IRAQ: A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UTOPIAN EXPERIMENT

Many impulses led to war in Iraq, not all of them conscious or rational. The invasion was meant to secure American energy supplies; at the same time it was intended to remake Iraq as a model of liberal democracy for the rest of the region. The first of these objectives was compromised by the war, while the second was unrealizable. A third – dismantling Saddam’s WMD programme – was a pretext.

In an attempt to legitimate an act of aggression the Bush administration, along with the Blair government, represented the attack on Iraq as a response to a threat posed by a developing weapons programme, but their argument was incoherent. If there was a weapons programme under development it could be dealt with without war –by intrusive inspection procedures and other methods. If Saddam already possessed biological or chemical weapons there was no reason to think they posed a danger to the United States – as analysis released by the CIA concluded, he was likely to use them against the US only in the context of an American invasion. A predictable effect of the war was to demonstrate to ‘rogue states’ around the world that they would be better off having the WMD that Saddam lacked – otherwise, like Iraq, they would be vulnerable to American attack. Rather than slowing it down the war accelerated the proliferation of WMD. There was, in fact, no cogent argument for the war in terms of American or global security.

The goals of the war lay elsewhere. Among the geo-political objectives advanced by neo-conservatives was the argument that the US must decouple from Saudi Arabia, which they viewed as complicit in terrorism. If it was to disengage in this way the US needed another secure source of oil in the Gulf and another platform for its military bases. Iraq seemed to fit these requirements. By controlling a crucial part of the Gulf’s oil reserves, the US could detach itself from an ally it no longer trusted. At the same time it could ensure that it remained the dominant power in the region, with the capacity to limit the incursions of China, India and other energy-hungry states.

This was always an incredible scenario. Oil production in post-war Iraq has never achieved the level it did under Saddam, and the oil price has risen greatly. In the anarchy that prevails throughout much the country – the Kurdish region, where there are no American forces, remains peaceful – a return to previous levels of production is impossible. Over time, production will fall still further as a result of declining investment and the costs of protecting facilities. As a result of the Iraq war America’s oil supplies are more insecure than before. The notion that post-Saddam Iraq would accept the transfer of its oil reserves into American hands was anyhow delusional. Why should a democratic Iraq – if that had been possible – accept the expropriation of its resource base? Even as an exercise in realpolitik the war was a utopian venture.

Regime change in Iraq was part of a global resource war that began soon after the Soviet collapse. What is sometimes called the first Gulf War – a title that overlooks the savage conflict between Iraq and Iran that took place some years earlier – was a resource war and nothing else. None of the parties to it pretended that it had anything to do with spreading democracy or curbing terrorism. The objective was solely to secure oil supplies. Throughout the nineties this was a major objective of US policy, underpinning the establishment of military bases in Central Asia and spurring closer relations with Russia.

Throughout the twentieth century geo-politics – the struggle for control of natural resources – was a powerful factor shaping conflicts between states. Securing oil supplies was a major issue in the Second World War, helping to trigger Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It continued in the abortive attempt by Britain to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. The British-American overthrow of the secularist Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh in the CIA-led ‘Operation Ajax’ in 1953 was mounted with the avowed aim of preventing Iran coming under increased Soviet influence. Its chief goal was to reassert western control of the country’s oil.

The rivalries of the post-Cold War period have developed against a different background. The balance of power between producers and consumers of energy is shifting, with oil-producing states able to dictate the terms on which they do business with the world. Russia is using its position as a supplier of oil and natural gas to reassert itself in global politics, while Iran has emerged as a contender for hegemony in the Gulf. Underlying these shifts is the fact that global oil reserves are being depleted while global demand is rising. Oil is not running out in any simple sense; but the theory of ‘peak oil’ suggests that global production may be near its maximum. Peak oil is taken seriously by governments. A report by the US Department of Energy entitled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, which was released in February 2005, concludes: ‘The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.’³ When dwindling oil is combined with accelerating industrialization the result is bound to be intensifying rivalry for control of the world’s remaining reserves. The geo-politics of peak oil is shaping the policies of great powers.⁴

The role of oil as the supreme asset was recognized by the Bush administration’s most powerful strategist. In a speech at the Institute of Petroleum’s autumn lunch in 1999, when he was CEO of Haliburton, Dick Cheney observed:

Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies in the broader sense as it is for the world … So where is the oil going to come from? Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality. The degree of government involvement makes oil a unique commodity … Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about 90 per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.⁵

Cheney’s remarks show a clear understanding of peak oil, which was reflected in the first Bush administration’s decision to reclassify energy policy under the heading of national security. There can be little doubt that oil was a vital factor in the decision to launch the Iraq war. The US acted to install a regime that would secure America’s oil supplies and to signal its determination to control the reserves of the Gulf as a whole.

The adventure ran aground on the impossibility of establishing an effective state in place of the one that was demolished. It has become conventional wisdom to think that disaster could have been avoided by planning for post-war reconstruction. This view is supported by the fact that some planning did take place – in the US State Department’s 2002 paper on the future of Iraq, for example – but was disregarded by Bush and Rumsfeld.⁶ Yet the belief that the chaos that followed the American invasion could have been averted is groundless. It assumes the goals of the war were achievable when in fact they were not. If there had been anything resembling realistic forethought, the war would never have been launched. Establishing liberal democracy in the country was impossible, while overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state.

None of this is hindsight. The insurgency that followed the initial military success was widely anticipated,⁷ while the history of Iraq shows that the risks of majority rule in the country were well understood generations ago. First known as Mesopotamia, the state of Iraq is largely the work of the British diplomat Gertrude Bell, who – along with T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and Harry St John Philby, the British colonial officer and father of the Soviet spy Kim Philby –constructed it from three provinces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire and established it as a Hashemite kingdom in 1921. With the fall of the Ottomans in 1919, Bell – the first woman to be appointed a political officer in the British colonial service – became secretary to the British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and began building a new state. In 1920 Bell met Seyyid Hasan al-Sadr, the leading figure among Iraq’s Shias and great-grandfather of Moqtada al-Sadr, the commander of the Mahdi Army that rebelled against the American occupation in 2004. She recognized that democratic government would mean theocratic rule: ‘I do not for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority, because otherwise we will have a theocratic state, which is the very devil.’ One of her chief goals was to ‘keep the Shia divines from taking charge of public affairs’, which required rule by the Sunni elite. A British strategic interest was to retain control of the country’s northern oilfields. By creating a new kingdom in which the Shias were kept from power and the Kurds denied a separate state these two objectives could be achieved together.

One reason Bell was able to construct the new kingdom was that she was deeply versed in the culture of the region. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, she translated the verses of the Sufilibertine-mystic Hafiz into English. She founded the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, later the National Museum of Antiquities, which after nearly eighty years of conservation of the country’s treasures was looted in the aftermath of the American invasion. The looting – which occurred while the Oil Ministry alone among government institutions was under American guard – drew from Donald Rumsfeld the comment, ‘Stuff happens.’⁸ From the early 1920s onwards Bell was out of sympathy with British policy in the country. In 1926, sidelined by the colonial service and lacking influence over events, she took an overdose of sleeping pills in Baghdad, where she was buried in the British cemetery.⁹

Bell knew the state she had created could never be democratic. In the Shia regions democracy would mean theocracy, in Sunni areas sectarian conflict, and separatism in the Kurdish north. The kingdom Bell created lasted until Nasserite officers murdered the royal family in 1958 two years after the collapse of British power in the region that followed the ill-conceived Franco-British attempt to seize control of the Suez Canal. Saddam’s despotism was based on the same realities of sectarian division and Sunni rule that sustained Bell’s kingdom. Overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state through which it operated and creating the theocracy Bell had warned against. While it was never as fully totalitarian, Saddam’s Iraq was an Enlightenment regime on the lines of Soviet Russia. It was thoroughly secular, the only state in the Gulf not ruled by Islamic Sharia law but by a western-style legal code, and implacably hostile to Islamism – a fact accepted by the US in the 1980s when it supplied Saddam with weaponry and intelligence in the war with Iran.

Iraq has always been a composite state with deep internal divisions. Though it was more repressive, Saddam’s regime was built on the same foundations as Bell’s kingdom. Saddam held Iraq together while repressing the Shia majority, the Kurds and others. Destroying Saddam’s regime emancipated these groups and left the Iraqi state without power or legitimacy. Democracy was impossible, for it required a degree of trust among the communities that make up the underlying society that did not exist. Minorities need to be assured that they will not be permanent losers, or else they will secede to set up a state of their own. The Kurds were bound to follow this path, and the five million Sunnis were sure to resist majority rule by the Shias. The fissures between these groups were too deep for Iraq’s rickety structures to survive. Nearly everywhere, states that suddenly become democratic tend to break apart, as happened in the USSR and former Yugoslavia. There was never any reason to think Iraq would be different, and by the time of Saddam’s sordid and chaotic execution in December 2006 the Iraqi state had ceased to exist.

Though at every stage it has been joined with a crazed version of realpolitik, the neo-conservative project of regime change in Iraq is a classic example of the utopian mind at work. For the neo-conservatives who masterminded the war democracy would come about simply through the overthrow of tyranny. If there were transitional difficulties they could be resolved by applying universal – that is to say, American – principles. Hence the construction of an imaginary structure of federalism that followed. The system that was devised for Iraq expressed a faith in paper constitutions that hardly squares with the history of the United States, which achieved national unity only via the route of civil war.

In practice the Bush administration was clueless. Weeks before the invasion, it had no idea how the country was to be governed. Opinion oscillated between installing a military-style governor on the model of post-war Japan and implementing an immediate transition to democracy. Donald Rumsfeld – a military bureaucrat and American nationalist rather than any kind of neo-conservative – never had any interest in bringing democracy to Iraq, but equally he had never proposed any strategy for governing the country once the Saddam regime had been overthrown. Replacing Saddam by a military governor – as some British officials suggested – was not a realistic option, for it meant setting up what would in effect be a colonial administration whose longer-term viability would be highly dubious and which the US was in any case predisposed to reject. For a powerful faction in the Bush administration, the war had always been a means of imposing American-style democracy on the country. This was notably true of Paul Wolfowitz. James Mann, author of a study of the self-styled ‘Vulcans’ – the circle of defence strategists who made up George W. Bush’s war cabinet – has written that Wolfowitz

became the administration official most closely associated with the invasion of Iraq. In the midst of the invasion Americans working in the war zone came up with the nickname Wolfowitz of Arabia for the deputy secretary of defence; the phrase captures the degree of intensity, passion and even, it sometimes seemed, romantic fervour with which he pursued the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing democracy to the Middle East.¹⁰

For Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the war, the invasion was a prelude to democratizing the entire region. In the event, the incompetence of Bush’s proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, was so devastating that a sudden move to democracy in Iraq soon came to be accepted as the only way the American administration could pretend to any kind of legitimacy.

In his first communiqués in May 2003 Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and sacked Baathist public officials, including university professors and primary school teachers, nurses and doctors. The Washington Post’s Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has described Bremer’s decision:

… on May 23, Bremer issued CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) Order Number 2, Dissolution of Iraqi Entities, formally doing away with several groups: the Iraqi armed forces, which accounted for 385,000 people; the staff of the Ministry of the Interior, which amounted to a surprisingly high 285,000 people because it included police and domestic security forces; and the presidential security units, a force of some 50,000 … Many of these men were armed.¹¹

Disbanding Iraqi forces came after Bremer’s Order Number 1 –De-Baathification of Iraq Society – which had barred senior Baathist party members from public office. Taken together, the two orders –which Ricks reports were strongly opposed by the CIA station chief in Baghdad – left over half a million people unemployed. In a country where families average around six people, this meant over two and a half million – about a tenth of the population – lost their income. Bremer appears to have issued the orders on the advice of Ahmed Chalabi, who aimed to install his allies in the positions left vacant.

The effect of Bremer’s orders was to dismantle the Iraqi state. The police and security forces ceased to be national institutions and were captured by sectarian militias, which used them to kidnap, torture and murder. Outside the Green Zone – the high-security area in central Baghdad where the American and British embassies and the coalition-backed Iraq government are located – the country became a zone of anarchy. By the end of 2006 around a hundred people were being killed every day, and according to a UNestimate torture was worse than under Saddam.¹²

The perception fostered by the Bush administration that Iraq has a fledging government that is rebuilding the country has no basis in reality. The American-backed government is a battleground of sectarian forces, while the Iraqi state has disappeared into history’s memory hole. If Saddam had been assassinated or had died of natural causes, the regime would most likely have survived. By imposing regime change, the Bush administration created a failed state, with a fragile government heavily dependent on the Shia militias – a fact ignored in Bush’s buffoonish criticisms of its policies. The resulting chaos has left the declared goal of the invasion – finding and destroying Saddam’s supposed WMD programme – beyond reach. If Saddam possessed any chemical or biological weapons – as he certainly did in the nineties –they have disappeared along with the state of Iraq.

There are some who argue that the failure of American forces to pacify Iraq is due to their being deployed in insufficient numbers. Certainly the war plan that was drawn up by Donald Rumsfeld went badly wrong in not anticipating the insurgency that followed the collapse of Saddam’s forces. Rumsfeld – who throughout his time in the administration was a forceful proponent of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ involving high levels of reliance on technology and the limited use of ground forces – was loathed by the military for imposing an unworkable strategy for the war and was first to be sacrificed when American voters rejected it. But a larger deployment would have made little difference. Despite having over 400,000 troops in the country in the aftermath of the First World War, Britain was unable to impose its will by military force; when a type of order was created it was by political means. The British invaded Mesopotamia in 1914 partly in order to secure crude oil supplies for their warships, which Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had switched from coal to more efficient oil-burning engines. The course of the occupation was far from smooth – between December 1915 and April 1916 the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force suffered over 20,000 casualties at the hands of Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, resorting later to razing villages by air strikes (a tactic the British also used in Afghanistan in the 1920s).

The state of Iraq was constructed to achieve a condition of peace that could not be achieved by the use of military force. In contrast, American military operations in Iraq have not been accompanied by any achievable political objectives. By early 2007 over 3,000 Americans had been killed – more than died as a result of 9/11 – and over 20,000 wounded, for the sake of goals that, insofar as they were ever coherently formulated, were unrealizable. American forces have made mistakes and committed some crimes; but blame for American defeat cannot be attached to the soldiers who were sent to discharge an impossible mission. Responsibility lies with the political leaders who conceived the mission and ordered its execution.

It is true that US forces were badly equipped for counter-insurgency warfare of the kind that began after the occupation of Baghdad. In the aftermath of humiliating defeat in Vietnam and Somalia, US military doctrine has been based on ‘force protection’ and ‘shock and awe’. In practice, this means killing any inhabitant of the occupied country that might conceivably pose any threat to US forces and overcoming the enemy through the use of overwhelming firepower. Effective in the early stages of the war when the enemy was Saddam’s forces, these strategies are counter-productive when the enemy comprises most of the population, as is now the case. The current conflict is what General Sir Rupert Smith, who commanded the British 1st Armoured Division in the Gulf War, UNpeacekeeping forces in Sarajevo and the British Army in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998, has called a ‘war among the people’.¹³ In a conflict of this kind, superior numbers count for little and the heavy use of firepower is useless or counter-productive. Any initial sympathy sections of the population may have had for American occupying forces evaporated after the razing of the city of Fallujah in early 2004. Involving the use of cluster bombs and chemical weapons (a type of white phosphorus, or ‘improved napalm’¹⁴) in ‘shake and bake’ operations against the city’s population, this was an act that can be compared with the destruction by Russian forces of the Chechen capital city of Grozny. In military terms it was a failure – a few days later the insurgents captured the bigger city of Mosul where they were able to seize large quantities of arms – and it demonstrated a disregard for Iraqi lives that fuelled the insurgency. A senior British officer, speaking anonymously in April 2004, commented: ‘My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as Untermenschen.’¹⁵

The use of torture at Abu Ghraib followed a familiar pattern. During the year after the fall of Saddam anyone could end up a victim. Thousands of people were swept up from the streets and subjected to systematic abuse. In acting in this way, American forces were following a well-trodden path. Torture was used widely by the Russians in Chechnya, the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya in the 1950s. Unlike these predecessors, who inflicted extremes of physical pain, however, American interrogators focused on the application of psychological pressure, particularly sexual humiliation. The methods of torture employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims. In using these techniques the US imprinted an indelible image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime can have legitimacy in Iraq.

US military authorities have condemned the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib. However, while the practice seems to have been resisted by sections of the Army, torture did not occur as a result of accident or indiscipline. From the start of the ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration flouted international law on the treatment of detainees. It declared members of terrorist organizations to be illegal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. The detainees held in the concentration camp at Guantanamo fall into this category, and so did Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan. Being beyond the reach of international law, they were liable to torture. In Iraq the Bush administration evaded international law by a different route. Security duties at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities were outsourced to private contractors not covered by military law or the Geneva Convention. In effect, the Bush administration created a lawless environment in which abuse could be practised with impunity. Torture at Abu Ghraib was not the result of a few officers acting beyond their brief. It was the result of decisions at the highest levels of American leadership.

Since Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has continued to defend the use of torture, while military judges, the CIA and the US military have continued to resist the practice. In February 2006 the CIA’s chief counter-terrorism officer Robert Grenier was fired for opposing torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’.¹⁶ It has been reported that the network of secret jails set up by the administration to house prisoners sent there under the special rendition programme (whereby suspects are abducted to countries where they can be tortured without difficulty) may have been shut down because the CIA – unconvinced of the efficacy of torture and fearful that officers who practise it could later be prosecuted – declined to carry out further interrogations. Senior military judges refused to sign a declaration of support for Bush’s policies on ‘coercive interrogation’.¹⁷ As with the administration’s use of unverified intelligence, its decision to employ torture was resisted in all the main institutions of American government, and, as before, the administration carried on with its policies.

Disaster in Iraq was hastened by the willingness to use methods that were inhumane and counter-productive. Some of these errors may have been avoidable, but a pattern of arrogant incompetence was built into the Bush administration. It refused to accept advice from the branches of government where expertise existed, such as the uniformed military, the CIA and the State Department. Instead it relied on the counsel of those in the administration whose views were shaped by a neo-conservative agenda, including the Office of Special Plans. But the picture of post-war Iraq that neo-conservatives disseminated was a tissue of disinformation and wishful thinking, while the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends showed the utopian mind at its most deluded.

The ease with which a wildly unreal assessment of conditions in Iraq came to be accepted in America had several sources. Public opinion accepted the war only after a campaign of disinformation. It was persuaded of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when it was known that none existed and informed that Saddam’s regime was engaged in an active weapons programme of which there was no reliable evidence. The neo-conservatives who orchestrated the campaign were themselves blinded by illusions, some of them innate to their way of thinking. They believed the methods needed to achieve freedom were the same everywhere: the policies that were required in Iraq were no different from those that had been used to spread freedom in former communist countries. But what is feasible on the banks of the Danube may not be possible on the Euphrates – even supposing peace prevailed in Iraq as it did in most of post-communist Europe – and this ardent neo-conservative belief in a universal model went with a deep indifference to the particular history of the country. If other cultures are stages on the way to a global civilization that already exists in the US, there is no need to understand them since they will soon be part of America. The effect of this adamant universalism is to raise an impassable barrier between America and the rest of humanity that precludes serious involvement in nation building.¹⁸

In Iraq this cultural default reached surreal extremes. In the shelter of the Green Zone, interns on short-term secondment from Washington – some from neo-conservative think tanks – plotted the future of Iraq insulated from any perception of the absurdity of their plans. Had the goals of the American administration been achievable at all, it would only be after many decades of occupation. Instead, the impossible was attempted in months. The armed missionaries who dispatched American forces to Iraq expected the instant conversion of the population, only for these forces to be repulsed as enemies. Robespierre’s warning to his fellow Jacobins of the perils of Napoleon’s programme of exporting revolution by force of arms throughout Europe was vindicated again, two centuries later, in the Middle East.

Iraq is only the most extravagant example of a trend in foreign policy that aimed to renew, in liberal guise, something resembling the European empires of the past. In this view, toppling tyranny in Iraq was not just an American attempt to secure hegemony in the Middle East. It was the start of a new kind of imperialism guided by liberal principles of human rights.