Learning from History: The Iran Deal and the Iraq War

I have said previously that I wasn't interested in blogging about the agreement negotiated between Iran and the coalition of international powers regarding Iran's nuclear program. I still think that what I said then was largely true - we're not having a debate or a discussion about the agreement, we're simply seeing a lot of tribal flag-waving and fear-mongering by people who, consciously or otherwise, have an identity stake in the game. Dispassionate analysis is hard to come by.

Which is why we should be paying special attention in this case to those people for whom dispassionate analysis is their stock in trade. Some members of Congress may not like it, but there really is scientific work done around issues of international relations and conflict between nations. A lot of very smart people have spent the past several decades building a real base of knowledge about how conflict, power, and arms control work. They have done so, to a large degree, under the rules of science, including falsifiability and replicability of hypotheses and peer review. These are not political hacks, nor are they paid large sums of money for their conclusions.

So what are these people saying? Increasingly, the voices of scholars of international conflict are repeating the same points, to whit: the "Iran nuclear deal" is the best that can be achieved and is better than all of the alternatives. David Lake of UCSD has chimed in on this, as has Steve Saideman. Pete Trumbore found and helped broadcast an excellent piece by one of the deans of the field, Graham Allison. A number of prominent scholars have weighed in on Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog.

All of this work, of course, is being dismissed by those who have an ideological, political, or identity reason to reject the deal. Most of it, in fact, isn't even being read by critics, despite being readily accessible.

Where have we seen this story before? Shortly after the start of the Iraq war, 850 experts signed an open letter predicting that the war would be a disaster, one of the worst mistakes of American foreign policy in decades. That list included many of the most prominent names in the field, including David Lake, David Laitin, Charles Kupchan, Louis Kriesberg, John Mueller, and many more. Many of these had said the same thing before the war started.

We now know, of course, that they were right. The whole thing was a disaster, ill-conceived from the start and horrendously executed. It is no stretch at all to draw a straight line from that decision to the creation and rise of the Islamic State phenomenon we see today. The Bush Administration broke the Middle East, and we will be dealing with the consequences of that decision for decades to come.

So perhaps, before we rush to a new war with Iran (which is clearly what some of the negotiated agreement's critics want), we should stop and think for a moment. We've seen this tune before. We don't have to blunder into yet another crisis blindly. There is real expertise we can turn to. I have no expectation that the blowhards on TV and Capitol Hill will do so. But maybe some of us ordinary Americans might.

Toxic Identities: The Corrosive Effects of Tribal Identities and Enemy Thinking

Imagine a land in which two groups exist side by side. They don't mix much and increasingly segregate themselves and live among their own kind. Each has a narrative about the evil of the other group, how the other is out to destroy everything worth fighting for, and how there can be no real co-existence. They may inhabit the same space, but they are worlds apart.

Sound familiar? This could describe the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Or between eastern and western Ukrainians. Or Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

But it's also here in the United States.

True, we don't have people shooting each other in the streets. And the majority of Americans don't really think this way. But there are some among us who do - members of our own society who have drawn their own identities in so extreme a fashion that their rhetoric looks a lot like Hamas, or the rebels in Donetsk, or the leaders of the Islamic State.

Who are these Americans? They exist on various ends of the ideological spectrum. But today the loudest, most vocal, and most numerous are hijacking the title of "Conservative". And they are becoming increasingly shrill.

To be clear, the majority of Americans who identify themselves as conservatives don't think this way. But there is a minority - a splinter group, if you will - who are working hard to hijack the label. And like all revolutionaries, they will turn on their own kind as readily as on their ideological enemies.

This is an identity battle fought to a large degree in social media, the great public conversation of our day. Here are a couple of recently-circulated examples:

The message here isn't subtle. For these to make any sense at all, you have to believe that there are "Conservatives" and "Liberals" in the same way that there are "Israelis" and "Palestinians", or "Sunnis" and "Shiites" - that is, that these are essentially fixed groups with nothing in common. Both memes are broadly and vaguely disparaging, the latter in the kind of screaming-tantrum-at-the-top-of-your-lungs sort of way. Really, I'm surprised there isn't a Hitler reference in there somewhere.

If you happen to identify as a Conservative who thinks along these lines, and you've read this far, your reaction might be, "Hey, Liberals do this too! Why aren't you picking on them, you commie?" Recognize that "the other guy does it too" is the defense of the three year old who knows he's wrong. Grow up.

I don't much care about whether people hold conservative or liberal political ideas. I have found many times that when people engage in real dialogue, they often find that they have far more in common than otherwise. And I know many folks of various stripes (but of late, especially conservatives) who have abandoned politics because of precisely this kind of rhetoric.

We are, or ought to be, better than this. We are not Palestine, Ukraine, or Iraq. One of the great contributions of the United States to the world in the last 200 years is the ongoing experiment, however fitful and imperfect, in creating a national identity out of so many different kinds of people. The folks who spread the memes above apparently want to undo all of that, and return to some kind of "purer" politics where only they and their ilk are in charge. When they see "E Pluribus Unum" perhaps they think it means "I'm right, you're wrong".

Whether you engage in this kind of rhetoric in the name of Conservatism or Communism is immaterial. It is the one kind of politics that is fundamentally un-American.

So if you're passing this kind of nonsense unchallenged (or even approvingly) on social media, please stop. You are neither better nor worse than your fellow Americans. And "they" are not the Enemy. Walt Kelly was right - we have met the enemy, and He is Us.

Obligatory Iraq Redux

With the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the US war in Iraq, many of my colleagues have been looking back at the last ten years and taking stock. My friend and colleague Steve Saideman does an excellent job of reconstructing his own thoughts and then examining them, so naturally I have to try to follow suit.

In that spirit, I went about trying to figure out what I actually thought (and wrote) at the time, and how well it did or didn't hold up. Like Steve, I didn't have a blog then, so there's no ready-made archive of stuff I wrote. I did oppose the war, which can be found on the record if you look hard enough - but that's not much of a stretch, since pretty much all IR scholars not being paid by the Bush administration felt the same way.

Here's a piece typical of what I wrote at the time - an op-ed that appeared in USA Today, titled "US Won't Get What It Wants".

That piece, and the notes from various public talks I gave at the time, tended to focus on three things:

• How many US soldiers will die? At the time, we were not that far removed from "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia and it was reasonable to suspect that any administration would suffer if there were high US casualties. This turned out not to be the case - Bush won re-election in 2004 (by a narrow margin, it's true) despite a war that had by voting time turned substantially south and was producing significant numbers of US casualties. Apparently, getting American soldiers killed doesn't extract much of a political price, at least for a Republican president.

• How many Iraqi civilians will die? This was an issue, I argued, not because Americans care (they didn't and don't) but because high Arab casualties would be the best recruitment drive al-Qaeda could want. The fear here was that high Iraqi casualties would generate greater sympathy for anti-American terrorists, leading to more anti-American terrorist attacks. This also turns out not so much to be true in the long run, as factions within Iraq have been far more interested in turning violence against each other than against, say, New Yorkers. That's not to say that there wasn't an increase in anti-American sentiment - but it was already pretty high before the invasion, so the increase may have been marginal. These days, people in the region (including in Iraq) have other issues to contend with; a substantial US withdrawal makes it harder to blame their ongoing problems on us. And the number and level of terrorist attacks since 9/11 has been pretty much in keeping with pre-9/11 history: few and far between, and not amounting to much on a strategic level.

• What will the ultimate outcome in Iraq be? The Bush administration argued that Iraq would be "freed" and democratized, and that a free & democratic Iraq would do more good for US interests than anything else we could possibly do in the region. I argued (see the above piece) that a democratic and stable Iraq was an extremely unlikely scenario, and that resources put towards such an end (if that were the goal) were likely to be wasted. This one I think I got pretty well on target: 10 years on there still isn't a stable government, there are still massive problems with refugees, human trafficking, a ruined infrastructure, and no more than an uneasy detente between the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis. Separatism in the north is still a very real and viable concern, and control over the oilfields still hasn't been clearly established. In short, Iraq is a mess and is likely to stay that way (with varying levels of violence and instability) for a while.

So after 10 years, the best summary I can suggest is this: our worst fears haven't been realized (massive new waves of anti-American terrorism), but it's hard to argue that the expenditure of resources (lives and money) was worth it (no WMD, no democracy in Iraq). We've learned some things about the US public (more casualty-acceptant than many thought; discussions of a "post-Vietnam politics" may have to give way to a "post-post-Vietnam politics"). And apparently, Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule" (You Break It, You Bought It) doesn't really work - 10 years on, Iraq is still decidedly broken but we're going to walk away anyway.

The real test of the future effects of all of this will be ... when? In future elections, will aggressive neo-conservatism play well? (probably not) Will this engender some caution in US foreign policy? Probably - but then, Iraq was an outlier, so perhaps what we will see is simply reversion to the mean. If we've buried the most aggressive neo-con ideas politically, that would be a good thing, though it hurts to have paid so much for the lesson.