Hindsight

by Will Wilkinson on August 12, 2006

Aaron Haspel has the best mea culpa I’ve seen about being on the wrong side of the war. I especially liked this bit:

There was also a certain haste to blame America in the anti-war arguments that bothered me. I have no desire to discourage self-criticism, least of all in this post. But even Jim Henley, who among the long-time opponents of the war most closely resembles a responsible adult, has not exactly emphasized the horrors of a culture that treats suicide bombers like rock stars and stones homosexuals to death. These very horrors, ironically, undercut the case of the warbloggers, who harp on them. Surely the least likely people to successfully impose your political ideas on are those whose core values are utterly alien to your own. You end up just killing them instead.

My initial tepidness about opposing the war was based in a thoroughgoing horror of viciously antiliberal Islamic culture, and I worried deeply about the fact that many anti-war types seemed not to share my horror. But Aaron’s incredibly important last point was one of the clinchers for me. I had the idea that maybe the war could do something to undermine Islamic religious authoritarianism, and if it was going to have that effect, that would be a strong reason in its favor. But reflection lead me to see that the depth of the problem is precisely what would make the attempt to swiftly impose liberal democracy an almost certain bloody failure. That’s what I had in mind, here:

A moral infrastructure is something neither Bechtel nor the CPA has the power to provide. Canals and constitutions are all for naught if Iraqis don’t develop norms that enable the emergence of a complex market and the benign administration of the state. If — whether because of religious conviction, political ideology, tribal affiliation or whatever — they don’t believe these are norms worth having, then they won’t have them. And despite our best intentions, our efforts there will fail.

[...]

How do you build, or grow, a moral infrastructure? That’s what we need to understand. Sadly — and let’s hope not tragically — we still don’t.

Well, it has turned out tragically.

  • dearieme
    Bonkers. The invasion of Iraq was bonkers and was obviously so. Conservatives should surely understand about the importance of habit and culture; societies are like organic entities - isn't that the old simile? It's pure Holywood to imagine you could convert Iraq into a European (or Japanese, or Hindu....) society in a few years, by force of arms, nearly painlessly. And if you couldn't, then you'd need to deploy repression on a scale far beyond the power of a paltry little army. Rash. Foolish. Bonkers.
  • Did Americans really want to make Iraq a more liberal, democratic place? Americans think that democracy and liberalism are good things. And they are notorious for not being able to distinguish one set of Arabs from another. Given what we know about human beings, how likely is it that a group of them will respond to an attack by another group by doing their attackers a favour?

    If the US really wanted to paint schools and build democracy somewhere, wouldn't it have chosen some place where it felt positive, or at least neutral, feelings towards the residents?

    It strikes me that the "nation building" rationale was always a thin rationalization for what was really going on. Some Arabs hurt us, and we wanted to hurt them back. John Derbyshire, for all his borderline psychopathy, got that right.
  • Cliff
    It seems to me that their lack of moral infrastructure is not going to prevent them from acquiring weapons with which they can grievously hurt us, if not destroy us. We know they already have the will and the desire.

    If we can't learn to change their minds, then what are the alternatives?

    And if the necessary alternative becomes to destroy them in order to prevent our own destruction, then how could that be undertaken without first trying to change their minds?
  • While I completely agree with Will's assessment (and Aaron's motivations) the WW2 comparisons keep cropping up.

    If the culture of Iraq is so pervasively different and anti-democracy, surely it is no more alien than 1945 Japan. And Pithlord -- surely WW2 era Americans thought far more poorly of the Japanese than today -- just look at the incredibly racist propaganda of the times. Yet, for some reason, it worked. In some kind of neo-con fever dream, we smashed a nation and replaced its government whole hog with a friendly, free, representational system that prospers to this very day.

    Now, I agree we shouldn't run around invading people to set up happy democracies -- but it certainly worked with Japan, a society about as far from a democratic ideal as one could imagine. What's the inherent difference between Iraq 2003 and Japan 1945? You could make the very rational (yet frightening) argument that it was because we utterly demolished (with atomic ferocity) the civil society before instituting our own.

    A pro-war advocate could respond by simply saying "well, we were just too easy on Iraq." Any argument that criticizes the Iraq invasion on the theory that nation-building is inherently impossible because of radical cultural differences has to explain Japan. Which is why I prefer casting my opposition to the invasion in terms of the self-protection vs cost analysis, one I believe to be relatively negative.
  • I wish I knew more about Japan. In so many ways, it is sui generis. For a long time, it was the only non-European country that industrialized. It reacts in unpredictable ways to a few major events, without much discussion, but with a certain unity.

    I don't think it's true that Japnaese civil society was utterly demolished. I think that's a dangerous illusion. Lots of Japanese were killed, but the social structures were intact. Even the Emperor was left in place.The fact that Japan decided to become a (peculiar) liberal democracy was a choice that the perfectly-intact Japanese elite made.

    As far as Americans go, the difference is that no one in 1941 claimed to be going to war to give the Japanese the gift of liberal democracy. As long as it was defeated, and disarmed, that was enough. Americans had an obvious grievance against Japan, and had an obvious reason to make it pay for that grievance.

    In Iraq, the theory was that we were going to make the Arabs free. But the subtext was the threatening and angry one expressed by Cliff. The combination was inherently non-sensical.
  • Yeah, I definitely see your point. But it's funny, like you said -- we intended just to crush Japan, and we ended up with a liberal democracy. We intended to create an Iraqi democracy, and we don't seem to be succeeding so well.

    And I guess "utterly demolished" could be an exaggeration -- but I think what I was describing was that we basically used the threat of erasing entire cities from the face of the earth to suppress any insurrections. Same with post-war Germany -- both nations surrendered (and I assume, abandoned any post-war resistance) because they realized that we would probably exterminate them all if they didn't.

    Would Iraq settle down if we had nuked Baghdad? It's a disgusting question that I feel sick about even asking -- but it's one that our society basically said "yes" to when it came to Hiroshima. Is it overwhelming, annihilatory force what enables nation building, or is it the difference between cultures? I don't know.
  • What people are failing to see here is that the Japanese mindset is fundamentally different from the Iraqi (and indeed religious Arabic) ones. For the past couple of centuries, Japan has tended to welcome change if it seemed to improve their society. All the Americans had to do was send a few warships to Japan in 1854 to convince them that the country needed to open up to the outside world.

    After a nasty bout with military dictatorship and the associated nationalistic chest beating, the Japanese saw that it wasn't working out (losing a war helped) and opted for a better system that although imposed upon them in no uncertain terms, was in their best interests. Maybe the elite saw the second and third-tier benefits of this.

    The Japanese are essentially pragmatic. This is not the character of the Arab world, at least among the theocratic radicals that are gaining popularity with each passing day. Belief does not brook pragmatism, and unfortunately, this characterization seems to apply to our current administration as well. Notice that in our struggles with Islam, we never hear about Turkey, which is probably one of the only secular Arab states left, along with Tunisia.

    If the U.S. decided to unwrap the nukes, it would not only be a bad public relations blunder (not to mention the incredible death and suffering) but it would not change the Islamic fundamentalist mindset one iota. It would in fact unite most, if not all Arab states against us.
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