Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Ya ahl al Iraq, ya ahl ash-shaqaq, ya ahl al kufra wa nifaq!
I’m using the old Iraqi 25 dinar note to illustrate this post as it portrays a group of Arab tribesmen on a traditional ghazwa, or raid. A ghazwa was both an opportunity for plunder as well as engaged in for entertainment. A ghazwa was pretty much what Saddam Husein did to Kuwait in 1990.
The Arabic above is the opening lines of what is the most famous political speech ever delivered in the Arab world. It was delivered from the pulpit in Kufa by the Governor of Iraq, Hajjaj bin Yousuf who was Governor from 694–714 C.E. and is reproduced in full below.
If you ask any of the Gulf Arabs, they will tell you that there are only two men in history who successfully governed Iraq, Hajjaj Bin Yusuf and Saddam Hussein. This opinion is held by both Shi’i as well as Sunni Muslims. I would have to add to that list Hammurabi who ruled from 1792 BC until 1750 BC and whose famous and justly harsh code of law was designed to order and control the people who lived and whose descendants still live in the Tigris- Euphrates valley. Little has changed in the intervening 37 centuries.
The core problem in governing Iraq is that the people are fractious and possess an inherent love of violence. As a senior member of the PLO once told me “You must always remember that the Iraqis like to drink blood.”
In fact, this propensity of the Iraqis to drink blood is ascribed to Hajjaj bin Yusuf by Al Mas’oudi in his book Marouj al-Dhahab (The Golden Meadows) written in the early 10th century.
When al-Hajjaj was born, he looked odd, and he had no hole in his posterior. So, his mother pierced a hole. And he would not suck the breast of his mother or of any nurse. His life was despaired of.
The devil appeared to them in the guise of a physician. On being told the story of the newborn infant, he said:
“Sacrifice a black kid for him and give him the animal’s blood to lick. On the second day, sacrifice a he-goat for him; on the third day a she-goat and on the fourth day a black snake. Make him lick the blood and smear his body with it. He will then be willing to suck from the breast.”
They did so and later on, as everyone knows, al-Hajjaj shed a vast amount of blood from human victims.
The general opinion in the Arab world is that the rest of the Arab world is better off when the Iraqis are fighting internally as when they unite, they invariably cause trouble for their neighbors such as occurred during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
It was Hajjaj bin Yusuf who pointed out this tendency to turbulence in his speech to the garrison at Kufa. Hajjaj was appointed governor of Iraq by the Caliph, Abd Al Malik ibn Marwan in 694 AD. Hajjaj clove to the same theory of Arab political governance best exemplified by the 2nd Caliph, ‘Umar ibn Al Khattab. ‘Umar knew his constituency well and had once famously summed up his philosophy of how to rule the new empire he inherited, thusly: “The Arab is an unruly camel, but I will tame him with my whip.”
Hajjaj was sent to restore order to the garrison towns of Kufa and Basra and bring the local tribes to heel. After the sermon following Friday prayers he got up in the pulpit and made this speech:
“O people of Iraq, O people of turbulence and hypocrisy, a lot of turbans and beards are visible here but very soon they are going to be wet with blood. Many heads are present in this assembly, which will soon be chopped off. Amir al-Muminin Abdul Malik examined his quiver and selecting the hardest and the most deadly arrow, shot it at you, in other words, he imposed me on you as your ruler. I will remedy all your ills and lack of discipline and straighten you out completely. You have been the center of much trouble and disruption. Now the time has come for you to be taught a lesson and your eyes to be opened. Amir al-Muminin has given instructions to disburse your salaries and send you to Muhallab to face the Khawarij. After the disbursement of the salaries, you are given three days time. If even a single soul is visible on the fourth day in Kufa, his head will be severed. Remember this is not an empty threat. You will yourselves see with your own eyes. I do what I say.”
Like Saddam Hussein, Hajjaj ruled by brute force but in doing so he brought order to the country. There is no disputing that Saddam and his regime were brutal beyond our comprehension in the West of how a government should act but the changes brought to Iraq through the war the US entered into against that country in no way addressed the key issue of the internal political instability of that country.
During the course of US involvement in Iraq, at one point, President Obama said that Iraqi leaders needed to come up with a political solution to governing their nation or “if they don’t there won’t be a military solution to the problem.” I have to ask myself what world he lives in. If he means that there won’t be an American military solution to the problem, then I have to agree with him. If he means that there won’t be an Iraqi military solution to the problem, then he was talking utter nonsense as there was clearly a military solution to the problem that developed on the ground. The issue is that Iraq is not and has never been a unified state unless unity was imposed upon it by outside force. The solution that was created by the Iraqis themselves in the aftermath of the US invasion was the de facto partition of an unviable non-organic political entity.
Obama then went on to say: “We gave Iraq a chance to have an inclusive democracy”. Is he kidding? What kind of a fantasy world does he and many of our policy makers live in? You can’t set aside 6,000 plus years of political history and social development because you wish it to be otherwise. Iraq is the way it is because it developed that way and not because we are projecting our wishful thinking on to it.
This wishful thinking came to full flower in the second Bush (Buwaish as I like to call W as Buwaish is an Arabic diminutive form of Bush) administration when W and his colleagues blundered into Iraq knowing little of the complexities of the situation there and fantasizing about the fact that they were going to transform that society and create something that approached some sort of pluralistic democracy. This idea has got to be one of the most delusional policies a US administration ever conceived. I have heard some truly breathtaking stories from contacts of mine in Riyadh concerning the depth of ignorance and lack of understanding of Iraq and the Arab people held by senior members of the Bush administration. One incredible example of this includes a decree issued by the American head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer in which he ordered the abolition of the tribes in Iraq, as if he could with the stroke of a pen erase millennia of familial, cultural and political structures. I also understand that besides this decree singularly failing that the final irony of its fatuousness is the fact that a couple of the major Iraqi tribes provided flank protection to the last of the US forces when they withdrew from the country.
The Buwaish Administration as we know, managed, through a policy of extraordinary ignorance to shatter the structure of the Ba’athist state in Iraq and replace it with a pseudo democratic Shi’i majority run state. They seem to have in part been suckered into this by Ahmed Chalibi. Chalibi was a prominent Shi’i businessman best known in the area because of his position as Chairman of Petra Bank in Jordan. He did not have a good reputation in the region. That he aspired to become President or Prime Minister of post Saddam Iraq seems not to be in question. How he managed to get the ear of senior Generals in the Pentagon and senior members of the Buwaish administration I cannot fathom. Yet he was a Shi’i and to have any chance of taking power he had to get rid of the Ba’athists and that included getting rid of Saddam’s Army.
We did it for him. The cost to us as a result was enormous. If one is to rule in the Middle East one has to think like and at times act like an Arab. I heard so many people in the region say why didn’t you just pay the Iraqi army soldiers two hundred dollars a month each to sit in their barracks. This would have doubled their pay. They would all have been happy and would have done what they like doing best, i.e., nothing. Instead, we put them all on the streets with their weapons. We created the mess that we then spent eight years and $1 trillion and 5,000 of our soldiers’ lives and no one knows how many Iraqi lives trying to clean up.
The net strategic result of US action in changing the regime in Iraq was to hand the Iranians additional political influence in the region on a silver platter. This is one of the greatest failures of American political policy in our history.
Once we lifted the tyranny of Saddam, we unleashed numerous local forces with competing political agendas some of which included, of course, driving us from the country. Once again there was a basic lack of understanding on the part of our leadership as to the nature of the war in which we were engaged. The Iraqi opposition did not share this lack of understanding. This is a problem which has dogged us in the region since the Iranian seizure of our embassy staff in Tehran in 1979. Carter’s limp wristed response to the hostage crisis convinced many in the Muslim world that the US was a paper tiger and did not have the stomach for a fight. This attitude was reinforced when Reagan pulled the Marines out of Beirut after the bombing of the Marine barracks there and was further reinforced by Clinton’s response to the Khobar towers bombing in 1996 and to the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar as Salaam in 1998. All he did was chuck a few cruise missiles around which really left the militant Islamists quaking in their sandals.
The problem that the US and the rest of the Western world face in the current conflict with hostile elements of Islam such as Al Qaida and ISIS is the fact that a modern pluralistic democratic society cannot fight a medieval war. The forces in the region that oppose western culture, ideas and civilization and that are dreaming of the re-creation of an Islamic State that will stretch from the Atlantic to Central Asia know this. Knowing that they cannot win major engagements and knowing even that they cannot really win small scale tactical engagements against better armed and trained units of American soldiers; they do know that if they can make the war bloody and brutal enough that the West is weak and decadent and that it does not have the stomach for this kind of fight and that our own media will help to turn public opinion against such wars.
And guess what, it is a strategy that has worked. We are out of Iraq. We are out of Afghanistan. We have shied away from intervention in Syria and the political landscape of the Middle East has changed without our influencing it in ways that are actually in our interests and certainly still within our power. It is a stunning abnegation of our leadership role.
As I said, the heart of the problem is that a modern pluralistic state cannot fight a medieval war. The only response to the first US marine being killed in Fallujah that would have worked would have been to take every man woman and child from the district where he died and to have killed all of them. We can’t do it. No modern democratic society can do it. The Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258. Soon afterwards there was a rebellion. The Mongols took everyone from an entire town and put them to death and then piled their heads up on the main road outside of Baghdad. There were no further revolts. Hajjaj bin Yousuf understood how to govern Iraq and so did Saddam Hussein. The leadership of the Islamic State understood this. We did not and we cannot.
I was told an interesting story by an Iraqi Chaldean Christian which further illustrates this attitude towards governance in Iraq. He said that shortly before his execution someone asked Saddam Hussein if he were put back in power could he restore stability to the country.
Saddam is reputed to have said, “Of course!”
When asked how long it would take him, he said, “A day!”
“How?”
He said, “First thing in the morning I’ll go for a swim and then have a nice breakfast by the pool. Then I’ll send for some cigars and read the newspapers and have a smoke. In the afternoon I’ll send for my tailor and get a few new suits made up.”
“Yes, but how will you restore order?”
“In the evening I’ll put twenty-five thousand people to death!”
There will always be a lot of blood drunk in Iraq in all the days to come as there has been since the establishment of the Sumerian Empire in around 2900 BCE. But then as a leading Kuwaiti banker once told me; “You have to remember that Iraq was the first nation on earth that Satan came to when he came to Babylon. There was a good reason he chose Iraq, as the human potential there was so great for him to work with.”
