Former US Ambassador warns of failed policies in Middle East

Ambassador Chas Freeman delivered a speech at the recent annual conference of the National Council on US-Arab Relations.

...We all know that events in the Holy Land have an impact far beyond it. American sympathy for Israel and kinship with Jewish settlers assure that Jewish deaths there arouse anti-Arab and anti-Muslim passions here, even as the toll on Palestinians is seldom, if ever, mentioned. But, among the world’s 340 million Arabs and 1.6 billion Muslims, all eyes are on the resistance of Palestinians to continuing ethnic cleansing and the American subsidies and political support for Israel that facilitate their suffering. The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of that criminal assault on the United States was to focus "the American people...on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people...”

The occupation and attempted pacification of other Muslim lands like Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the shocking hate speech about Islam that now pervades American politics lend credence to deepening Muslim perception of an escalating U.S. crusade against Islam and its believers...

Middle East Policy Council

Failed Interventions and What They Teach Remarks to the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations

Chas W. Freeman, Jr., US Foreign Service (Ret.)
October 21, 2010 | Washington, DC

I feel honored to have been asked to open this conference on U.S.-Arab relations and America’s ties with the broader Middle East. But I confess that, as an American, the results of U.S. policies in the Middle East remind me of the T-shirt someone once gave me. It said: “Sinatra is dead. Elvis is dead. And me, I don’t feel so good.” The Middle East is a constant reminder that a clear conscience is usually a sign of either a faulty memory or a severe case of arrogant amorality. It is not a badge of innocence. These days, we meticulously tally our own battlefield dead; we do not count the numbers of foreigners who perish at our hands or those of our allies. Yet each death is a tragedy that extinguishes one soul, wounds others, and diminishes the world. If we do not grieve for those we slay, we may justly be charged with inhumanity. If we cannot understand the consequences for ourselves of the manner in which they died, we are surely guilty of strategic ineptitude.

All that is required to be hated is to do something hateful. Apparent indifference to the pain and humiliation one has inflicted further outrages its victims, their families, and their friends. As the Golden Rule, which is common — in one phrasing or another — to all religions, implicitly warns, moral blindness is contagious. That is why warring parties engaged in tit for tat come in time to resemble each other rather than to sharpen their differences. I want to speak to you today about three things. First, why militarized U.S. policies and the actions we are taking pursuant to them in the broader Middle East risk provoking terrorist retaliation against the United States and its citizens. Second, why our military and quasi-diplomatic interventions in the region have failed or are failing. And, third, how our current policy course is changing us for the worse without changing the Arab and Islamic worlds for the better. I will end with a thought or two on the prospects for changed policies that could produce better results. War is not the spectator sport that the fans who watch it here on television imagine. Nor is it the “cakewalk” that its armchair advocates like to suggest it could be. War is traumatic for all its participants. Recent experience suggests that 30 percent of troops develop serious mental health problems that dog them after they leave the battlefield. But what of the peoples soldiers seek to punish or pacify? To understand the hatreds war unleashes and its lasting psychological and political consequences, one has only to translate foreign casualty figures into terms we Americans can relate to. You can do this by imagining that the same percentages of Americans might die or suffer injury as foreigners have. Then think about the impact that level of physical and moral insult would have on us.

Consider, for example, the two sides of the Israel-Palestine struggle. So far in this century — since September 29, 2000, when Ariel Sharon marched into Al Aqsa and ignited the Intifada of that name — about 850 Israeli Jews have died at
the hands of Palestinians, 125 or so of them children. In proportion to population, that’s equivalent to 45,000 dead Americans, including about 6,800 children. It’s a level of mayhem we Americans cannot begin to understand. But, over the same period, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 6,600 or so Palestinians, at least 1,315 of whom were children. In American terms, that’s equivalent to 460,000 U.S. dead, including 95,000 children. Meanwhile, the American equivalent of almost 500,000 Israelis and 2.9 million Palestinians have been injured. To put it mildly, the human experiences these figures enumerate are not conducive to peace or goodwill among men and women in the Holy Land or anywhere with emotional ties to them.

We all know that events in the Holy Land have an impact far beyond it. American sympathy for Israel and kinship with Jewish settlers assure that Jewish deaths there arouse anti-Arab and anti-Muslim passions here, even as the toll on Palestinians is seldom, if ever, mentioned. But, among the world’s 340 million Arabs and 1.6 billion Muslims, all eyes are on the resistance of Palestinians to continuing ethnic cleansing and the American subsidies and political support for Israel that facilitate their suffering. The chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a primary purpose of that criminal assault on the United States was to focus "the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people. . .” The occupation and attempted pacification of other Muslim lands like Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the shocking hate speech about Islam that now pervades American politics lend credence to deepening Muslim perception of an escalating U.S. crusade against Islam and its believers.

No one knows how many Iraqis have died as a direct or indirect result of the U.S. invasion and the anarchy that followed it. Estimates range between a low of something over 100,000 to a high of well over 1 million. Translated to American proportions, that equates to somewhere between 1 and 13 million dead Americans. Over 2.25 million Iraqis fled to neighboring countries to escape this bloodbath. Only 5 percent have returned. An equal number sought temporary refuge inside Iraq. Most of them also remain displaced. In our terms, this equals a flight to Canada and Mexico of 24 million Americans, with another 24 million still here but homeless. I think you will agree that, had this kind of thing happened to Americans, religious scruples would not deter many of us from seeking revenge and engaging in reprisals against whoever had done it to us. The numbers in Afghanistan aren’t quite as frightful but they make the same point.

We’re accumulating a critical mass of enemies with personal as well as religious and nationalistic reasons to seek retribution against us. As our violence against foreign civilians has escalated, our enemies have multiplied. The logic of this progression is best understood anecdotally. I am grateful to Bruce Fein (whom some of you may know as a noted constitutional scholar here in Washington) for calling attention to the colloquy of convicted Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad with United States District Judge Miriam Cederbaum. She challenged Shahzad's self-description as a ‘Muslim soldier’ because his contemplated violence targeted civilians, "Did you look around to see who they were?," she asked. "Well, the people select the government," Shahzad retorted. "We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit ..." Judge Cedarbaum interrupted: "Including the children?" Shahzad countered: "Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims." Later, he added: "I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die." No amount of public diplomacy, no matter how cleverly conducted, can prevail over the bitterness of personal and collective experience. The only way to reverse trends supporting anti-American violence by the aggrieved is to reverse the policies that feed it.

We are now a nation with unmatched military capabilities. Perhaps that is why we are the only country in the world to have proclaimed that our conflict with terrorists a “war” or to have dismissed civilian victims of our violence as “collateral damage.” Few allies joined us in Iraq. Those that joined us in Afghanistan did so to demonstrate their solidarity with us, not because they see the piecemeal pacification of the Muslim world as the answer to the extremist non-state actors in its midst. They seem to know, even if we do not, that terrorism is a tactic, not a cause against which one can wage war. Weapons are tools with which to change men’s minds, but the inappropriate use of them can entrench animosity and justify reprisal against the citizens of the nations that wield them. No other people has so powerful a military establishment that it could even begin to persuade itself, as many Americans have, that guns can cure grudges or missiles erase militancy.

If you view the world through a bombsight, everything looks like a target. Yet the lesson of 9/11 is that if you drop bombs on enough people — even peoples with no air forces — the most offended amongst them will do their best to bomb you back. Thus our destabilization of places remote from our shores has already blown back to challenge our own domestic tranquility. There is no reason to doubt that it could do so again. Then, too, one of the main lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are some problems for which invasion and occupation are inappropriate and ineffective responses. Far from demonstrating the irresistible might of the United States, as their neo-conservative champions intended, these wars have revealed the considerable limits of American power.

As a case in point, the use of force in Iraq has neither shaped that country to our will nor vindicated our values. We have so far given 4,500 American lives, suffered the maiming of 32,000 American bodies, accepted the disordering of the minds of tens of thousands of other young Americans, and spent at least $900 billion in Iraq. Our one clear achievement — the removal from power of Saddam Hussein — culminated in a tragicomic trial and execution that mocked rather than celebrated the rule of law. We will leave behind a traumatized society, brutalized by anarchy, sectarian violence, and terrorism spawned by resentment of foreign occupation. Iraq’s constitutional order, prospects for domestic tranquility, relations with its neighbors, and international orientation all remain in doubt.

The Iranian-influenced, Arab Shiite-dominated regime we brought to power in Baghdad is — for now, at least — at peace with Iraq’s Kurds. But this regime has not shown that it can coexist peacefully with the country’s Sunni Arab minority. More than half a year after national elections, no new government has been formed. Many in the region suspect that the army we Americans are training and equipping may in time emerge, like its predecessors, as the principal institution of government in Iraq as well as the violent enforcer of its national unity under Shiite Arab majority rule. Will Iraq once again balance Iran or will it collude with it? We do not know. What does seem clear is that neither the Iraqi nor the American people will remember Iraq’s close encounter with the United States proudly or fondly. The years to come are more likely to produce intermittent reminders of Iraq’s agonies and America’s witlessness as this century began than to furnish reasons for nostalgia about shared experience. Nor is the U.S. record in Iraq of much value to the formulation of campaign plans for pacifying other countries. The “surge” of more troops into Iraq is now presented by some as a model for plucking impasse from the maw of military disgrace in Afghanistan too. But that “success,” such as it was, cannot be translated to Afghanistan. The concentration of U.S. forces in Baghdad froze the pattern of sectarian urban enclaves that had emerged from four years of savage confessional cleansing. It allowed warring Iraqi religious groups to barricade the Baghdad neighborhoods into which they had retreated. This both reduced the level of mayhem and fixed sectarian divisions in place. But Afghanistan cannot be stabilized by such religious apartheid, which is irrelevant to it. Afghan divisions have always been primarily rural, ethnic, and regional, rather than confessional. In parts of Iraq, a surge of U.S. cash helped Iraq’s conservative Sunni tribesmen to recognize the U.S. Marines as allies against the murderous, foreign jihadis in their midst. Tribes and localities in Afghanistan are also fond of cash, but the context is very different. The foreign jihadis who were in Afghanistan have withdrawn to neighboring Pakistan, and no one wants or expects them to return. The Taliban are Afghans and traditionalists, not foreigners or radicals. Afghanistan has always defined itself as a confederation of tribes and localities that cooperate for limited purposes while resisting central or foreign control. The only alien presence in Afghanistan at present is U.S. and NATO forces and associated aid agencies and NGOs. But they are there to impose allegiance to Kabul and to challenge tribal customs, not to make common cause with the tribal and local authorities on these matters. Many at the local level see their presence as a nuisance that attracts unwanted attention from home-grown, not foreign guerrillas, and that disturbs, not preserves, the peace.

Counterinsurgency doctrine is an implausible answer to the situation in Afghanistan. It was developed to defend post-colonial governments in newly independent states modeled on those of their erstwhile colonial masters. It was never intended to emulate colonialism by building such states in traditional societies that lack and don’t much want them. It presumes that foreign forces are assisting a national government to defeat rebels attempting to overthrow it or secede from it. In Afghanistan, the national government is a barely established creature of foreign intervention that is attempting to extend central authority in unprecedented ways. The Karzai regime has been happy to leave the task of imposing its rule on the country at large to Americans and other foreigners, while profiting as best it can from our efforts. By all accounts, it hasn’t done at all badly at such profiteering.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. Its nearly thirty million people have a GDP of about $10 billion. Over the past nine years, we have put $350 billion into making war there, and spent another $54 billion on developing the place. Not surprisingly, some Afghans, including not a few in positions of authority, have seen no reason to restrain their enthusiasm about the opportunities for rake-offs this level of spending sustains. Nine years after it began, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has strayed far from its original objectives of suppressing al Qa`ida and punishing the Taliban to deter them from ever again accommodating anti-American “terrorists with global reach.” Our war now seems to be mostly about suppressing reactionary Islam and securing some measure of deference for feminist values. In practice, our primary enemy is no longer al Qa`ida but the Taliban and other Islamists.