Worldmaking
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Instead, the Iraq that emerged in the first few post-Saddam years was dystopian. Ordinary Iraqis died in the tens of thousands as the cycle of sectarian bloodletting intensified through 2004 and 2005. Recent estimates suggest that at least 133,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since March 2003, and that number continues to rise. In 2010, Dr. Haider Maliki, based at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, estimated that 28 percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Iraq remains one of the most unstable and dangerous nations on earth.
On the American side, some 6,800 troops have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. When Bush declared victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003, the death toll stood at 128. More than 6,780 American military contractors have also been killed in Iraq. Some 970,000 veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars have returned home and registered post-combat disability claims. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq had a profound psychological effect on the soldiers who battled them, and the spouses, children, and parents who lived with them. The human toll is a solemn one.207
There were grim strategic consequences too. Iran was perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the Bush administration’s freedom agenda. To the west, Tehran’s principal adversary was crushed and a Shia majority assumed political dominance. To the east, the hostile and unpredictable Taliban were removed from power. Iran was as safe in 2003 as it had been since the revolution. Indeed, if any national leader should have contributed financially to the Bush administration’s war on terror it was surely Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “Great Satan” provided Ahmadinejad—a risible, Holocaust-denying blowhard—with a genuine free ride. And this was a nation actually developing weapons of mass destruction. Iran’s emboldening certainly imperiled Israel, which was probably not what President Bush and the Pentagon had intended.
So what of the original casus belli? Not a lot, regretfully. Following months of scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, an official government report concluded that Iraq “essentially destroyed” its stockpiles of WMDs after the 1991 Gulf War and that its final facility, devoted to developing biological weapons, was decommissioned in 1996.208 With both WMDs and the al-Qaeda connection laid bare as fallacious, the principals instead reemphasized the democratization advantage. George Bush is confident that history will judge the Second Iraq War more generously than it has been judged in the present.
There were clear advantages to invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003. In the most obvious and immediate sense, the United States and its allies had removed an unpleasant, dangerous, and erratic despot from power. As Bush describes it in his memoir:
As a result of our actions in Iraq, one of America’s most committed and dangerous enemies stopped threatening us forever. The most volatile region in the world lost one of its greatest sources of violence and mayhem. Hostile nations around the world saw the cost of supporting terror and pursuing WMD. And in the space of nine months, twenty-five million Iraqis went from living under a dictatorship of fear to seeing the prospect of a peaceful, functioning democracy.209
The demonstration effect was indeed immediate. In December 2003, Muammar Gaddafi consented to give up his WMDs and abandon his decades-long quest to acquire a nuclear capability. This was a clear win. Gaddafi’s decision stemmed directly from America’s preemptive attack on Iraq. But other “rogue” states drew different lessons. The two remaining “axes of evil,” Iran and North Korea, reasoned logically that it was the absence of a nuclear deterrent that made Iraq vulnerable and pushed harder to develop their own.
The democratization of Iraq can certainly be counted as a victory—at first glance, at least. The civil war that raged intensely from 2003 to 2006 cooled from 2007. In January of that year, Bush announced a new military strategy in Iraq, the “surge,” which involved the dispatch of twenty thousand additional U.S. combat troops and the embrace of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy led by General David Petraeus. When combined with the so-called Sunni Awakening—whereby armed Sunni groups rose up and turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq—the surge served to reduce the harrowing levels of violence in Iraq. Endemic bloodletting and low levels of Sunni participation had marred the first national election of 2005. By 2010, the situation had improved in the sense that more Sunnis were willing to cast votes—although violence and electoral fraud had not abated.
The situation has deteriorated markedly since then. Up until August 2014, Iraq was led by a two-term prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, with clear authoritarian tendencies. Al-Maliki reneged on earlier promises to build a unity government with Sunni political groups, undermined the freedom of the press, and built a government blighted by pervasive corruption. Freedom House, an American NGO founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt, offered a damning assessment in 2013: “Iraq is not an electoral democracy. Although it has conducted meaningful elections, political participation and decision-making in the country remain seriously impaired by sectarian and insurgent violence, widespread corruption, and the influence of foreign powers.”210 Throughout the summer of 2014, the extreme Islamist successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—or ISIS—launched brutal assaults against Shia Muslims and other minorities. As of today, Iraq remains mired in violence. The Iraq War “positives” seem not so much when they are subjected to scrutiny.
In an interview with London’s Sunday Times on March 18, 2013, Wolfowitz expressed regret at the way the war was conceived and executed. There “should have been Iraqi leadership from the beginning,” Wolfowitz lamented, instead of a fourteen-month American occupation based on “this idea that we’re going to come in like MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them.” The decision to disband the Iraqi Army and pursue a rigorous policy of de-Baathification was clearly ill-conceived, Wolfowitz continued, and the Pollyannaish Ahmed Chalabi was not “completely straight with us.” But Wolfowitz also provided a staunch defense of many decisions that stoked fierce criticism then and now. On General Shinseki’s warning that America embarked on war with insufficient troops, Wolfowitz retorted that “this was not the kind of war you win by overwhelming force.” On the misleading use of “evidence” to justify the conflict, Wolfowitz observed, “The falsehood that the president lied, which by the way is itself a lie, is so much worse than saying we were wrong. A mistake is one thing, a lie is something else.” Ultimately, Wolfowitz protested hopefully that it was too soon to judge the invasion of Iraq as a failure: “We still don’t know how all this is all going to end.”211
In an open letter published in Harper’s magazine a few days previously, the historian Andrew Bacevich invited Wolfowitz—a former colleague from the American Enterprise Institute—to give more serious thought to what had transpired in Iraq:
Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war’s advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point, How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?
… To be sure, whatever you might choose to say, you’ll be vilified, as Robert McNamara was vilified when he broke his long silence and admitted that he’d been “wrong, terribly wrong” about Vietnam. But help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that we might extract from it something of value in return for all the sacrifices made there. Forgive me for saying so, but you owe it to your country. Give it a shot.212
One must hope that Wolfowitz rises to Bacevich’s challenge, and not twenty-five years after the fact à la McNamara. For the Second Iraq War may eclipse Vietnam in terms of its shuddering impact on U.S. foreign policy. But the prospects for a Wolfowitzian self-reckoning do not appear to be promising. In an interview in June 2014, Wolfowitz observed that America had in fact “won” the Second Iraq War by 2009 but that this hard-earned victory had been squandered by the Obama administration in its headlong rush to withdraw.213
9
BARACK OBAMA AND THE PRAGMATIC RENEWAL
With all respect to James and Dewey, it takes more tha
n a common sense instinct … to deal with the age of guided missiles [and] the age of revolution in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
—WALT ROSTOW
In the fall of 2002, John Mearsheimer, a well-known professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, pulled out of an antiwar rally scheduled to take place in Chicago’s Federal Plaza. To replace him, the organizers invited a young state senator named Barack Obama, who was scholarly, a fluent speaker, Chicago based, and available. Though the event was billed as an “antiwar rally,” suggesting a dovish unity of purpose, the ambitious Obama sensed an opportunity to present his foreign-policy views to a national audience. It was a potential breakthrough moment in his fledgling political career, though it was also fraught with danger. High-profile Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry had supported the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, including the president’s move toward war against Iraq. Opposing the mainstream of his party and a popular incumbent wartime president was not the safest course for a politician with national aspirations to take.
Obama spoke after the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the nation’s best-known African American political figure and a stalwart of the left of the Democratic Party. Here was a chance to lambast Bush’s rush to war and present an alternative paradigm of what a black Democratic politician might sound like. Reverend Jackson’s rhetorical prowess certainly made him a hard act to follow. “This is a rally to stop a war from occurring,” Jackson declared. He invited his audience to look into the sky and count to ten. When the time elapsed, and the crowd lowered their gaze, Jackson explained: “I just diverted your attention away from the rally. That’s what George Bush is doing. The sky is not falling and we’re not threatened by Saddam Hussein.”1
Yet while Jackson’s antiwar views were theatrically rendered, they were also predictable. On the eve of a major welcome-home parade in 1991, Jackson had characterized the first Gulf War as a costly failure waged by “public school children and foreign technology,” the latter a quaintly protectionist reference to the Japanese computer components used in American munitions. “It’s right to love the troops,” Jackson said. “But the moral way is to love the troops when they are no longer troops.”2 In the tradition of Charles Beard, Jackson viewed war as a distraction from the essential job of correcting the grievous societal problems that scarred the United States. Americans came first, Jackson reasoned.
Barack Obama viewed America and the world differently, as his first sentence made clear: “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.” Indeed, Obama devoted the next eight sentences of his speech to explaining precisely why some wars were necessary. “The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history,” Obama said, “and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could … drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.” His grandfather (a white Kansan) “signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army … He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil … After September 11…,” Obama continued, “I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”
What made the proposed war with Iraq so ill conceived, in Obama’s view, was its passionate “ideological” nature and its disregard of the apparent facts of the matter: “that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors … and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.” For Obama, launching a war against Saddam Hussein was “a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics … What I am opposed to,” he said, “is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”3 It was a good line, but the applause that met Obama’s speech was less effusive than the acclaim that met Jackson’s more “passionate” address.
It is interesting to compare the attributes Obama extolled—reason and principle—to those he impugned: passion, ideology, and politics. It was a speech that reveled in cold, hard thinking informed by reason and evidence, that decried the consequences of following theories and ideologies unshackled from historical precedent. He name-checked Paul Wolfowitz for a reason. Obama abhorred the grandiose utopianism that he and his allies embodied, preferring policies that test and probe, reaping incremental progress, rather than those that seek to unveil or validate universal truths. The world is uncertain and constantly evolving. Framing policies informed by modesty and provisionality is the best way to avoid needless conflict driven by skewed threat perception and grand, unattainable ambitions.
This intellectual method has a name: pragmatism—a word often misinterpreted to solely mean excessive compromise in pursuit of any given goal. In his classic book Pragmatism, William James observed that “at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method … The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”4 The Harvard-based intellectual historian James Kloppenberg argues persuasively that Obama’s worldview and diplomatic method are informed by Jamesian pragmatism, writing admiringly that it is “a philosophy for skeptics, a philosophy for those committed to democratic debate and the critical assessment of the results of political decisions, not for true believers convinced they know the right course of action in advance of inquiry and experimentation. Pragmatism stands for openmindedness and ongoing debate.”5 The aftermath of the Second Iraq War rendered otiose grand Wilsonian thinking about America’s ability to bend nations, regions, and indeed history to its will. The rise to power of Barack Obama, and America’s diminished geopolitical circumstances, vitalized America’s principal contribution to world philosophy as a guide to foreign policy.
* * *
Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 5, 1961, in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was Kenyan, and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was from Kansas. But they shared many traits, including a restless yearning for varied intellectual and geographical experience. The couple had met in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii in 1960 and had married just a few months before their son’s birth. This exotic mixed parentage would have caused a stir had Barack been born in, say, Wichita. But as the biographer David Maraniss notes, during the week of Obama’s birth in Honolulu’s Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, the other newborns were named Arakawa, Caberto, Kamealoha, Chun, Wong, Camara, Walker, Kawazoe, and Simpson.6 To be mixed race, or Hapa, in Hawaii was unexceptional—a scenario that remained constant through Obama’s peripatetic childhood. His parents divorced in 1964, following Barack Sr.’s departure for graduate school at Harvard, and Ann met and married an Indonesian graduate student named Lolo Soetoro in 1965. The family relocated to Indonesia in 1967, and from the age of six to ten Barack lived in Jakarta—joined by a half sister, Maya Soetoro—and attended Indonesian-language schools. The world’s most populous nation was similar to Hawaii in its ethnic heterogeneity. It was only when Barack finished his schooling in Indonesia and Hawaii and attended college in California and later New York City that he truly began experiencing racial discrimination, his hand forced by the dismal realities of the mainland.
To provide her son with educational stability while she pursued a travel-heavy career as a research anthropologist, Ann enrolled Obama at the elite Punahou School in Hawaii, one of the best-performing schools in the United States. Barack—or Barry, as he was then known—was academically accomplished,
although he also devoted a fair amount of time to playing basketball and smoking marijuana. After graduating from Punahou in 1979, Obama moved to Pasadena, California, and enrolled at Occidental College (or “Oxy”), a highly regarded liberal arts college, where he worked harder and played less basketball, having failed to make the team. Obama’s college friend Phil Boerner recalled the range of topics that he and Barry discussed:
… the CIA, El Salvador … whatever news was in the L.A. Times, Jimi Hendrix, Euro-communism, socialism … Marcuse’s “An Essay on Liberation,” Voltaire’s Candide, how to bring change in the world, the right wing’s control of the media, totalitarianism, Alexander Haig, poetry, James Joyce, Kafka, the Enlightenment, enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century … Frederick II, Richard C. Allen, the Soviet Union, gigantic traffic jams in L.A., arts of the avant-garde … the rise of apathy in America.7
If Boerner’s recollections are accurate, then Obama’s conversational tastes showed admirable range and heft.
After two years at a gilded college in the privileged environs of southern California—not dissimilar to Punahou in a cultural and climatic sense—Obama decided to transfer to Columbia University. His move to New York City was motivated by many factors, one of which was simply to find “a bigger pond to swim in.”8 But there was more to it than that. Oxy was small and parochial, inhabiting something of a bubble in a part of Los Angeles that was already detached from the everyday. And its total student body of sixteen hundred included only seventy-five African Americans, “and you could count the black faculty members on two fingers,” a classmate recalled. “I was concerned with urban issues,” Obama said, “and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities.”9 He moved from Pasadena to Morningside Heights with his friend Phil Boerner and shared an apartment at 142 West 109th Street. Obama walked the city as often as he could, drinking in New York’s myriad cultural attractions: a Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he “was lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song,” a conference on political ideology at Cooper Union, African cultural fairs in Brooklyn, a speech delivered by Jesse Jackson in Harlem. Obama went off the radar during his time at Columbia—few professors remembered him well—flying low to the ground of the world’s greatest city.