Tag: Iraq

Getting Iraq Right…from Miami…in Ohio

On By Martin Kramer

Adeed Dawisha is an old friend with a new book: Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton University Press). It’s a searing indictment of Arab nationalism from an insider’s perspective. And it’s especially relevant now, for the reason I underline in my jacket endorsement of the book:

Why does the world need this eminently readable book? Because academe is awash with speculation about the emergence of a “new Arabism.” Dawisha’s point is that anyone who lived through Arabism’s heyday knows how disastrous it was, and that the new Arabist nostalgia ignores history.

A lot of that new nostalgia fixed itself upon Saddam Hussein, who has now ended up in the same dustbin with Nasser.

I and my colleagues at the Middle East Quarterly thought so much of Dawisha’s book that we published an excerpt, which will give you the flavor of his uncompromising style. The book has now received a favorable review from the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim in The Guardian. Shlaim stands very much on the other side of the fence from me, and since we would agree on little else, Dawisha’s book deserves to be described as transcendent.

Dawisha was born in Iraq, and it’s worth quoting a few things he said on the eve of the war, since they were very courageous and prescient. Dawisha, speaking two months ago:

In academia, the prevalent attitude is to be anti-war, anti-invasion. I am not. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is a subject of much higher moral order than avoiding a war. It is a mystery to me how people in academia, who consider themselves liberal, don’t see that in terms of justice and moral responsibility of a civilized world, we need to rescue the Iraqi people from this nightmare.

“War is an evil,” he told an audience at the University of Michigan. “But sometimes, unfortunately, war is a necessary evil. And in this particular case, I think it is…War against Iraq in my opinion is not only permissible, in fact when I say this I shock a lot of people… to me it’s a moral obligation. Every person with an ounce of civility in him should recognize this fact.”

Dawisha also made right-on predictions of outcomes. On March 18, he predicted that Iraqi soldiers would “slip away from their units” and let the invasion succeed. They did. On March 20, he predicted that Saddam would only be supported in the fight by “eight or nine thousand men in his special Republican Guard…they’ll fight the Americans because if they don’t die at the hand of the Americans, they’ll die at the hand of the Iraqi people. Everybody else in Iraq detests Saddam.” And so it was. Some loyalists did fight, the rest filled the streets on arrival of the Americans and Brits to celebrate Saddam’s demise. Two months ago, Dawisha predicted that, “given America’s certain victory, and the Iraqis’ certain support, today’s nay-sayers will look pretty dumb tomorrow.” It looks like that prediction was on the mark, too.

So it pays to listen to Dawisha’s opinion on the day after. First, he argues that the United States alone must fashion Iraq’s political framework. Dawisha sees a possible role for the UN and other powers in the economic reconstruction of the country.

But I’m not very clear why they should be brought in, in the political reconstruction of Iraq….We want to put Iraq on a democratic path, whether this takes six months or a year or eighteen months, but we want to be there when we’re trying to orient the Iraqis towards democracy creating political institutions, writing a constitution. I’m not very clear [on] what the Chinese, for example, or the Russians have to add to this endeavor.

I’m not sure the French would have much to add, either. And Dawisha doesn’t favor the quick turnover to Iraqis now demanded by Arab “opinion” and panicky Arab leaders (who would be all too pleased to see the Baath creep back). He argues for a two-year period of political reconstruction: six months of stabilization, during which a constitution would be written; six months for the creation of political parties; and elections a year later. All sensible.

Dawisha has written an important book, made courageous moral arguments in the midst of a storm, ventured accurate predictions, and offered practical solutions. All of which probably explains why he teaches at a place called Miami University in Ohio, while mediocrity is celebrated and rewarded at places like Columbia and Stanford. Go figure.

CLARIFICATION: A few readers have written me, to attest to the virtues of Miami University in Ohio. I intended no slight to the university as a whole. But no one would go there specifically to study the Middle East, and it is not listed among the 120-plus colleges and universities in the United States that boast of having Middle East programs. On the other hand, many places that have large programs, some of them subsidized from Washington, have no one of Dawisha’s caliber. And that, as I wrote, is hard to figure.

On Entering Basra and Baghdad, Avoid This Mistake

On By Martin Kramer

As war against Saddam looms, military planners should read a very pertinent article by the late Elie Kedourie. Its title: “The Sack of Basra and the Baghdad Farhud.” It’s the story of how not to occupy Iraq’s two principal cities.

In 1941, the British sent forces into Iraq to remove a pro-Axis military junta from power. Now it’s called “regime change,” and more than one journalist and strategist has remarked on the parallels between 1941 and today. But they omit the mistakes made by the British commander, General (later Field Marshal) Sir Archibald Wavell, in securing Basra and Baghdad.

The British didn’t want to use troops to provide administration in the two cities, preferring that it be done by Iraqi authorities, while they bore down on strategic objectives such as the besieged RAF station at Habbaniya. Wavell’s instructions: “As long as Iraqi administration meets our military requirements it is not, repeat not, to be interfered with or superseded because it is inefficient in other directions.” And Wavell again: “Every encouragement is to be given to local Iraq administration to function so far as is consistent with safety of our forces. Political officers are to be regarded as liaison officers between Iraq administration and British forces and not as administrators except where Iraq administration is inoperative.”

British forces thus left key areas of both cities to the mercies of a defeated regime. In Basra, the abdication resulted in the sack of the bazaar by rioters and looters. In Baghdad, it was far worse. Wavell instructed that his forces “should not get involved in street fighting in disadvantageous conditions.” So while the British forces camped west of the Tigris, looting on the east bank by the bedouin and the remnants of the army and police turned into a full-scale pogrom. (Jews used the term farhud, a murderous riot.)

About 180 Jews (and some Muslims) were slaughtered. A British officer later wrote of hearing “the growing crescendo of rifle and machine-gun fire. Baghdad was given up to the looters. All who cared to defend their own belongings were killed, while eight miles to the west waited the eager British force which could have prevented all this.” Iraq’s ancient Jewish community never fully recovered from the blow, and its younger members began to plan emigration. (The pogrom also left a mark on young Elie Kedourie, who lived through it.)

The British could get away with cutting corners in 1941. They were immersed in a world war on multiple fronts, their forces were stretched thin, and the world wasn’t watching. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower is bearing down exclusively on Iraq, under blazing media spotlights. If the 1941 handling of Basra and Baghdad were repeated under these circumstances, the stain would be indelible. Preventing it means exercising complete control in urban areas. Delay could produce a bloodbath surpassing any “collateral damage” in cost and effect.

Battle plans come down to priorities, and in Iraq there are a lot of them: oil fields, the Western desert, possible WMD sites, Tikrit, and more. But the lesson of Baghdad 1941 (the Jewish quarter)—like that of Damascus 1918 (the Turkish hospital) and Beirut 1982 (Sabra and Shatila)—is the importance of immediately deploying forces to police an Arab city upon its conquest. In the absence of such policing, or upon its delegation to others, the likelihood of massacre rises sharply. That lesson is liable to be forgotten in all the optimistic chatter about how ready Iraqis are for democracy. Before that, Iraqis must be kept from settling scores. The road to hell—or a Belgian indictment—is paved with good intentions.

You’ll find Kedourie’s article in his collected volume, Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies, 1974.

ADDENDUM: Things were done differently before CNN and the Hague tribunal. Sir Alec Kirkbride, who entered Damascus in 1918 on the defeat of the Turks, explained how he put down looting, rioting, and the butchering of Turkish stragglers by vengeful Damascenes: he made “free use” of his large service revolver. “Occasionally, someone turned nasty and I shot them at once before the trouble could spread.” Right out of his memoirs, A Crackle of Thorns, 1956.

Iraq: Another “Expert” Blind Spot

On By Martin Kramer

Where are America’s Iraq experts? According to one view, the media are hiding them from you. That’s the claim of Juan Cole, University of Michigan historian. He’s one of the establishment boosters of Middle Eastern studies, and a staunch defender of the Middle East Studies Association against all comers. (He also edits its quarterly journal.) In a recent piece, he complains that the media are ignoring America’s historians of Iraq—people who know about the country in its historical context. “It is an index of America’s longstanding anti-intellectualism,” he remonstrates, “that long hours of cable television news are filled with the views on Iraq of small town radio talk show hosts and retired colonels, but virtually no one who actually knows Arabic or has written substantially on the country appears on the small screen.”

He goes on to list the historians and their fields of expertise, and the reader’s eye races ahead to learn the names of those who’ve done contemporary work. Suddenly, we crash into this paragraph:

No American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq, for which the sources would have to be propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers, expatriate memoirs with an axe to grind, Western news wire reports, and what documents the U.S. government has been willing to declassify. Given the limitations of these sources, it is no wonder that most scholars have devoted their energies to the Ottoman and British periods, for which more documentation exists, the biases of which are more easily dealt with because passions have cooled with the passage of centuries.

I wonder whether Professor Cole is even aware that he has contradicted himself. He complains that the media have excluded Iraq “experts” from the public forum, even as he reports that those same “experts” have excluded Baathist Iraq from their own area of expertise. In fact, the real scandal is not the “anti-intellectualism” of the American media. There is no reason on earth for them to ask an expert on 19th-century trade in Mosul about the intentions of Saddam Hussein. The scandal is the admitted fact that American academe has not produced a single work on Baathist Iraq.

Millions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into this field—including, after the Kuwait war, a special appropriation for research fellowships called the Near and Middle East Research and Training Program, justified on the grounds of “national security.” You would have thought that at least one bright young man or woman would have gravitated toward the study of Baathist Iraq, which for over a decade has been America’s top national security concern in the Middle East. But no one did, and the answer is implicit in Cole’s own words.

I’d like to work on Baathist Iraq, says the student. Don’t waste your time, says the professor. The sources are too unreliable, the subject is too burdened with passions. If you insist on working on Iraq, tackle some remote period. (Unless, of course, you want to join the legions of Middle East “experts” who are “working” on the Palestinians: any period, any subject is just fine. Palestinian newspapers, memoirs, and oral testimonies are evidence, and the historian of the Palestinians has special dispensation to indulge his or her biases and passions.)

It’s the guild masters who have created a situation where Baathist Iraq has been excluded from the research agenda. Outside America, where the guild is run differently, invaluable work has been done on this very subject. There is Amatzia Baram’s book on the Baath’s manipulation of Iraqi identity. There is Ofra Bengio’s book on Saddam’s political discourse. They made excellent use, among other sources, of those “propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers.”

Nor is it true, as Cole says, that there is “more documentation” for the Ottoman and British periods. After the last Gulf war, the United States government brought eighteen tons of Iraqi official documents to Washington, a treasure trove seized by Kurds from Iraqi government offices. Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya and Human Rights Watch have made use of these documents. Not so historians and political scientists, who presumably are too busy studying “masculinities in Egypt” and “perceptions of the deaf in Islamic societies” (real research topics funded with “national security” appropriations).

In the lengthening indictment of Middle Eastern studies, Cole’s confession—”no American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq”—is one of the weightiest counts. That absence, like the absence of studies of Bin Laden, is the result of a skewed academic culture that systematically discourages policy-relevant research. Why Washington continues to pump money into this enterprise is more of a mystery than the doings of Saddam Hussein.

POSTCRIPT: Now the Boston Globe has published a piece confirming the point of this entry from other sources. Dick Norton (Boston University): “We don’t have a single academic expert in America who understands how Iraqi politics work in 2003, not a clue.” Judith Yaphe, National Defense University: “There’s nobody in this country who really knows the internal dynamics, the fabric of how Iraq works.” So where did all that federal money go?