The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (86 page)

to sign your death certifi cate. Iraqi or not, these are traitors.”31

This intimidation made it impossible for the CPA to recruit the

local allies it needed to run the country. Insurgents shot down Aqila

al-Hashemi, a female member of Bremer’s showcase Iraqi Governing

Council, on her own doorstep. They also assassinated one of Saddam

Hussein’s senior revenue offi cials when he began to work with the

CPA, and they forced the governor of al-Anbar Province to retire

by kidnapping his sons. In the Shi’a south, the young radical cleric

442 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Muqtada al-Sadr’s men murdered several high-ranking clerics who

had signaled a willingness to work with the American occupiers.

Bush offi cials denied that the insurgents had any legitimacy or

popular support by dismissing them as “regime dead-enders,” Nazistyle Baathist thugs, or foreign Islamicists. Regarding the last claim,

there was indeed a strong transnational element to the resistance.

The CPA’s inability to control Iraq’s borders allowed those who

detested the United States’ global hegemony to surge into the country to kill Americans. Nonetheless, U.S. intelligence experts estimated

that most of the fi ghters in the insurgency were native-born Iraqis.

Senior Baathist leaders in hiding organized and funded much of their

operations, but there was no denying that many guerrillas were

common Iraqis who simply would not tolerate the occupation. As a

laborer explained: “[U.S. soldiers] searched my house. They kicked

my Koran. They speak to me so poorly in front of my children. It’s

not that I encourage my son to hate Americans. It’s not that I make

him want to join the resistance. Americans do that for me.”32 In April

2004, reports that guards and intelligence offi cers were systematically humiliating, if not torturing, detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib

prison deepened this widespread resolve to fi ght the occupation.

The Iraqis were no more organized in their opposition to the

American occupation than the French were under Nazi rule in the

previous century. The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda

in Iraq organization, which had no signifi cant ties to the preinvasion Saddamist regime, was the most signifi cant foreign element in

the insurgency. In the Baghdad slums and the Shi’a south, Muqtada

al-Sadr’s sixty-thousand-man Mahdi Army also fought the American occupiers. Most insurgents, however, were Iraqi Sunnis, but they

were divided over whether they were seeking the restoration of secular Baathist rule or an Islamic theocracy. Although they may have

been split along sectarian, ethnic, and ideological lines, the various

factions still generally agreed on the fundamental goal of expelling

the Americans. Most signifi cant, they never would have been able

to operate effectively if the general public had not been willing to

shelter them.

These largely common people successfully defi ed the United States,

which friend and foe alike described as the world’s sole superpower,

for more than fi ve years. Earlier generations of imperial subjects had

the same goal, but they lacked the organization and means to resist.

Conclusion 443

In the twenty-fi rst century, transnational fl ows of funding and support and the accessibility of advanced technology made it much easier

to resist a foreign occupier. Former army offi cers provided essential

training, but the insurgents also learned how to make improvised

explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide bombs from the Internet. They

used common household devices such as cell phones and garage door

openers to set them off. These tools gave Iraqis the means to reject

subjecthood.

Even more ruthlessly, the foreign fi ghters demonstrated the CPA’s

impotency and made Iraq ungovernable by infl aming sectarian divisions through suicide bombing attacks that indiscriminately killed

people as they went about their daily lives. The Iraq insurgency thus

wrecked the Bush administration’s grand blueprint for Iraq. The guerrillas destroyed the CPA’s infrastructure projects and forced contractors to shelter in fortifi ed camps for safety. Most consequential, they

sabotaged the Americans’ primary extractive agenda by preventing

the CPA from restarting oil production. Exasperated, Bremer noted

that the coalition forces could not protect traffi c to the Baghdad airport, and he compared their overstretched units to “an understrength

fi re crew racing from one blaze to another.”

The Bush administration eventually had to acknowledge that

direct American rule in Iraq was unworkable. It therefore cast about

desperately for ways to withdraw from Iraq without giving the foreign Islamicists free rein or plunging the country into anarchy and

full-scale civil war. President Bush’s only viable option was “nation

building,” a long and expensive process that he had openly derided

during the 2000 election campaign. From 2004 to 2006, the Americans

guided their Iraqi clients through a series of incremental steps that

included constitution writing, provisional and transitional administrations, and eventually elections for an Iraqi National Assembly and

a nominally independent government under Prime Minister Nouri

al-Maliki. While this was Bremer’s original goal in 2003, the resulting

regime looked nothing like his imaginary liberal Arab democracy.

Yet the emergence of a nominally sovereign Iraqi government did

not end the American occupation, for al-Maliki needed U.S. aid to

stay in power. As President Bush’s second term of offi ce drew to a

close, more than fi ve years after he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, there were still approximately 130,000 American soldiers in

Iraq. A new security arrangement with the al-Maliki regime set 2011

444 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

as the date for their fi nal withdrawal, a process that his successor,

Barack Obama, endorsed and accelerated.

Many of the hard power advocates who had argued so passionately

for the invasion sought to regain a measure of credibility by attacking

the Bush administration for failing to make proper use of America’s

vast military might. Latching on to the seeming effectiveness of a

“surge” in American troops levels in 2007, they blamed Rumsfeld

for grossly underestimating the number of men under arms that it

would take to occupy and control Iraq. In fact, popular revulsion over

the chronic violence stemming from the civil war and insurgency was

the real reason that the unrest appeared to wane. Common Iraqis lost

patience with foreign fi ghters and jihadis who were behind the bloodiest and most devastating bombings. Similarly, many Sunnis began to

work with the occupation forces when they realized that they needed

U.S. support as a counterweight to al-Maliki’s Shi’a regime.

These sectarian divisions would have allowed earlier generations

of imperial rulers to recruit local allies, but the United States simply

could not fi nd dependable Iraqi clients. As Ali Allawi, a western educated Shi’a who briefl y held several cabinet positions in the transition governments, explained: “There was no ‘American party’ in

Iraq, no people who were open advocates of an alliance with America

because it was not in the manifest interest of the country to have

such an arrangement. America’s only allies in Iraq were those who

sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage.”33

Bush offi cials never made a concerted effort to recruit more effective

intermediaries because they were afraid of what might happen if they

gave too much power to any particular faction. Indeed, it would have

been diffi cult to explain to the American public how Operation Iraqi

Freedom produced a Shi’a theocracy, a Sunni fundamentalist state,

or a revived Baathist regime rather than the promised secular liberal

democracy.

By any measure, the Bush administration’s attempt to use unilateral military force to remake Iraq was, without question, an unmitigated failure. The disastrous consequences of this semi-imperial

enterprise were so high in terms of casualties and resources that no

subjective balance sheet could conceal them. The primary function of a

formal empire has always been to extract tribute, but the CPA’s inability to restart the Iraqi oil industry meant that wealth fl owed from the

United States to Iraq to sustain the occupation. As a result, the price of

Conclusion 445

Operation Iraqi Freedom, which Rumsfeld and his planners assumed

would last only a few months and cost forty to fi fty billion dollars,

reached approximately three trillion dollars by 2008 and most likely

played a role in the ensuing global fi nancial crash. It also squandered

American hard power, as every major army and marine unit served at

least one, if not several, tours in Iraq during the Bush years. All told,

the invasion and occupation cost the American military more than

four thousand killed and thirty thousand wounded by 2008.34

The average Iraqi paid an even higher price for Operation Iraqi

Freedom. Diehard Bush partisans and their neoimperial allies tried

to excuse the deaths of thousands of civilians by claiming that the

overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of Iraq was a greater

good. CPA head Paul Bremer frequently equated the Baathists with

the Nazis and cited humanitarian anecdotes such as the suffering of

“little Khadiija,” a premature infant struggling to survive in a fortyyear-old incubator, as an example of what the American occupation

would fi x. Bremer liked to blame the media for failing to report the

“good news” in Iraq, but by any measure imaginable the American

gift of “freedom” was devastatingly expensive. Estimates vary, but it

may be that as many as half a million civilian casualties resulted from

the invasion, insurgency, and civil war.35 Furthermore, the violence

resulting from the occupation forced roughly 1.6 million people to

leave their homes to seek shelter in other parts of the country and

drove an addition 1.8 million Iraqis into foreign exile.36 It was therefore little wonder that an Iraqi journalist marked George W. Bush’s

farewell visit to Baghdad by throwing his shoes (a profound insult in

the Arab world) at the American president while shouting, “This is a

gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the

widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”

It is also easy to understand why so many Iraqis either joined the

insurgents and foreign fi ghters or refused to help the Americans root

them out. A combined public opinion poll conducted by American

and British media companies in March 2007 found that 78 percent of

Iraqis surveyed opposed the occupation, and a staggering 51 percent

believed that it was acceptable to use violence to drive the Americans out of Iraq. Additionally, almost two-thirds of the respondents

believed that the United States, rather than the al-Maliki government, actually ran the country.37 Most of these people did not take up

arms against U.S. forces, but they made the occupation unworkable.

446 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Neither the Bush administration nor its Pentagon strategists ever

imagined that these common people had the capacity to thwart their

grand plans. Many of the neoconservatives and imperial enthusiasts

who had argued so strenuously for the Iraq invasion tried to salvage

their reputations and explain this fundamental miscalculation by

blaming the Bush administration for mismanaging the invasion. And

the frustrated commanders, who found themselves trying to run the

occupation on a shoestring, can be forgiven for calling ideologically

driven administration strategists such as Paul Wolfowitz “dangerously idealistic and crack-smoking stupid.”38

Yet the fundamental reality is that Operation Iraqi Freedom was

never feasible, no matter how well or poorly it might have been

planned. Imperial methods are simply no longer viable in the transnational era. The great imperial powers of history would have been

able to isolate the Iraqi insurgents and counter their resistance with

ruthless naked force. Some even would have slaughtered anyone who

gave them support or shelter. The days of empire, however, are over.

Bush offi cials may have believed that their vast military power

gave them the means to act unilaterally, but they failed because the

world will no longer tolerate empire building, even if it is informal

and temporary. The international community turned a deaf ear to the

Bush administration’s pleas to help shoulder the costs of the occupation, but ultimately common Iraqis defeated Operation Iraqi Freedom

by refusing to cooperate with the conquering power. The American

military’s devastatingly powerful modern weapons and superbly

trained soldiers were of no value whatsoever in governing an unwilling subject population.

The American occupation of Iraq is a powerful cautionary example for those who would misuse or selectively interpret history to

further an ideological or self-aggrandizing agenda. From their comfortably safe positions of power and privilege in the White House,

the Pentagon, the halls of Congress, think tanks, editorial boards, and

academia, imperial enthusiasts advocated vital policy decisions that