INDCJournal: Iraq Hawks: Getting "Outside the Narrative"

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September 07, 2006

Iraq Hawks: Getting "Outside the Narrative"

Posted by Bill

In a recent e-mail exchange, erstwhile Iraq hawk turned pessimistic war critic Stephen Sherman issued me a relevant challenge:

Bill, I'm quite disillusioned, as you know. Even remorseful. There's no possibility of 'persuading by email,' but I'd recommend trying to 'get outside the narrative.' Maybe you saw Rick Moran's post on the Leftie narrative. We've got one too.

And he's right. We do. And if "we" references right-leaning Iraq War supporters, we've actually got several narratives. I can't speak to all of them, as some righties seem to reflexively endorse the use of military force as a philosophically soothing end unto itself, in addition to a means; but I can address the relevant ones to which I've subscribed. They go something like this:

Given an assumption about the inadequacy of porous law enforcement strategies to prevent terror attacks synthesizing WMD and Islamism, and the unacceptability of strictly reactive foreign policy measures given such bloody stakes, the Doctrine of Preemption and the encouragement of liberal democracy in the Middle East present sensible and ambitious foreign policy options. The latter is one of the few proposed strategic solutions that attempts to structurally quench the long-term political fuel behind the threat from Islamic radicalism.

Deposing the menacing regime in Iraq - which presented a special intersection of humanitarian, realpolitikal, legal, historical, potentially preemptive and strategic interest - was and is intended to deliver a critical acceleration to this generational endeavor, as history outlines several compelling precedents for successful Democratic dominoes tipped by deposition of the autocracies that preceded them. While Iraq is viewed as a key jumpstart to the stalled spread of democracy in the Middle East, the establishment of liberal governance in a region dominated by dueling autocratic and theocratic ideologies will take significant time and effort, its difficulty augmented by hypercritical analysis incessantly focused on narrow narratives in lieu of strategic assessment. The media (Western and otherwise) exacerbates this tendency towards taking the short view, motivated by varying degrees of narrative laziness, ideological bias against the war, reporters' cynicism about domestic authority, and a market-inspired gravitation towards dramatic ledes.

Got it?

If you share this basic worldview, you're inclined to put up with a lot of bad news from Iraq. For one thing, you don't trust the press any longer; after umpteen Vietnam-inspired, premature declarations of "Quagmire!", from just before the stunningly successful victory in Mazar-e Sharif to the briefly stalled march to Baghdad, the hawk is desensitized to and inherently suspicious of negative war news. By crying wolf for dramatic and ideological ends, elements of the mainstream media have diminished its credibility among war-supporting cynics to a dysfunctional extent, and a hawk's reception of many of the legitimately troubling reports from the conflict dead-end at skepticism and narrative confusion rather than aiding real analysis and conclusion. We've developed an abnormally thick skin for negative news, and this sports both beneficial and harmful consequences for anyone interested in sussing out a relatively objective truth about what's going on over there.

In addition to a mistrust of the media's characterization of events, the Iraq Hawk has a core belief that the grand historical changes attempted via an invasion of Iraq call for - demand - time and patience antithetical to 24-hour news cycles and emotional analysis shared by politicians, legacy media and carping bloggers alike. If government policy has the handling characteristics of an oil tanker, the critical event is the captain's choice of where to point it, not how quickly it turns. Having made our choice of captain and course, chattering analysis perceived as unrealistic demand for speedboat-like performance becomes irritating background noise. A war critic sees this steadfast support as ignorance or cognitive dissonance. A war supporter views it as mature, requisite patience. Realistic analysis can be complicated by both sides being right.

Now that we've established the worldview and analytical tendencies of the "dead-end Iraq War supporter," also known as "me," an honest reassessment of the war requires stepping outside of comfortable narratives while avoiding seductive replacements. Without diminishing the value of the struts that support my established point of view - distrust of the media, patience, a belief in the subtlety of deep trends that come to dominate large historical changes, etc - the challenge is to establish an emotionless, rational framework for analysis; a framework that goes deeper than both the BIG philosophy and the splintered, conflicting snippets of war's progress.

In his stinging Iraq war critique "The Assassin's Gate," George Packer features the story of writer Paul Berman, who "believed strenuously that it was the job of intellectuals to explain and mend the rent that [September 11] had ... made in the fabric of our world. For him, the answer lay in literature and philosophy as much as politics, let alone policy." Packer describes Berman's intellectual vision, a near-perfect encapsulation of the 30,000 foot strategy generally shared by neocons, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens, Dean Esmay, a guy who calls himself "dorkafork," and me:

Totalitarianism is a revolt against liberalism. And the answer to it is liberalism - liberal ideas (Berman never ceased to talk about the war of ideas) but also liberalism armed, liberalism without the dream of paradise.
...
It wasn't hard to see that the Arab Baath Socialist Party in Baghdad was totalitarian. Makiya had shown this in Republic of Fear. The regime held power through a cult of leader worship, pervasive terror created by endless acts of astonishing violence against its own citizens, overlapping and ubiquitous security agencies, continuous wars of aggression, and a climate of conspiratorial thinking and paranoia toward the Zionist and imperilaist enemies. Saddam seemed to have modeled his regime on Orwell's 1984, right down to Big Brother's mustache. His hero was Stalin, whom Saddam, more than any of the world's dictators, resembled. The founder of the Baath Party in Damascus in the early 1940's, Michel Aflaq (whose tomb is in Baghdad), was deeply influenced by Nazi ideology. But Baathism - like its European progenitors - was nominally secular. It was hostile to Islamist regimes and ideologies. It was also visibly in decay. The days of its ability to move masses of people to frenzy and violence were over. Then why go to war with Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda?
Berman answered: because Baathism was one of the "Muslim totalitarianisms," the other being Islamism. The terror was not just a police action or a military campaign. Like the war against fascism and the Cold War, it was an ideological war, a "mental war." Victory required that millions of people across the Muslim world give up murderous political ideas. It would be a long, hard, complicated business. But the overthrow of Saddam and the establishment of an Iraqi democracy as a beachhead in the Middle East would show that the United States was on the side of liberal-minded Arabs like Kanan Makiya and against the totalitarians and their ideas. Regime change would show that we, too, were capable of fighting for an idea - the idea of freedom. The willingness of liberal democracy to defend itself and fight for its principles is always in doubt. Alexis de Tocqueville worried about it; Hitler and Mussolini scoffed at it; so, more recently, did bin Laden. But the greatest affirmation of this willingness was made by Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he vowed that a nation (and not only his own - any nation) "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure.

So far, so good. But then Packer hits an uncomfortable mark with this hawk, my analysis still confident about the strategic solution to the threat posed by Islamic extremism and desensitized to negative argumentation:

This was not the kind of thinking that gets one invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations. Berman wasn't particularly interested in military strategy or policy issues. The answers to September 11 were just as likely to be found in Dostoyevsky and Camus as at the Brookings Institution or in the pages of Foreign Affairs. He was responding viscerally to the event (our late-night talks kept coming back to the scale of destruction just across the East River, shocking evidence of the Islamists' ambition) and also at an extremely high altitude of abstraction, where details become specks.

Certainly war commentators have been paying closer attention to the unfolding events in Iraq than an academic arguing policy based on his reading of "the Stranger," and many of us are quite interested and mindful of political and military strategy. I'd also add a component that's opposite in nature though reinforcing in practice to Packer's rebuke: in addition to the peril of letting "details become specks," supporters and opponents of the war also tend to selectively magnify specks, using them as building material to reinforce the larger ideological decision. Given these universal impulses, have righties let our patience and distrust of the media obscure a rational, contextual analysis of Iraq's mounting challenges? Or is our instinct correct about the perils of selective negative argumentation, as massive historical trends set in motion by a bold trauma gather strength and ripple towards a positive outcome: the painful yet inexorable birth of liberal democracy in the Middle East?

I can't say for sure. But over the next few months, I'm going to take a crack at figuring it out. And like the man says, doing so requires stepping "outside the narrative."

Posted by Bill at September 7, 2006 09:39 AM | TrackBack (0)

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Comments

But it's so warm and cozy inside the narrative! It's like a nice afghan blanket.

Posted by: Hubris at September 8, 2006 09:20 AM

I don't see myself as entirely comfortable inside the narrative and I don't think Bill is either. I'm still an Iraq hawk and I can clearly recall making the point to an anti war friend before we invaded that my biggest reservation was that we would be upsetting the status quo between Sunni and Shiite - and that seemed to me the war's biggest risk. Well, it is clearly become a major issue and the road to a stable Iraq hasn't been easy and still may end in chaos. I think Sistani's recent call through president Maliki to disarm the militias is the right course and I think the Iraqi army is the main instrument to do that. It has become clear to me that the majority of Iraqi Shia are willing to try democracy and are not just wanting an Iranian style Islamic republic. The majority of the majority can force democracy at the point of a gun much more effectively than outsiders. If we can get to a reasonably democratic Iraq then we will have Iran in an awkward position and be better off than if we didn't invade. I don't think it unreasonable to say that if we hadn't topped Saddam he may well have gotten rid of sanctions, pursued WMD and be in an arms race with Iran.

Posted by: lgude at September 8, 2006 12:20 PM

"The Doctrine of Preemption and the encouragement of liberal democracy in the Middle East present sensible and ambitious foreign policy options."

The problem I have when I read the National Strategy against Terrorism and many of the speeches on the GWOT is the inherent contradiction between 1) preventing extremists from toppling "moderate" governments and 2) encouraging the development of democracy.

Encouraging, prodding and poking at the dictatorships just results in a pantomime of state actions meant to resemble incremental democratic reforms for the benefit of everybody with a score card. Liberalization progresses until the point when it actually threatens the usually well entrenched ruling elite and then becomes frozen. These regimes require a revolutionary dispursal of concentrated executive power. And in many of the nations, alternate elites are overly anti-American.

And its a hell of a double standard that is applied to allies and adversaries. When Condi spoke on world press freedom day, she mentioned....Iran, Cuba and China and the Russia but none of the "friendly" Arab states like Saudi Arabia.

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