When we met for coffee, Makiya didn’t know this yet. But there was talk in the air. He had just spoken at a conference at Brandeis University on the Islamic world and the West after September 11. At the conference, Makiya raised the possibility of regime change in Iraq, only to be told by the other participants that the subject was out of bounds. The consensus among “progressive” intellectuals was also set: War with Iraq was unspeakable. “They wouldn’t let me talk about it,” Makiya said in his mild, nervous way. This bewildered rather than angered him. He seemed slightly breathless, as if he were suppressing excitement. Something was happening. The lonely dream he’d pursued for so many years in Cambridge was suddenly converging with history. Such chances did not occur often in life, and Makiya was determined to make the most of this one. He was already in touch with members of the administration, in the vice president’s office and the Pentagon. They were receptive to his talk about democracy in Iraq.
“There’s a kind of relationship between the United States and Iraq that’s become incestuous, incestuous,” Makiya said to me once during that decisive year 2002. “For eleven years it’s grown. A country of 250 million, the only superpower in the world, and this tin-pot little dictatorship by comparison (Iraq is no Germany), this nothing little country by contrast, is essentially at the center of world politics. It’s totally disproportionate. It’s completely bizarre. And they’re locked in this embrace that the first Gulf War created, and therefore it becomes natural for Iraqis now to see in the resolution of this incestuous relationship a future.”
* * *
WHY DID THE UNITED STATES invade Iraq? It still isn’t possible to be sure—and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richard Haass said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen—what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the Rashomon of wars.
The answer has something to do with September 11. But what, exactly?
The debate over Iraq began with the wounds of the terror attacks still open. Through the winter of 2002 into spring, while the blasted graveyard of city blocks downtown was cleared by excavation crews working twenty-four hours a day, I took part in endless conversations about how the world had and hadn’t changed. After years of trivial, bitterly partisan politics, September 11 had reopened large questions in a way that was both confusing and liberating. A natural response would be to fall back into familiar postures, and many people in America did this. But extraordinary times called for new thinking. Searching for a compass through the era just begun, I was drawn to people who thought boldly.
One of them was the writer Paul Berman, who was working out a theory about what was now being called the war on terrorism. Some of his thinking took place aloud in the midnight hour over food and drink at a bistro in the Brooklyn neighborhood where we both lived. Berman, in his early fifties, lived alone in a walk-up apartment that was strewn with back issues of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review and volumes of French literature and philosophy in the original. He lived above a Palestinian grocery store half a block from Atlantic Avenue, where there was an established Middle Eastern community, with Syrian antiques shops and Yemeni restaurants and bookstores that carried Arabic literature, including the works of some of the great Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. After September 11, Berman explored the neighborhood bookstores and began to read the works of Sayyid Qutb, the leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who was hanged by Nasser in 1966. Qutb’s writings about Islam, the West, and global jihad inspired other Islamist thinkers, such as the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, who in turn inspired Osama bin Laden. (In the late eighties the U.S. headquarters of al-Qaeda’s predecessor organization, the Afghan Service Bureau, occupied a storefront at 566 Atlantic Avenue, next to a Moroccan textile shop; until they closed down after September 11, there were also radical mosques on Atlantic Avenue that followed the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad, who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to bomb New York’s bridges and tunnels.)
Qutb’s ideas confirmed the theory that Berman had begun to develop, which was this: The young Arab men who had steered those four airplanes to apocalyptic death were not products of an alien world. They weren’t driven by Muslim tradition, or Third World poverty, or the clash of civilizations, or Western imperialism. They were modern, and the ideology that held them and millions of others across the Islamic world in its ecstatic grip had been produced by the modern world—in fact, by the West. It was the same nihilistic fantasy of revolutionary power and mass slaughter that, in the last century, drove Germans and Italians and Spaniards and Russians (and millions of others across the world) to similar acts of apocalyptic death. This ideology had a name: totalitarianism. Its great explainers were Orwell, Camus, Koestler, Arendt, Solzhenitsyn. In Europe its feverish mood had long since broken by 1989, but in the Islamic world, where modernity failed successive generations, the sickness had been spreading. Berman was saying that the Islamist movement is one that Westerners should be able to recognize—except when they are so blinded by a wishful belief in rationality that only an event on the scale of September 11 alerts them to its existence. Even then, for some, the urge not to see remains overpowering.
Totalitarianism is a revolt against liberalism. And the answer to it is liberalism—liberal ideas (Berman never ceased to talk about the war of ideas) but also liberalism armed, liberalism without the dream of paradise. Berman was a member of the generation of 1968, and he still spoke fondly of his comrades in the tiny anarcho-syndicalist movement. But by 1989 he had made his peace with liberalism, and his politics had grown close to that of certain liberals during the early Cold War—that is, antitotalitarian and prodemocratic. In the decade after the revolutions of 1989, the clarity of this politics faded a bit. The humanitarian disasters in Africa, the skirmishes in the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq—these were hard to understand in terms of the Hegelian movement of history toward human freedom. Even the wars of Serb fascism felt like aftershocks, radiating outward from the last place in Europe that hadn’t received the news. After September 11, Berman (and others, among liberals and leftists as well as on the right) found his way back into the twentieth century, the age of ideology and the tremendous intellectual excitement it stirred up. Suddenly all the books of modern history and politics crammed into Berman’s apartment sprang back to life on their shelves or in their stacks on the floor—along with new ones, by the likes of Sayyid Qutb.
Berman set about his project with a fierce and solitary intensity. There must have been weeks on end when he never emerged from his apartment. He called it “war duty”—after all, New York had become a front line. Berman believed strenuously that it was the job of intellectuals to explain and mend the rent that had just been made in the fabric of our world. For him, the answer lay in literature and philosophy as much as politics, let alone policy. One night, upon leaving his post long enough to share a late meal at the bistro, he announced, “I’ve found a master text!” It was Camus’ The Rebel, subtitled An Essay on Man in Revolt. Nihilistic terror was nothing new; the hijackers went back to the French Revolution. “Here, murder and suicide are two sides of the same system,” Camus wrote, giving Berman an epigraph. His conversation those nights had the quality of annoying and yet undeniably thrilling excess under the pressure of a justifiable obsession. He almost visibly trembled with his discoveries, though the work was hard, even discouraging, and Berman was personally given to grim self-assessment. He would order his cheeseburger and red wine (the waitresses all knew him) and, drumming a finger on the table to a rhythm only he could hear (he played jazz viola), or wagging the same finger in the air for emphasis, he would begin an account of Victor Hugo’s plays and the bombings of the late ni
neteenth-century Russian nihilists, which on the inexorable curve of Berman’s thinking would lead us forward to the most recent suicide attacks in Jerusalem and bin Laden’s latest communiqué from the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I listened, occasionally asking a skeptical question, admiring the dedication of his project (who else was really trying to figure this stuff out?), mostly sympathizing—but also worrying about Berman’s tendency toward sweeping, distinction-erasing intellectual moves. What, for example, did his theory have to do with Iraq?
It wasn’t hard to see that the Arab Baath Socialist Party in Baghdad was totalitarian. Makiya had shown this in his Republic of Fear. The regime held power through a cult of leader worship, pervasive terror created by endless acts of astonishing violence against its own citizens, overlapping and ubiquitous security agencies, continuous wars of aggression, and a climate of conspiratorial thinking and paranoia toward the Zionist and imperialist enemies. Saddam seemed to have modeled his regime on Orwell’s 1984, right down to Big Brother’s mustache. His hero was Stalin, whom Saddam, more than any other of the world’s dictators, resembled. The founder of the Baath Party in Damascus in the early 1940s, Michel Aflaq (whose tomb is in Baghdad), was deeply influenced by Nazi ideology. But Baathism—like its European progenitors—was nominally secular. It was hostile to Islamist regimes and ideologies. It was also visibly in decay. The days of its ability to move masses of people to frenzies of hatred and violence were over. Then why go to war with Iraq in order to fight al-Qaeda?
Berman answered: because Baathism was one of the “Muslim totalitarianisms,” the other being Islamism. The terror war was not just a police action or a military campaign. Like the war against fascism and the Cold War, it was an ideological war, a “mental war.” Victory required that millions of people across the Muslim world give up murderous political ideas. It would be a long, hard, complicated business. But the overthrow of Saddam and the establishment of an Iraqi democracy as a beachhead in the Middle East would show that the United States was on the side of liberal-minded Arabs like Kanan Makiya and against the totalitarians and their ideas. Regime change would show that we, too, were capable of fighting for an idea—the idea of freedom. The willingness of liberal democracy to defend itself and fight for its principles is always in doubt. Alexis de Tocqueville worried about it; Hitler and Mussolini scoffed at it; so, more recently, did bin Laden. But the greatest affirmation of this willingness was made by Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he vowed that a nation (and not only his own—any nation) “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could long endure.
This was not the kind of thinking that gets one invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations. Berman wasn’t particularly interested in military strategy or policy issues. The answers to September 11 were just as likely to be found in Dostoyevsky and Camus as at the Brookings Institution or in the pages of Foreign Affairs. He was responding viscerally to the event (our late-night talks kept coming back to the scale of destruction just across the East River, shocking evidence of the Islamists’ ambition) and also at an extremely high altitude of abstraction, where details become specks.
* * *
THE YEAR AND A HALF BETWEEN the terror attacks and the invasion of Iraq was crowded with large, aggressive ideas. Like the liberal revolutions of 1848, or the Bolshevik surge of 1917, or the utopian spring of 1968, September 11 gave political intellectuals plenty of work. Throughout 2002, as the Bush administration pursued its course of inevitable confrontation with Saddam, at the same time, outside the walls of power, there rose a clamor of arguments about the coming war, the nature of the enemy, the role of America in the world. Ideas burned hot across an astonishing assortment of minds.
Some of these minds were granted access to the highest offices of government. Bernard Lewis, the eminent British-born professor emeritus of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, who had first been introduced to official Washington in the early 1970s by Richard Perle, became the administration hawks’ chief guide to the Arab world, along with Fouad Ajami, a suave Lebanese-born scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where his friend Paul Wolfowitz was dean during the nineties. In 2002, Lewis and Ajami were summoned to meet with Dick Cheney. They told the vice president what everyone else could read in books such as Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs. The once-great Arab and Muslim world is a sick man, afflicted with corrupt dictatorships, repressed populations, extreme ideologies, paranoid conspiracy theories, cultural and economic backwardness. For decades, even centuries, this civilization has steadily fallen behind as the West and the rest of the world progressed into modernity. This decay is a source of humiliation and rage to millions of Arabs and non-Arab Muslims. In recent years, the sickness has produced a threat that ranges far beyond the region. American power has helped to keep the Arab world in decline by supporting sclerotic tyrannies; only an American break with its own history in the region can reverse it. The Arabs cannot pull themselves out of their historic rut. They need to be jolted out by some foreign-born shock. The overthrow of the Iraqi regime would provide one.
“Above and beyond toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein and dismantling its deadly weapons,” Ajami wrote in early 2003, “the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” The inevitable outcry from Arabs should be discounted as “the ‘road rage’ of a thwarted Arab world—the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds.” Ajami, whose prose employs the archaic cadences and vocabulary of a nostalgist, was proposing an American project as grand as the British colonial mission in the Middle East: “the spearheading of a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies and failures have been on cruel display.”
Ajami and Lewis were experts, area specialists. They were joined in championing the coming war with Iraq by a motley crew of generalists—writers, journalists, professors, activists. There was, to begin, Robert Kagan. He and William Kristol had supported John McCain as the candidate of “national greatness” during the 2000 Republican primary; George W. Bush’s call for “humility” and narrowly defined interests in foreign policy represented everything Kagan had argued against during the nineties. But after September 11, President Bush began to sound like a neoconservative, and The Weekly Standard became his most influential journalistic champion, enjoying the same privileged relationship that the early New Republic had with Woodrow Wilson when he brought America into the First World War. Writing in January 2002, Kagan and Kristol urged military intervention in Iraq as part of America’s reassertion of global leadership: “The failure of the United States to take risks, and to take responsibility, in the 1990s, paved the way to September 11.” Nothing short of the survival of “liberal civilization” itself depended on American action in Iraq. In the summer of 2002, Kagan wrote a long essay called “Americans Are from Mars, Europeans Are from Venus” that quickly broke out of the obscure pages of Policy Review and became the subject of intense debate on both sides of the Atlantic (it was subsequently published as a book, Of Paradise and Power). Having laid much of the intellectual groundwork in the nineties for the administration’s assertive foreign policy, Kagan now described a new era in which America and Europe have parted ways. Europe, weakened by the wars of the twentieth century, seeks cooperation and peace through multilateral institutions such as the European Union and the UN. America, at the zenith of world leadership, is strong enough to face alone the beasts in the jungle outside the civilized camp of the West. America will use power because it can, and it should not expect Europe to go along. Venus, Mars; Kant, Hobbes; paradise, power: Europe and America no longer live in the same world, as they did under the Cold War alliance, and everyone would be better off admitting it. Kagan’s essay was a ph
ilosophical brief for unilateralism.
There was the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank whose tentacles extended deep into the administration. At seminars and in papers, AEI’s resident fellows began to incubate grand theories of an unrivaled and unapologetic American empire, more powerful than any in history, which would spread democracy by force, securing national interests by exporting national values, beginning in Iraq. “You have to start somewhere!” exclaimed Danielle Pletka, a vice president of AEI and former aide to Senator Jesse Helms. “There are always a million excuses not to do something like this.” Pletka wrote the prowar testimony that Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, gave to Congress in August 2002, including these words: “People say there will be chaos. I disagree, but I must confess frankly that even chaos would be better than Saddam.”
There was Victor Davis Hanson, a struggling raisin farmer in California’s Central Valley and prolific classics professor at Fresno State University. Hanson’s scholarly writing on ancient Greece theorized that Athens became the greatest military power of the Mediterranean because its soldiers were yeoman farmers and citizens: They fought as freemen for a republic, not as slaves for a tyrant; they fought with reason rather than superstition, which gave them superiority on the battlefield. This marriage of democratic ideology with annihilating force became the key to the success of Western civilization over the following centuries, unto the American imperium, with our democratizing mission and massive firepower. In the months after September 11, in the pages of the conservative magazine National Review, Hanson’s interpretation of preclassical Athens made him a fierce advocate of the use of overwhelming U.S. force almost anywhere in the world we might have enemies. His writings caught the attention of Vice President Cheney and won the gloomy farmer-professor with the taste for warmongering rhetoric a dinner invitation to the White House.
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