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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy, by Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala. Cornell University Press, 2006. 354 pages. $18.45.
Jeffrey Record
Professor of strategy, Air War College (his views are entirely his own)
Iraq in Fragments is but the latest in an avalanche of books chronicling America’s stupidity and incompetence in Iraq. It follows, among others, my own Dark Victory: America’s Second War against Iraq (Naval Institute Press, 2004); Larry Diamond’s Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Henry Holt, 2005); David Phillips’s Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Westview Press, 2005); George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005); Michael Gordon’s and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (Pantheon, 2006); Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (Simon and Schuster, 2006); Rory Stewart’s The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Harcourt, 2006); Bob Woodward’s State of Denial (Simon and Schuster, 2006); and Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin, 2006).
As the United States approaches the fifth year of an utterly unnecessary war, and as a desperate White House embarks yet again on a “new” strategy to salvage America’s fortunes in Iraq, the scope of perhaps the worst-ever U.S. foreign policy debacle becomesincreasingly apparent. By destroying both the Baathist regime in Baghdad and (unintentionally) the Iraqi state, the United States forced Iraqis to fall back on sectarian, tribal, clan, and other sub-state loyalties. Coupled with the U.S. occupation’s failure to construct a new Iraqi state commanding national political legitimacy and capable of providing basic services — e.g., potable water, garbage collection, electricity, employment, security— the result was a fragmentation of political authority that portends Iraq’s disintegration.
The purpose of Iraq in Fragments is “to describe and explain the U.S.-state-building project in Iraq and its legacy,” and the book’s central arguments are that “political authority in Iraq has fragmented along many axes — not just along Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia lines — and that the characteristics of the U.S. state-building project have contributed significantly to that fragmentation.” Herring, a senior lecturer in international politics at the University of Bristol, and Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, contend that Iraq’s descent into sectarian war was not the product of the Baathist regime’s demise but rather of U.S. arrogance, ignorance, and fecklessness. Surprised by the collapse of the Iraqi state and clueless about how to reconstruct it, the Bush administration stumbled from one bad decision to another. Surprised by the insurgency and equally brainless about how to deal with it, the Pentagon bulled its way into a counterinsurgency strategy that recruited far more insurgents than it killed.
America’s nightmare in Iraq began with the
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collapse of the Iraqi state in April 2003, with its central institutions ceasing to operate, [which] represented more than just a short-term political problem for the U.S.-led Coalition which could be remedied through technical assistance. It also heralded the beginning of a multi-faceted struggle for control of particular state institutions. Furthermore, a wide range of actors, notably tribal, religious, and militia leaders, asserted their practical autonomy from the Iraqi government even if they accepted the notion of the potential authority of the Iraqi state. Many of these actors outside the control of the Coalition have established forms of rule that have proved more resilient than many of the Coalition’s own governing institutions.
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Things might have been different had the United States invaded Iraq with sufficient force to seize control of the country; retained the services of Iraq’s regular army and its Baathist technical community; insisted on a political process that generated necessary political legitimacy among the Sunni Arab community; mustered the resources and skill to restore basic services to Iraqis and prosperity to Iraq’s economy; displayed an understanding of Iraq’s history and culture; and possessed a strategic culture that insulated it from violating every established principle of successful counterinsurgency.
But such was not to be. The United States wanted “to transform Iraq from an impoverished dictatorship to a prosperous, functioning, multi-ethnic democracy with an open economy that would act as an ally of the U.S. and a role model for the other states of the Middle East.” The Bush administration, however, never understood that most Iraqis, while happy to see Saddam gone, had no experience with democracy and were in any event hardly keen to serve as agents of American neoconservatives’ strategic fantasies. Most Iraqis did not want to be what the White House wanted them to be, and as the occupation deepened and its failures multiplied more and more Iraqis became insurgents or sought the protection of sectarian militias.
The U.S. response to the insurgency simply made matters worse. Herring and Rangwala convincingly argue that
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the failure at the political level to bridge the gap between the state and society-the use of strategies which prioritise attempts to exert control over state-building, and the lack of an integrative national political process-have been fundamentally important in shaping policy towards the insurgency. As the political process has not generated sufficient legitimacy, in central Iraq especially, to influence the population to back the Coalition against the insurgents, the U.S. military has relied on coercion, as it has historically when propping up a government which could not otherwise hold on to power.
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The predisposition toward coercion was reinforced by a distinctive American approach to war that holds military victory to be war’s object because it dismisses war as a continuation of politics. As in Vietnam, the U.S. Army in Iraq approached counterinsurgency as a purely military rather than a predominately political challenge; the solution was simply to kill or capture suspected insurgents — never mind the demonstrably more successful although more manpower-intensive and time-consuming alternatives of physically and politically isolating the insurgents. And given the U.S. military’s profoundly conventional mindset and cultural ignorance, brute force, often based on poor intelligence, predictably became the hallmark of U.S. counterinsurgency in Iraq.
To be sure, and to its credit, the Army belatedly recognized the errors of its ways; it has rewritten its counterinsurgency doctrine to conform to the long-established principles of successful counterinsurgency and will apply the new doctrine under Gen. David Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq. But the damage has already been done. Sectarian violence has, moreover, surpassed insurgent violence as the primary threat to American fortunes in Iraq. More important is the reality that no change in tactics can redeem the disastrous prewar decision to invade Iraq with woefully insufficient force to seize control of the country and establish order. It was this decision that arguably doomed the entire American enterprise from the very beginning. (And it is nothing short of delusional to believe the White House’s January 2007 decision to plus up U.S. forces in Iraq by an additional 21,500 troops and expand their tactical latitude will alter the strategic course of the war; the “surge,” four years late and at least 250,000 troops short, is a confession of strategic bankruptcy.) The Pentagon almost certainly will re-embrace the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force so loudly condemned by the same prominent neoconservatives who have shamelessly jumped the Bush administration’s ship in Iraq. (In 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur entered Japan with 525,000 U.S. troops even though Emperor Hirohito had already publicly legitimized Japan’s surrender. During the following seven years of U.S. rule in Japan there was not a single act of politically motivated violence against American occupation forces.)
Herring and Rangwala believe that the “central legacy” of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is “the fragmentation of political authority” because American policy makers assumed that what they wanted for Iraq the Iraqis themselves also wanted.
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The high degree of U.S. involvement in the functioning of the Iraqi state lends itself to accounts of the Iraqi state in terms of U.S. imperialism. This view resonates with those within U.S. policy-circles who take direct or indirect U.S. rule of another country as both necessary for U.S. interests and also benign for that country. Early in the occupation, Iraqis soon found that the task of state building was being kept out of their hands by the U.S., which was determined only to hand it over to those it felt would proceed in a direction acceptable to Washington. The U.S. goal was to lock in a state with the kind of economy, politics and foreign policy it favored, but it saw no distinction between that and the desires and what it regarded as genuine and freedom-loving Iraqis.
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Iraq in Fragments is a serious and persuasive assessment of the unintended consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Splendidly researched and thoroughly documented, it sheds new light on what went so terribly wrong for the United States in Iraq. It should be required reading for Middle East specialists, foreign policy experts, and students of international relations in general. Even those neoconservatives who thought the invasion of Iraq was a grand idea might learn something from Iraq in Fragments, though I doubt it. They are too busy salivating over the prospect of launching a stupid new war against Iran.
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