The Widening Gyre of MSM prattling

This weekends Herald Tribune has two articles about Iraq under a common heading- The Widening Gyre. The first is 'Chaos and Unity in a fragmented Iraq' by Roger Owen, the second 'What They're Saying in Anbar' by Gary Langer. Your first thought, as was mine, was probably What is a gyre? Well, its either:

1. a ring or circle.
2. a circular course or motion.
3. Oceanography. a ringlike system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

So God only knows what they intend to mean...

This was my first indication that little clarity or useful information was on offer here. I don't know how Iraqs current situation will work end up, but I do know lots about what is going on right now. And I know one thing for absolute sure- either everything I know is wrong or both the authors of these pieces are wrong.

Lets take a very short prefatory wizz through Iraqi history. Iraq is comprised of three old Vilayets of the Ottoman empire- the Vilayet of Basra, the Vilayet of Baghdad and the Vilayet of Mosul, plus bits of Diyarbekir. All were ruled by beys of some type (sanjak beyis, beylerbeyi and mutasarrifs). These men were direct appointees of the Ottoman Sultan. Underneath the beys, there was a merchant class, tribal kingships and the top-end clergy (either Shia or Sunni depending on the area). Roughly speaking, the same system existed up until 2003. The Sultan was Saddam Hussein, his placemen ruled the vilayets and underneath them pretty much the same tribal and clergy leaderships. I don't want to underestimate the changes that took place during the 20th century, just to point out the substantial continuities.

If you lop off the Sultan, what happens to the structure? We've been finding that out over the last four years. Roger Owens piece is very confused. Its not clear what he believes is bad about the current situation in Iraq, just that it must be bad because Bush did it. Amongst his various points are that leaders in Iraq often seem not to have followers, the British and Americans have contributed to Iraq's chaos by handing control to local militias and tribes, the central government doesn't control local areas, criminality has come in the wake of decentralisation and a there now exists a patchwork of local groups and alliances that are not neat. His assumption is that these things are new, and that they are bad. I consider them to be normal given the absence of the all-important components, the Sultan and his large army. Lets consider the recent past.

Iraq was part of someone elses empire, and politics was therefore ALL local. By this I mean, if all the big decisions are made in Istanbul, local leaders only get to squabble over local resources. Even in the absence of a 'Sultan'/Saddam/American Viceroy, thats exactly what they are doing now. There is an underlying psychological expectation on the part of most Iraqi's that they are now part of the American empire, just as they were in Saddams empire and before him the Ottoman one; and that therefore they can go back to the way of life they have become accustomed to over many hundreds of years. Being an imperial subject is the template and backdrop for much of middle eastern thought.

While Roger Owen is factually not innaccurate, his analysis does nothing to provide an understanding of the mechanics and the system properties of the Iraq situation. He says "... Bush is right to believe that the presence of a large American military force is all that now holds the country together. But, by the same token, it cannot succeed in uniting Iraq behind a strong central government because the forces of disintegration unleashed by the occupation are now far too strong." Since about 1530, the 'only thing holding together' Iraq was the large Turkish army of the Ottomans, which it managed to do until 1920, or four hundred years. Mr Owen, Iraq is (becoming) united behind a strong central government, the one in Washington D.C.

There is a tri-partite mismatch of expectations here- first, the expectations of the political class in the US, which has virtually no direct knowledge of people outside the US. US politicians imagined that Iraqi's were pretty much like Iowans, just with funny clothes. The Iraqi's, for their part, expected that the US would come in and replace the Ottoman empire and rule it by massive force and coercion. As soon as it became obvious that they weren't, Iraqi's became worried and perplexed. The third set of expectations was that of the left in America and Britain: they thought this was a simple case of imperial overreach which would end up a military meat-grinder like Vietnam, with the plucky locals fighting tooth and nail for their independence.

Two out of three of these groups of people have tried to adjust their views to what the events in Iraq indicate is the true state of affairs. Pro-Bush Republicans and the executive branch itself have started to come to terms with the fact that Iraqi's respond better to clear-cut imperial domination than the warm-fuzzy disaster of 2003-2005; hence the surge, which has worked beyond all expectation. Iraqi's have begun to adjust to the idea that an overwhelmingly dominant military nation might not just be selfish and greedy, but have genuine aspirations of humanitarianism. Because this is a novelty in Iraq, it has taken quite a long time for ordinary people to start believing it might be true.

Only the third group of people, the lefties in America and Britain, are still exactly where they were in 2003 (and 2001 and every year dating back to at least the early nineteenth century). They have a rigid template for viewing events in the world, and no amount of detailed knowledge can change its terms of reference. Afghanistan and Iraq were both considered to be plain cases of patently obvious disasters-in-waiting. The Afghan war never went the way the lefties said it would, and what happened? It utterly disappeared for six years from our tv screens and our newspapers, because the large-scale media is dominated by lefties. Iraq was much more to their taste- it has never left our tv screens and newspapers, because although the violence was 90% Sunni moslem vs Shia moslem it was still violence and could therefore be passed off as America's fault. Its true, America is responsible, in the sense that once they took over Iraq it was their job to stop psychotic Sunni's from trying to murder shia and vice versa. But that is not the sense in which the vast majority of US newspapers and tv networks have portrayed the violence. America has been portrayed as the actual agent of the violence- the root cause and the main player in it. This despite the fact that dead Iraqi's murdered by other Iraqi's are on a vast scale in comparison with those killed in combat with US forces.

The impact of the Iraq intervention on American politics I contend will be enormous. What Vietnam started, I believe Iraq will end. The American left managed to achieve a US defeat in Vietnam despite the US military winning all the battles- three years AFTER the US pulled out, South vietnam was still free and non-communist. They got away with it that time, because they managed to cloud the extent their actions had bringing about the ultimate disaster. But this time is different. A large chunk of mainstream Democrats have been agitating for a US defeat for years- at every available opportunity on any platform they could find. They have nailed their colours to the mast of leaving Iraq to its terrible fate, and there's no hiding it this time. Not only that, but the ignorance shown by them this time around is more scandalous and shameful than even the Vietnam-era. As Mark Steyn recently pointed out, the US education system still educated people in the sixties.

When the US brings complete tranquillity to Iraq, the American people are going to ask some hard questions. Was four years and 4,000 lives too long and too much to spend on bringing about a vastly more hopeful future for the residents of Iraq? Why were the hyperventilators of the Democrat party so convinced American couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't win? Should America care whether the Europeans, so recently empire-builders themselves, despise it for doing the same thing? Should America care whether socialists/communists all over the world hate them, when the latter spend a goodly portion of their time shilling on behalf of murderous despots like Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mugabe? Should America care that it is regularly abused and trash-talked in the UN, when large sections of the General Assembly are dictators, kleptocrats and tyrants? Should America apologise for doing in Iraq what many of its worst critics are calling on it to do in Darfur? Do America's critics in fact have any consistent or interesting criticisms at all?

Gary Langer's piece (I bet you thought I'd forgotten about the Herald Tribune) uses a poll of 2000 Iraqi's to show that the US is unpopular in Iraq, especially amongst Sunnis in Anbar and Diyala. Did the Ottomans ever run polls amongst the populace, one wonders... I don't know how much it matters whether Iraqis love America. 155,000 American soldiers gives them the abiding impression that like them or not, they can't get rid of the by force. And that gives the US administrators and diplomats time to work out a reasonable de facto dispensation, rebuild the basic infrastructure and start to create an Iraq that can work long term. Thats all we need.