The following is an interview with Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol. Dr Herring is co-author of ‘Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy’ (2005), and a co-founder of NASPIR the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations. He is an advisor to UKWatch.
Alex Doherty: ‘You’ve written a lot about sanctions era Iraq, what kind of state was the country in before the Anglo/American invasion?
Eric Herring: That’s worth looking at a number of levels. One of the things the Americans hoped for when they moved in was that they would effectively inherit a functioning state. The Americans actually believed that when they invaded they would be able to install Chalabi as the new prime minister, that the Iraqi people would turn out to applaud and throw flowers, and that there would be an army, a police force and a functioning bureaucracy.
The reality of the Iraqi state before the invasion was, you could use the phrase, that it was very external to society. Meaning that society had very, very low loyalty to it. It had very low loyalty to it because this was a dictatorial state that could rely on revenue sources – it didnt actually need to rely on the people that much. Another aspect of it was what is known as ‘the shadow state’ where, especially under the sanctions, aside from the formal state structures there were the real networks that actually ran things, that were loyal personally to Saddam. Of course it wasn’t just the Ba’ath party but also these more personal networks that existed alongside the state. And what it meant was that the state itself had been hollowed out by Saddam’s power manoeuvrings and his efforts to deal with the sanctions and so it was a state that did not have popular loyalty.
What that meant was that when you had an invasion the state collapsed; it wasn’t simply that there was looting and so on the state that they thought they were inheriting was fundamentally a non-functioning state, it was in deep trouble as it was. Then of course you’ve got the services to society that were functioning not at all well very much because of the sanctions, partly because of the policy of Saddam in prioritising the elite, his cronies and those loyal in the security services and so on.
However not principally because of that because in the period before the sanctions what Saddam wanted to be was powerful, and the way to be powerful was to have a well educated, well fed, admittedly intimidated society, that would buoy him up. Starving illiterate people were no use to him. He needed Iraq to be a functional industrial society, and so he invested Iraq’s oil wealth heavily in that and therefore bought loyalty to that extent. Now that does matter because there’s more than one way of being a dictator – you can be a dictator as he was brutal, and at the same time ship the money out of the country and you know buy a million pairs of shoes the Imelda Marcos type or indeed the Indonesian type model where it’s absolutely corrupt and billions disappear and so on. Well that wasn’t his purpose because he actually wanted Iraq to be powerful, and he had a particular view of what it would involve, a kind of Arab nationalist view.
Now during the sanctions period the situation in the centre and south of the country was pretty desperate. In the north of the country things were significantly better in terms of welfare. It’s not that this showed that sanctions were irrelevant to people’s suffering, because from 1991 the north was an autonomous area, because of the uprising and the military intervention there led by the British and Americans; the so-called safe-havens. It was also that sanctions were less intense [in the north], sanctions were officially lighter, they had more money going to them from oil-for-food, they had a cash component, agriculture’s better, more porous borders and also they got a huge cut of the oil smuggling so things were relatively good there.
AD: What did you imagine would happen with the invasion? There were a lot of predictions, people expected the official war to drag on for a long period of time, as you say the Americans expected people to be throwing flowers and so on. Did you imagine what actually happened – the quick initial victory and then the insurgency on the scale we’ve seen?
EH: I did actually write a piece before the invasion that broadly set out what happened its my ‘I told you so’ piece. It argued that first of all that we had a choice between the UN’s disarmament agenda and the Bush administration’s overthrow agenda, and I said that those two were not compatible. I also said that fundamentally Iraq was disarmed and the idea that we did not know that Iraq was disarmed before the invasion was demonstrably untrue. It’s not a question of there being some big intelligence failure ‘you know we all thought Saddam still had these weapons’ it’s just not true. And weapons inspectors’ reports made it clear – Iraq had been disarmed, and what they were unsure about was some of the accounting for past activities. So what was incomplete was the information, which was never going to be complete information. So you had the choice of a disarmament agenda through the UN that would allow the sanctions to be lifted, but the Americans didn’t want that they had an overthrow agenda which meant keeping the sanctions in place, either until the sanctions brought Saddam down or until they invaded.
Now I argued at the time that the problem with the overthrow agenda was that it rather presumed that the invasion would result in a pro-US state in Iraq, and I said that there were lots of reasons to believe that Iraqis would not accept that, because I don’t believe that that was ever their preference. And therefore you’re going to get caught between creating a pro-American state and this opposition. Now here’s your problem – on the one hand you need a state, on the other hand you want to control it, but actually you can’t have both. The only state thats going to exist is one you can’t control in Iraq. And what’s happened as it turns out is that they end up pretty much having neither the Americans don’t have control and they pretty much don’t have a state either.
AD: The invasion was unusual for how little international support it gained. Why did Britain go along with the Americans unlike, say, the French or the Germans? And what does the British government perceive that it gains from such a close alliance with the Americans?
EH: In this case what you’re talking about principally are the preferences of a single person Tony Blair, to a very extraordinary degree. Britain has a very presidential style of government these days, increasingly so. Parliament is secondary, ministers very secondary, and personal advisors that are not part of the formal system in a lot of ways play a key role. I remember in the run up to the war being at the UN and interviewing people at the British mission and they weren’t making any arguments in favour of war. People like the head of the Iraq desk at the Foreign Office and so on; there was not the slightest hint that any of these people were of the view that the situation was one that required an invasion. None of them were recommending it, none of them even discussing it, except eventually when the Americans appeared more and more determined to have war and it was only then that they started to talk about what the Americans were doing and thinking. The first thing to note is that this did not come from the British government’s Iraq specialists either at the UN or in the Foreign Office. It’s just not where this was coming from, and the whole policy of trying to promote the idea of smart sanctions was an effort to save the sanctions rather than an effort to provide an excuse to invade.
It became very clear that George Bush was going to invade. One of the things that his administration had been obsessed with is that any given policy must not seem like something Bill Clinton had been doing. So whatever Bill Clinton’s policy was the US had to have a different policy, to quite an obsessive degree. And of course Clinton had endorsed the smart sanctions policy and talked about continued containment, and not invading and so on.
Now if you are Blair then you are faced with a choice, and I see no reason to disagree with him in terms of his representation of what he thought on this, which is that the United States should not be seen to be doing this alone. You know the United States is the global hyper-power, and being on the outside just disagreeing is going to be less productive than being on the inside modifying, amending and so on. Which is why for example Blair said to Bush ‘Don’t just start an invasion, let’s see if we can get a second UN resolution explicitly endorsing war, that will help legitimise the war enormously.’ And the kind of leaked documents that have come out since then show that that was the case.
Fundamentally Blair buys into a lot of the Christian right values of Bush and actually has more of a similar ideological worldview with him than with those on the left of his own party. And he fundamentally believes that the US is a force for good in the world and believes in the use of armed force for military interventions to promote the spread of liberal democracy and the removal of dictators. So he buys into many of these notions of the American right, that liberal democracy American style and imposed by America is a universal value that people really would choose given half the chance. So there’s a commonality of worldview, plus the belief that its in Britain’s strategic interest to be alongside the United States.
AD: So you think then that Blair is very much a kind of delusional person he’s persuaded himself that America and Britain are on this mission to bring democracy to the Middle East when despite whatever formal democratic institutions might be put in place the Americans will never allow a government which wants to improve relations with Iran say, or to demand the withdrawal of foreign troops and so on.
EH: Well I would put it somewhat differently it’s not delusional in the sense that they do have a project, they are extending it, and for better or worse they are going for that. They do wish to establish market economies, not in the sense of free markets because there are no “free” markets, but open economies to allow subsidised western corporations to play a role, in the belief that that’s the best way to become prosperous in these places.
In terms of what will and will not be allowed in Iraq though they actually have had a different belief. Which is that given a free choice [Iraqis] would choose a pro-US, pro-British outcome.
Now [the British and Americans] might prefer there not to be a pro-Iranian government in Iraq and they might prefer that the outcome be one where an Iraqi government doesn’t tell foreign troops to leave, but actually they can’t prevent it and they’re increasingly realising that. Although again I wouldn’t caricature Shia political forces in Iraq as simply pro-Iranian I think it’s vastly more complicated than that, there’s a lot of Iraqi nationalism, and there’s serious rivalry with Iran. I don’t see it as straightforwardly pro-Iranian and even pro-Iranian doesn’t necessarily mean pro-Iranian in terms of the particular faction that dominates Iran now, because Iran itself is divided.
In terms of the withdrawal of foreign troops its worth pointing out that the American strategic vision for the new Iraq never was the desire to have large numbers of troops permanently stationed there. What they wanted was a basing capability, a deployment capability; so they’d have bases with a relatively small number of personnel and the idea was that they would have them there in a time of crisis, not for use in Iraq but for use elsewhere in the region. So that was the outcome that they explicitly sought and again I have no reason to dispute that because that was their strategic vision before.
They are faced with a severe problem, in that in the December elections which will be direct parliamentary elections and depending on how it’s all organised this will be much more the election of a government – and in terms of Sunni Arab participation there is a lot of organisation on the Sunni Arab side, rather than having the boycott that they had in January that will be organised around the removal of foreign troops. And there is a massive majority of opinion amongst Shia and Sunni Arabs that as soon as there is a directly elected national government then foreign troops should leave because they’re making the situation worse. Now the Americans and British cannot prevent that, because the one nightmare scenario they’ve had all along is that whatever else happens there shouldn’t be a united Sunni-Shia uprising. They got a big fright in the spring of 2004 when the [Moqtada al Sadr] uprising took place, but even with that the Shia were clearly divided and so [the Americans and British] took comfort from that and managed to divert that. But they know that they are absolutely finished the day that there is a united view expressed in parliamentary terms that they should leave; then they’re out and they have no choice.
AD: Just on the democracy question, the way I’ve tended to think is that Blair and the Americans have taken a purely cynical approach and that they basically have no concern for democracy in the slightest and that it’s more of a public relations exercise. You know its not the fifties you can’t just install your general in Iraq and the population here and in America will be fine with that. I’ve tended to feel that there is more pressure here, in America and in Iraq for democratic institutions and human rights concerns and so the Americans and British have actually been forced into these positions although they have no actual concern for democracy. Noam Chomsky has said in the past that the Americans are completely neutral about political forms all they care about is obedience. So whether it’s democracy or dictatorship doesn’t matter the important thing is that Iraq is obedient and does what we say. But you think that the Americans have a genuine interest in promoting democracy and not just for public relations purposes.
EH: In comparing what I’ve said with Chomsky’s comments you’re actually comparing different things. What he was referring to was the actual objective function of American foreign policy and we can show clearly through the historical record that in functional terms the US state is neutral on these things, in the sense that if their calculation is that an elected leader will get in the way of their strategic objectives then they will have that leader removed, if they can they will invade, if they can they will overthrow, if they can they will undermine him. There’s plenty of evidence of that, so yes, in that sense they’re neutral. But subjectively they’re not it’s actually very hard for people to be cynical as in say one thing and do another. There are cynical people but it’s so much easier to believe in your own moral rectitude, it’s much easier to live with yourself and act and persuade. All those people I’ve spoken to and interviewed and so on, they all believe passionately in what they are doing. There are cynical individuals and there’s an element where it doesn’t really matter because you know what you’ve got to say and even if you’re not sure if you particularly mean it you know that it’s your job to say it so it all becomes very blurred. The line between sincerity and cynicism, it all gets washed away.
To return to looking at it in objective terms, generally speaking advanced capitalism operates more efficiently in a liberal democracy than in a dictatorship. So if you like the logic of advanced capitalism is not neutral with regards to liberal democracy it’s actually in favour of it. I think that many of us on the left can have the failing of being too dismissive about the progressive role of liberal democratic political forms and also fail to look hard enough at the functionality for advanced capitalism of liberal democratic forms. So advanced capitalism is neutral only in a narrow sense, in the actual concrete historical circumstances that we are in liberal democracy is generally functional for advanced capitalism which means that there is bias towards liberal democracy in US foreign policy which is a good thing in some significant ways and you have to look at its progressive function.
The problem you have in Iraq is not that the US is trying to prevent liberal democracy but actually they are sincere about trying to establish liberal democratic forms, that come out with the right answers of course, on those occasions when people spontaneously organised local elections in Iraq they cancelled the elections. Their argument was the wrong people were going to get in; their argument was that they were preventing liberal democracy in order to save it because they argued that bad guys who weren’t actually in favour of democracy were going to have a one time election, get in power and say ‘see we’re in charge now, no more elections’ or ‘we’re in charge now but we’re going to run it our way’. They were saying no you’ve got to establish true liberal democracy as in the liberalism, not just the democratic form, but the liberal values of tolerance, transfer of power and so on. So I think that there has been quite a lot of sincerity in that project and that it’s also functional for advanced capitalism, and those two things mesh together. However when you look at how they’ve actually gone about the concrete project you have to separate US state interests from the interests of capital. US state interest is about a particular state that will be pro-US, whereas advanced capitalism is actually much more Laissez-faire than that- you know ‘whose in charge? Well we don’t really care as long as we’re making money’ whereas in Iraq they are actually much more concerned about who is in charge. An Islamic state doesn’t actually matter to advanced capitalism- as long as they’re involved in the world economy who cares? But it does matter to the American government.
The Americans were confronted by indigenous spontaneous forms that they couldn’t control and that they were terrified of. So they tried to import exiles and select people on the basis of a supposed ethno-sectarianism and that unleashed forces that are undermining the occupation.
Part Two will follow shortly.
Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch collective.
The following is an interview with Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol. Dr Herring is co-author of ‘Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy’ (2005), and a co-founder of NASPIR the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations. He is an advisor to UKWatch.
Alex Doherty: ‘You’ve written a lot about sanctions era Iraq, what kind of state was the country in before the Anglo/American invasion?
Eric Herring: That’s worth looking at a number of levels. One of the things the Americans hoped for when they moved in was that they would effectively inherit a functioning state. The Americans actually believed that when they invaded they would be able to install Chalabi as the new prime minister, that the Iraqi people would turn out to applaud and throw flowers, and that there would be an army, a police force and a functioning bureaucracy.
The reality of the Iraqi state before the invasion was, you could use the phrase, that it was very external to society. Meaning that society had very, very low loyalty to it. It had very low loyalty to it because this was a dictatorial state that could rely on revenue sources – it didnt actually need to rely on the people that much. Another aspect of it was what is known as ‘the shadow state’ where, especially under the sanctions, aside from the formal state structures there were the real networks that actually ran things, that were loyal personally to Saddam. Of course it wasn’t just the Ba’ath party but also these more personal networks that existed alongside the state. And what it meant was that the state itself had been hollowed out by Saddam’s power manoeuvrings and his efforts to deal with the sanctions and so it was a state that did not have popular loyalty.
What that meant was that when you had an invasion the state collapsed; it wasn’t simply that there was looting and so on the state that they thought they were inheriting was fundamentally a non-functioning state, it was in deep trouble as it was. Then of course you’ve got the services to society that were functioning not at all well very much because of the sanctions, partly because of the policy of Saddam in prioritising the elite, his cronies and those loyal in the security services and so on.
However not principally because of that because in the period before the sanctions what Saddam wanted to be was powerful, and the way to be powerful was to have a well educated, well fed, admittedly intimidated society, that would buoy him up. Starving illiterate people were no use to him. He needed Iraq to be a functional industrial society, and so he invested Iraq’s oil wealth heavily in that and therefore bought loyalty to that extent. Now that does matter because there’s more than one way of being a dictator – you can be a dictator as he was brutal, and at the same time ship the money out of the country and you know buy a million pairs of shoes the Imelda Marcos type or indeed the Indonesian type model where it’s absolutely corrupt and billions disappear and so on. Well that wasn’t his purpose because he actually wanted Iraq to be powerful, and he had a particular view of what it would involve, a kind of Arab nationalist view.
Now during the sanctions period the situation in the centre and south of the country was pretty desperate. In the north of the country things were significantly better in terms of welfare. It’s not that this showed that sanctions were irrelevant to people’s suffering, because from 1991 the north was an autonomous area, because of the uprising and the military intervention there led by the British and Americans; the so-called safe-havens. It was also that sanctions were less intense [in the north], sanctions were officially lighter, they had more money going to them from oil-for-food, they had a cash component, agriculture’s better, more porous borders and also they got a huge cut of the oil smuggling so things were relatively good there.
AD: What did you imagine would happen with the invasion? There were a lot of predictions, people expected the official war to drag on for a long period of time, as you say the Americans expected people to be throwing flowers and so on. Did you imagine what actually happened – the quick initial victory and then the insurgency on the scale we’ve seen?
EH: I did actually write a piece before the invasion that broadly set out what happened its my ‘I told you so’ piece. It argued that first of all that we had a choice between the UN’s disarmament agenda and the Bush administration’s overthrow agenda, and I said that those two were not compatible. I also said that fundamentally Iraq was disarmed and the idea that we did not know that Iraq was disarmed before the invasion was demonstrably untrue. It’s not a question of there being some big intelligence failure ‘you know we all thought Saddam still had these weapons’ it’s just not true. And weapons inspectors’ reports made it clear – Iraq had been disarmed, and what they were unsure about was some of the accounting for past activities. So what was incomplete was the information, which was never going to be complete information. So you had the choice of a disarmament agenda through the UN that would allow the sanctions to be lifted, but the Americans didn’t want that they had an overthrow agenda which meant keeping the sanctions in place, either until the sanctions brought Saddam down or until they invaded.
Now I argued at the time that the problem with the overthrow agenda was that it rather presumed that the invasion would result in a pro-US state in Iraq, and I said that there were lots of reasons to believe that Iraqis would not accept that, because I don’t believe that that was ever their preference. And therefore you’re going to get caught between creating a pro-American state and this opposition. Now here’s your problem – on the one hand you need a state, on the other hand you want to control it, but actually you can’t have both. The only state thats going to exist is one you can’t control in Iraq. And what’s happened as it turns out is that they end up pretty much having neither the Americans don’t have control and they pretty much don’t have a state either.
AD: The invasion was unusual for how little international support it gained. Why did Britain go along with the Americans unlike, say, the French or the Germans? And what does the British government perceive that it gains from such a close alliance with the Americans?
EH: In this case what you’re talking about principally are the preferences of a single person Tony Blair, to a very extraordinary degree. Britain has a very presidential style of government these days, increasingly so. Parliament is secondary, ministers very secondary, and personal advisors that are not part of the formal system in a lot of ways play a key role. I remember in the run up to the war being at the UN and interviewing people at the British mission and they weren’t making any arguments in favour of war. People like the head of the Iraq desk at the Foreign Office and so on; there was not the slightest hint that any of these people were of the view that the situation was one that required an invasion. None of them were recommending it, none of them even discussing it, except eventually when the Americans appeared more and more determined to have war and it was only then that they started to talk about what the Americans were doing and thinking. The first thing to note is that this did not come from the British government’s Iraq specialists either at the UN or in the Foreign Office. It’s just not where this was coming from, and the whole policy of trying to promote the idea of smart sanctions was an effort to save the sanctions rather than an effort to provide an excuse to invade.
It became very clear that George Bush was going to invade. One of the things that his administration had been obsessed with is that any given policy must not seem like something Bill Clinton had been doing. So whatever Bill Clinton’s policy was the US had to have a different policy, to quite an obsessive degree. And of course Clinton had endorsed the smart sanctions policy and talked about continued containment, and not invading and so on.
Now if you are Blair then you are faced with a choice, and I see no reason to disagree with him in terms of his representation of what he thought on this, which is that the United States should not be seen to be doing this alone. You know the United States is the global hyper-power, and being on the outside just disagreeing is going to be less productive than being on the inside modifying, amending and so on. Which is why for example Blair said to Bush ‘Don’t just start an invasion, let’s see if we can get a second UN resolution explicitly endorsing war, that will help legitimise the war enormously.’ And the kind of leaked documents that have come out since then show that that was the case.
Fundamentally Blair buys into a lot of the Christian right values of Bush and actually has more of a similar ideological worldview with him than with those on the left of his own party. And he fundamentally believes that the US is a force for good in the world and believes in the use of armed force for military interventions to promote the spread of liberal democracy and the removal of dictators. So he buys into many of these notions of the American right, that liberal democracy American style and imposed by America is a universal value that people really would choose given half the chance. So there’s a commonality of worldview, plus the belief that its in Britain’s strategic interest to be alongside the United States.
AD: So you think then that Blair is very much a kind of delusional person he’s persuaded himself that America and Britain are on this mission to bring democracy to the Middle East when despite whatever formal democratic institutions might be put in place the Americans will never allow a government which wants to improve relations with Iran say, or to demand the withdrawal of foreign troops and so on.
EH: Well I would put it somewhat differently it’s not delusional in the sense that they do have a project, they are extending it, and for better or worse they are going for that. They do wish to establish market economies, not in the sense of free markets because there are no “free” markets, but open economies to allow subsidised western corporations to play a role, in the belief that that’s the best way to become prosperous in these places.
In terms of what will and will not be allowed in Iraq though they actually have had a different belief. Which is that given a free choice [Iraqis] would choose a pro-US, pro-British outcome.
Now [the British and Americans] might prefer there not to be a pro-Iranian government in Iraq and they might prefer that the outcome be one where an Iraqi government doesn’t tell foreign troops to leave, but actually they can’t prevent it and they’re increasingly realising that. Although again I wouldn’t caricature Shia political forces in Iraq as simply pro-Iranian I think it’s vastly more complicated than that, there’s a lot of Iraqi nationalism, and there’s serious rivalry with Iran. I don’t see it as straightforwardly pro-Iranian and even pro-Iranian doesn’t necessarily mean pro-Iranian in terms of the particular faction that dominates Iran now, because Iran itself is divided.
In terms of the withdrawal of foreign troops its worth pointing out that the American strategic vision for the new Iraq never was the desire to have large numbers of troops permanently stationed there. What they wanted was a basing capability, a deployment capability; so they’d have bases with a relatively small number of personnel and the idea was that they would have them there in a time of crisis, not for use in Iraq but for use elsewhere in the region. So that was the outcome that they explicitly sought and again I have no reason to dispute that because that was their strategic vision before.
They are faced with a severe problem, in that in the December elections which will be direct parliamentary elections and depending on how it’s all organised this will be much more the election of a government – and in terms of Sunni Arab participation there is a lot of organisation on the Sunni Arab side, rather than having the boycott that they had in January that will be organised around the removal of foreign troops. And there is a massive majority of opinion amongst Shia and Sunni Arabs that as soon as there is a directly elected national government then foreign troops should leave because they’re making the situation worse. Now the Americans and British cannot prevent that, because the one nightmare scenario they’ve had all along is that whatever else happens there shouldn’t be a united Sunni-Shia uprising. They got a big fright in the spring of 2004 when the [Moqtada al Sadr] uprising took place, but even with that the Shia were clearly divided and so [the Americans and British] took comfort from that and managed to divert that. But they know that they are absolutely finished the day that there is a united view expressed in parliamentary terms that they should leave; then they’re out and they have no choice.
AD: Just on the democracy question, the way I’ve tended to think is that Blair and the Americans have taken a purely cynical approach and that they basically have no concern for democracy in the slightest and that it’s more of a public relations exercise. You know its not the fifties you can’t just install your general in Iraq and the population here and in America will be fine with that. I’ve tended to feel that there is more pressure here, in America and in Iraq for democratic institutions and human rights concerns and so the Americans and British have actually been forced into these positions although they have no actual concern for democracy. Noam Chomsky has said in the past that the Americans are completely neutral about political forms all they care about is obedience. So whether it’s democracy or dictatorship doesn’t matter the important thing is that Iraq is obedient and does what we say. But you think that the Americans have a genuine interest in promoting democracy and not just for public relations purposes.
EH: In comparing what I’ve said with Chomsky’s comments you’re actually comparing different things. What he was referring to was the actual objective function of American foreign policy and we can show clearly through the historical record that in functional terms the US state is neutral on these things, in the sense that if their calculation is that an elected leader will get in the way of their strategic objectives then they will have that leader removed, if they can they will invade, if they can they will overthrow, if they can they will undermine him. There’s plenty of evidence of that, so yes, in that sense they’re neutral. But subjectively they’re not it’s actually very hard for people to be cynical as in say one thing and do another. There are cynical people but it’s so much easier to believe in your own moral rectitude, it’s much easier to live with yourself and act and persuade. All those people I’ve spoken to and interviewed and so on, they all believe passionately in what they are doing. There are cynical individuals and there’s an element where it doesn’t really matter because you know what you’ve got to say and even if you’re not sure if you particularly mean it you know that it’s your job to say it so it all becomes very blurred. The line between sincerity and cynicism, it all gets washed away.
To return to looking at it in objective terms, generally speaking advanced capitalism operates more efficiently in a liberal democracy than in a dictatorship. So if you like the logic of advanced capitalism is not neutral with regards to liberal democracy it’s actually in favour of it. I think that many of us on the left can have the failing of being too dismissive about the progressive role of liberal democratic political forms and also fail to look hard enough at the functionality for advanced capitalism of liberal democratic forms. So advanced capitalism is neutral only in a narrow sense, in the actual concrete historical circumstances that we are in liberal democracy is generally functional for advanced capitalism which means that there is bias towards liberal democracy in US foreign policy which is a good thing in some significant ways and you have to look at its progressive function.
The problem you have in Iraq is not that the US is trying to prevent liberal democracy but actually they are sincere about trying to establish liberal democratic forms, that come out with the right answers of course, on those occasions when people spontaneously organised local elections in Iraq they cancelled the elections. Their argument was the wrong people were going to get in; their argument was that they were preventing liberal democracy in order to save it because they argued that bad guys who weren’t actually in favour of democracy were going to have a one time election, get in power and say ‘see we’re in charge now, no more elections’ or ‘we’re in charge now but we’re going to run it our way’. They were saying no you’ve got to establish true liberal democracy as in the liberalism, not just the democratic form, but the liberal values of tolerance, transfer of power and so on. So I think that there has been quite a lot of sincerity in that project and that it’s also functional for advanced capitalism, and those two things mesh together. However when you look at how they’ve actually gone about the concrete project you have to separate US state interests from the interests of capital. US state interest is about a particular state that will be pro-US, whereas advanced capitalism is actually much more Laissez-faire than that- you know ‘whose in charge? Well we don’t really care as long as we’re making money’ whereas in Iraq they are actually much more concerned about who is in charge. An Islamic state doesn’t actually matter to advanced capitalism- as long as they’re involved in the world economy who cares? But it does matter to the American government.
The Americans were confronted by indigenous spontaneous forms that they couldn’t control and that they were terrified of. So they tried to import exiles and select people on the basis of a supposed ethno-sectarianism and that unleashed forces that are undermining the occupation.
Part Two will follow shortly.
Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch collective.