Writing through the rubble

While clouds of destruction hang over Iraq, a set of new books sheds light on how America bungled the war, and on the hope that lingers in small Iraqi towns.

By Salon staff

Read more: War, Books, Iraq, Gary Kamiya, Reviews, Book reviews, Baghdad, Weapons of mass destruction, Iraq War

Salon composite / REUTERS photo

U.S. Marines fire a howitzer in Anbar province, Dec. 21, 2006.

March 21, 2008 | It's been five years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- enough time to start looking back, with the hope of better understanding where we are now. We have picked an assortment of titles from among the books published this spring that sift through the documents and memories of invasion, war and occupation: a scathing portrait of a mismanaged war; a humorous compilation of quotations by those very experts who mismanaged the war; a memoir by an Iraqi-American of his years in war-torn Baghdad; and a biography of Ahmad Chalabi, whom the book's author dubbed "the man who pushed America to war."

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As the full dimensions of the Iraq nightmare have become apparent, the war's supporters have taken to insisting that it could have been won had it been executed properly. If only the United States had planned for the postwar period, stopped the looting, not disbanded the Iraqi army, and not banned the Baath Party, they say, it could have had a successful outcome.

Like all after-the-fact assertions, this one cannot be proved one way or the other. But in his superb new book "Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq," the British journalist Jonathan Steele makes a powerful case that it was not the poor decisions made during the occupation that doomed the United States, it was the occupation itself. The only way the U.S. and Britain could have succeeded, Steele argues, was by withdrawing their troops within a year or less after deposing Saddam. Military occupations always arouse resentment, and in the Middle East they are especially doomed to failure. Acutely aware of the West's long history of imperialist exploitation of their country and the Middle East in general, Iraqis were suspicious of U.S. motivations to begin with. They were also fiercely proud and nationalistic, and far more religious than the Bush administration realized. By staying too long, America and Britain brought already-simmering nationalist and religious outrage in Iraq to a boil -- and doomed their mission.

Just as important, Steele points out, Iraq isn't just any country -- it's an Arab and Muslim country in the heart of the Middle East. And for political, historical and cultural reasons, an occupation by Western powers was inevitably going to be disastrous. Britain's long history of imperialist meddling, in particular its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 1918 and its betrayal of Arab nationalist hopes, meant that Arabs viewed it with hostility. The United States was even more disliked because of its one-sided support for Israel and its long exploitation of the region. Steele writes that "the enormity of having Western tanks on Arab streets revives memories of an era of imperialism that was supposed to be over; the foreigners' presence brings back every Arab's latent sense of shame."

These points should have been obvious. Scholars like Rashid Khalidi had long warned that for Arabs, history is ever-present. But U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair chose to ignore the West's colonialist history, Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism within Iraq. Instead, they clung to the bizarrely simplistic belief that Saddam's sins had simply erased history, and that Iraqis would be so overjoyed to be liberated that they would welcome a Western invasion and occupation. Steele recounts that four months before the invasion, Blair brought in six academics from outside his yes-man circle of official advisors to brief him. One expert, a distinguished Arabist from Cambridge named George Joffe, recalled that "we all said pretty much the same thing: Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don't imagine you'll be welcomed." Blair's response was simply to say, "But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?"

Another expert present at the meeting told Steele, " I felt that he [Blair] wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervor."

Unlike the administrations that rushed myopically to war, Steele has both a solid grasp of Mideast history and a firsthand knowledge of Iraq and its people. An award-winning foreign correspondent for the Guardian, he covered the 2003 invasion and has done eight stints in Iraq since. One of the most illuminating and valuable parts of his book is his reporting on the attitudes of Iraqis living in Amman, Jordan, just before the invasion began. Stationed there in preparation for the war, Steele interviewed 20 Iraqis, some refugees, others students and businessmen who traveled back and forth to Baghdad.

Steele acknowledges that his survey was small and unscientific, but asserts that "it conveyed what seemed to be a plausibly accurate sense of a nation's mood." Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the Iraqis Steele talked to were vehemently opposed to Saddam. But that didn't mean they welcomed the invasion. Several did, but most had grave reservations or opposed the war outright. Many feared a chaotic aftermath. One young student feared that the vast Shiite underclass living in the Baghdad slum of Saddam City would engage in massive looting -- a comment, Steele points out, which "underlined a point that many Western analysts failed to understand -- that the tensions that were to explode in Iraq after the invasion often had a class dimension." One man worried that the Americans might not leave quickly: "The Iraqi people will rebuild their house the day after Saddam goes. If the US tries to meddle, we will fight them to the last breath. Iraqis hate Saddam, but they love their country more. That's why Iraqis are torn about the invasion."

The two recurring themes raised by the Iraqis, Steele notes, were "suspicions of the Americans and national pride. Failure to understand this Iraqi patriotism was the single biggest mistake made by Bush and Blair ... It was this inability to put themselves into the mindset of the Iraqis that doomed the occupation to defeat." Just as Bush absurdly claimed that jihadist terrorists attacked America "because they hate our freedom," so coalition authorities denied that the insurgency had increasingly broad popular support, insisting that it comprised only the "remnants" of Saddam's regime and foreign jihadis. "If the coalition did not even start by accepting that many Iraqis saw legitimate reasons for resistance," Steele asks, "how could the Americans and British ever win people's hearts and minds?"

Steele believes that if the United States had pulled its troops out quickly, it could have survived Iraqi suspicion and hostility. He cites numerous cases in which Iraqis from all walks of life and sectarian backgrounds warned that the Iraqi people had not yet turned against the Americans, but that they needed to leave soon. A graffito written in Baghdad in 2003 sums up their viewpoint poignantly: "All donne, go home."

But early withdrawal was never an option, Steele notes, because for its neocon architects, the war was not really about liberating the Iraqi people -- it was about larger geostrategic goals, including "removing an independent anti-Israeli ruler" and securing "access to the country's oil reserves." Steele notes, "The neoconservatives always wanted a prolonged occupation as a way to put new pressure on Iran and Syria, develop US military bases on Iraqi soil, and send a message of US dominance across the Middle East."

Contrary to revisionist beliefs, Steele argues, the U.S. decrees disbanding the Iraqi army and banning the Baathists were not the ultimate reasons the occupation failed. The decrees made things worse, he writes, but the real problem was that the United States refused to name a date for withdrawal. That convinced Iraqis, who had been willing to give America a grace period, that the U.S. had come not as a liberating force, but as occupiers.

And after the insurgency began, instead of recognizing that this was a war the United States could never win and getting out, Bush put the issue "in macho terms of 'not letting the enemy win.'" He has clung to that doomed approach ever since. "The more US troops died, the greater became the temptation to stay in Iraq so that there could be no perception of the US giving up or retreating. The dynamic is as old as war itself."

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