Mugged by Reality
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In a world where the tragedy that is Iraq is usually discussed only in media sound bites and political slogans, it is especially gratifying to see an adult, intelligent, and insightful account of life inside Iraq by someone who lived there for nine months in the early days of the occupation in 2003 and 2004, and who saw the fundamental mistakes that would later plague the attempt to create a viable Iraqi government.
John Agresto, a career American academic and former college president who volunteered to go help create a better higher education system in Iraq, learned a lot about Iraqi society in general and about American attempts to create a better society there.
Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions
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What is refreshingly different about this book is that it does not take the Bush administration line, the Congressional Democrats’ line or anybody else’s line.
Agresto is not out to prove some theory or push some pet scheme but to convey what he saw with his own eyes and discerned from his own experiences with both Iraqis and Americans in Iraq.
He makes no claim to infallibility but in fact admits to being forced to change his mind by what he saw.
Initially a supporter of the invasion, he now says that he would not have been a supporter if he had known beforehand how the occupation would be mishandled and the results that followed. But he also recognizes that we cannot unring the bell and simply leave, for that would lead to even worse consequences, not only in Iraq but elsewhere, not only to others but to ourselves.
The worst mistake, in Agresto’s view, was the failure to establish law and order in the wake of the military victory, before undertaking the grandiose project of attempting to create democracy in Iraq. From this fundamental mistake, many of the other tragedies followed.
In the absence of law and order, there was widespread violence, looting, rape — in short, the war of each against all that Hobbes warned about, centuries ago.
As for democracy, Agresto understands that the right to vote is no guarantee of freedom, toleration or respect for the rights of others. Without those prerequisites, democracy can mean tyranny at home and terrorism abroad.
Apparently the American civilian authorities in Iraq did not understand this or else they let that understanding be overridden by political considerations. By setting up a government based on warring factions, they made cooperation in the national interest a very unlikely prospect.
Today, when more and more Iraqis are rejecting the outside terrorists whom the media keep calling “insurgents,” and when our military is restoring more order than Iraq has seen in a while, the most intractable problem is the very government we set up.
General David Petraeus is mentioned only a couple of times, and briefly, in Mugged by Reality. But those brief mentions seem to be revealing.
Right after the success of military operations in Iraq, General Petraeus’ 101st Airborne had control of the city of Mosul. According to Agresto, “he ran it in radically different ways than the rest of Iraq was run” — and Mosul was “calm” in contrast to other parts of Iraq.
Then, after control of Mosul was passed on to others, it “began to rival the worst sections of Baghdad for attacks on Coalition forces and violence against Iraqis.”
One of the ways in which Petraeus ran Mosul differently from the way things were done in the rest of Iraq, according to Agresto, was not to get rid of existing public officials wholesale, despite their being members of the former ruling Baath Party.
Somebody has to run the basic institutions that make civilized life possible — and you can’t just get rid of those who know how to run those institutions before you have someone qualified to replace them. Apparently General Petraeus was pragmatic enough to understand that.
We may, belatedly, have found a man and an approach that work.
Nothing is easier than to second-guess other people’s decisions, ignoring the inherent limitations of knowledge, the pressures of circumstances, and the dangers of alternative courses of action.
Americans in all parts of the political spectrum have made serious mistakes about Iraq.
Some have been the mistakes of honorable people — indeed, mistakes to which honorable people may be more prone than others. Other people have acted with utter dishonor and dishonesty — the most shameful recent example being the smearing of General David Petraeus as a liar before he had said a word.
Precisely because Congressional Democrats already knew that there had been progress after the troop surge in Iraq — some of their own colleagues had been there and seen it — they had to discredit General Petraeus, in order to prevent the American people from knowing it.
Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said it all in an unguarded moment when he admitted that an American victory in Iraq “would be a real big problem for us” in next year’s elections.
That is why a general who is putting his life on the line every day in Iraq, and whose efforts are producing some success, has to be called a liar on nationwide television by United States Senators and a traitor in a New York Times ad.
What of the mistakes of the Bush administration?
John Agresto’s Mugged by Reality makes it painfully clear that the attempt to create a democracy in Iraq was the biggest failure of good intentions there and the key to much else that went wrong.
The idea was that democratic nations do not fight each other or sponsor terrorist campaigns against one another. Therefore, if we could create a democracy in Iraq, we would have made a historic contribution to world peace by planting the first democracy in the Arab Middle East.
Over time, the spread of that democracy in the region would successively deprive terrorist organizations of the bases and political support needed to wreak havoc in Western nations.
Perhaps the strongest support for this theory came from the actions of the terrorists themselves, who have poured men, money, and weapons into Iraq on a massive scale, and blown themselves up in suicide attacks, in order to prevent this project from succeeding.
However, as Agresto points out in Mugged by Reality, democracy has prerequisites — and those prerequisites are not universal, especially not in Iraq.
Of the various governments in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime was liquidated, he argues, the most effective was that of the American occupation authorities and the worst those elected by the Iraqis. Agresto spells this out in detail.
President Bush has rejected the idea that some peoples and cultures are not ready for democracy. He points to the large Iraqi turnout at the elections, despite the threats of terrorists. Everyone wants more freedom, he and his supporters say.
Wanting freedom, however, is not the same as wanting others to have the same freedom you have. Such tolerance is not the norm in Iraq.
Nor was it the norm in Western civilization until after Protestants and Catholics fought each other for centuries before finally realizing that neither could exterminate the other. Sunnis and Shi’ites have yet to reach a similar accommodation in Iraq.
Agresto points out how Americans’ organizing the Iraqi government on the basis of competing interest groups made reconciliation harder, if not impossible.
He notes that those who founded the United States organized political power on the basis of territory, so that mutual accommodations among people with different views within given communities were a prerequisite for gaining power.
What recent progress has been made in Iraq has apparently been made by mobilizing traditional local and regional Iraqi leaders and coalitions, not by relying on the democratically elected central government. There may be a lesson there.
If nothing else comes out of the Iraq war, it should banish the concept of “nation-building” from our language and our minds. “The track record of nation-building and Wilsonian grandiosity ought to give anyone pause,” as was said in this column before the Iraq war began.
We can now add the track record of Iraq to the list of disasters.
The very existence of Iraq is a result of Woodrow Wilson’s grandiose ideas about “the right of self-determination of peoples,” which led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious allied powers after the First World War.
Some of the most bitter and intractable conflicts of our time have arisen in nations carved out of the Ottoman Empire, whether in the Balkans or the Middle East.
You cannot turn a territory and its population into a functioning nation with the stroke of a pen or the drawing of lines on a map.
Real nations evolve over time out of the mutual accommodations of peoples, not by imposing the bright ideas of theorists from the top down.
No small part of African nations’ problems comes from the fact that most became nations only in the sense that conquerors carved up African territories among themselves to suit their own convenience.
There was no nation of Nigeria until the British drew some lines on a map and gave it that name. There is no reason to think that such a nation would have evolved on its own, given the mutually antagonistic peoples living in that vast territory.
Iraq is an object lesson in another sense. You seldom hear about the area of the country controlled by Kurds because that has been the most peaceful and orderly part of Iraq, and the media are drawn to death and destruction.
In Mugged by Reality, John Agresto says: “I do not believe one American, soldier or civilian, has been killed or even hurt in Kurdish Iraq since the war began — or maybe ever.”
Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
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As Agresto points out, democracy is a means, not an end in itself.
Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy argues persuasively for the international, as well as internal, benefits of democracy, seeing it as the kind of government that reduces the dangers of war.
President Bush became an enthusiast for the idea and spent hours talking with Sharansky in the White House.
Perhaps he should have spent a little time talking with Amy Chua, whose book World on Fire points out that democracy — in certain kinds of societies — is a recipe for disaster, despite how valuable it has been in Western nations.
Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
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Britain was a free country long before it became democratic. In Germany, Hitler was elected democratically. In much of Africa, democracy in practice has meant, “One man, one vote — one time,” as elected leaders put an end to both elections and freedom.
It would be wonderful to have free and democratic nations throughout the world, and that would very likely reduce military conflicts, as Sharansky and others say. But we do not ensure freedom by holding elections.
According to John Agresto, in Iraq “the ‘democratic’ government now entrenched is as sectarian and incompetent as we ever could have feared.” He is unwilling to say that the invasion of Iraq “as originally conceived” was a mistake but he fears that it has become “a tragedy.”
This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war.
It is the terrorists’ war, regardless of where it is fought.
Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is his memoir A Man of Letters.
