YOU OCCUPY A DEFEATED PEOPLE, NOT A LIBERATED ONE:

Iraq’s Democratic Prospects (Kanan Makiya, June 2006, Foreign Policy Research Institute)

Long before March 2003 I believed that the U.S. conflict with the Baath regime in Iraq, dating back to the annexation of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, could only be resolved by the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. Relying on sanctions alone to do the job, I held, was immoral and unworkable. Worse, the removal of sanctions short of overthrow would re-legitimize a regime that was the worst violator of human rights since World War II—and that assessment is from a report issued in the mid 1990s by Max van der Stoel, then the UN Rapporteur for Human Rights.

The burden is on the opponents of regime change in Iraq to say what they would have done with the Saddam regime by the late 1990s. Iraq’s society was rotting, its institutions were reduced to pale shadows of their former selves, and the country was in terminal decline, while the Baath regime continued to empower its own people. Sanctions were not working the way the world had thought they would, and 25 million people were paying the price. Surely the international community that had imposed the sanctions in the first place needed to be held responsible, Iraqis would have thought. Continuation of the situation was immoral. But in the end, only the U.S., Great Britain, and a handful of other countries acted. The fact that the U.S. is associated with the removal of such a regime has got to be a good thing, however bad the situation in Iraq might look today.

The administration’s emphasis on WMD following 9/11 discomfited many of us. It is not that we thought the regime did not have them; it is just that the focus on weapons detracts from the more human messages of the diminution of cruelty, the spread of political freedoms, and liberation from dictatorship that should be at the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

Even those of us who do not regret our support for the war can acknowledge that big mistakes were made. To begin with, we underestimated the social base upon which the Baath system of government, which entailed terror and a bloated security and social-control apparatus, rested. The armed men of the Baath did not really fight back in March and April 2003, but nor were they repressed or won over by the proponents of the new order, be they Iraqis or the Coalition Provisional Authority. They are fighting back now. And they, not the jihadis, are the logistical, financial, and organizational backbone of the insurgency. We made the situation worse by taking away their jobs in the army and security services and neither punishing them nor immediately reconciling them to the new order.

Personally, I, along with most former Iraqi exiles, underestimated the consequences on a society of thirty years of extreme dictatorship, even if they were liberated, not defeated as the German and Japanese peoples were in 1945. A regime was removed and a people liberated that did not understand what had happened or why.

The people of Iraq emerged into the light of day in a daze, having been cut off from the rest of the world to a degree that is difficult to imagine if you have not lived among them. This raw, profoundly abused population, traumatized by decades of war, repression, uprisings, and brutal campaigns of social extermination like the Anfal, were handed the opportunity to build a nation virtually from scratch.

They were adept at learning to use the most visually arresting symbols of their reentry into the world—the mobile phone and the satellite dish which now proliferate all over Iraq. But it proved infinitely harder to get rid of the mistrust, fear, and unwillingness to take initiative or responsibility that was ingrained by a whole way of survival in police-state conditions.

I also underestimated the wounds in the population left by the betrayal of the Iraqi intifada in 1991. In 1991, more Iraqis died in Saddam’s crushing of the uprising than in the US-Iraq war itself. In 2003, Iraqis could not trust the U.S. “I don’t believe they are going to do it” was the dominant feeling among Iraqis inside the country. Even after coalition forces had taken half the country, Iraqis who had known nothing but Saddam’s lies for all their lives remained skeptical. The presence of more Iraqis—Iraqis able to talk to the skeptics on the ground—with and inside the liberation army in 2003 would have helped. But there were hardly any Iraqis, even as auxiliaries, in the U.S. army that occupied Iraq. This caused much confusion, and it undermined the support that regime-change could have immediately begun to have among Iraqis.

The U.S. mistakes of the postwar period have been much commented upon, particularly what was perhaps the biggest mistake of all: inadequate troop strength. The first, and most lasting consequence of those mistakes was insecurity. Iraq never got over the breakdown of authority that was evident in the looting that broke out on April 9, the day of liberation. Security is never absent in a police state. With liberation associated with the removal of personal security, one cannot expect Iraqis to behave overnight as if they had lived all their lives in a mature democratic state. Underlying many of these mistakes was America’s unwillingness or inability to exercise authority in a comprehensible way.

Was military occupation even the right transitional formula for postwar Iraq? Occupation is a sensible temporary solution to the problem of government for peoples who have been defeated, like the Germans and Japanese in 1945. But is it the right formula for a people that you believe you have just liberated from tyranny? Iraq’s post Saddam experience suggests that a reluctant occupier, one who is unable to accept the reality and imperative of his own position of authority, may be the last thing such a country needs.

The main lesson of Iraq is that the Rumsfeld doctrine is right--we needed fewer troops and should have withdrawn them quicker.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2006 5:10 PM