Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (26 page)

There are some who argue that the failure of American forces to pacify Iraq is due to their being deployed in insufficient numbers.
Certainly the war plan that was drawn up by Donald Rumsfeld went badly wrong in not anticipating the insurgency that followed the collapse of Saddam’s forces. Rumsfeld – who throughout his time in the administration was a forceful proponent of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ involving high levels of reliance on technology and the limited use of ground forces – was loathed by the military for imposing an unworkable strategy for the war and was first to be sacrificed when American voters rejected it. But a larger deployment would have made little difference. Despite having over 400,000 troops in the country in the aftermath of the First World War, Britain was unable to impose its will by military force; when a type of order was created it was by political means. The British invaded Mesopotamia in 1914 partly in order to secure crude oil supplies for their warships, which Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had switched from coal to more efficient oil-burning engines. The course of the occupation was far from smooth – between December 1915 and April 1916 the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force suffered over 20,000 casualties at the hands of Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, resorting later to razing villages by air strikes (a tactic the British also used in Afghanistan in the 1920s).

The state of Iraq was constructed to achieve a condition of peace that could not be achieved by the use of military force. In contrast, American military operations in Iraq have not been accompanied by any achievable political objectives. By early 2007 over 3,000 Americans had been killed – more than died as a result of 9/11 – and over 20,000 wounded, for the sake of goals that, insofar as they were ever coherently formulated, were unrealizable. American forces have made mistakes and committed some crimes; but blame for American defeat cannot be attached to the soldiers who were sent to discharge an impossible mission. Responsibility lies with the political leaders who conceived the mission and ordered its execution.

It is true that US forces were badly equipped for counter-insurgency warfare of the kind that began after the occupation of Baghdad. In the aftermath of humiliating defeat in Vietnam and Somalia, US military doctrine has been based on ‘force protection’ and ‘shock and awe’. In practice, this means killing any inhabitant of the occupied country that might conceivably pose any threat to US forces and
overcoming the enemy through the use of overwhelming firepower. Effective in the early stages of the war when the enemy was Saddam’s forces, these strategies are counter-productive when the enemy comprises most of the population, as is now the case. The current conflict is what General Sir Rupert Smith, who commanded the British 1st Armoured Division in the Gulf War, UNpeacekeeping forces in Sarajevo and the British Army in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998, has called a ‘war among the people’.
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In a conflict of this kind, superior numbers count for little and the heavy use of firepower is useless or counter-productive. Any initial sympathy sections of the population may have had for American occupying forces evaporated after the razing of the city of Fallujah in early 2004. Involving the use of cluster bombs and chemical weapons (a type of white phosphorus, or ‘improved napalm’
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) in ‘shake and bake’ operations against the city’s population, this was an act that can be compared with the destruction by Russian forces of the Chechen capital city of Grozny. In military terms it was a failure – a few days later the insurgents captured the bigger city of Mosul where they were able to seize large quantities of arms – and it demonstrated a disregard for Iraqi lives that fuelled the insurgency. A senior British officer, speaking anonymously in April 2004, commented: ‘My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as
Untermenschen.’
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The use of torture at Abu Ghraib followed a familiar pattern. During the year after the fall of Saddam anyone could end up a victim. Thousands of people were swept up from the streets and subjected to systematic abuse. In acting in this way, American forces were following a well-trodden path. Torture was used widely by the Russians in Chechnya, the French in Algeria and by the British in Kenya in the 1950s. Unlike these predecessors, who inflicted extremes of physical pain, however, American interrogators focused on the application of psychological pressure, particularly sexual humiliation. The methods of torture employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims. In using these techniques the US imprinted an indelible
image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime can have legitimacy in Iraq.

US military authorities have condemned the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib. However, while the practice seems to have been resisted by sections of the Army, torture did not occur as a result of accident or indiscipline. From the start of the ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration flouted international law on the treatment of detainees. It declared members of terrorist organizations to be illegal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. The detainees held in the concentration camp at Guantanamo fall into this category, and so did Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan. Being beyond the reach of international law, they were liable to torture. In Iraq the Bush administration evaded international law by a different route. Security duties at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities were outsourced to private contractors not covered by military law or the Geneva Convention. In effect, the Bush administration created a lawless environment in which abuse could be practised with impunity. Torture at Abu Ghraib was not the result of a few officers acting beyond their brief. It was the result of decisions at the highest levels of American leadership.

Since Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has continued to defend the use of torture, while military judges, the CIA and the US military have continued to resist the practice. In February 2006 the CIA’s chief counter-terrorism officer Robert Grenier was fired for opposing torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’.
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It has been reported that the network of secret jails set up by the administration to house prisoners sent there under the special rendition programme (whereby suspects are abducted to countries where they can be tortured without difficulty) may have been shut down because the CIA – unconvinced of the efficacy of torture and fearful that officers who practise it could later be prosecuted – declined to carry out further interrogations. Senior military judges refused to sign a declaration of support for Bush’s policies on ‘coercive interrogation’.
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As with the administration’s use of unverified intelligence, its decision to employ torture was resisted in all the main institutions of American government, and, as before, the administration carried on with its policies.

Disaster in Iraq was hastened by the willingness to use methods that were inhumane and counter-productive. Some of these errors may have been avoidable, but a pattern of arrogant incompetence was built into the Bush administration. It refused to accept advice from the branches of government where expertise existed, such as the uniformed military, the CIA and the State Department. Instead it relied on the counsel of those in the administration whose views were shaped by a neo-conservative agenda, including the Office of Special Plans. But the picture of post-war Iraq that neo-conservatives disseminated was a tissue of disinformation and wishful thinking, while the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends showed the utopian mind at its most deluded.

The ease with which a wildly unreal assessment of conditions in Iraq came to be accepted in America had several sources. Public opinion accepted the war only after a campaign of disinformation. It was persuaded of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when it was known that none existed and informed that Saddam’s regime was engaged in an active weapons programme of which there was no reliable evidence. The neo-conservatives who orchestrated the campaign were themselves blinded by illusions, some of them innate to their way of thinking. They believed the methods needed to achieve freedom were the same everywhere: the policies that were required in Iraq were no different from those that had been used to spread freedom in former communist countries. But what is feasible on the banks of the Danube may not be possible on the Euphrates – even supposing peace prevailed in Iraq as it did in most of post-communist Europe – and this ardent neo-conservative belief in a universal model went with a deep indifference to the particular history of the country. If other cultures are stages on the way to a global civilization that already exists in the US, there is no need to understand them since they will soon be part of America. The effect of this adamant universalism is to raise an impassable barrier between America and the rest of humanity that precludes serious involvement in nation building.
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In Iraq this cultural default reached surreal extremes. In the shelter of the Green Zone, interns on short-term secondment from Washington – some from neo-conservative think tanks – plotted the future of Iraq insulated from any perception of the absurdity of their plans.
Had the goals of the American administration been achievable at all, it would only be after many decades of occupation. Instead, the impossible was attempted in months. The armed missionaries who dispatched American forces to Iraq expected the instant conversion of the population, only for these forces to be repulsed as enemies. Robespierre’s warning to his fellow Jacobins of the perils of Napoleon’s programme of exporting revolution by force of arms throughout Europe was vindicated again, two centuries later, in the Middle East.

Iraq is only the most extravagant example of a trend in foreign policy that aimed to renew, in liberal guise, something resembling the European empires of the past. In this view, toppling tyranny in Iraq was not just an American attempt to secure hegemony in the Middle East. It was the start of a new kind of imperialism guided by liberal principles of human rights.

The configuration of ideas and movements that led to America’s ruinous engagement in Iraq included more than a fusion of the neo-conservative utopians, Armageddonite fundamentalists and Straussian seers that have been examined so far. This exotic and highly toxic blend of beliefs, none of them grounded in any observable or even plausible reality, had one further but equally dangerous ingredient: a type of ‘liberal imperialism’ based on human rights. Neo-conservatives were able to gain support for regime change in Iraq and potentially other Middle Eastern countries because it could
be seen as applying liberal ideals of self-determination and democracy. Liberals insist that the legitimacy of government depends on its respecting the rights of its citizens. If any government fails in this regard, it can be resisted and overthrown – whether by its own citizenry or by an outside force. Human rights override the claims of sovereign states, and where these rights are severely violated other states – acting as the ‘international community’, in the terminology Blair coined in his speech in Chicago in 1999 – have the right, even the duty, to intervene to protect them.

This view seemed to be supported by humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, which, while failing to prevent some of the worst atrocities, succeeded in imposing a kind of peace in former Yugoslavia. The Balkan war led many liberals to endorse the attack on Iraq as a means of creating a new world order. Even now, some continue to believe the disastrous upshot does not undermine the rightness of military intervention to overthrow tyranny. Intervention of this kind amounts to a liberal version of imperialism, as has been recognized by some of its most influential advocates. Writing in
The New York Times
three months before the invasion of Iraq, Michael Ignatieff announced:

America’s empire is not like empires of the past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden … The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome power the world has ever known … Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The Bush administration would ask, What moral authority rests with a sovereign who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people, has twice invaded neighbouring countries and usurps his people’s wealth to build palaces and lethal weapons?
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Ignatieff shows the attractions the new imperialism had for liberals. Who dares deny that tyranny is bad, or question the ideal of a world based on human rights? Has not liberalism always been a universalist creed? After all, the claim that its values are valid for all of humanity is a cardinal principle of liberal philosophy. Does it not follow that liberal states are entitled – indeed obliged – to impose their values throughout the world, even if this requires the use of force? For many
liberals the ‘war on terror’ has been a successor to the Cold War – a struggle in which democracy prevailed over totalitarianism. Yet the differences are substantial. The Cold War was a conflict between states, while the ‘war on terror’ is one between states and a far more amorphous range of forces. The Cold War was waged between states pledged to rival Enlightenment ideologies, whereas the ‘war on terror’ is being waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. Yet again, the enemy in the Cold War was a communist system that never had popular legitimacy, while Islamist regimes –though very weak in comparison with the former Soviet Union – are gaining mass support. There is, in fact, hardly anything in common between the two conflicts. But like the Cold War the ‘war on terror’ could be seen as a universal crusade, a vast progressive enterprise in which practically every good cause under the sun could be subsumed, a new force that was