Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, "What has the coalition ever done for us?" And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.
Richard Fernandez, writing in his blog Belmont Club, in a post called “Realism” asks at the end if:
Can America work effectively through the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan to fight terror? Can it work through the Palestinian Liberation Authority to achieve peace? Working through counterparts has its own set of challenges. Nothing is easy.
Later, in the comments section of the same post, Richard asks:
The same long war tactics that al-Qaeda have successfully used to persuade the liberals of defeat in Iraq are going to be used in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is a landlocked country that is completely enclosed by the 'stans, Iran and Pakistan. And if the fighting ups in intensity, the logistical problems could be very challenging. Right across the border from Afghanistan is the nuclear-armed country of Pakistan. And on the other side is Iran. This the liberal idea of a favorable battlefield, though for what reason I can't say.
Maybe we're giving AQ too much credit and hoping for too much from our "allies" in the region. Maybe it's not AQ's "long war tactics" that are defeating us but rather the deep-seated Arab/Muslim cultural failure that is behind what Stewart describes. Rory Stewart's comment is no different from hundreds of other observations, by numerous authors over the years; of the Palestinian cult of death (vs. the Israeli cult of life), of the general fatalism of the Arab, wherever he lives. Of the love of conspiracy theories and their embrace by seemingly well-educated people, against all signs of fact and reason, to the obsession over Israel.
As observers, we are facing a world-historical moment where a great human culture has been exposed as failed. It is the Ralph Peters analysis - The Arabs - they're done, failed, Kaput.
Many of the world's cultures have confronted modernity in the last 100 years and it has not been easy. Come to think of it, it wasn't even easy for the half of Europe east of the Rhine! The Indians have adapted, the Confucian Asians (China, SE Asia, Japan) have adapted well, South American Latin culture seems happy in stagnation and not belligerence, Africa is really failed and inward looking, but the Arabs are failed and outward looking; they still believe they are at the top of the heap. Years of despotism has destroyed all individual sense of responsibility but oil has allowed them to escape from reality. Without oil, the Arab world would be just like Africa, if not worse.
So, maybe, all these calls to withdraw and to leave the Iraqis to success or failure, completely miss the point, as many of them assume the Iraqis have some capacity at self-agency, some care for success or failure. It seems, rather, that Iraqi society does not, and functions no better than the mall group or tribal level, which is why the US is having so much success in the field and with small Iraqi army units but not the larger civil society government entities in the Green Zone.
When cultures fail, they return to the oldest organizing principle: the tribe. If there is any reason for why we stay in Iraq, it is to prevent the brutality that occurs in tribal societies: death, death, and death, opening the door to the rule of the strongest...
