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The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008 (2009)

“All armies get it wrong at the beginning; the question is who adapts fastest.”
(British military historian Michael Howard quoted by Elliot Cohen, page 100)

‘All Americans make promises but nothing ever happens.’
Iraqi housewife complaining why there was still sewage in the street outside her house 5 years after the Americans invaded and promised to fix it (p.175)

Fiasco, a brief recap

Thomas E. Ricks won acclaim with his award-winning book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, published in 2006. That book gave an extraordinarily detailed, high-level account of the mind-bogglingly stupid, arrogant, ignorant and incompetent decisions made by senior American officials (Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and under secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith) in the run-up to the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Within a year it had been conclusively proven that a) Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and b) had no links with al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist organisation which carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. In other words, the instigators of the invasion (Cheney et al) had grossly misled the US political system, the media, the American public, and the world at large, via its utterly incorrect briefings at the United Nations.

Not just that, though. Ricks’s book is named Fiasco because he shows in excruciating detail, and with extraordinary access to senior officials in the Defence Department, State Department and, above all, the US military, how catastrophically bad decisions were taken all down the line, misjudgements and bad calls which led to the post-invasion ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq quickly degenerating into chaos out if which emerged the anti-occupation insurgency, alongside a civil war which developed between militias from the Sunni and Shia communities.

The stupidity can be boiled down to two main errors:

  1. Rumsfeld’s insistence that the invasion and occupation be carried out with far, far too few US troops on the ground; Ricks shows him consistently paring back Army estimates of how many troops on the ground would be needed
  2. the complete absence of a detailed plan for the reconstruction’ of Iraq, or even for the aftermath of the war, because the idiots in charge (Cheney et al) thought the Iraqi people would pick themselves up, return to work, set up a functioning government and rebuild their country using their own oil revenue, all within a couple of months of the overthrow of Saddam

These key assumptions and all the individual tactics and plans which were based on them – ‘the botched handling of the first three years of the war’ (p.116) – turned out to be disastrously wrong (p.102), but the entire situation was turned toxic when the man appointed as America’s viceroy in Iraq, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer, took the intemperate (i.e. against a barrage of opposition and informed criticism) and catastrophic decisions:

  1. to deprive any member of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party of their jobs, on the analogy of the denazification process applied to post-war Germany
  2. to disband the Iraqi Army, police and security services, with the naive idea that US forces would then train new ones, starting from scratch, inculcating democratic values etc

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, over 500,000 highly trained and motivated men and women lost their jobs, their careers and their incomes. After initial protests and appeals many of them went to form the core of the insurgent forces and militias which were to attack US forces and each other for the next 8 years.

More subtly, the Iraqi Army had provided a unifying force in a country made up of fractious ethnic and religious groups, namely (from south to north) Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the Kurds in the north. Removing one of Iraq’s core unifying institutions made the country’s collapse into disparate regions and ethnic civil war far more likely.

Factor in the fact that Rumsfeld’s obstinate insistence on sending far fewer troops than were required led to army barracks and ammunition dumps all over the country being left wide open to be looted by would-be terrorists, insurgents and militias, and you could hardly have create a more perfect recipe for a complete shitstorm.

And the shit really hit the fan when the steadily worsening security situation (i.e. widespread lawlessness, robberies, murders, rapes, attacks on occupation forces on a daily basis etc) crystallised into two contemporaneous uprisings: one among the followers of ‘radical’ Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, at first in the eastern slums of Baghdad and then spreading across the Shia south; at the same time as the mostly Sunni city of Falluja to the west of Baghdad, was scene of a massive uprising – both in April and May 2004.

Suddenly the mostly US occupying forces were thrown into more intense urban fighting, with higher casualties, than in the initial invasion back in March and April 2003. And that was the point in the story – with the Fallujah and Sadr City risings – where Ricks ended his first book.

The Gamble

This book is by way of being the sequel to Fiasco, picking up exactly where its predecessor left off. It covers a very specific time period, from autumn 2005 to autumn 2008 – three years – and, although it is, like Fiasco, staggeringly detailed, with extraordinary access to senior military figures who talk with astonishing candour about the political and military foul-up the Americans had landed themselves in – it is, in a sense, a fairly simple story.

It describes the agonisingly slow process whereby senior figures in the US Army slowly came to realise that they were fighting the wrong kind of war. The occupying forces were continuing to fight a conventional war in which the aim is to identify your enemy (hopefully wearing a nice identifiable uniform) and kill as many of them, and degrade their military or civilian infrastructure to such a degree, that their leaders are forced to sign a peace treaty, and then You Have Won.

Only slowly, during the course of 2004 and 2005, did senior officers in the large unwieldy Army bureaucracy and the Pentagon, come to heed the voices that had been advising that the army was in fact fighting a completely different kind of conflict: it was battling an insurgency and thus had to completely switch tactics in order to implement a counterinsurgency.

The last 100 or so pages of Fiasco had, in fact, already expressed this idea at some length, repeatedly, and so there is quite a strong feeling of repetition about the start of The Gamble. Once again we are introduced to the gurus of counterinsurgency, from Lawrence of Arabia with his 27 Articles (1917), to the counterinsurgency manual of Frenchman David Galula, ‘Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice’ (1964), and John Nagl’s ‘Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam’ (2002) and then the 2007 paper, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, by Australian soldier, David Kilcullen, which, amazingly enough, persuaded Petraeus to invite Kilcullen to come and work for him in Iraq as his counterinsurgency adviser.

Ricks repeats (and repeats again) the simple insight at the core of counterinsurgency theory which is that the population is the prize. Insurgents wear no uniforms, move freely among the general population, choose their own opportunities to emerge from the general population to mount ambushes, plant bombs and so on, before melting back into the crowd. They are able to do this in part because they terrorise the general population, often spending as much time killing their own fellow citizens for speaking against them or in any way helping the hated occupier.

So the only way to crush an insurgency is to separate the insurgents from the population and the only way to do that is to win over the general population to your side; and the way you do that is to break up the super-barracks the Yanks had built around Iraq, and instead create scores of smaller posts embedded throughout the cities and towns; to patrol regularly and visibly; to create law and order on the streets. It is emphatically not to kick down the doors of then houses of suspected insurgents, terrify everyone inside and humiliate the man of the house in front of all his relatives; that merely adds one more fighter to the insurgency. The way to behave is with elaborate respect for all citizens, assure them of your protection, respect their culture (especially the sacrosanct nature of hospitality and the respect due to male heads of households, communities or tribes). Ditto detainees, who must be treated according to the Geneva Convention and legality.

Above all try to restore the sense of law and order on the streets – which the Americans had so decisively lost in the first few days of wild looting after the conquest of Baghdad – and protection for everyday citizens from violent criminals and homicidal militias.

Ricks’s narrative describes how these ideas were expressed by scattered officers, academics and teachers within the huge Army bureaucracy, and then were taken up by General David Petraeus who, through a series of complex political manoeuvres, was appointed commanding general of the Multi-National Force Iraq in February 2007 and then wangled the resources – i.e. extra money and five brigades of extra troops – to try and implement this complete turnaround in the Army’s policy.

The notable increase in soldiers on the ground came to be referred to, in the media and then more widely, as ‘the Surge’ and an awful lot, from President George Bush’s political career to the reputation of the US Army throughout the Middle East and around the world, came to rest on it.

That’s what the title refers to and the book describes: the enormity of the stakes involved in what amounted to a humongous gamble to try and wrest back control of an Iraq policy and an armed occupation which had spiralled out of control.

Failed hopes of handing over

My summary so far doesn’t refer to two other important points. From the end of the invasion phase in May 2003 onwards the administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) came to cling more and more desperately to two shibboleths: 1) that once the Americans had supervised elections and gotten a democratically elected government in place, the Iraqis would take over their own country; and 2) that this would be done via the Iraqi Army and police force which the Americans were training up. The mantra Bush kept repeating to the press was ‘We step down as they [the Iraqi security forces] step up’.

But both policies hit big snags. Not one but two elections were held in Iraq in 2005, in January and December, but had almost entirely negative consequences: The January one was to create a transitional government which would draft a constitution for a successive vote. But in January 1) much of the minority Sunni population boycotted them (voter turnout was as low as 2% in the Sunni Triangle of Al Anbar province) thus confirming what was likely anyway, which was that most elected officials and the government itself was dominated by Iraq’s Shia majority; 2) which, instead of defusing, crystallised and exacerbated sectarian divisions (and violence) across the country (p.32). Just during the January election there were more than 100 armed attacks on polling places including nine suicide bombers, killing at least 44 people.

(Reading statistic like this again and again and again and again makes you marvel at the Iraqis’ dedication and commitment to murdering as many of their fellow citizens, fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims as possible, and utterly screwing up their country as much as they could. It was the scale of the mayhem which prompted Petraeus’s adviser Emma Sky in 2007 to call Iraq a failing state, p.147.)

The same level of violence accompanied the December 2005 election, alongside accusations of fraud and vote-rigging, and extremist language from countless clerics denouncing democracy as an evil alien ideology. Just a few months later, on 22 February 2006, the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, an important Shia shrine, really kicked off the hyper-violent sectarian conflict (p.32).

But while a violent civil war was kicking off, 3) it took Iraq’s squabbling political class five months to cobble together a ‘government of national unity’ under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. a) The excruciating slowness of the process, while car bombs and murders and kidnappings ran out of control across the country disillusioned many with the concept of democracy, which just seemed to be a synonym for inaction and corruption, and b) al-Maliki was in hock to his Shia supporters and, in Ricks’s narrative, becomes part of the problem for protecting the Shia militias carrying our murderous ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunni districts.

In Sunni neighbourhoods that had been ethnically cleansed, patrolling soldiers often found piles of executed bodies and vacant houses with blood smeared on the walls.(p.166)

Far from solving the problem, the Shia-dominated government turned out to compound the problem. One example: the Ministry of Health employed Shia militiamen who murdered Sunnis who applied for medical care (p.156). Another example: American officials meeting Iraqi government ministers could never be sure whether the ministers had tipped off the militias who would then try to assassinate the Americans en route to the meeting (p.158). Not really the beacon of democracy Cheney and Rumsfeld swore Iraq would become in a matter of months.

The neo-conservatives’ other hope was that ‘as they stand up, we can stand down’ i.e. as the Iraqi Army and police were trained and began serving, the Americans could reduce their involvement and begin to draw down their forces i.e. leave. This assumption (like all the neo-cons’ assumptions) turned out to be grotesquely flawed because the Iraqi Army and police force turned out to be useless. Army units refused to deploy anywhere but their home district – Ricks describes several occasions on which newly qualified Army units mutinied, tore off their uniforms and deserted their barracks rather than be shipped to another part of the country to support or replace American forces. And they were caught up in the sectarian division of the country i.e. were Sunni or Shia first and Iraqis second. And the police in particular, as well as turning a blind eye to militias from their own ‘side’ were breath-takingly corrupt. In Baghdad US forces found they had to ban the Shia-dominated police from even entering Sunni areas where they were regarded as murderers (p.168), reminiscent of Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia where the security forces ceased to operate above the conflict but became completely identified with one side.

Both these strategies came, by the new boys (Petraeus and his commander in chief Ray Ordieno and their council of advisers) to be referred to pejoratively as ‘rushing to failure’. They had to be dropped.

So George Bush’s decision to acquiesce to mounting calls to change strategy in Iraq referred not only to a change of narrow military doctrine (from war to counterinsurgency) but a wider acknowledgement that the policy of waiting for Iraqi politicians and security forces to take charge of their own country was also not working.

Fastabend’s essay

General David Petraeus was appointed senior military leader Iraq early in 2007. Lt General Ray Ordieno was appointed his number 2, in charge of day to day operations. Major-General David Fastabend was appointed director of strategic operations to Petraeus. He wrote an essay listing some of the complete turnarounds in American policy which were required:

  • there was a hole in the centre of the Iraqi state where the government should be, providing law and order but wasn’t; the militias had stepped in to provide it but the Americans had to occupy that space
  • eliminate extremists not by killing them (more will spring up) but working with them; convert them from terrorists and militia into neighbourhood watches – this was pursued by putting over 100,000 former Sunni insurgents onto the US payroll as ‘the Sons of Iraq’ (p.204)
  • reach out to the radical firebrand oppositionist Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr – this succeeded when al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in mid-2007 (p.201)
  • ignore the national politicians; work at regional and local level to reconcile Sunni and Shia

Another way of conceptualising the US failure in Iraq is that it fought the war it wanted and not the war that was needed. Dazzled by their status as sole superpower and shiny weaponry and sexy drones and laser-guided missiles and supercomputers, the Yanks thought their technological superiority guaranteed victory in any war. I.e. they lost sight of the fact that war is about people. And war in a catastrophically failed state is about working with the people, over the very long term, to rebuild the state one village, one town, one tribe, one region at a time. Long-term, low-tech, high manpower commitment. ‘Slow, ambiguous operations built not around technology but around human interactions’ (p.162).

America’s reluctance to commit troops and resources, its reluctance to lose even one soldier in combat, its reluctance to admit to itself that it is now an empire, is the subject of Michael Ignatieff’s incisive criticism in Empire Lite.

Points of interest

‘There are two kinds of plan, those that fail and those that just might work’ (p.159).

Rather than recap the entire narrative, I’ll select points of interest:

Ethnic cleansing

I hadn’t realised that in 2005, 2006 and 2007 the Iraqis were practicing ethnic cleansing identical to that in former Yugoslavia: in Baghdad in early 2006 Shia militias carried out car bomb attacks and massacres on Sunni communities and Sunni militias struck back on a daily basis killing 20, 30, 40 civilians every day.

Abbreviations

The group within the National Security Council lobbying for an increase in US troops in Iraq called themselves ‘the surgios‘.

MAMs = middle-aged males, an army category of detainee or prisoner (p.107).

AQI = al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Wasta – Iraqi term for clout, pull, connections, the power to get things done, which in turn generates respect.

Communitarian values

The Americans at all levels were obsessed with their own Western mindset of one-man, one-vote democracy based on the primacy of the atomised individualism produced by advanced capitalist societies. Iraqi society, on the contrary, was based around communitarian values based on respect and dignity, ‘dignity and respect, the core values of Iraqi culture’ (p.213). It took the Americans four years to understand this.

Stability over democracy

Part of the rethink was recalibrating the goals; instead of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz aim of setting up Iraq as a beacon of democracy and transforming the entire Middle East, the new Petraeus doctrine was to stop Iraq disintegrating into civil war which spilled over into a regional bloodbath (explained on p.164 and p.224).

Victory and Liberty were replaced as goals by stability and accommodation. Realistic minimalism of the army versus the maximalist rhetoric of the poltroon politicians. (Ahead of his April 2008 testimony to Congress Petraeus referred to himself as a ‘minimalist’, p.287.)

Stability became the goal. Controversially, this involved assessing whether ‘democracy’ contributed to or undermined ‘stability’ and it turned out to be the latter. In other words, the Americans talked their way round to understanding why a failing state like Iraq needs a strong, Saddam-like leader. In fact, American tacticians consulted with Iraqi leaders on just how Saddam had controlled his unruly population and began to borrow his techniques, for example siting many of the troops just outside Baghdad, which is where Saddam based his Revolutionary Guards. Odierno asks himself: ‘What would Saddam do?’ (p.165)

Doing deals

Similarly, a central plank of the surge, and prime cause why violence against US forces fell off, is because the Americans did deals with local Sunni leaders. Many were sick to death of the violence of (Sunni) al Qaeda in Iraq. Interrogations or just conversations with many former insurgents revealed that most of them were hard-up and planted bombs etc for as little as $10 a day. Petraeus organised schemes to take Sunni insurgents onto the payroll which eventually were costing $30 million a month.

But a criticism was that this was also a tactic undertaken by Saddam, who bought off tribal opponents with bribes, allowing sheikhs to create their own tribal armies complete with RPGs, AK47s and so on (p.216). Insoluble problems of Iraqi society.

Examples of Iraqi on Iraqi violence on pages 32, 180, 185, 186, 221, 228, 241.

Contractors

Ricks barely mentions the tens of thousands of security contractors who made a tidy living in Iraq, because they are outside the military and therefore his frame of reference. It is bleakly funny to learn that many contractors paid hefty bribes to local militias to ensure the safety of themselves and those they were protecting, and that the militias then used this money to buy more weapons and ammo to attack the conventional US army – Americans paying militias to kill Americans; terrific system (p.168). At the peak of the surge there were some 156,000 US troops in Iraq but this was beaten by the 180,000 contractors (p.187).

The JAMsters

JAM = Jaysh al-Mahdi, the militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, responsible for widespread ethnic cleansing i.e. massacring Sunnis; its members nicknamed JAMsters by many Americans (p.173). Being Arabs, or Muslims, or Iraqis, or just angry young men, JAM factions often fought among themselves. Ricks describes a situation in the Hurriyah neighbourhood of Baghdad when four factions of Jaysh were fighting each other, being Noble JAM, Golden JAM, criminal JAM and ordinary JAM. The Americans called JAM HQ in Najaf and asked them to come and sort it out. This worked because they were paying the JAM authorities respect.

Fear is the key

In Blood and Belonging Michael Ignatieff explains how ethnic nationalism arises when you no longer trust the police or security services to protect you but instead start to fear they will persecute you. Fear is the key motivator, as when, in Iraq, the national police became indistinguishable from the Shiite militias. Who can you turn to to protect you? People like you, ‘your people’, from your tribe or clan or ethnicity or religion. Once this starts to happen it is a downward spiral into tit for tat killings which push communities further apart. Eventually all you can do is physically partition the rival sides to stop them killing each other. Ricks describes the Americans building high concrete blast walls around the remaining Sunni communities in Baghdad to stop Shiite militias carrying out attacks. Peace walls. He appears not to have heard of the similar walls built in Northern Irish cities in the 1980s, the policed checkpoints needed between Serb and Muslim parts of Kosovo (p.173).

Asked in November 2008 what one word best describes Iraq [Ambassador Ryan Crocker] didn’t hesitate: ‘Fear.’ (p.310)

The Brits

The British are only mentioned 3 or 4 times, in the most striking instance when a senior American officer says they’ve basically ‘lost’ in the South i.e. Basra (p.177). As of 28 February 2014 the number of UK personnel deployed to Iraq was 141,640. 179 British Armed Forces personnel or MOD civilians died. Yet by the summer of 2008 Ricks says the Brits had just 4,100 troops at Basra airport ‘doing almost nothing’ (p.268). The dismal British performance is analysed pages 277 to 289.

Darwinian evolution of the insurgents

The insurgents and militias were smart, learned American tactics and behaviours and how and when best to attack. US troops liked to joke that all the stupid and amateurish fighters had been killed off early in the insurgency, leaving the smartest and most adaptive to fight on, becoming steadily smarter and more effective (p.180).

Iraqification

In the kind of high-level conceptualisation which makes his journalism so enjoyable, Ricks suggests that the ‘surge’ (and deals with Sunni insurgents) of 2007 represented the Iraqification of the war. For four years the Americans had been trying to Americanise Iraq; now, at last, they realised they had to let Iraq be Iraq (bloody, tribal, violent) and let themselves be Iraqified (p.219).

Murder board

Petraeus prepared for his September 2007 appearance before Congress by having his inner team submit him to a ‘murder board’ i.e. hit him with the hardest, weaselest questions they could think of (p.245).

Sayings

Good tactics can’t fix a bad strategy (p.160).

An old military aphorism has it that amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics (p.197).

Andrew Krepinevich’s law of the conservation of enemies: Never make more enemies at one time than you absolutely need to (p.223).

It is axiomatic in military affairs that every strength carries its own weakness (p.255).

The cost

By early 2008 the Iraq War, which Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had said would pay for itself, had cost the United States $650 billion, at minimum (p.292).

Afterwards

There are two problems, not so much with the book itself as its place in modern history. The obvious one is that Ricks’s account stops at the end of 2008 (with an 8-page epilogue taking us up to late 2009) and with the whole situation in Iraq profoundly unresolved.

US forces were, in the event, to remain in the country until the very end of 2011 – but even then they left a country in crisis, with the supposedly democratically elected Shia government alienating much of the Sunni population. And this in any case proved to be a brief hiatus since, in summer 2014, US forces had to return to Iraq to combat the new threat of the Islamic State group, which declared a caliphate across parts of north-west Iraq and Syria. US forces were to remain in Iraq for a further seven years (!), from 2014 to 2021.

Written and published so close to the events it’s describing, I had the gnawing sense that The Gamble had been superseded by 15 years of subsequent events, and that therefore many of its judgments might have been rendered obsolete.

This seems particularly true of the second problem which is that, if you Google ‘counterinsurgency+iraq’ you get quite a few articles referring to the whole doctrine Ricks praises being discredited. This is a bummer because the final third of Fiasco is devoted to describing and praising counterinsurgency (COIN) as the way forward, and The Gamble is entirely premised on this military doctrine. If COIN has, indeed, been discredited, then so has the basis of both Ricks’s books.

Whatever detailed, modern (2023) assessments of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq conclude, there’s no doubt that they didn’t work in the sense of securing long-term security for their countries, especially Afghanistan, where we all saw the US-trained army and security forces collapse and the Taliban surge back to power in little more than a week in August 2021.

Four thoughts

1. The complexity of the US military machine

As Ricks introduces us to members of the US Army at all levels, of all ranks, in Iraq, back in the States, to serving generals and retired generals, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to educators at West Point and Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies, to officials within the White House, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department, to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, all kinds of other bodies such as the Defence Policy Board, the American Enterprise Institute, the Iraq Study Group, as well as to academic experts on military history and strategy at place like the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to commentators and specialist journalists — he builds up a picture of the extraordinarily complicated ecosystem which makes up the US political-military machine. And that’s without mentioning the other two services, the air force and the navy which, of course, have their own vast bureaucracies and hierarchies.

Ricks’s narrative shows that, not only is the US military establishment huge and complex and byzantine, but it is riven with politics and personalities, arguments and ambition, rivalries and debates, which add elements of complication and confusion at every level from the White House downwards.

Reading Rick’s portrait of this vast, lumbering, multi-faceted behemoth helps you really understand how difficult it is to mount a campaign in the first place, and then helps explain the manifold failings and setbacks and false promises and crap strategies which the army of the richest country in the world keeps experiencing.

2. PhDs in the US military

As a footnote to the above, it is also a bit staggering how well educated a lot of these army types are. A lot of the army officers have degrees (impressive) but a surprising number also have PhDs (very impressive). Ricks lists the PhDs in the team Petraeus built around him on page 135. Reminding me of Michael Ignatieff’s comment in ‘The Lesser Evil’ that the US Army is overflowing with frustrated intellectuals. Who’d have thought.

So how does an organisation bulging with over-educated, cleverclogs manage to foul up so often? See point 1. I’ve worked for a number of UK government departments and agencies and have seen at first hand the magical, almost supernatural way in which, the more you fill a room with clever medium and senior-level managers, the dumber the discussion and the worse the outputs.

I personally have sat in a meeting of board members and the chief executive and watched them discussing results which I, the most junior person in the room, charged with monitoring the stats and producing weekl reports, knew to be factually incorrect or were being distorted for political reasons, both internal and external (I mean real politics, deriving from Cabinet and the government).

Should I, the lowliest person in the room, interrupt the presentation being given by the Head of Strategy to the Board and the Chief Executive, and thus embarrass my boss and his boss and his boss; be put on the spot in front of the entire board of the organisation; and with no alternative strategy to propose, just negatively pointing out errors and inaccuracies? Am I likely to speak up in that situation? No, and so I repeatedly watched decisions being boldly taken based on incorrect data and misleading stats.

This is why I enjoyed both Ricks’s books so much, because they really dig down into the psychological reasons behind clichéd expressions such as ‘bureaucratic inertia’ to show why that kind of thing arises and is so hard to combat in practice. It boils down to people being scared of stepping out of the groupthink, being the only one in the room to point out that the emperor is naked, of any sane person preferring to avoid ridicule and rejection, and so going along with decisions they know to be wrong.

3. Iraqi voices but no Iraqi perspective

It’s an obvious point, but this is the account of a man who has for decades been a leading journalist on the Pentagon and the US military. His contacts, his quotes, his grasp of the internal politics and debates within the US Army, the Defence Department, the State Department, the White House, are exceptional.

So there’s lots and lots and lots about the situation in Iraq and America’s military strategy in Iraq and bringing democracy to Iraq and making Iraq a free nation and rebuilding Iraq and the history of Iraq and the religious and ethnic groups of Iraq – all seen from an American point of view, by lots and lots and lots of well-educated US military – but actual voices of actual Iraqis?

Well, it would be false to say there aren’t any, there are – a fair number, in fact, al-Maliki is quoted a lot, as are his advisers, other politicians, al-Sadr, and numerous sheikhs. BUT they are all quoted commenting on American initiatives and American plans and American shortcomings. For a real sense of the Iraqi experience, Iraqi history, Iraq’s political, religious and ethnic challenges, how the Iraqis see it – you’d have to go elsewhere. At the moment I’ve no idea where.

4. Ethnic nationalism

Ricks’s narrative is about the Big Shift within the extended behemoth which is the US political-military machine from a mindset based on winning a war to the mindset of counterinsurgency, which he repeats again and again and again. But my reading of the situation he’s describing is heavily influenced by having just reread Michael Ignatieff’s books about ethnic nationalism and Anthony Loyd’s books about the wars in former Yugoslavia. So what I see is that, while Ricks is praising his heroes for turning the supertanker of American policy in a completely new direction, from 1. a strategy of war-winning to a completely different 2. strategy of counterinsurgency; in the meantime the situation had already passed that point into 3. a civil war between ethnic or religious groups (Sunni versus Shia).

You know the old joke about the late-Victorian British government’s attempts to solve ‘the Irish Question’, that every time the British government thought it had found an answer, the Irish changed the question. Same here. It’s more complicated than that, and Ricks knows more about Iraq than I ever will, but I wonder whether, while he praises Petraeus et al for moving from approach 1 to approach 2, the Iraqis had outmanoeuvred them by moving on to zone 3.

And the thing can be posited about civil wars, especially when they reflect profound ethnic or religious divisions – as in Bosnia or Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka or Sudan – that they are very, very difficult to end, not without partition of the country (as in Ireland and Sudan) or extermination of one party (as when the Sri Lankan government wiped out the Tamil Tigers).

Obviously a huge factor is the well-known leftist position that most of the countries in the Middle East, as in Africa, are the impractical creation of ignorant bureaucrats back in the capital cities of European Empires (especially the British and French) who drew arbitrary borders dividing homogeneous groups and forcing together into new ‘states’ ethnic and religious groups who have nothing in common.

Classically, such naturally fissiparous ‘states’ have to be held together by authoritarian leaders and, when those strongmen are removed, show a strong tendency to collapse into smaller units dominated by one or other ethnic or religious group. Thus Yugoslavia after Tito died. Thus Iraq after Saddam was overthrown. Thus Libya after Qaddafi’s ouster.

Part of the arrogant ignorance of Bush Junior, Cheney and Rumsfeld was thinking Iraq was like Nazi-occupied France; all you had to do was kick out the Nazis and an integrated European nation with a strong secular identity, a citizenry with advanced awareness of their civic rights and responsibilities, would revert to being a peaceful democracy.

But Michael Ignatieff’s visits to the trouble spots he chronicles in his books highlight the problem with this assumption. Ignatieff’s investigations show that such a sophisticated sense of political rights and duties, a widespread sense of civic responsibility, the complex matrix of what development experts call ‘civil society’, take centuries to develop and simply don’t exist in many, probably most, countries in the world.

The Americans removed the dictator and instead of getting a generation of keen young citizens springing up to create a vibrant democracy they got hundreds of thousands of angry militiamen, insurgents and terrorists whose main aim became to massacre as many of the infidel invader or their fellow citizens as possible, in an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat terrorist atrocities.

This sounds exactly like the Bosnia and Kosovo described so vividly by Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd, except so much worse, because exacerbated by the deeply tribal and clan-based nature of Arab culture. It isn’t just the Bosnians against the Serbs as in Yugoslavia; Ricks portrays Iraq as a land with thousands of tribes who all have feuds and vendettas against each other, where tribal or clan loyalty, religious and ethnic allegiance come a long, long way before any thought of the ‘democracy’ or ‘civil rights’ spouted by the invader and their corrupt politicians in faraway Baghdad.

  • ‘One of the mistakes we made early on was not understanding the importance of the tribes,’ Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno (p.110)
  • ‘Tribal society makes up the tectonic plates in Iraq on which everything rests,’ Brigadier General John Allen (p.219)
  • ‘the most powerful socio-cultural dynamic in Iraq, the tribal system…’ Adam Silverman, political adviser to a brigade of the 1st Armoured Division (p.329)

Which begs the really basic question: can such a society ever become a peaceful democracy, as we in the West know it? To which my short answer is, no. Ricks ends his book with a string of first-person testimony from US officers who worked closely with Iraqi politicians, senior police or army officers. Without exception they describe individuals steeped in intimidation, fear and violence who were just waiting for the Americans to leave so they could set about exterminating their enemies. Many of the experts he spoke to predicted a return to civil war, a military coup, or the rise of a Saddam-like dictator.

Here’s highlights of the current Foreign Office advice about travel to Iraq:

The Foreign Office advises against all travel to Iraq and all but essential travel to the Kurdish provinces…Protests [in Baghdad] can, and sometimes do, escalate into violence…Iraq remains subject to regional tensions…You should remain vigilant, have robust security arrangements and contingency plans in place…Terrorists are still very likely to try to carry out attacks in Iraq. You should remain vigilant…There’s also a high threat of kidnapping throughout the country, including from both Daesh and other terrorist and militant groups, which can be motivated by criminality or terrorism.

In a 2006 Senate debate conservative Republican Lindsey Graham said: ‘The American people are beginning to wonder if the Iraqi people can get this right.’ (quoted on page 59). The police chief of Fallujah, a former insurgent named Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie put it simply: ‘No democracy in Iraq. Ever.’ (p.209). Were they right?

Since then

So where is Iraq today? This article gives a brief overview of the current situation. Twenty years after the coalition invasion there are some 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq. According to the article this is for two reasons:

  1. to help Iraqi forces in ongoing conflict with the remnants of ISIL in the north-west
  2. to disrupt supply lines from Iran in the east through Iraq, to Lebanon and its ally there, Hezbollah, where Iranian arms could be used in Hezbollah’s ongoing conflict against Israel

Maybe it’s just an awful part of the world and people born in Iraq are condemned to live their entire lives in a violent country, plagued by terrorist atrocities, criminality and continual, low-level religious conflict. So far from the naive imaginings of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as to be surreal.

Iran

The darkly funniest thing about the whole sorry story is that Saddam’s Iraq had up till the invasion provided a strong, Sunni, Arab bulwark against the power of Shia Iran. With Iraq greatly weakened by the American invasion, Iran has been able to extend its power into Iraq (via tame Shiite politicians and militias) and onwards throughout the region. The biggest single outcome of the American invasion of Iraq has been the empowering of one of America’s bitterest enemies, Iran.

International affairs is undertaken by utopian idiots (Bush, Blair), sorted out by embattled realists (Petraeus), and provides endless black humour to armchair ironists (us).

Humanity

These are the best products of the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known. Their net achievement? Stupidity leading to mind-boggling violence leading to complete strategic failure.

After immersing yourself in this swamp of arrogant incompetence I don’t see how anyone can believe the rhetoric you hear all the time about ‘combating climate change’ or ‘building a better, fairer world’. The richest, most powerful country in the world spent over a trillion dollars, lost thousands of lives, spent nearly 20 years, and still couldn’t even fix one medium-sized nation among the world’s 200 countries. Nobody is going to save us from our own stupidity.

Credit

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008 by Thomas E. Ricks was published by Penguin Books in 2009.

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Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)

‘Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.’
(Hand-written sign in the bar of the British compound of the Green Zone, Baghdad)

Why America invaded Iraq

In March 2003 the US Army, accompanied by forces from the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, invaded Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The architects of the invasion, US Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, persuaded all concerned that the Saddam needed to be overthrow because a) he was running programs to produce and launch weapons of mass destruction which presented a clear and present danger to America and other Western nations, and b) he supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The neo-con sponsors of the Iraq War

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their chief supporter in the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their gofer at Defence, Douglas Feith, assured the President, the press and the sceptical military that the Army would be greeted as liberators, much like the Allies who liberated Italy and France from Nazi rule. They argued that the US need only deploy the minimum number of troops possible because the Iraqi army and police would quickly take over law and order duties. They didn’t work out a detailed post-invasion plan on how to reconstruct the country after a decade of sanctions and Saddam’s mismanagement had run it into the ground because they thought Iraqi civil servants would remain in place, the various ministries would continue to function smoothly, and that an interim Iraqi government would quickly be put in place. Whatever it cost would be covered by revenue from Iraq’s abundant oil reserves.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were right-wing Republicans, also known as neo-conservatives or neo-cons (p.128). They had a long-standing, hawkish, interventionist view of foreign policy, believing the US should use its military superiority to every other country in order to reshape the world to suit American political and economic interests, and took advantage of the confused and hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 to:

  • remove Saddam and solve the Iraq Problem once and for all
  • rebuild Iraq as a model democracy which would be an example to the region
  • rebuild not only the political system and infrastructure on a Western democratic model, but remake the economy as a model free market economy, privatising all the nationalised industries, setting up a properly run stock market, and opening the country to foreign investment
  • ensure the new Iraqi government would be a friend and ally of Israel, a country to which all neo-con Republicans are fiercely attached

Backing Ahmad Chalabi

The neo-cons (especially Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, p.216) put their faith in the smooth-talking Iraqi exile politician Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress who bolstered their thinking at every turn, assuring them Saddam was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction, assuring them the US army would be greeted with flowers and celebrations, assuring them he could form a national government which would be friendly to America and Israel, assuring them the Iraqi economy, for decades a command economy consisting of state-supported industries, could easily be converted to a flourishing free market economy, and so on and so on. All lies and fantasy (p.30).

Anybody who expressed a negative opinion of this wonder-worker was liable to lose their job, such as Thomas Warrick, one of the few staff at ORHA who knew what they were doing but expressed a strong aversion to Chalabi who he regarded as a ‘smarmy opportunist’ (p.40). So Rumsfeld got him fired.

Military operations

The invasion phase of the war began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations. After 22 days Coalition forces captured the capital city Baghdad on 9 April 2003 after a 6-day battle. On 1 May US President George W. Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’.

The Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

The Americans had made some preparations for managing the country after it had been conquered but left it very late and never developed one authoritative, commonly agreed plan; different plans produced by different parts of the bureaucracy floated around, none of them complete in the necessary detail.

It was as late as 20 January i.e. just 2 months before the start of the invasion, that Rumsfeld got round to creating a body to act as a caretaker administration in Iraq until the creation of a democratically elected civilian government. This was the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). They appointed retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner as Director, based on Garner’s experience managing the relief effort for Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (p.31).

Garner quickly realised that the lack of a plan for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq was just one among a whole host of problems he faced These included a lack of qualified senior managers to take over every Iraqi ministry and a severe shortage of experienced civil servants to assist them. Senior staff were dumped on him purely because of their ideological commitment to the Republican party rather than any expertise or qualifications.

  • Tim Carney was a retired ambassador. He was nominated to ORHA by Wolfowitz and assigned to run the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Carney had no knowledge whatsoever of industry or minerals. He was given no information and no briefing, no idea how many workers the industry employed, no idea how many factories or state-run companies there were, so he looked it up on the internet and busked it from there (p.38).
  • A bureaucrat from the US Treasury was put in charge of the Iraqi Ministry of Education, despite having no knowledge whatsoever of education.
  • A former ambassador with no experience of trade was put in charge of the Ministry of Trade.
  • Stephen Browning from the Corps of Engineers was asked to head up four Iraqi ministries, of Transport and Communication, Housing and Construction, Irrigation, and Electricity (p.34).

The Great Looting

Then came the looting. While they awaited the end of the conflict in their Kuwaiti hotel rooms Garner and his staff watched on TV the astonishing level of looting which the under-manned US army allowed to happen in the immediate aftermath of the Battle for Baghdad (p.43). Because Rumsfeld had obstinately insisted on keeping the US force to a minimum, the occupying army simply lacked the manpower to protect key buildings and facilities. Day after day American soldiers stood by and let looting on an industrial scale devastate every administrative office in the capital and every factory, warehouse and industry, down to power stations and electricity substations. Everything that could be dismantled, taken away for personal use or for sale on the black market, was.

Tim Carney of ORHA was quickly to conclude that the looting did far more damage to Iraq’s infrastructure than the Allied bombing campaign (p.49). For example, all but one of the nation’s fire stations had been completely looted of all their equipment; the service would need to be rebuilt from scratch (p.100). All bank records of all businesses and municipalities disappeared (p.134). The countries’ universities were stripped of all moveable assets, computers, lab equipment, desks, chairs, even wiring (p.186). Hospitals were completely gutted of all valuables, equipment and medicines (p.235).

With the result that when they finally arrived in Baghdad, Garner and his team had nowhere to stay, no agreed plan, little or no budget, and inherited government buildings which had been ransacked and, in many cases, burned to the ground, with the loss of all the key information about the Iraqi economy, assets and businesses.

Little surprise, then, that ORHA began its work in an atmosphere of confusion and demoralisation which only got worse as the scale of the disaster and the challenge sank in. Its own staff quickly gave it the joke name ‘the Office of Really Hopeless Americans’ (p.32). Garner’s pessimistic reports back to Rumsfeld in Washington, and his insistence that power be handed over to the Iraqis themselves as soon as possible, quickly turned the neo-cons opinion against him.

ORHA replaced by the CPA

With the result that, to the surprise of Garner and his staff, he was relieved of the job after just one month (p.60). In fact it was announced that ORHA itself was being shut down and replaced by a new entity, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This was to be assigned ‘executive, legislative, and judicial authority over the Iraqi government’ and headed up by staunch Republican, Lewis Paul Bremer III.

When he’d arrived in Baghdad Garner found no accommodation had been arranged for him or his staff. He’d had to scrounge help from spare military officials who had helped him find one of Saddam’s vacant palaces which had escaped bombing but had no water or electricity and so where his staff camped out while Halliburton, the government’s logistics supplier, put them on the long waiting list for camp beds, portable stoves and suchlike (p.55).

Setting up the Green Zone

Garner and ORHA were just one of several US administrative teams, the Army, the CIA and numerous private contractors who quickly realised that the palace area of Baghdad offered many advantages. Even in the first few weeks the general streets of Baghdad were lawless because the Iraqi civil administration had broken down, all the army and police stayed home and there weren’t enough American troops to enforce law and order. Baghdad’s big swish hotels (where the world’s press had stayed during the Gulf War) couldn’t be made secure enough by the insufficient numbers of soldiers and freelance security contractors (p.46).

Whereas, over a decade earlier, Saddam had begun work building palaces and reception buildings on a grand scale in an enclave of the city which fronted on the Tigris River. Here buildings were constructed on an epic scale, even the houses of the staff were luxurious, the roads were wider and shaded by trees. More to the point, Saddam had enclosed the whole thing in a solid, rocket-proof brick wall. The Americans quickly grasped this was a ready-made secure location for all their administrative staff and added 17-foot-high blast barriers topped with coils of razor wire. The precinct had just three entrances which were protected by concrete blast barriers, troops and tanks.

The Americans quickly named it the Green Zone, by contrast with the rest of Baghdad, and then of Iraq as a whole, which quickly degenerated into chaos and violence. Inside these walls, insulated from the privations of the entire Iraqi population which was going without fresh water, electricity and basic supplies, where the complete breakdown in law and order had resulted in burglary, theft, muggings, carjackings, shootings, murder and rapes, the thousand or so fresh-faced staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, published reports festooned with statistics and graphs showing how the country was going from strength to strength, cooked up impressive project plans for restructuring the economy or turning Iraq into a Western-style democracy, in complete ignorance of the reality of the world outside their comfort zone.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

And it is this – the heroic, ironic, often hilarious and sometimes tragic disconnect between the pipe-dream rhetoric of the CPA and the steady descent into chaos of the country they claimed to be running – which is the subject of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s award-winning book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

It is ‘imperial’ life because Bremer was, in effect, the viceroy of the imperial power, America, which ran Iraqi affairs from Washington DC. And Chandrasekaran calls it ‘the Emerald City’ because of the happy colour coincidence between ‘Green Zone’ and the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz books, a handy overlap which also conveys the sense of never-never quality of most of the CPA’s fantasies of nation building.

Chandrasekaran and Thomas E. Ricks

In Fiasco, his extraordinary account of the Iraq War, Thomas E. Ricks gives a high-level and highly analytical account which focuses on all aspects of the military involvement of the war, giving extraordinary insight into just how such a war is conceived and planned, with quotes and comments from an awesome cast of senior military figures, active and retired. Ricks sheds light on the huge amount of bureaucratic in-fighting which accompanies such a huge undertaking, not least between the conservative and sceptical diplomats at the State Department, run by former General Colin Powell (p.34), and the far more gung-ho, hawkish neo-conservatives at the Department of Defence (also referred to as the Pentagon) led by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who despised the former:

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratising the region. (p.95)

Although Chandrasekaran also covers some of the same territory as Ricks (he shows us Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz making the same mistakes as Ricks does, and Powell and other experts expressing the same reservations), by and large he is more firmly in the Green Zone, meeting numerous staffers, describing their everyday life of hamburgers and American movies, working out at the gym, and producing fantasy plans and utopian policies (their ‘crazy ivory tower schemes’, p.254) to please their ideological masters back in Washington which had no possibility of ever being carried out in Iraq. If Ricks is all about the Army, Chandrasekaran is all about the CPA and its people.

Ordinary people and amateurs

For the first part of the book Chandrasekaran is interested in people and their stories, generally the lower echelon staff, who populated the Green Zone. These guys were flown in to staff the CPA, often at very short notice, and generally with little or no expertise in the jobs they were expected to do.

Half had never been abroad before and for many it was their first full-time job (p.15). What comes over loud and clear is that all that mattered was ideological purity and commitment to the Bush Republican Party, that they be ‘the right kind of Republican’ (p.59). Ideology trumped both experience and expertise, as the whole world was able to tell, from the results.

Take John Agresto. He was 58 when Chandrasekaran met him. John had been assigned the daunting task of rehabilitating Iraq’s university system, comprising some 375,000 students located at 22 campuses which had all been trashed in the post-conquest looting. John had no experience of post-conflict reconstruction. He had no experience of the Middle East. His job back in the States was running a small college in Santa Fe with under 500 students. So what the devil was he doing in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s entire higher education system? Well, on the board of that little college back in Santa Fe just happened to be Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s wife and, when John had a stint working on the National Endowment for the Humanities, he had got to know Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, too, and they both told their husbands about him.

Getting a job at the CPA really was a case of not what you knew, or even who you knew but who knew you. However, once you were in post, none of your fancy contacts from back home in the States helped with getting the actual job done. After 8 months of assiduous research, John had concluded that he needed more than $1 billion to rebuild Iraq’s higher education facilities. When Chandrasekaran met him, he’d received just $8 million from the CPA. Neoconservative Republican nation-building…on the cheap (p.3).

At least Agresto had some experience of what he was charged with. Michael Cole was just 22 and barely out of college when he found himself employed by the ubiquitous contracting corporation, Halliburton, as ‘customer service liaison’ for the catering and canteen laid on for the CPA’s 1,000 or so staff. Did he have any experience of catering, of working with the military or in a warzone? Of course not. He had been working as a junior aide to a Republican congressman from Virginia when the Halliburton vice president overheard him talking to friends in a bar about handling irate constituents. She (the vice president) introduced herself, gave him her card, three weeks later Halliburton rang him up and offered him a job in Baghdad. That simple, that random.

Chandrasekaran’s book is about the extraordinary alternative reality which developed inside the enchanted city, populated as it was by young, fresh-faced American college kids who knew nothing about the real world, and less than nothing about Iraqi culture and society, but who carried on churning out PowerPoints and spreadsheets showing US policies transforming the country for the better, improving Iraq according to all kinds of gee-whizz metrics while, in the real world outside their bubble, the country was collapsing into hyper-violent sectarianism.

Another example is Mark Schroeder. This keen young fellow was employed to produce PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets with graphs showing how everything was getting better and better in liberated Iraq. He had never been outside the Green Zone and had no real idea what conditions were like. He didn’t even interview or talk to the thousand or more Iraqis who had the menial service jobs inside the Zone. He had no interaction with any of the population of the country he was reporting on whatsoever. Instead Mark got all his information from Fox News which, of course, promoted George Bush’s agenda, so he thought everything in Iraq was just dandy (p.25).

When, after some delay, Bremer and his deputies realised the extraordinary power wielded by Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they sent an emissary to him and who did they choose for this crucial mission? An Iraqi-American who knew nothing about politics or diplomacy but was a wealthy urologist from Florida who had developed a penile implant for impotent men (p.88).

The spirit is summed up by the comment of one unnamed staffer: ‘I’m not here for the Iraqis, I’m here for George Bush.’ (p.90) Not many of these staffers had voted Democrat and those who had quickly found out it was a secret best kept to themselves in this overwhelmingly partisan and zealously Republican environment.

Chandrasekaran has a section on how the vetting was carried out by pro-Bush partisans. According to Frederick Smith who served as deputy director of the CPA’s Washington office:

‘The criterion for sending people over there was that they had to have the right political credentials.’ (p.101)

People with much-needed expertise were rejected if they lacked commitment to Bush-type neo-conservatism. Rather than questions about the Middle East, Arabic or Iraq, applicants were questioned about their attitude to the Republican shibboleths of abortion and gun control. So they got an administration of people who voted the right way but had no qualifications for the job.

Bremer’s office advertised for 10 young gofers. The 10 who were hired were all vouched-for solid Republicans. Six of them were put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget although none of them had financial management experience.

Bremer had hugely ambitious plans to completely remodel Iraq’s centrally planned command economy into a free market, neo-liberal, capitalist economy. When the first nominee to this role, Thomas Foley, proved too zealous for the post, Bremer replaced him with Michael Fleischer. Fleischer had no experience whatsoever of creating free enterprise in a formerly socialist economy but…his brother was White House press secretary Ari Fleischman. It was all about contacts and connections, not expertise (p.251). That’s why billions and billions and billions of dollars were completely wasted.

L. Paul Bremer

Chandrasekaran describes the personality and working practices of the CPA’s chief executive, L. Paul Bremer, appointed on 11 May 2003, in chapter titled ‘Control Freak’. (This is not as rude as it sounds. It is how Bremer was described by Henry Kissinger, who he at one point worked for as a special assistant, as described on pages 70, 75 and 215).

Chandrasekaran travels with Bremer to ministries and schools and interviews him en route. Bremer talks a good game. He works long hours, incredibly hard. He insists on seeing every memo, signing off every document. And yet, as the Wikipedia article on the CPA pithily puts it:

At the CPA, Bremer moved quickly to install opaque and corruption-prone methods for the withdrawal and transportation of extremely large amounts of cash often transported from the US to Iraq by C-17 transport plane…The CPA was strongly criticised for its mismanagement of funds allocated to the reconstruction of Iraq, with over $8 billion of these unaccounted for, including over $1.6 billion in cash that emerged in a basement in Lebanon.

American valules. Bremer is, of course, remembered for his first two major acts as ‘viceroy’ of occupied Iraq, which plunged the country into chaos and condemned America to an 8-year occupation, the loss of some 5,000 US troops, an equal number of civilian contractors and a truly awesome amount of money, at least $757 million. Wikipedia again:

The first act of the CPA under Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, was to order the de-Ba’athification of Iraqi society. On 23 May, CPA Order Number 2 formally disbanded the Iraqi army as well as other public servants including nurses and doctors and eventually led to the direct unemployment of more than 500,000 Iraqi citizens.

Chandrasekaran discusses the background to the debaathification order on pages 76 to 81, and to scrapping the Iraqi army on pages 81 to 86. He goes out of his way to play devil’s advocate, to explain Bremer’s thinking, and point out that he wasn’t alone.

Nonetheless, lots of experts, his colleagues in the CPA, State Department officials and senior army generals, Bremer’s predecessor, Jay Garner, Steve Browning the man running five ministries – all warned that these orders would be catastrophic (p.78). They would create at a stroke over half a million angry, humiliated men and women, rendered jobless and aimless in a society awash with weapons. (Thanks to Donald Rumsfeld’s obstinate refusal to send enough US troops to adequately police the hundreds of military barracks and arms depots these were left unguarded and promptly looted, keeping insurgents and militia groups happily armed and provisioned for the best part of the next decade).

But Bremer went ahead despite all the advice to the contrary and all the critics and warners were proved correct.

Challenges of rebuilding a country

Initially I thought the whole book would be a kind of freeflowing satire of the hapless American’s incompetence as demonstrated by the youth and inexperience of so many staffers. But around page 100 of this 330-page book the narrative becomes a lot more structured. Henceforward each chapter deals in some detail with one particular challenge the CPA faced, namely:

Privatising the economy

Describes the woeful state of the Iraqi economy and CPA officials various plans to convert its socialist command economy into an America-style free enterprise, capitalist economy. This implied a raft of changes which included:

  • privatising the many industries managed entirely by the state
  • changing Iraqi laws to allow foreign companies to invest in Iraqi businesses
  • letting the Iraqi dinar float on international currency markets
  • setting up a stock market according to best international standards of transparency
  • abolishing the complex system by which state industries were subsidised and kept uncompetitive
  • reducing personal taxes to encourage initiative and entrepreneurship

Managing all this was handed over to Bremer’s economics czar, Peter McPherson. Unfortunately, the only difference everyday Iraqis noticed was that a) a lot of them lost their jobs in uncompetitive industries which were closed down; the Iraqi dinar plummeted on international markets so everything became more expensive. An unintended consequence of deleting the complex system of cross-subsidies between state-run industries was that the most efficient of them saw all their capital held in state banks wiped out.

The single most risky change was that, under Saddam, all Iraqi families received free food baskets. The CPA Republicans were strongly against this, wanting at the very least to replace the system with a monthly sum in cash or vouchers, and so they disappeared into evermore complicated and impractical ideas to replace it.

This kind of thing turned out to be very interesting. It was fascinating to learn how 40 or so years of Ba’ath Party rule had created a particular kind of command economy, and fascinating to get into the details of what the CPA wanted to change, and why, and why it was so often impractical.

And the issue of political contacts trumping expertise occurs here as everywhere else. Brought into oversee the privatisation program was Thomas Foley who had no experience of working in a command economy or post-conflict situation, but he was a major Republican Party donor and had been Bush’s classmate at Harvard Business School (p.140)

Crooked contractors

There’s a chapter devoted to a couple of chancers who set up a service supplier company which, initially, bid to provide security at Baghdad Airport, despite having hardly any security guards on their books and little or no experience of such a large project. But Chandrasekaran shows how, in the Wild West environment of post-war Iraq, lack of experience and expertise didn’t stop the companies risk-taking owners from accumulating over $100 million in government contracts before they were revealed as overcharging and scamming. Chandrasekaran doesn’t say as much but the implication is that many of the suppliers of services to a panic-stricken CPA also milked them for millions.

Electricity

A fascinating explanation of why the world’s number one superpower couldn’t get the power working again in a country sitting on one of the biggest reserves of oil and natural gas in the world, thus creating ‘overnight nostalgia for Saddam among people who had cheered his fall (p.170).

Lieutenant General John Comparetto turns the challenge over to Steve Browning, clever and resourceful, who begs electrical engineers from the army, sends them to assess the state of Iraq’s power stations, and uses the information to pull together a national plan (p.173).

I found the technical explanations of why the power grid was in such poor shape fascinating. Basically, ever since he decided to attack Iran in September 1980, Saddam had wasted his nation’s oil income on weapons and war and let its once admirable infrastructure rot. The infrastructure had been further degraded when during the brief Gulf War of 1991 when a few choice American missiles obliterated key parts of the power generating and distribution system. This was followed by 12 long years of sanctions, when the country’s engineers were prevented from getting the spare parts they needed to repair anything. And then, of course, came the brief 2003 war which had just ended:

American bombing during the war damaged about 75% of the country’s power-generating capacity. (p.167)

So that when Browning did his assessment he discovered most of the biggest power stations were held together by string and sellotape and were on their last legs. In other words, to crank electricity generation back up to first world levels would costs billions and billions of dollars of investment (the World Bank eventually calculated it would require $55 billion over 4 years to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, p.175).

Trouble is, almost all the other policies of the CPA depended on the whole notion of having a good, reliable power supply. Take privatising Iraq’s industries: who wants to buy a factory which has no electric power. In fact most elements of a modern society, starting with a police service providing law and order, rely on power for computers and even lights in buildings.

Chandrasekaran explains a further bad decision which exacerbated things. Knowing he had far less power than his country needed Saddam took the cynical decision to channel as much as possible of it to Baghdad, home of most of the citizens and also his biggest possible rivals, the army generals. But when he learned about this Bremer, like a good American democrat, decided this was wildly unfair and that the limited power should be distributed fairly around the country. This had the effect of alienating everyone – the entire citizenry of Baghdad who now struggled to have power for even half of the day, thus rendering all kinds of businesses nearly impossible to run, specially anything connected with processing and storing food; but it didn’t please people in provincial towns and cities that much because they, also, only had intermittent power.

Reading Chandrasekaran’s descriptions of the genuinely complicated technical, engineering, managerial, budgetary and political problems thrown up by every single aspect of rebuilding Iraq, for the first time made me start to sympathise with Bremer. It was an impossible job.

Constitutional wrangles

Compared with rebuilding the entire national grid and trying to reboot the economy, the challenge of writing a new constitution should have been easy. it’s not as if the world is short of national constitutions, even if some account had to be taken of Iraq’s heritage, its multi-ethnic make-up and its Islamic faith: after all, there are plenty of Arab states and they all have constitutions.

But in a complicated chapter Chandrasekaran describes how the precise process of how this constitution was going to be written hit insuperable obstacles. To be honest I got lost in the maze of discussions but I think Bremer wanted to convene a cohort of leaders of different communities who would draft a constitution, whereupon some kind of national election would be held about just the constitution alone, which would then be installed or adopted and only then would actual elections be held for the first government.

But there were problems every step of the way, starting with the highly contentious choice of who would be the members of the convention who would produce a draft constitution, given the requirement to take account of the country’s three main groups, the Sunni and Shia Arabs and the Kurds. Another cause of disagreement the issue of exiles and remainers i.e. the animosity between leaders who’d lived in exile for decades and often lost touch with life under Saddam but had the ear of people in Washington such as Cheney and Rumsfeld; and those leaders who’d remained in the country and, by necessity, made compromises with Saddam and the Ba’ath Party.

Then there was the simple question of whether any of these so-called ‘leaders’ had any actual followings in the country at large or were just chancers who’d floated to the surface and succeeded in sucking up to the Americans. `The only way to find out was to hold elections. But elections couldn’t be held until you had a constitution. But what kind of mandate did these politicians hand-picked by the Americans have if none of them had been elected?

And this is where Bremer’s plans ran into Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who intervened to publish a fatwah or holy ruling which is that no constitution should be accepted unless it was drawn up by elected representatives, not Bremer’s hand-picked crew. (It is very characteristic that key CPA staff involved in the constitution building were seeking to establish an entirely Western separation of church and state and therefore thought al-Sistani not only could be ignored but should be ignored, p.183).

All these forces interacted to produce a situation of mind-boggling complexity which Chandrasekaran explains at great length and made me feel even more sorry for Bremer, working 12 hour days and getting nowhere.

Other reforms

Only somewhere in this sequence of issue-based chapters did I begin to realise that the book amounts to a history of the CPA and its long list of utopian fantasy reforms. There are entire chapters or long passages devoted to other major issues, including:

  • rebuilding the entire medical system which had been damaged in the war and then trashed beyond repair in the national looting, a huge project with multiple aspects which was handled by a succession of appointees (Frederick M. Burkle Jr, Steve Browning, James K. Haveman Jr) who developed complicated multi-faceted plans, fought valiantly to get adequate funding, up against the shrinking deadlines imposed by the evershifting constitutional arguments and all of whom, in the end, failed (pages 232 to 244)
  • setting up a media service to compete with the anti-American messages of all the Arab TV and radio stations Iraq’s citizens tuned into
  • rewriting Iraq’s entire highway code: this task was handed to John Smathers who was a personal injury lawyer from Maryland; lacking any other sources he based his new Iraqi highway code on the  highway code of his home state, Maryland, which he downloaded from the internet and tweaked to local conditions; in the event his code was merged with the eccentric and often irrational one proposed by Iraqi officials and both, in any case, carried on being ignored by both police and drivers; Smathers was seriously injured in an insurgent ambush and flown back to the States before his ineffective, mongrel code was finally signed into Iraqi law by Bremer (pages 263 to 268)
  • persuading Iraq’s scientists, especially involved in weapons programmes, to come out of hiding and join a new science centre where they could make peaceful and positive contributions to the country, assorted out by unconventional State Department nominee Alex Dehgan

And, of course, all this was being attempted in a country which was becoming more violent and lawless by the day. For most of the period Chandrasekaran covers the Green Zone was an oasis of well-lit, well-fed calm in a city racked with violence. But then he gives a harrowing description of a rocket attack on the al-Raschid Hotel on the edge of the Zone and the severe injuries sustained by Colonel Elias Nimmer whose hotel room was directly hit by a rocket, 26 October 2003. The atmosphere deteriorated. Many staffers decided they had to leave.

The Sadr Revolt

By page 200 I’d realised that the book amounts to a history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ended with the muted ceremony whereby Bremer formally handed power over to the Interim Iraqi Government on 28 June 2004 ad flew home.

I’d begun to formulate a mild criticism that Chandrasekaran’s narrative focuses entirely on the history of the civilian CPA with almost no mention let alone analysis of the deteriorating military and security situation outside the walls of the Emerald City (much more the subject of Ricks’s Fiasco) – but then, at this point, the narrative suddenly switched into full battle mode.

The penultimate chapter starts innocuously by describing another day in the life of Sergeant Jerry Swope as he drives his team of Humvees into the tightly packed slum quarter of Baghdad known as Sadr City on their regular, boring but very smelly mission to drain the open sewers which overflow into the streets as part of the general decay of all Iraq’s infrastructure. The whole area was the stomping ground of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who had organised his followers into what was loosely described as ‘the Mahdi Army’. Jerry saw disaffected young men hanging round on the streets but they’d never caused trouble before.

What Jerry didn’t know was that five days earlier, on 28 March, Bremer had decided to take Sadr on. First he closed Sadr’s al-Howza newspaper for an article which likened Bremer to Saddam Hussein. Then the day before, Bremer had Sadr’s main man in Najaf, Mustafa Yaqoubi, arrested for an alleged murder.

Before they knew it Jerry’s patrol came under attack, for pistol, AK47 and RPG fire. When they tried to accelerate out of danger they found the road blocked. When he reversed he discovered two of his four Humvees had been rendered immobile. So he gathered his men and ran down the nearest alleyway till they found a 3-story house, stormed into it, set up machine guns on the roof and became seriously besieged. He radioed headquarters who sent out relief vehicles and, when these ran into trouble, seven tanks. Jerry and his men were besieged till after dark and ammunition was running low when they were finally rescued. In this one encounter the army suffered eight soldiers dead and 50 wounded.

It was the start of the 10-week-long Shia Uprising which made not just parts of Baghdad into no-go warzones but spread to other towns and cities across the predominantly Shiite south. Later, Army generals were scathing of Bremer’s behaviour; he had taken on the leader of up to 10,000 heavily armed militiamen with no military plan whatsoever. Bremer though al-Sadr would meekly back down like the editor of some local paper in America. Instead he triggered a major insurrection across the country.

The First Battle of Fallujah 4 April to 1 May 2004

What made it nearly catastrophic was it occurred as the same time as the Battle of Fallujah. This city is 70 kilometres west of Baghdad and a Sunni stronghold. Ever since the occupation there had been a series of very violent incidents, with American troops shooting and killing unarmed protesters, and a steady flow of fatal attacks on US soldiers.

On 31 March 2004 Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA. All four were shot dead, their bodies mutilated, burned and strung up from a nearby suspension bridge. Footage of the bodies and local civilians shouting and cheering were given to Arab news stations and beamed round the world.

Inevitably this caused outrage etc in Washington but, in Chandrasekaran’s account, the key fact is that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured President Bush that Fallujah could be taken and pacified by US Marines with few if any casualties, and the guilty parties brought to justice. He claimed the good inhabitants of the city would willingly hand over the murderers to the authorities (p.306).

This was just the latest in a long line of ignorant, arrogant, wishful thinking and profoundly wrong opinions delivered by Rumsfeld, a man who emerges from both Ricks’ and Chandrasekaran’s books as a dangerous moron.

Because when Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to send in the Marines, it turned out they met far stiffer resistance than anybody anticipated, with American troops dying on the first day and numbers steadily escalating, not to mention the many innocent civilians killed. Meeting resistance, the Americans increased their firepower, raining death from helicopter gunships. Footage of all this was also beamed round the Arab world and helped crystallise the image of the Americans as trigger-happy murderers of unarmed women and children.

Not easy to be an imperial power, is it?

But the massive assault, which threatened to drag on for days, was unpopular not only around the Arab world, but with America’s nominal allies. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair rang up from Britain saying it must stop, President Bush reluctantly stopped it in mid-flow. The Marines commanding officer was livid. He estimated they were two days away from fighting their way to the city centre and securing the whole city. Don’t start a military offensive if you’re not prepared to carry it through. But in a way that’s the moral of the entire invasion and occupancy; wishing a fantasy goal (convert Iraq to a lovely liberal democracy) without willing the means (huge numbers of troops, a comprehensive political, engineering and economic plan, and a huge amount of money).

Impact on the CPA

The impact on the CPA was simple: all reconstruction shut down. The fighting dragged into early May and the CPA was due to hand over power to the Iraqi Provisional Government in June. What was the point?

In the last few pages Chandrasekaran describes the last-ditch attempts of committed CPA staff to push through at least some reforms, notably the heroic attempts of John Agresto to screw funding out of the elephantine US bureaucracy for his cherished restoration of Iraq’s universities.

But he also quotes quite a few staffers reflecting on their achievements. It was a failure. Ignorant of conditions in wider Iraq, ignorant of Iraq’s history, social economic make-up, unable to a man to speak the local language, cocooned in their bubble, highly educated staffers fretted about rewriting the Iraqi highway code or the precise medicines to be placed on a national formulary or fantasising about giving every home in the country broadband access while beyond their walls, hundreds of thousands of angry young men, deprived of their jobs in the army or police or fired because they’d been Ba’ath Party members, plotted their revenge, which exploded that spring of 2004 in insurrection and insurgency right across the country.

It’s not about democracy, it’s about civic society

One guy puts his finger on it. It’s a piece of cake to ‘build’ a democracy, to write a spiffy new constitution, hold a census, draw constituencies on a map and arrange a day when everyone puts an X next to a candidate. That’s easy.

Whereas it’s almost impossible to build a deeply rooted civil society of the type which exists in the advanced West. Our liberal democracies are hundreds of years old, with their roots in even older values of Protestantism with its emphasis on individual human rights, the primacy of the individual conscience and so on. It’s taken at least 300 years, since the time of Locke and the post-English Civil War theorists, to combine a secular philosophy of individualism with the panoply of complicated fiscal and economic policies (the establishment of the Bank of England, the development of banking law, the invention of the limited company) which enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in the West – and these developments were not without all kinds of wars and civil wars, continental conflagrations and atrocities even in the so-called ‘civilised’ West.

To think that the products of this deep, rich and complicated history can be imposed on a country with a completely different history, culture and religion shows a moronic lack of self awareness. Chandrasekaran focuses on Agresto because it’s his summary that the book ends with:

The problem with democracy building is that we think democracy is easy – get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage ‘power sharing’, and see to it that somebody writes a bill of rights. The truth is the exact opposite – government of the few or government by one person is what’s easy to build; even putting together good autocratic rule doesn’t seem to be that hard. It’s good, stable and free democracies that are the hardest thing. America’s been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule [but it isn’t]…We as a country don’t have a clue what has made our country work… (p.320)

My interpretation is that the key component to successful Western democracy is none of the apparatus of democracy itself, nor the details of a particular economic model (free market capitalism). What makes them work is a very deep-seated commitment among most of the population to civic spirit and civic responsibility. We abide by the rules, we abide by the law, no matter how grudgingly, because our parents did and they brought us up in these traditions, in this culture.

The evidence from Chandrasekaran’s book is the Iraqis had absolutely none of this. Every Iraqi in any position of power demanded a bribe to carry out even the slightest duty. The Iraqi police demanded bribes to let malefactors off. Iraqi civil servants demanded bribes before they would process your claim.

The objective rule of law does not exist. Iraqi culture relies entirely on family, clan and religion, elements of personal identity it gives vastly more importance than most socially atomised Westerners can grasp. Rather than be loyal to some remote state or its officials who are corrupt to a man, for generations people have put their family, their clan, their tribe, and their religious allegiance first.

Handing out a spiffy new constitution along with a whole set of ridiculous documents like a westernised highway code, while the actual population was suffering from power shortages, food shortages, water shortages and anarchy on the streets, was the height of fatuousness.

Summary

Thomas E. Ricks’s book, Fiasco, is the irreplaceable, definitive account of the comprehensive lack of planning by Washington politicians and the military for the post-conquest situation which led to catastrophe in Iraq.

Chandrasekaran’s book perfectly complements it by showing you what the lack of a plan meant on the ground, in practice, when the badly conceived, badly organised and badly staffed Coalition Provisional Authority tried to rebuild and remodel Iraq’s economy, infrastructure and political system, and why it was always doomed to abject failure.

Read together these two books amount to a crushing indictment of the American political class, in particular the ideologically driven fantasy world of the Republican Party, and above all the unbelievably stupid, ignorant, short-sighted and disastrous policies promoted by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Bremer I came to pity for the impossibility of the task he was handed, but he too was blinded to reality by his ideological Republicanism and made a series of awesomely bad decisions which helped plunge an entire country into murderous chaos.

Credit

Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2006. Page references are to the 2008 Bloomsbury paperback edition.

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Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) part 1

(I believe you pronounce his surname Si-, to rhyme with sky, and -eed; Edward Si-eed.)

Orientalism created a big splash when it was published way back in 1978, nearly 50 years ago. It opened doorways into radical new ways of thinking about imperialist history and culture. It has gone on to be translated into more than 40 languages and had an immense influence right across the humanities. It’s a classic of cultural criticism.

An example of its ongoing impact is the way the very first wall label which introduced the 2019 exhibition at the British Museum about the interplay between the Muslim world and Europe – Inspired by the East – quotes page one of Orientalism and then liberally applies Said’s perspectives throughout the rest of the show. It may nowadays be impossible to discuss the cultural and ideological aspects of Western imperialism, specifically as it affected the Middle East and India, without taking into account his perspective and sooner or later mentioning his name.

There are probably four ways of considering the book:

  1. The thesis.
  2. What the text actually says, its discussion of individual Orientalists (I try to give a summary in part 2 of this review).
  3. Its implications and influence.
  4. The practical political conclusions Said draws from his thesis.

Said’s thesis

Said’s thesis is relatively simple in outline and consists of a set of interlocking contentions:

The ‘West’ has always defined itself against the ‘East’. In earlier centuries, Europeans defined Christianity and Christendom partly by contrasting it with Islam and the Muslim world. In the imperial nineteenth century Europeans thought and conceived of themselves as energetic, dynamic, inventive and ‘advanced’ partly by comparing themselves with an ‘Orient’ which was slothful, decadent and ‘backward’.

But this entire notion of ‘the Orient’ is a creation, a fiction, a fantasy, created over centuries by Western scholars and writers and artists. It is a self-contained, self-referential image which is the product of Western fantasies and needs and bears little or no relationship to the confusing and complex reality of peoples and races and religions which actually inhabit the very varied territories which Europeans all-too-easily dismissed as ‘the Orient’.

These fantasies and fictions and fabrications about ‘the Orient’ were created by a sequence of Orientalist scholars, starting in the later 18th and continuing throughout the 19th centuries. Orientalism as a discipline began back in the 18th century with the first studies of Arabic, the Semitic languages and Sanskrit.

The bulk of Said’s text comprises portraits of, and analyses of the work of, the leading Orientalist scholars who, from the late eighteenth century onwards, founded and then developed what turned into an eventually enormous body of work, given the disciplinary name of Orientalism. This far-flung discipline, whose attitudes leeched into arts, sciences, anthropology, economics and so on, set out to categorise, inventorise, define, label, analyse and intellectually control every aspect of life and culture in ‘the Orient’.

This body of ‘knowledge’ ramified out through Western societies: it was packaged and distributed via newspapers, magazine articles, the new technology of photography, and informing, and in turned informed by, creative writing – novels and stories and poems about the ‘exotic East’ – and the arts – painting, sculpture and so on – to produce an immense, self-reinforcing, self-justifying network of verbal, textual, intellectual, ideological and artistic, popular, journalistic and political stereotypes and clichés about ‘the mysterious East’, and its supposedly sullen, childlike, passive, sensual and barbarous peoples.

Eventually this huge network of images and texts became received opinion, idées recues, hardened into ‘common sense’ about the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Islamic world. And all of it – Said’s main and central point – was completely and utterly misleading.

Why did it thrive? How was it used? Said contends that this eventually huge set of preconceptions, this extensive set of prejudices, supported by leading scholars in the field, backed up by the narratives of various explorers and adventurers, given visual power in thousands of lush, late-Victorian paintings of the sensual, slothful, backward ‘Orient’, all this provided the discourse – the network of texts and images and ideas and phrases – which European rulers (of France and Britain in particular) invoked to justify invading, conquering, oppressing and exploiting those countries and peoples.

Orientalism justified empire. Orientalism provided the ideological, cultural, scientific and academic discourse which justified western colonialism.

When imperialist politicians, adventurers, soldiers or businessmen wrote or spoke to justify the imperial conquest and exploitation of the Middle East they quoted extensively from this storehouse of supposedly ‘objective’ academic studies, from supposedly ‘eye-witness’ accounts, from the widely diffused visual and verbal stereotypes and clichés of European artists, from what had become the received wisdom about ‘the Orient’ which ‘every schoolboy knows’ – in order to justify their imperial conquests and ongoing domination. But which were, in fact, the profoundly misleading creations of Orientalist scholars, ethnographers, writers, artists and so on.

The logical consequence of this sequence of arguments or worldview is that all Western narratives and images of the so-called ‘Orient’ produced during the 18th, 19th and indeed the first half of the twentieth centuries, are deeply compromised – because they all, wittingly or unwittingly, to a greater or lesser degree, helped to justify and rationalise the grotesque racism and unfair domination and economic exploitation of an entire region and all its peoples.

Orientalism is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition…as well as an area of concern defined by travellers, commercial interests, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples and civilisations. (p.203)

Compromised learning

Said’s basic premise is that all knowledge, including academic knowledge, is not pure, objective truth, but highly constrained and shaped by the society, and people, which produced it.

My principle operating assumptions were – and continue to be –that fields of learning, as much as the works of even the most eccentric artist, are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance, and by stabilising influences like schools, libraries, and governments; moreover, the both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions; and finally, that the advances made by a science like ‘Orientalism’ in its academic form are less objectively true than we like to think. (p.202)

Foucault

Said is a chronic name-dropper. He namechecks what has become the standard sophomore checklist of French and Continental literary and political theorists so very fashionable when the book was written. Thus he refers to Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. It’s notable that these are all Marxist theoreticians and critics, because, at bottom, his project is not only to inject contemporary politics back into academic discourse, but specifically left-wing, anti-imperialist politics. But the figure Said refers to most often (fourteen times by my count) is the French historian and critical theorist, Michel Foucault.

This is because Said’s thesis piggybacks on Foucault’s notion of discourse. Foucault was a French historian who studied the institutions of prisons and madhouses (among other subjects) with a view to showing how the entire discourse around such institutions was designed to encapsulate and promote state power and control over citizens, and in that very Parisian perspective, over citizens’ bodies. So you could argue that Said is copying Foucault’s approach, lock, stock and two smoking barrels, and applying it to his own area of interest (hobby horse) the colonial Middle East.

Contents

Rather than give my own impressionistic view of a book, I generally find it more useful for readers to see the actual contents page. Then we can all see what we’re talking about. Here’s the table of contents. (I give a detailed summary of the actual contents of the book in part 2 of this review; and a summary of the long Preface and Afterword in a third review):

Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism

‘Draws a large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes.’

1. Knowing the Oriental

2. Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalising the Oriental

3. Projects

4. Crisis

Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures

‘Attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists and scholars.’

1. Redrawn frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularised Religion

2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory

3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination

4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French

Chapter 3. Orientalism Now

‘Begins where its predecessor left off at around 1870. This is the period of greatest colonial expansion into the Orient…the very last section characterises the shift from British and French to American hegemony. I attempt to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.’

1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism

2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Wordliness

3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower

4. The Latest Phase

Said’s personal position

Limiting his scope to the Middle East

On page 17 of the introduction Said says that, in order to avoid writing a book about ‘the Orient’ in its widest definition, he’s going to limit himself to writing about Islam and the Middle East. Sounds like a reasonable plan, the kind of defining of the boundaries of an intellectual project which you’d expect in any objective academic study. But the last pages of the Introduction give a whole new spin to this decision. On page 11 he writes that:

No production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s own circumstances.

He says this in order to broach his own relationship with the entire subject, then goes on to indulge in more pages of autobiography than you’d expect in a scholarly work. He tells us that the subject is in fact very, very close to his heart.

My own experience of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West [he’s obviously referring to himself], particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he [Said] does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel is his uniquely punishing destiny. It has made matters worse for him [i.e. Said] to remark that no person academically involved with the Near East – no Orientalist, that is – has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs… (p.27)

So the book really is by way of being a very personal (and I use the word with knowing irony) crusade, coming out of his own personal experiences of discrimination and erasure, or, as he puts it in the 1994 Afterword to the book, from:

an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration. (p.338)

And written in the passionate hope that, by revealing the power structures behind the academic discipline of Orientalism in all its manifold forms, he can overthrow the false dichotomy between Orient and Occident, between East and West.

It’s a judgement call whether you find this frankness about his personal investment in the project admirably honest and an example of fessing up to the kind of personal position behind the text which his project sets out to expose in so many Orientalist scholars – or whether you think it reveals a highly partisan, parti pris perspective which invalidates his approach.

Said’s involvement in the Palestine-Israel problem overshadows the work

Said goes on to tie his detailed cultural analysis to a highly controversial contemporary political issue, namely the ever-fraught Israel-Palestine situation, as screwed up back in 1978 as it remains today. Crucially, his Introduction describes how this plays out in America culture, in academia and the media in the present day:

the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as upon liberal culture and the population at large (p.26)

In other words, Said explicitly ties his analysis of historical Orientalism to the bang up-to-date (albeit nearly 50 years old) political and cultural view of the Arab-Israeli conflict held inside American academia and the media and political establishments. This is obviously a perilous approach because the liveness of the current political debate around Israel-Palestine continually threatens to overshadow his academic, scholarly findings or ideas.

And Said was in fact far from being a distant academic viewer of the conflict. Said’s Wikipedia page tells us that from 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and deeply involved in negotiations to try and find a two-state solution to the Palestinian Problem.

1) It’s ironic that his book accuses all Orientalist scholars of being parti pris and biased, even if they don’t know it, while he himself is phenomenally biased and parti pris. But that’s a small point, and one he was perfectly aware of. He is perfectly clear about not really believing in the possibility of disinterested academic research:

I find the idea of strict scholarly work as disinterested and abstract hard to understand. (p.96)

2) More importantly, his political involvement threatens to a) distract from and b) overshadow Said’s entire project. In practice it meant he was forever getting dragged into stupid media squabbles, like the one featured on his Wikipedia page about him throwing a stone in Lebanon which managed to get blown up into press headlines about ‘The Professor of Terror’.

This is an American problem and links into the issues of the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington which is itself (as I understand it) linked to the even larger power of the fundamentalist Christian lobby in Washington, which (as I understand it) strongly supports the state of Israel for theological and eschatological reasons.

All I’m saying is that Said positions himself as someone who is bravely and pluckily bringing ‘politics’ into academia, revealing the power structures and political motivations behind an entire academic discipline, ‘Orientalism’, and good for him. But it’s a double-edged and very sharp sword. He who lives by politics dies by politics. Discussing radical political theory is relatively ‘safe’, as so many Marxist academics prove; but if you bring clarion calls about one of the most contentious issues in international affairs right into the heart of your academic work, and you shouldn’t be surprised if your political opponents will throw any mud to blacken your name.

Ironies

It’s a central irony of Said’s work that although he went to great lengths to expose the Islamophobia at the heart of the Orientalist project, he himself, despite being of Palestinian heritage, was not a Muslim, but had been raised a Christian.

In other words, all his writings about how Orientalists write about Islam without being inside it, without understanding it, without giving voices to Islam itself – the very same accusations could be brought against him.

From start to finish his book lambasts Westerners for speaking over the Orient, for never giving it a voice so it is a delicious irony that:

  1. There are no Muslim voices in his book – as far as I can tell he doesn’t quote one Arab or Muslim scholar anywhere, so he’s largely replicating a practice he is fiercely critical of.
  2. Said himself is not a Muslim – he lambasts various Western simplifications and demonisations of Islam with a strong sense of ownership and partisanship – but he himself comes from a completely different tradition.

I’m not saying either of these aspects negate his argument: but the whole thrust of the book is to teach us to pay more attention to the political aims and ideologies underlying apparently ‘objective’ academic texts, to question every author’s motives, to question the power structures they are part of and which permit their teaching, their research, their publishing. So these thoughts arise naturally from Said’s own promptings.

Problems and counter-arguments

Despite its astonishing success and the widespread adoption of its perspective throughout the humanities, Orientalism has many problems and issues.

Defining the ‘Orient’ and ‘Orientalism’

For a start, Said’s use of the word ‘Orient’ is extremely slippery. Sometimes he is referring just to the Middle East, sometimes he includes all of Muslim North Africa, sometimes he is referring to the entire Islamic world (which stretches to Indonesia in the Far East), sometimes he throws in India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, whichever suits him at the time.

In an ironic way Said’s definition(s) of Orientalism are as slippery and detached from reality as he says Orientalists’ discourse about ‘the Orient’ were.

One upshot of this is that you get right to the end of the book without ever reading a simple, definitive, usable definition of the central word. Here’s what the Etymological Dictionary has to say about ‘Orient’:

Late 14th century: ‘the direction east; the part of the horizon where the sun first appears,’ also (now with capital O-) ‘the eastern regions of the world, eastern countries’ (originally vaguely meaning the region east and south of Europe, what is now called the Middle East but also sometimes Egypt and India), from Old French orient ‘east’ (11th century), from Latin orientem (nominative oriens) ‘the rising sun, the east, part of the sky where the sun rises,’ originally ‘rising’ (adj.), present participle of oriri ‘to rise’.

Same applies to his slipperiness in defining what ‘Orientalism’ means. He gives at least ten distinct definitions (on pages 41, 73, 95, 120, 177, 202, 206, 300 and more) but it’s possible to arrive at the end of the book without have a really crystal clear definition of his ostensibly central concept.

Said is not a historian

This really matters because he is dealing with history, the history of European empires and of the texts which, he claims, though written by supposed ‘scholars’, in practice served to underpin and justify imperial rule. But thousands of historians of empire have passed this way before him and his text , whenever it strays into pure history, feels like history being done by an amateur.

It feels particularly true when he again and again suggests that what underpinned the British and French Empire’s control of their colonial subjects was the academic knowledge grouped under the heading Orientalism – and takes no account of some pretty obvious other factors such as economic, technological or military superiority.

In a sense he can’t afford to for at least two reasons: 1) because if he did get into, say, the economic basis of empire, his account would end up sounding like conventional history, and second-rate economic history at that; 2) literature and scholarly texts are his stomping ground a) because he’s just more familiar with them b) because his central premise is that knowledge is power; conceding that there are other types of power immediately undermine the narrow if intense scope of his book.

Histories of empires

In the introduction Said says that the chief imperial powers in the Middle East and India were a) Britain and France through to the mid-twentieth century, and b) America since.

This feels a bit gappy. John Darwin’s brilliant comparative study of the Eurasian empires, After Tamerlane, teaches us that ’empire’ has been the form of most governments of most civilisations for most of history. Imperialism is the ‘natural’ form of rule. It’s ‘democracy’ which is historically new, problematic and deeply unstable.

Were the British and French empires somehow unique?

No, in two ways. Taking a deep historical view, Darwin shows just how many empires have ruled over the Middle East over the past two and a half thousand years, namely: the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Moghul Empire, the Athenian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuk Empire, various Muslim caliphates who concentrated on conquering territory the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire (or Caliphate). So the British Empire’s relatively brief period of control was neither the sole nor the most important influence.

The role of the Ottoman Empire in falling to pieces during the nineteenth century, leading to mismanagement, repression and the rise of nationalist movements across its territories is never given enough credit in these kinds of books. It’s always the French and British’s faults, never the Turks’.

Second, focusing on Britain and France may be justified by the eventual size of their territorial holdings, but downplays the rivalry with and interference of other European imperial powers. For example, Sean McMeekin’s brilliant book ‘The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918‘ shows how the newly united German Reich (or empire) elbowed its way into the Middle East, with its own Orientalising scholars and preconceptions.

And Said completely ignores the Russian Empire. For me this is the most interesting empire of the 19th century because I know nothing about it except that it expanded its control relentlessly across central Asia, as far as the Pacific where it eventually got into a war with Japan (1905). But long before that Russia had ambitions to expand down through the Balkans and retake Constantinople from the Turks, re-establishing it as a new Christian city, the Second Rome. This is one of the most mind-boggling aspects of Orlando Figes’s outstanding book about The Crimean War (1853 to 1856).

Blaming Britain and France just feels like blaming ‘the usual suspects’. Very limited.

Putting politics back into scholarship

He says on numerous occasions that 19th century Orientalist scholars claimed that their work was objective and scholarly and completely unconnected with the way their countries exercised imperial dominion over the countries whose cultures they studied – and that this was of course bullshit. The Orientalist scholars were only able to carry out their studies because they could travel freely across those countries as if they were the members of the imperial ruling caste. Therefore his project is very simple: it is to put the politics back into supposedly neutral, ‘detached’ scholarly analysis.

This struck me as being very Marxist. It was Marx who suggested that cultures reflect the interests of the ruling class, aristocratic art in the 17th and 18th centuries, bourgeois art and literature with the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century – and made the point which underpins Said’s whole position, that supposedly ‘neutral’ bourgeois scholarship always always always justifies and underpins the rule of the bourgeoisie, there’s nothing ‘neutral’ about it.

Christendom versus Islam

Said claims that Western civilisation, that Christendom, largely defined itself by contrast with the Muslim world for 1,000 years from the rise of Islam to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as if this is a subversive insight. But to anyone who knows European history it’s obvious. Expansionist militarist Islam had already seized half the territory of the former Roman Empire and threatened to invade up through the Balkans and, potentially, exterminate Christendom. You would notice something like that. I’d have thought it was schoolboy-level obvious.

General thoughts

The Other

At regular intervals Said invokes the notion of ‘the Other’ which is always presented in critical books like this as if it was a big bad bogeyman, but I always find the idea a) childish b) too simplistic. If you read Chaucer you’ll see that his notion of ‘the Good’ is defined in hundreds of ways, most of which have nothing to do with Islam. OK when he refers to the Crusades (the Knight’s Tale) he does mention Islam. But there’s lots of other things going on in European texts, lots of ways of creating value and identity, which Said just ignores in order to ram home his point.

It’s an irony that Said says the use of the simple binary of East and West is too simplistic but then uses an even more simplistic term, ‘the Other’, replacing one simplistic binary with another which just sounds more cool.

What if the East really is a threat to the West?

Fear of the Other is always treated in modern humanities, in countless books, plays, documentaries, in artworks and exhibition texts, as if it is always a bad thing, irrational, can only possibly be prompted by racism or sexism or xenophobia or some undefined ‘anxiety’.

But what if things really do get worse the further East you go? What if the governments of Eastern Europe, such as Poland or Hungary, really are worryingly authoritarian and repressive? What if the largest country in the world, which dominates ‘the East’, Russia, has clearly stated that Western liberal democracy is finished, carries out cyber-warfare against infrastructure targets in the West, and has invaded and committed atrocities in a West-friendly neighbour? What if ‘the East’ is a source of real active threat?

As to the Middle East, what if it is subject to one or other type of civil war, insurgency, and horrifying acts of Islamic terrorism, widespread atrocities committed in the name of Allah, and the region’s chronic political instability?

And further East, what if the most populous nation on earth, China, is also known to be carrying out cyber attacks against Western targets, operates spy networks in the West, and is raising tensions in the Pacific with talk of an armed invasion of Taiwan which could escalate into a wider war?

Isn’t it a simple recognition of the facts on the ground to be pretty alarmed if not actually scared of many of these developments? I don’t think being worried about Russian aggression makes me racist. I don’t think being appalled by barbaric acts in the Middle East (ISIS beheading hostages, Assad barrel-bombing his own populations) means I’m falling prey to Orientalist stereotypes.

I don’t think I’m ‘Othering’ anybody, not least because there are lots of players in these situations, lots of nations, lots of governments, lots of militias and ethnic and religious groups, so many that simply summarising them as ‘the Other’ is worse than useless. Each conflict needs to be examined carefully and forensically, doing which generally shows you the extreme complexity of their social, political, economic, religious and ethnic origins.

Just repeating the mantras ‘Oriental stereotyping’ and ‘fear of the Other’ strikes me as worse than useless.

Britain and the East

Said goes on at very great length indeed about the British Empire and its patronising stereotyped attitudes to ‘the East’, ‘the Orient’ and so on.

But, because he’s not a historian, he fails to set this entire worldview within the larger perspectives of European and British history. Attacks and threats have always come from the East.

The ancient Greeks and Romans feared the East because that’s where the large conquering empires came from: the Persian Empire which repeatedly tried to crush the Greek city states and the Parthian Empire’s threat to the Romans went on for centuries. When Rome was overthrown it was by nomadic warrior bands from ‘the East’.

As to Islam, all of Europe was threatened by its dynamic expansion from the 7th century onwards, which conquered Christian Byzantium and pushed steadily north-west as far as modern Austria, while in the south Muslim armies swept away Christian Roman rule across the whole of North Africa, stormed up through Spain and conquered the southern half of France. They were only prevented from conquering all of France – which might have signalled the decisive overthrow of Christian culture in Europe – had they not been halted and defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732.

As to Britain, we were, of course, invaded again and again for over a thousand years. Britain was invaded and conquered by the Romans, invaded and conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, invaded and conquered by the Vikings, then invaded and conquered by the Normans.

Attacks on Europe always come from the East and attacks on Britain always come from the East. Napoleon threatened to invade in the early 1800s and in the later part of the nineteenth century many Britons lived in paranoid fear of another French invasion. Hitler threatened to invade and obliterate British culture in the name of a horrifying fascism.

So the fundamental basis of these views isn’t some kind of persistent racism, isn’t fancy ideas about ‘the Other’ or ‘imperial anxiety’, it’s a basic fact of geography. Look at a map. Where else are attacks on Europe, and especially Britain, going to come from? The Atlantic? No, from the East.

Throughout European history the East has been synonymous with ‘threat’ because that’s where the threat has actually come from, again and again and again. For me, these are the kinds of fundamental geographical and historical facts which Said simply ignores, in order to sustain his thesis.

And what if the Orient actually was alien, weak, corrupt and lazy?

Said repeats over and over again that Western, Orientalising views of the Middle East or Islam loaded it with negative qualities – laziness, inefficiency, corruption, violence, sensuality – in order to help us define and promote our own wonderful values, of hard work, efficiency, honesty in public life, good citizenship, Protestant self restraint and so on.

You can see what he’s on about and I accept a lot of what he says about Western stereotyping, but still… what if the West was, well, right. This is where a bit of history would come in handy because even modern, woke, post-Said accounts of, say, the declining Ottoman Empire do, in fact, depict it as corrupt, racked with palace intrigue, home to astonishing brutality from the highest level (where rival brothers to the ruling Sultan were liable to be garrotted or beheaded) to public policy.

I’ve just been reading, in Andrew Roberts’s biography of Lord Salisbury, about the Bulgarian Atrocities of 1876 when an uprising of Bulgarian nationalists prompted the Ottoman Sultan to send in irregular militias who proceeded to rape, torture and murder every Bulgarian they came across, with complete impunity. Up to 30,000 civilians were slaughtered, prompting the British government to abandon its former stalwart support for the Ottomans. My point is this wasn’t invented by Orientalists to justify their racist stereotypes about the violent barbaric East; nobody denies that it happened, it was widely publicised at the time, and it moulded a lot of people’s opinions about Ottoman rule based on facts.

Anybody who tried to do business or diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire quickly came to learn how corrupt and venal it was. So what happens to Said’s thesis that all these views were foundationless stereotypes, artificial creations of the racist Western imagination – if historical accounts show that inhabitants of the Orient, which he defines at the Middle East, really were lazy, inefficient, corrupt, violent.

For example, in his book about the railway line which the Kaiser wanted to build to Baghdad, Sean McMeekin describes the comic meeting between German engineers and Turkish labourers. No ‘Orientalism’ was required for the contrast between Teutonic discipline and efficiency and the corrupt, lazy ineffectiveness of the Turks to be clear to all involved.

Said’s style

Said is long-winded and baggy. He never uses one word or concept where fifteen can be crammed in. Moreover, he is clearly aspiring to write in the high-falutin’ style of the Parisian intellectuals of the day, Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, who used recherché terms and tried to crystallise new ideas by emphasising particular terms, words used in new, lateral ways, teasing out new insights. At least he hopes so. Here’s a slice of Said, made up of just two sentences.

Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is passively reflected by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is, rather, a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). (p.12)

That second sentence is quite exhaustingly long, isn’t it? In my experience, you often get to the end of Said’s huge unravelling sentences with the impression that you’ve just read something very clever and very important, but you can’t quite remember what it was.

A key element of his style, or his way of thinking, is the deployment of lists. He loves long, long lists of all the specialisms and areas which he claims his ideas are impacting or pulling in or subjecting to fierce analysis (power political, power intellectual, power cultural, power moral and so on).

On the one hand, he is trying to convey through monster lists like this, a sense of the hegemony of Orientalist tropes i.e. the way they – in his opinion – infuse the entire world of intellectual discourse, at every level, and across every specialism. This aim requires roping in every academic discipline he can think of.

On the other hand, his continual complexifying of the subject through list-heavy, extended sentences, through the name-dropping of portentous critical theorists, threatens to drown his relatively straightforward ideas in concrete.

Said describes the process of close textual analysis very persuasively but, ironically, doesn’t actually practice it very much – he is much happier to proceed by means of lists of Great Writers and Orientalist Scholars, than he is to stop and analyse any one of their works.

He explains that it would be ‘foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative history of Orientalism’ but this is deeply disappointing. That might have been really solid and enduring project. Instead we are given a surprisingly random, digressive and rambling account.

His actual selection of example, of texts which he studies in a bit of detail, is disappointingly thin. This explains why you can grind your way through to the end of this densely written 350-page book and not actually have a much clearer sense of the history and development of the academic field of Orientalism.

And lastly, he just often sounds unbearably pompous:

And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material? (p.8)

One uses the phrase ‘self conscious’ with some emphasis here because… (p.159)

And his frequent straining for Parisian-style intellectual rarefication sometimes makes him sound grand and empty.

I mean to say that in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence. (p.208)

No, no we must never forget that. Forgetting that would be dreadful.

Lastly, he cites quotations, sometimes quite long quotations, in French without bothering to translate them. This is impolite to readers. On a smaller scale he drops into his prose Latin or French tags with the lofty air of an acolyte of Erich Auerbach’s grand traditions of humanist criticism who expects everyone else to be fluent in French and German, Latin and Greek.

Nevertheless, [in French Orientalist Louis Massigon’s view] the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. (p.271)

It would be more polite, and effective, to take the trouble to find adequate English equivalents.

Immigration

When the book was published, in 1978, there weren’t many immigrants of any colour in Britain and Said could confidently talk about scholars and an academic world, as well as the nation at large, which was largely white. In other words ‘Orientals’ were still rare and relatively unknown.

In the 45 years since the book was published, mass immigration has changed the nature of all Western countries which now include not only large communities of black and Asian people, but eminent black and Asian cultural, political and economic figures. As I write we have a Prime Minister, Home Secretary and mayor of London who are all of Asian heritage.

I dare say fans of Said and students of post-colonial studies would point out the endurance of ‘latent’ Orientalism i.e. the continuation of prejudice and bigotry against the Arab and Muslim and Indian worlds, especially since the efflorescence of vulgar imperialist nostalgia around the Brexit debate.

Nevertheless, I imagine the unprecedented numbers of what used to be called ‘Orientals’ who now routinely take part in Western political and cultural discourse, who write novels and plays, direct films, comment in newspapers and magazines, host TV shows and, of course, teach courses of postcolonial and subaltern studies, would require Orientalism to be comprehensively rethought and brought up to date.

The modern Middle East

At the end of the day, Orientalism is a largely ‘academic’ book in two senses:

1. On reading lists for students

Said primarily set out to change attitudes within universities and the humanities. In this he was dramatically successful, and it is impossible to read about the European empires and, especially, to read about 19th century imperial art, without his name being invoked to indicate the modern woke worldview, the view that almost all European arts and crafts which referenced ‘the Orient’ are morally, politically and culturally compromised or, as he bluntly puts it on page 204, racist, imperialist and ethnocentric.

Said provides some of the concepts and keywords which allow modern students of the humanities to work up a real loathing of Western civilisation. Good. The Russians want to abolish it, too.

Irrelevant for everyone else

But it’s also ‘academic’ in the negative sense of ‘not of practical relevance; of only theoretical interest’. What percentage of the public know or care about the opinions of nineteenth century Orientalist scholars? For all practical purposes, nobody. Who gets their ideas about the modern Middle East from the poetry of Gérard de Nerval, the letters of French novelist Gustave Flaubert or umpteen Orientalising Victorian paintings? Nobody.

I suggest that most people’s opinions about the Middle East derive not from poetry or paintings but from the news, and if they’ve been watching or reading the news for the last 20 years, this will have involved an enormous number of stories about 9/11, Islamic terrorism, Islamic terror attacks in London and Manchester and other European cities, about the 2001 US overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, the long troubled military struggles in both countries, the 2011 Arab Spring followed swiftly by civil war in Libya, the terrible civil war in Syria, the military coup in Egypt, the ongoing civil war in Yemen, and just recently the humiliating and disastrous US withdrawal from Kabul (2021).

Remember the heyday of Islamic State, the videos they shot of them beheading Western hostages with blunt knives? Footage of them pushing suspected gays off rooftops? Blowing up priceless ancient monuments?

Alongside, of course, the perma-crisis in Israel with its never-ending Palestinian intifadas and ‘rockets from the Gaza Strip’ and retaliatory raids by the Israeli Defence Force and the murder of Israeli settlers and the massacres of Palestinians, and so on and so on.

And you shouldn’t underestimate the number of Westerners who personally know people who fought in one or other of those wars; for example, 150,610 UK personnel served in Afghanistan and some 141,000 in Iraq. All those soldiers had family, who heard about their experiences and shared their (sometimes appalling) injuries and traumas. First hand testimony trumping Victorian paintings.

And quite a few Westerners have been affected by one or other of the many Islamic terrorist attacks on Western cities, starting with the 2,996 killed in the 9/11 attacks and all their extended families, the 130 people killed in the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris, the families of the 22 people killed and 1,017 injured in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing; or attacks on tourists in Muslim countries such as the 202 killed and 209 injured in the 2002 Bali bombings, numerous Islamist attacks in Egypt, Tunisia and other tourist favourites.

Compared to the images and news footage and reports and first hand experience of these kinds of events, I’m just suggesting that Said’s warning about the frightful stereotyping of the Orient carried out by nineteenth century and early twentieth century writers, artists and scholars is a nice piece of academic analysis but of questionable relevance to the views about Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East currently held by more or less everyone living in the contemporary world.

Said addresses this point by saying that there is a direct link between older imperial views and current views, that his entire project was not only to show the origins and development of Orientalist views but how they continue up to the present day to inform contemporary news and TV and magazine and political discourse about Islam and the Middle East.

But proving that would require a completely different kind of book, something from the field of media studies which examined how the tropes and stereotypes Said complains are utterly without foundation in the real world, have gained renewed life from actual events which people not only consume via TV and newspapers, but via social media, massacres filmed live, as they happen.

In the 1995 Afterword and 2003 Preface which he added to the book (and I review separately) he does indeed try to do this, but he died (in 2003) well before the advent of social media and cheap phones transformed the entire concepts of media, news and information out of recognition.

In almost all ways, this book feels as if it comes from a bookish, scholarly, library-based world which has been swept away by the digital age.

An interview with Edward Said (1998)

This interview was produced in 1998, so before 9/11, the Afghan War, the Iraq War, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Arab Spring etc. If Said thought Western attitudes to Middle Eastern countries were bad then, what must he have made of the hugely negative shift in impressions caused by 9/11 and the subsequent wars (he passed away in September 2003, living just long enough to see the American invasion of Iraq, commenced in March 2003, start to unravel)? You could almost say that the interview hails from a more innocent age.

Practical criticism

See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes in the coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):

Credit

Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).

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Posted by Simon on September 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/20/orientalism-edward-said-part-1/

Karl Marx on the American Civil War (1861-65)

Marx the journalist

Karl Marx fled the revolutions which rocked Europe in 1848 to the relative calm and safety of London. Although he never intended to, Marx then ended up spending the rest of his life, in fact three quarters of his entire adult life, in capitalist England.

Ironically for Marx the revolutionary, he lived here during pretty much the quietest period of 19th century English history. The uproar surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 was long over, and the Chartist Movement failed and fizzled out after 1848. There followed 25 years or so of growing wealth, accompanied by (admittedly piecemeal) Parliamentary legislation to try and improve the lot of the working classes toiling in the new industrial cities in their grim seven-days-a-week factories. It was the era of the triumphant bourgeoisie and the unstoppable rise of British Imperialism, in India, China and around the world.

Although Karl wanted to write great masterworks of historical and economic theory, these wouldn’t pay the rent for himself, his wife and growing family. Although he wanted to be at the head of great revolutionary organisations, the Communist League with which he’d been associated during the 1848 revolutions, splintered and fizzled into insignificance.

So Karl turned to journalism, which he had actively pursued in Germany since his student days (it was his editorship of the seditious Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne which was the reason he was kicked out of Germany in 1849).

Incongruously, Marx ended up getting a job not even with a British publication, but with the New York Daily Tribune, working as its European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862. The Tribune had wide working-class appeal in America and, at two cents, was inexpensive. It had a circulation of 50,000 copies per issue and its editorial line was progressive and anti-slavery.

So it was a this progressive New York newspaper which ended up paying the rent of the Marx household living in Soho, London for a decade. However, when civil war broke out in America in the spring of 1861, it was for the Liberal Vienna paper Die Presse that Karl wrote 37 articles about it, starting six months into the conflict, on 20 October 1861.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Marx’s articles about the American Civil War

The American Civil War began with the secession of the southern slave states, starting with South Carolina, which declared independence in January 1861.

The eight seceded states went on to declare themselves a new nation, the Confederacy, with its capital at Montgomery, Alabama. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces shelled Fort Sumter, a fort off the coast of South Carolina which was still held by units of the U.S. or Union army. It was this action which signalled the start of the American Civil War.

Of Karl’s 37 articles just two are translated and published in the Penguin selection of Karl’s Writings From Exile 1848-1863, which is a shame. I wonder if you can read the lot online.

Karl begins by lining up the London papers of the day, The Times, The Economist, The Saturday Review and summarising their positions.

Most of the British press sympathised with the southern states. They thought the war was mostly about the issue of trade tariffs. The North imposed various tariffs on imports and exports, whereas the South didn’t. Moreover, an enormous amount of southern cotton was bought by British factory owners, turned into clothes, and traded back to the South (or sold on to India).

This explains why Britain, being a free trade nation, and economically linked to the region, had strong sympathies with the South.

It was because of this economic self-interest – Karl argued – that Britain’s papers and politicians argued, ‘Why shouldn’t the South declare itself a separate nation?’ And ‘Why should the North bother, or dare, to try and invade and suppress this new nation?’

Buried, pushed aside, undiscussed in all the mainstream media articles which Marx quotes, is the issue of slavery. In the two articles published in the Penguin selection, Marx sets out to contradict and refute the British bourgeois position, and to put the issue of slavery smack bang in the middle of the argument.

Marx’s knowledge

Marx is incredibly knowledgeable. I found reading the nineteen pages which these articles make up in the Penguin edition nearly as illuminating as reading James McPherson’s 860-page history of the war. Karl demonstrates a surprisingly detailed grasp of the geography, the economic facts, the demographic changes and the political manoeuvring that led up to the war.

Karl gives his unstinting support to the North and says it must conquer the South and overthrow its iniquitous slavery system. Otherwise the South will triumph in its pre-war attempts to impose and spread slavery to all parts of America and with it, to enslave the working classes, too.

Karl says the war is about slavery pure and simple. The Founding Fathers may have been slave-owners (most famously Washington and Jefferson), but they thought slavery was an evil imported from England which they hoped would eventually die out. By contrast, apologists for the South treated slavery as a good in itself which deserved to be spread as widely as possible. According to them, slaves loved their slavery. Not only that, they wished to spread and cement slavery as a core element in American society. The South is fighting, as one apologist put it, for ‘the foundation of a great slave republic,’ (page 336).

Karl details the political build-up to the war, including:

  • the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which established 36º 30′ as the northernmost extent of slavery)
  • the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 (which retracted that ruling)
  • the attempt to spread slavery into New Mexico
  • the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which forced northern officials to acquiesce in the hunting, kidnapping and return of slaves who had fled North into slavery-free states
  • the 1857 Dred Scott case which established that slave owners had a right to take their slaves anywhere in the country

Marx describes the revival of the slave trade in the years running up to the war which, he claims, had resulted in 15,000 new Africans being kidnapped and brought to America (making a bigger deal of it than McPherson does in his history).

And Marx repeats the outrageous but widely publicised aims of the southern states to conquer Cuba for America, and to extend their rule throughout Central America (specifically in Nicaragua where, for a year, a southern American mercenary did, indeed, manage to become president!).

All of these political events show, to Karl, the wish of the South not just to defend slavery, but to actively extend it throughout the wider region.

Why?

Marx’s economic explanation for the motives of the Confederate states

Karl gives a characteristically economic explanation for political events.

The old slave states are exhausting their soil. Maryland, Virginia, even South Carolina, have become net exporters of slaves. ‘Breed ’em and sell ’em,’ is the slavers’ policy. Therefore, the slave states need a steady supply of new markets, they need to make new territorial conquest, in order to maintain their economies.

Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil… South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances in so far as it already sells slaves to the states of the Deep South and South-West to the tune of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slave-holders can introduce slave labour into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave-raising and the sale of slaves. (page 341)

There is also politics. Each American state sends two senators to the Senate, regardless of population. Therefore, there is a naked power struggle whenever a new state is admitted to the Union as to whether its two senators will be pro or anti slavery, each new state’s nature threatening to upset the very finely tuned balance of power between slave and anti-slave states in Congress.

Who is pushing the drive to extend slavery? Karl estimates that there are only some 300,000 significant slave owners in the whole of the country. So an oligarchy of 300,000 has been trying to impose the political, legal and economic system which underpins its wealth onto the other 20 million Americans.

This ‘plantocracy’ was well aware what it was fighting for and understood that to restrict slavery to its current territories would:

  • reduce slaver representation in the senate i.e. undermine their political power
  • lead, over the long term, to the inevitable extinction of slavery
  • and the consequent general impoverishment of the South would lead to class warfare between the slave-owners and the poor whites who would, finally, realise how they are being exploited by the wealthy 300,000

Thus the war is nothing to do with free trade and tariffs, as the respectable London papers were trying to claim. It was about whether:

  • the 20 million free Americans should submit to a political and economic system imposed by an oligarchy of 300,000
  • the vast new territories of the Republic should be slave or free
  • whether the foreign policy of America should be peaceful – or get dragged into further wars with Cuba and Central America

Punchy and pithy

Karl is at his journalistic, punchy and pithy best. In the second article he makes the rhetorical point that the South – which had declared itself a new nation – isn’t a proper nation at all.

It is not a country at all, it is a battle-cry. (p.344)

In the second article he gives a detailed description of the geography and slave populations of all the ‘border’ states between south and north and describes how the slave states had made political, legal and, finally, armed attempts to infiltrate and capture these states for slavery.

Conventional opinion had it that it was the northern armies who had invaded the south, and indeed most of the fighting was done on the soil of southern or the so-called ‘border’ states. But Karl’s list of, first, the political attempts to suborn the border states, and then his detailed accounts of border incursions and raids by southern forces, makes a powerful case that the war is in fact:

a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery. (page 350)

A glance at the map of America in 1854 shows what was being fought over. The southern slave states (dark green) already controlled significantly more land than the northern free states (pink). The issue was: should slavery be extended into the huge expanse of land to the west (light green) – nearly half of the American land mass, which was still only roughly parcelled out into territories provisionally named Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon etc, but which would, in the near future, attain the status of ‘states’ and be admitted to the union. Should they be slave – or free?

American states in 1854

American states in 1854

Marx was wrong about lots of things but the materialist worldview which predisposed him to see all major events in terms of their economic basis and in terms of the class conflicts which capitalism inevitably give rise to, often gave him a thrillingly incisive vision which cut through the painful bombast and wordy rhetoric of the stuffy, obtuse Victorians he lived among.

Thus in Marx’s view the American Civil War was emphatically not about tariffs or free trade or the right to have a separate culture or any of the other mystifications and obfuscations which filled so many speeches and newspaper columns, no:

The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully co-exist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

He thought the North would win and that the full emancipation of the slaves was inevitable.

Given that he was writing in November 1861, with the war only six months old and most Republicans (including President Lincoln) still reluctant to countenance slave emancipation under any circumstances, Karl in these articles was not only typically incisive and insightful, but remarkably prophetic.

Related links

Related blog posts

Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

  • Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany
  • The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

  • The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution

Communism in England

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American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750 to 1804 by Alan Taylor (2016)

The picture which you have drawn, & the accts which are published, of the commotions & temper of numerous bodies in the Eastern States, are equally to be lamented and deprecated. They exhibit a melancholy proof of what our transatlantic foe have predicted; and of another thing perhaps, which is still more to be regretted, and is yet more unaccountable; that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government.
(George Washington letter to Henry Lee, 31 October 1786)

Debunking myths

In his blurb on the back of American Revolutions, historian Eric Foner makes the Big Point that it was during the Cold War that a particular version of American history was defined and taught across America’s schools, a version which made the American revolution an exception, distinct and different from the later French and Russian revolutions – by contrast with their chaos and violence the American Revolution was portrayed as ‘good, orderly, restrained and successful’ (p.3), a squeaky-clean Disney version of history designed to underpin America’s claim to an Exceptional Destiny, to being a beacon of reason and light, the leader of the free world.

In this version, whereas they (the French and Russian revolts) had been led by radical ideologues and resulted in appallingly violence, the American Revolution was fought by gentleman-farmers who just happened to be wise and benevolent philosophers in their spare time. They rallied the whole nation behind them with ringing declarations of human rights, to combat a corrupt and greedy British Empire.

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
(Second sentence of the 1776 Declaration of Independence)

Taylor’s history sets out to blow the Disney version of American history sky high in any number of ways.

For a start his text sets the American War of Independence in a far broader time period, and much wider geographical frame of reference, than is traditional.

But it is the core American myths and legends about the heroic men who left their simple life as farmers to stand up to British tyranny, to defy British demands for outrageous taxes, and to forge a new nation out of the thirteen disparate colonies, which take a colossal battering.

Not only is the reality neither as simple nor as high-minded as that, but Taylor regularly takes the reader’s breath away with the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which he debunks so many myths, so comprehensively.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The dates Taylor endstops his account with – 1750 and 1804 – sound fairly innocent and anodyne, until you realise that this period covers:

  • the build-up, course and outcome of the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763)
  • the slow, incendiary build-up to the War of Independence (1775 to 1783) with its bloody, anarchic eight year duration – during which it metastasised into a world war involving Britain against France, Spain and Holland
  • and, the period I found most interesting, the aftermath of the American War of Independence – 1783 to 1804 – during which the newly liberated ‘Patriots’ struggled with
    • a major economic depression
    • a huge increase in public and private indebtedness and the taxes required to pay them off
    • violent (riots, lynchings) disagreements about how to pull the new nation together

Taylor’s account of the creation of the American Constitution is as riveting as it is eye-opening. I had no idea that the chaos, confusion and violently different goals of post-war Americans led many eminent figures (Adams, Washington, Jefferson) to worry that, following ‘victory’ in the war of independence, there might be a civil war between the southern slave-owning states and the northern anti-slave states.

It is a little staggering to realise that the seeds of the great Civil War (1861 to 1865) were evident, and were a real threat, in the 1780s. The question then becomes not ‘Why did the Civil War break out in 1861?’ but ‘How did the Americans manage to delay the inevitable Civil War for so long?’

Such was the suspicion and hatred between the victorious states and their various political leaders that many commentators feared that the new nation might end up fragmented between the European empires which still surrounded it (Britain in the north [Canada], France in the west, Spain in the south).

And – mind-bogglingly – Taylor quotes many who thought that the only way to restore order and deference to authority (as opposed to jostling anarchy) was a return to a monarchy. To institute an American royal family!

For not only was there a division between slave-owning south and slave-free north, but, throughout the thirteen states, huge conflict between those who represented money and property and wanted a strong central government to defend them (who came in time to be called the ‘Federalists’) and those who wanted only a weak central government, and power to remain with the thirteen states, who became known as ‘Republicans’.

The Republicans felt keeping power close to the states ensured a better democracy, each state knowing its own special interests best and its leaders being accountable to an electorate who knew them best.

Taylor’s account of the lengthy debates among the fifty or so representatives from each state who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a new constitution is among the most interesting things I’ve ever read.

a) Because if you’re interested in politics, his explanation of the numerous compromises that had to be made to please various factions is a real eye-opener about the realities of power and power-brokering.
b) Because the constitution has remained the subject of intense debate and conflicting interpretation right down to the present day, invoked all sides in the constitutional battles raging around President Trump.

It is really eye-opening to realise that the American Constitution grew out of tumultuous and vituperative disagreement among men so incensed against each other that key players in the framing (Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton) often despaired of reaching any agreement.

In fact I was reminded, as I read Taylor’s clinical account of the Americans’ ferocious squabbles, of the Magna Carta of England, signed in 1215, which was also not, as most people think, some high-minded declaration of human rights, but a peace treaty, the minimum requirements the barons demanded from dictatorial King John. It also came at the end of a ruinous war and was an attempt to reconcile warring parties, and so has much in common with the American Constitution.

The delegates came to Philadelphia seeking a peace pact to avert civil wars within the fragile union, but their rancour seemed more likely to hasten that bloody collapse. (p.378)

In Taylor’s account the American constitution is just such a compromise, designed to heal rifts and bring together fiercely opposed factions, namely:

  • the slave-based south and slave-free north (in 1780 slaves comprised less than 4% of the northern population compared to 40% of the south)
  • believers that only a strong federal government could hold the ramshackle union together as opposed to believers that only strong independent states guaranteed liberty
  • and laid across these rifts a third one, a class conflict between supporters of the rural interest – of farmers and settlers who had been screwed by the Depression which followed the war and wanted a fairer distribution of land and wealth – and the well-educated, urban elite who owned big plantations, or were lawyers and bankers who made their money from big landowners and their wealth

The drafting was a long and acrimonious process which is absolutely fascinating to read about.

The Founding Fathers of America, from top left clockwise: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson

The Founding Fathers of America, from top left clockwise: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson

After months of horse-trading final agreement on a text was followed by even more trouble when the framers tried to get it ratified by the thirteen states, some of whom flatly refused.

Taylor brings out the importance of the control of the media, the press and the existence of good, well-educated writers and speakers on the Federalist side, which loaded the scales for in their favour, as opposed to illiterate and badly organised opposition from poor farmers and settlers who lived a thousand miles away from the urban centres of power.

This political and rhetorical power helped most of the states ratify the thing, and the ratifiers and drafters then were able to coerce the last few holdouts, like little Rhode Island, until they too capitulated.

It’s a thrilling read which completely alters your view about the origins of the United States and, on almost every page, sheds light on the origins of the economic, political and social problems which it faces to this day.

Americans often romanticise the founders of the nation as united and resolute and then present them as a rebuke to our current political divisions. Pundits insist that Americans should return to the ideal vision set by the founders. That begs the question, however, which founders and what vision? Far from being united they fought over what the revolution meant… Instead of offering a single, cohesive, and enduring plan, the diverse founders generated contradictions that continue to divide Americans. (p.434)

Myth-busting

The American revolutionaries were simple farmers

Well, they certainly derived their money from the land, but both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were masters of large estates worked, of course, by slaves. Washington had a very keen eye for a bargain and was an accomplished land speculator. He was one of the Virginia landowners angered by the British refusal in the 1770s to allow enterprising colonists (i.e. land speculators) to expand westwards into Indian territory.

The war was fought by patriots

Taylor emphasises what John Ferling’s book had already made clear to me, that after the first flush of revolutionary fervour in 1775 and 1776, as the war of independence ground on, all the Americans who could manage to do so, evaded military service and conscription by paying to have someone poorer replace them. By 1788 the Continental Army consisted almost entirely of ‘apprentices, transients, beggars, drunks, slaves, and indentured immigrants’ (p.195) All those gentleman farmers which the legends talk about, had skedaddled back to the safety of their farms.

American greed

Nobody made noble sacrifices. All the Yanks who possibly could, bought their way out of military service. The officer class fought like ferrets in a sack for promotion and for more money. The issue of pensions for officers became such an issue that significant numbers of officers quit the services, or organised strikes while the war was still in progress, so that Congress was eventually forced to promise all officers five-year pensions.

Government support

The British took better care of their soldiers than the Americans took of theirs. Congress could never raise adequate money to feed or clothe their own troops, and had to rely on massive loans from France to continue the war. In the depths of winter 1777, while his Patriot army was dispersed in winter quarters around Pennsylvania – in the freezing snow, often without tents or even blankets to huddle under, without food and without boots or shoes – Washington was disgusted to visit Philadelphia and discover it a city of fashionable balls and feasts and revelries celebrated by an urban élite dressed up in the latest fashions from London and eating fancy French delicacies.

American soldiers making the most of the appalling conditions at Washington's retreat at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-8

American soldiers making the most of the appalling conditions at Washington’s retreat at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 to 1778

There was, in other words, as Ferling’s book also makes clear, almost no solidarity between the colonial rich and the poorest of the colonial poor who they conscripted and sent off to be blown up and bayoneted to death in the scores of inconclusive but brutal military encounters which made up the ‘revolutionary war’.

American ‘liberty’ always tainted by slavery

Any slave who could make it to British lines was promised their freedom. Many freed slaves fought for British and a lucky few chose to sail to Britain when ships were evacuating or fleeing American attacks (an unlucky few ending up in Canada, where they were completely unprepared for the freezing weather).

Thus, to many rich Americans, especially in the middle and southern states where slavery was economically vital, the British represented a threat to slavery and, very simply, to their wealth. Whenever any American of the period writes about ‘freedom’, the entire concept, in American mouths, is intimately linked with – and hopelessly compromised by – the enslavement of about half a million Africans, (a fifth of the 1770s population of 2.5 million).

An American slave

American slaves

American ‘freedom’

British politicians and propagandists spotted this straight away and Taylor has a wry smile on his lips as he quotes a steady stream of British politicians and propagandists pointing out the wretched hypocrisy of white American men bickering from morning to night about the precise definition of ‘liberty’, while keeping a fifth of the population of America in chains – and all the while hell-bent on breaking through the barrier of the Appalachian Mountains to the west in order to seize and steal Indian land.

The Indians

It was news to me that one of the complaints that enterprising Americans had in the 1760s against the British authorities was that the latter tried to protect the Indians by limiting the colonists’ right to seize and trade land west of the Appalachian mountain chain, in the vast valleys of the river Ohio and Mississippi.

In 1774 the British passed the Quebec Act, designed to bring order and consistency to their rule in Canada. One of its many provisions was to extend Crown control over a huge swathe of land south of the Great Lakes – southern Ontario, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota – areas which American land speculators considered theirs to buy, develop and sell on (at immense profit).

Thus the ‘freedom’ which the Patriots proclaimed was the freedom to continue exploiting black slaves and to expand westwards and conquer the native Americans.

Punishing opponents

With typically unanswerable bluntness, Taylor declares that: ‘Revolutions breed civil wars’. The Patriots, utterly convinced of their own rectitude, couldn’t credit conservatives and Loyalists (who wanted to remain in the British Empire) with sensible arguments or ideas; they thought they must be brainwashed, blinded or – worse – bribed into opposing the cause of ‘Truth and Virtue’.

It is striking that 250 years ago ‘progressives’ displayed the same intolerant mind-set that they show today. Anybody who opposes the call for ‘revolution’ cannot be someone with a sensible or cautious approach; they must be a traitor, an outcast, a non-person.

Thus a recurrent theme in the history of the American Revolution is the whipping-up of mobs to attack and burn the houses of anyone who opposed the Patriotic line (compare and contrast the not-very-different mob rule in the French and Russian revolutions).

Naming and shaming and tarring and feathering

Hence the extensive examples Taylor gives of the way Patriot communities sought out British governors or anyone else in the British power structure who didn’t have the sense to scarper as soon hostilities broke out.

Anybody who collaborated or expressed ongoing loyalty to King George III, or was just too slow to respond enthusiastically to the latest Patriot declarations, risked being rounded up by a vengeful mob, stripped naked, having boiling tar (boiling, so it melted their skin) poured over them, feathers sprinkled onto the cooling tar, then placed on a beam of wood and paraded round town.

Some courts had Loyalists branded on the face or had their ears cut off, just so everyone could see who ‘the enemy’ was.

So much for the American revolution being some kind of ‘exception’ to the notion that revolutions breed civil wars and civil violence. And Taylor shows how, once established as a valid way of expressing political views and uniting communities, mob attacks, lynchings, the tarring and feathering of opponents, continued  long after the cessation of the War of Independence, well into the era of disputes about the Constitution and beyond.

Lynching a Loyalist, 1773

Lynching a Loyalist, 1773. Note the Liberty Tree, in American mythology a symbol of freedom but also handy for hanging dissidents from

The civilian violence engendered by the War of Independence established the kind of raucous and aggressively violent tone of public debate which visitors like Dickens and Trollope were so surprised by 50 years later – with lynchings, particular, going on to have a long career in the southern slave-owning states until well into the twentieth century.

Taylor’s style and approach

Taylor’s style is crisp, blunt and forthright.

  • Rendered arrogant by their larger population, British colonists mistreated their Indian neighbours, and colonial juries would rarely convict settlers for murdering natives. (p.40)
  • [Benjamin Franklin argued for toleration of people with different coloured skin.] Most colonists rejected his logic, preferring their racism. (p.60)
  • [The framers of the Constitution] wanted to redesign republican governments to weaken the many and empower the few. (p.371)

I’ve just finished reading John Ferling’s epic account of the American War of Independence, which deploys a leisurely, poetic prose style, and lengthy biographical sketches of key politicians and military leaders, to seek to understand the character, psychology and motivation of the men who made the big decisions and fought the battles of the Revolutionary War.

Taylor’s prose style is the opposite of rich and poetic. Pithy and to the point, many passages sound as if they’ve barely been expanded from a lecturer’s PowerPoint presentation.

  • The Glorious Revolution plunged Britain into prolonged warfare with the French Empire.
  • After 1700, British America imported 1,500,000 slaves: more than four times the number of white immigrants. (p.20)
  • The culture taught women to define their lives by motherhood and domesticity. (p.27)
  • Natives exploited the competition between rival empires to procure presents from both. (p.41)

Individuals – and entire cultures – are briskly dismissed for not sharing our modern enlightened views about race and gender, or for just generally being bad. Taylor takes no prisoners on either side.

  • [British commissioner for Indians] Johnson acted selfishly and cynically
  • In the name of liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorised their critics. (p.108)

His factual statements are sweeping and nervelessly confident.

  • Patriot women felt pride in their enhanced political awareness. (p.112)
  • British critics cast Americans as canting hypocrites who preached liberty while practicing slavery. (p.116)

Moderation, doubt, qualifications, don’t seem to exist in Taylor’s mind. Softening words which might qualify his judgments, words like ‘some’, ‘many’, ‘most’, aren’t in his vocabulary.

  • Eighteenth-century Britons celebrated their mixed constitution as the surest foundation for liberty in history and on earth. (p.91)

Really? Absolutely every Briton who lived between 1700 and 1800 believed this? There were no British critics of the British constitution at all in that entire hundred year period?

No. There is no room for equivocation, doubt or shades of grey in Taylor’s brisk, dismissive prose.

Taylor’s revolutionary aim

But then Taylor’s aim is not to equivocate but to overthrow accepted opinion in its entirety, to subvert reputations, to make us completely and utterly rethink what we thought we knew about the origins, course and meaning of the American War of Independence. (I say us: his book is mostly, one imagines, aimed at an American audience – Taylor is a professor of history at Virginia University, and this book is published by an American publisher.)

The sub-title, A continental history, is the key. As in the prequel to this book, the stunningly eye-opening American Colonies, Taylor’s avowed aim is not just to broaden our thinking about early American history, but to smash the bonds which have held it in prison for generations.

For two hundred years research, thinking and writing about America have been conducted in terms of white European men, focusing on the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ who settled New England, and following a lineage of Protestant dissent through to the ‘Founding Fathers’, who created the noble Constitution.

Taylor’s books aim to show this tradition up for the travesty it is, and to utterly transform it.

The earlier book, American Colonies, starts with the first people to cross the Barents Strait from Siberia around 15,000 years ago, and describes how they spread across the continent, developing differing cultures to cope with the huge variation of ecosystem they encountered, until the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego was reached some 8,000 years ago.

He then describes how the Norse settled Greenland and then reached Newfoundland around 1,000 AD.

Then Columbus came in 1492, bringing with him the brutal system of slave plantations which the Spanish had perfected on the Canary Islands.

The conquistadors first colonised the West Indian islands, then attacked mainland Mexico, destroying empires and enslaving peoples wherever they went. The Spanish explored up into Florida, where they spread diseases which ravaged the civilisations of the Mississippi basin, and also sent explorers and Christian missionaries across the arid deserts of New Mexico and up the California coast.

In other words, an absolutely vast amount of human activity had been taking place on the American continent for millennia before the English Pilgrim Fathers ever arrived. American history did not start with the Pilgrim Fathers.

And to think so is to submit, acquiesce and accept the very narrow, blinkered myth of America as a land of high-minded white Protestant farmers – that myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ which Eric Foner claims was fostered and crystallised during the Cold War.

Even once the white English settlers arrive in New England, they remain only a part, a tiny fragment, of the vastly wider network of human activities which comprise American history. It is impossible to understand how American developed unless you grasp:

Geography

How the different geography and ecosystems of the Atlantic coast determined what could be grown in each region and therefore what kind of social systems developed there. Thus the West Indies turned out to be ideal for growing sugar, which requires enormous amount of physical effort and so it was these islands that saw the rise of vast plantations worked by enormous workforces of slaves brought over from Africa, and the rise of a relatively small network of rich plantation owners.

Sugar grew less well in the land surrounding the big Chesapeake Bay (which became Virginia) but tobacco did. Again requiring intensive labour, and so big plantations of enslaved Africans.

But from New York northwards the climate was more like Europe and so farms for livestock or crops were more suitable, which tended to remain smaller, mostly family-run affairs. Hence there was never any need for slaves in the north and, though there were some, the slave population was always small.

The Atlantic economy

The intricacy of the Atlantic economy, whereby British ships bought slaves on the west African coast, shipped them to the Indies and Virginia, picked up sugar, rum and tobacco, carried these north to New England where they picked up grain and raw materials, and then sailed back to Britain, or swapped them for foodstuffs and linen which could also be taken across the sea to Britain, or sailed back south to feed the ever-hungry slave populations.

All parts of this triangle of trade became wealthy, and Taylor is brilliant at conveying the unremitting interlockedness of so many different peoples and cultures, towns and nations, agricultures and technologies, all around the Atlantic coastline.

Background to the American Revolution

This – the gist of American Colonies – is all recapped at speed in the first 50 or so pages of American Revolutions, the context for the series of conflicts between Britain and France which took place in Europe and around the world throughout the 18th century: to be precise, from 1689 to 1763.

The last of these conflicts took place from 1756 to 1763. The British called it the Seven Years War, although the colonists called it the French and Indian War, as that was who they were fighting.

The British won the Seven Years War, making massive gains in India, and in north America, seizing all of Canada from the French (along with some smaller West Indian islands and Louisiana).

But it had been a costly war, and when Britain began to raise taxes on the colonists to pay for the British soldiery and the new forts built to protect them, the colonists balked at the new taxes.

At least, that’s the conventional story – but, as usual, Taylor goes way beyond this, to describe another, previously overlooked and far less creditable source of conflict – the colonists’ relentless thirst for new land which brought them into conflict with the Indians, and with the British Imperial authorities who had pledged to protect the Indians and limit the colonists’ westward expansion.

In other words, there was more to the American rebellion than the high-minded rhetoric about taxation and representation would suggest. Characteristically, Taylor points out that Benjamin Franklin who represented himself as an honest man of simple tastes, was himself involved in some breath-taking land speculations just before war broke out. Taylor also chooses to debunk Daniel Boone – for generations painted as a true-hearted son of the soil – revealing that he also was in it for the money.

A veteran hunter, Boone knew the best routes over the mountains to the finest lands in Kentucky. Folklore casts Boone as a nature-loving refugee from settled civilisation; in fact, he helped land speculators fill the forest with farmers. (p.81)

Thus Taylor proceeds, in his short sharp prose larded with unforgiving judgements, as detached from his subject as a Martian examining an alien species.

Patronising

Sometimes Taylor’s explanations seem patronising – as when he explains that a society based on deference meant that the ‘common’ people were expected to defer to their ‘betters’ – as if these were ideas nobody had heard of till his book.

Similarly, he explains that colonial high society was based on status, part of which was being seen to wear the latest fashions from London – as if the rich trying to outdo each other was a practice unheard of anywhere else, at any other period.

Elsewhere, he explains that ‘Christians’ spurned the rewards of this world because they believed in a place called ‘heaven’ where all their good behaviour would be rewarded for ‘eternity’ – as if nobody had ever heard of these ideas before.

In fact, he often sounds precisely like a politically correct American university professor lecturing 18 year-old American students who appear to have no idea what an ‘aristocracy’ or ‘status symbols’ or ‘deference’ are, what Christianity or any other belief system is, until they step into his lecture hall. He takes absolutely no prior knowledge for granted. Sometimes it grates on those of us who do know what a society based on deference means, and have read a bit about Christianity.

Clean slate

But then this is all part of his strategy – which is to step right back from the period, from all the well-established narratives, legends and myths, and from the blinkered traditions of seeing the story only in terms of heroic, white, male Patriots striving for ‘liberty’ – to step right back, to reconsider all the sources, and to tell what actually happened, across the entire continent, to all of its inhabitants – not just to the handful of rich, white men who have usually dominated the story, but to all the different Indian nations, to the half of the population which was female, to the enslaved blacks, free blacks, and even black leaders, and also to the other European nations – specifically France and Spain – who are generally kept out of the story.

American Revolutions is a sweeping, brisk and often blunt account which debunks every conceivable legend about the origins of the United States, giving clear-eyed, unillusioned portraits of all the so-called Founding Fathers, setting all the events in the widest possible economic, social and political context right across the continent to include considerations of the Spanish rulers and French generals who played a role in shaping the new nation even after the War of Independence was concluded – of the Indians who shaped policy throughout the period, fighting on one side then the other – and of the important role played by slaves, primarily as forced labour, but also as freedmen fighting for one side or the other and, periodically, rising up in slave rebellions to seize ‘liberty’ for themselves…

The Haitian rebellion

To give an example, Taylor describes the slave rebellion which started in 1791 in the French colony of Haiti. This uprising forced the French revolutionary government to decoy troops away from the European front to sail half way round the world to put down the revolt.

But the French troops were badly mauled by the black freedom fighters over a series of engagements which dragged on for a decade, while governments came and went in Paris. Eventually, having lost over half their forces to disease and finding it impossible to stamp out the rebels guerrilla tactics, the French abandoned the effort to recapture Haiti in 1803.

Taylor then produces a great coup d’imagination by showing that it was this experience of having his forces pinned down and worn down in the Americas, which prompted the new French ruler, Napoleon, to also dispense with his other territory in the continent, the vast territory known as Louisiana, which he knew he would never have the resources, money or manpower to defend. So Napoleon sold it to President Jefferson in 1804, doubling the size of America at a stroke.

In traditional tellings, this development comes from left field, as an unexpected bonus. But it is the main purpose of Taylor’s account to present a fully integrated history of early America and all its peoples, across the entire region, showing how America was never a land apart, but always intimately linked to the three major European empires and the extraordinarily tangled network of trade in raw materials, goods and people which criss-crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the centuries leading up to Independence.

So that Taylor presents the wide perspective which allows us to understand that it was the slave rebellion in Haiti which persuaded Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the Americans – to put it another way, it was the efforts of black rebel slaves which enabled America to more than double its territory in 1804.

Again and again Taylor’s broad views and panoramic understanding allows him to shed drastic, and exciting, new light on familiar events.

America is not exceptional

Above all American Revolutions makes you realise that – as per Foner’s insight quoted at the start of this review – America is just another country like any other – and that even in its founding period it was characterised by the same kind of poverty, exploitation, corruption, hypocrisy and violence as was to be found in the very European nations it claimed to be superior to.

Except that it also carried the additional burden of bearing, from birth, the twin Original Sins of

  1. the mass enslavement of black Africans
  2. the calculated wiping-out of the native American peoples

Sins which will dog American politics and culture for as long as there is an America.

Related links

More eighteenth century reviews

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by Simon on July 19, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 19, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/07/19/american-revolutions-alan-taylor/