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| Volume X, Winter 2003, Number 4 |
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| EXCERPT: Military Power and State Formation in Modern Iraq |
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| Ahmed S. Hashim |
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Dr. Hashim is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies-Strategic Research Department, U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed in this study are those of the author and do not represent policy or opinions of the U.S. Naval War College or the departments of the Navy or Defense. This paper is a summary of the author's book-length manuscript on military power and state formation in Iraq.
This study will address the evolu-
tion of military power and
security and their relationship to
state formation in Iraq from 1921 to the present. Throughout history, military power and other types of security and law-and-order infrastructures have been intricately tied to the emergence and evolution of the state. The eminent German sociologist Max Weber once wrote that the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends, but rather in terms of the specific means peculiar to it. He defined the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."1 Once they have achieved control over the instruments of violence, rulers use them to further build up their states, to provide law and order, to repel interlopers, to oppress their own people, or to engage in policies of aggrandizement.2 Iraqi rulers have misused these instruments of violence against both their own people and others, and more often than not have been poorly served by them. As the dominant power in post-Saddam Iraq, the United States has to address, among other key issues, this relationship between state formation, security and military power as it begins the process of reconstructing that hapless country. For the United States to succeed, it needs also to avoid the mistakes made by the British, who created Iraq in 1921, and by successive independent rulers.
Iraq was a closed society for over 30 years under the Baath party (1968-2003), but the political literature on the country has burgeoned. Most of it has dealt with political history, patterns of state formation,3 political economy,4 the roles of the respective ethno-sectarian communities,5 and increasingly with the combat capabilities of the Iraqi armed forces and the patterns of civil-military relations.6 However, there has been no study of the relationship between military power and security on the one hand and state-formation on the other. This introductory study is intended to be the first step in redressing this lacuna.
1 Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p.78.
2 For details, see Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000); Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
3 The best studies of Iraqi state-formation on which I have relied heavily in this historical survey are Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Baathists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Pierre-Jean Luizard, La Question Irakienne (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Samira Haj, The Making of Iraq, 1900-1963: Capital, Power and Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985); Majid Khadduri's trilogy, Independent Iraq: A Study in Iraqi Politics Since 1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951); Republican Iraq: A Study in Iraqi Politics since the Revolution of 1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); and Socialist Iraq: A Study in Iraqi Politics since 1968 (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1978).
4 On political economy, see Isam al-Khafaji, "In Search of Legitimacy: The Post-Rentier Iraqi State," in Social Sciences Research Council -- Contemporary Conflicts at http://conflicts.ssrc.org/Iraq/khafaji/pdf/.
5 Among the best studies on communities of Iraq, see Faleh Abdul Jabar, Ayatollahs, Sufis and Ideologues: State, Religion and Social Movements in Iraq (London: Saqi Books, 2002); Faleh Abdul Jabar and Hosham Dawod, eds.; Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2003); Faleh Abdul Jabar, The Shiite Movement in Iraq (London: Saqi Books, 2003); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shiis of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) Second Paperback Edition.
6 On civil-military relations under Saddam, see Ahmed Hashim, "Saddam Husayn and Civil-Military Relations in Iraq: The Quest for Legitimacy and Power," Middle East Journal; Andrew Parasiliti and Sinan Anton, "Friends in Need, Foes to Heed: The Iraqi Military in Politics," Middle East Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 2000, pp. 130-140.
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