Resurrecting Empire Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Perils of Ignoring History

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Legacy of the Western Encounter with the Middle East

  CHAPTER TWO

  America, the West, and Democracy in the Middle East

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Middle East: Geostrategy and Oil

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The United States and Palestine

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Raising the Ghosts of Empire

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  THE PERILS OF IGNORING HISTORY

  I wrote this book before, during, and immediately after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, out of a desire to warn against what I believed was a looming disaster. It was first published in April 2004. I write today against the background of twenty months of a chaotic, mismanaged American occupation of Iraq. Before and after the book appeared, I spoke publicly about mistakes I perceived the United States was making in the Middle East.1 Everywhere I spoke, I found deep misgivings about the war, and a strong undercurrent of unease about the Bush administration’s approach to the Middle East. This book is an attempt to explain why there are solid, historical grounds for such misgivings and such unease.

  As the United States has marched into the Middle East as an occupying power responsible for creating a new political order in a major Arab country, seemingly stepping into the boots of former colonial rulers, it is difficult for someone familiar with the history of this region to avoid a sense of déjà vu. Nothing so ambitious, or so fraught with peril, has been tried there since just after World War I, when Britain and France engaged in their last burst of colonial expansion under the guise of League of Nations mandates. Their effort was strongly resisted by Middle Easterners, but it also resulted in the creation of many of the states, and produced many of the problems, in that region today. This historical context was largely ignored in the lead-up to war. Even less attention was paid to how Middle Easterners perceived American actions in terms of that recent history.

  Moreover, as an American who grew up during the Vietnam War era, it is hard to avoid a fear that the ghosts most of us thought had been permanently laid to rest then—the ghosts of American military overreach and imperial arrogance—are back to haunt us. And for an American academic of Arab ancestry with family in many parts of the Middle East, who travels to the region regularly, and with students and colleagues teaching and studying all over it, it is hard to remain silent when it is crystal clear that what is happening there bears no resemblance whatsoever to the optimistic picture painted by the Bush administration.

  This is particularly painful for me as a historian, because most of the extensive public debate about the relationship between the United States and the Middle East since September 11, 2001, has been taking place in a historical vacuum. The debate has been largely driven by denigrating stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East. It has rarely been grounded in a careful reading of how the history of the region’s stormy recent encounters with the West may affect a new phase of American involvement in the vast area between Morocco and central Asia, and between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

  A word on differing attitudes to history is in order here. One of the aims of this book is to give readers some of the basic history of the modern Middle East. This includes in particular the history of Western occupation and indigenous resistance, of attempts to establish constitutional systems in Middle Eastern states, of Western control of Middle Eastern oil, and of Western, and especially American, involvement in the Palestine question. Such knowledge is sorely lacking in the United States. But many Americans consider history, any history, as irrelevant to the present and the future. Perhaps this peculiarly American lack of interest in history—especially the history of others—is rooted in the fact that the United States is a vast continental island that never in its own history suffered foreign occupation, and that for the last two centuries had little reason to fear attack on its homeland by others—at least not until 9/11. In this providential isolation, the United States has been nearly unique among the countries of the world. For most other peoples, ignoring others’ history is an impossible luxury.

  Not surprisingly, most Americans do not realize that many influential Middle Eastern intellectuals had a liberal orientation for more than a century. They are unaware of the early constitutional experiments that took place in the Middle East, and of efforts to establish parliamentary systems there in the twentieth century. They are unlikely to know how Western powers undermined these systems by their repeated interventions, and how much resentment this caused among Middle Easterners. There has nevertheless been much airy pontification about the absence of democratic traditions in the Islamic world, how “Islam” is antithetical to democracy, and why “they” resent “us” because of our way of life. This contemptuous dismissal of real history, real experience, and real traditions in favor of crude stereotypes has received little response from the only people qualified to counter it: experts on the Middle East.

  Silence on the part of the experts is part of a larger problem, of why public discourse in the United States about foreign affairs is so often driven by the lowest common denominator, by ill-informed pundits rather than by people who are actually knowledgeable about the rest of the world. Perhaps it is because many prefer to hear what is familiar and reassuring, rather than what is strange and discomforting. Another of the objectives of this book is to reflect the history lying behind Middle Eastern perceptions of the American role there, perceptions that may not match what Americans think of their country’s role in the world. Some would cavalierly dismiss others’ views of the United States, or would address them solely via “strategic information” campaigns. This is to underestimate dangerously what is at work here: these perceptions and the history behind them are extremely important, for how others perceive us, and how they perceive their own history, rather than how we perceive ourselves, will determine how others act. We should be able to consider whether these perceptions may in fact be accurate, even if they are unflattering, without being told that we are anti-American or “blame-America-firsters.” This is an essential element of the respect for the views of others that we would expect to receive for our own views, but which is often missing when the views of Middle Easterners are concerned.

  But the inaccuracies and distortions in discussions of the Middle East cannot be blamed solely on the media, the Beltway think tanks, and policy makers. As stated above, blame for this situation also lies with Middle East experts, many of whom have not tried hard enough to speak to broader audiences, who disdain the process of clarification that is necessary for communicating with the general public about complex subjects, and who are rarely institutionally rewarded for doing so. Like other academics, I struggle with a tendency to overelaborate when writing for a nonspecialist audience such as the one at which this book is directed. I hope I have overcome that tendency. Given how little Americans know of the rest of the world, and the importance of historical knowledge with respect to the Middle East, it is the duty of experts to do everything possible to inform the general public in a way that has not been done in the past. This book is an effort to do just that.

  That the American public knows too little about a region their country is getting more and more deeply involved in is also partly a function of the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation that makes many Middle East experts reluctant to express themselves frankly. This is true generally about Middle East issues, and particularly true about the sensitive issues touching on Israel and Palestine. It is in some measure a function of the fact that many Americans have intense feelings about this subject
combined with limited knowledge, a combination not conducive to the shedding of light on a complex issue. It is also a function of the gross oversimplification that is operative in both the political and media arenas, oversimplification that reaches near toxic levels where the Middle East is concerned. Such an atmosphere is extremely harmful to American public discourse, especially to the necessary process of infusing the debate on U.S. actions in the Middle East with the context and background without which it is impossible to understand what is happening there or why.

  If this book can transcend these barriers and help to initiate an informed debate about what the United States faces as it intervenes ever more deeply in the Middle East, it will serve a useful purpose. For the Middle East is a region where history matters a great deal, and whose peoples have a very long history, with which they are quite familiar. The United States is deeply entangled in the affairs of this region today, and as Americans concerned for our country, we should pay careful attention to that history. We ignore it at our common peril.

  What has happened since this book was first published? In spite of a mock “transfer of sovereignty” at the end of June 2004, most elements of real sovereignty in Iraq are in American hands, a stubborn antioccupation insurgency is still untamed, while bloody terrorism continues unabated. Far from being a beacon to the rest of the region, Iraq looks to its neighbors like nothing so much as an endless, slow-motion train wreck. Twenty months after the invasion, nothing in Iraq looks as those who advocated the war had predicted. And yet the grim litany of disaster that we have witnessed since March 2003 should have been expected, indeed some of it was virtually inevitable, given the ambitious aims of those who decided on waging the Iraq War, and given their hubris and their ignorance of Middle Eastern realities. Leaving aside the stated pretexts for the war, which now stand revealed as spurious, from nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” to nonexistent links between the Iraqi Ba‘thist regime and al-Qa‘ida, it is clear that the Bush administration had several, largely unacknowledged, war aims.

  This was a war fought firstly to demonstrate that it was possible to free the United States from subordination to international law or the U.N. Charter, from the need to obtain the approval of the United Nations for American actions, and from the constraints of operating within alliances. In other words, it was a war fought because its planners wanted to free the greatest power in world history from these Lilliputian bonds, and saw the tragedy of 9/11 as a golden opportunity to achieve this long-cherished goal. For them, this was a war of choice, and Iraq was a suitable guinea pig for a new hyperunilateral American approach that would “shock and awe” the rest of the world.

  The Iraq War was fought secondly with the aim of establishing long-term American military bases in a key country in the heart of the Middle East: Pentagon officials still talk of retaining “fourteen enduring bases” in Iraq. American planners saw these as replacements for the increasingly contested bases established in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. It was a war fought thirdly to destroy one of the last of the third world dictatorships that had at times defied the United States and its allies (notably Israel). The administration clearly envisioned, and still seems to envisage, creating in its place a pliable client regime. It was a war fought finally to reshape, along the radical free-market lines so dear to Bush administration ideologues, the economy of a country with the world’s second-largest proven reserves of oil. This made Iraq a particularly attractive target for leading members of the administration, from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to then–National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who had all been intimately involved with the oil business. All these things—the demonstration effect of a unilateral, “preemptive” war, military bases, a client regime, and access to oil—were seen as vital to fending off potential twenty-first-century great-power rivals.

  Mesmerized by these ambitious goals, key figures in the Bush administration exhibited a scorn for the lessons of history, and a contempt for international law, that determined the painful outcomes that have transpired since the End of Major Combat Operations in Iraq was celebrated on May 1, 2003, with President Bush’s theatrical landing of a fighter jet aboard an aircraft carrier, where a now infamous banner announced “Mission Accomplished.”

  In fact, major combat operations were just beginning. By the fall of 2003 a stubborn insurgency had developed in several regions of the country, and in April 2004 an uprising across much of Iraq caused the understrength American occupation forces briefly to lose control of many crucial strategic points. American deaths in Iraq stood at over 1,300 and other U.S. casualties at about 10,000 at the end of 2004. From 20,000 to 100,000 Iraqis had died, though we have no way of knowing the real figure. Clearly, things in Iraq have not been getting better since the occupation began, and clearly, the core assumptions on which the occupation was organized have proven to be profoundly flawed.

  The hubris that allowed Pentagon planners to think that they were somehow immune to the lessons of history produced a grossly mismanaged occupation that has become hated by most Iraqis and has engendered fierce resistance. This all came to a head in a small city on the Euphrates River called Falluja. Clashes there between U.S. troops and Iraqi demonstrators in the spring of 2003 led to the deaths of many demonstrators. In the year that followed, Falluja became one of the main flash points of an insurgency that spread to much of Iraq. An American siege of the city in April 2004 was broken off after the ferocity of the resistance showed that the levels of force required to bring it back under U.S. control would be politically counterproductive. Then, in a weeklong assault by several thousand Marines and soldiers in November 2004, 71 U.S. troops were killed and over 400 wounded, and an unknown number of Iraqi insurgents and civilians died. Much of the city was reduced to rubble after most of its 300,000 people became refugees, another case of “having to destroy the town in order to save it.” This offensive brought what was left of Falluja back under U.S. control, but at a great political cost.

  Those who knew the history of Iraq recalled that for generations, radical Salafi and Wahhabi doctrines had influenced the Sunnis of Falluja, known as the city of mosques. Falluja was exposed to these doctrines because, as one of a string of towns along the Euphrates, it was close to the great desert highway that since time immemorial had linked the Nejd region (where Wahhabism began) and Jabal Shammar, in what is now eastern Saudi Arabia, with the great merchant towns of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It was located as well along the desert road to Amman. In consequence, people in this crossroads town had family connections to tribesmen and town dwellers around the fringes of the Saudi, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi deserts. But beyond Falluja being a nodal point for extensive, long-standing religious and tribal networks, it was there that the killing of a British colonial official, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Leachman, by a local leader, Sheikh Dhari, in 1920 sparked a great Iraqi revolt that produced thousands of casualties and led to British forces temporarily losing control of much of Iraq. Dhari’s grandson, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the spokesman for the Council of Muslim Ulema, and an outspoken critic of the U.S. occupation. The small city of Falluja, historically a symbol of resistance to foreign control, thus combined key religious, tribal, and nationalist aspects of Iraq’s history.

  Also crucial in producing the Iraqi quagmire was the undisguised hostility to international law and other global restraints on the freedom of action of the United States of the “muscular nationalists” who dominate the Bush administration, notably Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Since beginning their careers in the executive branch in the mid-1970s, Cheney and Rumsfeld had always chafed at congressional limits on the president’s unfettered power to make foreign policy. In the past, they had repeatedly shown their contempt for these domestic, as well as other international and legal, constraints on the freedom of action, and freedom from public scrutiny, of the executive branch. Symptomatic of this contempt was Cheney’s stubborn refusal to make
public the proceedings of the Bush administration’s National Energy Policy Development Group, headed by Cheney and composed largely of his old cronies from the oil business. For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the Iraq War was a golden opportunity to unfetter the imperial presidency, cut Congress down to size, muzzle the press, profit the private interests with which they were connected, and conclusively show the world that it could have no influence over the actions of the United States.

  However, their determined attempts to free the United States from the restraints of one specific aspect of international law—the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war—in Afghanistan, at Guantánamo Bay, and in the detention camps in Iraq, ran counter to the concerns of a pair of powerful institutions: the uniformed military and the press. The American military is committed to the idea that respect for the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war is in the United States’ interest because it protects U.S. military personnel should they be captured in wartime. Officers of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps vigorously opposed the efforts of Rumsfeld and his subordinates, backed by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and officials of the Justice Department, to undermine and subvert the limitations imposed by the Geneva Convention. By revealing the ways in which the Bush administration had eroded legal protections for Iraqi and other prisoners, these officers began the process of tearing down the edifice of contempt for law that administration policy had sought to erect. This process began with the uncovering of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. Later revelations of the death under torture of as many as three dozen detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in secret prison camps came from military sources disgusted with the actions of their civilian superiors. Worse was yet to come when film emerged that seemed to show the killing of a wounded, unarmed Iraqi insurgent prisoner by a Marine in Falluja.