DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Disaster in
Iraq, disaster at home By Peter
Van Buren
Some images remain like scars on
my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq,
where I spent a year with the Department of State
helping squander some of the US$44 billion
American taxpayers put up to "reconstruct" that
country, were horses living semi-wild among the
muck and garbage of Baghdad.
Those horses
had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein,
and seven years after their "liberation" by the
American invasion of 2003 they were still
wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban
landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for
food.
I flew home that same day, a
too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which
the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not
afford to pay teachers a
decent wage. Once-great cities were rotting away
as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those
horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I'm
left pondering these questions: Why has the United
States spent so much money and time so
disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations
abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to
crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as
"policy"?
The good war(s) With
the success of the post-World War II Marshall Plan
in Europe and the economic miracle in Japan,
rebuilding other countries gained a certain
imperial patina. Both took relatively little money
and time. The reconstruction of Germany and Japan
cost only $32 billion and $17 billion,
respectively (in 2010 dollars), in large part
because both had been highly educated,
industrialized powerhouses before their wartime
destruction.
In 2003, still tumescent with
post-9/11 rage and dreams of global glory,
anything seemed possible to the men and women of
the George W Bush administration, who would cite
the German and Japanese examples of just what the
US could do as they entered Iraq. Following what
seemed like a swift military defeat of the Taliban
in Afghanistan, the plan had gotten big and gone
long. It was nothing less than this: remake the
entire Middle East in the American image.
The country's mighty military was to sweep
through Iraq, then Syria - Marines I knew told me
personally that they were issued maps of Syria in
March 2003 - then Iran, quickly set up military
bases and garrisons ("enduring camps"), create
Washington-friendly governments, pour in American
technology and culture, bring in the crony
corporations under the rubric of "reconstruction",
privatize everything, stand up new proxy
militaries under the rubric of regime change, and
forever transform the region.
Once upon a
time, the defeated Japanese and Germans had become
allies and, better yet, consumers. Now, almost six
decades later, no one in the Bush administration
had a doubt the same would happen in Iraq - and
the Middle East would follow suit at minimal cost,
creating the greatest leap forward for a Pax
Americana since the Spanish-American War. Added
bonus: a "sea of oil".
By 2010, when I
wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the
Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People, the possibility that some level of
success might be close by still occupied some
official minds. American boots remained on the
ground in Mesopotamia and looked likely to stay on
for years in at least a few of the massive
permanent bases we had built there.
A
sort-of elected government was more or less in
place, and in the press interviews I did in
response to my book I was regularly required to
defend its thesis that reconstruction in Iraq had
failed almost totally, and that the same process
was going down in Afghanistan as well. It was
sometimes a tough sell. After all, how could we
truly fail, being plucky Americans, historically
equipped like no one else with plenty of
bootstraps and know-how and gumption.
Failure every which way Now,
it's definitive. Reconstruction in Iraq has
failed. Dismally. The US couldn't even restore the
country's electric system or give a majority of
its people potable water. The accounts of that
failure still pour out.
Choose your
favorites; here are just two recent ones of mine:
a report that a $200 million year-long State
Department police training program had shown no
results (none, nada), in part because the Iraqis
had been completely uninterested in it; and a long
official list of major reconstruction projects
uncompleted, with billions of taxpayer dollars
wasted, all carefully catalogued by the
now-defunct Special Inspector for Iraq
Reconstruction.
Failure, in fact, was the
name of the game when it came to the American
mission. Just tote up the score: the Iraqi
government is moving ever closer to Iran; the US
occupation, which built 505 bases in the country
with the thought that US troops might remain
garrisoned there for generations, ended without a
single base in US hands (none, nada); no gushers
of cheap oil leapt USA-wards nor did profits from
the above leap into the coffers of American oil
companies; and there was a net loss of US prestige
and influence across the region. And that would
just be the beginning of the list from hell.
Even former National Security Advisor and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, George W
Bush's accomplice in the invasion of Iraq and the
woman after whom Chevron Oil once named a
double-hulled oil tanker, now admits that "we
didn't understand how broken Iraq was as a society
and we tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out. And
we really should have rebuilt Iraq outside Baghdad
in. We should have worked with the tribes. We
should have worked with the provinces. We should
have had smaller projects than the large ones that
we had."
Strange that when I do media
interviews now, only two years later, nobody even
thinks to ask "Did we succeed in Iraq?" or "Will
reconstruction pay off?" The question du jour has
finally shifted to: "Why did we fail?"
Corruption and vanity
projects Why exactly did we fail to
reconstruct Iraq, and why are we failing in
Afghanistan? (Rajiv Chandrasekaran's new book,
Little America: The War Within the War for
Afghanistan, is the Afghan version of We Meant
Well in detailing the catastrophic outcomes of
reconstruction in that never-ending war.)
No doubt more books, and not a few theses,
will be written, noting the massive corruption,
the overkill of pouring billions of dollars into
poor, occupied countries, the disorganization
behind the effort, the pointlessly self-serving
vanity projects - Internet classes in towns
without electricity - and the abysmal quality of
the greedy contractors, on-the-make corporations,
and lame bureaucrats sent in to do the job.
Serious lessons will be extracted,
inevitable comparisons will be made to post-World
War II Germany and Japan and think tanks will
sprout like mushrooms on rotted wood to try to map
out how to do it better next time.
For the
near term a reluctant acknowledgment of our
failing economy may keep the US out of major
reconstruction efforts abroad. Robert Gates, who
succeeded Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, told a
group of West Point cadets that "any future
defense secretary who advises the president to
again send a big American land army into Asia or
into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his
head examined', as General MacArthur so delicately
put it." Still, the desire to remake other
countries - could Syria be next? - hovers in the
background of American foreign policy, just
waiting for the chance to rise again.
The
standard theme of counterinsurgency theory (COIN
in the trade) is "terrorists take advantage of
hunger and poverty". Foreigners building stuff is,
of course, the answer, if only we could get it
right. Such is part of the justification for the
onrushing militarization of Africa, which carries
with it a reconstruction component (even if on a
desperately reduced scale, thanks to the
tightening finances of the moment). There are few
historical examples of COIN ever really working
and many in which failed, but the idea is too
attractive and its support industry too well
established for it to simply go away.
Why reconstruction at all? Then
there's that other why question: Why, in our zeal
to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, we never
considered spending a fraction as much to rebuild
Detroit, New Orleans, or Cleveland (projects that,
unlike Afghanistan and Iraq in their heyday, have
never enjoyed widespread support)?
I use
the term "reconstruction" for convenience, but it
is important to understand what the US means by
it. Once corruption and pure greed are strained
out (most projects in Iraq and Afghanistan were
simply vehicles for contractors to suck money out
of the government) and the vanity projects crossed
off (building things and naming them after the
sitting ambassador was a popular suck-up
technique), what's left is our desire for them to
be like us.
While, dollar-for-dollar,
corruption and contractor greed account for almost
all the money wasted, the idea that, deep down, we
want the people we conquer to become mini-versions
of us accounts for the rest of the drive and
motivation.
We want them to consume things
as a lifestyle, s*** in nice sewer systems, and
send everyone to schools where, thanks to the new
textbooks we've sponsored, they'll learn more
about ... us. This explains why we funded
pastry-making classes to try to turn Iraqi women
into small-business owners, why an obsession with
holding mediagenic elections in Iraq smothered
nascent grassroots democracy (remember all those
images of purple fingers?), why displacing family
farms by introducing large-scale agribusiness
seemed so important, and so forth.
By
becoming versions of us, the people we conquer
would, in our eyes, redeem themselves from being
our enemies. Like a perverse view of rape,
reconstruction, if it ever worked, would almost
make it appear that they wanted to be violated by
the American military so as to benefit from being
rebuilt in the American fashion. From Washington's
point of view, there's really no question here, no
"why" at all. Who, after all, wouldn't want to be
us? And that, in turn, justifies everything. Think
of it as an up-to-date take on that classic line
from Vietnam, "It became necessary to destroy the
town to save it."
Americans have always
worn their imperialism uncomfortably, even when
pursuing it robustly. The British were happy to
carve out little green enclaves of home, and to
tame - brutally, if necessary - the people they
conquered. The United States is different, maybe
because of the lip service politicians need to pay
to our founding ideals of democracy and free
choice.
We're not content merely to tame
people; we want to change them, too, and make them
want it as well. Fundamentalist Muslims will send
their girls to school, a society dominated by
religion will embrace consumerism, and age-old
tribal leaders will give way to (US-friendly,
media-savvy) politicians, even while we grow our
archipelago of military bases and our corporations
make out like bandits. It's our way of reconciling
Freedom and Empire, the American Way. Only
problem: it doesn't work. Not for a second. Not at
all. Nothing. Nada.
From this point of
view, of course, not spending "reconstruction"
money at home makes perfect sense. Detroit, et al,
already are us. Free choice is in play, as
citizens of those cities "choose" not to get an
education and "choose" to allow their
infrastructure to fade.
From an imperial
point of view it makes perfectly good sense.
Erecting a coed schoolhouse in Kandahar or a new
sewer system in Fallujah offers so many more
possibilities to enhance empire. The home front is
old news, with growth limited only to reviving a
status quo at huge cost.
Once it becomes
clear that reconstruction is for us, not them, its
purpose to enrich our contractors, fuel our
bureaucrats' vanity, and most importantly, justify
our imperial actions, why it fails becomes a
no-brainer. It has to fail (not that we really
care). They don't want to be us. They have been
them for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They
may welcome medicines that will save their
children's lives, but hate the culture that the US
slipstreams in like an inoculation with them.
Failure in the strict sense of the word is
not necessarily a problem for Washington. Our
purpose is served by the appearance of
reconstructing. We need to tell ourselves we
tried, and those (dark, dirty, uneducated, Muslim,
terrorist, heathen) people we just ran over with a
tank actually screwed this up. And OK, sure, if a
few well-connected contractors profit along the
way, more power to them.
Here's the bottom
line: a nation spends its resources on what's
important to it. Failed reconstruction elsewhere
turns out to be more important to us than
successful reconstruction here at home. Such is
the American way of empire.
Peter
Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service
Officer at the State Department, spent a year in
Iraq leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
Now in Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he
writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and US
diplomacy at his blog, We Meant
Well. Following the publication of his book
We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the
Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People(The
American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books) in
2011, the Department of State began termination
proceedings, reassigning him to a make-work
position and stripping him of his security
clearance and diplomatic credentials. Through the
efforts of the Government Accountability Project
and the ACLU, Van Buren will instead retire from
the State Department with his full benefits of
service in September. We Meant Well is just
now being published in paperback. Van Buren is
currently working on a second book about the
decline of the blue-collar middle class in
America.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
