Previously in Politics & Prose:
A Country of Fear (April 2, 2003)
Iraq will be better off after the war. But will America? By Jack Beatty
In the Name of God (March 5, 2003)
Bush's rhetoric suggests that he feels God has chosen him to lead the U.S. against "Evil." Is that why Bush is dragging us into an unprovoked war? By Jack Beatty
The Road Better Not Taken (Februay 5, 2003)
A war against Iraq could be the most catastrophic blunder in U.S. history. By Jack Beatty
The Track to Modernity (January 2, 2003)
In a century of riotous change, the railroad's standardization of time stood out as a challenge to both nature and democracy. By Jack Beatty
The War for Nonvoters (November 27, 2002)
The "party of nonvoters" is 120 million strong. Whoever corrals them will hold the key to future elections. By Jack Beatty
The Temptation of War (October 23, 2002)
A new memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, warns that Presidents will do anything to avoid losing wars. By Jack Beatty
More Politics & Prose in Atlantic Unbound.
From the archives:
"The Fifty-first State" (November 2002)
U.S. responsibilites in the aftermath of a victory over Iraq would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years. In many ways Iraq would be part of America. By James Fallows
Atlantic Unbound | May 1, 2003
Politics & Prose |
by Jack Beatty
Fatal Vision

Can we control the forces of religion unleashed by the war
in Iraq?
.....

y brother-in-law fought in Vietnam for the domino theory.
His son fought in Iraq for a new domino theory—the notion that a
U.S.-sponsored democracy there will release a democratic "tsunami"
that will topple the authoritarian governments of the Arab world. Domino Theory
One was based on a strategic misconception: that we were containing
expansionist international communism in Vietnam instead of resisting a
nationalist, albeit Leninist-led, revolution rooted in the struggle against
French colonialism. Domino Two is based on the theory that the Arab
"regimes" are our enemy in what James Woolsey, the former CIA chief
and ubiquitous TV hawk, calls "World War Four"—because their
domestic repression stokes Islamist terrorism, which the regimes then deflect toward the U.S. But
Shiite anger at the U.S. and the baffled response it has met
with from U.S. officials who expected our forces to be hailed as liberators
suggest that religion may be to Domino Two what nationalism was to Domino
One—its fatal blind spot. Isaiah Berlin captured the nature of religious-based resistance to foreign
domination in his metaphor for the political dynamics of nationalist
resistance that swept us out of Vietnam—"the bent twig,"
which snaps back harder the further it is pushed.
The paranoid logic of the Cold War rendered Domino One
persuasive. To save San Francisco, we had to make a stand 12,000 miles away.
Domino Two, however, has an a priori logical flaw that awaits merciless testing by
experience. The democracy we prescribe for Iraq could be an iatrogenic cure.
An
Iraqi exile I talked to recently said that the scenario that
moderate Shiites like his family fear most is that Iraq's first free
elections will be its last—that the Shiite majority will come to power
and install a theocratic state under the sway of Iran. Since the Iranian Revolution of
1979, U.S. policy in the Gulf has sought to prevent revolutionary Shiism from
threatening the stability of the Gulf states and the U.S. national interest in
a secure supply of oil. That is a domino theory that the neoconservatives
driving Bush Administration policy seem to have forgotten in their fixation on
the threat to those countries and resources posed by Saddam Hussein.
Monomania talks a good game. It comes to a premature and
foreclosing clarity using self-reinforcing facts and arguments. It is bad
thinking that sounds good. Practical men like Colin Powell are always at a
disadvantage in rebutting idea-driven policies. They know the world resists
mono-causal accounts of what's wrong with it and how to set it right, but their
chattering-class opponents easily spin their skepticism as defeatism. In fact
that skepticism represents what Sir Lewis Namier, the British historian,
called the "crowning attainment of historical study ... an intuitive
sense of how things do not happen."
A U.S.-imposed democratic revolution from above, the
neoconservatives contend, will prove stronger than an Iran-sponsored Shiite
revolution from below fed on a millennium of martyrdom and focusing popular
resentments against a century of Western imperialism. But the historical
precedents they cite—the guided democraticization of Germany and Japan after
World War II—do not apply to Iraq, as historians like John Dower, who wrote a
Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the U.S. effort in Japan, have argued. The
differences between Iraq and Japan are fundamental. Japan is an island that could be sealed off from destabilizing
foreign influences, and the Japanese possessed cultural and ethnic unity. Even
so, reconstructing Japan and readying it for democratic self-rule took 250,000
U.S. servicemen and officials six years. And there was not a single act of terrorism
committed against the American occupiers.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has some commentators reaching for
a more troubling model—the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that began
twenty years ago. Initially the Israelis were greeted as liberators by the
Shiite majority for driving out the PLO "state within a state" that
had tyrannized them for years. But the honeymoon soon ended. Israeli tanks
entered a village in the midst of a religious ceremony honoring the
foundational martyr of the sect. The Shiites blocked their way and tried to
tip over their vehicles. The Israelis, defending themselves, fired on the
crowd, igniting a guerrilla war that took hundreds of
Israeli lives and finally drove the Israelis out of Lebanon altogether. That
incident, one expert wrote in The Boston Globe, was a "tipping point" from
welcome into violent rejection. In
two incidents this week U.S. soldiers killed Iraqi demonstrators in Falluja, a
Sunni city. Shooting into a Shiite crowd could have been—and could yet
prove to be—a tipping point. In Lebanon the
Shiites threw flowers at Israeli tanks, but in Iraq there were no flowers and
there will be more incidents. We have won the war, but who will win the
peace?
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of |