Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  Colonel Sean MacFarland, a brigade commander in charge of Ramadi, seized this opening. By cultivating and working closely with Sunni tribal sheikhs, MacFarland brought one Sunni tribe after another into the U.S. fold. He drew on the talents of men like Captain Travis Patriquin, who spoke Arabic and was highly knowledgeable about Iraqi tribal culture and who, “[o]ver countless cups of tea and hundreds of cigarettes . . . worked magic with the tribal leaders.” (Patriquin was killed by a roadside bomb in December 2006.)

  Crucially, MacFarland and his troops persuaded Sunni chieftains to recruit their fellow tribespeople to serve on new local police forces trained and armed by the U.S. military. It made all the difference to have local police who actually knew the neighborhoods and who could identify the insurgents and criminals. The new police protected local citizens from retaliation by al-Qaeda and provided the U.S. military with “cultural savvy and local knowledge that opened the door to enormous amounts of intelligence on al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups.” Suddenly, the U.S. military and its partners were able to capture hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects along with large caches of al-Qaeda weaponry.

  Instead of viewing Iraq’s tribes as anachronisms, as the CPA initially did, or dismissing their importance, as Wolfowitz had in 2003, the new leaders of the U.S. effort, such as Brigadier General John Allen, understood that “[t]ribal society makes up the tectonic plates in Iraq on which everything rests.” With its new Sunni partners, U.S. forces cleared neighborhoods one by one, then “gated” them, allowing only those with registration cards to enter. By November 2006, the area around Ramadi was largely free of al-Qaeda insurgents. And by summer of 2007, coalition forces had reclaimed much of Al Anbar Province.

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  Tal Afar and Ramadi became blueprints for General David Petraeus when he took over command of coalition forces in Iraq as well as responsibility for the surge in February 2007. The challenges facing Petraeus at the time could not have been more daunting. The country was still reeling from the sectarian warfare unleashed by the 2006 bombing of the Shia al-Askari mosque, and nearly four hundred thousand Iraqis had been forced out of their homes. Violence was at surreal levels, with “well over fifty attacks and three car bombs per day on average in Baghdad alone.”

  It was clear to Petraeus that the strategy the United States had been pursuing for years in Iraq—basically using overwhelming force to try to kill as many insurgents as possible—was failing. “An operation that kills five insurgents,” he observed, would still be counterproductive if it led “to the recruitment of fifty more.” Instead, Petraeus adopted the radically different approach pioneered by McMaster and MacFarland. As Petraeus saw it, the “big idea” emerging from Tal Afar and Ramadi “was that stability would be achieved by the bottom-up engagement of tribes and other Sunni groups as well as through the pursuit of top-down reconciliation via the Iraqi government.”

  The focus of the surge was Baghdad, which was on the verge of disintegration and seen by all sides as the “key to victory or defeat.” The plan embraced by Petraeus was extremely attentive to Iraq’s tribal politics. One of the principal documents underlying the surge, a strategy paper by military historian Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, included a color-coded map dividing Baghdad district by district, sometimes block by block, into “Sunni Dominated,” “Shia Dominated,” and “Sunni/Shia Mixed” areas.

  As in Ramadi, U.S. commanders now made a point of using men and women highly knowledgeable about Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian dynamics. This included Petraeus’s so-called “brain trust”: academics, journalists, military historians, and military officers such as the British brigadier Nigel Aylwin Foster, who, having served in Iraq with the CPA, had been highly critical of the Americans’ “cultural ineptitude.” (“[I]f I could sum it up,” Aylwin Foster said at the time, “I never saw such a good bunch of people inadvertently piss off so many people.”) On the ground, the coalition relied increasingly on people like the remarkable Emma Sky, an Oxford-educated Middle East expert who had lived in the region for years, and Lieutenant Colonel Nycki Brooks, who had “encyclopedic knowledge” of Iraq’s groups and subgroups and who was minutely aware of which tribal leaders were connected to whom.

  As in Tal Afar and Ramadi, the U.S. military no longer sequestered its troops in safe-zone FOBs, nor did it simultaneously try to kill everyone who had ever joined or supported the insurgency. On the contrary, U.S. troops were sent to live among the local people in Baghdad, “rather than raiding into the area from remote, secure bases.” As Petraeus explained in a 2007 report to Robert Gates, the secretary of defense:

  By living among the population we reinforced the Awakening Movements already underway and further empowered local communities that decided to reject extremism. We came to more clearly recognize that sheiks and tribes have important roles to play as key organizing structures in Iraq’s culture of honor.

  Taking a page from the British, the United States pursued a variant of divide-and-conquer in order to beat back the insurgency. As McChrystal would later put it, they sought out “the groups just shy of the most extreme poles” and tried to separate them from “the irreconcilables”—the groups dead set on insurgency. “The key,” wrote McChrystal, was “to feel for the fissures between the groups, and rip.”

  Experts today agree that merely deploying twenty thousand additional troops would not have been sufficient had American commanders not “stopped fighting Iraq’s tribal structure and instead started to cooperate with it,” building alliances with influential sheikhs and both Sunni and Shia local leaders.

  Measured by any number of metrics, the new approach was an unprecedented success. In just over nine months, from the height of sectarian conflict in December 2006 to September 2007, civilian deaths fell by 45 percent in Iraq overall and almost 70 percent in Baghdad. Deaths caused by ethnosectarian violence fell by 55 percent countrywide and by 80 percent in Baghdad. Although coalition casualties rose in the first part of 2007, a tipping point occurred in July and the numbers fell precipitously afterward. As Petraeus testified before a skeptical Congress in September 2007, “in the past 8 months, we have considerably reduced the areas in which Al Qaeda enjoyed sanctuary. . . . The most significant development in the past six months likely has been the increasing emergence of tribes and local citizens rejecting Al Qaeda and other extremists.”

  What’s really extraordinary is that we managed to achieve documentable success—regaining lost cities, drastically reducing both American and Iraqi civilian casualties, and bringing together formerly warring Sunnis and Shias to fight on the U.S. side—in the worst possible circumstances, when sectarian strife and anti-Americanism in Iraq were already raging. Fundamental mistakes made early on meant that even the most strategically brilliant group-conscious policies adopted three years later would always face an uphill battle. Undoing the effects of the draconian 2003 de-Baathification order, for example, proved impossible. It is sobering to imagine what success we might have had if we had entered the Iraq War with our eyes open to Iraq’s complex tribal politics in the first place.

  DEMOCRACY AND IRAQI TRIBAL POLITICS

  It’s often said that the surge was too little, too late. That may well be true, but another way to look at it is that the tribe-conscious gains finally being made on the military front were fatally sabotaged by our continuing, breathtaking tribe blindness on the political front.

  The December 2005 national elections swept members of the Shia majority into control of the new Iraqi parliament. Harmonious multiethnic coalitions did not form. For prime minister, the United States ultimately threw its weight behind former dissident Nouri al-Maliki, who assumed office in 2006.

  It is mind-boggling that when the U.S. government chose to back Maliki—vesting in him the hope of unifying the country—we paid such scant attention to the group affiliations into which he was born and raised. Unbelievably, we seemed not to notice or care that Maliki was a devout Shia w
ho had spent his whole life hating and fighting Sunnis. Maliki’s grandfather was a famous Shia revolutionary. His father was jailed by the Sunni Baath Party, and Maliki himself eventually fled after being sentenced to death by Saddam Hussein for belonging to a secret Shia organization. To this day, Maliki speaks openly about how Sunni Baathist officers in 1979 “arrested everyone who was connected to me,” including two of his brothers, and executed sixty-seven people from his village.

  Perhaps we had Nelson Mandela in mind—who rose above and forgave his former oppressors—but if anyone had thought about it for even a second, they wouldn’t have been so surprised that once in power, Maliki began excluding, detaining, persecuting, and executing Sunnis. After the Obama administration took over and U.S. troops began withdrawing, Maliki shed all pretense of conciliation and pursued an increasingly brazen sectarian agenda. He forced Sunnis out of the political process, cracked down on peaceful Sunni protests, and imprisoned thousands of Sunnis indefinitely without trial. Even while President Obama was praising Maliki at the White House for “ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive and democratic Iraq,” Shia militias were terrorizing Sunnis, forcing thousands out of their homes, and summarily executing seventy-two civilians in the Diyala province. As time went on, many Sunnis of all backgrounds came to believe that Maliki was a puppet of the (Shia) Iranian government, determined to perpetrate genocide against them.

  Thus was born ISIS. Also known as ISIL, Daesh, or the Islamic State, ISIS is many things. A fantasy caliphate that rejects the nation-state. An al-Qaeda offshoot that has eclipsed its parent. An apocalyptic cult that rapes, enslaves, and immolates. But at its core, the Islamic State is also a movement founded, led, and populated by Sunnis who feel shut out, mistreated, and persecuted by the Shia-dominated government in Iraq.

  Indeed, a key difference between ISIS and al-Qaeda—which are now rival terrorist organizations—is that the former explicitly targets Shias. ISIS’s caliphate is openly Sunni, as devoted to killing Shia “apostates” as it is to killing Western “infidels.” Before he was killed by U.S. strikes, al-Zarqawi (now regarded as the founder of the Islamic State) reportedly disgusted Osama bin Laden by insisting that all “Shiites should be executed.” Bin Laden’s mother was a Shia.

  It’s impossible to understand the stunning success of ISIS without understanding the ethnopolitical dynamics of postwar Iraq. Iraq’s Sunni Arabs correctly perceived that democracy would disempower them and—whatever the ethnically blind U.S.-drafted Constitution might say—leave them at the mercy of the majority Shias. And it was the height of naïveté for the United States to expect that Iraq’s Shias would put centuries of Sunni oppression and brutality behind them.

  The fact is that while many, if not most, Sunni Iraqis hate ISIS, they often fear and hate the specter of Shia dominance more. Even affluent, well-educated Sunni doctors and professors often preferred ISIS to Maliki, who finally was forced out in 2014. According to veteran Middle East reporter Patrick Cockburn, “Mr. Maliki is not to blame for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he played a central role in pushing the Sunni community into the arms of ISIS.”

  Sunnis continue to feel disenfranchised and marginalized under Maliki’s successor, Haider al-Abadi. As late as 2016, according to a Carnegie Endowment report, some 25 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs “remain[ed] supportive of the Islamic State. In Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, a majority of the population appear[ed] to support the Islamic State or to express indifference about the subject.” Meanwhile, with the United States focused on defeating ISIS, the real beneficiary has been Shia-dominated Iran. The United States spent over $1 trillion on the war in Iraq; some 4,500 American lives were lost. Yet fourteen years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran’s power is ascendant, with Tehran now wielding more influence over Baghdad than Washington.

  TRIUMPHALISM AND ETHNONATIONALISM IN THE POST–COLD WAR ERA

  Our failure in Iraq is part of a much larger pattern in post–Cold War American foreign policy. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, a triumphal consensus swept U.S. policy making circles. Communism and authoritarianism had failed, so the correct policy combination had to be their exact opposite: markets and democracy. It was only natural that America—the world’s greatest champion of free market democracy, not to mention the sole superpower left standing—would take the lead in spreading this winning formula.

  It was a time of extraordinary bipartisan optimism. Republicans and Democrats alike saw markets and democracy as a universal prescription for the many ills of underdevelopment. Market capitalism was the most efficient economic system the world had ever known. Democracy was the fairest political system, and the most respectful of individual liberty. Working hand in hand, markets and democracy would transform the world into a community of prosperous, peace-loving nations, and individuals into civic-minded citizens and consumers. In the process, ethnic hatred, religious zealotry, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment would be swept away. Thomas Friedman captured this view in his 1999 number one New York Times bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, quoting a Merrill Lynch ad: “‘The spread of free markets and democracy around the world is permitting more people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements, . . . [erasing] not just geographical borders but also human ones.’” Globalization, wrote Friedman, “tends to turn all friends and enemies into ‘competitors.’”

  That’s not what happened. Instead of global peace and prosperity, the decade between 1991 and 2001 saw the proliferation of ethnic conflict; intensifying nationalism, fundamentalism, and anti-Americanism; confiscations, expulsions, calls for renationalization; two genocides of magnitudes not seen since the Nazi Holocaust—and the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

  Just as in the Cold War, during this decade of U.S. triumphalism, we failed to take into account the potency of tribal politics. Most important, we failed to see that democracy has ethnic, sectarian, and other group-dynamic ramifications. In many parts of the world, far from neutralizing tribal hatred, democracy catalyzes it.

  Iraq and Yugoslavia exemplify a pattern that has played out repeatedly in the developing world. In countries with long-pent-up ethnic and religious divisions, especially where national identity is weak, rapid democratization often galvanizes group hatred. Vote-seeking demagogues find that the best way to mobilize popular support is not by offering rational policy proposals but by appealing to ethnic identity, stoking historical grievances, and exploiting group fear and anger. As America celebrated the global spread of democracy in the 1990s, ethnonationalist slogans proliferated: “Georgia for the Georgians,” “Eritreans Out of Ethiopia,” “Kenya for Kenyans,” “Whites should leave Bolivia,” “Serbia for Serbs,” “Croatia for Croats,” “Hutu Power,” and “Jews Out of Russia.” All too often, poor majorities use their new political power to take revenge against resented minorities, while minorities, fearful of being targeted by the newly empowered majority, resort to violence of their own. None of this is rocket science. It’s basic tribal politics.

  The point is not that democracy is to blame for the rise of ISIS. On the contrary, if anything, the blame rests with the cruelly repressive dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the long-suppressed Shia anger that now makes democratization so challenging, and the bloodcurdling ideology of radical Islam. The fact remains that in many postcolonial countries—with their long legacies of divide-and-rule, corruption, and autocracy—rapid democratization can have catastrophic consequences. Just as U.S. blindness to tribal politics helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan, so too it helped create ISIS.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Terror Tribes

  Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups . . . it is the rule.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  A striking fact about terrorists is that, unlike serial killers, they are not generally psychopaths. Most serial murderers, experts agree, exhibit traits con
sistent with diagnosable psychopathic personality disorders. By contrast, psychologists studying terrorism have struggled in vain for years to identify particular deviant or abnormal personality traits typical of terrorists.

  For example, some studies purport to show that terrorists are “narcissistic” or “driven by depression” or suffer from low self-esteem or had abusive childhoods. One West German researcher found that “[t]he terrorist group represents an outlet for archaic aggressive tendencies, frequently rooted in youthful conflicts with stepfathers.” A nineteenth-century commentator hypothesized that “vitamin deficiencies” were linked to terrorist violence; more recently, a psychiatrist has suggested that “faulty ear functioning may be common among terrorists.” Yet another expert postulated that terrorists tend to come from “societies where fantasies of cleanliness are prevalent.”

  In fact, all these claims have now been rejected, each batted down with a torrent of counterexamples. There is simply no reliable evidence that people who join terrorist organizations or engage in terrorists acts have unusually troubled childhoods or deviant personalities. On the contrary, suicide bombers and other terrorists are often described by stunned friends and acquaintances as “lovely,” “friendly,” “very personable,” “a nice guy.” Indeed, there is now consensus among researchers that “terrorists are essentially normal individuals.”

  The problem with attempts to identify “typical terrorist traits” or “the terrorist personality” is that they focus on the individual. But terrorism is above all a group phenomenon: it’s a murderous expression of tribal politics. To understand how group dynamics can so twist an individual’s psyche, it’s helpful to start with some basic group psychology.