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.
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