsula. So they took to the
road and targeted the United States, and they were brutally candid about
their motives. They did not strike at America because it was a patron of
Israel; rather, they drew a distinction between the "near enemy" (their own
rulers) and the "far enemy," the United States.
Those entrenched regimes could not be beaten at home. Their power, as well
as their people's resigned acceptance that their rulers' sins would be dwarfed
by the terrors that Islamists would unleash were they to prevail, had settled
the fight in favor of the rulers. The targeting of America came out of this
terrible political culture of Arab lands. If the leader of the Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, the physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, could not avenge himself against
the military regime of Hosni Mubarak for the torture he endured at the hands
of his country's security services, why not target Mubarak's U.S. patrons?
A similar motivation propelled the Saudi members of al Qaeda. These men could
not sack the House of Saud. The dynasty's wealth, its political primacy,
and the conservative religious establishment gave the rulers a decided edge
in their struggle with the Islamists; the war against America was the next
best thing. The great power was an easier target: it was more open, more
trusting, and its liberties more easily subverted by a band of jihadists.
The jihadists and their leader, bin Laden, aimed at the dynasty's carefully
nurtured self-image. The children of Arabia who had boarded those planes
on September 11 and the countless young men held at the Guantanamo Bay military
base could not be disowned. Bin Laden got the crisis in Saudi-American relations
he aimed for. Those 15 young Saudis were put on those planes to challenge
the old notions about the stability of the monarchy. Grant the devil his
due: bin Laden knew the premium the dynasty placed on its privileged relationship
with the United States. He had an exquisite feel for the regime's cultural
style, its dread of open disagreements and of scrutiny. He treated the House
of Saud to its worst nightmare, puncturing the official narrative of a realm
at peace.
That veneer of Saudi-American harmony was destined to crack. The Saudi population
had changed; it was younger, poorer, and more disgruntled. Its airwaves crackled
with bitter anti-Americanism, and a younger breed of radicalized preachers
had challenged the standard Wahhabi doctrine of obedience to the rulers.
As the winds of anti-Americanism and antimodernism blew at will, the rulers
stepped aside. The royal family was cautious: it rode with America but let
the anti-Americanism have its play.
CASUS BELLI
The case for war must rest in part on the kind of vision the United States
has for Iraq. The dread of "nation-building" must be cast aside. It is too
late in the annals of nations for outright foreign rule. But there will have
to be a sustained American presence if the new order is to hold and take
root. Iraq is a society with substantial social capital and the region's
second-largest reserves of oil. It has traditions of literacy, learning,
and technical competence. It can draw on the skills of a vast diaspora of
means and sophistication, waves of people who fled the country's turbulent
politics and the heavy hand of its rulers. If Iraq's pain has been great
in the modern era, so too, has been its betrayed promise. There were skills
and hope that the polity could be made right, that the abundance of oil and
water and the relative freedom from an overbearing religious tradition would
pave the way toward modernity and development.
For Pax Americana, Iraq may be worth the effort and the risks. America has
been on the ground in Saudi Arabia for nearly six decades now, in Egypt for
three. In both realms, there is wrath and estrangement toward America. What
has been built in Arabia appears in serious jeopardy. The aid and help granted
to Egypt has begotten nothing other than ingratitude and a deep suspicion
among frustrated middle-class Egyptians that the United States wishes for
them subjugation and dependence. There is an unfathomable anti-Americanism
in Egypt -- even among those professionals who have done well by the American
connection.
There appears to be no liberal option for Egypt, no economic salvation. This
country of outward tranquility and seething internal radicalism is in the
grip of deep frustration. Egyptian history has stalled; the military ruler
is supreme, but he offers no way out for his country. As the political life
of the land has atrophied, anti-Americanism has taken hold, offering absolution
and a way of airing the rage of a proud population that has fallen short
of its own idea of itself and its place among the nations. Iraq may offer
a contrast, a base in the Arab world free of the poison of anti-Americanism.
The country is not hemmed in by the kind of religious prohibitions that stalk
the U.S. presence in the Saudi realm. It may have a greater readiness for
democracy than Egypt, if only because it is wealthier and is free of the
weight of Egypt's demographic pressures and the steady menace of an Islamist
movement.
Iraq should not be burdened, however, with the weight of great expectations.
This is the Arab world, after all, and Americans do not know it with such
intimacy. Iraq could disappoint its American liberators. There has been heartbreak
in Iraq, and vengeance and retribution could sour Americans on this latest
sphere of influence in the Muslim world.
But America could still be more daring in Iraq than it was after Desert Storm.
To begin with, the bogeyman of a Shi'ite state emerging in Iraq as a satrapy
of the Iranian clerical regime -- the fear that paralyzed American power
back in 1991 -- should be laid to rest. The Iranian Revolution's promise
has clearly faded. The clerics there are in no position to export their "revolutionary
happiness," for they would find no takers anywhere. Then, too, the Shi'a
of Iraq must be seen for what they are: Arabs and Iraqis through and through.
Shi' ism was a phenomenon of Iraq centuries before it crossed to Iran, brought
to that land by the Safavid rulers as a state religion in the opening years
of the sixteenth century. But even long before that, it had been an Arab
religious-political dispute. Moreover, the sacred geography of Shi'ism had
brought Shi'a religious scholars and seminarians from India, Lebanon, and
Persia to Iraq. Thanks to geographic proximity, the Persian component had
been particularly strong: it had used the shrine cities of Iraq as sanctuary,
checking the power of their own country's leaders in the ceaseless tug-of-war
between rulers and religious scholars. But in their overwhelming numbers,
the adherents of Shi'ism were drawn from Arab tribesmen. Arab nationalism,
which came to Iraq with the Hashemite rulers and the officers and ideologues
who rode their coattails, covered up Sunni dominion with a secular garb.
As Iran was nearby, larger and more powerful, it became convenient for the
ruling stratum of Iraq to disenfranchise its own Shi'a majority, claiming
that they were a Persian fifth column of Iran.
This invented history took on a life of its own under Saddam Hussein. But
before the Tikriti rulers terrorized the Shi'ite religious establishment
and shattered its autonomy, a healthy measure of competition was always the
norm between the Shi'ite seminaries of Iraq and those of Iran. Few Iraqi
Shi'ites are eager to cede their own world to Iran's rulers. As the majority
population of Iraq, they have a vested interest in its independence and statehood.
Over the last three decades, they have endured the regime's brutality yet
fought its war against Iran in 1980-88. Precious few among them dream of
a Shi'a state. The majority of them are secularists who understand that the
brutalized country will have to be shared among its principal communities
if it is to find a way out of fear and terror.
There is a religiously based Shi'a movement, the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), based in Iran, led by Ayatollah Mohamed
Baqir al-Hakim. The choice of Iran as sanctuary by the al-Hakim family was
dictated by the brutality of the Iraqi regime and by the lack of an Arab
sanctuary where the Shi'a opposition could survive and function. Iran gave
the clerics and laymen of sciri the resources and proximity for their war
against the regime. What such men could bring to a new order is difficult
to forecast with any confidence, but it is hard to see them building the
necessary bridges to the Kurds and the Sunni remnants willing and able to
break with the Tikriti legacy.
A more likely outcome would be the rise to power of a different kind of Shi'ism:
more at home in the secular world, granting the clerics a political and cultural
role of their own while subordinating them to secular authorities, as is
the case in Lebanon. In the scheme of historical development of the Shi'a
tradition, the triumph of clerics has been a relatively recent phenomenon
-- more a feature of Iran since 1979 than of the Arab world.
FAREWELL TO PAN-ARABISM?
A new regime in Iraq might be willing to bid farewell to virulent pan-Arabism.
The passion for a Palestinian vocation in a new Iraq may subside, if only
because the Palestinians have been such faithful supporters of Saddam Hussein.
The norm has been for Iraq, the frontier Arab land far away from the Mediterranean,
to stoke the fires of anti-Zionism knowing that others closer to the fire
-- Jordanians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese -- would be
the ones consumed. A new Iraqi political order might find within itself the
ability to recognize that Palestine and the Palestinians are not an Iraqi
concern. A new ruling elite that picks up the pieces in Iraq might conclude
that offering a bounty to the families of Palestinian suicide "martyrs" is
something that a burdened country can do without.
A new Iraqi political arrangement would also empower the Shi'a and the Kurds,
and neither population owes fidelity to the pieties of Arabism. The Iraqi
Kurds owe the Arab world little. The Iraqi opposition's solitude in the wider
politics of the Arab world has been deep and searing. Saddam's opponents
have had no Egyptian or Saudi sponsorship, nor have the Arab nationalists
and "the street" embraced them. They have worked alone from London and Iran,
and more recently, with American patronage. They are free to fashion a world
with relative indifference to Arab claims.
A respected Kuwaiti thinker, Muhammad al-Rumaihi, has recently observed that
the talk of Iraq as a model for other Arabs is overdone, that Iraq has never
enjoyed such primacy in modern Arab life, either under the monarchy or under
the radical regimes that have held sway since the revolution of 1958. There
may be truth in what he says, for the country is idiosyncratic and lacks
the cultural accessibility to other Arabs, such as those in Cairo, Damascus,
or Beirut. But herein lies the prospect of Iraq's deliverance: freedom from
the deadly legends of Arabism, from the lure of political roles that have
wrecked Arab regimes that succumbed to them. Think of Cairo under the weight
of its Arab calling and the undoing of the bright hopes of its Nasserist
era. No country should wish for itself this sort of captivity.
The pan-Arabism that has played upon Iraq and infected its political life
has been a terrible simplification of that checkered country's history, a
whip in the hands of a minority bent on dominating the polity and dispossessing
the other communities of their rightful claims. Iraq had been a country of
Kurdish highlanders, Marsh Arabs, Sunnis, Shi'ites, Turkmen, Assyrians, Jews,
and Chaldeans. But only the Sunni Arabs came into power -- the city people,
the privileged community of the (Sunni) Ottoman state.
British rule had worked through the Sunnis, for the British had rightly assumed
that a ruling community that included 20 percent of the population would
be easily subordinated to foreign tutelage. In a cruel historical irony,
the Sunni Arabs emerged with the best of alternatives: they were at once
the colonial power's proxies and the bearers of a strident, belligerent ideology
of Arab nationalism. The state remained external to the body politic, an
alien imposition.
Oil and terror gave that state freedom from the society and the means to
destroy all potential challengers. The regime grew more clannish, more relentless,
more Sunni, and more Arab by the day. The Assyrians were destroyed in a military
campaign in 1933. Then the Jews were dispossessed and expelled. There remained
the Shi'ites, the Kurds, and the Turkmen to contend with.
The state also grew in power. The dominance of Saddam Hussein's fellow townspeople,
the Tikritis, led to the gradual hardening that separated the regime from
the larger society around it. In earlier, more benign days, the Tikritis
had lived off the making of rafts of inflated goatskins. The steamships broke
that industry. By happenstance, the Tikritis made their way into the military
academies and the security services. There, they found a brand-new endeavor:
state terror. Their rule had to be given ideological pretense, and pan-Arabism
proved to be a perfect instrument of exclusion, a modern cover for tribalism.
The Fertile Crescent has always been a land of rival communities and compact
minorities. Arab nationalism, the creed of Iraq's rulers, escaped from all
that ambiguity into an unyielding doctrine of Arabism. The radicalism of
that history wrecked the Arab world and gave the politics of the Fertile
Crescent a particularly rancid and violent temper. Saddam did not descend
from the sky; he emerged out of his world's sins of omission and commission.
The murderous zeal with which he went about subduing the Kurds and the Shi'a
was a reflection of the deep atavisms of Arab life. There, on the eastern
flank of the Arab world, Iraq and its "maximum leader" offered the fake promise
of a pan-Arab Bismarck who would check the Persians to the east and, in time,
head west to take up Israel's challenge.
AN OPENING FOR DEMOCRACY
An Arab world rid of this kind of ruinous temptation might conceivably have
a chance to rethink the role of political power and the very nature of the
state. It has often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition
is immune to democratic stirrings. The sacking of a terrible regime with
such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqis and Arabs a break with the
false gifts of despotism.
If and when it comes, that task of repairing -- or detoxifying -- Iraq will
be a major undertaking. The remarkable rehabilitation of Japan between its
surrender in 1945 and the restoration of its sovereignty in 1952 offers a
historical precedent. Indeed, the Japanese example has already turned up,
in both American and Arab discussions, as a window onto the kind of work
that awaits the Americans and the Iraqis once the dictatorship is overthrown.
Granted, no analogy is perfect: Iraq, with its heterogeneity, differs from
Japan. America, too, is a radically different society than it was in 1945
-- more diverse, more given to doubt, and lacking the sense of righteous
mission that drove it through the war years and into the work in Japan.
Yet for all these differences, the Japanese precedent is an important one.
In the space of a decade, imperial Japan gave way to a more egalitarian,
modern society. A country poisoned by militarism emerged with a pacifist
view of the world. It was the victors' justice that drove the new monumental
undertaking and powered the twin goals of demilitarization and democratization.
The victors tinkered with the media, the educational system, and the textbooks.
Those are some of the things that will have to be done if a military campaign
in Iraq is to redeem itself in the process. The theatrics and megalomania
of Douglas MacArthur may belong to a bygone age, but Iraq could do worse
than having the interim stewardship of a modern-day high commissioner who
would help usher it toward a normal world.
At a minimum, Iraq would be lucky to have the semidemocratic politics of
its neighbors. Turkey and Jordan come to mind, and even Iran is a more merciful
land than the large prison that Iraq has become under its terrifying warden.
The very brutality that the Iraqis have endured under Saddam may be Iraq's
saving grace if redemption comes its way. There may come relief after liberation
-- and a measure of realism.
The deference to the wider Arab phobias about the Shi'a or the Kurds coming
into new power in Iraq should be cast aside. A liberal power cannot shore
up ethnic imperiums of minority groups. The rule of a Sunni minority, now
well below 20 percent of Iraq's population, cannot be made an American goal.
The Arabs around Iraq are not owed that kind of indulgence. It is with these
sorts of phobias and biases that the Arab world must break. A culture that
looks squarely at its own troubles should think aloud about the rage that
is summoned on behalf of the Palestinians while the pain of the Kurds, or
the Berbers in North Africa, or the Christians in the southern Sudan, is
passed over in silence.
This righteous sense of Arab victimhood -- which overlooks what Arab rulers
do to others while lamenting its own condition -- emanates from a political
tradition of belligerent self-pity. The push should be for an Arab world
that acknowledges its own economic and political retrogression and begins
to find a way out of those crippling sectarian atavisms.
From the Kurds, there are now proposals for a federal, decentralized polity
that would keep the country intact while granting that minority the measure
of autonomy they were promised when they were herded into a Baghdad-based
Arab government in the early 1920s. That federalism would look different
in an Iraqi setting, but there may lie Iraq's salvation. It would be a departure
from the command states dominant in the Arab world and in the centralized
oil states in particular. In their modern history, the Kurds have been repeatedly
betrayed, and that terrible history has bred in them habits of fratricide
and sedition. But the Kurds ought to be given credit for what they have built
over the last decade in their ancestral land in northern Iraq, albeit under
the protection of Anglo-American air power.
Kurdistan has thrived, and the perennial struggle between its dominant warlords,
Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, appears to have subsided. An attempt is
being made at parliamentary life. This achievement is fragile and could crack,
but under the gaze of two watchful and hostile powers, Iran and Turkey, the
Kurds appear to control the zone they rule, which consists of 10 percent
of Iraq's land and 15 percent of its population. Arabs are not given to charitable
views of the Kurds, but the Kurds could bring to the debate about a new Iraq
the experience and the poise gained during self-rule.
It is not decreed that the Kurds, or the Shi'a for that matter, will want
sectarian republics of their own. The convenience that created Iraq in the
1920s may still hold, but it would have to be a different Iraq. A country
of genuine pluralism, a culture that has traffic with Iran, Turkey, Syria,
and the Arabian Peninsula, and the inheritance of four decades of British
tutelage, has treated the Arab world to a cruel idea of Arabism, racial belonging,
and merciless clan rule as well. This duality would be tested and played
out if Iraq's different communities could arrive at a tolerable public order.
The "ownership" of a new Iraq would have to be shared; its vocation would
have to be a new social and political contract between state and society
and among the principal communities of the land.
But Iraq would also provide, as it did under British tutelage, a mirror for
American power as well. A new American primacy in Iraq would play out under
watchful eyes. There will be Arabs convinced that their world is being recolonized.
There will be pan-Arabists sure that Iraq has been taken out of "Arab hands,"
given over to the minorities within, and made more vulnerable to Turkey and
Iran, the two non-Arab powers nearby. There will be Europeans looking for
cracks in the conduct of the distant great power. The judgment that matters
will be made at home, in the United States itself, as to the costs and returns
of imperial burden. The British Empire's moment in Iraq came when it was
exhausted; on the eve of its occupation of Iraq, the United Kingdom's GDP
was 8 percent of the world product, when the comparable figure for America
today is at least three times as large. America can afford a big role in
Iraq, and beyond. Whether the will and the interest are there is an entirely
different matter.
The Arab world could whittle down, even devour, an American victory. This
is a difficult, perhaps impossible, political landscape. It may reject the
message of reform by dwelling on the sins of the American messenger. There
are endless escapes available to that Arab world. It can call up the fury
of the Israeli-Palestinian violence and use it as an alibi for yet more self-pity
and rage. It can shout down its own would-be reformers, write them off as
accomplices of a foreign assault. It can throw up its defenses and wait for
the United States to weary of its expedition. It is with sobering caution,
then, that a war will have to be waged. But it should be recognized that
the Rubicon has been crossed. Any fallout of war is certain to be dwarfed
by the terrible consequences of America's walking right up to the edge of
war and then stepping back, letting the Iraqi dictator work out the terms
of another reprieve. It is the fate of great powers that provide order to
do so against the background of a world that takes the protection while it
bemoans the heavy hand of the protector. This new expedition to Mesopotamia
would be no exception to that rule.
Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle
Eastern Studies at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns
Hopkins University. Copyright 2003 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
LOAD-DATE: December 10, 2002