Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  Closing the borders could have been accomplished by one of three paths. First, a massive effort by the Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians, Kuwaitis, and Iranians could have done the trick, but they were not going to act because they wanted a U.S. failure in Iraq and were improving their internal security by unloading their Islamist firebrands across the borders. Second, the U.S. military and its coalition allies could have massively reinforced their armies of occupation and done the job themselves. This was a nonstarter, however, as it would have made clear that Secretary Rumsfeld’s transformed and massively expensive, light, fast, and precision-weapon-armed military could not do what hordes of old-fashioned ground-pounding infantry could do to ensure a U.S. victory. Third, Washington could have tried some combination of the two, if it had been able to extensively use a tool that is very effective in closing borders—the land mine. Alas, the land mine is the mortal enemy of many of the Cold War’s antinational groups—NGOs, UN components, human rights organizations, etc.—and their large-scale deployment apparently was never seriously considered. Washington was content to lose Iraq and Afghanistan by allowing insurgents easy and reliable cross-border access because they were fearful of offending the antinational groups, and they were even more afraid of the frenzy those groups loved to whip up among their media and academic supporters.

  Several other Cold War leftovers helped to defeat America in Iraq. The Bush administration’s goal of creating a secular, pluralistic, and multicultural post-Saddam Iraqi society could have been imagined only if even the most conservative Republicans, neoconservatives, and just plain war hawks fully bought into the multiculturalists’ bankrupt notion that all cultures are equal and able to live together peacefully. While the vote-chasers in both houses of Congress, especially on the Democratic side, naturally endorsed the sham war aim of multiculturalism, one would have hoped for more historical awareness from the reputedly hard-headed Republican “realists.” But such was not the case, and so America’s initial goal was unachievable, not to say laughable. That U.S. leaders thought such an outcome possible in Iraq can be seen only as confirming the immense insularity, ill education, and willful mental isolation of the bipartisan U.S. governing elite. History gives no reason to assume that different cultures can easily coexist, the noted historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has written, and “[w]hat makes less sense is the pretense that relations among the embodiments of different cultures should be harmonious.”40 Any American tourist, business person, intelligence officer, or soldier who has spent any time overseas, particularly in the Muslim world, knows unashamedly from first-hand experience that (a) in terms of fairness, legal equity, broad opportunities for improvement in life, and basic security, American society is superior in every way to anything they encounter abroad, and (b) be that as it may, most Muslims are immensely proud of their religion and history, have no wish to become just like Americans, and regard anything that smacks of secularism as inherently inferior to their way of life and an affront to their faith, indeed, as fighting words. Only among the U.S. governing elite is multiculturalism an attainable goal, and it has that status only because our elite, while extraordinarily well traveled (usually at the taxpayers’ expense), is crewed by common-sense-immune, history-ignorant, mental isolationists who are eager to shove politically divisive and tolerance-fraying multiculturalism down the throats of U.S. voters and are able to see but unable to understand anything overseas that does not mesh with their preconceived notions. “Yet our mastery, our very knowledge of the world remains spotty in the extreme,” Fouad Ajami wrote of U.S. leaders in October 2000. “We have traffic with the rulers of Arab and Muslim states, but it gives us precious little insight into these lands.”41 To this day, truer words were never spoken.

  Other Cold War assumptions have also happily fallen by the wayside in Iraq. Obviously, amid the mounds of severed heads, disfigured, head-shot, and blindfolded corpses, destroyed holy sites, and random murders, the Cold War’s limits on violence are long gone, and the rules of engagement imposed by U.S. politicians and leaders who listen to the just-war theorists have made America’s military children targets rather than the killers they should be.42 And although Joseph Nye continues to lament that Washington has not used sufficient amounts of our “soft power” in the war against Islamists,43 events in Iraq have proven that soft power without definitive military victory is impotent. We have conducted repeated elections, built roads, dug wells, provided prenatal and most other kinds of health care, created employment opportunities, handed out U.S. cash by the unaccountable boxload, established schools, sung the praises of democracy loud, long, and multilingually, and generally exploited soft power to a substantial extent. And it has failed for two reasons. First, no matter how many of these soft-power components we bring to bear, we still run up hard against the fact that Muslims hate U.S. foreign policies. Most Iraqi Muslims appreciate better schools, health care, and water, but they still hate U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world—as in “Thanks for the dental work, but why did you stand by and watch Israel gut Lebanon in the summer of 2006?”—and it is arrogance to assume that potable water will make Muslims forget that they hate us for what they perceive as the infidel occupation of Iraq, the demeaning of their faith, and the killing of their brethren. Second, soft power will not work unless the enemy is first defeated to the extent that there is no doubt in his mind, or that of the local populace that supports him, that they have been well, truly, and conclusively whipped. William T. Sherman had the sequence exactly right when he said in 1864 that he would defeat his armed foe and “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” and only then, after such a persuasive defeat, would he become “the advocate of mercy and restoration to home, and peace, and happiness of all who have lost them to my acts.”44 In later years the U.S. experience in Vietnam and its current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have served to revalidate a conclusion made by a U.S. soldier fighting to suppress the Philippine Muslim insurrection more than a hundred years ago. “This business of fighting and civilizing and educating at the same time doesn’t mix very well,” the soldier noted.45

  The Iraq war also has proven that the usefulness of advice and guidance from expatriates, exiles, and ethnic experts has not transferred well from the era of the Cold War. At a time when al-Qaeda and its allies are defeating the U.S. armed forces in the Iraqi insurgency—and other Islamist groups are making significant headway in places like Thailand, Bangladesh, Somalia, and the North Caucasus—the message from these advisers is invariably upbeat. Take Fareed Zakaria, for example. In 2002, Mr. Zakaria expected a “massive benefit” from the Iraq invasion because “[d]one right, an invasion would be the single best path to reform in the Arab world.”46 Two years later, when the tide was turning against the U.S.-led coalition, Mr. Zakaria was still confident. “[T]he bad guys are losing,” he wrote. “Unable to launch major terrorist attacks in the West, unable to attract political support in the Middle East, militant Islam is searching for enemies and causes…By now surely it is clear that al-Qaeda can produce videotapes but not terrorism.”47 And then there is the analysis of the Sarah Lawrence College professor Fawaz Gerges: “We are in the throes of the beginning of a new wave [in the Muslim world],” Gerges has claimed, while also dismissing al-Qaeda as a deadly nuisance, “—the freedom generation—in which civil society is asserting itself. Its vanguard is the generation under 30 years old, which represents more than 60 percent of the Muslim population.”48 Oddly, a good deal of scholarship suggests that the educated, under-thirty generation increasingly belongs to bin Laden and the Islamists.49 And again Zakaria, this time telling Americans not to worry but be happy because U.S. foreign policy and its actions in Iraq have not motivated Muslims to wage war against America; rather Muslims are just so dumb and gullible that “militant, political Islam has brainwashed young Muslims around the world who believe it is their duty to fight against the modern world.”50 Mansoor Ijaz takes Zakaria’s point about masses of retarded Muslim automatons and lays it
on even thicker, thereby introducing a few shadowy Muslim wizards of Oz hiding behind Bedouin robes. “[A]l-Qaeda and its affiliate terrorist networks have evolved their global operating system,” Ijaz prates, “into an airborne virus capable of infecting concentrated cells of disaffected followers to carry out by proxy the orders of their hidden masters.”51 Taken together, the mostly inaccurate advice and guidance of these individuals and others of their ilk will ensure that America never gets back to Kansas.52

  Taking the Right Lessons from Defeat

  When the U.S. defeat in Iraq becomes clear and unquestionable, it will be very important, as it is in Afghanistan, that Americans do not permit the Republicans and Democrats, and the punditry aligned with each, to effectively sell the idea that all would have been well in Iraq if Washington had had an extravagantly expensive and ready-to-roll reconstruction plan to implement after Saddam’s regime was destroyed. As defeat becomes obvious, some in high places will step up this already loud assertion. They will say, if only we had stopped the looting; if only we had a plan for restoring and expanding electricity production, if only we had not disbanded the army; if only we had quickly modernized the energy infrastructure; and on and on, and louder and louder it will get. Most of this blather will emanate from the Democratic Party, which will argue that the use of military force against the Islamists has been unsuccessful and then urge the spending of untold billions of U.S. dollars on a “New Deal” for the Middle East. This, they will contend, will deradicalize Muslims and make them peaceful, moderate, prosperous democrats; in short, al-Qaeda and its allies will be made into a slightly more aggressive version of the Rotary Club. Armed with the irrelevant Marshall Plan analogy, officials from Mr. Clinton’s administration are already beating the drum for vast increases in U.S. aid to the Muslim world. “If we are to be serious about promoting fundamental reform in pivotal [Islamic countries],” Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have written,

  We need to do more than hector them and sprinkle money on small-scale initiatives. We must engage the societies deeply and dramatically. We have done this before. Decisive American action along these lines helped preserve democracy in Western Europe during the years after World War II, thereby laying the groundwork for the NATO alliance and eventually victory in the Cold War. Our tools then were the economic assistance of the Marshall Plan and, of course, military resolve in the face of a massive Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. The differences between Europe in 1945 and the Middle East today are huge, as are the differences between America then and now. Nevertheless, we did engage in a profound degree in other societies whose political development was crucial to our national security, and we were successful. Democracy in Western Europe flowered as voters rejected the future offered by the Soviet Union.53

  Beyond the always pervasive Democratic itch to spend the taxes of Americans on things and people that do not benefit them, this passage brings to mind Machiavelli’s warning that history should be used creatively, not in a cookie-cutter fashion; history provides lessons to be learned and adapted, not opportunities for past experiences to be exactly duplicated. The Marshall Plan analogy is often used as a staple bipartisan justification for U.S. involvement in Iraq and across the Middle East. It provides a road map to disaster. Europe in 1945 was economically devastated and convinced that fascism was untenable; the enemy states and their militaries were annihilated; and the continent as a whole was, after witnessing the Red Army rape eastern Germany, afraid to death of the USSR. Perhaps more important, the United States shared a common heritage with Europe; both sides of the Atlantic were grounded in the Classical experience, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the several Enlightenments, and the Industrial Revolution. Utter defeat, fear of Moscow, and broad underlying cultural and religious commonalities made the Marshall Plan work as much as did dollars. In the Pacific, the annihilation of Imperial Japan’s armed forces and the Japanese will-to-war were complemented by a culture willing to submit to its U.S. conqueror, as well as by President Truman’s wisdom in sending the self-imagined divinity General Douglas MacArthur to deal with Emperor Hirohito. Here truly was an instance when the god America sent was bigger than the god sitting on Japan’s throne.

  None of the conditions that allowed the Marshall Plan and its Pacific counterpart to succeed are present in the Muslim world. That world is not defeated; it is America that is being beaten by that world’s youth in two locations. In cultural terms, we share almost nothing with the Islamic world. There are no historical commonalities on which to build; indeed, the historical experiences that the West shares with the Islamic world are crusades, colonialism, imperialism, and military intervention—not exactly the stuff from which happy-ever-aftering is made. In the area of religion, we could not be more dissimilar. Our faith is a barely tolerated, once-a-week duty; an as-needed and often cynical fillip to political rhetoric; and nothing worth fighting for. Their faith infuses all of life and is lived daily, treasured and taught as a proud history, and dutifully and even joyfully defended to the death. With this lack of positive cultural, historical, and religious commonalities, a Marshall Plan for the Muslim world would be as successful as pouring water on sand and hoping for a bumper crop of wheat. Indeed, it would be just as successful as has been the many billions of dollars in aid that the West has poured into the Muslim world since 1945.

  Americans also must reject any claim by their leaders that does not acknowledge the most important reason for U.S. defeat in Iraq—Washington’s attempt to build a secular democratic polity there. We failed to replace Saddam’s regime with a functioning, durable government precisely because we tried to export our political model to Iraq. Our subsequent bipartisan effort to blame the Iraqis for their failure to build the secular democracy we wanted reveals a staggering level of ignorance and dishonesty. The Iraqis had no appreciable experience with a democratic system, are deeply torn by sectarian differences, and are divided among three major ethnic groups, none of which had more than a modicum of interest in sharing power with the others, each fearing it would become the target of Saddam-like abuse if one group finagled a way to come out on top. Moreover, the great majority of Iraqis saw secular democracy as anathema to their Islamic faith. To a people whose religion rejects as apostasy the concept of deliberately separating church and state, American advice suggesting that Iraqis govern themselves on the basis of such a separation is tantamount to telling the advisees to turn their backs on God. This reality was easily knowable before we invaded Iraq; it is one of the first lessons drawn from even a cursory reading of Islamic theology and history. “If the Iraqi government,” write the Iraq Study Group’s geriatric Cold Warriors to fix blame on Iraqis for the catastrophe wrought by the elite to which the group belongs, “does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government.” 54 In other words: “You ungrateful little brown brothers better shape up or the Yanks are going to ship out.”

  The most important lesson for Americans to draw from defeat, however, is that our failure to install democracy in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan, shows beyond question that our current governing elite is either ignorant of U.S. history (what Paine called “a too great inattention to the past”) or holds that history and the people who have made it in contempt. The bedrock ethos, political philosophy, and religious principles on which the American republic and its democracy are based go back many centuries, with contributions dating as far back as Aristotle and the republics of Rome and Sparta. A plausible starting point for the political evolution that would lead to the American polity lies eight centuries back at the time of the drafting and signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, which circumscribed the arbitrary powers of England’s King John. Then Americans, as Americans, had 150 years of self-governing experience and reliable political stability in North America before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Since the Decl
aration, Americans have battled through bitter politics and elections; westward expansion; economic depressions; slavery and civil war; industrial strife; segregation, Jim Crow, and lynch mobs; two world wars; and the Cold War in an ongoing communal effort to bring our society as close as possible to the always unachievable targets of perfect equity and equal opportunity for all citizens and peace at home and with foreign nations. The length, the difficulty, and the many miles still to go in this process are starkly apparent in recalling that the Voting Rights Act is only a bit more than forty years old, and we remain engaged in wars, large and small, all around the world.

  U.S. political leaders with any knowledge of, pride in, or respect for the political and social hardships and achievements of the American people could not possibly have expected to build anything even faintly resembling it in Iraq. The building blocks of the American republic—Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Calvinist Christianity, Jefferson’s Declaration, Madison’s Constitution, Hamilton’s Federalist, the New Deal, the Voting Rights Act, etc.—are simply absent from the Iraqi experience and that of Muslims generally. The Iraqis and their Islamic brethren have their own set of founding documents—the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah—but U.S. leaders want no truck with the sort of society and country that would be built on them. The American governing elite’s effort to blame the Iraqis for failing to achieve in four years what America has not fully achieved in eight hundred years is the act of ill-informed, cynical, and utterly despicable villains. This is surely a vital lesson about their bipartisan leaders that Americans must keep foremost in their minds when deciding if they believe any current U.S. leader of note has any genuine desire to protect their families and their country’s interests.