Hans Morganthau and the Iraq War - John J. Mearsheimer

Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism John J Mearsheimer 19 - 5 - 2005
The renowned American foreign-policy realist Hans Morgenthau (1904-80) opposed the Vietnam war. He would have regarded the neo-conservatives’ adventure in Iraq as equally flawed, says John J Mearsheimer.

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century and one of the great realist thinkers of all time. Morgenthau, along with almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the Vietnam war. Their opposition came early, long before it became clear that the war was a lost cause; in fact Morgenthau was warning against American military involvement in Vietnam in the late 1950s.
Equally, almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the war against Iraq. Many supporters of that war are now having second thoughts, since it is becoming increasingly clear that American troops are stuck in an open-ended conflict from which there seems to be no exit. The realists, however, anticipated big problems before the war began; in this, they have been proved largely correct.
Taken together, these facts raise the obvious question: would Hans Morgenthau, the realist who opposed going to war in Vietnam, also have opposed the war on Iraq? We can never know for sure and it would be foolish to say with total certainty that Morgenthau would have opposed the Iraq war. Nevertheless, given his theory of international politics, his opposition to the Vietnam war and the parallels between the two conflicts, it is highly likely.
This article is adapted from a lecture given by John J Mearsheimer at the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt in Munich on October 28-30 2004, commemorating the centenary of Hans Joachim Morgenthau’s birth. The conference was entitled “Hans J. Morgenthau – The Heritage, Challenge, and Future of Realism”
For a short biography and summary of Hans Morgenthau's work, see the box at the foot of this article
The neo-conservative case: military powerThe dispute about whether to go to war in Iraq was between two competing theories of international politics: realism and the neo-conservatism that underpins the Bush doctrine. To understand the realist case against Iraq, it is necessary first to lay out the neo-conservative strategy that the realists were challenging.
Neo-conservative theory – the Bush doctrine – is essentially Wilsonianism with teeth. The theory has an idealist strand and a power strand: Wilsonianism provides the idealism, an emphasis on military power provides the teeth.
Neo-conservatives correctly believe that the United States has a remarkably powerful military. They believe that there has never been a state on earth that has as much relative military power as the United States has today. And very importantly, they believe that America can use its power to reshape the world to suit its interests. In short, they believe in big-stick diplomacy, which is why the Bush doctrine privileges military power over diplomacy.
This belief in the utility of military force explains in large part why the Bush administration and the neo-conservatives favour unilateralism over multilateralism. If the United States emphasised diplomacy over military force, it could not act unilaterally very often, because diplomacy by definition is very much a multilateral enterprise. But if a state has awesome military power and can rely heavily on that power to do business in the international system, then it will not often need allies. Instead, it can rely almost exclusively on its military might to achieve its goals. In other words, it can act unilaterally, as the Bush administration often did during its first term.
The key to understanding why the neo-conservatives think that military force is such a remarkably effective instrument for running the world is that they believe that international politics operate according to “bandwagoning” logic. Specifically, they believe that if a powerful country like the United States is willing to threaten or attack its adversaries, then virtually all of the states in the system – friends and foes alike – will quickly understand that the United States means business and that if they cross mighty Uncle Sam, they will pay a severe price. In essence, the rest of the world will fear the United States, which will cause any state that is even thinking about challenging Washington to throw up its hands and jump on the American bandwagon.
Before the Iraq war, realists would say to the neo-conservatives that if the United States threatens Iran and North Korea by putting them on the “axis of evil” along with Iraq, it will drive them to redouble their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Neo-conservatives would say to realists that Iran and North Korea will respond to the fall of Saddam by understanding that they are numbers two and three on the hit list, and will seek to avoid the same fate by surrendering. In short, they will jump on the American bandwagon rather than risk death.
Critics of the Iraq war would also say to the neo-conservatives that it would make sense to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before invading Iraq. Neo-conservatives would answer that an American victory in Iraq would compel Yasser Arafat to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The road to Jerusalem, they would argue, runs through Baghdad. If the mighty United States got tough with troublemakers in the Arab world, the Palestinians would read the writing on the wall.
Bandwagoning logic also underpinned the famous “domino theory”, which was a critical factor in the American decision to go to war in Vietnam. According to the domino theory, if Vietnam were to fall to communism, other countries in southeast Asia would quickly follow, and then countries in other regions would begin to fall under the rule of the Soviet Union. Eventually almost every state in the international system would jump on the Soviet bandwagon, leaving the United States alone and weak against an unstoppable juggernaut.
Some forty years later, the Bush administration thought that it could turn the domino theory to its advantage. Knocking off Saddam, the war party thought, would have a cascading effect in the middle east, if not the wider world. The Iranians, the North Koreans, the Palestinians, and the Syrians, after seeing the United States win a stunning victory in Iraq, would all throw up their hands and dance to Uncle Sam’s tune.
The neo-conservatives’ faith in the efficacy of bandwagoning was based in good part on their faith in the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA). In particular, they believed that the United States could rely on stealth technology, air-delivered precision-guided weapons, and small but highly mobile ground forces to win quick and decisive victories. They believed that the RMA gave the Bush administration a nimble military instrument which, to put it in Muhammad Ali’s terminology, could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
The American military, in their view, would swoop down out of the sky, finish off a regime, pull back and reload the shotgun for the next target. There might be a need for US ground troops in some cases, but that force would be small in number. The Bush doctrine did not call for a large army. Indeed, heavy reliance on a big army was antithetical to the strategy, because it would rob the military of the nimbleness and flexibility essential to make the strategy work.
This bias against big battalions explains why deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (a prominent neo-conservative) and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed out of hand (the then US army chief of staff) General Eric Shinsheki’s comment that the United States would need “several hundred thousand troops” to occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz understood that if the American military had to deploy huge numbers of troops in Iraq after Saddam was toppled, it would be pinned down, unable to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. A large-scale occupation of Iraq would undermine the Bush administration’s plan to rely on the RMA to win quick and decisive victories.
In sum, the RMA was supposed to make bandwagoning work, which, in turn, would make big-stick diplomacy work, which, in turn, would make a unilateralist foreign policy feasible.
The neo-conservative case: Wilsonian idealism
The idealist or Wilsonian strand of the neo-conservatives’ theory of international politics focuses on promoting democracy, which they believe is the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth. Moreover, they believe that the world divides into good states and bad states, and that the democracies are the white hats.
Democracies have benign motives and are naturally inclined to act peacefully toward other states. Democracies only act in a bellicose fashion when the black hats, invariably non-democratic states, leave them no choice. Of course, they believe in democratic peace theory, which says that democracies hardly ever fight each other. Thus, if the United States could help create a world populated exclusively with democracies, there would be no war and we would have reached what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”. If every state in the system looked like democratic America, which is obviously a virtuous state, we would live in a world of all white hats and no black hats, which, by definition, would be a peaceful world.
Fukuyama thought we had reached the end of history in 1989 with the end of the cold war, and that boredom would be the main problem in the decades ahead. But 9/11 made it clear that the west was not going to be bored for the foreseeable future, because it faces a major-league terrorist threat emanating from the Arab and Islamic world, especially the middle east. The neo-conservatives reacted to this problem by arguing that the root of the problem was the almost complete absence of democracy in the middle east.
End of history logic, in other words, did not apply to this area because virtually no state looked like America. The solution was obvious: export democracy to the middle east, and hopefully to the wider Islamic world. Transform the region and make it into a zone of democracies, the neo-conservatives argued, and the terrorism problem would go away. After all, no state modelled on the United States would resort to terror.
Thus, the Bush doctrine emphasises the importance of spreading democracy, especially in the middle east. Iraq was the first major effort in this endeavour, although it could be argued that the war against Afghanistan was the initial step and Iraq was the second one. Regardless, Iraq was not intended to be the last step.
In the heady days after Baghdad fell on 9 April 2003, the Bush administration and its neo-conservative supporters made it clear that they intended to use the threat or application of military force to topple the regimes in Iran and Syria and eventually to transform the entire region into a sea of democracies. This was to be social engineering on a massive scale and it was to be done with a mailed fist.
To call the Bush administration conservative, at least in its foreign policy, is mistaken. It is pursuing a radical foreign policy, regardless of what one thinks of its merits. No true conservative would embrace such a grandiose policy. Moreover, the label neo-conservative seems like a misnomer when one considers the scope and ambition of the foreign policies that neo-conservatives prescribe for the United States.
Neither the neo-conservatives nor President Bush ever explained in detail how democracy was going to take root in the middle east, where there was hardly any history of democracy. Furthermore, little was said about how the United States was going to effect this transformation at the end of a rifle barrel. It was just assumed that democracy would sprout once Saddam Hussein and other tyrants were removed from power.
The American people, much to their discredit, never demanded an explanation as to how the United States military, which has never been particularly good at nation-building, was going to do massive social engineering in a foreign and probably hostile culture.
The bottom line is that the neo-conservative theory of international politics that moved the invasion of Iraq has a power-based strand which emphasises big stick diplomacy and bandwagoning logic, and an idealist strand that calls for spreading democracy across the middle east and maybe even the entire globe.
Hans Morgenthau and the realist critique of neo-conservatism
What, then, is the realist critique of this neo-conservative theory, and how might Hans Morgenthau have reacted to the arguments for and against the Iraq war?
Realists do not believe that we live in a bandwagoning world. On the contrary, realists tend to believe that we live in a balancing world, in which, when one state puts its fist in another state’s face, the target usually does not throw its hands in the air and surrender. Instead, it looks for ways to defend itself; it balances against the threatening state.
Thus, realists predicted that Iran and North Korea would not react to an attack on Iraq by abandoning their nuclear programmes, but would work harder than ever to acquire a nuclear deterrent so as to immunise themselves from American power. Of course, this is exactly what has happened over the past two years, and there is no sign that either of the remaining members of the axis of evil is likely to cave into the Bush administration’s threats. Simply put, we live in a balancing world.
It is also worth noting that the neo-conservatives expected America’s allies in Europe to change their tune after Iraq and support the Bush doctrine. Once the United States demonstrated the power of its sword, the weak-kneed Europeans would have to accept the fact that they live in a world that operates according to American rules and nobody else’s. So far, the French and Germans do not appear to be following that script.
As far as Morgenthau’s views on balancing versus bandwagoning are concerned, the critical issue is how he thought about the domino theory, which is based on bandwagoning logic and which was at the heart of the debate about whether to fight in Vietnam.
Morgenthau, not surprisingly, thought that the domino theory was hooey. Like all realists, he understood that we live in a balancing world and that the fall of Vietnam would not have a cascading effect in southeast Asia, much less across the entire globe. It is hard to believe that he would have accepted the neo-conservatives’ claim that invading Iraq would cause America’s other adversaries to start dancing to the Bush administration’s tune.
On the idealist strand of neo-conservative theory, the argument is even stronger that Morgenthau, like almost all contemporary realists, would have opposed the Iraq war. Realists tend to believe that the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth is nationalism, not democracy. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies largely ignore nationalism. It is simply not part of their discourse. For them, the emphasis is constantly and emphatically on democracy, and they believe that invading countries to facilitate the spread of democracy is an attractive option.
Realists, by contrast, think that nationalism usually makes it terribly costly to invade and occupy countries in areas like the middle east. People in the developing world believe fervently in self-determination, which is the essence of nationalism, and they do not like Americans or Europeans running their lives. The power of nationalism explains in good part why all of the great European empires – the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Russian – are now on the scrapheap of history.
There are other cases which demonstrate that nationalism quickly turns liberators into occupiers, who then face a major insurrection. The Israelis, for example, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and were at first welcomed as liberators. But they overstayed their welcome and generated an insurgency which drove them out of Lebanon eighteen years later.
The American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan fit the same basic pattern, although the American and Soviet learning curves were a bit steeper than the Israeli. In short, realists thought from the start that it was foolish in the age of nationalism to think that the United States could invade and occupy Iraq and other countries in the middle east for the purpose of altering their political systems in ways that would make them friendly to America.
There is little doubt that Morgenthau saw nationalism as a potent political force and that, more than any other factor, it drove his opposition to the Vietnam war. Many argued during the Vietnam years that the fight was a war between democracy and communism that the United States could not afford to lose. Morgenthau rejected this view, and argued that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong (the guerrilla forces in South Vietnam) were motivated mainly by nationalism, not communism, and that they would invariably view American troops in their midst as colonial occupiers whom they would fight hard to expel.
The United States’s Vietnam war
America’s “Vietnam war” (which the Vietnamese call the “American war”) began in 1954, when Vietnamese nationalist-communist forces defeated the French colonial army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the subsequent Geneva conference agreed a provisional north-south partition of the country.
American military support for the southern entity, which became the Republic of Vietnam (“South Vietnam”) in 1955, began under Dwight D Eisenhower and continued under John F Kennedy. It included extensive military training, arms supplies, and brutal counter-insurgency operations. As conflict escalated, the US committed ground troops and broadened its already intensive bombing campaign to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (“North Vietnam”) in 1965.
In January 1968, nationalist-communist forces in the south (the “Viet Cong”) launched a major assault on urban centres, including the capital Saigon. The numbers of combatants and civilians killed sharply rose. Lyndon B Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election as president. After Richard Nixon’s election in November, there was even more ferocious bombing of the north, of supply chains to the south (the “Ho Chi Minh trail”), and of neighbouring Cambodia (the “sanctuaries”).
The increasing death toll among US forces, and the widespread domestic opposition to the war, led Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to devise a strategy of phased withdrawals of US troops and a transferring of security responsibilities to South Vietnam. This “Vietnamisation”, pursued after Nixon’s re-election in 1972 and Kissinger’s appointment as secretary of state, survived the 1974 Watergate scandal and the replacement of Nixon by Gerald R Ford.
After a succession of military defeats, the South Vietnamese army and state collapsed in April 1975, and victorious North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon a day after the US embassy there had been evacuated. The war had cost 58,000 American soldiers’ lives; around 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died. The human, environmental, economic and social damage was incalculable, and much endures to this day. David Hayes
Morgenthau understood that if the United States committed large-scale military forces to Vietnam, it would face a major-league insurgency that would be extremely difficult to beat. It is natural to conclude that he would have understood that this same basic logic applied to Iraq, and thus would have opposed the Iraq war as fiercely as he opposed the war in Vietnam.
Realism, democracy, and American foreign policy
There is no question that the revolution in military affairs helps the United States conquer countries in the middle east quickly and easily, although it is not clear that the RMA is essential for that purpose. After all, the Soviets did not need the RMA to overrun Afghanistan in 1979, and the Israelis did not need the RMA to overrun Lebanon in 1982. The United States almost certainly could have defeated Iraq in short order without the RMA. In fact, it is relatively easy for a powerful country like America to conquer states in the developing world.
The real trouble comes once the United States owns the country it has overrun, and the Americans are seen as occupiers and face an insurgency. The RMA is largely useless in combatting an insurgency, against which a large army is needed, as the Bush administration has discovered in Iraq. But once the United States commits huge numbers of soldiers in a country like Iraq, it is no longer free to invade other countries because it is effectively stuck in a quagmire.
When that happens, bandwagoning is taken off the table, simply because America’s other adversaries no longer have to fear that the American military will swoop down out of the sky and finish them off; thus they have no reason to throw up their hands and surrender to the Bush administration. In short, occupation stokes nationalism, which leads to insurgency, which undermines any hope of making bandwagoning logic work, which undermines big-stick diplomacy.
If a misunderstanding of nationalism is the first problem with the idealism of the neo-conservatives, the second is that democracies, for all their virtues, do not always pursue benign foreign policies. I have no doubt that democracy is the best political system and I think that spreading democracy across the globe is a noble goal. I am glad that Germany is a flourishing democracy today and I hope that Iraq follows suit sooner rather than later. Nevertheless, when it comes to foreign policy, democracies are not always the white hats that President Bush and his neo-conservative supporters make them out to be.
For example, it is often argued that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was especially evil because it used chemical weapons against both Iran and the Kurds in the 1980s. However, at the time, the United States was providing Iraq with overhead satellite imagery so that it could use its chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian army. When Iraq came in for condemnation for using chemical weapons at the United Nations and in the US Congress, the Reagan and first Bush administrations went to considerable lengths to shield Saddam’s regime from criticism in those august bodies.
The United States not only has dirty hands from Iraq, but it has also engaged in barbaric behaviour of its own. One should not underestimate how ruthless democratic America can be when pushed to the wall. American bombers pulverised German and Japanese cities in the second world war, killing about a million Japanese civilians in the process. Moreover, the United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against another country.
Of course, most Americans believe that there was nothing wrong with bombing Germany and Japan or using nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians, because we are the white hats and the victims were the black hats. However, when you are at the other end of the American rifle barrel, it usually does not look that way. When you are staring down the barrel of that rifle, it is the United States that looks like the black hat.
As Morgenthau clearly understood, it is often difficult to distinguish between good and bad guys in international politics, which means that there is likely to be much resistance to America’s big-stick diplomacy, since many people around the world are likely to view the Bush administration as a bully, not a liberator.
There is another problem with democracies portraying themselves as the white hats in the world: it encourages them to go on crusades to crush non-democracies and transform the world into one giant zone of democracies. This tendency was definitely on display in the United States during the first half of the 1960s, when intervention in Vietnam was being debated. Not surprisingly, Morgenthau warned about the dangers of pursuing global crusades in making his case against the war in Vietnam. This same tendency was in play again in the run-up to the second Gulf war of 2003 when the Bush administration laid out its case for transforming the middle east with the mailed fist. Morgenthau almost certainly would have criticised that policy and the impending war loudly and clearly.
Creating democracies in areas like the middle east, where there is little experience with that form of government, is a daunting task. The United States has not had much success with nation-building in the past and there are no good theories that explain how to succeed at it. There are many reasons to think that spreading democracy with military force is not an effective way to build democracy in Iraq, or any other place for that matter.
Not surprisingly, Hans Morgenthau was an ardent critic of the American effort to democratise Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Morgenthau was not opposed to making Vietnam democratic. He just thought that Vietnam was not ready for democracy and American efforts to impose it on that country would ultimately fail, regardless of US intentions.
Realists are often accused of disliking democracy and even of being anti-democratic. This is a bogus charge. Every realist I know would be thrilled to see Iraq turned into a thriving democracy. Realists, however, are well aware of the difficulty of spreading democracy, especially by military means. They also understand that even if the enterprise is successful, that is no guarantee that peace will break out. Democracies as well as non-democracies like having nuclear deterrents, and both kinds of states support terrorism when it suits their interests.
In conclusion, neo-conservatives and realists have two very different theories of international politics, which were reflected in their opposing views on the wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq. Actually, the war itself has been a strong test of the two theories. We have been able to see which side’s predictions were correct. It seems clear that Iraq has turned into a debacle for the United States, which is powerful evidence – at least for me – that the realists were right and the neo-conservatives were wrong.
I think that Hans Morgenthau, who some four decades ago made the realist case against escalation in Vietnam using arguments similar to those realists employed in the run-up to the Iraq war, would have opposed that war as well if he had been alive.

A New Strategy for Winning Iraq

In the face of mounting public opposition to the war – seen most clearly in the dropping poll numbers, Cindy Sheehan’s vocal anti-war camp outside the Presidential ranch and louder calls for withdrawal – it is about time that the Bush administration clearly define American objectives, propose a strategy for attaining them and ask for the American people’s support. So instead of his hollow rhetoric about spreading freedom to the Iraqi people and the broader Middle East or how the war has made America safer (stating his own opinion as fact), President Bush needs to come clean about what we want to accomplish and how to get there. There is a large consensus on what is needed our objectives: a weakened insurgency, a strong Iraqi military force and a promising political process that lays the foundations for a democratic state. How to get there is a different question. Some call for staying the course, others for a time table to be established and the more daring ones, for a full withdrawal.
In the new issue of Foreign Affairs, Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich outlines a bold, new strategy for combating the insurgency and creating stability and security in his article, “How to Win in Iraq.” In perhaps the most cohesive, compelling and creative proposal I’ve read yet, Krepinevich calls for an “oil-spot strategy” as the solution to America’s struggle against the insurgency. Instead of the current strategy of hunting down and killing the terrorists, the “oil-spot strategy” calls on coalition and Iraqi forces to concentrate their efforts on protecting the Iraqi people by creating secure areas where the insurgents are denied support and operational capacity. From these zones, the security radius could slowly spread (or ooze if you want to continue with the oil metaphor) to encompass larger areas free from insurgent violence. Such a strategy would bolster the Iraqi people’s confidence in the current government and coalition nation-building efforts by granting their basic demand for security. What’s more these secure areas would demonstrate the tangible benefits of areas under government control– thus taking steam out the support for the insurgency. This strategy is based on the British successful counterinsurgency operation in Malaysia in the 1950s whereby the British defeated the Malaysian insurgents by recognizing the inextricable link between the political and military sides of counterinsurgency.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has focused too much on tracking and killing the insurgents instead of providing the conditions for viable political process to take hold. Evidence of this strategy’s failure exists in Samarra and Ramadi where American forces flushed out the insurgents but quickly left only to have the cities fall into insurgent hands again. Even closer to the heart of American efforts – the highway to the Baghdad airport is one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq– if safe transport can’t even be granted to Iraq’s main int. Given the failure of the Bush administration’s current strategy and the even graver consequences of withdrawals or time-tables, the “oil-spot strategy” offers a fresh approach to an old problem with great promise of success.
This strategy, however, is no quick-fix solution. It would require strong American commitment – both in terms of resources (financial and military) and significant public support. It also requires patience as successful counterinsurgency is notoriously slow (Bush isn’t lying when he says it’s “hard work.”) Unfortunately, the insurgents quickly recognized a weak spot in a democratic society such as ours – the tremendous value we put into human life. In Clausewitzian terms, our center of gravity lies in the public’s support for the war which was perhaps the most profound lessons of Vietnam
It is up to President Bush to take the gloves off by being clear to the American people what is at stake, what we want to accomplish and how to do it. Lt. Col. Krepinevich provides a fresh strategy of how to proceed – let’s just hope President Bush is listening.


Again here’s the URL to the article:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84508-p0/andrew-f-krepinevich-jr/how-to-win-in-iraq.html

America's Real Middle East Quagmire

This is a piece I'm working on as a senior political analyst with AID annd that I plan on submitting it for publication. Any thoughts, opinions, reactions, compliments? Cheers.

PPEsq.

America’s Real Middle East Quagmire

by Phillip Paul Esq.

Now that so much of the justification for the continued American presence in Iraq is based on establishing a democratic government which the Bush administration hopes will serve as a linchpin for democratic transformation throughout the Middle East, it is critical to examine this grandiose policy within its regional context and its long-term implications for US Middle East policy.

Viewing terrorism and hostile Islamic fundamentalism as rooted in political repression, economic stagnation and intellectual suppression, the Bush administration has abandoned long-standing policies emphasizing stability and security in favor a “forward strategy of freedom for the Middle East.” Secretary Rice bolding declared this radical shift in policy in a June speech in Egypt, “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither,” she said. “Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

While substantive political and economic reform would doubtlessly alleviate many of the conditions that foster terrorism and extremism, a policy exclusively focusing on the transformation of internal political conditions through external means is deeply problematic and carries significant risk. Worst of all, should this policy fail, there is almost new room to maneuver or to change course without further significant damage to American interests, credibility and security.

There are three deep failings in this policy approach that need to be considered in assessing its feasibility, value and long-term implications for American policy.

First is the practical issue of promoting substantive democratic reform. As building democracy in Iraq is proving to be a challenge beyond comprehension – not just “hard work” – it is time to re-examine what means the US possesses to promote political transformation. Given the unprecedented scale of anti-American sentiment in the Arab/Islamic world, little headway in the Arab-Israeli conflict, petrodollars flooding into government coffers, and strong distrust of American democratization efforts, the answer is very little. This is to say nothing of internal impediments in Arab countries: governments unwilling to yield power, the general absence of institutions conducive to reform, dysfunctional economies and the list goes on. The Bush administration’s “forward strategy of freedom” thereby overestimates American capabilities to generate change while completely underestimating local obstacles. Wishful thinking and harsh realities do not mix well in the turbulent politics of the Middle East.

Second is a concern of national interest. Although President Bush declared in his inaugural address that “Our vital interests and our deepest belief are now one,” this is a gravely oversimplified reading into the complex issues and interests at play in the Middle East. While political reform is indeed in the national interest, it cannot come at the expense of other important concerns such as stability and security, especially in a region as prone to upheaval and strategically-vital as the Middle East.

Vital interests such as ensuring the stable flow of oil, preventing the emergence of power vacuums and eliminating terrorist networks demand cooperation with states such as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran, however odious their political credentials. A full-steam-ahead campaign to spread democracy would severely undermine American capabilities to address these vital issues more central to national security and regional interests. Should Bush administration prioritize American interests and soberly reassess American means, it becomes clear that democracy promotion would easily take a back seat to greater concerns.

The lower priority of democracy promotion leads to the last and perhaps most damning aspect of democratization: inevitable back-peddling with almost nowhere to go. Given the gulf between vital interests and democracy promotion, when a situation arises whereby interests are threatened by mass political action, such as when Islamists were prevented from taking power in Algeria in democratic elections in 1992, the US would responsibly choose the former. However, by proclaiming unabashed support for the spread of democracy, any back-peddling on this policy will only raise loud calls of protest among already discontent Arabs as yet another example of “American hypocrisy,” and would dishearten those brave reformers already encouraged. Moreover, it will confirm widespread apprehensions, especially voiced by Islamic fundamentalists that the whole democracy campaign was one big sham to project and to entrench American power in the region.

Through this credible demonstration of blatant American hypocrisy, the terrorists’ ideology would receive further legitimacy thereby creating another major setback in the War on Terror and the America’s mission to win the “hearts and minds.” The problem thus fundamentally lies in the Bush administration staking America’s credibility on a dubious project as democracy promotion.

Now the vital question becomes where can America go from here? As there is a certain degree of correlation between national interests and democracy promotion, it should be cautiously pursued with a healthy respect for the complexities and contingency in the Arab world. Above all, the US needs to be realistic about the means it possesses and the objectives it seeks to attain.

The Middle East will not morph into a post-historical democratic paradise that embodies the “universal values” of democracy and peace. Instead it will remain a bleak region, burdened by violence, oppression and terror and the best the US can do is contribute to a stable and secure environment that serves American interests and regional purposes while encouraging gradual inroads to reform.

Jihad and Martyrdom

The article below (from The World Today, a publication by the Chatham House which can be accessed at http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/index.php?id=37) is one of the more interesting and insightful I have read in a long time about the War on Terror. The article focuses on the emergence of internal dispute within the jihadist movement concerning the use of suicide bombings directed at innocent civilians, especially with the mounting toll of Iraqi Shi’ia killed in attacks. As much as the America and the West try to change Islamic concepts of martyrdom and what is justified conduct in war through imposition, Islamic leaders, even Jihadists, are taking progressive steps to end such a brutal, indiscriminate and inhumane tactic. Please read on and respond.

Islamic Debates over the War in Iraq and Attacks on the West
Muslims and Martyrdom
Bernard Haykel

The ideologues of global jihad argue that the war in Iraq is part of a larger American war on Islam and encourage Muslims to fight the US-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. For them, armed resistance is the individual duty of all able-bodied Muslims, as this is a war against a non-Muslim invader of Islamic land. Until recently, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was seen by jihadis as a divine blessing because it confirms the truth of their teachings, boosts recruitment and is an opportunity to defeat the last superpower in a replay of the 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq, however, has not been going well for jihadis.

Serious criticism has emerged within jihadi ranks and internal reassessments of the situation are underway. The nub of the dispute centres on the killing of civilians, particularly Muslims, in suicide bombings. It underscores that the jihadi's Achilles heel lies in their contentious and unrigorous justifications for the permissibility of suicide attacks.

Errors by Hotheads

The analogy that jihadis made between Iraq and Afghanistan in the 1980s quickly collapsed after the US-led invasion when they realised that the enemy they are facing is qualitatively different from the Soviet army. Jihadis are distressed at their inability to kill large numbers of Americans and, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's leadership, quickly turned to attacking Shiites in suicide operations. This, however, has had serious repercussions on their image among Muslims.

Ever sensitive to their Muslim public, some ideologues, such as Abu Musab al-Suri - also known as Mustafa Sitt Mariam - have been arguing that jihadis ought to diminish their efforts in Iraq and revert to 'spectacular' attacks in the west, like those of September 11 2001 and the Madrid train bombings. These he argues are singularly popular among Muslims and are the only effective means of doing long-term damage to the west. Zarqawi's mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi - also known as Asim al- Barqawi - expressed his unease about the jihadi strategy in Iraq on Al Jazeera on June 7: 'We see on television tens of Iraqi civilians, women and children, killed and barely one or two occupying Americans are killed. This is a matter about which to be concerned and which requires rethinking.'

Al-Maqdisi has written a treatise of 'support and advice' to Zarqawi, making the argument that the killing of ordinary Shi'a is not permitted in Islam, as they are not to be considered infidels, and that suicide bombing is a tactic to be used only in extreme and exceptional circumstances. He has also said that individual jihadis have resorted to this weapon in a systematic and uncontrolled fashion because of a misguided understanding of the rules of warfare. Al-Maqdisi sees his role as the jihadi movement's principal guide, correcting the errors of hotheads.

There are strong indications from jihadi websites, their online journals, and from contacts during research among fundamentalist Salafis, that the suicide attacks are turning many Muslims, including Salafis, against the jihadis.

Salafism represents a particular set of theological beliefs and a specific interpretation of texts of revelation. The Salafis are not a homogenous religious community, but are split on issues of politics and militant action. Not all Salafis advocate Al-Qaeda's militant jihad, and a majority is politically silent.

An example of the opposition, published in Al-Asr, an online pro-jihadi journal, www.alasr.ws, is a letter from a reader, criticising the religious legitimacy that al-Maqdisi and others have given to suicide attacks and their present ambiguous stand on this matter:

'Which jihadi operation, whether in Iraq, Saudi, Spain, London, America, even in Israel doesn't involve the killing of women, children and the cutting of trees! Is the shedding of innocent Muslim blood simply a mistake committed by an individual [as you've mentioned]? The massacres and the large numbers of those killed in Iraq and elsewhere are simply to be considered individual mistakes! You inflame the sentiments of the young men with general talk about jihad, whose many conditions [sanctioning it] have not been satisfied…as has been shown by such great scholars as Shaykh al- Albani. And after the shedding of all the blood and the large number of victims, you slither like a snake and say that these are errors committed by individuals!'

Sanctioning Killing

Jihadis base their claim that islamic law sanctions suicide operations in which Muslim civilians are killed on two arguments. The first relates to prophetic traditions allowing the historic use of siege engines, like the giant catapult, against an enemy who holds Muslims as human shields. This is referred to in Arabic as the tatarrus argument, from turs or shield. The second argument also draws on a tradition in which the prophet Muhammad tells his wife, Umm Salama, that the innocent people killed with an evil army that is entirely destroyed will be resurrected on judgment day and judged according to their good intentions. In other words, they will be saved and go to paradise. This is known in jihadi sources as the resurrected according to their intentions argument.

Quoting and elaborating on these, jihadis make comparisons and analogies with the situation in Iraq to justify their attacks. For example, they claim the Iraqi civilians are being held as human shields by the occupying US-led forces, and that the pious among them who die in the attacks will be resurrected and sent to heaven. In short, the jihadi position consists of saying there is religious sanction for the killing of Muslim civilians and neither the innocent victims nor the bombers are doomed to suffer in hell. It is important to note that an obsession with questions of salvation underpins all these discussions. Views and tactics have to be made to coincide with an understanding of God's will.

The first major test of these tactics for the jihadis came not in Iraq but in Saudi Arabia in 2003. First in May, and then in November, suicide bomb attacks killed a number of Muslims, including Saudis and other Arabs, at housing compounds in Riyadh. Those who died in November were fasting for Ramadan. This led to a furore against Al-Qaeda's branch in Saudi Arabia among ordinary Saudis and the organisation has not repeated such acts since, confining itself to attacking western and Saudi government targets.

The jihadis banked on the fact that in Iraq the attacks would primarily kill Shi'a, and that because they are considered heretics, fellow Sunni Muslims would either approve or turn a blind eye. Indications emerging from the Arab world point to a widespread view that such attacks have backfired and alienated ordinary Muslims from the jihadis. This explains the revised positions of ideologues like al-Maqdisi. The only exception to this is in Najd, in central Saudi Arabia, where a number of Salafis continue to support the Iraq tactics and see nothing wrong with the killing of Shi'a.

Reversing Views

Another major jihadi ideologue has in fact reversed his position on suicide bombings after the July London transport attacks. This is the British-based Abu Baseer al-Tartusi - also known as Abd al-Munim Halima, www.abubaseer.bizland.com. Despite his fatwa being well-argued on islamic legal grounds, Abu Baseer's motivations for the reversal are suspect. He is Syrian and may fear he will be extradicted to his homeland where he would face certain imprisonment and torture. Some jihadis have severely attacked him on Internet message boards for putting self-preservation above religious conviction. The important points to note, however, are that real chinks have appeared in the jihadi ideological armour, either because the real consequences of suicide attacks, or religious justifications underpinning them, are untenable.

Arguments can be built on Abu Baseer's position that suicide attacks inevitably involve killing innocent civilians, including Muslims living in the west, and that these are difficult to justify in islamic law. Rather than expelling him from his asylum in Britain, someone like Abu Baseer could be cultivated to further undermine jihadi ideology.

More Attacks Likely

It is likely, however, that an even more determined hardcore of zealots will emerge from these splits. This group will heed the advice of Abu Musab al-Suri by attacking western targets and withdrawing gradually from the Iraqi war because they will accept that the analogy with 1980s Afghanistan does not hold and that their campaign has alienated too many Muslims.

Al-Qaeda's most recent statements, as expressed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, appear to be trying to find common ground between the various factions by stressing the importance of the war in Iraq and attacks on the west.

The wars in Iraq and on terror are intertwined in complicated ways and, for the jihadis, this has to do with ideology, the Muslim public's perception of their activities and the achievement of long-term strategic goals. Far from being nihilists or fascists, the jihadis are a dynamic group which is constantly debating and calibrating its views in the hope of achieving an internal consensus that will translate into support from a worldwide Muslim public.

Professor Bernard Haykel, of the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University, is a speaker at a Middle East Programme seminar at Chatham House.

Greetings All,

First off, I'd like to thank you for expressing your interest in this amazing new forum that allows me unimpeded by the complaints and confrontations of others to express my thoughts. So instead of talking people's ear off, you may now read (or choose to ignore) at your own pleasure.

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