Demosophia

Hors Categorie: The Climb to Victory. Nation-Building in Iraq.

I've been thinking quite a lot about the sort of problem the US faces in Iraq. The Belmont Club has posted several provocative essays on the topic that have helped me conceptualize what the US may be doing, and perhaps should do in Iraq. Wretchard grasps the details of the military operations far better than I, so his insights have been critical. The primary issue for the US in Iraq is that we're involved in doing something far more difficult and nuanced than winning a military campaign. In fact, it requires such a high level of nuance that it really makes the machinations of diplomacy at the UN theater of the absurd leading up to the war breathtakingly simple, by comparison. We're building nations as part of a strategy toward winning what has to be the strangest war in history. And if the strategy of nation-building isn't successful it's very unlikely that the overall war will be either.

The rather unique problem we confront in Iraq has to do with what political sociologists call "legitimacy," or in another formulation "the right to rule." Max Weber, one of the founders of the field of sociology, conceived of three different types of legitimacy that could confer the right to rule on a government. These were tradition, charisma, and legal/rational authority. And, as Seymour Martin Lipset observed, the problem for any "new nation" is acute:

Old states possess traditional legitimacy, and this need not concern us further, beyond suggesting that new nations may sometimes be in a position to enhance their own legitimacy by incorporating the already existing legitimacy of subordinate centers or persons of authority. Thus, new nations that retain local rulers--for example dukes, counts, chiefs, clan heads, etc--and create a larger national system of authority based on them, may be more stable than those which seek to destroy such local centers of authority. It can be argued that the case of Europe's most stable republican government, Switzerland, is to be explained as a consequence of the preservation of cantonal government and power, i.e. as an extension of cantonal legitimacy. [Reference the adoption of the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan as the basis of a republic dominated by a predominantly mountainous cantonal structure. The similarities with Switzerland are suggestive.] Contemporary Malaya is a recent example of an effort to foster national legitimacy by retaining traditional symbols of local rule.

But where traditional authority is absent, as it was in post-revolutionary America or France, and much of contemporary Asia and Africa, it can be developed only through reliance on legal and/or charismatic authority. [emphasis added] -- (Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation, p. 17.)

Lipset footnotes the above with:

A crisis of legitimacy may occur even when the traditional forms of rule are maintained, if authority figures are subordinated to alien rulers. Beaumont noted this problem among Indian tribes during his visit to America with Tocqueville in the early 1830s. Gustave de Beaumont, Marie, or Slavery in the United States (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), especially p. 241.

This fairly brackets the problem we face in Iraq, and may encounter in other areas of the world if we attempt similar projects, as the neocon cabal advises. In my own estimation one way to look at legitimacy is as the seasoning in a dish that makes it palatable to the client. If we are unable to season the offering so that it's attractive to relevant Iraqi factions, we're wasting our time. And this problem of the legitimacy of a new regime, or government, is the central problem we will face for the next quarter-century.

For imperial powers interested in establishing only a puppet regime the problem of legitimacy isn't acute, because the polity isn't self governing. It may be largely self administered, as was India, but ultimately it was the colonial power that actually governed. In such situations it will therefore suffice to install someone with nominal traditional legitimacy, like Herod in the case of Roman Judea, or Faisal I in the case of British Mandate in Iraq. The weakness of such an arrangement is, of course, that it invariably leads to Maccabaean uprisings that must be controlled through some form of repression, which is approximately the opposite of what ought to be our goal in Iraq. Establishing a self-sufficient and self-governing state is a project only slightly less daunting than finding the philosopher's stone. And the basic problem of legitimacy, or ultimately "sovereignty," is that it's a quality that must ultimately arise from within. Even so, the alchemy has been accomplished successfully in the past, so we know it's possible. The issue at present is how to accomplish it not only successfully, but with minimal expenditure of time, lives and resources. It's a tall order, to say the least.

In the case of the United States itself, legitimacy grew out of the revolution.[1] Specifically it grew out of the embodiment of the revolution in the charismatic person of George Washington, and to a lesser extent the other Founders, as well as the difficulty of struggle and ultimate victory. But even if the makers of the Revolution conferred legitimacy on, or transferred legitimacy to, the institutions of the fledgling state, the project was only sealed and finalized "four score and seven" years later, in the bloodiest war in US history. And for Australia it may well have taken the horrendous losses at Gallipoli to finalize a sense of national legitimacy. The component of great sacrifice leading to unity, although not specifically referenced by Weber, is no small part of the process (and in the cases of both Australia and the US the actual military victory which followed was, in this sense at least, anticlimactic).[1]

Which brings us to Iraq, and more specifically to Fallujah and Najaf/Kut. The Belmont Club's coverage of these events begins with a post on Fallujah that might have been prophetic, had we decided that our highest priority was military victory.

"...once the Marines get the momentum of processing going, the tribal leaders will lose control and the whole structure will start to crumble. The Marines can exploit their physical domination by offering clemency or even rewards to those who rat out on other perps. The inner bastion of Fallujah will collapse like a termite-eaten post as each man looks out for himself. "

Subsequently, the marines began not only to employ tactics of co-option and negotiation, but also to begin integrating Iraqi units into the fight. And according to some first person accounts they performed well:

I could tell you stories of individual heroics of Iraqi soldiers. One specific example is of an Iraqi SgtMaj who came into our lines during the first days of fighting in Falluja. He made his way through the mujahadeen and risked being killed by us to tell us that he was concerned about the ICDC (Iraqi Civil Defense Corps) armory in town. He knew it was only a matter of time until the muj went for the armory to take the weapons. Honestly, I would have thought that they had already done it as the police stations and every other good piece of ground seemed to be occupied by the muj by that time. In short, he wanted to let us know that he was going back into the town to get the weapons. The Marines asked him if he wanted us to help. No. He only wanted us to take the weapons from him when he came back through. This guy took a couple young Iraqi soldiers with a truck and drove back through our lines into the hornets nest of Falluja. He went to the armory, emptied the weapons and ammo stored there and brought it back out through the fighting to us. We expected him to want to stay with us or to move on to Baghdad or some other safe area. He refused and stated that he was going back into the city as that was where his duty was. Not a coward by even the most cynical standard.

At any rate I've been trying to think of an analogy for this strategy that makes sense to me, and I borrowed a term from bicycle racing. I have a friend who is an ex-racer, who regularly beats the socks off the rest of us even though he's nearly 50 (which really isn't over-the-hill in spite of the hype), and he described his career in bicycle racing thusly: "I was just 'pack fill.'" If you've ever seen TV coverage of a major bike race, like the Tour de France, you know what a "pack," or what cycling fans call a "peleton," (etymologically related to the word "platoon") looks like. Actually, in most lesser races such packs are much smaller than those in the Tour de France, or other major European stage races like the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana . The term "pack fill," at least as my friend used it, refers to those racers who are good enough to ride with the pack by taking advantage of the aerodynamics of paceline riding, but who probably aren't strong enough to be competitive for the lead on a consistent basis. In the big stage races these are often the people Phil Ligget calls "domestiques." They do the fetch and carry during the race, and are sometimes called upon to protect, defend, and give respite to a team leader. They may also be younger riders learning the ropes, and one way to cultivate a future champion is to place such a promising rider within the pack where they get intimate with racing proforma and can develop endurance and tactics/strategy through the direct inspiration of those around them, and of course by sharing the experience of the most challenging major endurance sport in the world.

In addition to the training value of pack riding there is also a component of inherent strategy because the rules set the time for a stage equal to the time of the first rider in a group or "pack" that crosses the finish. So riding within the main pack is one way that a champion rider may rest without losing time to his closer rivals, as he prepares for the stages where his fate will usually be decided (the mountains, and the time trials).

But the main insight I'd like to offer about paceline and pack riding is that it's a means of competitive cooperation that is, in many ways, directly analogous to competitive cooperation in other realms. For instance, it is analogous to the cooperation between management and workers within the larger market structure, because unless a company produces products at a completive price and quality neither management nor labor obtain benefits. And in an even larger sense competitive cooperation is the very essence of a democratic political culture. In his seminal analysis of the US, Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes this quality of cooperation in competition, which differentiated the US from Europe, and which was one of the characteristics that he thought made America "exceptional." And in the Federalist Papers James Madison specifically references an intentional strategy to "establish crosscutting alliances" between members of different political and ideological factions, competition between which had doomed earlier experiments in representative government in Europe. The most devastating consequences had only recently been observed in the catastrophe of the French Revolution, where political factions had become aligned with traditional social and economic cleavages in society to produce the Reign of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre.

So how does this analogy apply to Iraq, or to the general problem of establishing a state with enough legitimacy to govern? Madison's argument was simple. Provide competing factions with an economic stake that gives them an incentive to cooperate across the traditional warring social cleavages: economic and social class, race, religion, etc. And it is the alignment of these kinds of factional groups with dominant social cleavages that are precisely the forces at work in Iraq that challenge the establishment of a democratic political culture. It is an old problem, requiring a combination of old and new solutions. Add to the traditional social cleavages that concerned Madison, the unique push and pull of clan and tribe that are part of the defining culture of the Middle East, and the challenge must be daunting indeed.

But the same principles that knit the competing factions in the early US, or at least kept them from explosively breaking apart as happened around the same time in France, and that bound out of the "many, one" national identity with common purpose can, theoretically, mend or heal the ideological, ethnic, political, religious, and tribal/clan cleavages in Iraq. For Americans, the success of the early nation, as well as it's long term ascendancy, were based on the healing insights of the Madisonian vision, as well as the common purpose provided by a shared ideology.

What we are engaged in, in Fallujah and the Shi'ite enclaves, on one level, is a process of heaping disincentives on factionalization, by beating the tar out of divisive factions like those of Sadr, the Fedayeen "insurgents," and the radical Islamists and Salafists. And this is going on as we simultaneously bribe elements of these factions to a common economic purpose and future. But on another, and perhaps ultimately deeper, level we are instructing in the basic tenets of the "American Ideology," or what Lipset and others have called, simply: Americanism. The essentials of this doctrine are, again according to Lipset: equality (of opportunity), religious sectarianism, and individualism/anti-statism. The first and second values probably hold greater promise for Iraq than does the third, which in many societies is considered an incentive to disunity. But in the particular case of the US it actually became a founding value (much to the chagrin of socialists like Friedrich Engel, who correctly perceived that because many of the objectives sought by socialism were already part of the American experience, the actual implementation of socialism faced an uphill battle). The primary role of this third value for Iraqis, at this point in their history, is that it may serve as something of a tonic for the more corrosive effects of Ba'athism. But realistically it is not likely to undo the clans, nor should it. Where possible we may play off of some of the fears that Salafists like Zarqawi expressed in a recent letter, using those very clan structures against the insurgents. Dan Darling fisks a few relevant passages from the Zarqawi letter:

America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes. It is looking to a near future, when it will remain safe in its bases, while handing over control of Iraq to a bastard government with an army and police force that will bring back the time of (saddam) Husayn and his cohorts. (headquarters comment: it is not clear to whom "it" is referring, but it appears to mean the united states.)

Herein lies the failure by al-Qaeda's leadership to understand that, contrary to media reports and the (wishful?) thinking of some in the West, today's America is not the same America that pulled out of Vietnam and left the South Vietnamese and Cambodians to rot under their progressive conquerers that our earlier domestic anti-war movement idolized in the 1960s. Certainly I haven't seen any college protesters touting bin Laden's declaration of war the way they used to Mao's Red Book ...

Their basic fear seems to be that the US is going to do in Iraq what we've done in Afghanistan - set up a series of reinforced bases in-country and then set up a friendly government. Given that al-Qaeda is highly unlikely to buy into US claims of spreading democracy in the Middle East, he likely assumes that the US is going to create a "benign autocracy" inside Iraq that he fears will become something resembling the current Egyptian government, which is reliably pro-Western (abeit in an anti-Semitic sort of way) but every bit a totalitarian state. The reference to bringing back the time of Saddam Hussein refers to the re-establishment of a police state in Iraq. The Egyptian secret police and military establishment have waged a protracted war against Gamaa al-Islamiyyah and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad ever since the Sadat assassination that has all but crippled both organizations' ability to operate inside of Egypt proper (this is why so many Egyptian extremists have taken their cause abroad) and Zarqawi clearly fears that the same will occur in Iraq.

There is no doubt that our field of movement is shrinking and the grip around the throat of the Mujahidin has begun to tighten. With the spread of the army and police, our future is becoming frightening.

This is good news, it means that not only is he having trouble recruiting but that the organization that he does have is under intense pressure from US and Iraqi authorities. This is extremely good, it means that he's still got his core network but is unable to expand upon it. The key thing to do now is to locate and destroy his remaining bases and kill or capture his lieutenants to cripple the al-Qaeda element of the insurgency.

While it's true that Zarqawi is not directly concerned about the establishment of democracy in Iraq, the fact remains that the clan structure may be working to the advantage of the US rather than the insurgents.

I have somewhat conflated three issues that are often regarded separately by students and theorists of political culture. Strictly speaking most people in the field tend to treat the problems of legitimacy (more often called "legitimation" to differentiate it from the parenthood issue), factionalism (the remedy for which is Madisonian "cross-cutting alliances"), and national unity (which may be either common ethnicity, or common ideology). The US is not founded on the basis of a common ethnic identity, and a common ideology substitutes for this. The issue of ethnic divisions is also acute for Iraq, so one solution to the problem of national unity may be a perceived common ancient history (which was somewhat contrived, but still holds potential) and a common recent history since the establishment of Sykes-Picot. But I still believe that inculcation in the tenets of Americanism may be of value for Iraq. And the critical issue is how to infuse these values into a society that may well be resistant.

On the ground this infusion takes place both formally, as part of the military training that recruits in the Civil Defense Force receive, but probably far more importantly through the kind of informal intimate contact that only those who share positions in battle can have. The way I conceive it is that you have your crack troops begin an operation so that they take the brunt of what the enemy resistance has to offer, which is roughly the way we began the Fallujah and Najaf/Kut campaigns. Then you gradually bring your novice troops into the fray so that they end up fighting along side the more experienced people, as part of their "internship training." One Marine officer, a "Captain B" describes the early stages of this tactic in Fallujah:

Subject: Reorienting and Driving Forward

As you all probably know by now, we are turning Fallujah over to the Iraqis.

This will give us an opportunity to focus on other areas, and hopefully to build a new Iraqi Army with some of the folks that are feeling alienated right now. We're all painfully aware of the various issues associated with this move, but there's no point in discussing them. We'll make this work, just like we make everything else work to the best of our ability.

And another Marine officer describes the strategy in its implementation:

We had a group that showed up shortly thereafter. You have probably heard about them as they came out of Baghdad and on the way were ambushed a couple of times. By the time they made it here only 200 of 700 were in their ranks. I know that the public story is that they folded after a couple of days of fighting and disintegrated. They actually made it through three days of fighting. Not just taking a few rounds, they held through accurate machine gun fire, mortars and multiple assaults. They also moved forward and occupied positions on the Marines' flanks. After three days, we pulled them out. The Marines will tell you that they did a hell of a job.

What these Marine officers are describing is really the model that we'll use to perform the alchemy of giving birth to a liberal state at the balance point of the Arab Middle East. And ultimately it's a model that will launch Iraqis, rather than Americans, as victors in a war against insurgents and terrorists from all over the Muslim world. The difficulty of the implementation of such a strategy can't be overemphasized. As Wretchard observes, relieving a unit in contact with the enemy is one of the most difficult and dangerous military operations there is. And even though US units will not be in intimate contact with the enemy in most instances throughout the country as the transition occurs, the operations in Fallujah and in the Shia areas are the models for the most critical stage of the alchemy that we must produce. We have done something like this before, in the Philippines, as the Belmont club has already noted.

The President has recently appointed Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus as the commander in charge of training and equipping all Iraqi security and military forces. He is regarded by many military experts, including General Zinni, as "the best we have." But it would be inaccurate to conclude that this is merely a training mission rather than a nation building mission, because there will come a time when the Iraqi forces will take the lead and our forces will recede into the background. That must happen, and how this delicate move is handled could well determine the future of the country, and the course of the War on Totalitarianism 3.x.

To illustrate the problem we return to our bicycle racing model. During the 2002 Tour de France two modern legends of bicycle racing, Lance Armstrong and Marco Pantini, both of whom had previously won the race, met on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, a final climb so overwhelming that it's considered beyond categorizing (HC for hors categorie, a term also used in mountain climbing). As they neared the top of the ascent, and the finish line, Armstrong led, followed closely by Pantini "on his wheel." In bike racing, because of the role of aerodynamics, it is actually considered an advantage to be in second position nearing the finish because the lead rider then has to take the brunt of the aerodynamic drag allowing the follower to draft until the very last instant, although on a very steeply graded finish such as Ventoux this advantage is diminished. Nonetheless because of the power of these cyclists the advantage still exists. But as the two finally drew close to the finish it was apparent that Marco did not have enough stamina left for a final sprint, in spite of having been in Armstrong's wake. And at the last instant, in an apparently magnanimous gesture, Armstrong backed off the pace allowing Pantini the victory as a "gift."

From a strategic standpoint the gesture cost Armstrong little, because his goal was an overall victory. Coming in second in a middle stage (over a period of three weeks), well ahead of the "pack," served his purposes as much as a win. But the gift did not gratify Pantini, who saw it as an insult. It is hard to say what Armstrong intended, but when he described the reasons for his actions he said that he had taken the lead to give Pantini a rest "because small riders have to work harder on a steep slope," which isn't strictly the case and does sound suspiciously like a slight. I can't think of a reason why a steep climb would be tougher for a smaller rider, as long as his power-to-weight ratio is favorable. Nor is the smaller rider at an aerodynamic disadvantage, since with less surface area such a rider will, almost by definition, create less drag.

But whatever the reason for the American's gesture on Ventoux, we can't afford to follow a similar example, offering a new Iraqi Civil Defense Force such an empty victory. We will have to fade from the scene much further down the slope, so that we're nowhere in sight or even in mind when the finish line finally looms. And that really represents the ultimate victory for the US in Iraq. In a sense it's a victory over our own shortsighted need and desire to win every contest, and dominate every foe. Thus, when Richard Holbrooke complained in a CNN interview recently that the US has been defeated in Fallujah and Najaf because we negotiated a withdrawal, we can rest assured that, as General Myers said about Fallujah: "If that was a defeat, we need more of them." We need more of them because our current task, part of a much longer war, is the most challenging form of alchemy: building an open civil society.

[1] Although the beneficiaries of US nation-building in the wake of WWII did not have the legitimacy-producing advantage of having won a war, the emergence into a modern and peaceful economic life after the crushing defeat at the hands of the allies was, relatively speaking, regarded as a victory. And the fact that it happened in such a short span added to the sense of prestige. It might also be argued that the shift from WWII to the Cold War, with its shift of allegience of Germany and Japan to the winning side of the War on Totalitarianism 2.x, further enhanced the legitimacy of the democratic regimes. In addition, of course, Japan kept its Emperor as a source of traditional legitimacy, while for Germany the institution of a parliamentary form of government with elections could be seen as a return to the pre-Nazi "mainstream," after the years of deviation. And the creation of an effective middle class in both "West" Germany and Japan were stunning achievements in their own right.

Posted by Demosophist at June 1, 2004 05:00 PM | TrackBack