All posts tagged President George W. Bush

Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart (2007)

‘If you put my cousin on the council, I will slit his throat.’
(Typical threat from an Iraqi sheikh, Occupational Hazards, page 231)

Rory Stewart

Stewart (born 1973) is posh. He comes from a family of Scottish landed gentry. Like lots of poshos born into a family which helped administer the last shreds of empire, Stewart was born abroad, in Hong Kong in his case, and then brought up in Malaysia. He, of course, was sent back to the old country to be educated at Eton and Oxford. After a brief spell in a posh regiment in the British Army (the Black Watch) he went on to work in the Diplomatic Service. Absolutely stock, standard posh-boy career. Then, in the footsteps of the posh travellers of the 1920s and 30s (Wilfred Thesiger et al), he left the Diplomatic Service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and then, of course, wrote a best-selling book about the experience, ‘The Places in Between’ (p.8).

Post-war Iraq

Stewart’s posh boy qualifications, his experience in the Foreign Office, his (supposed) knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture (he’s very candid about his shortcomings in speaking or understanding Arabic, as he is about everything else) meant that when the Coalition Provisional Authority (the provisional Western power set up in Iraq after the American invasion of March 2003) put out feelers to the British Foreign Office for volunteers to work as ‘governorate co-ordinators’ in the southern provinces of Iraq (which had been assigned to the British to manage) Stewart was a prime candidate.

In fact, surprisingly, he received no response to his initial application and so, with the confidence borne of his Eton-Oxford-Foreign Office pedigree, he flew to Jordan, took a taxi to Baghdad and lobbied for the job on the spot. He was vouched for by the Director of Operations and Infrastructure at the CPA, Andy Bearpark and was duly appointed (p.73).

Stewart in Iraq timeline

Thus it was that on 28 September 2003 Stewart found himself on a flight from Baghdad down to Amara, capital of Maysan Province in southern Iraq (p.10). Here he worked as ‘governorate co-ordinator’ running a team of ten or so civil affairs officers, alongside the British Army’s (completely separate) military operations for the next 6 months.

Map of Iraq’s provinces, by Orthuberra and published under Creative Commons attribution Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

In November 2003 the American diplomat Molly Phee arrived, assuming the position of Governorate Co-ordinator and Rory switched to become her deputy (p.188). A few days later, Paul Bremer announced the CPA would hand over authority to a provisional Iraqi government on 30 June 2004. In the same month an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Iraqis described the allies as ‘an occupying force’ (p.220).

In January 2004 the security situation suddenly deteriorated and the compound at Amara started coming under attack (p.288).

In March 2004 Stewart was moved from Maysan to its western neighbour, Dhi Qar, and its capital Nasiriyah, where he served as senior advisor to the civil affairs team. There were mounting attacks on occupation garrisons throughout Iraq.

In April 2004 the Shiite cleric, politician and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr unleashed his supporters’ insurgency against the occupying forces, leading to attacks against Coalition offices throughout Iraq, and against Stewart’s compound in Nasiriyah. The very fierce fighting would continue until al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in September 2004.

Meanwhile, in June 2004, the Coalition Authority handed all its powers over to the Iraqi Provisional government, and Stewart’s job came to an end.

He revisited Iraq a couple of times, later in 2004 and in 2005, but his day-to-day involvement at that point came to an end.

A memoir not a history

I bought this paperback when it came out in 2007. I remember being disappointed. Now I realise this was because I was expecting a historical overview, a comprehensive chronological account of the coalition invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and Stewart’s book is definitely not that. For that kind of objective, historical and analytical overview, I recommend Jack Fairweather’s thorough and authoritative account, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq (2012).

I now realise I was disappointed by Stewart’s account because it is something else entirely: it is a highly personal memoir of the day-to-day challenges he faced, first in Maysan and then in Dhi Qar, and doesn’t even attempt to be an overall survey.

Instead, it is much more like a diary account (it’s not quite a diary because, as he tells us, he didn’t have time to keep a day-by-day record) of where he went and who he saw, and the issues and challenges he had to address, of the countless conversations and arguments with innumerable Iraqi officials, political leaders, sheikhs and clerics, interspersed with conversations with senior officers in the British Army in both provinces, and occasional meetings with masters in the CPA up in Baghdad. Above all, it is an odyssey through the amazingly convoluted networks of tribes and parties and gangs and warlords and militias which made up the immensely complicated tapestry of political life in his province.

And it is very deliberately provincial in focus. Occasionally he mentions politicking up in Baghdad or outbreaks of violence in the rest of the country, but only the briefest of mentions because his focus is overwhelmingly on the multiple parties and sects and forces at work in his province that he has to deal with.

This explains several things about the book:

1. At 434 pages, it is surprisingly long. But as you get into it you realise this is because it takes a long time to get to know all the many, many tribal and political leaders in Maysan. Stewart’s understanding only inches forward via long conversations, arguments, meetings, pledges, threats and unexpected revelations. In all these ways his book is more like a novel than a history: it’s not to be read for the facts; it’s to be read so as to allow the behaviours, conversations, promises, threats and actions of the various factions to slowly build up a complex, multi-layered portrait.

2. It also explains why, right at the start of the book, there’s a 4-page list of dramatis personae i.e. key figures from the narrative, just as in a classic nineteenth century Russian novel. Initially I thought I could skip these, but slowly realised that reading the book only makes sense if you maintain a good grasp of who’s who and, more to the point, who is conspiring against who, rubbishing them behind their backs, and why. Or at least, why Stewart thinks they’re doing so.

At which point I realised something quite important: that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The clash of cultures

This point brings us to one of the two central themes of the book which is the immense, unbridgeable cultural gulf between this highly educated, objective and dispassionate civil servant, and the maze of Iraqi politicians he struggles to understand and manage. Over the book’s 430 pages he (and we the readers) obviously gain insight into people’s characters and motivations; but it’s delusive. Tribal leaders still abruptly reverse their positions, or pull out of agreements, for no motive that Stewart can fathom. One minute he’s enjoying a cup of tea in his pokey office in the CPA compound in Amara with a Shia cleric who promises to work with Stewart’s plans to set up a provincial council. A week later the same person is leading an angry mob on the same compound, inciting them to riot, chanting ‘Death to the Coalition’ and publishing a leaflet calling for all devout Muslims to assassinate CPA officials like Stewart (p.228). It is an impassable gulf:

Even in the stable context of our office, with good translators, it was often difficult for us to understand Iraqi guests and for them to understand us…the truth was that the most basic concepts like, ‘civil society’ or ‘sharia law’, meant very different things to each of us. (p.242)

The more he understands, the more he realises he’ll never understand. Not least because quite a few of the local players themselves don’t fully understand what’s going on. In a Hobbesian world where everyone’s hand is against everyone else’s, nobody can be sure of any of their pacts or alliances or deals.

‘These people talk randomly,’ said the governor in a tense, tired, quiet voice. ‘Even among themselves they agree about nothing. It is impossible even to get a consistent demand from them.’ (p.294)

This explains something else absolutely central which is that, when push comes to shove, if you’re in doubt about who was your ally and who was conspiring to have you assassinated, the One Thing that was guaranteed to win you brownie points with almost all the other Iraqi parties, was declaring ‘Death to the West! Death to the Coalition!’

Stewart doesn’t say it in so many words, but it emerges naturally from his countless stories of promises broken and double crosses, that opposition to the Coalition, to the occupying forces, and the West in general, was so vehement because it was, at bottom, the only policy on which almost all the squabbling Iraqi parties could unite on.

Being political illiterates, having absolutely no concept whatsoever of democratic processes or conventions, ‘Death to the West’ was the one and only policy that could (for a while) unite parties, tribes and interest groups who were, otherwise, at each other’s throats (for example, at the first meeting of the council Stewart has himself selected, p.277).

Security, security, security

All of which is related to the other, deeper, central message of the book which comes over loud and clear. Young Rory arrived with the naive belief that people are basically decent; that, if given space, law and order emerges naturally from the culture of a society; and so he initially allowed himself to be dazzled by the enormous number of economic and social development projects being worked up by the ten-person civil society team which he found in Maysan before him.

Only slowly and brutally, does he realise that the locals don’t give a monkeys about educational programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism and constitutional reform (p.82) or ‘gender-awareness workshops’ (p.83).

What they wanted was security security security. What they wanted was law and order. What they wanted was to be able to walk down the street at night (or even during the day) without being held up, mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held to ransom, or tortured and murdered.

And that, as it turned out – the provision of basic security, elementary standards of law and order – was something the occupying forces turned out to be completely incapable of providing. And Stewart’s account is a priceless testimony as to why. You might as well try to get a box of frogs to put on a military tattoo as get the endlessly bickering Arabs who Stewart profiles to agree about anything.

The rivals

Amid the blizzard of other projects and responsibilities, the central consuming project of the first, Maysan, part of the narrative, is Stewart’s attempts to appoint a provisional council which can then meet and agree a) a new provincial governor and b) a new chief of police.

The police are poorly trained, cowardly and corrupt (p.83). For example, tribal leader Abu Rashid drafted hundreds of his militia followers into the police, some of them as young as 12. The day before a meeting with Rashid Stewart hears that, when Abu Rashid’s mother had been told to wait when she went to hospital, some of these boys had drawn their weapons and threatened to shoot the doctors unless she was treated immediately (p.87). What can you do with a society split into such fiercely partisan warlord groups, and where that kind of instant resort to extreme violence is normal?

Pretty much all the sheikhs and party leaders he has to deal with are criminals. When Stewart appoints Abu Rashid chief of police it is in the knowledge that Rashid’s cousins run the major smuggling operation in the area. Stewart’s thinking is it’s better to have the big gangsters inside the organisation and let power slowly educate them, than simply making them eternal foes.

Most of the leaders he deals with are involved in some kind of criminal activity, such as smuggling drugs or diesel. Most have threatened to assassinate each other and some are responsible for murders, while most had had some member of their family killed over crime or tribal vendettas. Most of them run extortion and blackmail rackets. All the contractors he allots CPA funds to for ‘development’ projects, skim some or most of the money into their personal accounts, with sometimes hilarious results.

‘There were 54 political parties, 20 substantial tribes, and a dozen leading political figures in the province’ (p.169). Broadly speaking there are:

  • tribal sheiks: there are two massive tribes in the province but innumerable sub-tribes and smaller tribes all jostling for power, slow to forgive ancient feuds (‘Most urban Iraqis perceived the sheikhs as illiterate, embarrassing, criminal, powerless anachronisms,’ p.231)
  • some of these sheikhs had forebears who had proudly fought against the British occupier and coloniser in the 1920s and so, even if they’d wanted to be co-operative, family tradition and pride insisted that they be seen to be as unco-operative and obstructive as possible
  • there are the various candidates and parties which are all fronts for the self-styled Prince of the Marshes, a charming, educated and thoroughly untrustworthy figure, who leads a gang of semi-literate criminals who, immediately after Saddam’s fall, comprehensively looted Amara
  • clerics, all Shia, but with a surprising number of fierce rivals; incongruously to British readers, many of these religious leaders have their own militias which regularly kidnap or assassinate opponents
  • Iran-backed parties: during Saddam’s long tyranny (1968 to 2003) tens of thousands of political and religious leaders fled abroad; only a handful of them were ‘secular’ (or what passes for secular in a Muslim country); most of them were various flavours of Shia and fled east to Shia Iran; here they were kept on the Iranian government payroll awaiting the day when Saddam (a Sunni) was overthrown; so Stewart had not only to deal with Shia clerics who remained in the country, but with a whole cohort who had returned from Iran and were all, to some extent or other, in hock to Iran and carrying out pro-Iran policies; thus, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was funded by Iran and represented Iran’s interests (p.65), lobbying for wilayat-e-faqih, meaning government of the jurists i.e. a Shia theocracy identical to Iran’s
  • then there were the Sadrists, followers of Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who shouted the same kind of anti-Coalition slogans from their pulpits as the returners-from-exile but with one key difference: Muqtada had never gone into exile and was a fierce Iraqi nationalist i.e. opposed the Iran-backed parties as violently as they opposed the Coalition; his militia calls itself ‘the Army of the Redeeming Imam’ (p.86); Muqtada ‘created his own armed militia, assassinated clerical rivals, declared an alternative government and called for the immediate departure of the infidel Coalition’, p.253; Stewart makes the point that all the Shia groups seem to be represented by younger and younger men who reject the moderation of their elders; in other words, political Islam was becoming more unstable (p.230)
  • there weren’t many Sunnis in Maysan (the further south in Iraq you go, the more Shia it becomes) but by and large the Sunni were more moderate and better educated than the Shia, who they regarded as uneducated, backward heretics (p.46)
  • last and least, quavering in the shadow of all these fierce and violent factions, were the handful of genuinely secular, middle class, liberal democratically minded Iraqis and the handful of ‘feminists’; none of these stood a hope in hell of being elected to anything but Stewart and his boss, Molly Phee, appointed some to their provincial council because it’s what the CPA in Baghdad, and all the Western politicians bankrolling the whole thing, had told their populations we were doing in Iraq – building a modern democratic state which respects the human rights of all blah blah blah

The point is that nobody in Iraq trusts anybody else; they are all prepared to believe the absolute worst of all the other tribes, clans, groups, militias, police forces and so on; and, knowing no other way of calmly settling disputes, and also conceiving of power as a zero sum game where you are either in total control or nothing, they routinely try to kidnap or assassinate each other.

A society where nobody believes in anybody else’s good intentions, yes, it probably does require a strong, authoritarian ruler to quash all these rival sources of authority and, above all, of violence. Only a really strong, violent man with a strong, violent security apparatus can quell all the other violent rivalrous groups into submission. Stewart starts off believing this is anti-Arab propaganda, but runs into trouble when Arab after Arab tells him it is true.

‘We Iraqis, we admire strong men. We have tough heads. You must be strong.’ (His first Iraqi interpreter, page 32)

How many Iraqis are you going to ignore when they tell you point blank that their society just won’t function unless it is governed with a fist of steel? It may be racist for us to make such sweeping statements, but isn’t it just as racist to ignore an Arab’s description of their own society because we supposedly know better than they do?

Thus various tribal and religious and political leaders tell him again and again that only an extremely strong, dictatorial authority can enforce security in Iraq (pages 59, 81, 82). When he and Molly finally agree settle on the members of the provisional council they’ve nominated, Stewart gives a characteristically droll summary of them:

I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modelled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others old oil on the black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies which made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from the same tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. (p.268)

And at their very first meeting the Sadrist member announced that the council was illegal, poisoned by the presence of the Coalition and forbade anyone from taking their oaths. Lolz, as my kids would say.

Or when, after the first guy they appointed as chief of police is assassinated, after much heart-searching Stewart and Molly appoint the Prince of the Marshes’ brother, Riyadh Mahood Hatab on the basis that he is a competent administrator with 20 years experience in the civil service, the respect of the ministry directors, the power of his brother’s militia behind him and contacts in Baghdad. Yes, he’ll do. And then the comic horror with which Molly and Rory listen as the newly installed chief of police outlines his programme: he wants to take full control of the police, set up a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had insulted him and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council (p.275).

This is how everyone they try to negotiate thinks about power; it is a zero sum game and, if they are given a position of power, they must immediately move to assume complete control as quickly as possible in order to forestall the inevitable attempts and assassinations and coups which all their rivals will mount against them. Given half a chance, everyone turns into Saddam. No-one turns into the kind of mild liberal democrat the CPA in Baghdad, and their masters in Washington and London, fantasised about.

Violent rhetoric

In the build-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein promised the Mother of all Battles but as soon as the invasion started most of his soldiers ran away (some didn’t; some stayed at their posts and fought very hard until obliterated by bombs from the air). I have read serious, sympathetic, Arab writers trying to explain that flowery and impassioned rhetoric is part of their culture. Alternatively, maybe they genuinely are as bloodthirsty and cut-throat as the characters in Stewart’s book suggest.

Stewart visits one of the many schools he’s helped refurbish with CPA money only to bump into the Prince of the Marshes who is ranting about the shoddy quality of the plasterwork, leading up to the blood-curdling threat:

‘Now I need to know the name of the contractor who did this work – tell me his name and I will rip out his tongue.’ (p.98)

Is this bombastic showing off, especially as he said it for the benefit of the school’s headmistress who was standing nearby? Even so, it’s hard to fit this kind of language into anything that might be said in a civilised society. Or was it meant literally? After all, there was always a low level current of mafia-style violence across the province and that was before the insurgency began, which itself degenerated into sectarian civil war, when thousands of people were kidnapped, had their eyes gouged out, their kneecaps drilled through and otherwise hurt in the most cruel and sadistic ways imaginable.

If it was rhetoric, it paved the way for real life atrocities. But more likely, the language just matched the actions.

Tribal fights were still very common – it was not rare for two or three men to be killed in a week in tribal disagreements. (p.143)

Stewart helps a sheikh of the Suwaad tribe who graciously invites him for lunch. Next day the sheikh’s house is firebombed. At an art exhibition he is introduced to Dr Kifiyah, a confident woman who is working for an aid organisation educating women (p.175). He supervises the election of a mayor for the town of Ali Al Sharj. Three days later, the mayor is ambushed and killed (p.226).

The central event of the first section, set in Maysan, is the assassination of the chief of police who Stewart and the CPA had put all their hopes on, which unleashes a kidnapping, and various forms of sectarian violence. The point is that everyone has so many enemies that they’re not at all sure who carried out the assassination.

Under siege

The first 300 pages chronicle Stewart’s time in Maysan. Around page 300 he leaves that post and is driven across the border into Dhi Qar province and on to the Coalition’s base in the provincial capital, Nasiriyah. He discovers it is a far bigger, more populous place than Maysan. He discovers that the team here held elections to appoint a provincial council and they were judged a success, shedding light on his decision to appoint a council, which led to all the problems which made up most of the text about Maysan.

The next most important thing he discovers is the military presence here is Italian and, living down to their hard-won reputation, they are useless. Never on time, never serious or committed, they rarely lose an opportunity to run away from a fight. To be fair this was because, a few months earlier, in November 2003, a huge truck bomb had detonated at the Italian headquarters in Nassiriya, killing 17 Italians. At which point Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his 2,300-strong contingent not to take any risks. Any more casualties and negative public opinion would force him to withdraw from the Coalition. There were strong political and operational reasons for the Italians’ tardiness and unreliability.

All of which is important because Stewart is in Nassiriya when the dual insurgencies, of Sunnis in Fallujah and Sadrist Shia militias across the entire south, kick off in April, and the CPA compound in Nassiriya comes under sustained attack. It’s a really serious situation, with the compound besieged, running low on water, two guards at the gate are seriously injured, scores of mortars and RPGs attack the compound continuously, the entire civilian staff have to take cover.

Eventually he manages to get them extracted from the besieged base in a convoy of armoured patrol vehicles, only for them to trundle straight into an ambush and be bombarded with machine guns and RPGs and, having remained behind in the base, he has an agonising half an hour wondering if he’s just sent his entire team to a violent death, before getting a phone call to confirm that they had all arrived safe at the allied base at the airport outside of town.

Even here there’s Waughesque comedy, as the incompetent driver of the first APV unexpectedly throws it into reverse, nearly running over Stewart and a colleague who were remaining behind. When his infuriated commander leans down to cuff the harassed driver round the ear, he then accelerates into a pile of barbed wire which promptly tangle up the wheels and prevent it going any further, till the wire is slowly painfully untangled.

There’s page after page detailing the amazing ineffectiveness and cowardliness of the Italians, and it’s not just Stewart who is gobsmacked. A team of British and American security contractors from Control Risk Group (CRG) remain in the base with him and cannot believe how useless the Italians are (pages 390 to 393). Eventually after 3 days of siege a Coalition Spectre plane uses its night sights to locate the mortar bombers and pick them off one by one, killing or wounding the entire insurgent group. Next day the city is back to its normal bustling self. Stewart is full of praise for the consultants (aka mercenaries) who manned the machine gun posts and prevented the Sadrists storming over the walls and massacring Stewart and the garrison.

But Baghdad orders the compound to be evacuated. Obviously, the minute they’ve left the looters move in and strip the place of any moveable values, right down to the wiring, before gutting and burning it.

Once safely ensconced in the Italians’ main base at Tallil Stewart comes to like them. Wherever they go, they build pizza ovens and their food is extraordinary. In fact, once you stop thinking about the Italian Army as soldiers, but actually as great chefs in fancy uniforms, what’s not to love about them?

The CPA

In case I’m accused of being anti-Arab, Stewart also has a chapter devoted to a visit to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Baghdad which overflows with details of the inane, out of touch, ludicrous, over-ambitions of inexperienced Yanks who worked all the hours that God sent and yet somehow presided over a complete shambles (pages 105 to 121). I particularly liked the deliberately comic passage where he describes going to one of the evening discos in the Green Zone and being introduced to two men who were both under the impression they had been appointed acting Interior Minister. A little later he meets two men who both think they are the Media Commissioner (p.112). Chaos.

More seriously, Stewart describes talking at different times to two soldiers, one American, one British, who both try to get him to admit that the whole war and occupation was to do with taking Iraqi oil. If even the troops on our own side believe this myth, Stewart reflects, what hope of stopping most of the Iraqi population from believing it, too (p.108). After all, Iraq is sitting on the second biggest oil reserves in the world and yet throughout the Coalition’s rule, ordinary Iraqis had to form long lines at petrol stations. Why else could that be except that the West was stealing their oil? The real explanation, that Saddam’s extraction and refining industry was on its last legs and insurgents kept blowing up pipelines and facilities, was believed by no-one (p.152).

Talk of blowing up stuff raises the point that the Iraqis devoted an extraordinary amount of energy not just to killing each other, but to destroying the infrastructure of their own country (pages 205 to 206). The Great Looting in the days after the allied victory wasn’t an anomaly but a revelation of the true character of the Iraqis, a nation of looters and thieves.

Long after those days of chaos the looting continues. Everything not tied down is stolen. Factories are looted, warehouses are looted. In January, rioters storm the governor’s compound and loot every single piece of moveable furniture or equipment, even the filing cabinets (pages 289 to 297).

Several times Stewart mentions the practice of Iraqi criminal gangs who blow up power pylons so they can strip the copper from the coil, melt it down and sell it on the black market. The criminal gangs get tens of thousands of dollars from the venture but it costs the Americans tens of millions to rebuild series of pylons and rewire them. Obviously, most of the rest of the population suffers even worse power shortages than they already did.

As soon as he, the Italian garrison and the mercenaries withdraw from the CPA compound in Nasiriyah, it is comprehensively looted and trashed.

In a sentimental mode he describes the huge mudhif, a building built entirely out of marsh reeds using ancient skills of local builders, which had been constructed in such a way as to let light through a latticework of openings. It is ornate and beautiful as a cathedral. The Sadrists burn it to the ground.

When you have a people so absolutely determined to loot and vandalise their own country, what can you do? Leave them to get on with it.

On 28 June the CPA formally handed over authority to local council and governors in Iraq’s 34 provinces. The ones Stewart was involved in immediately plunge into chaos and violence. The Prince of the Marshes promptly allies with the Sadrists against the Iranian-backed parties. He shoots the chief of police of Majar dead. The remaining Coalition compounds such as the one where Stewart spent his first 6 months, in Amara, are now under continual, ferocious attack.

Church and state

It’s my view that it took hundreds of years for us in Britain to break the power of religion over the state. Three hundred years ago it took a civil war and a revolution to loosen the grip of the church over the nation’s political life. During the long Victorian century and well into the twentieth, the Christian denominations still exercised a very negative, anti-progressive influence, especially on what is loosely called the nation’s morals (anti-sex, anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti-gay). It was a long, hard battle to overthrow religious influence on our national life.

Here, in this book, are countless examples of Muslim clerics insisting that their religion, their religious values, their ancient forms of social organisation and their dark age forms of political process eclipse, trump and obviate the need for ‘modern, ‘western’ ideas like democracy or human rights or women’s rights. A cleric named Seyyed Faqr puts it with particular clarity:

‘What matters is not the law. What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.’ (p.222)

But what happens if two clerics claim to represent God, a Sadrist and an Iranian? And if you throw in a Sunni cleric? And one from this tribe and one from that tribe? And they all claim a direct line from God so that they can’t negotiate or compromise? Then you have a recipe for endless civil war, as in Libya, Sudan, the Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Only when all sides agree to abide by a law which is above all of them, impersonal and objective, and agree to thrash out their disagreements via legal channels, can you have a civil society. This is the lesson the Coalition Provisional Authority should have been trying to teach the fractious Iraqis. A legal system to which everyone submits, an independent judiciary, and an impartial police force, these are the bedrock of a civilised states, not the flashy trappings of elections. Elections and the trappings of democracy are a subset of law and order, which trumps every other concern. (cf p.315)

Humorous stories

Anyway, so far this summary has failed to mention the single most important thing, not about the book’s subject and themes, but about it’s style and manner. For this is an extremely readable and enjoyable book. I thought I’d had enough of books about Iraq and took it down off my shelf one evening only because I was bored watching TV. To my surprise, the next time I looked up, I was on page 50. I was hooked.

Occupational Hazards is beautifully written and by far the easiest to read of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of that is down to Stewart’s appealingly British irony and deadpan humour which you may or may not attribute to classic upper-class sang-froid and irony. He expects things to go wrong and is never upset when they do. Many of the accounts of his meetings, with tribal leaders or top army officers, or foreign civilians in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end with a bathetic, ironic, darkly humorous punchline.

It helps that so many of the facts are themselves blackly, bleakly comical, in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic accounts of Africa, walking a fine line between horror and hilarity. The secret is in the very dry, clipped phrasing. Here he is reflecting on the rather ludicrous title the Prince of the Marshes had awarded himself:

In truth, of course, Iraq didn’t have princes any more, and it hardly had marshes. The last princes were murdered on the kitchen steps of the palace in 1958 and disembowelled and mutilated in the streets, where the mob used the Regent’s intestines as necklaces. (p.18)

This is the Waugh tone, the casual, ironic, drawling half-humorous description of shocking criminality or scandalous behaviour:

I had spent my first two weeks almost entirely in my office or in camp and I was eager to visit rural towns, which I had heard were bastions of corruption, inefficiency and political tension. (p.90)

On one of these rural rides Stewart stops at an isolated compound to chat with a genuine farmer, not some politico with an axe to grind:

As I left I asked him what I should be doing. ‘Don’t trust the police chief, he replied. ‘He is a gangster. Don’t trust anyone who lives south of Al Amara. They are thieves and bandits.’
‘But you live south of Al Amara,’ I protested.
‘Don’t trust me either,’ he said. He presented me with a live guinea fowl in parting as a gift. (p.96)

The guinea fowl clinches the comedy of the anecdote. Whether this encounter ever happened or took place as Stewart recounts it, who cares? It’s not as if it made the slightest difference to what actually happened in Iraq. It’s these throwaway details at the end of each anecdote or cadence which give it the true Waugh feel.

The Bazun sheikhdom was in dispute between the two main families, one of which had stolen all the heavy digging equipment from the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. (p.234)

And:

We drove past the main government building, which Nate had seen demolished by rockets: only a fragile facade of coloured tiles remained, and a sculpture commemorating the Iraqis’ 1920 uprising against the British. It depicted a British officer being shot in the back of the head. (p.303)

Of course horrible things happen. For example, quite a few of the Western civilians, administrators and soldiers Stewart meets on his first arrival end up dead, shot or blown up in suicide attacks. And then, in April, the four US contractors are lynched and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah (p.342) which so infuriates President George W. Bush that he orders the US Army to storm the city to find their murderers and ‘bring them  to justice’ ho ho ho. In the same week Muqtada al-Sadr starts his Shia rebellion across the whole south of the country. Hundreds and then thousands died as a result of these parallel insurgencies, one by Sunnis (Fallujah), one by Shias (Muqtada’s).

Black comedy

An extended comic sequence is provided by the story of the kidnapping of a British hostage, Gary Teeley. The first part is all panic and concern among CPA officials and the military to establish who kidnapped him and why and how to get him back. In the event, some of the many tribal leaders Stewart has been having lengthy discussions with simply turn up at the gates of the compound and hand over the filthy and disorientated Brit, directly to Stewart, in person, expecting thanks.

Over the next few days various other tribal and religious factions, including the Sadrists, contact Stewart to claim the credit for releasing Teeley, even though it seems fairly certain that some of them were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place.

But that’s just the start. Stewart debriefs the shattered and disorientated hostage, who had been kept blindfolded for a week, then packs him into an ambulance to be taken to the nearby Italian hospital. Walking back through the compound he is accosted by an irate British woman who tells him she is a hostage negotiator who has been on high alert for 3 days, why didn’t he contact her? Because he didn’t know she existed. Why did he hand over Teeley to the Italians? Because he clearly needed to go to a hospital to be checked over. Yes, says the woman, but he should have been sent to the British hospital at Basra.

By now Stewart realises there is a propaganda battle going on between the British and Italian military, both wanting to be seen to be the hostage’s liberators, not least for the benefit of the Americans and the CPA in Baghdad. Thus the Italian commander sends an email round claiming the release was the result of the Italians working with their favourite tribal leader, Sheikh Talib of the Beni Rikaab tribe.

But it’s not finished yet. The released Teeley turns out to be selling his story to the papers, and – in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of Fleet Street, Scoop – three different British newspapers print three completely conflicting accounts of his ordeal. The Daily Telegraph leads with a big photo of the Italian general shaking hands with Teeley as if the Italians negotiated his release. Then The Sun reported that Teeley had been released by Italian forces who used a helicopter to track a suspicious car to an apartment which they then stormed, discovering the captive bound by the legs. Then The Mail on Sunday led with the scoop that the Italian forces who had been credited with finding and releasing Teeley were in fact elite SAS officers wearing Italian military outfits!

Three different packs of lies, each more outrageously untrue than its predecessor.

The moral(s) of the story

1. Stewart’s book shows in more granular detail than any other account the sheer folly of expecting a backward, illiterate, tribal, sectarian society full of cut-throat, corrupt, criminal and hyper-violent tribal, religious and political leaders to become anything like a democratic society in the sense we understand it.

In Stewart’s account any Iraqi leader who gains even a modicum of power immediately moves to reinforce their position, arm their followers, and harass, arrest or assassinate any possible rivals. Saddam politics. This is what even the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malaki, did as soon as the Americans finally withdrew, in 2011. I love the fact that the very day after the last US forces withdrew, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for his own vice president, the Sunni Tariq al-Hashemi, who was forced to flee to Turkey and, convicted of terrorism, was swiftly sentenced to death in his absence. Saddam politics.

2. If there’s one message from all this, as from all the other books I’ve read about the British effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not to believe a word about the Britain’s foreign exploits, either a) given in press releases by the military but b) even more by the British newspapers, who will fall over themselves to invent any old lies to promote their respective agendas (The Sun: ‘Our Brave Boys Save The Day’; The Telegraph: ‘Secret SAS Mission’; The Guardian: ‘Shame of British Troops’ etc).

Lasting thought

As I closed the book and reflected on it for a few days, one thought rose above all the others, which is that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan. OK, not saying things the Coalition or the West or Iraqi apologists or themselves would be very pleased to read. But all the other books I’ve read focus on Americans and Brits and Westerners and the occupiers – Stewart’s book, alone, goes way out of its way to focus on the actual Iraqis he met and talked to and tried and failed to manage.

In fact, this ends up being the conclusion of the epilogue he added to the paperback edition of the book published in 2007. By that point the insurgency had become general and had evolved in many places into a sectarian civil war. Stewart criticises politicians, academics and journalists for dealing in fine words, abstract concepts and abstract statistics.

No one is offering a granular and patient account of the insurgency in all its evolving and surprising multiplicity. We prefer the universal and the theoretical: the historical analogy and the statistics. But politics is local, the catastrophe of Iraq is discovered best through individual interactions.

And it’s precisely a multitude of such ‘individual interactions’, bleakly disillusioning though most of them are, that this impressive, illuminating and drily humorous book offers, in abundance.

Credit

Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart was published by Picador in 2006. References are to the revised 2007 Picador paperback edition.

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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

  • expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
  • easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
  • increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

Contents

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

  1. insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
  2. loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
  3. liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
  4. separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
  5. occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
  6. global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

  • the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
  • as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
  • the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
  • what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
  • the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
  • widespread lack of education
  • marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
  • the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
  • and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 17, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 17, 2023

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