Eric Herring | ukwatch.net

UK Operations in Iraq

JamieSW — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:09:38 +0000

Editor’s note: In September 2007, Dr. Eric Herring (senior lecturer in International Politics at the University of Bristol) submitted this written evidence concerning British operations in Iraq to the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence.

Emphasis in original.

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Executive Summary

In nearly all of the provinces which have been under formal British control, there is clear overall support for the invasion. However, most of the population expect security to improve following a withdrawal of Coalition forces and most think that the US military surge begun in January 2007 has made security worse. The UK has sought to play three roles in relation to Iraq – persuading the US of its views, acting as a broker between the US and other international actors and implementing its own policies independently of the US in southern Iraq – but has failed in all three. With the US making all the key decisions on the state building project, UK armed forces have engaged in what could only be intermittent and intermittently productive operations. In specific times and places, UK forces will carry out positive security tasks for the local population. However, this is insufficient reason for them to remain when the population mostly think they are making the situation worse and want them to leave.

The UK should not support US efforts to strengthen the existing Iraqi Government by armed force and training of security force. As Iraq has no coherent government, and as the lines between the state, insurgents, militias and mafias are blurred, there can be no confidence that training of Iraqi security forces is actually a contribution to strengthening the state. It is just as likely – indeed, often more likely – to result in the strengthening groups which will pursue their own interests, stand in the way of strengthening the Iraqi state and turn on Coalition forces when it suits them. The UK should not support the ethno-sectarian partition of Iraq because it is overwhelmingly opposed by Iraqi public opinion; federalist sentiment in Iraq is divided over the specifics and mostly not ethno-sectarian; and the Iraqi constitution sets out the process of federalisation as one to be decided by Iraqis voting in referenda. Nor should UK forces be kept in Iraq because the US wants them to stay for symbolic purposes or to protect its supply lines. The US role in Iraq is neither legitimate nor prudent and hence not worthy of British support.

Instead, the UK should end its combat role in Iraq. No-one can be sure whether the humanitarian and political situation will become worse or better for Iraqis should Coalition forces leave. But the assessment of most Iraqis is that it would improve, and hence withdrawal would not be ‘cutting and running’ – it would be compliance with clearly expressed Iraqi preferences.

The UK should also promote international and regional diplomacy aimed at making economic, political and non-combat security assistance contingent on acceptance of negotiations and political reconciliation among insurgents, militias and the factions that make up the Iraqi Government.

Introduction

This evidence derives from my academic research on Western policy on Iraq over the last seven years or so based on open source documents and interviews in Iraq (2002), the US and UK. My most recent book Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy published in November 2006 by Hurst and Cornell University Press was co-authored with Dr. Glen Rangwala (Cambridge): ‘first-rate … a compelling account – the clearest yet available of the “new Iraq”’ (Prof. Charles Tripp, author of A History of Iraq), ‘an admirably sober and powerful analysis … a must read‘ (Prof. Tareq Ismael, editor International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies) and ‘serious and persuasive … Splendidly researched … required reading’ (Prof. Jeffrey Record, USAF Air War College). I was specialist adviser to the Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords for its inquiry into economic sanctions in 2006-07. My current research is on the political economy of peacebuilding in Iraq and I recently addressed the Royal United Services Institute in London on British counter-insurgency in Iraq.

Why the invasion was wrong – and why it has mattered for UK operations in Iraq

Perceptions of illegitimate, illegal and unilateral action matter in terms of undermining the willingness of international actors and the local population to accept the invasion and occupation. The window of opportunity for acceptance of the occupation by much of Iraqi opinion was brief. Only a massively resourced effort which transferred power rapidly to Iraqis would have had any chance of success, and that would have been a huge gamble. Instead, the US embarked on a violent but under-resourced attempt to retain power until the ‘right’ institutions and economy were imposed and until the ‘right’ Iraqis looked like they might be elected. This has been doomed from the outset and has been the essential determinant of the failure of UK operations in Iraq.

Did Britain and the US have the legal right to do what they did? No. The invasion was not and would not have been authorised by the UN under international law. That is why they did not go back to the Security Council for a resolution authorising war, having ensured the passage of earlier resolutions by insisting that the US and UK would not treat them as authorisations for war.

Did Britain and the US have the moral right to do what they did? No. First, this was a war launched with a mixture of deception and self-deception. If a society is to go to war democratically it must at least be on the basis of the facts presented and debated honestly and accurately. Second, starting a war has potentially huge and potentially uncontrollable consequences – the first of these creates an obligation to prepare for the aftermath (an obligation not taken seriously) and the second creates a presumption against gambling with lives and property through war, requiring compelling evidence of necessity (another obligation not met).

The US and British Governments have been propagating the myth that the invasion was based on an intelligence failure – that the expectation was that WMD would be found after the invasion. Some of those who favoured the invasion were persuaded themselves that WMD would be found, but this self-deception was despite, not because of, the intelligence. For example, Carne Ross, who was the First Secretary in charge of Iraq policy at the UK Mission to the UN between 1997 and mid-2002, has said regarding that period:

It was emphatically our view, and that was based on very careful consideration of the intelligence evidence and the evidence that was gained from inspectors in UNSCOM and later UNMOVIC, that Iraq was not in any substantial way rearming with its weapons of mass destruction …

Others such as Scott Ritter, chief UN weapons inspector between 1991 and 1998, made that point repeatedly and publicly before the invasion. It is easy to forget now that there were no finds of WMD or WMD production programmes in Iraq from 1992 onwards because the Iraqis had destroyed them in 1991 and possibly also early 1992.

The best and most common defence of the invasion is that getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime (and economic sanctions) made the current mess worthwhile on balance. However, while a majority of Iraqis polled used to be in favour of the invasion, Iraqi majority opinion is now against the invasion, and increasingly strongly so. In the BBC poll in March 2007, 47% of Iraqis said the invasion was right and 53% said it was wrong. In the BBC’s August 2007 poll, 37% said it was right (12% absolutely right) and 63% said it was wrong (35% absolutely wrong). Furthermore, it is no coincidence that those areas which were not actually invaded and occupied (the mainly Kurdish north east) have been most in favour of the occupation, while those areas which have suffered the brunt of US use of force (the mainly Sunni Arab centre) have been most opposed to it. And the around 2 million who have fled the country as refugees, the further 2 million displaced and of course the hundreds of thousands of dead will not have featured in the polls. When these factors are taken into consideration, even these negative polls must be regarded as flattering to the occupation.

The most damning aspect of the polls for the occupiers is that, among those in the sector of the population – the Sunni Arab one – that has experienced the occupation most directly, opposition has been consistent and almost total. For example, in the August 2007 BBC poll, 97% of Sunni Arabs thought the invasion was wrong (70% absolutely wrong), 93% thought attacks on Coalition forces were acceptable, 95% thought Coalition forces were making security worse and 72% wanted them to leave now. These figures refute the Coalition claim that it is protecting Sunni Arab Iraqis from terrorists. Instead, according to the population, the US is illegitimately imposing its presence.

UK forces currently remain in Basra at the airport.They have withdrawn from their bases in Muthanna, Dhi Qar and Maysan provinces but were engaged in combat as recently as June 2007 in the vicinity of Amarah, the capital of Maysan, which resulted in over 100 Iraqi deaths. In nearly all of the provinces which have been under formal British control, there is clear overall support for the invasion. In the ORB poll in February 2007, 70%, 90%, 90% and 49% respectively by province thought themselves better off now, almost no-one thought themselves better off under the previous regime, while 22%, 4%, 5% and 39% thought the two were as bad as each other. However, most of the population expect security to improve following a withdrawal of Coalition forces (60%, 74%, 70%, and 91%). In Basra, 40% expect security to get a great deal better following the withdrawal of Coalition forces and only 5% think it will get a great deal worse. While polling did not generally distinguish between British and US forces, in a Ministry of Defence poll in August 2005, support for attacks on Coalition forces was 25% in Basra and 65% in Maysan province.

It is not the case that support for attacks on Coalition forces is restricted to Sunni Arabs. Many Shi‘a think that such attacks are acceptable (e.g. 61% in September 2006 and 50% in August 2007) and even around 15% of Kurds supported them in September 2006.

Iraqis have been divided on whether Coalition forces should leave immediately, when security is restored or when Iraqi security forces are stronger. However, the preference for immediate withdrawal has climbed steadily to 47% in August 2007, and there was majority opinion poll support in 2006 among Kurds and Shi‘a as well as Sunni Arabs for withdrawal after six months to two years. As far as most Iraqis are concerned, the US military surge begun in January 2007 has made security worse. 72% (more than ever) in August 2007 thought Coalition forces were making security worse, and 61% thought security had become worse in the country as a whole in the preceding six months.

It is true that the Iraqi Government wishes Coalition forces to stay, but that government only survives because of those forces, and its legitimacy is overwhelmingly rejected by the mainly Sunni Arab areas in particular that are on the receiving end of the use of force by the United States. The Iraqi Government is elected, but a dictatorship of the majority is counter to the principles of liberal democracy which require that the interests and views of minorities are taken into account. The Sunni Arab population tried boycott and then voting to have its voice heard, and neither worked. Not surprisingly, 86% of Sunni Arabs polled in September 2006 said that they regarded the current Iraqi Government as illegitimate.

Brig. Gavin Bulloch, retd. is currently rewriting UK counter-insurgency doctrine for publication at the end of 2007. In a presentation on 21 September 2007 to a conference held in the Royal United Services Institute, Brig. Bulloch announced that the new doctrine would for the first time include the notion of popular consent as a requirement. This is a development to be welcomed. It contrasts strongly with US Army counter-guerilla doctrine adopted in 2004, which states:

Commanders must be prepared to operate in a broad range of political atmospheres. The host country’s form of government may be anything from an absolute, and not too benevolent, dictatorship to a democracy struggling to establish itself, or anything in between. … No matter what political atmosphere prevails in the host country, the brigade commander must engage the guerrilla with every asset at the commander’s disposal. He must realize that democratic principles may not be immediately applicable. However, he should act within the limits of his authority to improve the circumstances of the government he was sent to support.

British doctrine is, fortunately, moving in a direction that is incompatible with this US requirement.

UK operations in Iraq have been undermined fatally at the political-strategic level

Counter-insurgency doctrine and practice have two elements – legitimation and coercion. Legitimation is often termed ‘hearts and minds’, and the latter has a practical function (providing guidance on what to do), an ideological function (obscuring counter-insurgency’s coercive dark side in which a polity is being imposed violently on an unwilling population) and a self-deceiving function (reassuring those engaged in coercion that they are legitimate because what they would ‘really’ prefer to do is win hearts and minds but are being forced by their opponents to act coercively).

Despite the widespread approbation in Western policy circles at the end of 2006 regarding the appointment of counter-insurgency expert Gen. David Petraeus to lead Coalition forces and the adoption by the US military of its new counter-insurgency doctrine, the US strategy since the beginning of the surge has been based primarily on coercion – for example, aerial bombardment and detention have been at record levels. Subjecting around 25,000 to internment with entirely inadequate due process is wrong and will have the net effect of deepening the Coalition’s unpopularity. The same can be said of US air strikes which receive little attention outside Iraq. In the first half of 2007, the US Air Force dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq, triple what it dropped in the second half of 2006 and five times the total for the first half of 2006.

The US state building project has lurched repeatedly in different directions, and British political and military operations in Iraq have been deeply affected by those lurches. The original US intention was rapid elections so that Iraqis would install pro-US exiles who would inherit functioning governmental institutions. When the exiles proved incapable and unpopular and governmental institutions collapsed or were abolished by the US, the new model was direct US rule for as long as it took to install an ideal neoconservative state. When that dream evaporated, the US sought rapid formal handover to the alliance of Kurdish paramilitary leaders and Shi‘a fundamentalists who dominated the elections. And now the US is floundering in its efforts to bring about some kind of compromise that will incorporate Sunni Arabs and protect what it sees as US strategic interests.

The UK has sought to play three roles in relation to Iraq – persuading the US of its views, acting as a broker between the US and other international actors and implementing its own policies independently of the US in southern Iraq – but has failed in all three. With the US making all the key decisions on the state building project, UK armed forces have engaged in what could only be intermittent and intermittently productive operations. The UK military presence in Iraq has been tiny and under-resourced, and the UK political mission in Iraq to which it is meant to be subordinated has been even tinier. There has also been persistent incoherence and lack of integration, with little guidance from London or Baghdad or even neighbouring provinces. In continual fear of being over-run, the priority has been to avoid antagonising excessively existing or rising armed local political actors. UK forces have made reconstruction, anti-militia and anti-corruption efforts such as Operation Sinbad which ran from late 2006 to early 2007. However, this should not obscure the fact that they have tended to be (often uncomprehending) spectators, occasional protagonists and only rarely the centre of power and legitimacy. Their position was notably jeopardised by the ill-conceived and half-hearted US actions such as its offensive against the Mahdi Army in the Spring of 2004.

Counter-insurgency usually implies a coherent state that is being protected from overthrow by a clearly separate armed group. In the case of Iraq, the line between the state, insurgents, militias and mafias is blurred. Iraq is a fragmented state in the sense of there being no agreed overall political authority and no means of resolving disputes over its location. There is fragmentation between and within regions, classes, religious sects, ethnicities, government ministries, tribes and political parties. Ethno-sectarian fragmentation into Kurds, Shi‘a and Sunni Arabs is only one axis of fragmentation and often not the most important one. The Iraqi Government will not move decisively against militias in general because it is largely rooted in them. The Iraqi Government is not a coherent actor and the line between it and those it is supposedly fighting is blurred, with (for example) Sadrists in and out of government posts. This is even more the case with the state as a whole, most obviously in the case of the security forces which are permeated with embedded insurgents – people taking the pay, training, intelligence and resources of the state security forces but using them against the Coalition and the Iraqi state. It is also the case with supposedly Iraqi but actually almost purely Kurdish or Shi‘a Arab units deployed in Sunni Arab areas. This practice generates and exacerbates ethno-sectarian tensions rather than protects Iraqis from insurgents and militias. It seems that a significant proportion of Kurdish troops speak little or even no Arabic, which can only contribute to inter-communal alienation.

What’s left for the UK to do in Iraq?

The UK should not support US efforts to strengthen the existing Iraqi Government by armed force and training of security forces, and should not support ethno-sectarian partition. Nor should UK forces be kept in Iraq because the US wants them to stay for symbolic purposes or to protect its supply lines. Instead, the UK should promote international and regional diplomacy aimed at making economic, political and non-combat security assistance contingent on acceptance of negotiations and political reconciliation among insurgents, militias and the factions that make up the Iraqi Government.

Military backing for the existing Iraqi Government?

There has been far too much willingness to accept the US claim that the decline in the number of attacks between late July and mid September represent successes for the surge. First, the level of attacks was at an all time high in May and June, despite the extreme summer heat. Second, other factors were probably more important in the decline in attacks – insurgents resting and regrouping after their surge in attacks, insurgents and militias lying low as the surge passed their areas, unsustainable bans on the use of vehicles in places such as Falluja and parts of Baghdad, segregation through displacement and rumoured Saudi and Jordanian behind the scenes efforts. The US’s own figures show that the average daily casualties in Iraq remained at near-record levels for the entire period of the surge since February 2007 inclusive, with only a slight dip in June. More importantly, there can be no military victory in Iraq for the Coalition: the key measure of success has to be political progress, and that has not occurred.

The US military surge has not achieved its stated goal of creating the space for political reconciliation: instead it has had the opposite effect of removing the political incentive for it. The Kurdish and Shi‘a groups favoured by the US in the Iraqi Government have not had to compromise because they have been able to rely on the US military to prop them up.

The process of training Iraqi army and especially police forces is suffering from poor retention rates of weapons as well as personnel. But there is an even deeper problem. As the state is fragmented, there can be no confidence that training of Iraqi security forces is actually a contribution to strengthening the state. It is just as likely – indeed, often more likely – to result in the strengthening groups which will pursue their own interests, stand in the way of strengthening the Iraqi state and turn on Coalition forces when it suits them. The problem with Iraqi security forces is not lack of training but alternative loyalties, which is precisely why the US is reluctant to provide them with weapons, especially heavier ones. The Iraqi Government has complained publicly about this, and the US Government, torn between fear of what Iraqis will do with the weapons and the need to arm Iraqi forces to take over from US ones, has recently boosted its arms sales to Iraq. Even if some groups, such as tribal ones, work with Coalition forces, such alignments will be temporary and contingent, and are not evidence of endorsement of the Coalition’s goals or presence.

Violence in Basra escalated recently and the situation remains unstable. In specific times and places, UK forces will carry out positive security tasks for the local population. However, this is insufficient reason for them to remain when the population mostly think they are making the situation worse and want them to leave.

Support partition?

There is much talk, especially in Washington, of backing some form of top-down ethno-sectarian partition, either hard partition (separate states) or soft partition (a federation with a relatively weak centre). The UK should not back schemes for partition in Iraq because they are completely against the wishes of most Iraqis. Federalist sentiment in Iraq is divided over the specifics and mostly not ethno-sectarian and the Iraqi constitution sets out the process of federalisation as a bottom-up process via referenda.

In terms of responsibility for most of the violence in Iraq, Iraqis mainly blame the Coalition, followed by al Qaeda/foreign jihadists; and then roughly equal blame for the Iraqi government, Sunni and Shi‘a militias and leaders, sectarian disputes, common criminals and Iran. The fact that Iraqis mostly blame non-Iraqis for the violence is indicative of a continuing national sentiment.

Kurds are fairly consistently positive about the invasion and the performance of the Coalition politically and militarily. Shi‘i tend to be more positive than Sunni Arabs about the invasion but similarly negative about the occupation and Coalition forces. However, it is fundamentally misleading and dangerous to attribute a single view to each supposed ethno-sectarian ‘group’.Opinion polls show that Iraqis overwhelmingly think that separation of people on sectarian lines is a bad thing (98% in August 2007) and that the separation on such lines that has occurred has been forced. Most Iraqis want a unified Iraq with a strong central government in Baghdad (and a substantial minority want regionalised government and a federal government in Baghdad, without suggesting that this is ethno-sectarian).

The overall picture is a fairly strong though variable continuing commitment to the idea of an Iraqi nation and to its expression in the form of a self-determining Iraqi state. The weakest commitment is among Kurds, but even there it is too easy to exaggerate the contrasts between Kurdish and Arab Iraqi views. For example, polled in late 2004, more Kurds expressed a preference for living in an ethnically mixed Iraq than for living in an independent Kurdish state. Kurdish political elites assert a Kurdish right to independence but a willingness to live in an autonomous region within a federal Iraq. At both popular and elite levels, desire for an independent state is tempered by an awareness of the risks of pursuing that goal (such as invasion and occupation by Turkey).

Keep UK forces in Iraq to provide symbolic and practical support for the US?

Some favour keeping UK forces in Iraq protecting supply lines or so that the US Government is not displeased at losing its main symbolic ally. The US is fully capable of protecting its own supply lines. More importantly, for the reasons given throughout this evidence, the US role in Iraq is neither legitimate nor prudent and hence not worthy of British support. The Bush administration’s bottom line in Iraq appears to be to avoid losing until the United States has a Democrat as president (a real prospect in the November 2008 election), and then blame defeat on the Democrats for their weakness and the Iraqis for their fecklessness and ingratitude. A Labour Government or indeed any British Government should not let British soldiers die for this cause. Supporting US operations in Iraq practically or symbolically would require the UK must also share some responsibility for the US actions in Iraq.

Promote international and regional diplomacy which makes non-combat assistance for factions in Iraq conditional on their commitment to negotiations and political reconciliation

No-one can be sure whether the humanitarian and political situation will become worse or better for Iraqis should Coalition forces leave. But the assessment of most Iraqis is that it would improve, and hence withdrawal would not be ‘cutting and running’ – it would be compliance with clearly expressed Iraqi preferences.

To a great extent events in Iraq are, and always have been, beyond the control of the US and British governments, and trying to gain it militarily and unilaterally with a coating of superficial multilateralism will continue the march to failure and make it even harder for the situation to be retrieved by anyone (and that will have to be mainly Iraqis). The US and UK governments need a paradigm shift in their approach from control to influence, from violence to non-violence and from unilateralism to multilateralism. This shift might be beyond them, but the imminent prospect of defeat and escalating chaos may push them in that direction. Assistance in training of security forces and economic reconstruction can and should be provided only to the extent that it assists the realisation of the overwhelming Iraqi preference for a democratic and coherent Iraqi state that is not organised around ethno-sectarianism. In effect, this approach takes benchmarks of political progress seriously. The Coalition approach has been to provide support to the existing Iraqi Government as an incentive to make progress. The reverse approach must be adopted, that is, support should be provide as a reward for actual progress. Furthermore, those rewards should be provided to any committed to negotiation and reconciliation.

There are many intertwined but also in some respects independent armed conflicts in Iraq in the north-east, the centre, Baghdad and the south. They will end when the key actors (a) think they can gain more from negotiating than fighting (either to continue a stalemate or to achieve victory) and (b) are be able to deliver their constituencies in support of a deal reached through negotiations. In other words, they have to be willing and able to negotiate. At present, neither condition exists and the creation of those conditions is not being prioritised at present by the US and UK. It may be that externally-provided rewards will not be able to make a major difference in bringing about those conditions, but at least the effort would be being made, and without the UK being involved in or supporting illegitimate and counter-productive uses of force and detention.

UKWatch Interview - Part Two

Alex Doherty — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 13:58:11 +0000

The following is part two of an interview with Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol. Part one can be read here. 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: The British media has tended to very sharply contrast the behaviour of British and American troops. The Americans are very trigger-happy whereas we have the softly-softly approach and so on. How accurate do you think that depiction is? And what role do you think the British are playing in the South?

Eric Herring: There are very significant differences between the British and American modes of operation, though I’m going to qualify that heavily in a moment. The Americans are engaged in “force protection” meaning, if in doubt shoot it. The Americans talk about “hostile intent” you know he looked dangerous so I shot him sarge. Whereas the British tend to refer to hostile action, you have to actually be shooting, at least a lot of the time. There is significant evidence that even when British forces got shot at they didn’t see that there was any productive value in shooting back so they didn’t. That has been a very significant difference but it doesn’t tell you very much. Interestingly when you look at the operation of American forces in the Kurdish North of Iraq they’ve mostly played a very positive role, they’ve engaged in local dispute resolution, mediation, peacekeeping – not combat.

In the south British forces there’s only about eight and a half thousand of them, which is a puny number of troops for doing anything and they are basically tolerated. It’s not that they are winning hearts and minds whereas the Americans are losing them. This is just a choice between two ways of not controlling Iraq. You can do it the American way where you blast the hell out of everything, kill lots of people, and trash lots of places. You declare a town “insurgent hell” you go in, you take over, you alienate everyone, you pull out and the insurgents move back in. Or you can do it the British way where you just abandon control to the insurgents. So it’s two ways of losing one trashes the place and the other abandons it. You are not talking about a superior British way. Interestingly enough the people who know that are the British military and especially in non-attributed interviews they will tell you that straight out. And sometimes on the record – one of the British commanders said we are only here because we are tolerated, and that’s completely true. They now find themselves in a very dangerous position where as soon as there is any opposition they suddenly find themselves having to travel by helicopter, or not leave base at all. They are tolerated, and they have abandoned control and there is no state building project. For example Mark Etherington who was the coalition governments coordinator for the province of Wasit in the east he had a total of six people, six civilian staff in the whole of a province of a million people. Actually we can’t even run this department of politics that were sitting in with six administrative staff, so how do you run a province of a million people? Well the answer is you don’t.

AD: The insurgency has been extremely violent, operations carried out with seemingly little regard for civilians. There have been a great many atrocities that are very much focussed on in the media. The use of suicide attacks far outstrips Hezbollahs use in Lebanon or Palestinian militant groups in the occupied territories. What do you attribute the ferocity of the insurgency to?

EH: I haven’t done any serious comparison of relative degrees of use of suicide bomb attacks or indeed bomb attacks targeted on civilians so I couldn’t give you a general comparison. In terms of the Iraqi case one of the most important aspects of it is the foreign dimension, which does matter. It’s not that the insurgency is dominated by foreign fighters but that the jihadist culture of martyrdom has been developing in the specific circumstances of a number of conflicts, building on Bosnia as well as Palestine, Afghanistan and so on. There’s a growing assumption that it’s a tactic that works, it seems to and indeed does work it inflicts costs on the enemy and so on. You also have to put it in the context of some of the very specific sectarian violence that’s developing in Iraq itself.

Now you mentioned two things one was the suicide bombings and the other was the civilian casualties- and they’re not the same. A lot of suicide attacks are very much directed at American forces and infrastructural targets as opposed to those that are deliberately for sectarian purposes which is clearly the case with Al-Qaeda in Iraq who have a very extreme view of Sunni Islam and who therefore regard the Shia as apostates. So you have to separate out those things.

There is now debate amongst the insurgents with some arguing that this is provoking a divide in the insurgency between those Iraqi insurgents who don’t want sectarian violence and Al-Qaeda who are increasingly regarded by indigenous insurgents as a problem for the insurgency, as they are de-legitimising the insurgency.

AD: In a recent debate that you spoke at you said that you would not choose between the occupation forces and the insurgents. Since though you support an end to the occupation many would say that you are therefore tacitly supporting the insurgency since they are the people who are likely to take over if the occupation ends.

EH: I certainly see the logic of that but the underlying point for me is what have the Iraqis themselves expressed a preference for? After all it’s their lives, their country, their society. What Iraqis are pretty clear about in the centre and south, the north is different of course, what Iraqis have said is that the fact of occupation itself is unacceptable. Regardless of the legal niceties Iraqis still regard themselves as occupied by the proportion of nine to one. The same proportion want foreign forces to leave, either immediately or as soon as there is a directly elected Iraqi government. Most of them regard armed attacks on coalition forces as legitimate. Well that has to matter. They also tend to see that the presence of coalition forces makes there lives less secure, both because they induce insurgent attacks and also because of the actual actions of the coalition forces in terms of their impunity and their violence and so on. Well that’s what they want, it’s their choice, and that is not siding with the insurgents. I think that if foreign forces were offered to Iraqis in a peacekeeping role and a policing role they would welcome that. They’ve said all along what they want is security and if foreign forces will contribute to that then thats fine. So the Iraqi people haven’t chosen the insurgents.

The next problem is when the conflict continues and when it reshapes without foreign forces who then do you support? Because there isn’t a single thing called “the insurgency” and not everyone is in favour of armed opposition to the occupation so you’d have to look at what those remaining social forces were and work out who to support and how and why. So I suppose you could argue in quite a crude way that if you’re not with us you’re against us, but the Iraqi people don’t see it that way I think.

AD: With regard to the issue of peace-keepers being used in Iraq with a withdrawal of the British and Americans, we recently did an interview with Milan Rai who argues for what he calls a “replacement strategy” replacing the occupation forces with forces either drawn from Arab nations or European countries that did not support the invasion. There are others in the anti-war movement who have argued for a straightforward withdrawal. People like Alex Callinicos for example who says that at this point the UN is just too discredited in the eyes of Iraqis because of the sanctions and the weapons inspection process and so on. What would you say to those kinds of positions?

EH: I think it’s very unclear. There’s no clear preference amongst Iraqis as far as I can see. What Iraqis desperately want is security and what they desperately want is an end to the occupation and what they want is an end to the violence and impunity of the occupation forces. I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone in the anti-war movement to prescribe the right solution because that needs to mesh with Iraqi preferences. Now it may be that what emerges from Iraqi preferences when you offer them a variety of possible involvements is that they say well Arab forces under a UN flag, they may say actually we want the British to stay on in a different role. There are all sorts of things that they may want I just don’t think it’s real politics to in some abstract sense prescribe the ideal involvement. You just look at your range of options and you look at the political feasibility and it may be one of a number of things and it may be that we just have to keep the hell out. So I don’t think one needs to and it’s not politically realistic to prescribe one solution.

The reason we get drawn into talking about these things is the standard gambit which is ‘Ok what’s your alternative’ and the standard reply tends to be oh dear I better have a very specific plan and then someone says this is the right one and then we all argue about it. I think a better argument is to say here is the range of options and it may be one of those. It seems to me that that is vastly more plausible in a circumstance where we really don’t know what the outcome will be. It may well be that after the December elections the new Iraqi government will tell foreign forces to just go and at that point it’s just bye bye. That’s what I can easily imagine as an outcome.

AD: That would be quite a disaster for the Americans given the cost of the occupation and the decline in support for the US around the world that the invasion and occupation has caused. But you really think they would let it go.

EH: Well they wouldn’t have a choice. Because the nightmare scenario a united Arab Iraqi uprising – would just finish them. Absolutely finish them. If [Grand Ayatollah] Sistani declared that the American presence was unacceptable they absolutely could not hold on. They would be wiped out; it would be a complete disaster. The Americans I’ve talked to, including the American military are much more of the view ‘lets declare victory and get the hell out of here’ and they can say ‘look there you go, we’ve established a democracy, we helped the people, they’ve had elections, we’ve delivered. We’ve created the Iraq we said we were going to create and look they’ve made their choice – they’ve asked us to leave and we’re leaving’. So they might have to make the best of a bad job.

That then leads to the question of what is Iraq’s future? I think that Iraq is going to be more pro-US and pro-British than a lot of people think. The Iran connection I think is unbelievably exaggerated. And I think we might find this especially when we think about Iraqi elite politics and also the Iraqi business class and the current state of corporate capitalism which is American led. And global capitalist institutions are American led and so you kind of have to get on with the Americans. A possible example would be Vietnam, which is now a capitalist pro-American state. Some of the most ludicrously pro-American people I’ve ever met are Vietnamese, embarrassingly so where they talk about the wonderful gift of democracy from the Americans. That could be the outcome in Iraq’s case.

AD: There has been a lot of speculation regarding Iran as to whether the Americans are gearing up to some kind of attack on the country especially since the Iranian President’s comments regarding Israel. How likely do you think such an attack is given the public opposition from people like Jack Straw?

EH: I think the political costs in Britain would very be heavy. Britain going along with it would force a general election and bring down the government. The reason for that is that last time before the invasion when there were massive demonstrations the government was insisting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The governments credibility on these issues has now gone, it’s absolutely in tatters. So I think it would really be unsustainable for the government the Americans would be doing this on their own. The demonstrations would be five, ten times larger. An invasion of Iran would bring pandemonium in the UK.

In terms of the likelihood of American military action against Iran it is amazing what people can gear themselves up to do once they persuade themselves of a given outcome. It’s amazing that in the run-up to the Iraq invasion that the ideologues in the Bush administration just shut out anyone who had a different view, and who warned them of the possible outcomes. And they grew to believe deeply that Iraq was up to the gills in WMD and so on. It is possible that that kind of mentality will arise again.

Another issue is tactical, that is what you would attack in Iran and how you would attack it, and with what expected strategic result. It’s hard to see what the scenario would be. If they attempt to topple the government by bombing the country who’s going to take over? Well harder liners probably. So no one who’s rational should attack Iraq but who knows what fantasy they might come up with.

AD: I was reading recently the piece you wrote on Noam Chomsky and his treatment by academics. As you know he’s recently been voted the world’s greatest intellectual for whatever that’s worth, and yet you write of how he’s pretty much ignored in the humanities, treated really as pariah. Why is that do you think?

EH: I think it’s incredibly important to focus on the fact that he is such a pariah. I think it is an important thing. Not because of him personally but what it says about academic politics. Way back I read some of his work when I was an undergraduate and I mentioned it in class and my tutor said ‘Oh Chomsky! The guy’s just a conspiracy theorist, don’t waste your time reading Chomsky’. And so you know I thought well I’m too busy to be wasting my time, if my tutor says its rubbish I’ll leave it because I’m not going to waste my time. Years later I started reading him again and found he was saying things that I wasn’t hearing elsewhere and I was just completely knocked out by it. And you know every time I said Chomsky there was just this wave of hostility. Now the question I always ask people is ‘which Chomsky books have you read?’ Because it usually turns out that they haven’t read any.

When I wrote that piece with Piers Robinson about models of the US media and foreign policy what we pointed out was that the mainstream leading communications scholars in the United States have the same model as Chomsky in very significant respects. Except that they call it “indexing” and so on, they just don’t use the same words as him. As part of this project we wrote to these scholars and said why don’t you use Chomsky and [Ed] Herman? Because it’s the same model in a lot of ways. Many wrote back and said, well we don’t like his politics, he’s far too left wing. And you know academics aren’t supposed to say that, they’re meant to say it’s because there’s some intellectual flaw in the project. Others wrote back and said ‘look I really like Chomsky’s stuff but I daren’t reference it because I won’t get taken seriously. So the amount of flak people get is very considerable.

Well what is it that makes Chomsky different? Well a number of things; first is that he embeds his analysis in a critique of the ideological function of academia itself. You see these academics and communications scholars they study the media and say the media like to think they are independent and adversarial but actually they are indexed to the government, theyre indexed to the government and elite debates. But Chomsky then says well so are academics, whose response is you cant say that about us, how dare you say that about us! Similar to what the journalists say in fact. So academics are highly offended by his critique of the ideological function of academia. The second thing is that he argues that US actions in the world arent mistakes. They are systematically functional for an offensive corporately driven power structure. And academics wont have anything to do with this either. They wont talk about the underlying reason for media obedience. The third thing is that he harnesses his critique to actual existing social movements, real campaigns, and real current issues. Another thing is that he is contemptuous towards the academic establishment; he has no respect for it. And theyre contemptuous back. They basically say you can do everything except challenge our legitimacy, and this is the problem as he fundamentally rejects the notion that they are legitimate. So they dont recognise themselves in his picture.

AD: With regard to the media and the propaganda model a question that has always interested me is the difference between British media and American media. Particularly why there is the kind of narrow gap in the British mainstream for some dissident opinion. So Mark Curtis say can get published in the Guardian and theres a few others Monbiot, Fisk in the Independent and so on who inhabit a small gap on the left extreme of the mainstream. Whereas in the US theres more total exclusion. Why do you think there is that difference and which do you think is the more functional system, which works better at quelling the domestic population?

EH: Thats a good question; in terms of functionality I think its a very good question. I think you could end up with quite a long complicated answer explaining the different British and American culture, corporate structure, and specific histories. You could end up with quite a long complicated answer that wouldnt necessarily be wrong but the way I would put it is that the closer you are to power the more touchy power becomes. Britain is relatively marginal so we can have all our relatively fancy debates because we are actually quite secondary in terms of global corporate power. Its a hypothesis rather than a considered conclusion but its a pretty reasonable argument that in any structure the closer you get to threatening the power structure the harder it will be to have a hearing. You know Fisk has an audience of how many? Pilger, Curtis how many in comparison to the American syndicated media? I mean youre talking about dozens of orders of magnitude.

In terms of which is the more functional system well that will depend on the existing social movements. So the incredibly narrow range in America, and it is unbelievably narrow. I lived there for many years and it just staggered me the limited range of opinion. Apart from of course ultra-liberal little hotspots. But the very narrow political scene is something that has been worked at very successfully over generations, whereas here there is more breadth. In terms of which works better well I think you have to look for whats functional for the relevant interests and analyse that contextually. I think that you just couldnt have such a narrow range here because of the social breadth and political history of socialist movements, which has been more effectively buried in American history. Equally though the critique here is still very much more about America and the interesting thing about Mark Curtis is that his work is about British foreign policy and its getting people to do stuff about Britain in the world that gets you as vilified as Curtis and Pilger.

AD: Whats your view of the current state of the anti-war movement, which at least appears to have declined from the pre-invasion period. Where do you think it should be going? What do you think it should be focussing on?

EH: Well in the pre-invasion period the reason you could have mass mobilisation was that there was a very specific objective that people could agree on – which was prevent the invasion. It was an incredibly diverse movement with people coming from all backgrounds lots of people who had previously not been at all political and who have gone back to their non-political background. Now some are of the view that the only way to stop British and American aggression is to follow on with civil disobedience and so on. Im more sceptical, Im sure that civil disobedience, strategic non-violence can work in certain circumstances but it can backfire as well. Perhaps thats just me being a personal coward in saying that! And who knows maybe thats partly true, but I often think its not useful.

In terms of what to focus on one thing is the work that the Campaign Against the Arms Trade are doing which is particularly good and something I try to promote research into. The good thing about it is that it focuses in on the really dark under-belly of the British state and what it does the people it supplies with arms and what they are supplied with, and the subsidies to the arms trade. So I think targeting Britain and the arms trade is an incredibly valuable thing. Uncovering more of Britains colonial history is a very good thing; uncovering more about Britains role in the occupation is a very good thing. For instance the public interest lawyers who have been bringing all those cases about Iraqis whove been killed and tortured. These are all very important things because they challenge the British state on its territory. There are many things relating to continuing violence that Britain is involved in that are being worked at. There are a lot of very healthy positive things going on.

Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch Collective

UKWatch Interview - Part One

Alex Doherty — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:25:19 +0000

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.