Learning From Failure: Formulating A New U.S. Middle East Foreign Policy
Here is an interesting opinion piece by someone who warned (in a congressional hearing) prior to 2003 that there were no Iraqis inside Iraq and the plain to bring them democracy was a fools errand. Iraq has Shiite Iraqis, Sunni Iraqis, and Kurdish Iraqis, all of which don't get along and don't have democratically elected leaders.
We see this today in Afghanistan when the neocons insist the Taliban will never rule, as if they have a say in such an outcome or a way to achieve it.A commentator recently complained that President Trump does not have a “Syria strategy” and therefore awful Assad is winning. Countless Op-Ed writers before him likewise commented that President X “did not have a [insert the name of any country from Morocco to India] strategy,” and therefore awful Z was winning.
That sort of writing is still today considered honest work by Op-Ed editors, who studiously ignore what happened when US Presidents did have “a strategy”—and not just in 2003 when the awful Saddam Hussein was removed to allow the Iraqi people to advance towards democracy.
It was only upon entering the country that the absence of any actual Iraqis was discovered, as opposed to rival Shi’a, Kurdish, and Sunni factions, in none of which the leaders are chosen democratically, thereby making an Iraq-wide democracy impossible twice over, intra-factionally as well as inter-factionally.
Yet when I testified to that effect in a Senate Foreign Relations hearing before the 2003 invasion, the pro-Administration witness easily prevailed, by pointing out that I had just said that Iraqis were incapable of democracy, which was “racist” he said. I immediately confessed that it was culturalist, but failed to note that anyone who is not is a total fool would not expect Neapolitans to behave like Japanese, or vice versa.
No strategy for any country can possibly succeed if intersectional American inhibitions preclude the acceptance of its simplest cultural realities, thereby allowing a country like Iraq to be confused with, say, Norway or Denmark, whose 1945 liberation was indeed followed by democratic elections.
Unfortunately, such confusions and even greater ones are the norm rather than the exception: Afghanistan, for example, was judged ripe for Scandinavian feminism when its constitution was drawn up: it mandates a higher quota of female parliamentarians than the proportion of female members in the U.S. Congress or the Canadian parliament. Naturally, they count for nothing in an assembly dominated by warlords and their lieges.
In another Afghan example, in June 2017 Secretary of Defense Mattis overcame strong resistance from President Trump to send out 4,000 more U.S. troops to serve as instructors for the Afghan Army, to enable it to resist the Taliban, which was winning, as it still is.
The mystery is why Afghan soldiers needed training from very expensive American NCOs no less, while the Taliban do not. But the answer of course is that individual skill levels have nothing to do with it: the Afghan Army cannot be trained to fight by definition, because it can only exist as a lucrative business for its bosses and as a form of welfare for their underlings, and not as a fighting army in the absence of an Afghan national identity on which cohesion can be built.
For much less money, the U.S. could have built up a formidable army of separate Tadjik, Uzbek, Hazara, Aimaq, and selected tribal-Pathan regiments that would have smashed the Taliban. But any such proposal would have horrified Secretary Mattis, who of course knows that ethnic regiments served the British in both Asia and Africa very well indeed (and a Gurkha regiment still does), but who evidently felt compelled by political correctness to scrupulously eschew even the most elementary of Afghan realities in framing his policies: the non-existence of an Afghan identity, except among some expatriates.
Science advances because erroneous theories are refuted, but in forming U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, nothing whatever has ever been learned even from total failures.
So yes there really is a “strategy” that will work successfully every single time, that every President should adopt and rigorously follow: when invited to intervene in the Middle East, don’t.