Rethinking the Islamic State

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story on the evolution of the Islamic State. While it might be better to characterize what has been happening as an evolution in Western thinking about the Islamic State, a point that the story (if not the headline) attempts to make, there is some useful information to be gleaned from the pastiche of interviews and expert analyses presented in Tim Arango's narrative.

First, individuals living in areas controlled by the Islamic State and experts on the region make the point that the Islamic State, while extremely repressive, has brought a measure of stability to parts of Iraq and Syria that have long been in turmoil. This stability is, at least to some extent, due to the elimination of the corruption that existed under the region's dictators and, all too often, its supposed liberators as well. As a man from Raqqa put it, "You can travel from Raqqa to Mosul, and no one will dare to stop you even if you carry $1 million." Sadly, neither the forces favored by the West in Syria nor the governments that succeeded Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan have been convinced that good governance--clean governance--is essential to the state-building enterprise. This seems to be something that the Islamic State, for all of its horrors, understands.

Second, three of the experts quoted in the article--Harvard's Stephen Walt, the Brookings Institution's William McCants, and former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin--find parallels between the violence of the Islamic State and that of revolutionary France, Bolshevik Russia, Maoist China, and some other modern states. If these parallels are meaningful--and I would argue that they are--then Western discourse needs to abandon the rhetoric of fighting terrorism where the Islamic State is concerned, unless those using that rhetoric intend "terrorism" to mean what it did when the term was coined in connection with the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. A state that conducts beheadings--whether with a guillotine or a sword--should be condemned, but we misconstrue what is happening if we call the beheadings acts of terrorism while using that term in its modern sense.

A few weeks ago, while working on the third edition of Seeking Security in an Insecure World, I wrote the following about the Islamic State for the section of the book that deals with failed states:

At the heart of the Peace of Westphalia was an agreement to eliminate religion as a reason for warfare by establishing a rule of mutual tolerance among (if not within) states. Both the Holy Roman Empire’s bid to subdue Protestant principalities and the effort of Protestant rulers to extend their control to Catholic territories were delegitimized by their joint acceptance of a principle encapsulated in the Latin phrase cuius regio eius religio (the ruler of the territory determines the religion practiced in it). While religious differences have factored into conflicts many times in the Westphalian era, now the basic principle is being threatened. 

The Islamic State--also called the Islamic State in Iraq and ash-Sham (the term for Syria in classical Arabic) or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)--has capitalized on state failure to inject into the modern world a distinctively pre-modern understanding of the way religion and the state are to interact. On June 29, 2014, the Islamic State publicly proclaimed a caliphate with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the first caliph since the days of the Ottoman Empire. It is a theocratic state that considers itself unbound by the Westphalian principle of sovereignty with its corollaries of non-aggression and non-intervention. In fact, the formation of the caliphate signaled the Islamic State’s intent to pursue a policy of expansion that would, according to prophecies in the Qur’an, lead to the Day of Judgment with its divinely foreordained apocalypse. For Muslims who subscribe to the most literal reading of the Qur’an, the establishment of the caliphate was a pivotal event; thousands began traveling from all over the world to the lands controlled by the Islamic State to lend their support to its efforts, military and political, to impose divine judgment on both Muslim and non-Muslim apostates. 

By the middle of 2015, and in spite of armed opposition on the ground supported by American and British airstrikes, the Islamic State controlled a swath of territory roughly equivalent to the size of the British Isles with a population estimated at six to eight million. Its territory, primarily in the most ineffectively governed regions of Iraq and most war-torn parts of Syria, demonstrates well the hazards posed by failed states and the tendency for conditions in them to threaten other states. To be clear, in the territories it controls the Islamic State exercises many of the functions associated with modern states. It enforces law, collects taxes, maintains both military and police forces, and even seeks to build alliances with like-minded organizations. (In March 2015, Boko Haram offered--and the Islamic State accepted--a pledge of allegiance that, in theory, extends the caliphate to West Africa.) In many respects, the Islamic State exercises more effective control over the territories it occupies than the states it has displaced did. However, the Islamic State does not have, and will likely never obtain, the recognition of other states. It exists as a quasi-state (due to the absence of the critical element of recognition) only because the recognized states whose territory it occupies are themselves quasi-states (due to their inability to exercise effective control). Nation-building, therefore, appears as an essential element of any strategy to defeat ISIS, a point recognized by President Obama in his pledge at the June 2015 G-7 meeting in Germany to accelerate efforts to train the Iraqi army to fight Islamic State units.

In working on a book that deals with contemporary issues, there is a constant concern that the period between writing and publication will witness changes that render even the most careful analyses obsolete. Our powers of prediction in international politics are severely limited. In this instance, however, I suspect the Islamic State will still be around next spring when the new edition of Seeking Security appears. It will likely be looking more and more like a "real" state. And some in the West will probably still be trying to figure out why it doesn't really make sense to call it a terrorist organization.

Out of Control

James Risen reported in the New York Times yesterday that Daniel Carroll, the project manager in Iraq for the private military firm then called Blackwater, threatened to kill two State Department investigators. The investigators, Jean C. Richter and Donald Thomas Jr., arrived in Iraq on August 1, 2007, and almost immediately uncovered numerous contract violations. When they confronted a State Department official at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Acting Regional Security Officer Ricardo Colon, with this information, Colon ordered Richter and Thomas to conclude their investigation and leave Iraq. Colon wrote in a email to Washington, "Regrettably, the pattern of behavior exhibited by the team members [Richter and Thomas] reached a level that became unsustainably disruptive to day-to-day operations and created an unnecessarily hostile environment for a number of direct hire and contract personnel. That left us no recourse but to request that the team wrap up its work and depart Post at the earliest opportunity (Aug. 24)."

According to an internal memorandum written by Richter, a special agent in the State Department's Diplomatic Security Office assigned to the investigation, Carroll told Richter "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq." Thomas corroborated Richter's account of the conversation, which had begun with questions about the operations of a dining facility operated by Blackwater under its contract with the U.S. Government. Both Richter and Thomas reported to superiors that they regarded Carroll's comments as a serious threat. Carroll was never punished for his behavior in spite of the fact that State Department officials concluded that, in context, his remark met the legal definition of assault.

Although the investigation was cut short by Colon's order for Richter and Thomas to leave Iraq, Richter had apparently seen enough to raise a number of red flags that should have been noted by the Bush administration. In his memorandum to his superiors back in Washington, Richter wrote,

I was not only surprised by the unnerving remarks related to Mr. Carroll's perceived understanding of what fell under COM [chief of mission] and Department property, but also by the cavalier and unrestrained manner in which the Blackwater contractors felt they could respond to a USG [U.S. Government] official. To me, it was immediately apparent that the Blackwater contractors believed that they were the de facto authority and acted accordingly, in an alarming manner.

In addition, I witnessed Blackwater employees make disparaging remarks of superiority in reference to the FBI personnel presence in Iraq. These comments along with my COM Authority conversation sent a clear message that the Blackwater contractors saw themselves as "above the law" and actually believed that they "ran the place." Once again, this highlights conduct and performance issues that have been present throughout Blackwater's participation in the WPPS [Worldwide Personnel Protective Service] program.

Just weeks after Richter wrote these words, Blackwater contractors killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in a shooting spree in Baghdad's Nisour Square. An American investigator called the incident "the My Lai massacre of Iraq." To date, no one has been held accountable for the killings, although a federal prosecution against the contractor believed to have fired the first shots has recently been revived.

Finally, the Iraqi government's displeasure over the Nisour Square killings and the U.S. Government's response to them was one of the issues that prevented both the Bush and Obama administrations from reaching an agreement with Iraq on the basing of U.S. troops in the country beyond 2011. This, in turn, has been a factor in the ability of ISIS to take control of large portions of Iraq in recent days.

Joshua Casteel (1979 - 2012)

I learned this week of the death, back on August 25, of Joshua Casteel. Chances are that you've never heard of Joshua Casteel, but he left his mark on the world in a way that deserves to be pondered, discussed, and perhaps even emulated. If nothing else, the trajectory of his life and the "crystallization of conscience" that he experienced merit thoughtful consideration, especially in an age when it seems that, as Yeats put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Casteel grew up in an evangelical Christian home in Iowa, steeped in patriotism and conservative views. At 17, he joined the Army Reserves, then went to the University of Iowa on an ROTC scholarship. On entering active duty, he was assigned to language school where he studied Arabic. In 2004, just weeks after the torture scandal became public knowledge, Casteel was assigned to Abu Ghraib as part of the Army's 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion. He was a translator and an interrogator in one of the world's most notorious prisons.

The "crystallization of conscience"--the moment when Casteel decided to apply for conscientious objector status--came in response to the comments of a Muslim prisoner (and self-proclaimed jihadist) he was interrogating:  "[He said] I wasn’t fulfilling the call to turn the other cheek, to love one’s enemies. When posed with that kind of challenge, I had nothing I could say to him. I absolutely agreed with him. My position as a U.S. Army interrogator contradicted my calling simply as a Christian."

Casteel was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector in May 2005. He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, published a book entitled Letters from Abu Ghraib, earned an MFA in writing at the University of Iowa, and wrote two plays about his experiences in Iraq. In 2010, be began studies at the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which claimed his life on August 25, 2012.

Soldiers of Conscience, a documentary produced in 2007 and broadcast on PBS the following year, featured Casteel's story. An excerpt appears in the clip below.

Walking Wounded

Nicholas Kristof's piece in tomorrow's New York Times about Maj. Ben Richards is a must-read.  It is a reminder that the human costs of war are truly incalculable.  It is also a reminder that when we fail to pay the economic costs of war--by inadequately funding the care of veterans--we dishonor brave men and women.

Detainee Dirty Tricks

Via the Dunn County (Wisconsin) News (November 25, 2009):

When detainees at Camp Cropper [in Baghdad] want to get under the skin of guard force soldiers from the 829th Engineer Company, they employ a tactic that would be more at home along the St. Croix River than inside a theater internment facility in Iraq: They needle the Wisconsin Guard troops about Brett Favre's success as a Minnesota Viking.

Detainees apparently realized they had a way to get under their guards' skin when guards began decorating the camp with Packers logos and team colors.

As Lt. Col. Tim Donovan, the public relations officer for the 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, put it, "It's a small world."

Obama on Iraq

Senator Obama has a statement on Iraq in the op-ed pages of today's New York Times. It's available here.

Iraq: Casualties in 2007

Today's New York Times provides an interesting graphic representation of deaths among security forces in Iraq during 2007. The conclusion: "For those in uniform [both Iraqis and Americans], 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion."

The Deadliest Year

More American troops have died in Iraq thus far in 2007 than in any previous year of the war. Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 3,857 Americans have died in Iraq. Of that number, 854 military fatalities have occurred this year.

For details, see the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

Mistakes

The Bush Administration's mistakes in Iraq--too numerous to count--have been the subjects of scores of books already. Many of the mistakes are also recounted in No End in Sight, an excellent documentary currently in theaters. Perhaps none of the many mistakes, however, was more significant than the decision to disband Iraqi security forces.

We now know, based on letters released by L. Paul Bremer, that President Bush did not object to the plan, developed in the Defense Department, to "make it clear to everyone that we mean business"--Bremer's words--by dismantling Iraq's military. In fact, based on his reply to Bremer, the President seems to have shown very little interest in the issue.

The picture that emerges from more and more documentary evidence related to the Iraq War is one that should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the events of the last six years: The United States is governed by a clueless president surrounded by arrogant and venal advisors. This is hardly an original observation, but it is one that is well worth remembering as the Bush Administration tries to make the case for staying in Iraq.

(For more on Bremer-Bush correspondence, see this post by George Packer.)

War Isn't Real

A brief commentary, well worth reading: George Packer, making the point that "war isn’t real until it’s happening to you," describes George Orwell's reaction to an inconsequential play performed in London in 1940 and compares it to an American soldier's feelings of disgust at Disneyland after his return from Iraq. Packer writes, "There's something infuriating, though probably unavoidable, about the fact that life goes on in all its waste and indifference while Americans eight thousand miles away are being killed on our behalf."

Another General Speaks Out

According to The Onion, another military expert has decided to express his views on the Iraq War:

Breaking a 211-year media silence, retired Army Gen. George Washington appeared on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday to speak out against many aspects of the way the Iraq war has been waged.

Washington, whose appearance marked the first time the military leader and statesman had spoken publicly since his 1796 farewell address in Philadelphia, is the latest in a string of retired generals stepping forward to criticize the Iraq war.

The Onion really nails the Bush administration's response to expert critics:

White House response to the former general's criticism was swift and sharp. Spokesman Tony Fratto dismissed Washington as "increasingly irrelevant" and "a relic" who "made some embarrassing gaffes" during his own military career, such as the Continental Army's near destruction in the Battle of Long Island in 1776.

Read the whole thing here.

[Via Opinio Juris.]

The Gators

Washington Post writer Laura Blumenfeld, whose book Revenge: A Story of Hope recounts her effort to find the terrorist who shot her father in Jerusalem in 1986, has an interesting story in today's paper about three interrogators (or "gators," as they're called in the U.S. military)--one who worked in Iraq, one who worked in Northern Ireland, and one who worked in Israel.

Inconsistencies

Michael Kinsley, writing in today's Washington Post, exposes a number of the inconsistencies in the arguments being made on behalf of continued support for the war in Iraq. Here's a sample:

There was a time, circa 1999, when Republicans considered it the height of naivete, irresponsibility and indifference to the fate of American soldiers to commit any troops to action in a foreign country without what used to be called an "exit strategy." That was when the president was a Democrat. Now it is considered the height of naivete, irresponsibility and indifference to the fate of American soldiers to suggest the possibility of any exit strategy short of triumph. If you do, you are betraying the troops. And no one sees actual triumph in the cards, so there is no exit strategy.

After noting the Wall Street Journal's suggestion that Democrats use the power of the purse if they really want to end the war--and pointing out that the same Wall Street Journal applauded the Reagan Administration's illegal efforts to get around congressionally imposed funding restrictions in the Iran-Contra affair--Kinsley parses the argument that Bush, being democratically elected, has a certain democratic legitimacy for his policy of going to war in Iraq:

Of course, the president is elected, and in that sense he is acting as proxy for the citizens when he decides to take our country into a war. Right? Well, not quite. Let's leave aside the voting anomalies of the 2000 election. When this president first ran for national office, he campaigned on a platform of criticizing his predecessor for engaging in military action (in Kosovo and Somalia) without an exit strategy. He mocked the notion of trying to establish democracy in distant lands. He denounced the use of American soldiers for "nation-building." In 2000, if you were looking for a way to express your disapproval of the policies and prejudices that later got us into Iraq, your obvious answer would have been to vote for George W. Bush.

Read Kinsley's essay. It's an important contribution to the current debate.

A Private Contractor Talks

In today's Guardian, a British private security contractor writes about what it's like to work on a security detail in Baghdad.

The anonymous contractor, who describes the firm he works for as "basically a taxi service with guns," is part of a team that protects individuals moving through Iraq to various reconstruction projects.

After detailing his daily routine and telling what he makes (about £90,000 [$175,000], tax free, for eight months of work), he writes,

I will probably bin [trash] it fairly soon. I think the writing is on the wall for Baghdad. I think it is about to go ballistic. The Baghdad security plan is not going to work. Other people will no doubt stay because they want the money but I think there comes a time when you need to ask, is this sustainable?

You can find the entire account here.

"Nothing of Substance Has Changed"

Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international politics at Boston University and author of The New American Militarism, one of the best books on foreign policy I've read in the last several of years, lost his son, 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq on May 13. This past Sunday, Professor Bacevich wrote about that loss and about the war he has long opposed. His essay contains an important message for both Democrats and Republicans.

Read it here.

Educing Information

Educing Information is the title of a new report commissioned by the Defense Department's Intelligence Science Board. The report argues, in the words of the New York Times story on the report, that "the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."

The report--along with a recent speech by Philip Zelikow (available here as a .pdf file), former adviser to Secretary of State Rice, that harshly criticized some CIA and Defense Department interrogation methods--comes at an important time. The Times story continues:

The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

President Bush has insisted that those secret "enhanced" techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series "24" to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists. A 2005 Harvard study supported the selective use of "highly coercive" techniques.

Three years after the Abu Ghraib photos revealed to the world the serious problems with American interrogation methods--problems that have risen to the level of torture in many instances--the Bush Administration still can't get it right. Nor can the American citizens who continue to applaud politicians promising even more in the way of "harsh interrogations."

Memorial Day 2007

James Carroll, in a column published yesterday in the Boston Globe, reflects on the meaning of another Memorial Day with the nation at war in Iraq:

"If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted," the Vietnam novelist Tim O'Brien wrote, "or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." O'Brien says that the hallmarks of truth, when it comes to war stories, are obscenity and evil. "You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you."

Such dark notes are struck by the chroniclers of every war, going back to Homer, but they seem especially apt when those being mourned have fallen in a war that, even before its end, has already shown itself to have been mistaken from its first trumpet.

Carroll concludes, "The proper memorial to the war in Iraq is its immediate end."

Contractor Casualties

The New York Times reports today that at least 146 private contractors died in Iraq during the first quarter of 2007. The total death toll for contractors in Iraq is now at least 917; another 12,000 have been injured or wounded.

According to the Times, this is the first time that specific figures--based on claims filed with the Labor Department and on interviews with insurers and others--have been reported. Private military firms (PMFs) are, of course, not eager to talk about employee casualties. As the Times notes, "Companies that have lost workers in Iraq were generally unresponsive to questions about the numbers of deaths and the circumstances that led to casualties."

The extent of the U.S. military's dependence on PMFs in Iraq is staggering:

Nearly 300 companies from the United States and around the world supply workers who are a shadow force in Iraq almost as large as the uniformed military. About 126,000 men and women working for contractors serve alongside about 150,000 American troops, the Pentagon has reported. Never before has the United States gone to war with so many civilians on the battlefield doing jobs--armed guards, military trainers, translators, interrogators, cooks and maintenance workers--once done only by those in uniform.

In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, for example, only 9,200 contractors--mostly operating advanced weapons systems--served alongside 540,000 military personnel. But at the end of the cold war, Congress and the Pentagon were eager to seize on the so-called peace dividend and drastically scale back the standing Army. The Bush administration expanded the outsourcing strategy to unprecedented levels after the invasion of Iraq.

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA), chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, has announced that he will schedule hearings on the use of PMFs this fall. Meanwhile, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Rep. David Price (D-NC) (a former Duke University political science professor) have introduced legislation to require the government to provide information on private contractors in Iraq. (The House passed their legislation in the form of an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday.) At present, "unless there is something specifically stated in the contract about accounting for personnel, there is no requirement for the U.S. government to track these numbers," as military spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph M. Yoswa notes.

Parallels

Historian Robert Dallek describes the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam in this astute essay in the Washington Post. Here's a brief sample:

Like Johnson and Nixon, President Bush is hoping that adding troops will turn a civil war around, is relying on local, U.S.-trained forces to stave off defeat, and is worried that failure will undermine America's international credibility. Bush also disdains antiwar voices and is determined to prove them wrong in the long view of history. But unlike Johnson and Nixon, he doesn't seem to realize that his war is lost. Instead of learning from his predecessors, Bush seems to be replicating their mistakes.

"Going Blackwater"

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on Thursday. The text of his remarks is available here.

In his testimony, Scahill noted that private contractors in Iraq sometimes make in a month what an active-duty soldier makes in year. This, of course, creates resentment and envy. It also creates an incentive for experienced military professionals to leave the armed forces of the United States in order to go to work for private contractors. Scahill stated, "There is slang in Iraq now for this jump. It is called 'Going Blackwater.' To put it bluntly, these private forces create a system where national duty is outbid by profits."

Read the entire statement.