For the last few days there’s been a blogospheric food fight, sparked by South Carolina Sen. (and Republican presidential aspirant) Lindsey Graham’s complaint that President Obama was responsible for “losing Iraq”, a judgment in which as noted by Tom Maguire, the New York Times concurred. John Hinderaker piled on. As was to be expected John Amato denied it. I have a vague recollection of some of the president’s defenders making the same argument that Noam Chomsky did about “losing China” (the original country to which the appellation was applied more than a half century ago): it wasn’t ours to lose.
Now, honestly, none of that interests me. What does interest me is a little quote from Gen. David Petraeus that Tom Maguire dredged out of an interview conducted with him in March. Here it is:
Where I think a broader comment is perhaps warranted has to do with the way we came to think about Iraq and, to a certain extent, the broader region over the last few years. There was certainly a sense in Washington that Iraq should be put in our rearview mirror, that whatever happened here was somewhat peripheral to our national security and that we could afford to redirect our attention to more important challenges. Much of this sentiment was very understandable given the enormous cost of our efforts in Iraq and the endless frustrations that our endeavor here encountered.
In retrospect, a similar attitude existed with respect to the civil war in Syria — again, a sense that developments in Syria constituted a horrible tragedy to be sure, but a tragedy at the outset, at least, that did not seem to pose a threat to our national security.
But in hindsight, few, I suspect, would contend that our approach was what it might — or should — have been. In fact, if there is one lesson that I hope we’ve learned from the past few years, it is that there is a linkage between the internal conditions of countries in the Middle East and our own vital security interests.
The emphasis is mine and it is there that my questions arise. If the internal affairs of other countries, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are also our internal affairs which would give us the right to intervene in them, how is that to be distinguished from colonialism? Doesn’t the same argument apply to Russia’s intervening in Ukraine? Or in Syria?
I don’t think there is such a distinction.
I, on the other hand, would prefer to consider our relationship with the Middle East in terms of mitigating risks rather than “vital security interests”. How do we mitigate the risks posed to us by unstable, malignant, or even outright antithetical governments in the Middle East? I can think of a half dozen different ways, none of which involve going to war with them or overthrowing their governments.
I think by “internal conditions,” Petraeus is referring to failed states, but the context is also clearly preventative, i.e. we must act before they fail. His preferred actions appear to be Wilsonian, support an inclusive moderating Iraqi government, and support an anti-ISIS faction in Syria, presumably outside Assad’s control. The question does not remove the alternative approach of supporting strong-men who repress their people and offer the promise of stability. In the context of post-colonial thought, it should be pointed out, that the United States is always “supporting” something, i.e. when the U.S. is not intervening against a bad actor, it is supporting said actor.
I would probably go further than Petraeus and observe that the U.S. will intervene in the face of instability/failed states in certain parts of the world. This would be the case at least in the heart of the Middle East since the Suez Crisis, and the Eisenhower Doctrine. The U.S. would later extend support to non-Communist friends in the Middle East under the Nixon Doctrine, then the Carter Doctrine essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine to the Persian Gulf, and the Reagan Corollary extended the Carter Doctrine to protecting the stability of countries in the Gulf. The Clinton doctrine committed the U.S. to stop mass genocide — the killing of a large group of people because of race, religion and ethnicity. And the Bush doctrine promised to pursue nations that support terrorism.
What I take from this series of post WWII doctrines and corollaries, some arising from a situation in the Middle East, others not, but far more applicable to the Middle East than any other region, is that the U.S. will intervene in the region at some point in any extended conflict. My comment is predictive, not prescriptive.
This intervention is not acquisitive like those of Russia or China. They have by and large received backing from other Western nations or the U.N. The contention under dispute (that you don’t want to discuss) is that Iraqi political leaders agreed to a retention of U.S. forces in Iraq, but the dispute boils down to whether this decision could be made by the leaders or needed a parliamentary measure. This is pretty weak tea for colonialism accusations.
An “inclusive moderating Iraqi government” wasn’t one of the available choices any more than a Syrian opposition of moderate Islamists is an available choice there.
In retrospect I should have supported in Iraq what I’ve supported all along in Afghanistan: what Ralph Peters has described as a “small, lethal” residual force, mostly with the mission of counter-terrorism. I certainly didn’t count on the Iraqi government being as incompetent as it has been or on our arming and training DAESH in Syria which is, apparently, what we’ve done (since “moderate” in Syria appears to be a matter of context rather than of personnel).
I’m perfectly willing to say Obama lost Iraq – just so long as it is acknowledged that he had a lot of help from several previous Administrations and Congresses of both parties.
…
As for the continuing mess in MENA: It seems to me that we’re still sorting out the fallout of the collapse of several different empires, especially the Ottoman Empire, as well as figuring out to exist with a combination of a fanatical extremist religion in an age of tremendous amplification of the power of an individual to do damage. That ain’t easy work.
I think by “internal conditions,†Petraeus is referring to failed states, but the context is also clearly preventative, i.e. we must act before they fail.
That’s both correct and the source of the problem. Petraeus is as much a worshipper at the cult of American Exceptionalism as the rudest, flag-waiving hick. Assuming we can successfully intervene in the affairs of a failing state is to assume they have no internal affairs, no history or culture to impede our efforts so long as our devotion is absolute. Iraq was lost in 2006 when the insurgency exploded across the country; after that it was only a question of when, not if, the occupation would collapse.
Ellipses: I think I’d agree about the empire business, if you included the British, French, Soviet and the historic or mythic Islamic empires. The U.S. helped push three of those out, and we seem to be left with a parody of European nation-states in places where nationalism is weak, polarized against the promise of the early Islamic empire.
The Soviet influence is probably under-appreciated as only a few Middle Eastern states, largely on the periphery were actually Marxist, but until the fall of the Soviet Union there was an active Leftist/Marxist polity in many countries that agitated for modern reforms and had influence. That ideology was largely discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union, and helped increase the power of Islamacists. (Meanwhile many of the former Leftists/Marxist elites have fled to Europe and America to complain bitterly about being abandoned to medievalists.)
I don’t think there’s much doubt that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has left a vacuum. Additionally, my suspicion is that the colonization of the Arabs, not a recent phenomenon but one that goes all the way back to the 12th century, is as much a symptom of their social dysfunction as it is a cause of it.
I don’t have a problem with including the Ottoman’s, but when one talks about problems in the Middle East, many of the areas under discussion were never under Ottoman control, and many others were under nominal control for hundreds of years, particularly Iraq. I don’t know that it is much difference qualitatively than French/English control over major export centers or payoffs to local political elites. I think the case is often very overstated, and in many respects it has 30-40 years that have been revealing.
. . . it has been the last 30-40 years that have been revealing.
This ties in with observations in the comments thread of another post. We’ve never colonized the Middle East but the English and French have, at least not in any sense in which we haven’t colonized Denmark. Somehow anti-colonial anger has been deflected onto us.
“Somehow”
We took over where the colonial powers left off. In our zeal to fight the Cold War, PD is correct i think about Soviet influence in the area, we thought it acceptable to interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations, and as we know, we haven’t done that good of a job at it. We supported the strong men that came to rule in the ME countries. We haven’t done nearly all of the bad things of which we are accused, but we have done enough that it makes it easy for these poorly run countries to blame some of their troubles on us and have the populace believe it.
Steve