Douglas Feith, we learn in a profile on him in the May 9 issue of the New Yorker, has a large black and white portrait of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, hanging over the couch in his library. Feith, who as No. 3 man at the Pentagon and a prominent member of the cabal of neocons in the Bush administration, was a chief architect of the war in Iraq.
Like other neocons, including Paul Wolfowitz, who told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter in Nov. 2002 that he would be “astonished” if there were instability in postwar Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld, who made the prescient observation on the eve of invasion that Iraqis would line their streets to pelt American soldiers with flowers, is unrepentant.
Asked by Jeffry Goldberg, who wrote the New Yorker profile, to describe some “incorrect decisions” that he and the other neocons may have made in planning for the aftermath of war, he responded disingenuously: “A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out.”
Clearly, the US does not have that kind of timeline luxury.
The long and short of it is that, unfortunately, the price for the mistakes the administration made for going to war now falls on Iraqis to pay — mistakes such as imagining that postwar reconstruction of Iraq was going to follow the same facile line as that, say, of postwar Germany; disbanding the country’s army and police without pensions; instituting large scale de-Baathification, whose end result was loss of jobs by bureaucrats who had committed no crimes but who now could not feed their families; and ignoring the fact that an occupation army, regardless of how benign its intentions, will in no time find that it has worn out its welcome.
Now we know the United States has shelved that baloney about “democratization” (amazing, is it not, how a wholesome word like that has come to acquire such sinister connotations in the minds of ordinary Arabs?) and reduced its ambitions in Iraq to merely insuring the emergence of enough stability there so it can bring the troops home. And to do that, Americans plan to give Iraqi security forces, who currently lack even basic professional training, enough know-how to win their own war against the insurgency.
Oh, yes, the insurgency, surely one of the most enigmatic of resistance movements in modern times has, according to an official count released by Interior Minister Bayan Jabr last Thursday, killed 12,000 Iraqis in the course of the last 18 months, and 850 since the new government was formed. And we await the figures on how many it has maimed.
Enigmatic indeed. This insurgency’s strategy is to have no strategy at all. Unlike other resistance movements, it has made no effort to win the people’s support by winning “hearts and minds.” Instead, it has killed them indiscriminately, in their market places, their homes and their mosques. It shows no interest in gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the international community, including the Arab world. It has fielded no recognizable political program for a future Iraq, no well-defined ideology, no popular leader, no articulated cause, and no unified goal.
If the insurgents’ objective is to drive the coalition forces out and then get to rule Iraq, they surely are going about it in a destructive manner. True, most insurgencies, whether national liberation movements against entrenched colonizers or resistance movements against foreign occupiers, have used some measure of intimidation against the populace, or those segments in it not responsive to their objectives, but the caveat here is this: Do not under any circumstances alienate more of your people than is good for you. That was a lesson that insurgents all the way from China to Vietnam, and from Algeria to Nicaragua scrupulously adhered to.
Communist insurgents in Greece in the 1940s, in Malaya and the Philippines after World War II, and in El Salvador in the 1980s, opted to ignore that lesson, and ended up paying dearly by turning people against them, the very people among whom they were, as guerrillas, to be like fish in the water, and without whose support they could not sustain their rebellion — thus in the end fighting themselves into irrelevance and then oblivion.
Uprisings are known to develop their own logic and momentum, but only where that logic speaks to, about and from the mass sentiment of the population on whose behalf that uprising has been mounted, and where that momentum is in lockstep with the sensibility of society at large.
You attack worshippers praying in mosques and ordinary folk shopping in market places, and pursue a tactic guaranteed to engender sectarian conflict, and then you will not endear yourself to anyone.
If the Iraqi insurgency’s goal is to rid Iraq of the American presence, then that goal may resonate somewhat among a lot of Iraqis, especially those who blame Americans for the mess they are in today, not to mention those who are simply resentful at the idea of being occupied. But if the insurgency is trying to topple the government, identifying it as a “collaborationist regime,” a la that of Vichy in France during the Nazi occupation, it surely has a problem here.
It just so happens that the new government in Baghdad, competent or not to lead Iraq, was democratically chosen by the people of Iraq in free elections. And that by itself should represent a monumental obstacle, as no less an astute commentator on the theory of revolution than Che Guevara would tell you.
“Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote ... and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality,” he wrote, “the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.”
In a letter to James Madison in 1787, at age 44, after he’d been around the block a few times, Thomas Jefferson confided: “I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
How true. Rebellions, whether mounted collectively by a social system or individually by a human system (in an attempt to reorder one’s existential condition), act as a tension-producing agent that sharpens our life’s contradictions, propelling us forward beyond our fixed meaning. (Like me, you no doubt see echoes of the Maoist concept of the “continuous revolution” here.)
But you have to couple Jefferson’s psychologically cogent observation with what Albert Camus, the noted Pieds Noires existentialist author, who was there during the Algerian uprising against French rule in the late 1950s, had to say about the matter.
“It is not rebellion itself which is noble,” he wrote in his book, The Plague (La Peste), “but the demands it makes on us.”
I do not know of any demands, moral or otherwise, that the Iraqi rebellion is making on us, other than the pursuit of a nihilistic cause that is no cause at all, and of the cheap thrills derived from destruction, violence and death, senseless destruction, violence and death enacted for their own sake, independent of any constructive program. Meanwhile, people like Douglas Feith sit in their library, sipping on a snifter of Courvoisier as they salute the black and white portrait of Theodore Herzl, snickering about how they made it all possible.
