Author Rory Stewart is a star at Harvard’s Kennedy School, mentioned as a future Foreign Secretary in the UK. Here he is in the Kashmir Observer, putting the lie to the George Packer-Charles Ferguson claim that the Iraq invasion, which Stewart supported, would have succeeded if we just hadn’t disbanded the army.
My instinct is that the mission was doomed from the start. Of course we made a number of errors – de-Baathification, abolition of the army, looting, etc., etc. – but these were ultimately minor. Even had we avoided those errors, the invasion would still have failed. The reasons lay deep in the limitations of contemporary Western government institutions, which in turn reflect the limitations of our own politics and society on the one side and on the other the fractures within Iraqi society.
Then he goes after the neocons:
Some of the critics of these kinds of interventions say the problem is we’re not being Machiavellian enough or aggressive enough. But the reality is that our societies don’t produce Machiavellian princes, but even if they did produce Machiavellian princes the public and those officials would not be comfortable with such treatment. And even if they were it is unlikely it would be successful for the final reason, which is of course the destruction of Iraqi society itself, which has been significantly hollowed out: the political administration has for the last twenty or thirty years lacked any autonomy, financial responsibility, or independence; people are very reluctant to take political office or exercise political power; most of the traditional forces such as the Sheikh were largely obliterated over fifty years of land reform and change; and Iraqi society essentially is struggling to reconcile itself to the reality of a foreign occupation. Nationalism is extremely strong, insurgency and sectarianism is extremely strong. In different ways all of these things meant that the Iraqi society is extremely unlikely either to consent to the occupation or to provide people who are prepared to take on the sort of administration involved in this sort of occupation.
KO: So in light of the troubles in Iraq and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, are the tools of Western foreign policy and reconstruction incapable of building and securing democracies in foreign countries?
RS: I think the creation of democratic institutions is something that needs to be led from people within a country. It’s not something that can be imposed from outside. There are minor roles that these institutions can play – providing information, providing basic security – but it’s extremely unlikely they would be capable of building the required institutions of government….
For instance in the United States some talk a very aggressive and hawkish line, and there’s an entire neo-conservative counterculture with its own extremist rhetoric…
British Empire was so spectacularly successful because they kept all the structures of the societies that they conquered.
Eva, exactly.
State-building unfortunately, doesn’t work, which is why our mission to build a central authority in Afghanistan is doomed to fail.
Callooh callay, the scales have fallen from this whiz kid’s eyes. But it is far too easy to blame our failing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan on neocon extremists, awful as they are. The problem is bigger, and wider.
Let’s just look at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which Rory Stewart currently heads. It is no neocon hotbed, it’s full of nice liberals. And yet…
Stewart’s predecessor as director of the Carr Center, Sarah Sewell, wrote a slavering introduction to the new US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. For Sewell, a former Pentagon official, human rights work can be an excellent helpmeet to counterinsurgency warfare in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. I doubt she identifies as a neocon, and yet she’s happy to lend a hand with invading and occupying.
Sewell’s predecessor at the Carr Center, Michael Ignatieff, is also no neocon, yet he was a big, big fan of the Iraq War, not to mention the invasion of Afghanistan.
Samantha Power, Stewart’s former colleague, did not support the Iraq War, but it would be too much to say she has ever opposed it, with speeches as peace rallies, in her columns at Time Magazine or elsewhere. From her perch in Obama’s National Security Council, she supports the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has argued that our allies who don’t contribute troops or treasure to this campaign should be punished. (See her Time Magazine column of April 17 2008.) She’s no neocon, but still an ardent supporter of imperial adventures and yes, nation-building. (Power has in the past espoused some very sane views on America, Israel and Palestine; I hope she still does.)
There are plenty of other liberal hawks (like Packer), humanitarian interventionists, neoliberals, centrists, and NGOs (Center for American Progress; Feminist Majority Foundation) who are fully on board with America’s invasion and occupation in Afghanistan and the spread of the war into Pakistan. They are not neocons, not part of an extremist counterculture, but their bottom line is pretty much the same. It is understandable that Rory Stewart, who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and is having second thoughts about both, should now try blame these disasters on another faction of the foreign policy elite. But it is also shoddy and dishonest.
Yep, this is the problem. The war party definitely has its claws into many who fancy themselves as progressive democrats. They carry the banner of humanitarian war. If Stewart is indeed being groomed for high office in the British FO then we should fully expect him to carry that banner as well. These were the people that gave us the war in Vietnam, the war against Serbia and now the escalation in Af-Pak. Samantha Powers is also in that camp.
They must be very unhappy with the neocons for them to have given war such a bad reputation. Before these liberals can march toward more war, they will have to dissociate themselves from the neocons. That is all this is.
But there might be one winner in this internal dispute among the war-mongers and that might be the Palestinians. This division could possibly reflect a split away from Israel itself — that could be why Phil is so excited by this development.
The good news is that we are not going to fight any more wars for Israel. The bad is that we will find other reasons.
Harvard has become, for some reason, a real nest of status quo support – which is not even really different, it just seems to have become more visible. To be really frank, I really have not met anyone recently from Harvard that can argue their way out of a paper bag. They seem to excel in the pronunciation of the name – “Hhhaarrvvard,” perhaps they have special classes for this.
Of course, this is nothing different in general than most schools of “higher education,” which is merely the fat closest to the midsection of whatever reigning elite in whatever country. No, you have correctly detected my distaste for new lows in higher learning. Most intellectuals just have to join the parade –
INTELLECTUALS LOVE A PARADE
Harvard that has a legal chair who is a plagiarist running around the country making a fool out of himself (Dershowitz). Colleges on its campus that take hints from war criminals, enroll them, and even let them teach subject matter. Really the list is almost endless, and most are becoming quite worthless.
Chespirito is right. The neolibs are even more dangerous than the neocons. Madeleine Albright killed more Iraqis than Bush did. Her doctrine: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
Identifying groups in terms such as the neolibs and the neocons, and leaving it at that, seems to me to ignore that they draw strength from the individuals within the diverse mass who elect them, or are influenced by them. I wish to see details about why such ideas are foolish, rather than dismissal of those ideas as foolish.
What is happening in Palestine is US foreign policy, let go to its worst extreme. We can see the cost to others, something we rarely are given an opportunity to do, because our wars are fought elsewhere and with greater effort to conceal the cost.
With a new president, there is new opportunity to debate why the US should not align its interests and its actions closer to those which have predominated in Israel. The Middle East and Central East Asia are a battlefield that must be recognized as common for those who oppose the policies of Israel.
While eyes are focused on Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is selling Predators to the Congo, as well as continuing to sell the “war on terrorism,” and the value of targeted assassination as a legitimate form of warfare, to the governments of the world.
Let me back up a bit – I have been educated by the comments on this site, understanding far more about various elements of history and their importance than I dreamed were relevant when I first began reading it. I also continue to consider it an important source of information for a larger audience than those who comment. My skills are limited, and as an individual so is my knowledge and understanding. A blog brings together many minds, many skill sets and many pools of knowledge and out of that grows greater understanding for a large audience.
Please – apply lessons learned regarding Jews and those not Jews, Palestine, Israel, the greater world to the quandary that faces us as nations which are waging a war in Afghanistan – please do that in your daily life and on this blog.
Thanks – for what is freely given, for what has been received, and for not pointing out my own limitations to me.
It might help at the grass roots level if public education reintroduced Gym and Civics
classes.
THE (IR)RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS
My sister, who is a banker, does not read or listen to Noam Chomsky “on principle” thereby illustrating his point to the “t”.
I am also reminded that it is integral to human nature to become more extreme in their views and preferences in the company of like-minded people. It is, I believe, hard wired into the way our brains work, and is used to shape societies by those who are aware of it: By isolation (see North Korea and Burma, and restrictions on associations in religions like Jehowa’s Witnesses or Orthodox Jews), by propaganda (see endless one sided reporting from Iraq and non- availability of Al-Jazeera in USA), by political structures ( two party system in UK and US), by education (see hysteria linked to Hugo Chavez’ s idea of changing the teaching curriculum in Venezuela from purely orthodox capitalist to including Simon Bolivar’s liberal perspectives), by associations – formal like Ku Klux Klan, or informal like Baader Meinhof.
Therefore it is everybody’s responsibility to counter that kink in our perception by deliberately listening to people with other points of view, even if it may include, for readers of this side, something as distasteful as articles by Dershovitz, or op-eds by Benny Morris ;-)