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Wars and Ideas by George Packer 
WARS AND IDEAS by George Packer The New Yorker, Issue of 2004-07-05 Posted 2004-06-28 Sheikh Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, who this week will take over Saddam Hussein's old job as the president of a sovereign Iraq, recently mentioned a favorite philosopher. In the spirit of his American counterpart, he might have noted the Prophet Muhammad; instead, the name that came up was Thomas Paine. A British-born deist and revolutionary pamphleteer of the Enlightenment is not the first figure you would expect to be named by a Sunni Arab leader who wears tribal dress in his official role and was living in Saudi Arabia when the American-led war began, last year. But the new Iraqi President's choice helped to clarify what is at stake as the occupation limps to an end. The Iraq war, from its inception in Washington think tanks to its botched execution on the ground, has always been a war of ideas - some of them very bad ones. There's the idea of preëmptive war, America's divine right of intervention; the idea of tyrannies falling like dominoes in a strategically realigned Middle East; the idea that American power is worse than the worst dictatorship. Facts have reduced most of these to rubble - notably, the argument that this was a war of urgent national security (although facts can be less stubborn than officials in the grip of ideological truth). Only two serious, and competing, versions of the Iraq war's meaning are left standing: one, that this is a war against tyranny and for democracy; the other, that this is a war of American domination. It's about liberalism, or it's about imperialism. Where you fall on questions like how long foreign troops should remain in Iraq, or who is to blame for the ongoing violence, or whether the most apt analogy is the Second World War or Vietnam tends to depend on which of these two versions you accept. Few Americans, Europeans, Arabs, or other non-Iraqis have been able to hold both versions in their heads at the same time and continue to function. But the Iraq war has always contained them both: Iraqis were liberated, and they were occupied; the invasion greatly benefitted Iraqi human rights, and it subjected Iraqis to an incompetent and sometimes harsh foreign rule. Yawar - who, as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, was one of the sharpest critics of the occupation - shows the complex understanding that the situation requires: in insisting on Iraqi independence from America, he invokes a hero of America and a champion of universal rights. The last days of the Coalition Provisional Authority have the feel of a deathwatch. Soldiers who once spoke ardently of wanting to rebuild Iraq now express open contempt for a people who seem unwilling to help themselves. "I sympathized with the Iraqis when we first got here," a young sergeant who has served every single day of the occupation in Iraq said. "But now I'm cold. I feel no remorse. When some of your friends get killed, and you came here to help these people, it changes you." A majority of the American public has finally turned against the war. As for the Iraqis, their opinion of the Americans in their country has long since gone rancid with disappointment and suspicion. A recent poll commissioned by the C.P.A. itself found that two per cent of Iraqis have great confidence in the Coalition forces, around eighty per cent have none at all, and more than half believe that all Americans behave like the abusive jailers at Abu Ghraib. Sovereignty won't untie the knot of this mutual hostility, but it will bring a welcome replacement of American decision-makers with Iraqi ones. Many Iraqis seem to be giving the new interim government a chance, but they don't have much choice. The occupation's flaws were many, and they all lead from Baghdad back to Washington. The heart of the problem has always been the Bush administration's almost theological conviction that American power is by nature good and what follows in its wake will be freedom and democracy. This is sometimes called American exceptionalism, and it's another idea that the Iraq war should lay to rest. But at least one idea should be salvaged. In the last years of the twentieth century, with the liberation of Eastern Europe, the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, and the qualified success of Kosovo, a new conviction began to stir in certain quarters of the liberal democracies - that regimes don't have an absolute right to slaughter their own citizens, that the democratic powers should intervene when it's feasible to stop the worst atrocities and create the kind of security in which democracy has a chance to grow. This was always a fragile minority view, and it has become a significant piece of the collateral damage inflicted by the Administration's blunders in Iraq. The war has everyone from George Will to Michael Moore sounding like an unsentimental realist with no patience for any American involvement in moral messes overseas. The closest analogy to the Iraq war is the aftermath of the First World War: we're in for a bitter reaction against "liberation" and "humanitarianism" and the other lofty words that sent American troops into Falluja and Najaf. The Administration has given idealism a bad name, and it will now take years to rescue Vaclav Havel from Paul Wolfowitz. American power has received a bloody comeuppance, but there's no happiness in that for Iraqis. They can't afford to give up on idealism, because they can't leave on June 30th. Perhaps the end of the occupation will liberate Americans from their thwarted wish to be appreciated and loved by Iraqis; perhaps it will also force Iraqis to stop blaming the occupying power for every car bomb. Then the other war, the one that really matters, will come back into view - the increasingly desperate fight between those Iraqis who want a decent future under representative government and those who want to destroy it. For better or for worse, it's a fight in which America continues to have an obligation as well as an interest. In Baghdad the other day, an Iraqi judge who has survived three attempts on his life as he tries to do his job said, "This is a battle, Mister. And we're all soldiers in this battle. So there are only two choices - either to win the battle or to die. There's no third choice." There was an echo of Paine in those words. |