World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [153]
49 Like other market-dominant minorities around the world, perhaps America should try to turn symbolism around in our favor. There is no long-term promise in retreating into belligerent isolationism, or glorifying American parochialism—a recent number-one country song celebrates not knowing “the difference between Iraq and Iran.” It is difficult to see, in any event, how a little generosity and humility could possibly hurt.
Afterword to the Anchor Edition
In March 2003, three months after the publication of World on Fire, the United States went to war with Iraq, commencing our preemptive strike with the awesome bombing of Baghdad. We went to war without United Nations authorization and without the support of traditional NATO allies such as France, Germany, and Canada. Of the major European powers, Great Britain alone, led by Tony Blair, fought beside us.
The U.S. government’s principal justification for war was national security—specifically Saddam Hussein’s sponsorship of terrorism and the “grave danger to global peace and security” posed by Iraq’s “massive stockpile” of biological and chemical weapons and its efforts to produce nuclear weapons. At the same time, an equally powerful sub-theme—formally laid out in “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” issued by the White House in September 2002—was the U.S. government’s commitment, including through military means, to replacing brutal, repressive dictators like Saddam Hussein with free market and democratic institutions. According to the Strategy, “We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” And in his March 31, 2003 Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, President George W. Bush explained that “disarming and liberating Iraq” was merely “a first step” toward “the development of a free market democracy in Iraq.”
The U.S.-British victory in Iraq was swift and decisive. Despite Saddam Hussein’s bizarre claims that “The enemy . . . is in trouble now” and “Victory will soon be ours,” his reviled Ba’athist regime fell in just over forty days, prompting dancing and cheering—not to mention looting—throughout Iraqi streets. Since that initial jubilation, however, one thing has become painfully clear: The United States dramatically underestimated the difficulty of turning Iraq into a liberal, Western-style free market democracy.
Before the war, optimists (including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) pointed to American successes in reconstructing post-Second-World-War Germany and Japan, both of which transitioned smoothly to free market democracy. But neither postwar Germany nor Japan is an apt comparison for Iraq, for one simple reason: Neither country was riven by ethnic, religious, or tribal schisms remotely comparable to those of Iraq. By 1945, Germany had exterminated most of its non-Aryans and Japan had for centuries been strikingly ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Unfortunately, a far better parallel for post-Saddam Iraq is post-Tito Yugoslavia.
Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s ethnic and religious dynamics are extremely complicated. They involve cross-cutting conflicts across Kurds, Shias, Christians, and Sunnis; many horrendous massacres; wholesale confiscations; and deep feelings of hatred and need for revenge. In particular, Iraq’s Shias represent a 60 percent long oppressed majority in Iraq. It is impossible to know what kind of candidate—fundamentalist or moderate, conciliatory or vengeful—they would vote for in free elections. It is clear that the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s brutal (but secular) Ba’athist police state, while long overdue, has also fueled religious demagoguery among vying Islamic clerics and unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements throughout the country. Needless to say, these extremist movements are intensely anti-American, anti-foreign- investment, and illiberal. They have especially grievous implications for girls and women.
Perhaps because of beliefs in the “melting pot” and the United