Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  Iraq

  A group of imams turned up to see me, introducing themselves as Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, and both Sunni and Shia. . . . I asked them how I could help. “You know our needs,” one retorted. “America would not have invaded without knowing everything about us and what we need.”

  —EMMA SKY, The Unraveling

  You don’t kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

  —GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS

  In 2003, U.S. leaders and policy makers thought they had the right foreign policy models for the invasion of Iraq: post–Second World War Germany and Japan. In both countries, we overthrew an authoritarian regime, liberated the populace, democratized, and introduced a liberal constitution—all with extraordinary success, leading to peace and prosperity. As President Bush put it, “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.”

  As a result, the United States invaded Iraq with enormous optimism. “We will help the Iraqi people establish a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East,” President Bush said, later adding, “The rise of freedom in this vital region will eliminate the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder and make our nation safer.” Similarly, Vice President Cheney predicted that after the United States liberated Iraq, “the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy,” and “the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.” In the months before the war, CIA analysts were so confident that Iraqis would warmly welcome U.S. soldiers that one operative suggested “sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators.”

  Of course, none of this happened. On the contrary, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, we soon found ourselves in an unwinnable war, hated by the people we were supposedly trying to help. Instead of establishing a shining model of free market democracy in the Middle East, we produced ISIS.

  The problem was that postwar Japan and Germany were the wrong “comparables.” From a tribal politics point of view, they could not have been more different from Iraq. Both countries were strikingly ethnically homogeneous—Japan because it had always been that way, and Germany because by 1945 it had exterminated most of its non-Aryans. In other words, postwar democratization in both those countries took place in the relative absence of ethnic or religious division.

  Unfortunately, a much better comparison was staring us right in the face: 1990s Yugoslavia. Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a multiethnic nation (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, and so on) with a long history of ethnic enmity. To give just one example, Croats, with Nazi support, slaughtered thousands of Serbs in concentration camps in World War II. Yugoslavia had deep religious divides (Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslims). It had a market-dominant minority (the Croats, who, along with the Slovenes, were far wealthier than the more populous, less economically developed Serbs). It had a relatively weak national identity (like Iraq, the state of Yugoslavia was created after the First World War). And all this had been held together by the iron hand of a charismatic military dictator (Josip Broz Tito) with considerable success. Under Tito’s decades-long rule, although ethnic tensions simmered just below the surface, Yugoslavia’s different groups had lived together relatively peaceably, with Serbs and Croats often intermarrying.

  But when democratization came to Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the result was not peace and prosperity. It was ethnic demagoguery, ethnic warfare, and ethnic cleansing—a kind of violence not seen in Europe since the Holocaust. Concentration camps appeared. Serbs killed Croats, Croats killed Serbs, Serbs slaughtered Bosnian Muslims. Serbs who had lived as neighbors with Croats for years were suddenly roaring with approval as their leaders shouted, “We will kill Croats with rusty spoons because it will hurt more!”

  Yugoslavia, not Japan or Germany, would have been a far more instructive comparison for Iraq. In 2003, Iraq too was a multiethnic nation, with cross-cutting ethnoreligious divisions among Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and Christians. (Although most Kurds in Iraq are also Sunni, I will use the term “Sunnis” to refer to Sunni Arabs.) Iraq too was a country with a relatively weak national identity, ruled for decades with an iron fist by a military dictator. And, like Yugoslavia, Iraq had its own equivalent of a market-dominant minority.

  SUNNI MINORITY DOMINANCE IN IRAQ

  On the eve of the U.S. invasion, Iraq’s roughly 15 percent Sunni minority dominated the country economically, politically, and militarily. By contrast, Shias comprised the vast majority of the country’s rural poor as well as most of the urban poor living in slums on the outskirts of Baghdad and other major cities.

  Sunnis had dominated Iraq for centuries, first under (Sunni) Ottoman rule, then under the British, who, in signature divide-and-rule fashion, favored and governed indirectly through Sunni elites, while marginalizing Shias and Kurds. In 1968, the Baath Party took control of Iraq and, despite its nominal emphasis on secularism and Arab unity, quickly became an organ for Sunni hegemony.

  But Saddam Hussein, the almost cultlike leader of the Baathists, took Sunni favoritism—and subjugation of the Shia majority—to a whole new level. After becoming president in 1979, Saddam filled the ranks of Iraq’s military, civil service, and intelligence with Sunnis. Under his regime, Sunnis—especially from his own hometown and clan—occupied the most powerful government posts and controlled the country’s vast oil wealth, with Baathists holding the key positions in the nationalized oil company.

  At the same time, Saddam ruthlessly crushed and persecuted the country’s Shias and Kurds. Threatened by the rising influence of Shia clerics and the large Shia population, Saddam banned Shia religious holidays and arrested and executed prominent Shia clergy. Entire Shia villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands of Shias and Kurds were expelled or killed. After the Kurds and Shias rose up in 1991, Saddam retaliated mercilessly, using chemical weapons and executing untold numbers—including women and children—whose corpses were thrown into mass graves.

  These were the conditions when U.S. troops invaded in 2003, overthrowing Saddam in a matter of weeks. The Sunnis were a privileged ruling minority, and the Shias a long-oppressed 60 percent majority with deep feelings of resentment and a desire for revenge. The dangers of rapid democratization—especially given the recent events in Yugoslavia—should have been obvious. The Shias had a collective ax to grind, and the Sunni minority had every reason to resist and fear majority rule. Yet most of America’s foreign policy makers, politicians, and thought leaders seemed to think that the Sunni-Shia divide was no big deal, repeatedly minimizing its significance.

  “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias,” Senator John McCain stated in 2003, “so I think they can probably get along.” “Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together,” said conservative commentator William Kristol. Testifying before the House Budget Committee, then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz noted that, compared to the Balkans, “[t]here has been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another. . . . These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.”

  Worse, American policy makers believed that democratization was the solution to Sunni-Shia tensions. Harvard professor Noah Feldman, one of the principal authors of the new Iraqi Constitution, expressed confidence that the democratic process would unite Sunnis and Shias: “[O]ne can predict with some confidence that ordinary politics will eventually take effect, and the Shi’a will divide into multiple political parties that will, in the end, have to look for Sunni partners to create parliamentary majorities.” Sadly, democratization had the opposite effect.

  BRINGING DEMOCRACY TO IRAQ

 
Practically from the moment U.S. troops arrived, Sunni insurgents began waging war against the American invaders who they believed (correctly) would bring the majority Shias to power. The on-the-ground American ignorance of local group conditions is hard to overstate. Only one senior official in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) spoke any Arabic. The main selection criteria for staffing the CPA were conservative credentials and loyalty to the Bush administration; applicants were asked whether they had voted for Bush and “if they supported Roe v. Wade.” The CPA’s ignorance about Iraq, especially the Sunni-Shia dynamic, resulted in a series of catastrophic decisions.

  For example, Sunni fears and opposition were exacerbated by the disastrous “de-Baathification” order issued by the CPA in May 2003, which stipulated that anyone “in the top four ranks of the Baath party should be dismissed from their jobs and never allowed to hold public office again.” As General Stanley McChrystal put it a decade later, de-Baathification “reinforced Sunnis’ fears that the fall of Saddam would leave them disenfranchised in the face of Shia dominance.” De-Baathification also stripped the country—already in economic ruin from the war—of desperately needed skills. Hospitals found themselves without doctors, and government ministries lost expertise overnight.

  But perhaps the worst U.S. decision was disbanding the entire Iraqi army. Overnight, we produced a pool of some 250,000 to 350,000 unemployed, frustrated Sunni men who owned weapons and had no marketable skills other than their military training, leaving them with no means of earning a livelihood. Many of these men joined Sunni insurgency groups, including al-Qaeda and ISIS, and took up arms against the United States. In 2015, one expert estimated that over 60 percent of ISIS’s most prominent leaders were former Baathists. A former Iraqi army intelligence officer, who lost his job when the army was disbanded, commented that “[t]he people in charge of military operations in [ISIS] were the best officers in the former Iraqi army.”

  Back in 2003, the U.S. solution for this massively unstable state of affairs was—immediate democratization. With practically no guidance or knowledge of local conditions, coalition military commanders were ordered to schedule provincial elections and to print ballots. Danger signs appeared immediately. In Najaf, for example, in June 2003, the coalition set up elections, but then, embarrassingly, had to cancel them when it became clear that “[t]he most organized political groups in many areas are rejectionists, extremists and remnants of the Baathists. . . . They have an advantage over the other groups.”

  Nevertheless, the United States pressed on with democratization, and in December 2005, three days before the country’s first national elections, President Bush hailed the upcoming vote as “a remarkable transformation for a country that has virtually no experience with democracy and which is struggling to overcome the legacy of one of the worst tyrannies the world has known.” He spoke with pride of the “hundreds of parties and coalitions” that registered for the election and the candidates “holding rallies and laying out their agendas” across the country.

  Unfortunately, the political parties that emerged tracked and galvanized Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian divisions. Shias voted for Shias, Kurds for Kurds, and Sunnis for Sunnis. As General David Petraeus later put it, “The elections hardened sectarian positions as Iraqis voted largely based on ethnic and sectarian group identity.”

  In other words, the 2005 elections did nothing to unite the people or ameliorate sectarian violence. On the contrary, violence quickly escalated. In Baghdad, roaming Shia death squads began terrorizing and murdering Sunnis. At the same time, militant Sunnis commenced their own campaign of terror. One of their leaders, Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, declared “all-out war” on Shias, on democracy, on the coalition, and on America. The 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine, one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites, set off vicious sectarian warfare, as furious Shias retaliated by bombing more than twenty Sunni mosques over the next few days. More than a thousand people died, pushing Iraq to the brink of a Sunni-Shia civil war.

  —

  What was the United States doing, militarily, in response to this violence? By 2006, the American populace was sick of the war, and the U.S. military was largely in “exit-strategy” mode. The orders from Washington were to minimize U.S. casualties, so most American troops had retreated into sealed-off forward operating bases (FOBs). In other words, as Iraq descended into chaos, U.S. troops were holed up, essentially trying to avoid contact with Iraqis. When a confused soldier in an FOB near Tikrit asked his captain what they were supposed to be doing, his superior replied, “We’re here to guard the ice-cream trucks going north so that someone else can guard them there.”

  Could we have done better if we hadn’t been so blind to tribal politics in Iraq—if we had paid more attention to, and worked with, the most important group ties and loyalties on the ground? There’s very good evidence that the answer is yes.

  THE 2007 SURGE

  In a sea of foreign policy failures, the United States enjoyed a brief moment of success in Iraq when President Bush ordered an influx of twenty thousand additional troops in 2007, dramatically reducing sectarian violence and both civilian and U.S. casualties. Most Americans, however, have a very poor understanding of the surge, in part because it’s been dragged through the mud of partisan spin and finger-pointing. But the surge is worth examining in detail, because it offers a concrete example of what a more effective, tribal-politics-conscious U.S. foreign policy might look like.

  While the additional U.S. soldiers—sent primarily to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province—were of course a critical factor, the surge succeeded only because it was accompanied by a 180-degree shift in our approach to the local population. For the first time in Iraq, the U.S. military pursued explicitly group-focused, ethnically conscious policies on the ground. The surge was won tribe by tribe, leader by leader, neighborhood by neighborhood.

  The story begins almost two years earlier and involves a then-little-known colonel by the name of H. R. McMaster, who would later become national security adviser in the Trump administration.

  In the spring of 2005, McMaster and thousands of troops arrived in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, at the time largely controlled by Sunni insurgents and awash in beheadings and bloodshed. After two demoralizing years in Iraq, McMaster had become acutely aware of the failings of U.S. policy: “When we came to Iraq, we didn’t understand the complexity—what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship, with ethnic and sectarian divisions . . . [W]e made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.” Known for being a contrarian, McMaster decided to take a totally different approach—one that tried to understand and work with Iraq’s complex group divisions and identities.

  To begin with, McMaster required his troops to take detailed crash courses in local group customs, practices, and attitudes. As George Packer writes:

  [T]he regiment bought dozens of Arab dishdashas, which the Americans call “man dresses,” and acted out a variety of realistic scenarios, with soldiers and Arab-Americans playing the role of Iraqis. . . . Pictures of Shiite saints and politicians were hung on the walls of a house, and soldiers were asked to draw conclusions about the occupants. Soldiers searching the house were given the information they wanted only after they had sat down with the occupants three or four times, accepted tea, and asked the right questions.

  McMaster prohibited his soldiers from using derogatory terms, like “hajjis,” for Arabs and told them, “Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy.” He also had some troops take Arabic language classes, and ordered hundreds of copies of The Modern History of Iraq by Phebe Marr. Moreover, instead of cordoning them off, McMaster sent his troops to interact with the local population, to cultivate trust and to figure out Tal Afar’s complex group dynamics and power structures. One of McMaster’s squadron commanders spent forty to fifty hours a week meeting one-on-one
with the leaders of the city’s dozens of tribes: “first the Shiite sheikhs, to convince them that the Americans could be counted on to secure their neighborhoods; and then the Sunni sheikhs, many of whom were passive or active supporters of the insurgency.”

  McMaster began building alliances with crucial tribal leaders. He recognized that the only way to defeat the insurgency was to get Sunnis and Shias to work together against the extremists, whose brutality and indiscriminate killing had left a terrorized Tal Afar strewn with headless corpses. His task was enormously difficult: the insurgents were Sunni, and the local Sunni tribes hated and feared the Shias, who controlled the local police. But against all odds, through painstaking on-the-ground persuasion, often one tribal leader at a time, McMaster succeeded. By driving a wedge between moderate and extremist Sunnis, and by persuading Sunni and Shia tribal sheikhs to cooperate, McMaster and his men cleared Tal Afar of insurgents block by block. Within just six months of McMaster’s arrival, Tar Afar had stabilized, and sectarian violence had fallen precipitously.

  Tal Afar was the U.S. military’s first successful large-scale counterinsurgency initiative in Iraq—a lonely bright spot in a year of sustained losses. Drawing on McMaster’s success, U.S. forces pursued similar tactics in Ramadi, capital of the Al Anbar Province in central Iraq.

  By 2006, many Anbari Sunnis who originally supported the insurgents had become disgusted with al-Qaeda’s savagery and utter disregard for human life. “[A]nyone who was caught smoking had his or her fingers chopped off,” writes retired colonel (and now professor) Peter Mansoor. “The corpses of assassinated Iraqis were booby-trapped so that family members coming to collect them for burial would be killed and injured in the process.” Moreover, many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders were foreigners, who executed even widely respected Sunni tribal leaders if they refused to cooperate. In what is now known as the “Sunni Awakening,” many Anbari Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda.