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Violence In Iraq Is Beyond Our Control
With the administration's long-awaited progress report on Iraq set to be delivered to Congress today, it seems clear that most of the contending arguments regarding the future of U.S. operations in Iraq share the assumption that Iraqi political leaders could settle the conflict if they were determined to do so. Those who support an indefinite commitment believe that forcefully suppressing violence is a precondition for political accommodation among the various political factions, and they claim that progress is being made. Those who want American forces to leave believe that the prospect of reduced protection is necessary to compel the accommodation that virtually everyone concedes has not yet occurred.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt whether Iraq's leaders could control the violence even if they wanted to. The violence in Iraq is highly localized and does not have the features of organized conflict implied by the frequently used terms "insurgency" or "civil war." Moreover, the level of violence is probably substantially greater than is being officially reported - an ominous challenge to the claim of significant progress.
These facts suggest a response is needed that is of a different order than the remedies now under discussion in Washington.
It is increasingly evident that the forceful removal of the Saddam Hussein regime triggered such a profound disintegration of Iraqi society that basic legal order could not be preserved. In the absence of effective restraint, violent predators have emerged whose actions are not directed by any purpose that might be subject to negotiated settlement on a national scale.
The breakdown of legal order is apparent in two basic statistical observations. First, using standard epidemiological methods, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health estimated that more than 600,000 deaths from violent causes occurred in Iraq between 2003 and 2006 and that no part of the country escaped the affliction. Their estimate is nearly 10 times greater than estimates of civilian casualties based on Pentagon reports and records compiled by the independent Iraq Body Count, which aggregates international press reports.
Second, comparisons with data from other conflicts reveal that many fewer large incidents involving fatalities of 500 or more have occurred in Iraq, indicating that violence there has been conducted on an unusually small scale. This is consistent with violence that is not being orchestrated by a small number of large groups, but is instead being generated spontaneously by conditions on the ground.
Catastrophic breakdown is also apparent from reports circulating within aid organizations and among military personnel candid enough to discuss what they see on the streets.
It is difficult for Americans to comprehend the sustained breakdown of civil order in an advanced, urbanized society. Although such comparisons are imperfect, it may be useful to consider analogies to more familiar settings.
One can begin by imagining, for example, what would have happened in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans if the National Guard had never arrived, if virtually the entire infrastructure had been destroyed and not replaced, if all of the governmental institutions including the police had been removed, and if the population had been left to cope entirely on its own with no prospect of leaving the disaster area.
People in such circumstances would have been forced to form groups to survive and defend themselves. These groups would probably be very local in nature and form along easily visible lines, such as race and religion, as we have seen in Iraq. When legal order disappears, separatist identities become the result rather than the cause of violence.
One might also compare the civilian fatality reports from Iraq with the reliably documented details of violence in Baltimore. In 2006, there were 275 murders in the city, which has a population of about 650,000. The same murder rate, scaled up to the Iraqi population of 27 million, would produce 11,500 violent deaths per year and 45,500 killed over four years of conflict.
Reports based on Pentagon and Iraq Body Count sources estimate that about 75,000 civilians were killed in Iraq over the first four years of the conflict. This suggests that Iraq is less than twice as violent as Baltimore. In stark contrast, the Johns Hopkins estimate of 600,000 violent deaths over four years suggests that Iraq is 10 to 15 times more violent than Baltimore. The latter is intuitively more consistent with qualitative impressions.
If the violence in Iraq is indeed the result of a sustained social and legal breakdown, then an effective response will not emerge from quibbles between Congress and the White House over small changes in the current Iraq operation. The fundamental problem is that we forfeited at the outset the legitimacy required to command consensual allegiance. In order to have any hope of acquiring it, we will need extensive international assistance from countries such as China, Russia, Iran and Syria that are themselves concerned about the use of American military power. Strong measures of reassurance will be required, involving drastic revisions of global security policy.
John Steinbruner heads the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies. His e-mail is jsteinbr@umd.edu. Tim Gulden is a Research Scholar at the center. His e-mail is tgulden@umd.edu.
© 2007 The Baltimore Sun
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Show AllThe invisible hand of the market in action.
"Operation Thundering Cameltoe..."
I have just watched a video from the Jon Stewart Show where the author of the "Counterinsurgency Field Manual" for Iraq summed up its contents as follows: be polite - be professional - be prepared to kill
Wow. What a great strategy. If Iraqis were questioned about it they would surely confirm the strict adherence to the last point but it would not be easy to to find witnesses for the two other demands.... ("kicking ass" does not really sound very polite...)
Following the latest repeated comments from GWB " this is a different kind of war" Nagl also stressed ..."this is a thinking person´s war. We have to outthink the enemy."
Ah. That explains a lot.
The Iraqis, even the religious extremists, are not stupid, they know that the US can´t be trusted and that they have destroyed the Iraqi state to control its assets.
Even Iraqi children can´t be hoodwinked with sweets and smiles... (a soldier wanted a photo with children in the background only to realize later that one child was mocking the "Heil Hitler" salute and another holding a poster about US torture in Abu Ghraib) http://warcomeshome.org/patrick_resta
But the architects of this war would probably agree with President Putin´s assessement of Russian dissidents and claim that it also applies to the resistance fighters:
They just have an excessive sense of justice....
Forgive this long quote, but everyone should read Gwynne Dyer's *The Mess They Made*:
Gwynne Dyer, Introduction. The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007: 1-4. ISBN 978-0-7710-2980-6. 268pp.
The Middle East as we have known it for the past ninety years is coming to an end, because the Americans will soon be leaving. President Bush is so determined to resist that conclusion that the legions will not finally depart until he has left office, but it is coming as surely as the sun sets in the west. And although Bush will leave defeated and dis¬graced, he has set events and emotions in train that will transform the region—if not quite in the way he intended.
Ali Allawi, defence minister in the first American puppet government in Baghdad, got it exactly right in a regional peace proposal he floated recently: "The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its suc¬cessor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos. The collapse of the entire order in the Middle East now threatens as the Iraq imbroglio unleashes forces in the area that have been gathering in virulence over the past decades."
Allawi is not exaggerating. The destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent defeat of U.S. military power there have finally destabilized the Middle East, a notional region that came into being after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918 (though it did not become widely known as the "Middle East" until the Second World War). It was initially controlled by the British and French empires, who drew most of the borders, but a surge of revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s brought independence to the Arab countries. By then, however, both oil and Israel had made the region of great interest to the United States, which took over as the dominant power from the 1960s onwards. And under that American dispensation, there have been no further changes of regime for forty years, apart from the revolution in Iran in 1978 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: the undemocratic regimes that were in power in 1967 are all still in power, within the borders that the European empires drew in 1918.
It is that Middle East that is now coming to an end. It is ending because defeat and humiliation in Iraq mean that soon there will no longer be the will in the United States to go on with the task of maintaining the status quo, and because the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq are going to over¬whelm the status quo. Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even the 1918 borders themselves might change. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, almost anything you care to imagine.
So what should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is going to choose its future for itself—and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse—but also because it's none of their business.
For several generations the West has insisted that the Middle East is its business, because that is where half the world's oil comes from. Radical change cannot be allowed there because it might interrupt the flow of oil, and so the region has remained politically and socially frozen for generations. But today every major oil-producing country in the Middle East depends on the cash flow from oil exports to feed its growing population, so they are all compelled to sell pretty much every barrel they can pump—and to sell it into a single global market that sets the price for buyer and seller alike. So it doesn't matter to us who runs these countries.
It matters a great deal to their own people, of course, but the oil will go on flowing no matter who's in charge, so it's all the same to the customers. If the new regime is better than the old, good; if not, too bad. But it's their business, not ours.
There is the question of Middle Eastern terrorism, but Islamist extremism and the terrorism it breeds are both responses to a century of foreign domination and manipulation of the region. It wouldn't all stop right away if the West ceased meddling in the area, but the resentment and humiliation that fuel it would dwindle rapidly. Just as well, because this is not a policy proposal; it is a prediction. The West will stop meddling in the region's affairs, because the United States is going home hurt.
Finally, the question of Israel. The Middle East was definitely the wrong place to put a Jewish state if the idea was to create a safe haven for the world's Jews, but that's done now and the question is: Will Israel survive? The answer is probably yes, because it has and will retain the ability to take the entire region down with it in a nuclear Armageddon. But the oppor¬tunity of the 1990s has been wasted, and it probably faces another generation of confrontation—perhaps, this time, without the comforting support of the United States.
What we are seeing at the moment is a clear demonstration, both to the American and the Middle Eastern publics, of the inability of American military power to dictate outcomes in the region. Once that demonstration has been concluded, we shall see what comes out of the box in the Middle East.
It will undoubtedly be messy, since it will be a sudden thaw after centuries of political glaciation under Ottoman rule, Anglo-French domination, and American hegemony. In places, it will probably be bloody. The West will not like some of the regimes that emerge (but it's still none of our business).
In the long run, it will certainly be better for the peoples of the region than perpetual foreign tutelage. And it will not harm the West's interests, so long as the oil continues to flow. Apart from that, the entire region is of little economic or strategic importance to the rest of the world. Lie back, and try to enjoy the ride.
Thanks for the quote zoya. I think most of us at CD realized long ago that it will not matter to most US consumers, in terms of prices they will pay, who controls the oil. It does matter to US oil companies and to US elites who want to try to limit China's access to energy. And the whole effort of controlling the Middle East was very expensive for the taxpayers and very lucrative for the arms industry, so those two groups will be positively and negatively affected, respectively, if this period of depravity and insanity is brought to a close.
But the US government has shown way beyond any doubt that it has no competence in trying to control events in the region. It is way past time for this tragedy born of hubris to end.
"Violence In Iraq Is Beyond Our Control"
WRONG!!! The violence in Iraq is in perfect control, it gives justification for the US presence…long enough to sign those production sharing agreements for oil.
As for America, the US Government is beyond our control. Elections and the will of the people mean nothing.
Thank you Mr. Steinbruner and Mr. Gulden for saying what has been missing from many other commentaries. The United States does not have the ability to create stability in Iraq. The President's motives for going to war with Iraq were not only unpure (to say the least). they were so blatantly unpure, that the US has lost almost all of its allies. Never before has the US engaged in a war after fabricating a "need" this ridiculous.
Thank you also, Zoya for pointing out that Iraq will have to have its Civil War eventually. Nothing in the forseeable future can prevent the process that has been tragically, needlessly initiated.
zoya: It would have been a lot better for you to have summarized that excerpt in 1 sentence and have given a link.
Just some additional confirmation:
http://www.statecraft.org/chapter12.html
Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and
Counterterrorism, 1940-1990
The Problem of Ideology
Ideologyfor Export
"In the long run, the ostensible defender of the status quo may play the greater role in its destruction, for example, through acts of genocide or bombing a country "into the stone age" (or turning it into "a howling wilderness," as General Jacob Smith pledged in 1901 in the Philippines—in order to resist a change in the status quo.64 Less drastic responses to revolutionary insurgency, however, also may occasion enormous disruption to a traditional social and political fabric on a scale disproportionate to the disruption intended by the insurgents themselves. The incarceration of much of the Algerian Muslim population in concentration camps and the regimentation of the rest through administrative systems to tightly monitor and control the population permitted the French Army to claim military victory over the Algerian nationalist movement, but the old regime would never be the same independence was inevitable. Similarly, the extermination of a large fraction of Guatemala's Indian peasantry and the confinement of many of the survivors behind the wire of army-administered "villages" perhaps irreversibIy altered the semifeudal relationship between the peasantry and the coffee planters of the Guatemalan highlands—though to what result remains to be seen."
What need I say more?