Old Hands on Deck

In the chain of disasters that has characterized the occupation of Iraq, one of the very first was also one of the most avoidable. Just before Baghdad fell, the United States administration flew in a Shia cleric, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, as its goodwill ambassador to the Shia holy city of Najaf. Upon arrival, al-Khoei was hacked to death by a mob on the orders of the radical, anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Washington didn’t seem to know that its potential allies, the Shia, were divided, or that al-Khoei’s father was a moderate who had been used by Saddam Hussein to stop a Shia rebellion in 1991.

There were experts on the Arab world in the US State Department who could have warned al-Khoei’s handlers. But Washington had decided against using such Arabists and even their own Arabic interpreters. Since then, the results, when not deadly, have been darkly comic. US Army engineers, for instance, were stymied in their reconstruction efforts by an explosion on a bridge in Baghdad because it was the same bridge they always crossed to get their Iraqi translator.

The consequences of America’s failure to use its Arabists in Iraq have been considerable. Before they were excluded, area experts had warned the US administration that it had less than half the number of troops necessary to hold the country after the invasion. They foretold the massive looting in Baghdad and the security breakdown. They warned against using Ahmad Chalabi as America’s man in Iraq, and Chalabi ended up misleading everyone. The Arabists warned Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, not to dismantle the Iraqi army and bureaucracy, and when he did, thousands of unemployed people took their guns to the insurgency. More recently, the lack of area experts has contributed to the framing of a constitution and the staging of elections that promise little peace, and might contribute to an all-out sectarian war between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish factions.

Barbara Bodine, an American Arabist with a long track record in the Middle East, who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is bewildered by the US administration. It was blinded by “the inability or unwillingness to recognize the structures that could reinforce national identity,” she says. The Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds had got on reasonably well in Iraq, Bodine maintains. With an Arabist’s eye for history, she points out that Iraq is a riverine nation and that the Kurdish north, Sunni centre, and Shia south are united by trade routes established by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Bodine further argues that the three main groups mix in the regional capitals, and that Iraq, compared with other Middle Eastern countries, is relatively urban and modern. Its population is better educated, and intermarriage is common. First loyalties for many Iraqis extend to the tribe, to be sure, but as Bodine points out, in many instances tribes contain both Sunnis and Shia. For the Shia, Saddam Hussein and his Sunni Baathists were a political, not a sectarian, enemy, and both groups are united in their distaste for Iran. According to Bodine, it is this complexity and balance that the war and occupation have upset.

In 2003, when Bodine was posted to direct reconstruction in Baghdad, she met the sheik of one of the great Sunni-Shia tribes, who begged her, “Please don’t Lebanize us.” The fear that haunts Iraq—and Bodine—is indeed the example of Lebanon. It was the imposition of a sectarian government on Lebanon by foreign powers that led to civil war. In Iraq, Washington failed to understand that the three main groups had, however painfully, coalesced into a nation. Instead, it viewed the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds as belligerent sects that needed to be placated. In balancing the provisional Iraqi governing council along these lines, the US divided the country. In setting up elections without electoral districts, it encouraged people to vote in massive religious and ethnic groupings rather than considering local interests that cut across sectarian lines.

To make matters worse, Washington’s ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, played the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds off against each other through a series of horse-trades during the constitutional negotiations. Now the minority Sunnis are angry and under-represented, and the constitution, by encouraging Shia and Kurdish demands for autonomy, is contributing to a growing civil war. Sectarian rivalries complicated the December 15, 2005, parliamentary election. Provinces were belatedly used as electoral districts but the damage had been done. Now, Bodine speaks regretfully of “the Lebanization of Iraq.” By ignoring the inside information of experts, she says, the Americans have “set off forces they can’t control.”

Those in charge of implementing Washington’s policies on the ground bear no resemblance to the Arab-world experts described by T.E. Lawrence’s Oxford mentor, David George Hogarth: “dedicated men of special knowledge, in it neither for pay nor honours, men who understood historical trends and could interpret intelligence, and from all this form an opinion on policy.” According to Bodine, Hogarth’s definition should characterize any US diplomat serving in the Middle East. Echoing Bodine, author and investigative journalist Robert Kaplan, in The Arabists, quotes an expert who describes the ideal American Arabist as someone who knows the area and the culture well enough to anticipate the thoughts of local decision-makers.

Bodine emphasizes that the reluctance to use foreign-area experts did not begin with the Bush administration. As reflected by long-standing disputes between bureaucrats and politicians, the State Department has endured growing isolation within the US government over the years. As Bodine sees it, the State Department deals with things as they are, while the administration bends matters to fit with political objectives and constantly attempts to centralize power in the executive branch. The result for the State Department is perennially low staff morale.

Just after World War II, US Arabists were accepted as a refined elite with the skills necessary to read the Arab world, even if they tended to romanticize it. In 1948, however, with the US supporting the creation of Israel in the face of an outraged Arab world, the Arabist started to become, according to Kaplan, “he who intellectually sleeps with the Arabs, someone...assumed to be politically naive, elitist and too deferential to exotic cultures.” And while the US supported Israel, it was Russia who supported the Arabs and, as such, American Arabists were increasingly viewed as unpatriotic.

The real sea change came after 1967 and the Six Day War. Israel’s remarkable victory followed by postwar support from the US, contributed to US Arabists becoming desk-bound bureaucrats, carrying out Middle East policies shaped by others and largely determined by the need to defend Israel. Where the old Arabists had seen the Arab world as multi-layered and nuanced, Washington viewed it as singularly untrustworthy and, according to Bodine, refused to listen to Arabists attempting to explain complexities and regional differences.