Confronting the closed circle: reflections on the war in Iraq.(Defence)

IN 1989 THE BRITISH WRITER and war correspondent David Pryce-Jones wrote a celebrated study of the Middle East entitled The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. In this book, Pryce-Jones demonstrated how the Arab world had chosen to reject the open-society model of social and political modernity. He showed how Arab politics and culture remain firmly based upon the collectivity of tribe, kin and religious affiliation--a situation which favours authoritarian rule by ethnic oligarchies--rather than liberal democratic rule by parliaments. Political violence and oppression, wrote Pryce-Jones, were endemic realities throughout the Arab world, with government often based upon "despotism tempered by assassination".

In Pryce-Jones's view, the combination of despotism with the collective power of tribe, clan and family made Arab culture a "closed circle" into which modern ideas of liberal democracy and civic society could barely penetrate. Even Islam, the greatest force for social cohesion and identity in the Arab world, contributed to the closed circle by being divided between different Sunni and Shi'a religious traditions.

Pryce-Jones was not alone in his pessimistic assessment of Arab political culture. Other writers such as Rafael Patai, Peter Mansfield, Albert Hourani and Bernard Lewis have pointed out how Arab pride in its great civilisation of the medieval era and the current patriarchal, tribal and collective features of Arab culture have, in combination, created a long and deep resistance to modern Western political ideas. Indeed, a central feature of Rafael Patai's classic 1976 study, The Arab Mind, is the bitter struggle by the Arab world against the psychology of Westernisation. A 2002 reissue of Patai's book contains a foreword by the American Arabist, Norvell B. De Atkine, in which an Arab intellectual tells a Western professor: "we want your televisions but not your programs, your VCRs but not your movies". Patai's belief that most Arab countries reject, and will continue to reject, a Western culture which they see as a sinister blend of secularism and materialism--both of which are regarded as destructive to Islamic social order and religious tradition--is as valid today as it was in 1976. In short, the Arab world has always set its closed circle against the West's open society.

It is against the "closed circle" of Arab culture and its fear of the "sinister West" that we must assess the American-led Coalition's experience in Iraq over the past four years. What began as a liberal democratic crusade by the Bush White House in early 2003 to remake Iraq as an open society that would serve as a bastion against the rise of radical political Islamism in the Middle East has collided with the harsh realities of Arab political culture. The three-week "shock and awe" blitzkrieg of Operation Iraqi Freedom led by General Tommy Franks that swept away the regime of Saddam Hussein has culminated not in a stable new democracy but in insurgency, communal violence and bitter sectarianism.

The present struggle in Iraq reconfirms the truth that, while the West is invincible in high-technology conventional warfare, it remains uniquely vulnerable in unconventional conflict--a realm where the intangibles of willpower, public opinion and psychological strength count as much as military hardware. In Iraq, in 2007, the US-led Coalition faces a grave crisis both of prestige and of political perception. Outright military victory is not possible in today's Iraq, for the mission at hand is one of state-building and stability operations. This is a task not of swift "shock and awe" but of grit, willpower and patience over a long period.

Under these conditions, any precipitate Coalition strategic withdrawal from Iraq would be nothing short of catastrophic, for it will fulfil Osama bin Laden's prophecy that the Americans, for all their armed might, can be defeated and that the West has no stomach for a protracted struggle. As Lee Kwan Yew, the former Singaporean Prime Minister, warned in Washington recently, "if the United States leaves Iraq prematurely, jihadists everywhere will be emboldened to take the battle to Washington and its friends and allies. Having defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq, they will believe that they can change the world."

This article seeks to analyse how it is that Arab Iraq's closed circle has seemingly ensnared America's open-society model of democratic transformation into a deadly asymmetric struggle whose outcome is deeply uncertain. Four areas are examined. First, the article considers briefly the "closed circle" character of Iraqi society and how this character predisposed Iraq to factional violence after the fall of the Ba'athist regime in 2003. Second, the extraordinary absence of a "Phase IV" plan in American postwar strategic planning is assessed--an absence that created a fatal political vacuum that facilitated the rise of an Iraqi insurgency. Third, US progress in developing a counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq is analysed with the focus on how this strategy has had to contend with multiple second-front challenges emanating from the rise of sectarianism. Finally, this essay snapshots the January 2007 US "surge strategy" announced by President George W. Bush and considers the political ...