The Book of Jihad (no, it's not the Koran)

Update

What inspires people to stick up political rants on low-traffic blogs with no relation to or sympathy for the subject matter? It's happened to me, and now to a friend who unwarily used the phrase 'Pope and Islam' in a post title. At least my guy had a case to make about discrimination in Malaysia, even if he did it on a post about our club barbecue. Jeremy's visitor managed to mention the Pope, but only once amidst the screeching about oil independence from "Islamonazis" (are those like "commie-nazis"?).

Flatten the world, and you get the lowest common denominator...


Update 2

See what I mean?
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Ever since the Pope put Islam and violence together, the media has been awash with religious men commenting on what other religius men had to say about other religions. Some, like the Anglican vicar given a 2500-word column in today's Australian, have some interesting points to make. The only one I'd take issue with is his (unsubstantiated) assertion that the medieval Catholic doctrine of holy war derived from jihad. Cultures are quite capable of cooking up fanatical ideas independently, as I hope comes across in this piece dashed off for my Crusades subject a couple of years ago.

Personally I'm more interested in what al-Sulami had to say about the Franks - an 'existential threat' to society from within, against which people have to be roused from complacency to defend themselves, and with whom no compromise is possible. Now where have I heard that before?...

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Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad ('Book of Jihad') is the first extant call for a Muslim military response to the Crusades. Delivered as an oral sermon in the Great Mosque at Damascus six years after Jerusalem’s capture by the Franks, its’ immediate context is the establishment of the Crusader states in the face of the Muslim world’s continued apathy. The Kitab al-Jihad is therefore a key text for study of the evolution of Islamic responses to the Crusades, although its value to the historian is vitiated by the fact that its two surviving manuscripts are incomplete. More specifically, al-Sulami’s qualifications as a religious scholar make his text valuable to understanding the construction of the Islamic ‘holy war’ concept; to this end, it provides more insights than the accounts of Arab historians or political leaders more familiar to historians of the Crusades.

The Kitab al-Jihad is clearly intended to mobilise a pan-Islamic military campaign against the Franks. Al-Sulami draws his listeners’ attention to the invasion and occupation of Islamic territory, and exhorts them to express Muslim solidarity through an armed response; his Damascene audience is told that the Franks’ assault on Palestine and the cities of the Mediterranean coast constitutes an ‘attack on your country’, and that a counteroffensive is a matter of the ‘defence of yourselves and others of your brotherhood’. While certain references in the text indicate that al-Sulami’s message was delivered to a high-ranking audience - men with the authority and resources to mobilise the country for war – it is addressed to Muslims as a community, in the same sense that Pope Urban’s sermon at Clermont was preached to a noble audience but addressed to Latin Christendom. Al-Sulami cites Islamic history and the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed) to demonstrate that jihad is the collective duty of all the faithful. This goes against the then-prevalent view of the Frankish intrusion as a regional affair, a matter concerning the local emirs or at most the Seljuk rulers. Al-Sulami’s rebuke to his audience for continuing to rebel against their punishment may be a direct reference to the absence at that time of any substantial Muslim response to the fall of Jerusalem.

Indeed, al-Sulami’s emphasis on a collective Muslim duty to fight the Crusaders stems from his perception of this phenomenon’s peculiar nature. To him it represents no ordinary trial, but ‘a punishment the like of which [God] did not warn you [Muslims] with before … a matter of serious vengeance, destructive extermination and removal’. Allowing for rhetorical hyperbole, this message still contrasts sharply with other contemporary Muslim writers’ characterisation of Frankish aggression as mere banditry or revenge-seeking. Al-Sulami was apparently alone among his contemporaries in recognising that the Franks were waging a religious war against Islam. He actually uses the Arabic term jihad to describe the Crusaders’ behaviour. They are not a passing menace, but a fundamental threat to the integrity of the Muslim world that must expunged by armed force.

Al-Sulami’s analysis is significant not only for its novelty and perceptiveness, but for its implications for Muslim behaviour towards the Franks. At the turn of the 12^th century the Muslim Levant was a political patchwork created by the erosion of Seljuk authority. The wider Islamic world seems initially to have been prepared to accept the Franks as a new element in this mix, albeit a novel and unusually violent one. Christians had after all coexisted with Muslims for centuries in the Holy Land (though in a subordinate position and forbidden to bear arms). It is only once the Franks are constructed as a religious aggressor that expelling them becomes imperative. Al-Sulami brands them as ‘enemies of God’ and ‘blasphemers’, thus elevating them from ignorant savages into active enemies of the Faith, who cannot be bargained with or simply ignored. Our knowledge of the evolution of Frankish-Muslim relations would be further improved if we could study how al-Sulami developed views so distinct from those of his contemporaries, but we are unfortunately ignorant of his sources of information.

Having constructed the Frankish presence as a matter of holy war, al-Sulami’s sermon is necessarily underpinned by a religious theme. The Crusaders are a ‘warning from God’, a punishment for Muslim sin and complacency. At the same time they represent a test, a chance to repent by obeying God’s rulings as set out in the Qur’an – specifically by conducting jihad against the Crusaders. However, waging war against the infidel is not in itself enough; if one does not ‘desire God’s face’ by an act then it is hypocritical, and impliedly no better than the behaviour which attracted divine wrath in the first place. Therefore practice of the internal jihad – ‘rooting out’ bad qualities, submitting oneself to God’s will – is a prerequisite for success in the external jihad against the Franks. The spiritual state of the individual jihadists will determine whether God grants victory or whether ‘He will make you fall into the hands of your enemy’.

There are repeated and striking parallels between this elaboration of holy war and the Crusading idea preached by contemporary Popes: the attribution of catastrophe to divine judgment, the calls for religious solidarity, the emphasis on personal piety as integral to the military endeavour. These similarities become more intriguing when one considers that the concepts of jihad and crusade developed independently of each other. It is highly unlikely that al-Sulami was familiar with the content of Pope Urban’s sermon at Clermont, if he knew of it at all; conversely the Crusaders (initially, at least) knew nothing of the centuries-old Muslim doctrine of jihad. The kitab al-jihad provides a useful basis for a comparative study of the two holy war traditions, aiding critical analysis of their main features.

Take for instance the common approach of caricaturing the enemy, whether by railing at the ‘great tyranny’ of the Franks or by conjuring images of Turks defiling Christian altars and murdering Christian babiess. Another means of dehumanising the religious foe is by stripping them of autonomous motives or capacities: ‘(the Franks) acted as they did because of (you Muslims’) blame of God’ (sic), and it is God who ‘increases them in great tyranny’ (i.e. gives them victory). Portraying the enemy as nothing more than an instrument of God’s chastisement undermines attempts to understand or interact with them as fellow human beings. The fact that such interaction did occur – take for instance the arrangements reached between the Templars and various Muslim factions, or the chivalrous exchanges between Richard I and Saladin – highlights a gap between the theory and practice of holy war that is easy to overlook from a 21^st century viewpoint.

Comparative analysis is also useful for placing religiously-defined war within its sociopolitical context. Al-Sulami’s message went unheeded for over a decade; it produced .no fruit until it encountered fertile political ground, specifically when Muslim rulers (Zengi, Nur ad-Din, Saladin) found jihad a useful concept to support empire-building agendas. This is not to deny that these leaders may have been motivated by genuine religious conviction, but the timing does provide insights into the influence of extra-religious factors on the practice of ‘holy war’. At first glance, the immediate and dramatic response to the Clermont sermon might seem to be a contrasting experience. However, by drawing attention to the sociopolitical context of late 11^th century Western Europe – overpopulation, a drive to expand Papal influence, the closing of domestic outlets for knightly aggression – al-Sulami’s example helps us appreciate the role of these extrinsic factors in the crusading concept’s development.

Comparative analysis does show up some differences between Christian and Muslim holy war traditions. For instance al-Sulami uses the image of ‘sleep’ to rebuke his Muslim audience, whereas papal criticisms of Latin Christendom’s were generally focused on its internecine warfare. Another point to note is that al-Sulami’s God is a more prominent and vengeful character than the deity featuring in crusading sermons. The differences are however certainly less remarkable than the similarities. As one writer has observed, the great value of al-Sulami’s text is that it shows how certain basic ideas associated with holy war were common to medieval Christendom and Islam, so often considered alien cultures in the context of crusades studies.

Shrub: He's No Superman (part one)

A few more days and I'll be back to regular posting, doubtless to the joy of my thousands of readers out there. Until then here's another instalment from my 'better essays' box, this one a piece on George W. Bush's job performance. It was written in early 2004, and a lot of water has flowed through the Potomac (and the Tigris) since then. But I don't think the Iraqi insurgency, immigration-gate or any of the other landmarks of Dubya's second term have hurt my thesis too much.

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John Kennedy described the presidency as ‘the vortex into which all the elements of national decision are irresistibly drawn’. The decentralized nature of American government creates a natural lethargy that can only be overcome by active presidential leadership. But the presidency is more than the country’s coordinating executive institution; it holds a symbolic, almost shamanistic significance for the American nation. As such the office places unique demands of character, intellect and emotion upon incumbents. This essay will not consider the legitimacy of George Bush’s first election. With the end of his first term in the White House approaching, the more pertinent question is whether he has demonstrated the qualities to merit a second one.

The extent to which an incumbent's personality shapes the presidential office rather than vice-versa is debatable. Nevertheless, it seems common sense that some degree of personal engagement and job satisfaction is needed for what is possibly the most demanding executive position in the world. Bush has been labeled a ‘reluctant president’, placed there by his family’s dynastic ambition rather than his own drive, and in public he often gives the impression of impersonating the role instead of engaging with it. This contrasts however with personal impressions of the man, which emphasise his focus, personal discipline and sense of his responsibilities. Since historically personality has not proved an accurate index of presidential success, we should look to more quantifiable criteria to assess Bush’s capacity for the role.

The ability to articulate a political vision for the country is arguably a president’s most powerful tool for asserting national leadership. The presidency’s central and symbolic status in the political system gives incumbents an unrivalled ‘bully pulpit’ from which to promote their message about what the government should be doing. On arriving in office George W. Bush did not apparently have a vision; his election creed of ‘compassionate conservatism’ proved a political chimera, and the new president lacked the intellectual confidence to take clear positions on particular issues. September 11 however cleared the stage for the relentless focus on one primary issue at which Bush excels. His unrefined convictions and ‘big picture’ conception of issues (“you are either with us or against us”) equipped him ideally to advance the single-minded purpose that the nation desired after the attacks.

While he alone can articulate ea political vision for America, the president cannot by himself sustain it or translate it into action. The fragmentation of political power in the United States makes coalition-building the essence of the presidential job. Great presidents did not stand above politics; they bargained, with their party, Congress, interest groups, bureaucrats and so on, to build a political foundation for their grand designs. Bush manifestly does not have the ‘power of persuasion’ needed for this kind of work; he convinces only those who already share his political convictions. His leadership style is built around reliance on those he knows and trusts, not on the risk-taking and qui pro quos needed to effect lasting political change. Unsurprisingly Bush has proved unable to maintain the political consensus generated by September 11. Despite the unifying advantages of an ongoing ‘war’, he now presides over the bitterest divide in recent American political history, one that will undermine his projects even should be obtain reelection.

The Bush administration exhibits, by presidential standards, an impressive coherence and sense of direction. Far form being his ‘natural enemies’, Bush’s cabinet members – selected for common political views and (in several cases) long-term association with the Bush family – function both as a team and as a presidential resource, providing the wealth of knowledge and political experience that Bush himself conspicuously lacks. The White House staff is well-disciplined and organised, a tribute to Bush’s personal discipline and people skills. Such a system facilitates Bush’s ‘decide and delegate’ approach to executive leadership, with the president making big picture decisions and others seeing to their implementation.

The problem with this arrangement is that administrative support comes to substitute for active leadership. While first-hand observers agree that Bush is in charge of his administration, its intellectual and political impetus clearly comes from the eminent brains around him. Leaving aside allegations of a ‘cabal’ using a quiescent presidency to push through right-wing agendas, any team as ideologically homogenous as the Bush one is prone to a ‘groupthink’ that produces dangerously one-dimensional approaches to complex problems. Take for instance the absence of qualifying voices (excepting Colin Powell’s) in the decision to invade Iraq, the consequences of which are only now becoming evident.

Bush himself is not well equipped to compensate for such deficits of political insight. His shortcoming appears to be neither intelligence nor self-awareness, but rather a basic intellectual laziness. He relies on his advisers to present him information in a digestible form, and then on his political instincts and core moral convictions to make decisions.* Bush supporters contend that this allows him to focus on fundamentals and overall strategy, instead of becoming encumbered in detail and producing a morass of ‘tactical’ decisions. The more probable outcome is that Bush makes decisions without adequate knowledge, either of the issues or of the political context in which his orders will be carried out. A preference for faith and instinct over facts is simply not sufficient for the numerous and complex decisions demanded of modern presidents. While incumbents should have guiding convictions, they must concern themselves enough with detail to gain some understanding of the subject matter and the difficulties of implementing the relevant policy.

While the president carries final responsibility for almost all executive functions, decentralized government disperses actual power and authority among many different entities which can potentially frustrate presidential policy at various stages of implementation. This problem is compounded by the size of the staff now needed to handle the presidential workload. Presidents thus need to take a hands-on, administrative approach to policy execution, for which George Bush’s formal training and his innate lack of initiative have not prepared him. A case in point is the administration’s failure to respond to the threat posed by al-Qaeda before September 11. Bush’s passive dependence on a national security and foreign policy team trained for the Cold War produced no action, despite clear warnings of an impending attack. The president should have taken the initiative to form his own opinion on the primary threat to American security and then to cajole his staff, the military and the intelligence agencies to respond to it.

Presidents cannot simply frame policy and expect it to be carried out; they must involve themselves in the messy reality of execution. Nor can a president’s cabinet and advisers collectively substitute for his own ‘strategic sense’ – the ability to identify what is important and devise a plan to achieve it. Bush’s flaw is not so much his lack of political experience and intellectual equipment as his proven disinclination to acquire them. He simply does not have the ‘quality of mind’ required in a president of the United States.

* This has been described as the ‘one page memo’ approach to making policy. For example, where Bill Clinton reportedly spent twenty-five hours preparing his budget for Congress, Bush spent five.

Knights of Christ (part two)

Better viewed in firefox, as always.

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Given the efforts they made on Latin Christendom’s behalf, the amount of criticism attracted by the military orders seems incongruous. Partly it stemmed from the ‘perceptions gap’ referred to above, which led European-based commentators to undervalue the orders’ contributions in the Holy Land. The orders may also have suffered from lingering doubts about their conceptual legitimacy. The merging of a secular institution (knighthood) with a spiritual one (monasticism) that seemed diametrically opposed to it raised initial misgivings, which were sufficiently widespread to provoke the writing of a letter of encouragement to the Templar brethren in 1128; several years later, the Templars felt obliged to commission one of the day’s leading theological commentators to write a defence of their new institution. Circumstantial evidence scattered over the next two centuries, including several writings explicitly or implicitly questioning the orders’ calling as well as spurious assertions by the Hospitallers of an existence in biblical times, suggests that the feeling there was something ‘unnatural’ about fighting monks never completely died out.

In general however it was Christendom’s embrace, not rejection, of the military orders that magnified their shortcomings and created a tendency to overlook their achievements. The orders were the institutional embodiment of the crusading idea, and their advent during the period of this idea’s ascendancy (the early twelfth century) ensured them not just an enthusiastic reception but a largely uncritical one. The Templars and Hospitallers were accepted literally as a ‘Holy Knighthood’, who would fight not men’s battles but God’s; their monastic and international character represented their transcendence of worldly ties in the direct service of Christ, a calling which dictated spiritual as well as soldierly excellence. In short, they were expected to be both faultless and victorious. By its nature, the crusading concept on which the orders were based precluded objective explanations for defeat; military failure had to be explained by spiritual failure rather than external circumstances, since the latter were clearly no obstacle to those fighting as the ‘right arm of God’. The orders thus came to carry vicarious guilt for Frankish setbacks in the East, a trend exemplified by the readiness to blame them for specific defeats despite the fact that they were only one contingent in crusader armies.

Unrealistic expectations also drew excessive attention to the institutional blemishes that inevitably emerged. To begin with, the privileges heaped by papal and royal decree on the two major orders soon became incongruous with their ascetic vocation. Ranging from tax exemptions to immunity from suit in royal courts, these rights became a widespread source of resentment against both the Templars and Hospitallers, particularly as the orders were seen to be abusing and fraudulently extending them. External manifestations of piety were central to the crusading ideal and the orders, whose original austerity had been much praised, quickly amassed unseemly wealth through privilege and through public donations, the latter often made in the belief that they were more virtuous than ‘traditional’ monastic orders. Lay criticism of the military orders focused on their concern with money, which seemed inappropriate for organisations devoted to fighting the enemies of Christendom. The extent of the orders’ assets throughout Europe also supported the view that their continual appeals for aid for the Holy Land, which increased in proportion with Frankish defeats, had to indicate some kind of fraud. This was partly a function of the ‘perceptions gap’ that dogged the orders’ public relations; the Levant’s distance and fluid politics meant that the information they sent to Europe in support of aid requests often proved out of date, giving rise to cynicism about the orders’ motives. Critics also rarely appreciated the cost of maintaining castles and knights in the numbers required by Outremer, or the amount of revenues soaked up in maintaining the orders’ European chapters and non-combatant brethren.

Avarice was a standard criticism of monastic orders by the twelfth century, but to this vice the military orders added pride, a sin associated with the knightly class. Thus while the orders’ hybrid character may not in itself have been a significant problem, it did expose them to dual criticism. That the orders were proud is beyond doubt; it is attested by complaints from all segments of society, as well as by admonishments in the orders’ own internal documents. Pride allegedly led the orders to put their own interests before those of Christendom, the defence of which was their original raison d’etre. By virtue of their wealth and military importance the Templars and Hospitallers inevitably became involved in Outremer’s politics, in which they proved willing to make alliances with Muslim rulers and to takes sides against fellow Christians, even to the point of armed force; their partisanship in the extended papal-imperial contest of the early thirteenth century drew particular ire from commentators. The murder by the Templars in 1173 of an Assassin ambassador travelling under the King of Jerusalem’s protection was cited by contemporaries as evidence of fanaticism, greed (for lost tribute revenue from the Assassins) or contempt for legitimate authority, all of which jeopardised the crusader states’ wider interests. On balance however the orders played a subsidiary rather than a dominating role in Outremer’s politics, at least before the collapse of feudal authority in the thirteenth century, by which point the demise of the crusader states was only a matter of time.

Certain institutional traits rendered the military orders an easy political target. Perhaps most important was their lack of social roots in either Europe or Outremer; recruiting mainly from the minor nobility (often younger sons) and common knights, the orders lacked connections and influence with other powerful social institutions such as the secular clergy or the upper nobility. This was one reason for their dependence on Papal patronage, which inevitably bred resentment among the clergy and suspicion among secular authorities. The military orders were, in one historian’s succinct phrase, ‘out of the mainstream of circumstance’; their interests were international, and as such they constituted a quasi-alien element in the body politic. Initially this was not a problem, but as the orders’ wealth and power expanded their independence began to be perceived as a threat by monarchs trying to centralise authority in their own hands. The lacklustre response of the orders to these political challenges can also be partly explained by their social recruitment base, which produced a low level of education among the brethren and even among the orders' leaders.

Ultimately the orders’ political fortunes, like their military ones, fluctuated with the wider environment. The impact of specific events like their clashes with the Emperor Frederick II has already been noted, but more importantly long-term trends within Christendom proved unfavourable to the military orders. A general decline in monasticism’s prestige and expansion in monarchical power was less significant than the waning of the crusading idea itself, of which the orders had been both supreme expression and beneficiary. As the crusading ethos was overexploited and debased by political expediency, and as the Frankish presence in the Holy Land withered away, the military orders effectively became obsolete, carrying on only through a sort of ‘historical momentum’ derived from their power and prestige. As this ran out they had to adapt to new political realities (as did the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order) or face extinction (the fate of the Templars).

Knights of Christ (part one)

Exam season is here, so I'll be recycling essays for a week or two. With the Da Vinci Code playing in theatres I'm getting a bit sick of people going on about the Knights Templar, so to dispel the romance here's the first half of a piece I did for my crusades subject last year.

Footnotes removed for the usual reason - because IE can't handle them.

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Once established, the military orders quickly came to play a central role in Frankish military operations in the Latin East. The Templars and Hospitallers were able to draw recruits and revenues throughout Christendom, in contrast to Outremer’s feudal lords whose military capacity was limited by their lands’ modest resources and in particular by a chronic shortage of Frankish manpower. From the mid-twelfth century the two major orders each maintained around three hundred knights in the Kingdom of Jerusalem alone, making their joint contingent comparable in size to the Kingdom’s feudal levy. As time progressed, Outremer’s feudal system proved unable to cope with the perpetual military readiness dictated by the crusader states’ position, and increasingly yielded the burden to institutions designed for continual war against the infidel. Thus the military orders began from an early stage to receive control of strongholds that the secular nobility could not afford to maintain or garrison; by 1180 the Hospitallers alone were responsible for twenty-five castles in the Latin East. The orders built fortresses of their own and waged an ongoing frontier war with Islam, as well as fulfilling the Templars’ original role of protecting pilgrims. As the resources of the feudal lords declined with the loss of territory to the Muslims, the orders’ importance increased till by the mid-thirteenth century Outremer’s defence rested primarily upon them.

The orders also provided the most effective troops available to the Franks in the Latin East. Western European battlefield tactics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied on the heavy cavalry charge, a manoeuvre ill-suited to countering the light cavalry tactics employed by the Muslims. Successful use of the charge in this context required a level of experience and discipline that was lacking in knights newly arrived from Europe, where battles were infrequent and governed by the chivalric imperative to seek individual glory. By contrast the military orders benefited from the experience gained by individual members through extended service against the infidel, as well as from an accumulated knowledge of warfare in the East that was codified in each order’s statutes. Discipline was imposed on individual knights through their vow of obedience to the order, supplemented by severe punishments for disobedience or cowardice on the battlefield. The orders’ troops could furthermore be relied on to remain in the field for as long as their commanders ordered, being free from the political and economic constraints that hamstrung feudal armies and in particular crusading expeditions from Europe. The brethren of the military orders were in short the first professional soldiers that the west had produced since the fall of Rome, and their qualities soon came perforce to be acknowledged within the hierarchies of Outremer. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the Templars and Hospitallers were involved as a matter of course in military operations and discussions of military policy in the Latin East. On campaign their troops were typically assigned to the army’s rearguard and vanguard (the positions most exposed to attack), were given responsibility for defence of the army’s encampment at night and escorted the True Cross.

The best known aspect of the orders’ military prowess, however, was their heedless courage in battle irrespective of circumstances. The bravery of the warrior monks was universally recognised, and their reputation reached legendary proportions. Nor was it merely theatrics; on many occasions it won the day for the Franks, for instance at Damietta in 1219, or at Montgisard in 1177, where a charge by the outnumbered Templars scattered the enemy and almost captured Saladin. The Muslims considered the brethren of the military orders to be the Franks’ most formidable troops, courageous to the point of fanaticism. Muslim chroniclers described the Templars as ‘demons’ and likened the orders’ castles to impregnable lairs of wild beasts, ‘a bone in the throat of Islam’. Saladin, a leader noted for his magnanimity, reportedly vowed to ‘cleanse the land of these two impure orders’ and routinely executed captured Templars and Hospitallers.

For some critics, bravery merged with pride - the military orders’ other universally acknowledged trait - to become foolhardiness, compromising military outcomes. At the siege of Ascalon in 1153, for instance, the Templars allegedly caused an assault to fail by preventing their fellow Christians following them through a breach in the walls, desiring the glory for themselves. As a rule, however, claims of recklessness by the orders are ambiguous or associated with a particular individual rather than systemic traits. The Ascalon story derives from a single account written years after the event and inconsistent with the reports of eyewitnesses.Similarly, the alleged role of the Templar Grand Master Gerard de Ridefort in the disaster at Hattin is based on one potentially biased source and receives no mention in other contemporary accounts of the battle. Even if true, the irresponsibility displayed on this occasion and earlier the same year at Cresson (where a hundred Templars charged fifteen hundred Muslims and were wiped out almost to a man) reflects on de Ridefort’s leadership rather than on the Templars as an institution.

In any case, a degree of aggressiveness was essential to the reputation that drew the orders recruits and revenues from all over Christendom; they could not be seen as reluctant to fight when their prestige stemmed from an image of holy warriors smiting the infidel. It was failure to meet this paradigm, rather than a perceived excess of zeal, that underpinned most allegations of military incompetence made against the orders. Generally speaking the orders’ leaders had a sound understanding of the current military situation, which rarely favoured the Franks; they were thus inclined towards a prudent approach that often put them at odds with crusaders from Europe, for instance at Damascus in 1148, Mansurah in 1250 and during the Third Crusade. The crusader states’ distance and unfamiliar political environment meant that westerners had little understanding of the situation ‘on the ground’, and of the practical problems that the orders faced in maintaining Outremer’s long-term viability. Cultivation of relations with the Muslims, for example, made strategic sense but seemed to compromise the orders’ first principles and gave rise to accusations that they were in league with the infidel. Similarly, criticism that the orders’ brethren tended to hide in their castles during Muslim invasions and frequently surrendered fortresses without resistance reflects lack of knowledge of Outremer’s defence system. Castle garrisons were only expected to delay an invader until the field army had been mustered, and a castellan without hope of relief was well advised to surrender his fortress in exchange for safe passage and so preserve his garrison for the crusader states’ scarce manpower.

Not all of the orders’ shortcomings were mere matters of perception. Contemporaries noted the disparity between their resources and the forces they actually deployed in Outremer, and some degree of underutilisation did probably exist, though this is better explained by administrative deficiencies rather than indifference. Throughout nearly two centuries of residence in the Holy Land, the orders never developed a novel approach to warfare against the Muslims. The rivalry between the two major orders and their independence from secular authority undermined concerted Frankish action against the infidel, more significantly as the Templars and Hospitallers became dominant political powers in Outremer during the thirteenth century.

In the final analysis however the military orders should not be judged too harshly; they failed because they had undertaken an impossible task. The crusader states were strategically untenable; their survival depended ultimately on the political condition of the surrounding Muslim powers, and internal factors such as the orders’ performance could only delay catastrophe. To achieve anything more would have required sustained support from the west, but this was never forthcoming; Frankish immigration to the Levant was never more than a trickle, while crusades from Europe were sporadic, ephemeral and dissipated across too many fronts. The military orders, by contrast, never wavered in their commitment to Outremer. Their conduct in the hopeless defence in 1291 of Acre, the last Frankish foothold in the Holy Land, provides a fitting epitaph for their role in a crusading enterprise that was doomed from the outset. We should be inclined to accept the judgment of King Amalric of Jerusalem, who by the mid-twelfth century had already concluded that ‘if we can achieve anything, it is through them [the military orders] that we are able to do it’.

The Battle of Serendah

All this fuss about Kokoda has rekindled interest in my own family's brush with the Great Pacific War. That, and I haven't had time for an original post. So here's a piece I wrote for my VCE English class seven years ago, about the Battle that Didn't Save Malaya.

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Our flight touched down after dark, at Kuala Lumpur's gleaming Sepang Airport, which doubles as a Formula One racing track. Visiting grandparents is routine familiar to every Chinese family. Much of our three days in the Malaysian capital is spent seeing friends, but one is set aside.

The North-South Highway shimmers in the heat, symbol of Malaysia's progress. We speed along in a rented Proton, the air conditioner set on high. One cannot look around at the surrounding country without shades: not that there is much to see. After passing the ubiquitous green-roofed tollgates, it is jungle or rubber plantation the whole way.

Serendah, once a tin-mining town, is now a jumble of housing estates, commissioned to line the pockets of some Chinese tycoon. The place is a bath of heat. We trundle down uncovered lanes and round blind corners, products of shoddy building regulations: symptoms of too-rapid development. The houses are typical Malaysian homes, one-story link structures sharing a common wall on each side, each with its own small paved yard in front. Chinese households are marked by the red altars standing in the front yards, or by blackened joss sticks stuck in the grass outside.

Serendah has not changed in sixty years. Kuala Lumpur is a city dominated by the Petronas Twin Towers, and sporting all the trappings of a First World capital, if not the cleanliness. My friends there frequent air-conditioned shopping centers and internet cafes. Here, bare-foot children play alongside open storm drains. In the restaurants, their walls plastered with Chinese lunar calendars and Guinness posters, old men sit at tables dotted with flies, staring at the wall-mounted TV between draws on their cigarettes.

The house, all tiles and bare walls, is surprisingly cool. The entrance leads into the living room, some four metres by three. A fan is suspended from the ceiling, its blades turning lazily. The sole evidence of the Nineties is a small TV and VCR in the corner. On top of the TV sits a photo of my family, six years past. One top of the VCR is a video tape of my one-year old cousin in Wantirna.

My mother converses with her parents in a string of Cantonese, smattered with English. My grandfather, hale for his seventy-seven years, reclines in a striped deckchair, cigarette in hand. His eyes, framed by prominent cheekbones and whip-combed hair, study me inscrutably. Koong (his Chinese title) grew up in this town, and like most venerable men loves to tell stories of his childhood. His favourite is that of the battle fought here sixty years ago, when the Japanese swept the British out of Malaya.

On this occasion, he asks if I would like to see the sites I have heard about so often in a Melbourne living room. With no other prospects for the next hour and a half, I readily agree. We don hats against the ferocious tropical sun, step outside and into his old Datsun, the interior musty and humid despite the shade.

We inch down the town’s main street, a solid mass of trucks, motorcyclists and the odd Proton. There are no traffic lights, much less regulations; the whole scene is awash with noise and heat, not to mention pollution from two-stroke engines. This was once the main trunk road from the north, down which the Japanese came, also riding on bicycles. Then, as now, it was overlooked by the ubiquitous Chinese shop signs, their characters splashed in red or black, with the absence of the small KFC. Finally, we are beyond the crush and driving alone along the outskirts. Grass tall as a man lines each side of the dirt road; the jungle has long since disappeared from this place. The land, once cleared for the endless rubber plantations, will likely soon be the site of some new development monstrosity.

Serendah, never a town of note, has one distinction to its name. Here, sixty years ago, was formed the first unit of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, the MPAJA; a force run by the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan campaign was not going well. The outnumbered Japanese were driving the British and Indians down the peninsula at frightening speed. In desperation, the British recognized the Communists and gave them arms. Later, these would be used against the British themselves, in the postwar struggle for Malaya’s independence. At the time however, all the colonial masters cared about was halting the Rising Sun, for even a few days.

No local boys joined – my grandfather never contemplated it. The Communists recruited from the Chinese middle schools in the cities: smooth-faced youths, their minds opened by education and seeking a cause. Before them were dangled the twin prospects of a crusade against the hated Japanese, and the inevitable victory of Communism. ‘The East is Red’ was a slogan taken seriously in those days.

A cul-de-sac leads us to the river itself. Sungai Serendah is a sluggish creek, wandering beneath high banks crammed with jungle foliage. It is hard to imagine these slow brown waters being an obstacle to anyone, let alone a battle-tested army.

There is no bridge now, in place of the parallel structures of sixty years ago, one road and one rail. Both were dynamited by the British, as they arrived in retreat from the north. The British proceeded to fortify the line of the river, setting up four or five antitank rifles along the banks, with three artillery pieces in the town. They hoped to fight a delaying action, nothing more.

The Chinese population, meanwhile, had abandoned the town for the relative safety of the jungle fringe. The behaviour of Japanese troops in China was well known, and the fear of the Japanese Army preceded it. Koong and a few other youngsters, however, sneaked back out of curiosity. The town was being looted – even the Indian soldiers were breaking into shophouses in search of liquor. People were in no doubt as to which way the campaign was going. Already, survival was the priority. As Koong and his colleagues left, arms filled with as much as they could carry, the hills echoed to the crump of the British artillery, bombarding the Japanese concentration north of the river.

The fighting commenced just before dawn, the favourite hour for Japanese assaults – a fact the British had by now worked out. With typical disregard for personal safety, the Japanese tried to force a crossing in the face of withering machine gun fire. After clogging the river with the bodies of their soldiers, they withdrew and tried another way.

A drive past the derelict tin mine takes us out of town, to the Chinese cemetery by the river. The graves sprawl across the slope with a total lack of order, the size of each denoting its occupant’s affluence. The grass grows wild, save where a dutiful family has cleared a patch round their deceased.

The hill overlooks both town and river, and had been chosen by the fledgling MPAJA as their headquarters. It was occupied by about a hundred middle school students, boys with guns. One was on sentry duty when a Japanese patrol appeared and crossed the river. In panic he fired on them, and the Japanese fired back – but their mission was reconnaissance, not battle. The young guerillas hurriedly retreated to the mountains. ON their way, they passed through the refugee camp, telling everyone of their great clash with the invaders.

The Japanese had done what they did throughout the campaign – outflanked the defenders. Now Japanese fighters appeared to strafe the British positions. There was not an Allied plane in sight. By afternoon, the British had withdrawn. Kuala Lumpur, forty kilometers to the south, fell two days later. The Japanese chased them all the way down to Singapore, and what Churchill would label ‘the greatest disaster in British military history’.

For the people of Serendah, those two days transformed their world forever. The whole prewar order collapsed before an invader who was absolutely merciless. For the next three years the population eked out a precarious existence, between their occupiers and the growing prospect of famine. Koong supported the family by cycling forty miles to Kuala Selangor to buy tapioca, then bringing it back to sell to the starving Indian plantation workers. The Japanese were finally expelled in 1945, but they had shattered colonial prestige forever. The British returned to a population no longer prepared to obey them. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya was born. My mother was two years old.

I sit another hour in my grandparents’ house, listening to Koong and my father debate the merits of the Mahathir government. When I was small there was an Indian hawker on the street outside, whose pisang goreng (banana fritters) provided some relief from the monotony. But she is gone now; perhaps gone to the city to seek a better fortune. Serendah, like a hundred similar towns across Malaysia, is withering in the wake of the national boom. Already elderly folk like Koong and Po make up much of the population.

It is time to go. We say our farewells, getting into the baking Proton. Again I promise Koong that, one day, I will get around to writing our family history. The question is how far back it will go. It is something to ponder, as we board our flight to Shanghai.

The Universality of Human Rights

Following up the 'Asian values' debate at the last PIS meeting, here's a not-so-old essay of mine - minus footnotes, introduction and conclusion - on drawing the line between human rights and culture. This issue happens to be getting the media glare right now, with the impending execution of an Afghan citizen for converting from Islam to Christianity.

I'll try to follow this up with something more specific on 'Asian values', assuming I have any energy left to think after homework, job applications and LSS tutes.

Cross-posted at the club blog.

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Human rights must have legitimacy if they are to be realised within a given community. The widespread perception in Muslim countries that human rights are ‘un-Islamic’ or a tool of western imperialism, for example, makes it difficult for governments to implement human right or for rights advocates to gain social and political traction. In developed states like the US, opposition to judicial enforcement of economic and social rights stems more from perceptions that they are not bona fide ‘rights’ than from persuasive separation-of-powers arguments. Attempts to give human rights an objective basis, for instance by linking them to economic development, have met little success; implementation of human rights depends on a cultural choice by the community in question, a choice that can only spring from cultural legitimacy.

The basic problem faced by the global human rights movement is that the very concept of human rights, defined as inalienable claims by an abstract individual upon society, lacks legitimacy outside the western world. If one attempts to ground human rights in religion or moral philosophy, they appear as a western cultural construct. Even accepting that numerous belief systems recognise the inherent human dignity on which human rights are founded, many manifest practices that are inconsistent with ‘international’ human rights norms; certain principles in Islamic jurisprudence, for example, conflict directly with the rights to freedom of belief, freedom of speech and equality before the law. A strong argument can be made that other key concepts underpinning human rights – the individual’s autonomy from society and the cosmos, for instance – are specifically western cultural developments. As such, their introduction into non-western societies presupposes that these societies are either culturally deficient or on an evolutionary path that will turn them into facsimiles of the contemporary west.

Nor have positivist approaches to human rights given non-western peoples the sense of cultural ownership that grounds legitimacy. The core of international human rights, expressed in the Universal Declaration, was articulated by western states in the context of the ideological struggle with communism. On an ongoing basis, Western states are perceived to serve vested commercial interests by promoting civil and political rights over economic and social ones, abandoning even the former when inconvenient (take Australia’s reservations to the ICCPR regarding federal implementation and juvenile detention). Non-western governments stand accused of using communitarian conceptions of human rights to justify internal repression. In this context, the non-western world at large has unsurprisingly developed a cynical understanding of human rights.

Yet despite the rhetoric of cultural distinctiveness from their elites, non-western societies are taking an evolutionary path similar in many respects to that of the west: industrialising, evolving powerful bureaucracies, developing market economies. In this changing social context, human rights are necessary to shield ‘authentic human life’ – whatever cultural expression that life may take – from the corrosive effects of modernity. Freedom of speech and association, for example, may be needed to protect traditional social structures or cultural practices from exploitative employers, corrupt bureaucrats and callous state policies.

Critiques of human rights as exclusively ‘western’ also employ an excessively static notion of culture. Muslim rights advocates have argued that the Shari’a provisions referenced above are a historically contingent interpretation of Islamic texts, which should be reinterpreted consistently with contemporary conditions. Torture and poverty were once considered legitimate by virtually all societies (including western ones) but are now widely rejected, at least in theory. These are instances of a global cultural evolution towards recognition that certain practices and conditions diminish human personality in any cultural context. Critics of the universal rights discourse correctly assert that ‘personality’ is culturally defined, but miss the point that it attaches to a universal ‘individual’ who is the subject of human rights. If the individual’s integrity is compromised, for instance through torture or poverty, personality cannot be fully realised. Pace Douzinas, the ‘human’ in human rights signifies a physical and mental core on which all cultures operate.

Human rights thus have a universal moral basis, notwithstanding their initial conception in the west, and as such are universally applicable. The global human rights machinery serves a legitimate role in monitoring adherence to human rights within all states, including their western progenitors; consider the Human Rights Committee’s (HRC’s) declaration of a US reservation to ICCPR subordinating that treaty to the US constitution as invalid, or the UN High Commissioner’s finding in 2002 that Australia had breached the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, the precise content and means of enforcement of human rights must correspond to social organisation and conditions, which differ between nations and cultures. The right to freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy or family, for instance, may need to countenance traditional forms of community supervision and authority (for example the role of village elders in regulating social relationships).

Implementation of human rights should therefore take place as locally as practicable, for instance through national or regional human rights commissions, rather than via international treaty mechanisms such as the HRC’s individual complaints mechanism. Localised implementation avoids the charge of western cultural imposition, and allows rights to become ‘foundations for actions and policy’ rather than meaningless abstractions. It is only through such ‘concretisation in the [local] context’ that human rights will acquire the legitimacy needed to take root in a particular community.

East is East, West is West, but sometimes the twain can meet

This piece is the first instalment in an Asia-Pacific politics column I'm doing for Farrago, the Melbourne Uni student mag. It overlaps with my AAP article on the changing Asia-Pacific order, but focuses on the background politics to the new East Asian Summit and its implications for Australia.

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The political landscape of the Asia-Pacific is changing. The US-centric alliance system that has dominated the region since the early 1950’s is under pressure from several directions: the rise of China, the growth of East Asian regionalism, changes in US foreign policy priorities. The East Asia Summit that convenes in Kuala Lumpur this December is the most significant expression to date of these converging trends.

For over a decade China has been engaged in intense diplomatic efforts to improve its position in East Asia. These bore fruit from the late 1990’s with APEC’s displacement as the most important regional forum by the ‘ASEAN Plus Three’ grouping, which includes China but excludes the US. It is from this grouping that the East Asia Summit has emerged, representing a shift in the region’s political centre of gravity away from Washington. While the EAS will initially focus on economic issues, its architects intend it to evolve into a vehicle for regional governance and security dialogue. Combined with the proliferation of regional free trade zones, this has led to much speculation about an emerging ‘East Asian community’ comparable to the European Union, or even of a Sinocentric hierarchy resembling imperial China’s tributary system.

These prophecies are premature at best. Asia is far more diverse – politically, culturally, geographically – than Europe, and lacks the shared historical experience that underpins the EU. Regional states remain too apprehensive about China to accept a system dominated by Beijing; Japan, Singapore and Indonesia for example lobbied heavily for the inclusion of Australia and India in the EAS to balance China. Despite its diplomatic setbacks, the US remains entrenched in the region through its military presence and security ties with allied states, which have been renewed and expanded in parallel with the growth of Chinese power. The Bush administration’s readiness to court India to the point of antagonising Pakistan, a key US ally in the War on Terror, demonstrates the US commitment to curbing Chinese dominance in the Asia-Pacific.

Nevertheless the fact that an East Asian grouping (which the US has always opposed) has emerged at all shows how far American influence in the Asia-Pacific has slipped. As regional states have developed and their interactions have grown more complex, the post-1945 system of bilateral security and economic relationships centered on the US has become an anachronism. Washington’s failure to show leadership during the Asian Financial Crisis crystallised the movement for an alternative political framework to address the region’s needs, a trend accelerated by the regional stresses created by US foreign policy since 9-11. Condoleeza Rice’s absence at the recent ASEAN conferences in Laos, which finalised the basic structure of the EAS, was the coup-de-grace to US prospects for staying in the political driving seat. Increasingly Washington will have to deal with East Asia as a ‘region’, rather than simply a location for various US security interests.

These developments have produced a win-win situation for Australia. Previously confined to the fringes of East Asian regionalism as an ASEAN dialogue partner, Australia is now a founding member of the institution that will lay the basis for East Asian cooperation in the 21^st century. Instead of estranging us from the US, invitation to the EAS has raised Canberra’s stock in Washington, which having itself been excluded from this emerging political architecture needs loyal allies on the inside. It seems to be the death knell for the argument that Australia must choose between Asia and the West (i.e. the United States). In reality this was always a false contention; the Labor governments of the early 1990’s promoted APEC as a vehicle to keep the US involved in the region while accommodating East Asian aspirations, particularly those of China. Hawke and Keating are often accused of courting Asia at the expense of our US relationship, but in effect they sought to have our cake and eat it too. Ironically it is the Howard government – which has emphasised Australia’s separateness from Asia, faithfully followed US foreign policy and persisted with a doctrine of regional military preemption – that has got a slice.

Iraq: Quo Vadis?

Ambitious to start with a 3000 word post? Maybe, but this and the one above it have absorbed most of my spare time for the past week and a half. They'll be in the next issue of AAP, the magazine of the Melbourne Uni Political Interest Society.

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In 1999, LSE professor Mary Kaldor published a book entitled ‘New and Old Wars’. In it she argued that where ‘old wars’ were state-centric and fought between clearly defined armed forces, ‘new wars’ will be driven by globalisation and involve a range of actors competing for power amidst the wreckage of failed states. Iraq today exhibits all the traits of such a ‘new war’; it is afflicted by a kaleidoscope of violent groups who can operate because of the power vacuum left by the old regime’s collapse and popular hostility towards the occupying forces. This explains the US military’s manifest inability to pacify Iraq, despite having access to cutting-edge technology and a century’s experience of counterinsurgency warfare. The only way to defuse ‘new wars’ is to remove the failed state conditions that breed them, a task at which the Coalition Provisional Authority singularly failed due to a mixture of complacency, arrogance and ideological blindness. The danger now is that Iraq’s deterioration will reach a critical mass at which national institutions and cohesion break down faster than they can be rebuilt.

Until mid-2004 the official US line was that the insurgents were foreign jihadists and former regime loyalists, no more than 5,000 strong and lacking in genuine support within Iraqi society. When this picture became untenable, the insurgency was repainted as a regressive Sunni movement, led by former Ba’athists and driven by a fear of losing power in the new democratic Iraq. The guiding imperative was the Bush administration’s need to portray the insurgency as separate from and hostile to wider Iraqi society, thus absolving the US of blame for the violence and linking it to the global terrorist threat. For political reasons therefore the insurgency was treated as an autonomous and hierarchical guerilla force, similar to 20^th Century communist insurgencies. The US military responded with appropriate tactics: targeting prominent insurgent leaders and strongholds, trying to cut the flow of recruits and assets across Iraq’s borders, attempting to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Iraqi civilians. Yet in July 2005 the number of attacks continues to grow, with top US generals and even the Secretary of Defence now effectively admitting that there is no end in sight.

Calls for more foreign troops, ‘internationalisation’ of the foreign presence or pressure on Syria and Iran as perceived insurgent sponsors have faded, as it becomes increasingly clear that the nature of the problem has been misconceived. The insurgency is less an organisation than a social movement, defined by opposition to the US presence and drawing recruits from across Iraqi society and beyond: former regime elements, foreign volunteers, home-grown extremists, ex-soldiers, private militias, transnational terrorists, criminals, unemployed youths, sympathisers scattered throughout government and Coalition institutions. While their precise motivations may vary – the prospect of losing power in a US-shaped new order, blame attached to the US for Iraq’s problems, global jihad in defence of Islam – the common element is the use of violence against the US and anyone allied with it, including fellow Muslims. This is where the insurgency connects with the international Islamic terrorist movement. Both are fuelled by an ‘emulation effect’ that leads more and more individuals to take up proven means of striking at the perceived source of their grievances, resulting in a constantly growing network of autonomous groups. Thus the focus on numbers (the official US line now posits between 20,000 and 40,000 ‘hard core’ fighters with some 200,000 supporters) is misguided. The problem is not a limited number of fanatics who can be rooted out from wider society by force, but rather the conditions that facilitate the violence and breed popular hostility towards the Coalition.

Historical guerilla movements relied by necessity on a centralised command structure and on logistical support from outside sponsors or the civilian population; these were weak points that could be targeted by counterinsurgency efforts. In ‘new wars’, by contrast, a combination of state failure and globalisation diffuses the means of inflicting violence throughout society. Arms stockpiles left by Saddam’s regime make weapons readily available, and former regime officials use funds accumulated while in power to bankroll any group which fights the Americans. The breakdown in law enforcement and border control allows insurgents to bolster their resources through theft, looting and smuggling, to move easily around the country and to dominate local communities. Twenty-four hour media coverage enables isolated cells to identify vulnerable targets, determine which tactics and weapons are most effective and coordinate attacks with other groups; it also aids psychological warfare by bombarding Iraqi and international audiences with constant images of violence, peppered with especially horrendous incidents such as major bombings or televised hostage executions. The internet provides a communication, propaganda and recruitment system that is impossible to shut down, and gives anyone with a computer and telephone line access to technical knowledge ranging from bomb-making to urban warfare tactics. Rampant unemployment and criminality provides a vast pool of potential volunteers, and creates an environment in which citizens are under pressure to assist insurgents out of fear, opportunism or clan and ethnic loyalties. The process of rebuilding government institutions and the Coalition’s dependence on local translators and intelligence sources allows extensive penetration by insurgent sympathisers, facilitating sabotage and blackmail, providing targeting data and compromising counterinsurgency operations.

Widespread hostility towards the occupying forces both drives the insurgency and creates an environment in which it can flourish. Notwithstanding the impression gained from western media coverage, US troops are the main object of insurgent violence. Targeting patterns have been consistent for over two years: measured by the month, attacks on Iraqi civilians have comprised less than 5%, those on the new Iraqi security forces between 5% and 15%, those on Coalition forces between 75% and 90%. One reason that the training of new Iraqi security forces has been prioritised is the negative feedback generated by American troops: civilians refuse to cooperate with them or provide intelligence, hide insurgents and weapons caches and feed the enemy information about their movements. While this antagonism has its roots in natural distrust of an invading force, it has flowered from events after the invasion. The devolution of law enforcement on the US military meant that it was held responsible for the chaos that descended across postwar Iraq; it also dictated a pervasive US troop presence that created a sense of subjection to a foreign power, with all the attendant resentment and humiliation. Cultural illiteracy and a lack of interpreters among US troops inevitably caused friction with the civilian population, while repeatedly extended tours of duty in a guerilla warfare environment makes soldiers embittered and heavy-handed. Since March 2003 US military action has been one of the primary causes of civilian deaths and property damage in Iraq, and compensation is rarely forthcoming. Harsh security measures such as mass detention and incarceration without trial, and more flagrant abuses of power symbolised by Abu Ghraib, complete the image of an occupation in the worst rather than benign sense of the word.

This accumulating hostility has been exploited by insurgents. Omnipresent violence forces the US military to keep swathes of Iraq under effective martial law, while collateral damage caused by attacks on US troops makes their presence unwelcome to the local population. Another tactic is to provoke excessive reactions from US forces. Targeting roadblocks leads US troops to adopt shoot-to-kill tactics that inevitably claim civilian victims. The November 2004 assault on Fallujah was (like the 1968 Tet Offensive) a tactical victory but a public relations disaster, producing footage of US troops shelling mosques and apparently shooting unarmed and wounded Iraqis at point blank range. In short the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq has come to mean violence for civilians, whichever direction it comes from; small wonder that polling data indicates that the general attitude towards Coalition forces is that they are at best a necessary evil and should leave as soon as possible.

Ultimately it is this willingness on the insurgents’ part to inflict wanton destruction that has confounded Coalition military efforts. Historically, guerillas sought to control the institutions and social fabric of the nation-state: the protagonists of ‘new wars’ seek to destroy them, to make way for alternative social orders based on narrower identities like race and religion, or simply to benefit from the chaos. In Bosnia and Rwanda, this involved ethnic cleansing to produce ethnically ‘pure’ political units. In Iraq today it means sabotaging the national rebuilding process, whether through indiscriminate violence, targeting economic infrastructure or sectarian killings, for instance bombings of Kurdish and Shi’ite religious festivals and tit-for-tat murders of Sunni and Shi’ite civilians. However oppressive Saddam’s regime, its institutions were a force for national integration; their disappearance has created space for an identity-based politics that aims to fragment Iraqi society along its ethnic fault lines, or simply set it on a downward spiral into anarchic warlordism on the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan. Short of violent repression, the occupying forces can do nothing to fight this trend; the only remedy is to displace it with the benefits of successful nation-building. Unfortunately, for most of the past two years ‘nation-building’ in Iraq has delivered an absence of security, basic amenities or employment, bickering politicians and a country policed by despised foreign troops.

The blame for this state of affairs rests squarely with the now-defunct CPA and the US administration. Their mistakes stemmed from a hubris that regarded the occupation’s merits as self-evident and not in need of active justification to the Iraqi people, and that saw fit to rebuild Iraq on US terms, without accountability or regard to actual conditions. A typical example was the disqualification of Ba’ath party members from public office, which disfranchised and alienated much of Iraq’s middle class. It also compromised the rebuilding process, since new institutions had to be created and new personnel trained from scratch; the fact that this was done on US models and by US contractors or government agencies only furthered perceptions that Iraq was being rebuilt as a US client state. The lack of concern by US and CPA authorities for financial accounting created a corruption-ridden political economy characteristic of ‘new wars’; the system rewards American companies and well-connected locals but has left ordinary Iraqis jobless or on third world salaries, and bears much blame for the lack of progress in repairing Iraq’s infrastructure or restoring its economic health. Perhaps most serious was the decision not to reconstitute or even pension off the old regime’s security forces, resulting in a power vacuum and giving the insurgency a valuable source of expertise. This error was compounded by failing to prioritise creation of new Iraqi police and armed forces from the outset, despite the chaos that immediately descended across the country; law enforcement and security were left to the US military, with the adverse consequences outlined above.

The only Iraqis involved in all these decisions were long-time exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, men who appeared to be US stooges and whose policy advice often proved faulty: they infamously assured their Pentagon patrons that US troops would be greeted as liberators, while Chalabi was a driving force behind the de-Ba’athification policies. The political movements and parties that emerged upon Saddam’s fall were initially given no voice, and their subsequent inclusion looked like cooptation into a hollow political process rushed through to combat the growing insurgency. Certainly the emphasis given to constitutional drafting, political horse-trading and other democratic forms while the country remained in ruins and under siege did not inspire confidence in the new regime. The CPA made no efforts to articulate a clear vision for Iraq’s future or to counter Saddam’s prewar propaganda, not to mention the inevitable postwar rumours and conspiracy theories. Iraqis were left to judge from what they could see: US officials moving into Saddam’s palaces, US companies setting up in fortified inner Baghdad, US troops establishing permanent bases around the country.

In short the Americans behaved like conquerors, with no regard for the needs or sensitivities of a population that had suffered greatly from previous US policies towards Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld’s glib response to the looting of Baghdad – ‘freedom is messy’ – was typical of the triumphalism and ideological certainty that governed the US approach to postwar management and precluded timely acknowledgement of problems, let alone responses. Such attitudes had in fact compromised the reconstruction process long before the invasion. President Bush’s decision to give the Pentagon control over postwar Iraq made the prewar planning effort hostage to the Defence Department’s civilian leadership, dominated by neoconservative ideolgoues. Planning was oriented around crisis events like WMD attacks and oil field sabotage that suited this group’s fixation with Saddam’s regime; it was diverted from broader political and security issues that they were convinced would not materealise under liberation by benign US forces. The State Department’s $5 million ‘Future of Iraq’ planning project was ignored, as were repeated warnings by US intelligence agencies of postwar armed resistance. Even within the Pentagon, planning suffered from political turf battles; officers of the Joint Staff were excluded, and when the Army’s Chief of Staff warned Congress of postwar security concerns he was stamped on by his civilian bosses. Ideological correctness trumped objective analysis. Vice-President Cheney blocked State Department appointments to occupation authorities; Cheney’s daughter was chosen over State Department career specialists to advise reconstruction czar Jay Garner; Garner himself had barely set up in Baghdad when he was replaced for opposition to the de-Ba’athification policies.

Where to now for Iraq? Coalition withdrawal is out of the question. The US withdrawal from Vietnam in the early 1970’s had few strategic consequences, either globally or regionally; Iraq by contrast occupies the heart of the most strategically significant region in the world. It is also hard to dispute Iraq’s emerging centrality to the global campaign against fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. The insurgency is not an entity but a cause, representing the use of indiscriminate violence to thwart the US and its allies. In material terms, Iraq now serves as the very sort of testing and training ground for militants that the war on terror is supposed to eradicate. The new Iraqi security forces are clearly years away from being to able to shoulder the country’s security burden by themselves. For all these reasons a complete US withdrawal is unlikely, regardless of domestic US public opinion.

Conversely, pouring in more foreign troops is not the solution. There are currently almost 160,000 Coalition troops in Iraq and yet, like Napoleon’s armies in Spain, they control nothing but the ground they stand on. Such a large and prolonged deployment is burdening the US economy, the US military and US foreign policy, to say nothing of domestic political damage to the administration. In this light the prospect of large US troop withdrawals by early 2006 (foreshadowed in a recently leaked British defence memo) is not that far fetched, especially when the apparent Taliban and al-Qaida resurgence in Afghanistan is added to the equation. What is most likely to happen is a progressive scaling down of the US presence towards a rapid reaction force, that would deal with major threats as Iraqi forces increasingly assume control.

Ultimately, Iraq’s fate lies with the new government’s ability to end the failed state conditions that allow the violence to grow. Former Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said as much in a recent interview with London’s Sunday Times: “[without] national unity, the building of institutions, the economy … the country will deteriorate”. It would be comforting to believe that Iraq is now firmly on the right path, given recognition of the past two years’ mistakes and the presumable preference of most Iraqis – after decades of Saddam’s rule, the Iran-Iraq war, the First Gulf War, UN sanctions, US invasion and finally the insurgency – for national reconstruction over the continued strife and uncertainty entailed by the alternatives. But the facts do not bear this out. Trust in the new government is being eroded by growing evidence of human rights abuses by its security forces and of an interior ministry fast becoming a facsimile of Saddam’s, with paramilitary units, extra-judicial executions and an alleged secret network of torture centres across the country. Shi’ite domination of the new security forces makes them vulnerable to abuse as a tool of sectarian violence, with elite units like the Wolf Brigade already accused of waging a covert war against the Sunni community. The inability to disarm sectarian militias such as the Shi’ite Badr Brigade (the armed wing of Iraq’s largest political party) leaves them free to fight ‘insurgents’ according to their own interpretation and provoke response in kind; Zarqawi’s organisation has reportedly set up a special division solely charged with eradicating the Badr Brigade. The mutually hostile Kurdish factions in the north remain independent of Baghdad, and there have long been reports of ‘soft’ ethnic cleansing in areas under their control.

Economically the picture is not much brighter. Iraq’s GDP continues to shrink, with the oil sector – now representing 95% of national income – struggling under the weight of sabotage, mismanagement and the corruption. As noted above, corruption has become endemic in post-Saddam Iraq, thriving on a lack of adequate controls; the CPA’s own auditor found it unable to account for $8.8 billion handed over to Iraq’s Interim Government, while there is still no system for monitoring the army of US contractors absorbing reconstruction funds. The domination of Iraq’s economy by American companies sucks money out of the country and has made it impossible to dent the unemployment rate, which is now at 50% and rising. Violence and its accompanying security costs deter foreign investment. Two years on from Saddam’s overthrow one in three Iraqis is malnourished, while one in six survives on a food rationing system. Most worrying is the US failure to deliver the promised sums for Iraq’s reconstruction, with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice recently confirming that of the $18.6 billion voted by Congress only $7 billion has been spent.

Iraq’s new government has come into existence saddled with too many problems to overcome with the resources at hand. Its only hope is adequate support from its US patron, not just in military terms but comprehensively. Unfortunately it seems that the Bush administration, having invaded Iraq with no plan for winning the peace, has failed to develop one in the two years since. Allawi bluntly told the Sunday Times that “the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq”, an extraordinary comment from a man in his position and a warning about how serious the situation is. With Baghdad now under continuous siege from suicide bombings and Iraqi politicians openly speaking about civil war, it seems that Colin Powell’s famous warning to the President way back before this all began – ‘if you break it, you own it’ – has come home to roost.