All posts tagged Rory Stewart

The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp (1982)

Carey and Dickens

In 1973 the literary critic Professor John Carey published an entertaining study of Charles Dickens’ imagination entitled ‘The Violent Effigy’. Instead of analysing Dickens’ novels in terms of themes or issues or morality or symbolism, of gender or class or race and so on – Carey instead devoted a chapter each to half a dozen primal aspects of human experience which really fired Dickens’s writing, identifying the situations and subjects which triggered his most vivid writing, starting with violence and working through topics like fire, food, sex, death and so on.

Each chapter was stuffed with examples from the novels (and essays and travel books) as if Carey had read Dickens’s complete works with a set of index files constantly open by his side in which paragraphs or entire scenes would be assigned to each theme and sub-theme. The result was chapters made up of quotes and scenes and characters and events and words and phrases and metaphors illuminating each particular topic. Thus the opening chapter, on violence, shows how powerfully, repeatedly and obsessively Dickens was attracted by public hangings, raging fires, murderers, how his gargoyle imagination created characters who burst into flame or wanted to eat one another, and so on and so on.

Kemp and Wells

Well, in 1982 literary journalist Peter Kemp did something similar to H.G. Wells.

Introduction: the Darwinian worldview

Kemp starts from the basic premise, readily attested by umpteen quotes from Wells himself, that the year Wells spent studying under the great promoter of Darwinian evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley, at the South Kensington College, was the most important of his life. And that the central learning of that year was a kind of biological reductionism, the radical teaching that humans are animals like any other, just another twig on the vast tangled bush of life, entirely physical and material in nature, with no hint of a God to promote our sense of specialness and apartness from all the other living things.

No, we are living organisms, one species among the million or so others which have evolved over three billion years of chance and accidents, most closely related to the family of primates and, within that family, to the great apes. In this brief opening chapter Kemp gathers together a dozen or so Wells quotes all repeating the same idea, that ‘humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape’, but ‘an etherealised monkey’, ‘a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape his ancestor’, is:

no privileged exception to the general conditions that determine the destinies of other living species.

Just like all the other animals, humans need to ‘eat, mate, find a congenial habitat, and survive danger – by fighting, escaping or co-operating with other members of his species’. Man is, in other words, ‘the culminating ape’ i.e. the culmination, in the present, of the line of descent from the apes (‘in the present’ for who knows what mutations and evolutions await in the future).

So, having established that this materialist, Darwinian view of humanity underpins everything Wells wrote, Kemp then does a Carey, and devotes a series of chapters to looking in great detail at specific aspects of this human-as-animal worldview, and how these fundamental aspects are embodied and dramatised and described across the full range of Wells’s forbiddingly vast oeuvre.

Kemp’s five big chapters address:

  1. Food (The Edible Predator)
  2. Sex (The Slave Goddess)
  3. Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)
  4. Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)
  5. Self Image (The Grand Earthly)

And just like Carey’s book, Kemp’s is stuffed to overflowing with as many examples, quotes, scenes and passages, keywords, symbols and metaphors as he could find about each of these core issues from all over Wells’s works. What it lacks in ‘theory’, Kemp’s entertaining book makes up for in its hundreds of juicy examples and entertaining quotes. It sometimes contains ideas and thoughtful interpretations but really it is a riotous guided tour of the phantasmagoria of Well’s unquenchable imagination, and so it is a riot to read.

1. Food

Having just read it I can confirm that the real message of ‘War of the Worlds’ is not so much alien invasion but the idea that humans, so long accustomed to being top of the food chain, suddenly find themselves the prey and foodstuff of the Martians. Just like rabbits and grouse and all the other animals we’re used to hunting, now we have to go on the run, find burrows, hide during the day and only come out at night.

‘The Island of Dr Moreau’s central idea is to blur the boundaries between the human and the animal, as Dr Moreau does in his demented vivisection experiments. Closely connected to it is the notion of cannibalism, as his half-man half-animal creations show no reluctance to kill and eat people or each other. Kemp offers a summary of Wells’s overall intention:

The cannibalism and carnivorous preying in his books are designed to frighten man into a full awareness of his biological condition. (p.34)

‘The Food of the Gods’ is, as the name suggests, entirely about the impact of a wonderfood which makes babies grow into giants and the social disruption this brings.

One of the Invisible Man’s many problems is that when he eats anything it is, to start with, entirely visible inside him as half-digested chunks of matter. Only as his system breaks food down and absorbs it into him does it become invisible which explains why, after eating, he has to hide till this biological process has been achieved (p.49).

Kemp cites Wells writing that he aimed to counter and refute what he called ‘Bio-Optimism’ i.e. the sentimental belief that evolution means things steadily improve, countering it with a healthy dose of what could be called ‘Bio-Realism’ (p.12). Certainly his scientific romances all point to the disasters that mankind’s accelerating technologies seem liable to bring.

The phrase Bio-Optimism made me think that, if the dictionary definition of ‘woke’ is being ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’, you could conceive a term closer to my sense of things, which would be ‘biowoke’, meaning being ‘alert to the evolutionary, biological, Darwinian nature of human beings’ and, indeed, of the entire natural world we live in.

Anyway, the opening passages about Wells’s polemical materialism soon get swamped by the avalanche of Kemp’s examples, which feel like they quickly wander far from the point and descend to a kind of fascinating triviality.

Leaving the marvels of the scientific romances mentioned above for the bathos of Wells’s social novels, Kemp explains at some length how ‘The History of Mr Polly’ is a novel about a man who is a martyr to his bad digestion (pages 52 to 54). In fact, Kemp shows how Wells’s own personal history of stomach and digestive problems is echoed in lots of novels and characters.

In Mr Polly he builds a whole book around human indigestion…basically, it is the story of a man who leaves a bony woman who is a bad cook for a plump woman who is a good cook. (p.52)

Having just read it, I was amused by the accuracy of this summary. Kemp neatly balances Polly (about bad food and indigestion) with ‘Tono-Bungay’, which is a novel about a cure for indigestion which becomes a worldwide smash hit and propels its creator and his nephew, the book’s narrator, to giddy heights of fame and wealth – but all based on exploiting the bad guts of its credulous consumers (p.55). And so it makes a neat counterpoint to Polly:

Real ills are displayed in Mr Polly; spurious remedies in Tono-Bungay. (p.54)

Kemp modulates from the level of considering entire plots of novels to zooming in on particular aspects of food and eating. He gathers quotes from umpteen novels to show us that Wells had a thing about tentacles e.g the horrible tentacles gathered at the mouths of the hungry Martians and the tentacles of giant crabs the time traveller encounters in the dying days of the planet, through to the social comedies where, for example, innocent Ann Veronica feels harassing Mr Ramage’s hands ‘stretching [like]

hungry invisible tentacles about her’.

And teeth – when we see other people’s teeth we realise they are descended from countless generations of animals which have used them to rip and tear to pieces other living animals. The front teeth are acceptable but sight of the incisors should make anyone with an imagination shiver, so Kemp then proceeds to give us loads of examples of monsters with horrific teeth, or people with notable teeth, examples of where teeth are used as symbols or metaphors, and so on.

So when Kemp is at level 1, showing how a theme or idea dominates an entire narrative, such as ‘War of the Worlds’ or ‘Moreau’ or, in a domestic vein, ‘Polly’ or ‘Tono’, Kemp is interesting and useful. When he shifts down to level 2 and throws at the reader loads of quotes describing tentacles or teeth, he persuades us that these are recurring obsessions of Wells’s which we will, as a result, be more aware of next time we read a Wells text. But you can’t help feeling he is descending to trivia when, at level 3, he has a few pages telling us that Wells repeatedly gives characters food names and rattles off a long list of examples, from Amontillado (a cardinal in Meanwhile) to Wensleydale (in The Sea Lady) via characters named Butter, Beans, Bramble, Cranberry, Cabbage, Lettice. Or when he gives us a few pages full of quotes showing that Wells also liked to use similes comparing people to food (a veiled bride looking like confectionary, an albino having a head like a coconut, someone who is ‘egg-faced’, a man who looks like a chestnut, and so on and so on). You can’t help feeling that, by this stage, the method has dwindled down to a form of stamp collecting or train spotting.

On the other hand, though, this stamp collecting approach does remind you of the thousands of throwaway details in a novel which you enjoy at the moment but tend to forget in the sweep and overall shape of the narrative, and it is enjoyable to be reminded of these details, and hundreds and hundreds of forgotten details is what this book overflows with. I’d forgotten that in the future when ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ the white cliffs of Dover are covered in advertising hoardings – things like that which spark sudden memories of the feel and flavour of books you read a while ago…

2. Sex (The Slave Goddess)

Scientific premise: All animals have to mate. Humans breed. Society replenishes itself with new generations.

Kemp kicks off, a bit tangentially, by highlighting the handful of places where Wells tangles with eugenics, the idea of breeding a better standard of human, but Wells was the first to admit that science didn’t have the first idea how to do this, knowing nothing of genetics.

This chapter gives the impression of flitting about the large subject of sex and love and reproduction almost at random. Next thing we know Kemp is describing the basis biographical fact that Wells married his cousin when he was a very young man, discovered she was dim and sexless so ran off with one of his students, but soon enough got bored of her and embarked on a series of affairs, some of which caused public scandal. The point of all this is just how often he recycled these facts in his novels, marriage to someone markedly beneath the protagonist’s intellectual and cultural level in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, a dry and disappointing marriage followed by a happier one in Mr Polly, running away for the sake of true love in Ann Veronica, and so on.

Then Kemp spots that Wells, in his autobiography, says his first sexual stirrings came from the images of Britannia and other female national symbols he saw in Punch (the weekly humorous magazine), followed by seeing big bare-breasted sculptures in art galleries, and Kemp goes on to list all the male characters who admit to the same foible scattered through his fiction. And then specific instances of Greek goddesses being cited, Aphrodite or Athena.

The scene of a boy or young man looking up at a girl sitting on a wall occurs in Tono-Bungay and Mr Polly. These and other women are generally a social class above the protagonist, who is looked down on in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Proposals or love happen at elevations. Helen Walsingham crowds Kipps into proposing to her up the old keep at Lympne. Ann Veronica finally knows passionate love in the Alps, and many other examples.

The ultimate high place is flying, which is described with sensual lavishness in Tono-Bungay.

However, these high-up women invariably end up very much the junior partners, and Kemp brings together the many places where female characters explicitly refer to their men as Master or King, as Ann Veronica does in the Alpine section of her novel. Kemp cites a whole series of characters who are sceptical of women’s ability to have original thoughts and of women who are all too ready to abase themselves as helpers to strong men.

In fact Kemp more or less lists a whole load of sexist attributes which Wells consistently gives to his women, which includes:

  • making his women honorary men or boys
  • making women describe themselves as slaves who venerate their beloved men as King or Master
  • ridiculing women’s intellectual ability as non-existent
  • making them indulge in childish play talk with their lovers
  • characterising women as extravagant spenders of men’s hard-earned cash

All the early social comedies feature a woman ‘wrecker’ who diverts and destroys a promising man’s career, reworkings of the autobiographical fact that Wells gave up his studies to marry his cousin who turned out to be intellectually dim and frigid – ‘research disruptors’ such as Ethel in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, Marion in ‘Tono-Bungay’, Miriam in ‘Mr Polly’, Remington’s career ruined by his elopement with Isabel Rivers in ‘The New Machiavelli’).

Many of the novels feature a love triangle, itself the trigger for jealousy, sometimes murderous rage.

By contrast, his various utopias envisage a jealousy-free world of free love.

For an advocate of free love Wells is surprisingly judgemental about smut and sordid fumbling and horrible male banter. This is all muddy and grubby. It is contrasted with the ‘clean’, pure love of clean young men and women for each other as, for example, Ann Veronica.

Wells the Victorian anathematised what he saw as the moral collapse of the 1920s into obscenity and pornography. Thus he thinks Brave New World demonstrated that Aldous Huxley was obsessed with sex (which is a bit rich coming from the notorious old philanderer). When the Sleeper Wakes he discovers the future has Pleasure Cities where the lascivious and promiscuous exhaust themselves in hedonism till they die childless, what Kemp calls ‘camouflaged extermination chambers’ (p.109). Like everyone who enjoys speculating about utopias and perfect worlds, Wells knows it will require exterminating quite a lot of the actual existing human population.

What comes over is that Wells consistently thinks of sex as a powerful urge which has to be slaked but shouldn’t be over-indulged in or get in the way of work. Incidentally Kemp quotes at length the description of Ramage from Ann Veronica which summarises very well a certain experimental male attitude to sex as endless quest and adventure:

His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.

Ramage is an example of the City gent as sexual hypocrite, all immaculate facade and coercive exploitation. Another type of hypocrite is the sexually repressed Oxbridge don, such as Prothero in ‘The Research Magnificent’ (1915).

Although he counsels restraint and balance in his books, between grubby promiscuity and his other enemy, celibacy, ‘that great denial of life.’ Celibacy is particularly dangerous when the sexually abstinent take out their frustrated energy in other mediums, especially politics, as Rud Whitlow in ‘The Holy Terror’ (1939).

I’ve just finished reading his feminist novel, ‘Ann Veronica’ so was surprised that Kemp pulls out so many quotes demonstrating Wells’s intense antipathy to the suffragettes. Wells thought they would be a sisterhood of pure-hearted statuesque females as per his fantasies. Instead he was disillusioned to realise they were a screeching rabble, addicted to violence and hooliganism. He has one of his characters describe suffragettism as ‘The Great Insane Movement’.

Kemp is funny on Wells taking the mickey out of the suffragettes. I liked his characterisation of Wells dwelling on the feminists’ preference for ‘damage over debate’, and how, in order to demonstrate the special qualities of reason and compassion which women said they would bring to politics, they set about burning letter boxes, smashing shop windows, spitting at cabinet ministers, assaulting the police, slashing paintings and sending letter bombs. Feminists and our culture, generally, nowadays downplays the impressive Suffragette bombing and arson campaign which contemporaries and the activists themselves referred to as terrorism.

3. Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)

Scientific premise: species, and life in general, are shaped and moulded by their environments. Man is the first species which can substantially alter his environment and, Wells argued, he needs to do it more and faster if he is to survive.

Basements: The odd chapter title derives from the fact that Wells spent his early formative years living in a series of basements (in his parents’ shop, then when his mother became a housekeeper at Up Park country house, then he was apprenticed to various drapers’ shops). These grim subterranean experiences meant that, once he escaped from a life of humiliating toil, Wells’s imagination fantasised about high, light, open places. And it’s this dichotomy, between dark cramped dingy underground and light bright upstairs, as dramatised in umpteen ways throughout his writings, which this chapter explores.

As with the other chapters, it starts by exploring the theme very literally and then slowly moving out to more metaphorical or related topics.

TM: Probably the most striking example of this upstairs-downstairs dichotomy in The Time Machine between the sunny happy world inhabited by the Eloi, who are preyed on by the Morlocks who emerge from their underground dens, but that’s not where Kemp starts.

Rising: Kemp starts by showing us how very widespread the description of basements is, particularly in the social comedies. By contrast, he shows us that when Wells characters go up in the world they not only rise up the social hierarchy, but move to bigger higher lighter houses (with bigger windows).

Uncle Edward’s ascent: He particularly focuses on Tono-Bungay in which Uncle Edward Pondorevo, as he amasses more wealth, rises from living in a basement in Highbury, to living in a house, to moving out to a house in the country (big windows, aery rooms) and the logical conclusion of all this rising which is to commission his own house to be built on a hilltop. Clearly, this physical ascent out of the gloomy underground to a rich man’s mansion on a height mirrors Uncle Edward’s social ascent, as he climbs the social ladder, taking lessons in etiquette and elocution along the way.

Disorder: But ‘Tono-Bungay’ also demonstrates related topics. For Wells the country house of Bladesover represents order and hierarchy. Kemp demonstrates how ‘Tono-Bungay’ contains a dazzling variety of embodiments of disorder, chaos, collapse, disintegration. This extends from the speech patterns of many of the comic characters who can barely speak or have odd mannerisms, through to the symbolism of ‘quap’ which rots and decays everything it comes into contact with. Kemp lists and explains a whole raft of images of decay which infect the novel at every level and this passage really deepened my appreciation of the novel (pages 131 to 137).

Ruins of the future: In this respect, ‘Tono-Bungay’ is deeply connected to ‘The Time Machine’ because the latter describes collapse and decay but in a science fiction context, as when the time traveller goes exploring the ruins of latter-day London far in the future, and Wells luxuriates in page after page of descriptions of ruined buildings and statues covered in vines etc, images which have become standard in sci fi but which must have been phenomenally powerful to those first readers.

London cancer: This segues into a brief section about Wells’s dislike of the way London has spread out chaotically, like a cancer, swallowing up the nice orderly villages around it (compare E.M. Forster’s similar dislike of London’s inexorable spread, destroying the surrounding country e.g. the end of Howards End).

New York: By contrast Kemp describes Wells’s admiration for New York, with what was then (1910s/1920s) its unprecedented array of soaring skyscrapers. Its height and space dazzled Wells on his first visit (in 1906, described in ‘The Future in America’) and triggered admiring references throughout his writings.

Ideal cities: New York’s mathematical orderliness of avenues and streets was a model for some of the ideal cities of Wells’s utopias and this takes Kemp on to a consideration of the new worlds described in his various utopias which, of course, consisted of high light aery buildings. If they have undergrounds these echo the fundamental dichotomy laid out in The Time Machine as in When the Sleeper Wakes, with its extensive network of of ‘underways’.

Magic transformation of society: This leads Kemp, in passing, to note how bad Wells was at thinking through the process whereby humanity would get from its chaotic present to the gleaming futures he imagines. In one a man falls asleep and wakes up 200 years later. In another a comet passes through the earth’s atmosphere, trailing a chemical which brings about a complete transformation in human nature. In ‘Things To Come’ only a ruinous war which almost destroys civilisation can clear the ground for the bright new future.

Relations between the sexes have always been poor with both sides complaining long and bitterly about the other, and the modern ubiquity of feminism means that it is difficult to think, write or talk about men and women, love and sex, without triggering an avalanche of parti pris comment from one side or another of the toxic culture wars. So the sex chapter (above) felt vexed and embattled.

By complete contrast, this chapter about spatial and geographic metaphors in the life, autobiographies and fictions of H.G. Wells – free of gender cultural controversy – felt enlightening and rather wonderful.

4. Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)

Scientific premise: Animals have three strategies to cope with threat: fight, flight or co-operation.

Fight

Destruction: As Kemp’s title suggests he is at pains to show that, although Wells described himself as a pacifist, his imagination overflowed with images of war, specially in the science fiction and utopias. World war destroys civilisation in ‘The War in the Air’ and ‘the World Set Free’ and in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’, and ‘The War of the Worlds’ revels in massive destruction.

Soldiers: His autobiographies reveal that he loved playing with toy soldiers and imagining himself a general as a boy. But once war arrived, in 1914, after an embarrassing early rush of blood to the head (in which he wrote unforgivable things about conscientious objectors) he grew increasingly haunted by the realities of war and Kemp quotes some choice passages from the novels which describe various protagonists at the front squidging through rotten corpses, seeing maggots breeding in dead bodies, rotting faces covered with flies etc.

Wells’s temper: Moving on, Kemp tells us that Wells had a very short temper and was quick to fury. One aspect of this was the scathing letters he wrote to reviewers and fellow authors, the blistering caricatures he carried out at book length (Henry James caricatured in ‘Boon’, Ford Madox Ford in ‘The Bulpington of Blup’).

Anti-Catholic: Wells’s fiction takes swipes at clerics, lampoons bishops and develops a really blistering hatred of the Roman Catholic church, leading up to the gassing of the Pope in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’.

Violent chaps: Wells has surprisingly violent characters: it’s easy to forget how homicidal the invisible man becomes or just how violent us ‘Uncle Jim’ who aims to maim and injure the hero of ‘Mr Polly’, turning what ought to be the bucolic Potwell Inn into a warzone.

Flight

Bicycles: In a typically lateral move, Kemp associates the ‘flight’ part of an animal’s response to danger with The Bicycle. Wells was an early adopter and proselytiser for bicycles, his happiest characters ride one (e.g. Mr Polly) and he wrote an entire novel about a draper shop assistant’s cycling holiday, ‘The Wheels of Chance’. Bert Smallways, hero of ‘The War in the Air’, goes from running a bicycle repair shop in a Kent suburb to witnessing the end of civilisation.

Running away from domesticity: Kemp cites lots of evidence from Wells’s autobiographical writings of his need to escape the chains of custom and habit and the humdrum, which translates into his small trapped men who try to run away – Lewisham, Kipps, Polly. Many of his novels are studies in frustration by a man who moved restlessly from love affair to love affair, and also moved house regularly, and at one stage planned to have four dwellings, two in Britain, two in France, which he could move between, restlessly in movement (p.166). Wells later wrote that the entire novel ‘The New Machiavelli’ was ‘a dramatised wish…about going off somewhere.’ Ann Veronica performs a series of escapes ending up with her running off with her lover, Capes.

Suicide: I think Kemp misses a trick by not mentioning suicide; he doesn’t discuss it and it doesn’t appear in the index and yet a number of his heroes in the social comedies feel so wretchedly trapped that they consider suicide. The most florid example is Mr Polly. After 15 years trapped in a loveless marriage and a poky little shop, the only way out he can conceive of is to cut his throat and set fire to the shop. It is comic that he sets fire to the shop alright but then bottles out of the suicide and so finds himself in the middle of a raging house fire, and it is farcical that this quickly runs out of control into the Great Fire of Fishbourne.

Adventure running: Obviously, in the science fiction adventures there is a great deal or running, such as the narrator running from the Martians or Graham going on the run in ‘Sleeper Wakes’ and the invisible man is on the run from London where he’s committed various crimes. Kemp thinks the scene where Bedford is racing across the moon crater trying to keep ahead of the creeping shadow of the lunar night is the most exciting thing Wells ever wrote. Here, as at other points, Kemp comes close to banality because, when you think about it, almost all adventure stories involve chase scenes…

Flying: Paralleling the passage Kemp devoted to cycling, he then has a section citing all Wells’s references to flying. First there’s the fact that Wells himself became addicted to flying and took early flights to and within a variety of countries. Then Kemp lists the characters who fly, including George Pondorevo who’s a flight designer as well as Graham in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’, but many other, and not forgetting the ultimate extension of flying, Bedford and Cavour’s flight to the moon.

Co-operation

Finally, Wells thought of flying as having the capacity to bring mankind together into the kind of world state he fantasised about, in two ways: one, commercial travel would bind together countries in common economic and cultural ties. Two, the mere fact of airplanes diminishes the idea of the self-contained nation state. No country is secure once manned flight gets off the ground, every country becomes vulnerable to aerial attack, and so the arrival of manned flight would, Wells, thought, provide a great spur towards nations weakening their identity and moving towards a world government. Some hope. Thus, for example, the fact that the new world order in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ is established by a brotherhood of engineer aviators, represented in the movie version, ‘Things To Come’ by the aviator hero John Cabal.

In his factual writings Wells used his biological training to highlight examples of co-operation or symbiosis in the natural world and spent 50 years repeating over and over than humanity had to do the same, to coalesce, to become one organism, sometimes meaning it almost literally. Look at the world today: Gaza, Ukraine, Xinjiang, Sudan, Syria, drugs gangs everywhere. Is Wells’s vision of a united human race under a world government any nearer than during his lifetime? No, because it is a profoundly stupid idea which reveals the basic shallowness and naivety of his ‘thought’.

This explains why the three massive factual books he wrote between the wars, the so-called ‘Outline of History’ trilogy – The Outline of History (1920); The Science of Life (1930); The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) – are completely unread today, because they had little of enduring value to say.

Never judge creative writers for the power of their ‘ideas’ which are almost always tripe. Assess them on the power of their imaginings and their prose, which are often transformational.

All Wells’s writings about a World State are based on one primordial error, which is the assumption, so common up to the present day among western liberals and writers and commentators, that western values are world values, that the values of the west (democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of expression) are universal values, but they are not. Russia, China and the entire Islamic world are cultures and places where some of these values are paid lip services but other values are more important, nationalistic values in Russia and China and Islam in the Islamic world.

Remember the Iraqi farmer who told Rory Stewart that Iraq would never be a democracy, never. Why not? Because the great majority of its people don’t want it to be – democratic values of the kind Wells spent 50 years (from the 1890s to the 1940s) banging on about, are a particular outcome of the particular religious, social, cultural, economic and military histories of western countries. Other peoples and places haven’t had the same experiences and so prioritise other values. In Iraq identity is predominantly about family, tribe, region and religion, a long way from western notions of deracinated, rootless, atomised units of labour, citizens detached from ancient identities who are free to debate, assemble and vote according to their consciences.

Kemp entertainingly highlights the complete contradiction between Wells’s lifelong hectoring of mankind to co-operate and collaborate more, and his complete failure to collaborate with anyone in his own life. Anybody, like scientist Julian Huxley, who worked with him on joint authored books struggled with his domineering decisions. Beatrice Webb wrote scathingly about his inability to work with anyone in the Fabian Society, his bad manners, rudeness and dictatorial style. And the film professionals he wrote screenplays for complained about Well’s inability to compromise and respect others’ specialisms.

It’s like an alcoholic preaching to everyone about abstinence before passing out from inebriation.

A concrete barrier in Wells’s own writings about a unified mankind was that he himself was riddled with prejudices. Kemp confirms what I’ve noticed in all his books which is a consistent antisemitism, and selects quotations whose gross stereotyping sometimes make Wells sound like a Nazi.

Mind you, Kemp goes straight on to give us quotes where Wells comprehensively badmouths the Germans, who he began criticising during the Great War and didn’t stop for the next 30 years. Germans, in his view, are insensitive, brutish and only happy when obeying orders.

Kemp then quotes Wells’s views on Black people which are at best patronising (colourful clothes, happy smiles, upbeat music) and at worst, casually belittle Blacks with comments about their supposed stupidity and vanity. Wells’s fears are dramatised in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ in which, during the world revolution, colonial Black police are sent to London bringing their terrifying reputation for rape and violence. In the Fourth Year (1918) includes the quote:

It is absolutely essential to the peace of the world that there should be no arming of the negroes beyond the minimum necessary for the policing of Africa. (quote p.185)

5. Self Image (The Grand Earthly)

Scientific premise: human beings aren’t really individuals but collections of moods, emotions, personalities and so on. What gives humans a shaky unity is what Wells calls the persona.

This is a promising idea but Wells expresses it in a terrible wishy-washy, humanist manner. Compare and contrast Sigmund Freud’s dazzling succession of theories about the unconscious and the dynamic nature of mind, or Carl Jung’s theories about archetypes, the anima and so on, and Wells is nowhere. (Kemp picks out a passage where Wells explicitly says he prefers Alfred Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex to Freud’s theories of the human mind, quoted p.194).

Still, we’re not interested in Wells as a ‘thinker’ where he’s a non-starter, but as an entertainer. As Kemp aptly phrases it, we enjoy his best works because they are:

enriched with unexpected detail scooped from life by deftly imaginative phrases. (p.214)

In this respect Kemp kicks off with a consideration of how many of his characters pretend to be someone else, associate, worship, model themselves on others.

Kemp starts with the men Wells modelled himself on, paying repeated tribute to the medieval scientist Roger Bacon, but the central figure is Thomas Huxley, who moulded his thinking on scientific lines, who showed the central importance of education, and who showed that being an educator could lead to fame and respect.

So his entire life was dedicated to the role of public educator with reams of articles and lots of books designed to educate the public away from religion and superstition and towards science. He became hysterically convinced that society was in a ‘race between education and catastrophe’, as he put it in ‘World Brain’. And Mr Lewisham has the slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’ pinned to his garret wall.

Yes but knowledge of what? And what kind of power?

Wells makes the two same mistakes most commentators do of thinking a) that most people give a toss about ‘education’, when quite obviously plenty of people hated school, left as soon as they could, and passed on their know-nothing attitude to their kids, whilst many people just aren’t suited to academic study; and b) that education means one commonly agreed thing: i) 100 years later educators are still squabbling about what to teach and how; ii) in many parts of the world, for example the Muslim world, teaching religion is hugely more important than ‘western science’, compare Saudi Arabia’s funding of madrassahs across the Muslim world.

So Wells’s vast output of texts advocating for ‘education’ are i) irrelevant to most people ii) based on an untenable notion that there is just One Education, one kind of knowledge, one incontestable Science which everyone needs to be converted to and which, it becomes clear as his books progress, simply equates to his own views, a utopia where ‘world government’ is the simple-minded answer to all problems.

So it’s a meaningless concept, and even if it had any meaning, it’ll never happen. In fact the error is summed up in Kemp’s pithy opening sentence:

A scientific education saved Wells’s life; he assumed it would do the same for the world. (p.1)

But he was wrong.

Back to the books, Wells spoke about all knowledge being brought together into a ‘World Brain’ (the title of a book) and Kemp links this back to the colourful idea of the Grand Lunar who rules Selenite society in ‘First Men in the Moon’. (This explains the title of this chapter, for the Grand Lunar, essentially one big brain yards wide, cannot believe that earth society is run by governments of men. ‘Is there not a Grand Earthly? he asks.)

The dominating importance of education moves onto the dominating educator. We’ve seen how Wells talked about co-operation but was in practice a difficult domineering personality.

From there Kemp moves on to discuss dictators in Wells’s work, men who exercise total control. He praises Adler because he thinks the inferiority complex and the will to power operate continually whereas Freud’s sex instincts are more intermittent.

But Wells doesn’t venerate one particular leader. In his prophetic writings he went on and on about an elite, what he calls the Samurai in ‘A Modern Utopia’, the subject of his essay ‘An Open Conspiracy’. In ‘After Democracy’ he calls for ‘a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis’ (p.196).

He prided himself on his access to the powerful, to the great minds of the age, a trend which reached its peak in his notorious meeting with Stalin. His idiocy about the world reaches a kind of climax, as he subsequently wrote that Stalin is modest and self-critical and that no-one is afraid of him (p.197). Someone that completely wrong about one of the key figures of the twentieth century and everything he represented is hardly to be trusted on any other subject.

All this can be seen as an astonishing achievement for the son of a housekeeper. More subtly you can see how it is motivated by the wish to create an alternative hierarchy of values and achievers – scientists and educators – than the hierarchy Wells was brought up in and oppressed by – aristocrats and their parasites, religion and superstition.

The exorbitance of his imagination is revealed by the books titles, 11 of which have ‘world’ in the title, most of the others overdoing it – First and Last Things, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, Mankind in the Making.

And the length – many of them are very, very long. Wells freely explained that many of the reasonable length novels (Kipps, Ann Veronnica) were fragments of what he originally planned.

And the unstaunchable prolificness, the terrifying amount he wrote, came at the price of repetition. Many of the later novels echo or repeat plots and characters from earlier ones. Kemp points out that the novels about sexual relations show a tendency to fall back on the same limp scenarios and emotions.

That said, Kemp makes the interesting point that scientists, previously thin on the ground in English fiction, throng Wells’ novels and short stories i.e. he helped to make the serious research scientist a plausible figure, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, which, as he grew older, Wells yearned to be elected to.

Alliteration

It’s not a heavy theoretical book, there aren’t really many ideas in it although lots of insights, but Kemp clearly set out to enjoy himself and to entertain his readers. One amusing aspect of this is his fondness for alliteration:

Drudgery in draperies sapped his energy… (p.1)

He bounded energetically towards affluence and achievement… (p.1)

Subsisting on a medical menu, Mrs Tewler is duped and doped to death… (p.57)

It’s a trivial detail, really, but Kemp’s enjoyment of his own alliteration is infectious and worth mentioning.

Conclusion

This kind of book has at least two definable merits. One, its selection of quotes and scenes and examples reminds you of moments in the novels which you’d forgotten, so it works as a pleasurable aide memoire, a collection of memory jogs.

Secondly, the extended descriptions of basements and downstairs spaces in Wells’s own life and then in his fiction – as of all the other topics and themes which Kemp lists and describes – don’t explain the novels, they enrich them. They bring all these aspects – which it is easy to overlook in the hurry of reading for the plot – to life. It makes them 3D. it gives them an extra power and pungency. It makes reading or remembering these themes and images in the novels more rich and pleasurable. It enhances your enjoyment. This is a very enjoyable and enriching book.

Credit

The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp was published by Macmillan Press in 1982. References are to the 1996 revised paperback edition.

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The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

  • The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
  • The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
  • The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.

Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.

Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.

Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.

Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom.

Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.

A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

  • conflict
  • elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
  • landed wealth
  • weak social norms
  • the curse of natural resources
  • high inequality
  • corruption
  • ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the  cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

  1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
  2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
  3. Experiment, based on the results of the search.
  4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
  5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
  6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services,  sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think  he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

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The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar (revised edition, 2015)

This is a hefty 480-page account of the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring by a highly experienced BBC correspondent, so why did it feel such hard work, and why did I find myself heartily disliking the author long before the end? There are several reasons.

To begin with, I was deterred by the patronising, facetious tone of the opening chapter (examples below). Then, in the following, more serious chapters, Danahar does two interrelated things: he arranges the material about each of the countries he surveys (Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria) in a surprisingly non-chronological, apparently arbitrary way, which makes it difficult to follow the course of events or understand causal relationships or even be clear about key turning points. And this is exacerbated by the second element, namely Danahar’s apparent determination to name-drop every politician, commentator or local he’s ever met or interviewed.

When Michael Ignatieff interviews politicians in Empire Lite, his questions, the answers, and his reflections on them, are beautifully focused on the ideas and issues he is exploring. But in this book, although the politicians or generals or religious leaders Danahar interviews obviously speak more or less to the topic at hand, there is no discernible thread or focus to their comments. The result of these tactics is that each chapter turns into a porridgey morass of disconnected dates and unrelated soundbites. Danahar makes so many hundreds of minor ephemeral points that the main issues are buried.

Patronising and bad comedy

The first chapter, about the collapse of the old Middle East, is written in a patronising, would-be comic style, characterised by facetiousness and sarcasm. It’s a terrible example of what happens when BBC journalists are told to make their work ‘more accessible’ and, as a result, attempt to make subjects simple and funny.

Thus, when he explains that the Arab Spring was the expression of the frustration of the young generation in each of its countries, he doesn’t give any facts or figures or statistics, he just mocks and ridicules the old dictators of these countries:

But then these were old men who probably needed help from their grandchildren to operate the DVD player. (p.22)

The dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria tightly controlled the traditional media (press and TV) but:

The Grandads were too blind to see that their political class didn’t control the message any more. By the time they tried to turn the Internet off it was too late. (p.22)

This comes over as patronising and condescending and stupid. It lacks anything useful in the way of evidence, data, statistics, facts and analysis. It is a silly, cartoon version of the world and it is the dominant tone of this introductory survey.

A few weeks before the NATO jets began to rev up their engines to drop their first payloads on the regime of ‘the world’s most famous dictator’, the man who would soon soar up the charts to grab that title from him was still pretty confident that he faced no serious trouble at home. (p.27)

He’s talking about Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, but in the language of Top of the Pops. Why? Does he think it will make the subject more ‘accessible’? It doesn’t. It just comes over as patronising and childish. Here’s another, typical gag:

We in the West need to understand this region, because Vegas rules do not apply. What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. (p.17)

Here he is explaining why democracy is important:

Democracy is a safety valve. The ability to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and wander down the street hurling abuse at your leaders is a good thing for society. Without it the pressure just grows. (p.41)

The Internet. The Grandads. The Strong Men of the Arab World. Democracy. Everything is capitalised as for children. Janet and John. Blue Peter. BBC Bitesize.

We all know George W. Bush was a twerp but that’s no excuse for writing twerpishly about him. Here is Danahar describing George Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ and Bush’s apparently sincere belief that he was on a mission from God to bring peace to the Middle East:

He [Bush] pushed for elections in the region but then the Arabs started voting for the wrong people, Islamists. That wasn’t the plan. So Western government supported economic reform instead, but that only helped the dictators steal even more money. So Western aid money started to go back into civil society projects that seemed like a nice safe way of doing something while, critics said, not doing very much at all. The ‘mission from God’ became rather less driven. Instead it sort of ambled about a bit, took in the view and told the Arab people to be patient. (p.36)

See what I mean by patronising and condescending? Note the complete absence of facts or dates. Instead there’s just Danahar’s cheap sarcasm. Here is his cartoon summary of America’s puzzlement at the Arab Spring:

America not only doesn’t understand the rules of the game, it can’t work out what winning might look like. Since the revolts it has been roaming around the table looking at everyone else’s hand, offering advice on which hand to play, but because it acted like it didn’t have a stake in the game, nobody was really listening. (p.7)

Not helpful, is it? Weak attempts at humour are no substitute for intelligent analysis. Here is his explanation of why the Arab Spring kicked off in Tunisia:

Middle-class people don’t riot, or at least they didn’t before the Arab revolts. Middle-class people, by definition, have something invested in the system. It might not be much but it is theirs. So when trouble breaks out their instincts are normally to moan, not march. But nothing upsets the middle-classes like a show-off. And if the flashy neighbours are showing off with your money, the gardening gloves come off!

This is what happens when journalists think they’re stand-up comedians. ‘The gardening gloves come off!’ What a prannet.

Anti-West

Another reasons for disliking this book is that Danahar pins most of the blame for the failure of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions not on the actual inhabitants of the countries in question, but on ‘the West’. According to Danahar, ‘the West’ doesn’t understand the Arab world. ‘The West’ uses racist stereotypes of Arabs. ‘The West’ propped up dictators like Saddam and Assad for generations (p.21). ‘The West’ preaches democracy but then rejects it as soon as Islamist parties are elected (p.22). ‘The West’ projected its own facile wishes for a liberal third way onto the revolutions (p.23). When someone in ‘the West’ called them ‘the Facebook revolutions’ it’s because ‘the West looked for labels it could understand to explain a region it did not’ (p.22). Silly old, stupid old West, eh?

On and on goes Danahar’s barrage of accusations. ‘The West’ preaches democracy and human rights but conveniently forgets them when it has to do deals with Saudi Arabia for its oil (p.31). ‘The West’ ‘bought the line’ peddled by the old dictators that it was them or chaos, them or dangerous fundamentalists (p.34). Silly old West.

This all gets very tiresome very fast. Danahar’s pose of blaming ‘the West’ for everything is itself a stereotype, a Guardian-reader cliché, precisely the self-hating condescension towards his own country and culture which a certain kind of university-educated, white, Western, middle-class liberal deploys in order to feel smugly superior to it. When Danahar berates ‘the West’ for its racist ignorance or its hypocrisy he obviously isn’t including himself in ‘the West’. He is not part of the racist West. He is not part of the hypocritical West. He is perfectly attuned to the Arab world. He understands everything. After all, he works for the BBC and so is a god.

At one point he says ‘the West’ only reports on violence in the Arab world, thus fuelling the stereotype that the Arab world is violent (p.21). Well, er, isn’t he himself a, you know, journalist? Hasn’t he himself ever reported on violence in the Arab world? In fact his book overflows with reportage about revolution, insurgency, intifada and civil war all across the Arab world. So isn’t he, in other words, a fully paid-up member of the system which he opens his book by sarcastically criticising?

Plainly, Danahar considers himself an exception to the rule; when he reports on violence it is not how other reporters, those ghastly riff-raff, report on violence – he reports on it from above the fray, from the lofty vantage point of a BBC correspondent. This is exactly the tone of smug superiority which runs through another BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane’s, self-congratulatory book about Rwanda. Maybe it’s a requirement for the job.

Israel, again

After the deeply off-putting introduction, the book goes on to long, rambling, often confusing chapters about the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Egypt, Palestine, Israel. There’s a chapter about America’s attempts to cope with the course of events, and then on to reviews of events in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The Arab Spring affected the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and changed the dynamic affecting the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas. And it had some effect in Israel although, despite reading the Israel chapter twice, I couldn’t tell you exactly how. Maybe unnerved the Israeli government and army as they watched to see who would end up running the countries around them.

My main thought on Danahar’s chapters about Palestine and Israel was – why, at just over a hundred pages, is a quarter of a book which is meant to be about the Arab Spring devoted to the Israel-Palestine question?

The bias in international reporting

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme, I was the ‘Asia’ editor. I produced discussion pieces about the tail end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988) through to the first Gulf War (1991). In between, I tried every week to get items on the air about other parts of Asia, for example, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, or south-east Asia such as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam or Indonesia, but found it difficult-to-impossible. Even getting stories about China onto the programme was virtually impossible since, back in those days, the only reported events were the stiflingly boring Communist Party congresses.

No, the three countries that appeared on the programme week in, week out, with mind-numbing inevitability, were America, Israel and South Africa. Atrocities could happen in Indonesia or Cambodia, political arguments in India, elections in Bangladesh, riots in Kyrgyzstan – my editor and the commissioning editor weren’t interested. But one settler got shot in Israel or the South African police opened fire on a group of black protesters and, whoosh! We’d immediately schedule ten-minute discussions assessing the state of the never-ending peace process or have yet another talkfest about the apartheid regime. And an American senator or congressman only had to make a controversial remark or a judge somewhere in Kansas make a ruling about abortion or civil rights and, whoosh! off we had to go to America for yet another in-depth report about America America America.

What I learned from working on an international affairs programme was the enormous in-built bias in the media towards certain countries and certain stories and against most others. There are at least four reasons for this. 1) It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely. So Israel and South Africa, for all the shortcomings of their regimes, were First World countries with excellent transport and power and communications infrastructure. Sometimes a bit perilous, but basically very good countries to report from.

2) Everyone already knows the narrative. The Arab-Israeli conflict has taken on the character of a fairy story (a particularly Grimm fairy story) with an extremely clear, black-and-white narrative about the conflict between the Goliath of the all-powerful, unpleasantly right-wing but recognisably democratic Israeli state and the David of the plucky underdog, the downtrodden oppressed Palestinians, all too often represented by awful terrorist organisations, first the PLO and now Hamas. The simplicity of the narrative makes it easy to conceptualise, describe, and analyse. It’s Easy to package. Same used to be true of apartheid South Africa. Apartheid authorities = evil; black freedom fighters = heroes and martyrs; Nelson Mandela = a saint.

They were pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about.

Compare and contrast the difficulties I had trying to persuade my editor to do an item about the general election in Bangladesh, where 17 different parties were standing, and the ruling party was riven by corruption accusations, or the latest political scandal in Indonesia. I never stood a chance of getting those kinds of stories on the show because 1) the countries were difficult to operate in and get stories out of, 2) the situations were complex and unfamiliar, so would take some time to explain properly by which time, it was assumed, the audience would have turned over to watch Love Island.

Incidentally, it was even worse for my friend who was the Africa editor. She was initially angry, frustrated, tried to make a change, protested, and eventually slumped into sullen acceptance of the fact that she would never get a story on the programme about any other African country but South Africa. During the apartheid years, any speech by a government minister, any shooting in a black township, any announcement by the ANC got more coverage than entire wars in Chad, Sudan, Congo and so on. Because it was easy to report from (five star hotels, excellent satellite links) and the narrative was fairy-tale easy to cover in a short studio discussion.

3) Related to the points above is the way that Western journalists and editors shared the same basic assumption that these places mattered to their audience. Regarding Israel, maybe because of residual British guilt at having mismanaged our mandate over Palestine, probably more to do with the active Jewish community in Britain, it was assumed that British audiences had a kind of vested interest in what goes on in Israel. In the same way, many British firms had business connections and investments in South Africa; lots of pukka Brits have lived and worked there. Again it was assumed the audience had various kinds of attachment to the place in ways they just didn’t to Indonesia or Malaya or Bangladesh.

(In fact, some 650,000 people of Bangladeshi origin live in the UK, or 1% of the UK population, twice as many as Jews, about 370,000 or 0.5%. So it’s not a case of raw numbers. And obviously the British Empire ruled Bangladesh as much as it ruled between-the-wars Palestine; facts which reinforce my theory that it’s to do with ease of access and simplicity of narrative.)

4) Lastly, over and above these points, there was what you could call the student-level, Guardian-reading and Labour Left feeling that we, the British government, ought to be doing more in both places to bring about justice, democracy etc. A moral and political commitment to these places. Remember all the marches and rallies and speeches about apartheid during the 1970s and 80s? And the marches and speeches and rallies which still go on about Palestine? Left and progressive politics was and is committed to the injustices in those places in ways that just don’t apply to injustice and grievance in Indonesia or Bangladesh.

So these 4 reasons help to explain why just a handful of foreign countries were (and their modern equivalents still are) vastly over-represented in the British media while others, in fact most of the countries in the rest of the world (Chad, Guatemala, Angola, Tajikistan) go virtually unreported in the media from one year to the next.

I wouldn’t say this is conscious racism – the two countries I’ve highlighted as dominating the headlines in the early 1990s included Arabs and Jews and blacks – and in fact all bien-pensant liberals were falling over themselves to speak up for Palestinians and black South Africans, so it’s not racism in the obvious sense.

But the four reasons I’ve listed above go some way to explaining why there is a kind of institutional and deeply embedded bias in all reporting of world affairs by almost all Western media. Some countries are easy to report from and feature simple black-and-white narratives (Russia = invading bully; Ukraine = plucky underdog) and so they tend to get the headlines. Countries which are harder to move around freely, or lack a good comms infrastructure, or where the issues are complex and require a bit of explanation – not reported so much, or hardly at all.

Hopefully, you now see the point of my heading ‘Israel, again’. I was hoping this book would provide a good narrative account and analytic explanation of the revolutions in countries I don’t know that much about (Libya, Syria), describing the Arab Springs which were carried out in Arab countries by Arab peoples.

Instead, as Danahar’s text set off on a long rambling account of the Arab-Israeli conflict which included all kinds of historical digressions – taking in the Balfour Declaration, the first Temple, Mohammad ascending into heaven from the Dome of the Rock, Abraham, descriptions of the three Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, the various intifadas, Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, its invasions of the West Bank, rocket attacks, illegal settlements blah blah blah – I found myself thinking: why is a quarter of this book about bloody Israel (again)?

As to the actual content, it can be summarised thus: Israel has been becoming more right wing, with the ongoing rise of intolerant religious/sectarian political parties and groups in society, and Supreme Court rulings which are tending to define Israel more and more as an exclusively Jewish state, increasingly excluding and alienating the 2 million citizens of the country (total population 8 million) who are not Jewish.

Some commentators blame the fiercely right-wing turn Israeli society has taken (and the collapse of the old Israeli Left) on the sizeable influx of Russian immigrant Jews, who are more fiercely anti-Arab and pro the illegal settlement of the occupied West Bank than the average population. These Russian immigrants are blamed for fundamentally changing the nature of Israeli society (p.224). If Danahar’s correct in this description, then the liberal, democratic and progressive Israel I grew up admiring has vanished forever.

Rambling text

Danahar arranges his chapters in long repetitive, unstructured and emphatically unchronological narratives. So in the Israel chapter, one minute we’re in 1917 (Balfour Declaration), then in 1982 (invasion of Lebanon), then it’s 1967 (Arab-Israeli war) and suddenly 2003 (US invades Iraq), in no particular order, as his train of thought rambles over the subject.

On one level this makes the text quite enjoyable, a bit like Tristram Shandy. Every time I opened the book I came across sections I couldn’t remember reading, and had no idea where I was in the story, since the narratives in each chapter deliberately follow no chronological or logical order. Pot luck. Spin the wheel.

On a more practical level, however, it meant I got to the end of the chapter about, for example, Egypt, with no clear idea what happened during the Arab Spring protests there. I think the street protests in spring 2011 led to the overthrow of Egypt’s long-time authoritarian leader, Hosni Mubarak; after a period of confusion, elections were held which returned the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood to government. They, and their leader, Mohammed Morsi, turned out to be terrible at running a country, at trying to balance and reconcile all the opposing factions, and began to behave increasingly autocratically while at the same time street crime/lawlessness increased. Until eventually the army, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in July 2013 stepped in to end the chaos, deposed Morsi, and imposed yet another round of military rule. I think.

In the same way, the two connected chapters about Palestine-Israel ramble all over the place, burying the impact of the Arab Spring under layers of digression about every other conceivable subject. For example, the Israel chapter includes long passages about some of the extreme orthodox Jewish groups and parties which seem to be growing in Israel, passages which weren’t really about the Arab Spring at all, but fit more into Danahar’s broader thesis that the entire region is becoming more prone to religious sectarianism and extremism.

I registered this idea, processed it and then thought – hang on; what about the Iranian revolution of 1979? I was alive at the time and remember it having a huge, seismic impact, far more game-changing than the Arab Springs. Ten years later, when I worked on the international affairs programme, many of the experts I spoke to associated the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the creation of a theocracy based on Sharia law with the advent of a completely new phenomenon – Islamic fundamentalism.

This was then echoed and amplified by the example of the mujahideen in Afghanistan who, for ten long years (1979 to 1989), brought the concept of Islamic fighters into the front room of anyone in the West who owned a telly and watched the news. In other words, I thought this phenomenon, the rise and rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic sectarianism had been becoming slowly more widespread for 30 years or so before the Arab Spring.

I suppose it’s possible to argue that the Arab Spring came after the experience of Iraq collapsing into bitter sectarian civil war and ethnic cleansing from 2003 onwards had ramped up sectarian bitterness a notch; but this had been prepared decades earlier when Sunni Saddam went to war with Shia Iran in 1980, by Sunni-Shia clashes in the Lebanon, by the uneasy rule of the Shia minority Alawi sect over a majority Sunni population in Syria and many other Sunni-Shia clashes across the Arab world.

And as to extreme religious orthodox groups in Israel, I swear to God I’ve been watching TV documentaries or reading articles about them for decades. In fact a stock part of any debate about whether we should have proportional representation in the UK is to cite the example of Israel where PR means that the tiny ultra-orthodox parties can have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers or democratic mandate.

So this is another reason I didn’t like this book. Not only does Danahar go on at extraordinary length about issues and historical events which are peripheral to the nominal subject of his book (what have extended interviews with the Israeli haredi community got to do with the Arab Spring?) but many of the ideas he derives from it seem surprisingly, well, stale and obvious. Religious fanaticism is on the rise in the Middle East! Haven’t we known this for decades and decades?

America, again

What I wrote above about Israel and old apartheid South Africa is a million times truer of America. Regular readers will know of my dislike of the way the arts and media industries in the UK slavishly kowtow to all things American (the Barbican, Radio 4). I was surprised to realise just how much this lickspittle adulation extended, during the Iraq and Afghan wars, to politicians like Tony Blair and the entire staff of the British army who went out of their way to suck up to the Americans. According to Jack Fairweather and Frank Ledwidge the only reason the British chiefs of staffs recommended deploying the British Army to Afghanistan in 2006, and Blair and Reid enthusiastically agreed, was to try and rebuild our reputation with the Americans after we fouled up so badly in southern Iraq. British military policy was dictated by keeping in with the Yanks.

So it irritated me that a) Danahar places his chapter about American policy in the Middle East before he gets to the actual Arab Spring events in the key states of Libya and Syria; and b) that the chapter about America is longer (52 pages) than the chapters on Iraq (43), Libya (44) and only just eclipsed by Syria (56). America, as usual. America, again.

Mind you he isn’t a fan. The reverse. Danahar’s America chapter is 50 pages of snarky sarcasm about how quickly the Americans were wrong-footed, told in Danahar’s trademark Horrible Histories style:

Perhaps it was the moment America’s old and decrepit foreign policy in the Middle East found itself caught in the headlights, just before the juggernaut driven by a generation of young Arab youths turned it into roadkill. (p.231)

History as sketch show.

Then I was further disheartened to discover that half the America chapter is – guess what? – predominantly about America’s closest ‘ally’ in the region, Israel (again!), with page after page after page chronicling Barack Obama’s difficult relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. OK, there is some coverage of Saudi Arabia, about its break with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about its (apparent) lack of any home-grown talents or industries apart from oil; and about Israel and Saudi’s common interest in fearing Iran’s nuclear programme. But Israel, America, America, Israel, God spare us.

According to Israeli military figures, Israel carried out a decisive attack on Syria’s nuclear programme in 2007, a devastating attack which destroyed the programme and which both sides have kept hushed up (p.377). Danahar explains how Netanyahu sees his historical role as being the man who saved Israel from Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and how he has consistently called for bombing runs to destroy Iran’s facilities, but how Israel isn’t strong enough to do this on its own, it needs America. And how Obama refused to countenance such a thing and preferred to work through sanctions.

This is interesting enough, but I was hoping for more analysis of Arab countries in a book about the impact of the Arab Spring; not to read page after page after page after page about America or Israel or both.

(As I finished this review, 5 July 2023, America launched an incursion into the West Bank, ostensibly to liquidate ‘militants’ but, inevitably, resulting in civilian casualties and triggering a car attack in Tel Aviv. Just as I’m about to publish this, Hamas launched its atrocious pogrom against Israelis living near Gaza and Israel is responding with a full-spectrum assault on the whole of Gaza whose brutality many Israelis are starting to doubt. So it has gone on during my entire life, and will continue long after I’m gone.)

A blizzard of interviews

By page 300 I’d noticed a verbal tic of Danahar’s which I thought was very symptomatic of the book’s shortcomings. On page after page he says he interviewed this, that or the other senior figure in this, that or the other relevant country, and records how they ‘told him’ their view or take or version.

The more I pondered all these ‘told me’s’ the more symptomatic I realised they are. Danahar is a journalist. Journalists work on relatively short ‘stories’ which they file one at a time to newspapers and magazines or TV or radio, generally on a quick turnaround. It is a badge of achievement to add into these stories that you interviewed or got access to very senior figures in the army or government or whatever relevant part of the administration as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, ordinary people like teachers taking part in protest marches or innocent citizens whose house has just been bombed etc. Quoting one or two of these in every ‘story’ wins you brownie points, shows how well ‘in’ you are with people in the know and/or have done the legwork to get piping hot eye-witness accounts.

My point is that this entire approach, which is a central aspect of journalistic technique, doesn’t work so well in a book. Instead, having two or three extensive quotes from a galaxy of sources, on every single page does the opposite to what it does in an article – it makes the narrative cluttered and confusing. So many people are quoted saying so many things that it becomes very difficult remembering who’s who, what they said and why.

The people quoted in Michael Ignatieff’s books (which I regard as a kind of gold standard) speak to the issue under consideration, and their quotes are chosen in such a way as to elaborate and elucidate the central topics and ideas, to sustain a train of thought. Ignatieff selects and edits his quotes very carefully in order to further and deepen his analysis.

By contrast, Danahar just quotes people because they shed a bit of light on this event, have a view about this or that personality, saw this thing happen, knew that person, are a paid commentator or protester or whatnot, have a bit to chip in. Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. When he quotes Nikolas Sarkozi and Obama being caught by microphones at the UN agreeing that they both hate Netanyahu, I realised a lot of these ‘exclusive’ interviews are little more than high-level gossip. Crucially, his quotes don’t contribute to the narrative, they rarely shed much light. Instead, the sheer number of people popping up with this or that comment on this and that turn of events are a major reason why the text feels so dense and confusing.

Danahar has spoken to hundreds of the right people and yet has somehow, magically emerged with next to no interesting or useful analysis. In his series about contemporary international affairs Michael Ignatieff interviewed far fewer people but his interviews have a laserlike precision; Danahar’s build up a huge, colourful and completely confusing mural.

‘I was there’

This is related to another aspect of the book, which is fine, which is very creditable in journalism but also doesn’t work in a book, which is constantly telling all his readers that he was there. Danahar was there when Obama made his big speech in Cairo, and again at the UN (p.265). Danahar was there when Colonel Gaddafi addressed his General People’s Congress for the last time on 2 March 2011 (p.342). Danahar interviewed Gaddafi in person after the revolt had begun (p.353). The Great Leader even put his arm round Danahar’s shoulders (p.354), and, a few months later, Danahar was at the morgue to see Gaddafi’s mutilated corpse (p.358). Danahar interviewed Bashar al-Assad (p.371). Danahar was there in Baghdad when the Americans entered the city (p.283). Danahar was there in the West Bank as the Israeli rockets flew overhead, he was there, he saw it with his own eyes.

All this is fabulous in an immediate, rushed, eye-witness piece for a newspaper or magazine, but boring and distracting in a book with pretensions to analysis. I don’t care whether he choked on teargas in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian protests, or ducked under incoming fire in the West Bank. That’s irrelevant to what ought to be an objective analysis of the events and their meaning.

But Danahar can’t leave his journalistic mindset behind. He has spoken to hundreds of people and he is determined to quote every single one or die in the attempt; and he was there to eye-witness this invasion and that firefight or this key speech or that momentous signing, and he’s not going to let you forget it.

Indeed, most of the chapters open, not with a significant moment in the events he’s chronicling, but with a personal story of him being on the spot in Egypt, or Israel or Iraq.

‘Even if you win, it is difficult to rule an angry people,’ he told me. (Introduction)

‘I can’t believe we’ve won, I can’t believe we’ve won,’ shouted a man to me over the noise of the chants and firecrackers as Cairo’s Tahrir Square exploded into an ecstatic mix of joy and relief. (Chapter 2)

My ears were working perfectly so I could hear him screaming: ‘Made in the US, look! Made in the US.’ (Chapter 5)

It started for me mid-morning on a quiet street, much like any other, in 2003 in central Baghdad. (Chapter 6)

The bursts of fire from the anti-aircraft gun blistered their way across the field towards the lines of government forces dug in on the other side. The deafening noise and the smell of cordite suffocated my senses. (Chapter 7)

The village sat nestled among cornfields and green pastures where sheep grazed in the crushing midday sun under the watchful eye of local shepherds. A dusty little road wound its way up through the surrounding fields to the small grey-brick homes sitting on a rocky outpost overlooking the countryside. As I entered the house from the dazzling light outside, it was difficult at first to understand why my boots were sticking to the ground in the dark little room. (Chapter 8)

So not only is the text confused and rambling and so stuffed with quotes it feels like an old mattress, but it is continually punctuated with grandstanding reminders of how clever Danahar was to be in the right place at the right time. Fine if you like magazine journalism. Distracting and, ultimately, irritating if you’re looking for analysis.

Anthony Loyd’s war books contain as much or more about himself, and candid revelations about his personal life far in excess of Danahar’s, BUT…a massive but…these personal passages are balanced by intelligent, insightful, priceless analyses of what was going on in the wars Loyd reported on, and why. Loyd’s analyses give you a real sense of what was happening, and how politics and warfare work on the ground. I remember much of his stuff about Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kosovo because it was so insightful, he really helped me to understand those wars.

In addition, Loyd’s complex mingling of reportage with autobiography give you insights into the trade of foreign correspondent, insight into what drives pampered westerners to seek out warzones and scenes of atrocity. They manage to be not only excellent war reporting, but subtle meditations on the trade of war reporting itself. There’s nothing that subtle or interesting here.

Initial facts about the Arab Spring

The Arab nations are disproportionately young. In many, half the population is under 25 (p.7). In all the chapters, about all the major Arab states, Danahar repeats the same point: there is not enough work for these young people to do and no work means no marriage, no family, no identity, no future (e.g. Libya, p.364).

It began in Tunisia. Tunisia was ruled by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for 24 years and had erected a huge security apparatus to keep it that way. His family ran everything and were known as The Family. The whole thing was dominated by his infamous wife, Leila Ben Ali.

It began on 17 December 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street trader, poured petrol over himself and set himself alight in protest at having his street trader goods confiscated by the corrupt police. This incident was distributed like wildfire via social media and triggered protest marches which turned to riots in January 2011. The marches and protests became so large that, when some of the army and security forces began to show their support for the protesters, Ben Ali and his family fled the country. The example of Bouazizi was beamed round the Arab world and was, arguably, incited and inflamed by the Arab-focused news media, particularly the Qatar-owned TV channel al-Jazeera.

Iraq

Saddam was toppled so that the region could be reformed. Instead it was convulsed. (p.324)

I’ve now read half a dozen books about Iraq. Danahar’s account suffers from several trademark flaws. For a start, he devotes a lot of time to rehashing the well-known story of the buildup to the American invasion of 2003, the looting which followed, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, his decision to sack every member of the Ba’ath party from their jobs and dissolve the army and all Iraq’s security forces, two of the worst decisions made anywhere ever, the collapse of the country into insurgency and then sectarian civil war – all old news by 2015, and even older as I read it in 2023. But Danahar tells all this in his usual arsey-versey manner, mingling dates and events in single sentences, sweeping past issues I know to be complicated with just a phrase.

And, of course, the buildup, invasion and then catastrophic mismanagement afterwards are almost entirely American affairs so it’s yet another example of America, again. George Bush again, and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, again.

For me his account only gets interesting when he gets to Obama, who took office in January 2009, because Obama isn’t covered in the accounts of Thomas Ricks and other early histories I’ve read.

So it was useful to read Danahar’s take on Obama’s attempts to extricate America from Iraq, along with the baleful impact of the billions America invested there i.e. ongoing terrible infrastructure collapse, and long-standing resentment, even hatred, among all those who lost family members in the terrible violence.

America left no friends behind in Iraq. (p.322)

Danahar is more critical of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki than other authors I’ve read have been, for the simple reason that he is writing later (2015) as the evil caused by Maliki’s shameless sectarian support of Shia militias and his sustained attacks on Sunni politicians and communities had led to dire results. Most notable of these was the rise of ISIS, which was an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, itself manned by disaffected Sunnis, including former Iraqi Army officers.

The Iraqi army was in no shape to deal with this because, according to US assessments, by then al-Maliki had ‘hollowed out big chunks of the Iraqi military. He de-professionalised it, moving out some of the competent leadership, moving in people loyal to him who didn’t know what they were doing…’ (p.322)

So when ISIS forces stormed across the border from Syria in June 2014, Maliki’s army turned tail and fled. Soldiers threw off their uniforms and ran away.

The Iraqi army was proving itself not to be much of an army at all. (p.414)

Four Iraqi army and federal police divisions disintegrated, abandoning all their expensive US-supplied weapons to the jihadists. Black humour doesn’t come much blacker. So that by mid-2014 ISIS found itself ‘governing’ a large part of eastern Syria and north-western Iraq, and was a magnet for every (Sunni) jihadist who truly believed the caliphate was being restored and the end times were at hand. (See my review of ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger.)

Danahar appears to agree with Emma Sky’s view that Obama went to the opposite extreme from Bush and his neocons, by withdrawing American forces too fast; in too fast, out too fast. Obama wanted to be shot of the whole problem but in completely withdrawing US troops and leaving Iraq to the tender mercies of al-Maliki, he was partly responsible for the vacuum into which ISIS burst. And promptly found himself dragged back into Iraq to try and sort out the mess.

After trying to ignore the rise of ISIS during 2013, Obama was finally forced to take notice when ISIS captured the major city of Mosul and began to carry out well-publicised atrocities in its new territory. In June 2014 he sent the air force to pound ISIS strongholds and US special forces back into Iraq to assist Kurdish forces in taking on ISIS. Obama painfully learned the truth of the laconic remark Powell allegedly made to Bush back before the invasion even took place: ‘You broke it, you own it.’

Anyway, the final page of Danahar’s Iraq chapter has little to do with Iraq itself because, without quite understanding how, we are back discussing America, again. Danahar’s final thoughts are all about the US of A. He makes the intriguing suggestion that, had the invasion of Iraq achieved its goal (creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East) it might have tempted the Americans on to the kind of over-reach which marks the end of empires. Instead, the invasion and occupation were such a crushing failure that they forced the entire US establishment, politicians, civil servants and military, to pause and rethink their interests and goals.

Fair enough, interesting point – but this thoughtful conclusion does seem like … America, again.

Libya

Four big takeaways: 1) Gaddafi created a cult of personality more total and far-reaching than any other Arab leader. He was the Arab world’s longest-serving leader (42 years; p.327). He smothered all freedom of debate, political parties and civil society. So, when he was overthrown, there was a bigger vacuum.

2) It was triggered by one man. Just as Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader, triggered the revolt in Tunisia, so Libya kicked off after a human rights lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was arrested in Benghazi on 15 February 2011. Protesters organised a ‘Day of Rage’ on 17 February and that is the date which became associated with the uprising (p.329).

3) There is a major split between east and west Libya, which were originally two distinct provinces of the Ottoman Empire and only yoked together as a result of Italy’s violent colonisation in the 1930s (p.334). When the revolt against Gaddafi broke out, there were two distinct groups of rebels, who didn’t interact. According to Danahar the National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Benghazi in the east, proved reluctant or incapable of helping the rebels in the west, Gaddafi’s powerbase. They also didn’t come to the aid of smaller towns in their region, a failure which encouraged local militias to believe it was every man for himself i.e. to split the anti-Gaddafi forces into lots of fragments (p.333). So that’s part of the cause of the civil war which lasts to this day.

4) ‘The NATO intervention was unquestionably the deciding factor in Libya’s civil war,’ (p.358).

Timeline

17 February 2011 – Day of Rage

27 February 2011 – National Transitional Council set up in Benghazi

21 March 2011 – NATO forces intervene i.e. bomb Gaddafi / Libyan army positions

27 June 2011 – International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant against Gaddafi and his entourage

20 August 2011 – Gaddafi ousted from power in Tripoli and withdraws to his home town of Sirte which he declares the new capital of Libya

20 October 2011 – Sirte captured by rebel forces, Gaddafi found, lynched and murdered

End of the first Libyan civil war

Start of the second Libyan civil war

11 September 2012 – al Qaeda forces attacked the US consulate in Benghazi killing the US ambassador and 3 others leading to a government crackdown on Islamic and rebel militias which had lingered on after the war, and slowly escalated into a new civil war

Libya became split between the House of Representatives, also known as the ‘Tobruk government’, which is internationally recognised as the Libyan Government, and the rival Islamist government of the General National Congress (GNC), also called the ‘National Salvation Government’, based in the capital Tripoli.

The last pages of the Libya chapter give an entertaining overview of the chaos the country descended into by 2014. It’s worth quoting Danahar’s explanation, at length:

Things got so bad so fast because the Gulf states would not stop interfering. Qatar kept funneling money to the Islamists and its favoured militias in Misrata. The UAE and Egypt found their own proxy in the form of an old Libyan army general named Khalifa Haftar. Egypt first got involved because President al-Sisi didn’t want a country led by the Brotherhood on his doorstep. Hatred of the Brotherhood also motivated the UAE, which sometimes cut out the middle man and used their own fighter jets to bomb Libyan militias. After Islamist extremists beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christians working in Libya, al-Sisi started air strikes too. (p.367)

It’s nice to see Danahar calling the Arab League a joke. That was our view back in the early 1990s but I note that it’s now acceptable to say it openly. Why? Because the League promotes a unicorn called ‘Arab unity’ while all across the region Arabs are at each others’ throats, often literally (see al Qaeda beheadings in Libya, Syria and Iraq). Tot up the dead and injured from the civil wars in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq:

  • Syrian civil war: 570,000+ killed and counting
  • Iraqi insurgency, civil war, and ISIS war: 220,000+ killed and counting
  • Yemeni Civil War: casualty figure at 350,000+ killed and counting
  • Libyan Crisis: 40,000+ killed and counting
  • Egyptian Crisis: 5,000+ killed and counting

Arabs have killed about a million other Arabs in the last decade. Some unity. Instead there is a complex web of interference in all these conflicts by other Arab states, often lined up behind opposing factions, supplying arms and bombing each other’s militias.

Their differing objectives meant that Saudi Arabi and Qatar were, behind the scenes, at each other’s throats over Syria. The US tried, and failed, to get them to co-operate. (p.376)

And Arab incompetence. Not my view, Danahar’s:

Within weeks of Mubarak’s overthrow the institution which had symbolised much of what is wrong with the Arab world during his rule [the Arab League] was suddenly in danger of losing its hard-won reputation of being utterly useless in a crisis. (p.235)

By the time his book went to press (2015) Libya looked increasingly like a country in name only, being split down the middle with two governments, two armies and two sets of foreign sponsors, with some towns and cities under no one’s control but the scenes of ongoing urban warfare and terrorist attacks.

Characteristically, Danahar winds up his Libya chapter by reflecting on America (again). It was NATO bombing which halted and ‘degraded’ Gaddafi’s army, allowing the rebels to seize territory. But Danahar ends with President Barack Obama regretting, in retrospect, that the West hadn’t worked out a plan for what to do after Gaddafi’s overthrow. It beggars belief that 8 years after they made that gross mistake in Iraq (what do you do after you overthrow the dictator?), America admitted it had made the exact same mistake in Libya. History is the blackest of black comedies.

Syria

Danahar makes one big point about Syria, which is that when protests against the authoritarian rule of Bashar al-Assad began and then turned violent, a sizeable proportion of the Syrian population did not join the protests because they had seen what happened in neighbouring Iraq when a tyrant was overthrown i.e. descent into sectarian civil war. This was particularly true of non-Muslim minorities such as the sizeable number of Christians in Syria and the minority Alawi sect identified with the Assad family. Therefore a notable percentage of the population acquiesced in Assad’s rule, not because they supported him but because they were terrified of what would happen if he was overthrown. Therefore the protesters, rebels and insurgents couldn’t muster the widespread popular support they needed. Therefore Assad was able to keep enough of a powerbase to launch increasingly violent war against his own people (pages 321 and 375).

It started in March 2011 when 15 schoolchildren in the town of Dera’a were arrested and tortured for writing on a wall the slogan ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime’. On 18 March, after Friday prayers, some of the population gathered to protest the brutal treatment of the children whereupon the security forces opened fire and killed four. At the funeral of these dead, the security forces opened fire again, killing even more unarmed civilians. And so the city rose in rebellion, which spread to other cities.

Once again, the Arab League cocked it up:

‘Everyone missed the train on this crisis,’ a diplomat in Damascus told me. ‘The UN did not show up, the Europeans and Americans did not show up. They left it all in the hands of the Arab League. Then the Arab League started messing it up from day one. They are the ones who radicalised it.’ (p.379)

Three reasons why the Syria civil war is so intractable:

  1. Syria is a regionally, ethnically and religiously fragmented society. The opposition to the regime could never be united into one group, not by the UN or the US, not by the most proactive Gulf states Saudi and Qatar, not by the patronage of neighbouring Turkey; but obstinately persisted in fragmentary militias and parties.
  2. This was played on by Assad who sowed division between neighbour and neighbour, carrying out atrocities (massacring men, women and children in one village and blaming it on the different religion or ethnic group in the next village. Bosnia. Balkanisation. Spreading fear. Massacres, reprisals, revenge).
  3. The number of outside countries piling in to support their own groups and agendas, namely (pro-Assad) Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Russia; (against Assad) Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And then, of course, the hapless West in the shape of the bewildered Yanks, drawn into yet another Middle Eastern conflict they couldn’t resolve.

Sides in the Syrian civil war

Pro Assad

Russia had supported the house of Assad back in the Cold War days, Russia had business investments in Syria and a Russian naval base at Tartus. Russia sees Assad as a secular leader battling a sea of Islamic fundamentalists.

Iran supports Assad because a) Assad’s Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam and b) as a major regime in the Arab world beholden to them and thus a counterweight to anti-Iran Saudi Arabia.

Anti Assad

Saudi Arabia‘s main foreign policy concern is the rise and rise of Iran as a regional power; Iran quickly came to the aid of Assad, threatening to create a Shia arc of influence from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria, and on into Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. The Saudis, despite their instinctive dislike of popular rebellion (which might threaten their own conservative monarchy) nonetheless opposed Iran’s ally Assad and began payrolling and supplying Islamic militias.

Qatar supplied arms and ammunition to Islamists with a view to creating a new government run by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Turkey, led by the Muslim populist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and antipathetic to Assad’s secular militaristic regime, condemned Assad’s brutality, supported the rebels and, led by paranoia about the knock-on effect of Syrian Kurdish separatism for their own Kurdish region, has ended up occupying northern parts of Syria.

As so often, I wondered why America feels so obligated to get drawn into these toxic conflicts. Why doesn’t it just walk away and let them all slaughter each other? If this is what Arab culture amounts to – endless sectarian slaughter – why don’t America and the West leave them to enjoy it?

Danahar’s encouragement to intervene

The world

In his coverage of Syria Danahar did something which really pissed me off; he indulged in precisely the high-minded, moralising blackmail which dragged us into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all considered disastrous. What I mean is he uses the kind of emotionally charged rhetoric which journalists can throw around without having to bother about the consequences:

Homs was where the wider world first learned of the savage brutality of the Assad regime and then realised it didn’t care enough to do much about it. Homs was where the world began its betrayal of the Syrian people. (p.379)

This is meretricious grandstanding. Who is this ‘world’ he talks of? Is he talking about you and me, did you betray the Syrian people? Or does he mean major international organisations like the UN and the EU? Well, the UN made repeated attempts to find a settlement but failed because of the intractable nature of the conflict: Assad refused to back down, the opposition weren’t united or strong enough to overthrow him, the backers of both sides (Iran and Russia versus Saudi and Qatar) also wouldn’t back down.

What does Danahar think ‘the world’ should have done so as not to betray the Syrian people? Invaded Syria and overthrown the tyrant? Joined the war as yet another outside player, and bombed the Syrian army into oblivion? We all know what happens when the West begins an air campaign (see Kosovo), within a matter of days it’s bombing civilian convoys or blowing up the Chinese embassy and its hands become as sullied as anyone else’s; and it may, eventually, lead to a ceasefire but not to a real solution (Kosovo).

Christopher Phillips book on Syria shows that everyone was delighted when the French-led bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya emboldened the opposition and led to the dictator’s capture and brutal murder (October 2011) but then…Then the opposition collapsed into rival warlords and civil war, not unlike the chaos which followed the overthrow of Saddam eight years earlier, and now, 12 years later, Libya is in effect a failed state, divided into two feuding regimes.

The criticism made of ‘the West’ is that it didn’t follow up on the air strikes, didn’t engage with, fund and organise the opposition enough and steer them towards a unified settlement. But could they have? How much would that have cost? Should Barack Obama have gone to Congress and asked them to provide tens of billions more to send troops to supervise the reconstruction of Libya? Like they supervised the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan? How many troops? For how long?

The one great conclusion of all the books I’ve read by Jack Fairweather, Frank Ledwidge, Thomas Ricks, Rory Stewart and Michael Ignatieff is that ‘the West’ needs to acknowledge that 1) it can intervene a lot less effectively in conflict zones than it used to think, 2) that its interventions are almost always counter-productive, and 3) its interventions always lead to more lives lost, not least among Western armed forces but also, always, among the local people.

So Danahar made me really cross by playing to the gallery and striking this bleeding heart pose of caring journalist stricken that ‘the world’ was just standing by and letting Assad murder his own people. What should we have done instead, Paul? Bomb Syria? Invade Syria? Assassinate Assad? Or should we have ‘cared’ more? What does that even mean?

The cavalry

Danahar concludes his Syria chapter with:

If the Arab Spring and the years that followed had been a revelation to the world, it had been an education for the Syrians too. The most important thing they had learned was this. While the war raged there would be no foreign cavalry marching over the horizon to save them. Until the fighting ended the Syrian people were on their own. (p.425)

This is objectionable on at least three grounds. 1) ‘Foreign cavalry’? He is, of course, talking about the much-maligned West but why, why, why should British and American (or Canadian or Danish) soldiers die in their hundreds because Bashar al-Assad is a murderous tyrant? We had a go at ‘saving’ the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan and you know what? Within weeks they had united in attacking the infidel crusader occupiers. This is Tony Blair’s line in his infamous Chicago speech where he put the case for humanitarian intervention if a dictator is massacring his own people; this was precisely the rationale behind his decision to back Dubya and send hundreds of British troops to their pointless deaths in Iraq. We intervened in Libya and fragmented the country.

Has Danahar learned nothing?

Why should ‘the West’ save the rest of the world? Libya, Iraq and Syria aren’t screwed-up disaster zones because of western imperialists from a hundred years ago, but because they were ruled by extremely typical Arab dictators who suppressed every form of civil society for decades so that, when they fell, none of their people knew how to run anything, all they knew was how to seize power for themselves, generally using extreme violence, and creating a political vacuum into which flooded psychopathic Islamic extremism. Well, the Arabs are welcome to the world they’ve created. There are 22 countries in the Arab League, including some of the richest in the world. Let them sort it out. Or, to turn it around, if Arabs can’t sort out Arab problems in Arab countries, why should anyone believe that non-Arab, non-Muslim outsiders can?

2) Anyway, Danahar is wrong. It’s not that there is no cavalry riding over the hill to save the Syrian people (good God, these trite Hollywood metaphors turn so many writers’ brains to mulch); it’s that there are too many cavalries riding over the hill. Danahar’s entire Syria chapter describes the intervention in Syria of Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, plus numerous jihadist factions (al Qaeda, ISIS). The problem isn’t lack of cavalry; Syria is overrun with cavalry.

(And I am just reading Christopher Phillips’s long and mind-bogglingly detailed account of the Syrian civil war which lists in great detail precisely how much manpower, money and materiel poured into Syria from the half dozen main foreign players and beyond. Dozens of cavalries rode over that hill and then all started attacking each other.)

3) Anyway, ‘the world’ did try to save Syria. Repeatedly. Christopher Phillips’s account goes into great detail about the repeated attempts of the UN, the EU, the Arab League, America and various other outside players to broker some kind of ceasefire and peace deal. Skimming through the Wikipedia article about the Syrian peace process gives you a good sense of the immense amount of diplomatic work which went in to repeatedly trying to find a solution. But Phillips’s account gives you a powerful sense of why all of them fell short, breaking on the complete intransigence of the Assad regime itself, or the vested interests of key players, namely Russia, Iran and Turkey.

So it seems both morally despicable to me that Danahar ends his long rambling book by slamming the West for not ‘riding to the rescue’ of yet another Arab country, as if ‘the world’ is as simple as a Hollywood movie. And it seems plain factually incorrect of him to say that ‘the world’ abandoned Syria, when ‘the world’ (UN, US, Arab League) made repeated, sustained efforts to stop the fighting.

Europe endured hundreds of years of barbaric wars until we finally fought ourselves to a standstill in 1945 (although plenty of low-level conflicts raged on for decades afterwards). Maybe other regions of the world are going to go through the same process, agonisingly, for centuries.

Or maybe this is just what human beings are like. Everywhere. And the fortunate billion who are lucky enough to live in the peace and plenty of Western Europe and the Anglosphere are enjoying a blip in history, a window of relative stability, before the big impacts of global warming start to kick in and the entire global population collapses into growing instability and violence.

Maybe our idea of ‘human nature’ in ‘the West’ is hopelessly partial and incomplete because of the accident of history, the relative peace and plenty, we happen to be living through. And the people of Libya, Syria and Yemen, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo, of Bosnia and Afghanistan, of Sri Lanka, Timor, Cambodia and Myanmar, have a better grasp of what human beings are really like.

Conclusions

1. Overthrowing Arab dictators leads to worse repression…

Danahar’s book confirms what I thought at the time, when the Arab Spring revolts broke out back in 2011, as I followed events in the news. Naive young middle-class ‘revolutionaries’ took to the streets in spontaneous protests which weren’t centrally organised but snowballed and gathered their own momentum, leading to the overthrow of the ailing regimes and aged rulers in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

But being naive young fools who, apparently, had never read a history book in their lives, none of these impassioned demanders of freedom and democracy appear to have had an inkling that, when you overthrow a dictator, once all the partying and midnight rallies and wild drives through the capital honking your horn are over, the old brute isn’t automatically replaced with a government of liberals and progressives, as so many of the young urban protesters and their sympathisers in the West expected. Instead, he is likely to be replaced by the quickest to organise and most ruthless in seizing power (p.24).

Thus the overthrow of Charles I led to the repressively Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell; the overthrow of Louis XIV led to the repressive dictatorship of Robespierre; the overthrow of the Czar didn’t lead to the arrival of a moderate, modernising Duma but to a coup by the best organised and most ruthless party in Russia, the Bolsheviks. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown he wasn’t replaced by a moderate, sensible etc but by the religious fundamentalism of Ayatollah Khomenei. And so on, forever.

(This pretty obvious point, that in a revolution the moderates are overwhelmed by the extremists, is made by Christopher Phillips in his excellent book The Battle for Syria, page 189, as he explains the logic which led moderate protesters to be outflanked by extremists until the extemest of the extremists, Islamic State, seized huge swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq.)

2. Or, alternatively … chaos

Or you get scenario two: if there is no single organised party in waiting to step into the vacuum then … there will be chaos. In 2003 Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq. Result? Chaos, rise of religious intolerance, civil war and ethnic cleansing. Apparently, the protesters who marched against Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and Assad in Syria, were unaware of the example of Iraq, an Arab country like theirs, where a dictator just like theirs was forcibly overthrown. I appreciate they thought their countries would be different, and that they weren’t initially marching for regime change just for reform to make their lives less unbearable. What I’m struck by is how many of them, and their naive backers in the West, were so surprised when what happened in Iraq proceeded to happen in their countries, too.

In 2011 Gaddafi was overthrown. Result? Chaos, civil war, division of country between rival warlords. In 2011 the good people of Syria tried to overthrow their ‘Grandad’, Bashar al-Assad. Result? Syria became the most fought-over place in the world, with at least 12 different parties, factions, militias, ethnic groups and neighbouring countries all fighting each other.

I’ve just finished reading Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger’s book ‘ISIS: The State of Terror (2015) towards the end of which they make one simple but dazzlingly important point:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all. (ISIS: The State of Terror, p.237)

Or, as Barbara Bodine one-time US ambassador to Yemen puts it in Danahar’s book:

‘I don’t know anybody who liked dealing with dictators but there’s a perverse simplicity to it.’ (p.3)

Or as Danahar himself puts it:

In Egypt, where revolutionaries failed to smash the old regime, its remnants quietly nurtured and nourished those insecurities and plotted a return. In Libya, where the regime was destroyed, young men with guns bullied their way into the vacuum. In Syria, where the state held firm, it did so by unleashing the most appalling violence. It plotted to divide its opposition by setting neighbour against neighbour until no-one knew whom to trust…The Iraqi leadership [Nouri al-Maliki] pulled its country back into the sectarian abyss. The regional mayhem left many longing for the miserable certainties of their old lives under dictatorships. (p.4)

3. A cause of points 1 and 2 is the lack of democratic leaders in the Arab world

There’s a third aspect to the problem, which is less attention-grabbing than the previous two but equally if not more important. In Jack Fairweather’s book about the West’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he makes the simple point that, once the Coalition had overthrown Saddam Hussein, it discovered that … there were no moderate, democratically-minded leaders to step into the breach.

America, as it always does in these situations (see Korea, see Vietnam) favoured a long-time exile from the country in question to become leader, in the case of Iraq, Ayad Allawi mainly because he’d spent decades lobbying and brown-nosing in Washington, cultivating the right people and persuading them that he would favour US interests. The only catch was that Allawi was almost completely unknown in Iraq and had no constituency. So when Allawi was imposed on the political turmoil post-Saddam, the only interest he was seen as representing was the invader’s.

Meanwhile, potential leaders who had remained in country during the dictatorship, often did so because they represented intractable constituencies which were too big for the dictator to tackle directly and could rely on a long tradition of resistance to central rule.

When change came, these local, often tribal leaders carried on representing their constituencies against what they perceived as just one more form of centrally imposed government, just as they had opposed all previous forms of central administration. This category includes the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had fierce support among Iraq’s impoverished urban Shi’a communities, but also rogues like Abu Hatem, the self styled Prince of the Marshes, in the south, or the leaders of the two main Kurdish guerrilla armies in the north.

Thus Iraq had political ‘leaders’, but none of them the kind of democratically minded, technocratic, moderate politicians who, in western countries, can be assigned responsibility for government departments and expected to run them with a modicum of ability and fair mindedness. Nothing like.

Fairweather’s point is that there was an almost complete absence of those kind of people in Iraq and a total absence in Afghanistan. Instead, as this account suggests, you had a squabble of figures who had historically only represented one tribe or religious group or region. None of them had a national perspective and it was hoping too much to expect them to put national interests first, above the very community loyalties which had brought them to power and sustained them, sometimes for decades.

Therefore, it was entirely natural and predictable that into the vacuum created by overthrowing the old dictator did not step a cohort of Scandinavian-style, well-educated and democratically-minded politicians and technocrats, but instead a squabbling rivalry of warlords, drug barons, ethnic and religious sectarians, whose sole concern was representing the interest of ‘their’ people, placing as many of ‘their’ people in ministries and positions of power as possible, and then stealing as much money as possible from the state, for themselves and to pay off their chief backers and supporters.

Frank Ledwidge can barely bring himself to call the Afghan government a government at all, referring to it instead as a gang of warlords and drug barons who the international community gave tens of billions of dollars to, which the crooks used to build up property portfolios in the West, salt away in Swiss bank accounts and pay off their entourages. Danahar, also, refers to ‘atrocious leadership’ as being one of the basic political facts of the Middle East (p.4).

Christopher Phillips, in his detailed book about Syria, points out that, although the opposition rallied round the idea of getting rid of the wretched Bashar al-Assad, nobody – not the Americans, the Saudis, the Qataris, none of the rebels armies or jihadist groups – could think of a suitable replacement, could think of an alternative leader for the country, which goes a long way to explaining why the Syrian civil war rumbles on to the present day.

Before you start campaigning to overthrow your dictator have a plan about who you’re going to replace him with.

So: these are three well-established realities which should have informed everyone’s thinking about the so-called Arab Springs. Anyone bearing them in mind would not have been in the least surprised when overthrowing Gaddafi led to the collapse of Libya into civil war, when protests in Yemen led to civil war, when the uprising in Syria led to the bitterest civil war anywhere for decades. Egypt got off lightly when the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been clamouring for power for generations, turned out, once handed power, to be rubbish at ruling and were replaced within two years by yet another military regime. Given the chaos erupting in countries to the west and east and south (with yet another civil war kicking off in Sudan, as of spring 2023), I’d say the Egyptians got off lightly. An oppressive authoritarian state is miles better than no state at all.

4. Should the West intervene?

No. Read any of the last ten books I’ve reviewed about Britain and America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand why. The fundamental reason is not that Arab nations refuse to be ‘democratised’ by outsiders, or that Arab nations are particularly unsuited to ‘democracy’, or that we in the West are staggeringly ignorant and simple-minded in our understanding of Arab culture – though all these things are true.

The main objection is simply that we’re useless at intervening. As Stern and Berger put it in their book about ISIS:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, page 238)

On Radio 4 today I heard a woman journalist in Afghanistan passionately reporting on the oppression of women in Afghanistan. Taliban government. Fundamentalist Islam. Oppression of women. Which bit comes as a surprise?

The only interest in listening to her piece came from wondering: what, exactly, does this woman journalist expect us to do about it? Invade Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and put in place a moderate, modernising regime? Reconstruct the country’s infrastructure and be greeted everywhere as friends and liberators?

Um. Didn’t we just get through trying that? In Iraq and Afghanistan, both? And how did they turn out? Social collapse, bloody civil war, mass refugees, while a) losing lots of Western soldiers killed by ‘insurgents’ , b) killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, c) stoking civil war and ethnic cleansing, and d) achieving nothing permanent in the way of ‘reconstruction’ or ‘development’, despite e) spending over $2 trillion in both countries. Shall we try that again? No.

Maybe we will finally learn the hard lesson which Michael Ignatieff’s series of books about the new world disorder lead up to, echoed in Frank Ledwidge’s two analyses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the moral of Rory Stewart’s detailed, acerbic account of his time as governor of an Iraqi province – which is that western governments and international bodies need to be much, much, much more realistic about the pitifully little that they can achieve by intervening in the internal affairs of failing states; and much, much, much, much more cautious about where we intervene and why, and what we can realistically expect the outcomes to be.

The harsh reality is that our interventions are almost always catastrophically counter-productive. We are, quite simply, useless at ‘nation building’, for the scores of reasons listed in Ignatieff, Ledwidge, Fairweather and Stewart’s books.

So the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer from the oppressive behaviour of the men of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Just as the people of Syria, Yemen and Sudan will continue to endure unending civil wars, the Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans will suffer under China’s oppression, the Amazonian Indians will be wiped out, hundreds of thousands of people will starve to death each year in Africa, and any country neighbouring Russia is likely to be invaded and devastated by Putin’s brutal armies.

That’s what the world is like. I didn’t create it. I don’t approve of it. I’m just trying to understand it by unsentimentally studying the facts of how we humans actually behave.

Credit

The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar was published by Bloomsbury Books in 2013. References are to the revised 2015 paperback edition.

Related links

New world disorder reviews

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A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq by Jack Fairweather (2012)

This is an outstandingly thorough, factual and authoritative account of the British Army’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe the most comprehensive, detailed and balanced account available.

Jack Fairweather

Jack Fairweather covered the Iraq War as the Daily Telegraph‘s Baghdad and Gulf correspondent for five years. He and his team won a British Press Award for their coverage. He went on to be the Washington Post‘s Islamic World correspondent. By the time this book was published he had become a fellow at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.

It’s a solid work of 430 pages, consisting of 32 chapters with good maps, thorough notes, a list of key players, a useful bibliography, index and so on. Well done to the publishers, Vintage, for such a professional package.

However, something (obviously) beyond their control is that, having been published in 2012 means the narrative does not include the rise of ISIS and the chaos that ensued. Fairweather’s narrative is now over ten years out of date, a factor I’m coming to realise is vitally important when reading about this disastrous part of the world (Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan) and, in particular, putting the entire conflict in Afghanistan into context, given the swift collapse of the Afghan government and return to power of the Taliban in 2021.

Companion piece to Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco

Having read Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s highly detailed accounts of the US decision making and planning leading up to the war, it’s fascinating to follow the same storyline from the British government point of view. For example, how the UK government made the same mistake of failing to consider or plan for the aftermath of the war, but for different reasons.

Tony Blair was the first British premier to be fully aware of modern media and how to use them. He and Alistair Campbell were all about focus groups, opinion polling and managing the news cycle and this is all short term thinking. Fixated as he and his team were on the media, they were obsessed that concrete proof the UK was planning for war shouldn’t leak out. Therefore Blair forbade the Department for International Development from officially commissioning post-invasion planning (the kind of thing it specialises in) in case someone leaked it (p.13). Similarly, Blair forbade the Army from placing orders for the kind of kit it would need for a large-scale deployment abroad (p.14). So Blair’s obsession with media management prevented him from properly, fully considering the post-conquest management of Iraq, from commissioning adequate plans for reconstruction, and from planning for the post-invasion policing by the British Army. Inexcusable.

Key points

Fairweather covers every detail, every aspect of the story, in calm, measured, authoritative chronological order. This really feels like the account to read.

1997 Tony Blair elected Prime Minister.

1998 Blair supports the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Saddam. New Labour make the first increase to the military budget after a decade of Tory cuts.

March 1999 Blair succeeds in pushing the US and NATO to intervene in Kosovo with a bombing campaign against Serbia (with mixed results; see Michael Ignatieff’s book on the subject).

April 1999 Blair makes his Chicago speech making the case for intervention/invasion of countries on a humanitarian basis if dictators are massacring their people.

The 9/11 attacks change everything. President George W. Bush immediately starts planning an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In October 2001 US forces began their attack, supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban government. The Taliban overthrown by December 2001. George Bush phones Tony Blair to sound him out about attacking Saddam Hussein.

The long tortuous process whereby the US tries to bamboozle the UN Security Council into agreeing a resolution allowing the invasion, and the New Labour government began its campaign of lies and deception, resulting in the dodgy dossier of fake intelligence, cobbled-together scraps from a PhD thesis including the ludicrous claim that Saddam could launch ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 45 minutes. It was indicative of the way New Labour were obsessed by media and presentation and paid little attention to substance.

20 March 2003 The ‘coalition’ invasion of Iraq began. During the build-up, a variety of figures in the military and civil service discovered there was no plan for what to do after the invasion. It was mainly the Americans’ fault, Bush only set up an Office for Post-War Iraq a few weeks before the invasion and ignored advice contained in documents like Tom Warrick’s ‘the Future of Iraq’ project (p.15). Reconstruction was handed to retired general Jay Garner who rang round his pals to ask if any of them knew how to rebuild a country. Planning was ‘shambolic’ (p.21).

In London, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith had to be cajoled into reluctantly agreeing that invasion was legal without a second, specific UN resolution stating as much. How much he must regret that now (p.19). Alastair Campbell bullied ministers into kowtowing to Blair’s determination to march alongside the Americans i.e. be Bush’s poodle (p.19). Claire Short, Secretary at the Department for International Development, let herself be persuaded not to quit, something she regretted ever after.

Haider Samad and Iraqi stories

It’s worth highlighting that unlike most other books I’ve read on the shambles, Fairweather goes out of his way to include the stories of actual Iraqis. The first we meet is a man named Haider Samad. We hear about his family background, his wish to marry, intertwined with the history of Shiite religion in the southern part of Iraq. Samad will volunteer to become an interpreter for the British Army with ruinous consequences for himself and his family and Fairweather will return to his story at various points during the narrative as a kind of indicator of the British occupation’s broken promises and failures.

Names

Another distinctive feature of the book is the extraordinary number of named individuals Fairweather introduces us to, on every page, and their extraordinary range. Chapter 3 opens with Major Chris Parker patrolling Basra six weeks after the successful invasion has overthrown Saddam, to his commanding officer, Brigadier Graham Binns, a Scots Dragoon Officer Captain James Fenmore, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Ashmore, paymaster Ian Jaggard-Hawkins, Lieutenant Colonel Gil Baldwin of the Queen’s Royal Dragoons, the army’s top lawyer in Iraq Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, SAS commander Baghdad Richard Williams and hundreds and hundreds more.

On one level the book is a blizzard of individual names and stories of soldiers engaged in this or that aspect of the occupation, which is what makes his nine-page list of Dramatis personae at the end of the book invaluable.

Back to the narrative

Defence Minister Geoff Hoon made as light of the epidemic of looting which broke out in the aftermath of the invasion as Donald Rumsfeld did, claiming the looters were ‘redistributing wealth’, which was a good idea. What an idiot (p.29).

The thing is, the British had invaded Basra before, back during the Great War when we were seeking to defeat the Ottoman Empire which had allied with Germany and Austria. Hence the Commonwealth War Cemetery which Sniper One Dan Mills discovered in al-Amarah and gave him a fully justified sense of ‘What are we doing back here a hundred years later’?

Now, as then, after overthrowing the ruling elite, the British discovered there weren’t many capable native Iraqis to run anything, even to form a town council. Eventually, they picked on a Sunni tribal leader to run a majority Shia town, Basra, an error of judgement which, of course, immediately triggered widespread protests (p.31). Ignorance.

Fairweather details how, struggling with the number of detainees and ‘suspected terrorists’ they were being sent, British military police and soldiers came to abuse and intimidate the rapidly increasing number of ‘terrorist’ detainees, set up kangaroo courts and deliver summary justice (p.33). This led to the scandal surrounding Corporal Daniel Kenyon and colleagues who took photos of themselves abusing Iraqi prisoners at ‘Camp Breadbasket’, which leaked out, led to their arrests and trial and conviction (pages 46 to 48). The British version of the Abu Ghraib scandal. All the politicians’ claims about the moral superiority of the West went up in smoke.

After less than 2 months flailing to run an office of reconstruction, Jay Garner was fired and replaced by L. Paul Bremer who was the ‘right kind’ of Republican i.e. a devout Christian and neo-conservative (p.40). He was put in charge of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority. He was to prove a relentless, impatient workaholic who took catastrophic decisions and plunged Iraq into a civil war and vicious ethnic cleansing.

Fairweather chronicles the key role played by Douglas Feith (under secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005) in persuading Bremer to completely disband the Iraqi army and remove everyone with high or mid-level membership of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party from their jobs. At a stroke this threw half a million well-trained young men (the army) onto the dole queue and a hundred thousand people with managerial experience (Ba’ath) ditto. Bremer refused to listen to the argument that most Ba’ath Party members cared nothing about the party’s ideology, that being a member was simply a requirement of holding senior posts like hospital consultant or head of the power or water systems. Bremer didn’t listen. They were all fired. Chaos ensued.

From these angry men whose lives were ruined by L. Paul Bremer sprang the insurgency. Tim Cross, a British logistics expert who worked with Garner till he quit in disgust called American efforts ‘chaotic’ and a ‘shambles’ (p.41).

Britain contributed 40,000 troops to the initial invasion. By mid-summer 2003 half had returned to Blighty. General Sir Mike Jackson became head of the British Army.

September 2003 the BBC Today programme quoted an anonymous source claiming that New Labour officials ‘sexed up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ which we went to war on, infuriating Alastair Campbell. The label was to stick to this day (p.50).

A section about the history of the Marsh Arabs, going back to the first occupation of Iraq by the British during and after the Great War. The exploits of Gertrude Bell, who crops up repeatedly in Emma Sky’s account of her time in Iraq (p.52). The Marsh Arabs’ history of independence and revolt against central authority. The disastrous way they were encouraged to rise up against Saddam by President George Bush who then failed to provide any support so that tens of thousands were slaughtered by Saddam’s forces. Then Saddam’s decade long project to drain the marshes altogether and destroy their way of life, which he had just about achieved by the time of the 2003 invasion.

Maysan was the only Iraqi province to liberate itself from Saddam’s security forces and had no intention of kowtowing to the foreign invaders. Into Maysan province, came the Third Battalion the Parachute Regiment, famous for their gung-ho approach. Fairweather quotes Patrick Bishop’s description of the paras from his book ‘3 Para’ (2007) which I’ve reviewed.

Angry protests against the occupying forces started straight away, with stones being thrown, and then the first shots being fired. It was Northern Ireland all over again, but without the half a dozen crucial elements which made Northern Ireland, in the end, manageable (itemised in Frank Ledwidge’s outstanding book on the subject). In Basra, unlike Ulster, there was a lack of clear government authority, and the lack of a reliable police force to work alongside, the lack of a shared culture and language, and the lack of enough men to do the job.

In a series of incidents which he described in great detail (‘From the rooftop Robinson shouted, “Remember lads, you’re fucking paratroopers”‘), Fairweather traces the quick degeneration of the ‘peacekeeping’ mission into a fight for survival against hostile crowds and growing numbers of highly motivated, highly armed local ‘insurgents’.

The soldiers of 1 Para were only faintly familiar with the region’s history and how it had bred a culture of suspicion of outsiders. (p.55)

Fairweather gives a detailed forensic account of the killing of six military police by an enraged crowd after they got trapped in the police station of Majar al-Kabir on 24 June (pages 55 to 63). Critics focused on the lack of equipment, specifically a satellite phone to call for help, and their insufficient ammunition. Having read Lewidge’s book, though, I understand how the soldiers had been put into a completely untenable position by the naive over-optimism of the politicians (Blair) and the failure of the army general staff either to stand up to the politicians (to say no) and then to provide adequate intelligence, adequate equipment but, above all, a clear strategy to deal with the worsening situation.

Fairweather describes the arrival of a new British civil servant, Miles Pennett, sent to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad and the chaos he found there created by teeming hordes of graduates all fresh out of American universities and selected solely for their adherence to right-wing neo-conservative Republican values (p.69).

(In his book ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone’ , American journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells us candidates for the CPA were interviewed about their views on abortion or neo-liberal economics rather than any technical qualifications or experience whatsoever. This explains the CPA’s reputation for chaos and incompetence.)

While things fell apart in Iraq, Tony Blair flew to the States to receive a Congressional Gold Medal and make a grandstanding speech to the Congress. It shifted a complete change in the aims of the occupation. Gone was mention of the weapons of mass destruction which had so feverishly justified the invasion. Now, it turned out, the occupation was about bringing universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty to ‘the darkest corners of the earth’ (p.70).

In other words a) indistinguishable from Victorian rhetoric about civilising India or Africa which justified control and occupation; and b) bullshit, because i) quite a few ‘places’ don’t particularly want ‘democracy, human rights and liberty’, they want food and water so they don’t starve to death and, next above that, security: maintenance of law and order so it’s safe to walk the streets. That – basic security – comes a million miles before Western values and, in the event, the occupying forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be unable to provide them.

And ii) because as explained at the start of this review, Western-style democracy was never an option for Iraq, with its complex and corrupt matrix of tribal, ethnic and religious allegiances; and never, ever a possibility in Afghanistan.

Pride comes before a fall. The day after Balir received his congressional medal the body of David Kelly, the weapons expert, was found in a wood. He had committed suicide. He had been the source for BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s story about the ‘sexed up’ dossier about WMDs the government used to deceive MPs into voting for the war. Hoon and Campbell had pressed for Kelly’s name to be leaked to the press in order to discredit him. It never actually was leaked but enough information was provided for the press to be able to identify him. Snared in a political mesh he could see no way out of without ruining his reputation, Kelly took his own life. Alastair Campbell was forced to resign. The New Labour government was snared in scandal (pages 70 to 73).

All this distracted from the worsening situation in Baghdad. Fairweather’s account is super-detailed. He gives precise names, careers, quotes for hundreds of the personnel deployed to the CPA in Baghdad and to run Basra Province. It was the usual cobbled-together, last minute list of candidates as had characterised the hurried creation of Jay Garner’s short-lived Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance: a former director at a merchant bank was appointed finance minister, a public schoolmaster was appointed minister of education, an internet entrepreneur was made minister for trade and industry (p.67).

The advent of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN, now despatched to the court of Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority and the difficulties he encountered, namely the Americans steamed ahead doing whatever they wanted to (dissolved the 500,000 strong Iraqi army, sacked 100,000 Ba’ath Party members from their jobs, delayed elections) and ignored him.

The Anglo-American relationship that Blair had gone to war to strengthen was coming under serious pressure. In fact it was increasingly difficult to find areas where British and American views matched. (p.79)

America’s disastrous early efforts to ‘train’ a new Iraqi police force, handed to Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner (p.79). Rumsfeld tries to reduce the budget required to train a new army. Fairweather strikingly calls Rumsfeld ‘a bully’ (p.80).

Typical neo con plans to privatise Iraq’s hundreds of state-own industries in one fell swoop, to be masterminded by former venture capitalist at Citicorp, Tom Foley (p.80). Chandrasekaran is very funny about the complete lunacy of this ideas and its ruinous impact on an economy already on its knees.

As a presidential election year approaches, the politicking in the US, Bush reshuffles his team.

Rumsfeld, whose grasp on the chaos he had created was tenuous, was removed (p.83)

Condoleeza Rice takes over. Arguments about the new Iraqi constitution, when it should be drawn up, who it should be drawn up by, whether or not it could form the legal basis for elections, when those elections should be held, what kind of form they take (Bremer preferred US-style electoral colleges rather than a simple poll).

By the end of 2003 Iraq fatigue had set in in London. Blair’s entire personality was built around can-do optimism and so found it difficult to cope with the relentless bad news from Iraq. And he’d lost Campbell, his key advisor and media manipulator.

By October 2003 the British administration in Basra accepted the fact that it was, in effect, an imperial occupation, and moved into Saddam’s palace. Fairweather shows us how it worked through the eyes of Sir Hilary Synnott, Regional Coordinator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Southern Iraq from 2003 to 2004.

The problem of the UK Department for International development, populated by progressives who strongly opposed the war, and the occupation, were desperate to escape accusations of imperialism, but were entirely dependent on the military pacifying the place before they could do a stroke of ‘development’ work.

When development minister Hilary Benn and permanent undersecretary Suma Chakrabarti flew into Basra it was to discover the army commander, Major General Graeme Lamb, mired in controversy because some squaddies from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had just arrested seven Iraqis, took them back to base, hooded them, abused and beat and tortured them, till one of them, Baha Mousa, died (p.86). What was it Tony Blair was saying about bringing universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty to ‘the darkest corners of the earth’?

Meanwhile the other provinces of southern Iraq needed governing. Fairweather introduces us to the men selected for the job, being: Mark Etherington, former paratrooper; old Etonian Rory Stewart, whose account of his time in the role I’ve reviewed; old Etonian John Bourne; Emma Sky, former British Council worker, whose account I’ve also reviewed (p.89).

Fairweather makes the simple but penetrating point that a certain type of posh Englishman has always ‘loved’ and identified with the Arab way of life because it echoes the primitive hierarchy and independence (for tribal leaders) which used to exist in Britain, in medieval to early modern times. They instinctively identified with the feudal setup which reminded them of their own country estates and venerable lineages.

Anyway, these Brits were handed entire provinces to run, exactly as in the high days of empire when jolly good chaps ruled provinces the size of France or more. Their efforts were so amateurish it’s funny. Adrian Weale was handed the task of organising elections in Nasariyah. He had no idea how to do this so emailed his wife, a borough councillor in Kensington and Chelsea (of course), and asked her to send him guidelines for local elections in Britain, to be adapted for Iraq. Making it up as they went along.

None of this stopped Stewart, in Maysan, having problems with the self-styled ‘Prince of the Marshes’, Abu Hatem, while Etherington, 100 miles north, appointed governor of Wasit, whose northern border touched Baghdad, was beginning to have trouble from the followers of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his devoted followers. In a telling sentence, Fairweather says: ‘Sadr was organising faster than the British’ (p.91). Sadr established his own parallel provisional government for Iraq and declared any government created by the British or Americans illegitimate (p.91).

In November Etherington attended a conference of US business donors in Baghdad and was astonished at how out of touch the CPA was. Even the US military was surprised at being kept out of the loop by Bremer and his secretive cabal of advisers.

Back in Amara Stewart was involved in a complicated sequence of events which led to rioters looting the office of the local governor, who had been inserted into the job by the egregious Abu Hatem. British troops found it hard to contain brick-throwing mobs. Stewart reflected that his Victorian forebears believed in their mission and were committed to the long-term development of their countries. Deep down Stewart knew that wasn’t true of Britain.

2004 uprisings

All the allies had growing misgivings about the growing power of Muqtada al-Sadr. In March 2004 Bremer took the publication of a series of articles lambasting the Coalition Provisional Authority in Sadr’s newspaper, Al-Hawzat as a pretext to shut it down. On 3 April US troops arrested the editor, sparking protests. On 4 April fighting broke out in Najaf, Sadr City and Basra. Sadr’s Mahdi Army took over several points and attacked coalition soldiers, killing dozens of foreign soldiers. This was the start of the Sadr Uprising in the south of Iraq.

What made the situation ten times worse was that on 31 March gunmen ambushed four American contractors outside Falluja to the west of Baghdad, beat them to death, burned their bodies and hung them from a bridge over the river Euphrates. Footage was beamed round the world. Bush was horrified and vowed revenge.

Suddenly the occupying forces were faced with a Sunni uprising in the so-called Sunni Triangle to the West of Baghdad, and a parallel but separate uprising by violent forces loyal to Sadr in every town in the south.

Fairweather details the experience of Mark Etherington in the Cimic compound at Kut as fierce fighting breaks out between the Shia militia and the Ukrainian UN troops. Here and in all the other towns of south Iraq, the UN and CPA compounds came under intense fire. The Americans’ actions against Sadr in Baghdad effectively plunged southern Iraq into war. Etherington knew all about the catastrophic defeat of a sizeable British Army at Kut by Ottoman troops during the First World War one hundred years earlier (p.109). Fairweather gives a brilliantly vivid and nail-biting description of Etherington and his staff abandoning the compound at Kut. The same kind of thing was happening at Nasariyah under its Italian governor, Barbara Contini.

Meanwhile, the President had ordered the US army to enter the town of Fallujah and find the people responsible for the murder of the civilian contracts. This ridiculously impossible task of course led to all out war and the First Battle of Fallujah. All round the world were beamed footage of houses being destroyed, terrified civilians being rounded up, and thousands of refugees fleeing the city as the civilian casualties grew into the hundreds. All round the Arab world young men decided they had to go to Iraq to fight these genocidal invaders.

Fairweather quotes part of a George Bush speech which epitomises one of the American’s conceptual stupidities, where Bush says: ‘the American people want to know that we’re going after the bad guys’ (p.111). These simple-minded dichotomies, the binary polarities of a thousand Hollywood movies, which divide people up into the Good Guys (John Wayne, Bruce Willis) and the Bad Guys (wearing black hats), governed US policy throughout the twentieth century. This worked fine when there really were Bad Guys, like the Nazis, but not so well in societies riven with complex ethnic, religious, social and political divides, such as Vietnam or Iraq where there’s a wide variety of bad actors and it becomes impossible to figure out who the ‘good’ ones are, if any.

Obviously, in order to bring the ‘murderers to justice’ many times more US troops were killed and injured than the original 4 contractors. In the end 37 American soldiers were killed and over 600 Iraqi civilians. Huge parts of a major city were devastated. Inevitably, the supposed murderers of the contractors were never found.

Apart from the obvious security issues, it caused a political issue because the entire Sunni membership of the provisional Iraqi government which Bremer was trying to cobble together threatened to quit, and could only be made to support coalition forces with an extreme of arm-twisting and promises of money and influence.

Meanwhile, in the south of Iraq, US forces retook the CPA compounds in Kut, Amarah and Nasariyah, but the British consuls who returned to their posts had abandoned all thoughts of reconstruction and development. Not getting killed became their number one priority (p.113).

Bremer was strongly critical of the British failure to secure the south, exacerbated by negative coverage of the American butchery in Fallujah in the British press, plunging American-British relations to a new low and this led to a significant outcome. Bremer banned British representatives from the ongoing discussions with local politicians about the forthcoming constitution and elections.

Britain’s effective involvement in shaping Iraq’s political future was over. (p.114)

In late April the photos of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the notorious prison at Abu Ghraib to the west of Baghdad emerged. I’ve described it elsewhere. Bringing ‘universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty’ eh?

For a spell Fairweather’s text overlaps the narrative of Sergeant Dan Mills, sniper with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, in his bestselling book, Sniper One. Mills describes how, on the very first patrol on the very first morning of the very first day of their deployment, Danny and his patrol parked up outside the local headquarters of Sadr’s Mahdi Army or Jaish al-Mahdi as it was properly called, JAM as the Brits called it. Mills’s patrol did this in complete and utter ignorance of the local geography, town layout, and local sense of bitter resentment of the infidel occupiers.

The JAM attacked, using machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and mortars, and Danny and his mates found themselves in the middle of a series of intense firefights and attacks which continued on a daily basis until their eventual withdrawal from the Amarah government compound four months later.

The Americans had now surrounded al-Sadr who was holed up in the Imam Ali Shrine in the holy city of Najaf where their attempts to break in had damaged some parts of the shrine. Shia anger was off the scale. Danny and his mates and all UK forces across the south of the country had to deal with the consequences. Fairweather gives a series of absolutely gripping, vivid, terrifying eye witness accounts of the running battles and firefights which followed.

The Prince of the Marshes, Abu Hatem, threw in his lot with the Sadrists. When the Brits made a raid to capture insurgents and took prisoners back to their prison, the detainees were subject to abuse and heard screams and torture sounds from other cells. When eventually released these stories helped recruit more insurgents and incentivise existing ones into a life or death struggle against the invader. Public relations catastrophe (p.123).

Escape to Afghanistan

In January 2004 the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death acquitted the government of blame and BBC Director General Greg Dyke resigned, but much of the media accused the report of being a whitewash. Fairweather quotes cabinet colleagues who noticed the impact the strain was having on Blair’s face. Hs hair started to turn grey.

In June 2004 a NATO conference decided the US-led mission had languished because of the focus on Iraq and volunteered NATO forces to take a more active role in Afghanistan. Why? Use it or lose it. NATO had big budgets from member countries who periodically wondered why they were spending so much. This would give the organisation the sense of purpose it needed.

In London Blair and his team saw it as an opportunity to regain the initiative. In Iraq we were not only visibly losing but being sidelined in every way imaginable by the Yanks. Deployment to Afghanistan offered the British Army a chance to redeem its damaged reputation and Tony Blair a way of restoring his reputation as an international statesman.

In fact the Americans had specifically asked the Brits to relocate NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps to the south of Iraq. It was crunch time. Fairweather describes the nitty gritty of discussions, with pros and cons on both sides. But the Brits decided to cut and run. Iraq was a swamp where the Americans disrespected us. Afghanistan offered a second chance. But could we fight a war on two fronts? The decisive view was given by director of operations at the Ministry of Defence, Lieutenant General Robert Fry. He argued that troop deployments to Afghanistan would be ramped up as troops in Iraq were drawn down. This was ratified by Chief of the Defence Staff Michael Walker. They’re the men to blame.

Fairweather gives a detailed analysis of the politics around successive Defence Reviews, with the Treasury constantly trying to cut the military budget and the top brass looking for any arguments to increase it. This in turn was meshed with the bitter rivalry between Blair the international grandstander and Gordon Brown, morosely hunkered down as Chancellor of the Exchequer. So another reason for the Afghan Adventure was entirely due to Whitehall politicis, in that the deployment forced a reluctant Treasury to release more money to the Ministry of Defence.

Chapter 13

Cut to a fascinating chapter about dismal attempts to train a new Iraqi police force, told through the eyes of Brit trainer William Kearney, 12 years in the Special Branch and now manager of ArmorGroup security, one of the many contractors who worked in Iraq. Compare and contrast with the American approach which was to flood the streets with poorly trained ‘police’ provided with uniforms, guns and ammunition which they quite regularly sold onto the insurgents.

We meet up again with Iraqi Haider Samad who is working for the Brits in Basra as an interpreter and the time he was beaten to the ground by four strangers who tell him next time they’ll kill him if he carries on working for the infidel. Haider’s experience is a peg to introduce the wider issue that many, many of the new ‘police’ being recruited at such speed in order to make Western politicians happy, were themselves members of the Shia militias.

Chapter 14

Introduction to the leader of Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra, Ahmed al-Fartosi, and his aim to utterly destroy the British occupation. He was convinced the Brits wanted to extend their occupation forever because their real aim was to steal Iraq’s oil. He had spent some time in exile in Lebanon and so on return to Basra reorganised the militia along the lines of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. That said, Fartosi was no fan of the Iranians who had fought Iraqis in a bitter eight-year-long war. Half a million Iraqis died in that war and Iran came close to capturing Basra.

Another one of Fairweather’s gripping descriptions of a firefight which broke out on 9 August in Basra between British forces and the Shia militia led by Fartosi who ambushed a patrol forcing them to take refuge in nearby houses and call for backup etc.

Amara Fairweather cuts to the similar situation in Amara where sniper Mills and his buddies were included in the 150 or so coalition troops defending the Cimic House compound from daily attacks and hourly mortar bombs. After a particular intense firefight all the Iraqi cooks and ancillary staff leave, taking as much loot with them as they could carry. Fairweather then gives his version of the siege of Cimic House, the intense battle which forms the centrepiece of Mill’s book, Sniper One (pages 155 to 158).

Soon afterwards al-Sadr caved to majority Shia opinion and called off his insurgency. The far more influential cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani had returned to the country, gone to Najaf and seen the damage to the shrine which he, and moderate Shia opinion, blamed on Sadr. Hence his climbdown.

Fairweather switches from his intense description of combat right up to the highest level of politics and the scheming by Iraqi exile Ayad Allawi to curry favour with the Americans and get himself appointed new president of Iraq. All the accounts I’ve read describe Allawi as a plausible swindler who promised Bush and Rumsfeld whatever they wanted to hear, thus materially aiding the misconceptions and lack of planning on which the invasion was launched.

Fairweather drolly explains that this plausible chancer was put on the payroll of MI6 and ‘supplied the British government with some of the most flagrantly misleading intelligence before the war, namely the completely bogus claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes (p.131). This crook had Bush and Blair’s enthusiastic personal support.

In November the Americans launched the Second Battle of Fallujah with a view to exterminating Sunni insurgents and establishing the rule of law. The battle saw some of the heaviest urban combat the American army had been involved in since the ill-fated Battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968. 95 American and 4 British soldiers were killed, along with up to 2,000 ‘insurgents’. Over a fifth of the city was destroyed.

2005 election A general election for the interim Iraqi parliament was held on 30 January 2005. Sunni Muslims, despite being a minority in Iraq (64% Shia, 34% Sunni, 2% Christian and other) had historically held power. Saddam and his clique were Sunnis. Now, in protest against the battle of Fallujah and the perceived bias of the occupying force towards Shias, large numbers of Sunnis boycotted the elections. This was self-defeating as it gave sweeping victory to Shia parties backed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Allawi’s parties polled just 14%.

Both Americans and Brits now had to deal with an ‘elected’ Iraqi government dominated by Shias who, far from being grateful to their liberators, were deeply suspicious and resentful of them.

Chapter 16

Fairweather switches focus to a new location, the south of Afghanistan, giving us a potted history of Britain’s ill-fated military adventures here during the nineteenth century, notably the swingeing defeat at the Battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880, heaviest defeat of a Western power by an Asian power until the prolonged Ottoman siege and massacre of the British at Kut in southern Iraq in the winter of 1915/16

Cut to 2004 as the British Army staff begin to plan a deployment to Afghanistan. Now that elections had taken place, British planners and politicians looked for a way to extract the army from Iraq. The task fell to Major general Jonathon Riley who adopted the formula of the Americans: as the Iraqi police force ‘stepped up’, the British forces would ‘step down’. Sounded good but conveniently ignored the fact that the so-called ‘police’ were very poor quality, corrupt if you were lucky, at worst – during many of the clashes of the Sadr Uprising – joining the insurgents in shooting at British troops. When the police were objective and reasonably independent, they were themselves liable to attack. In the first half of 2005 350 police officers were killed in attacks on police stations and recruiting centres.

We remeet the Brits handed the challenging job of training Iraqi police, namely William Kearney and Charlie MacCartney, police mentor of the Jamiat; SIS station chief Kevin Landers. Fairweather details the process whereby all these guys come to realise that the head of the Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) Captain Jaffar, was deeply in league with the insurgents. In fact the SCU was to become a growing bugbear in the Brits’ side, and establish itself as a centre of criminality and extortion against the civilian population.

Elections are all very well but the January 2005 ones put Sadr party members into Basra’s provincial council and into the governor’s seat. But the Brits didn’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest. They were now planning to withdraw all but 1,000 British troops from Iraq by end of 2005, with a view to redeploying them to Afghanistan at the start of 2006.

How did the Brits get deployed to Helmand, right next to the historic battlefield of Maiwand, home of the fiercest, most invader-resistant traditions in all Afghanistan? Well, remember the whole thing was a NATO operation. The Canadians had lobbied hard to have overall control of the deployment to south Afghanistan and called first dibs on the biggest town, Kandahar. Considering the alternatives, the Brits learned that Helmand Province had now become the biggest single source of heroin, which would please the army’s civilian master, Tony Blair. And it was also the historical homeland of the Taliban, so combatting them would also give political brownie points to Blair, keen to rehabilitate his ailing reputation.

Chapter 17

At this point Fairweather cuts away to catch up on the career of interpreter Haider who was now working for a private security firm. His boss was William Kearney who we’ve seen trying to train the Iraqi police. Haider has saved up enough money to propose to his childhood sweetheart, Nora, whose family previously banned the match due to his lack of money.

Chapter 18

Reg Keys’s son, Tom, was one of the six military policemen murdered by the mob at Majar al-Kabir police station in June 2003. Fairweather devotes some time to chronicling Keys’s campaign to get to the bottom of his son’s death but his increasing frustration with MoD prevarication. The army board of enquiry published its findings nine months later. The families of the dead were not invited to contribute or to attend. They asked for advance copies on the eve of publication but were refused. They were given just an hour to read the 90-page report ahead of a meeting with Defence Secretary Geoff Hoons. Despicable.

Arguably the limited and obviously parti pris ‘enquiries’ into the launching of the war, the David Kelly affair and the red caps’ deaths went a long way to discrediting the entire idea of a government enquiry.

The angered parents set up a support group, Military Families Against the War (p.253). But they went further and funded Keys to stand in Tony Blair’s constituency of Sedgemoor in the 2005 general election. Fairweather gives a characteristically thorough and fascinating description of how what started as a jokey suggestion over a coffee was turned into a serious political reality, giving us lots of information about the working of modern British political parties and the media.

Just before the election Channel 4 News leaked a March 2003 memo from Attorney General Peter Goldsmith giving his opinion that he didn’t think the case for war would stand up in a court of law. Only days later a soldier in Amarah was hit by a roadside bomb and killed. The war wouldn’t leave Tony Bair alone. You broke it; you own it.

In the general election Blair’s share of the vote went from 65 to 59% and Reg won 10%. Labour’s majority in the House of Commons was cut from 200 to 66 MPs. So not a defeat. In fact pollsters considered the Iraq war a minor issue. The economy was booming and lots of people didn’t care all that much (as, arguably, most sensible people don’t care about any form of politics).

(Page 197 quote from Ibn Saud, future king of Saudi Arabia, on the irredeemably rebellious nature of the Iraqi tribes who can only be governed by ‘strong measures and military force’.)

Chapter 19. Iran

Rocky relations between the Brits in Amarah tasked with patrolling the porous border with Iran, just 50k away, and the newly elected governor, Adel Muhoder al-Maliki. More descriptions of firefights and attacks the latest troop of British soldiers come under within minutes of leaving the heavily defended Amarah air base. The point is that the incredibly brave bomb disposal officer, Captain Simon Bratcher, not only neutralised a clutch of roadside bombs but provided the first evidence that they were being supplied by Iran.

The Shia government It’s all very well organising ‘free and fair elections’ until they end up voting in people you strongly disapprove of. Two months after the January 2005 elections, Ibrahim Jaafari, the leader of Dawa, one of the two main Shia parties, was announced as the next Iraqi Prime Minister. The Interior Ministry was handed to Bayan Jabr, a former commander of a Badr Brigade i.e. one of the main Shia militias. These men continued to further Iran’s influence at every level of the Iraqi administration. The Interior Ministry was said to have set up death squads to kidnap, torture and execute former Ba’ath Party members and Sunni leaders.

Jack Straw learns of an American plan to set up death squads to ‘take out’ leading Iranian agents working in Iraq militia leaders, but vetoes it (p.. (Did they go ahead anyway?) Straw’s objections were about not upsetting the Iranians at a difficult time of negotiations with the West about Iran’s nuclear power programme. But it’s one example among hundreds of how Iraqi politics became steadily more entangled with Iranian.

Fairweather makes an interesting point. Iranian policy in Iraq often seemed contradictory – at the same time supporting the Shia-led government but also backing anti-government militias. But why shouldn’t Iran be like Western countries, with conflicting parties and factions jostling for power and implementing different, sometimes conflicting strategies? Also: why not make it a conscious strategy to back different parties and factions while it was unclear who would win (p.204). In the end, of course, Iran won.

Chapter 20. Jamiat

This was the name of the police station in Basra which had become the focal point of corruption, extortion, kidnapping, torture and militia influence. Major Rupert Jones of the newly arrived 12 Mechanised Brigade decided to do something about it and asked for a list of possibly corrupt policemen. It became an uncomfortably long list. The Brits asked for them to be removed. Nothing happened. Then they asked for Fartosi to be arrested but learned that Fartosi had been put on a ‘no lift’ list because the prime Minister didn’t want to antagonise the Sadrists on whose support his government rested.

Kidnap of two SAS officers

Then three British soldiers were killed by roadside bombs and Brigadier John Lorimer, the eighth brigade commander in Basra in two years, decided to act. On 17 September an SAS detachment infiltrated Fartosi’s home and arrested him. Two days later two SAS officers on patrol were kidnapped. Fairweather describes in detail the complex standoff which then followed as several sets of British officials ascertained that the two soldiers had been taken to the notorious Jamiat police station. When British officials went to the station they were themselves promptly arrested and detained. Negotiations involved an Iraqi judge, and an increasing battery of coalition lawyers and officers. The negotiators were themselves hustled at gunpoint to the cells where the two soldiers were being kept, as fighting broke out at the front of the police station, with Iraqi police officers who the British had spent time and money training now opening fire on British forces. British relief forces were surrounded by angry crowds throwing bricks and a succession of Warrior vehicles were set on fire.

Sergeant Long escaping from his Warrior armoured vehicle after a petrol bomb was thrown down the gun turret (source: Reuters)

Eventually the SAS men and the other Brit hostages were rescued by an attack by SAS men who were brought all the way from the regiment’s HQ at Herefordshire to help them. The political fallout was threefold. 1) Pictures of George Long on fire escaping from his Warrior tank covered the front pages of British newspapers alongside articles claiming the British softly-softly police in Basra was a shambles. 2) More specifically, it revealed that the entire concept of training the Iraqi police force which politicians from Blair downwards had put such emphasis on, was in fact a sham. 3) The Shia governor, Muhammed al-Waeli, forced to take sides, came down on the side of his Shia constituency, accused the Brits of terrorism, led a tour of the now devastated police station, and declared he would never have anything to do with the Brits again.

Fairweather is outstanding at giving detailed forensic accounts of this kind of event (compare his description of the murder of the military police at Majar al-Kabir).

Chapter 21. Helmand

7/7 suicide bombers

On 7 July 2005 four British Muslims carrying backpacks full of explosives detonated them on London Underground trains and a bus. These were the first suicide bombs on British soil. They killed 52 and injured over 700. In a pre-recorded video one of the bombers described his motivation as revenge for all the innocent Muslims the British Army was killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much for our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan making Britain safer. The exact opposite.

But when news came out that the men had been trained at terrorist training camps on the Pakistan-Afghan border, government spin doctors turned it into a justification for deploying British troops to Afghanistan.

In September 2005 Lieutenant General Rob Fry, the individual most responsible for the plan to deploy to Helmand, presented John Reid with the MoD’s plans to deploy 3,150 troops, mostly drawn from the Parachute Regiment. British forces would take over an American base named Camp Bastion in the desert north-west of the province’s capital, Lashkar Gah. He promised that Taliban fighters crossing from Pakistan would be easy to identify and eliminate. ‘The senior SIS men in the room rolled their eyes’ (p.225). Brigadier Ed Butler was chosen to command the force.

Fairweather shows the gulf between the top of the army (Fry and Chief of the General Staff Sir Mike Jackson) who assured sceptical politicians that it could be managed as long as the Brits withdrew their forces from southern Iraq at the same speed that they deployed them to Helmand – and many of the officers on the ground who thought it was madness. Defence Secretary John Reid was sceptical. ‘Won’t British troops be isolated and exposed?’ he asked (p.225). Fry assured him not. Reid was right. Fry was way wrong.

Split command

Right from the start it was ballsed up. The British formed part of a NATO force commanded by the Canadians. Because the Canadian force was being commanded by a brigadier, army etiquette demanded that Butler step aside to allow a more junior officer to command his men, and so Colonel Charlie Knaggs became commander of the British deployment. This meant Butler would have to oversee operations from Kabul. Then he discovered his headquarters would not be doing the operational planning but that a staff officer from army headquarters in Northwood would be drawing up the crucial operational plan.

Crucially, Butler would only have four Chinook helicopters at his disposal, barely enough to support one offensive mission a month and, it would prove, not nearly enough to extract British soldiers from the umpteen dangerous contact situations they were going to get into.

After the Jamiat police station siege, senior officers considered advising against the deployment, realising that the situation in south Iraq was far worse than previously understood, and would entail a much slower withdrawal than planned but they never made their opposition clear enough.

Sher Mohammed Akhundzada

Before the troops arrived the Brits made another mistake. UK ambassador to Kabul, Rosalind Marsden, persuaded president Hamid Karzai, to remove the province’s long-time governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada. He was notorious for rape, murder and involvement in the drugs trade, so getting rid of him played to press releases about Tony Blair’s counter narcotics policy. Unfortunately, Muhammed may have been a criminal but he was the only person with the contacts and authority to keep a lid on the province. Later, he cheerfully told British officers that, removed from his position of influence and no longer able to pay them, he let his 3,000-strong fighting force defect en masse to the Taliban. At a stroke the Brits made violent conflict inevitable and created a huge opposition force. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That motto should be carved on Tony Blair’s tombstone.

Fairweather describes the efforts of the chief planner Gordon Messenger and development experts to assess the province, their dismay at the illiteracy and corruption of the Afghan administrators and police they met, and their equal dismay at the ignorance about Helmand displayed by British politicians and army staff. The politicians had assigned the army a three-year deployment. Development expert Minna Jarvenpaa said it would take ten years, probably longer, to begin to develop such a place (p.233). Politicians didn’t want to hear. No-one listened.

Details of the deployment were announced in January 2006, just in time for a conference of Afghan donors’ which Tony Blair was chairing. John Reid declared we were going to spend three years in the south of Afghanistan, bringing peace and security and helping the locals reconstruct their country. None of this was to happen.

Gil Baldwin, head of the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit resigned in disgust, saying it beggared belief that Britain was preparing to go into Afghanistan even worse prepared then it had been for Iraq (p.234).

Chapter 22

Introduces us to the first soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan including Will Pike and Harvey Pynn of the Third Parachute regiment, 3 Para. This part of the narrative exactly matches the account of 3 Para’s time in Helmand (April to October 2006) given by Patrick Bishop in his rip-roaring soldier’s eye view of endless firefights in ‘3 Para’.

Fairweather repeats the surprising fact that, of the 3,500 British troops being deployed, all but 600 were support staff, engineers, cooks, drivers, quartermasters, ammunition handlers and so on. Governor Daoud wanted the Brits to deploy to protect towns in the north of the province from the Taliban. Butler was reluctant but agreed to support local Afghan army units. Development consultant Minna Jarvenpaa knew the tribal situation around Sangin was complicated with the town divided between two tribes, and both involved in rival drug operations.

In May 2006 Daoud sent the British commander, Charlie Knaggs, a desperate message that the district centre in the town of Naw Zad was being attacked by Taliban forces. A force of Paras is despatched, who were later replaced by Gurkhas. Soon Daoud was asking British troops to protect other towns and the Americans asked them to bolster the small force protecting the important Kajaki Dam. Step by step the Brits were forced into abandoning the initial plan of securing a relatively small area bounded by Camp Bastion, Geresh and Lashkar Gah in the south, and instead found their forces scattered thinly across half a dozen outposts which came under increasingly fierce attack.

Far from being a gentle peacekeeping and reconstruction exercise, the deployment was turning into a full scale war against the Taliban. Fairweather is brilliant at conveying the complex political cross-currents which led to the decisions, and the shambolic last-minute way they were carried out.

Will Pike led the deployment to the northern outpost of Sangin. As the Paras set about fortifying the district centre a delegation of town elders came and asked them to leave. They knew the Taliban would attack. They knew it would develop into a siege of attrition. They knew their town would be badly damaged. They were right on all three counts, but Pike had to turn them down. So much for listening to the locals, democracy etc. Instead of peace, the Brits brought war and destruction wherever they went.

Days later the Sangin district centre was hit, 3 killed 3 badly injured. If Butler had been in Camp Bastion maybe he’d have changed his mind but he was in Kabul where his job had evolved into trying to manage Governor Daoud and his master, Afghan president Karzai. So he overruled his junior officers’ concerns and the troops remained in Sangin in what developed into a relentless, daily barrage from the surrounding Taliban.

Already it was clear the critics had been right: a) the deployment to Afghanistan was too small; b) it had truckled to political pressure and spread its forces too thinly; c) it wasn’t going to be a peacekeeping deployment but a full-on conflict.

Chapter 23. Counterinsurgency in Iraq

Fairweather’s account of the revolution in military doctrine brought about by General David Petraeus who tries to re-orient the US Army approach from a ‘capture and kill the bad guys’ approach to a more imaginative deployment of counterinsurgency doctrine. The Americans referred to the British Army’s experience in the Malaya ’emergency’ i.e. how it handled an insurgency by revolutionary communist guerrillas. The main thing is to shift the goal from capturing or killing insurgents to winning over the general population by ensuring security. This shift in thinking is the central theme of Thomas E Ricks’s two books, Fiasco and The Gamble.

I believed all this until I read Frank Ledwidge’s devastating book, Losing Small Wars. There he points out two fundamental factors which the counterinsurgency proponents didn’t take into account. In Malaya, as later in Northern Ireland, a) there was one government whose fundamental legitimacy the majority of the population didn’t question; and there was b) an effective, impartial, well trained police force. Neither of these factors was present in Iraq or Afghanistan. On the contrary the ‘governments’ of both countries were deeply contested by large parts of the population, were widely seen as corrupt and parti pris; and the police forces in both countries were bywords for corruption and backsliding i.e. running away or turning their guns on their supposed Western allies whenever it came to a fight.

As the redeployment to Helmand began to be thought through, officers in Basra came under pressure to speed up the process of handing over responsibility to the Iraqi police and army. Only problem being, they were often corrupt and ineffective. Didn’t matter:

The army leadership was preparing to dispense with its commitment to create a competent Iraqi security force in the name of political expediency. (p.251)

Security in Basra was collapsing. The News of the World published a video of British soldiers beating detainees which triggered 48 rocket and mortars fired at the Abu Naji camp. Sectarian strife increased. A Sunni cleric was killed and new corpses turned up every day.

In January 2006 a further round of elections were held. Now, after weeks of horse trading, following the elections, Shia politician Nouri al-Maliki was finally appointed Prime Minister. He hated the British. British forces had arrested his grandfather in a 1920 Shia uprising. He saw the British presence as a continuation of its old imperial ambitions. On his first visit to Basra he told the British authorities he didn’t want to meet them.

Fairweather gives an illuminating account of the Ministry of Defence and army’s notorious problems with commissioning the right kit and equipment. While the army spent hundreds of millions on hi-tech, computerised gewgaws to fight the next world war, it neglected basic transport vehicles solid enough to resist improvised explosive devices.

Six month rotations ensured that just as each set of officers and men was coming to know the people and the job, it was rotated back to the UK and a completely new set came in. These were often led by a commanding officer determined to ignore everything his predecessor had done and implement his own pet theories. This was a recipe for inconsistency and incoherence. Fairweather cites the replacement of the bullish General Shireff with the scholarly General Jonathan Shaw in January 2007 (p.302).

He has an upsetting passage about post-traumatic stress disorder and the inadequate care the army takes of its psychiatrically damaged veterans. American studies suggest that 15% of veterans will suffer PTSD (p.256). The poor care for the physically wounded veterans at the Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham caused a scandal in the media (p.281). The scandal was to lead to the establishment of the extremely successful Help for Heroes charity (note, p.393).

The entire policy of withdrawing from south Iraq in order to redeploy to Afghanistan was thrown into doubt when the Brits handed over the main base in Muthanna province to the local security services then, a few days later, a crowd of several hundred assembled and stormed the base, the Iraqi security forces melting away as they were wont to do, whereupon the mob stripped the base of all the expensive equipment, looting all the arms and equipment the Americans had stocked it with. Farce (p.270).

In August British forces handed over Camp Abu Naji outside Amarah to local security forces. Within an hour word had spread, a few hours later a mob had assembled, and a few hours after that the crowd entered the base and comprehensively sacked and looted it. After spending £80 million trying to reconstruct the province the British were leaving it in the worst possible state. A ‘debacle’ and ‘fiasco’, the loss of Abu Naji brought the British army’s reputation among the Americans to a new low.

6 September 2006

The dreadful day when four Paras defending the Kajaki Dam in Helmand got caught in a minefield, one fatality, three terrible injuries and the heroism of Chinook pilot Mark Hammond who flew sorties not only to the dam, but to Sangin and Musa Qaleh, too (p.275). In fact it was only a week later that the elders of Musa Qaleh came to Butler and brokered a ceasefire deal between him and the Taliban. Both sides would withdraw and fighting would cease. An eerie quiet descended over the battletorn town which had been badly damaged during 6 months of fighting. The British talked about reconstruction but brought only destruction.

Meanwhile in Basra new commander, Genera Richard Shireff proposed a bold new plan of increasing his force and embarking on a policy of clearing the city neighbourhood by neighbourhood of the JAM, handing it over to Iraqi police to hold and then civilian experts to deliver high impact development projects. Of course none of this ever happened. He could never get enough British troops and the Iraqi police were useless. After some civilian contractors were killed Margaret Beckett ordered the entire DFID contingent to leave Basra Palace base and be evacuated to Kuwait.

Back to the story of Haider the interpreter. He has married his sweetheart, Nora, and had a baby. Now he is thunderstruck to be told by his sympathetic boss, William Kearney, that the security firm is pulling out of Basra. Haider is going to lose his job and become more exposed to the JAM thugs who want to kill him for working with the infidel.

Chapter 28 The Surge, 2007

General Petraeus and retired general Jack Keane lobbied and persuaded president Bush not to quit and withdraw from a ruined Iraq but to take a gamble and increase troop numbers, by 30,000, the famous ‘surge’. General Casey was replaced by Petraeus as commander in chief.

The so-called Surge coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening which was when Sunni tribes finally sickened of being threatened and dominated by al Qaeda militias. Delicate negotiations persuaded many Sunni tribes to accept American money and support to take on the terrorist group.

Baghdad had now become the epicentre of the civil war between Sunni and Shia, with mass ethnic cleansing, 200 deaths a week, and concrete walls separating ethnic neighbourhoods. Fairweather mentions the role of British civilian and pacifist Emma Sky as an unlikely adviser to hulking American general Ray Ordieno (pages 292 to 296).

Detailed description of the negotiations initiated by British General Graeme Lamb and James Simonds to convert Sunni militia leader Abu Azzam over to the Coalition side, with a mixture of flattery, promises of jobs and money for his 1,000-strong militia. The central achievement of Emma Sky in making friends with a female member of Maliki’s cabinet, Basima al-Jadiri and from then onwards keeping lines of communication open between the coalition commander and stroppy Maliki (p.298).

The Brits had been working through the latter half of 2006 towards finally withdrawing from Basra, deceiving themselves about the readiness of the Iraqi security forces to take over, or that Shireff’s policy of clearing neighbourhoods was working. But just as the withdrawal began to be implemented the Americans were embarking on the exact opposite policy, bringing in more troops as part of their Surge. In this context British policy looked more than ever like running away.

The British were under pressure to look tough and so undertook daring missions, including seizing Jaish al-Mahdi leaders. At the same time they sought interlocutors to negotiate a peace with. Most important was to be the leader of Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra, Ahmed al-Fartosi, who they had arrested and imprisoned three years before, and whose arrest led to the reprisal kidnapping of the two SAS men.

The British made him a simple offer: call off militia attacks and in return the British would cease patrolling the city and release his imprisoned cadres on cohorts. The clincher was telling Fartosi he had to take the deal in order to get his men freed and enrolled in the security services before Iranian agents and politicians took over. Fartosi was Shia, fanatical Shia, he had taken money and arms from Iran – but drew the line at letting Iran take over his patch.

These are the kinds of subtleties or complexities created by ethnic, religious, tribal, warlord and gangland allegiances which the coalition failed to get to terms with. Emma Sky is described trying to persuade Ray Ordieno that he needed to stop lumping all opposition groups as al Qaeda or Ba’athists or ‘insurgents’ and learn to distinguish between them. Only then could the coalition figure out what they wanted and even start to find negotiated, political solutions to the chaos.

June 2007

Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Tony Blair stepped down as Labour Party leader. According to Fairweather everyone in Whitehall and the military knew that Brown regarded Iraq as Blair’s folly and had no interest in throwing good money after bad. He wanted all British troops withdrawn as soon as reasonably possible. As always, politics. When the army staff told Brown cutting and running would infuriate the Americans Brown said ‘good’. In Britain, and further afield (in the European countries which were always against the war) it would draw a stark line between Brown and his predecessor, and win him kudos for standing up to the Yanks. Army planners at the British military command centre in Northwood drew up five withdrawal scenarios. Brown unhesitatingly chose the quickest (p.315).

Some top brass thought a rapid withdrawal would make the British public question the sacrifice made so far. But in the three months during which Blair had extended the British occupation to mollify the Americans, 11 more British soldiers had been killed. The opposite line was that the British had fought shoulder to shoulder with the Americans for four bloody years and enough was enough.

The Brits released Fartosi’s deputy, other detainees and complied with their side of the bargain to halt all patrols in Basra. However violent attacks continued, with relentless bombarding of the British HQ in Basra Palace. American command in Baghdad gave the British senior officers who came to explain their withdrawal timetable short shrift. As the Brits claimed that Basra’s police force was ready to enforce security, American officers laughed.

In August 2007 the deal with Fartosi began and he was given a small office in the the base prison complete with phone and fax machine. From here he organised a complete ceasefire and an uneasy calm fell over Basra. On 3 September the British commander handed over security governance to the Iraqi government general assigned the job, and 600 soldiers left Basra Palace in a convoy of Warriors, armoured cars, lorries piled high with office furniture. They drove the ten miles to Basra airport. The idea is a residual force would stay there for up to a year to continue to train Iraqi army and police force. The JAM militia held wild celebrations at the ‘liberation’ of their city.

Story of Haider the interpreter, continued

Since the start of the year a number of interpreters had been executed by the militias. Terrifying story of him attending his brother-in-law’s wedding procession of twenty or so cars when it was intercepted by trucks with no plates, armed men leapt out, ran across to the car which contained Haider and his wife but grabbed Nora’s cousin by mistake, hauled him out of the car, threw him in the trucks, and roared off while the women screamed and wept. Next day the cousin’s corpse is found with a scrap of paper telling Haider to ring a mobile phone number. Haider’s wife’s uncle, Ali, arranges for him to flee to Iran with a fake passport and a little money. Then the militiamen kidnap Ali and call Haider, saying he must return or Ali will be murdered.

Haider makes a plan, to return to Basra, collect his family and go to the British base. Gordon Brown had announced a fast track visa process for Iraqi interpreters. He takes a minivan cab and collects his wife, mother, sister and three brothers but when they get to the British base, security won’t let them through.

Anyway, it turns into a real odyssey. They walk to a gas station where an old geezer has a taxi. Haider tells them they’re refugees and the old guy takes them home and lets them sleep in his apartment. But next morning he starts getting suspicious. Haider’s contact inside the British base tells him the precise paperwork he needs, but it involves getting an old style Iraqi passport which will take ages.

Haider has a brainwave and rings up a doctor he knew at medical school. Reluctantly, the doctor agrees to house them all in a spare room in his clinic, knowing he’s risking reprisals from the militia. Haider has a phone so he rings his old boss and friend William Kearney. Kearney jumps into action ringing round contacts to get Haider’s paperwork approved asap. He commissions a journalist to write a piece about the plight of interpreters and he even – and at this point we start to realise why we’ve been hearing so much about this poor man – arranges for Haider to do an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, from the spare room at the clinic where he’s in hiding. Atmosphere of Anne Frank’s loft. Every time they heard footsteps in the corridor they froze in fear.

There are more hurdles to jump through, judges to be bribed, paperwork to be secured, relations pressed into running round the city getting the right documents. After a week they take another cab to the British base but Haider is now told that his brothers and sister aren’t eligible. He loses his rag.

When the British had needed him he had risked his life, but when he needed their help all he got was red tape. (p.326)

And now, 16 years later, the same treatment dished out to Afghan interpreters fleeing the Taliban. What a disgraceful, disgusting country Britain is.

Abandoning Basra

So the British abandoned Basra and the Shia militia took over, quickly intimidating the Iraqi police into staying in their stations, while black hooded armed men patrolled the streets, hitting women who weren’t properly covered and embarking on a campaign of murder and extortion. The Iraqi Way. A British officer, Colonel Andy Bristow, helps the new Iraqi governor of Basra, General Mohan al-Faraji, but quickly realises the deal with Fartosi to allow us to leave in peace, effectively undermined the police i.e. bankrupted the whole reason for us being there in the first place. When Mohan found out the British had gone behind his back to do a deal with the head of the militia to release back onto the streets over 1,000 criminal detainees, he was apoplectic.

It was just the sort of double-dealing the British were infamous for during their colonial days. (p.330)

On 31 December 2007 Fartosi himself was finally released from prison and within days (January 2008) war broke out between Jaish al-Mahdi and Mohan’s police force. The British base itself came under sustained mortar attack. The deal with Fartosi had failed. Not only that but the situation in Helmand was deteriorating, Ceasefires with local Taliban commanders had failed and the fighting was fiercer than ever. The army desperately needed to move its Basra forces to Helmand.

Fairweather then gives a typically detailed account of the way the new advisor to General Mohan, the Brit Colonel Richard Iron, conceives a plan to deliver a US-style surge but just to Basra. As mentor to Mohan he is outside the British chain of command and so a) gets Mohan to present it as a request to the Basra commander, something the Brits are meant to help with, b) schmoozes with the Americans in Baghdad who love it. Petraeus is won over and the Yanks begin making plans to send troops to help the meagre British presence from the air base.

BUT. At one of these co-ordination meetings everyone is stunned to learn that Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, having been briefed about it some weeks before, has taken the bull by the horns, and ordered his own surge in Basra, using native Iraqi troops!

Long story short: the Iraqi army took on the Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra and won! Over 6,000 Iraqi troops marched on Basra and Maliki himself flew in to supervise. To begin with it was chaos, with Iraqi units disintegrating or being blown to pieces by the heavily armed and motivated JAMsters. But the Americans couldn’t allow this to fail and so diverted troops and planes south to join the fight. The British administrator on the ground was humiliatingly denied entrance to meetings between Maliki and the American commander in chief. Maliki blamed the British for letting Basra sink to this level. The American military no longer trusted the Brits to do anything. Anyway, bureaucracy and reluctance to overturn the withdrawal plans meant only a handful of British officers were available. The Iraqis and Americans got on without them. National embarrassment. Humiliation.

Meanwhile Mohan was sacked and a new Iraqi commander put in place. American General Flynn told British brigade headquarters he’d flown in to stop the Brits failing again. Fairweather calls it ‘a damning indictment’ and laments ‘Britain’s battered reputation’. The senior British officers hung their heads in shame (p.337).

Then, to everyone’s surprise, there was a ceasefire. Unknown to the Brits or Yanks Maliki had sent delegations to the Iranian city of Qom to ask al-Sadr and the commander of the Iranian al-Quds Force to broker a ceasefire. Maliki knew that the Iranians had a vested interest in seeing him re-elected, as a moderate Shia Prime Minister, whereas defeat in Basra risked plunging the south into chaos and also triggering a resurgence of Sunni resistance. On balance it was in Iranian interests to rein in their proxies. So The message came back to Fartosi to cease fire. The guns fell silent. The Jaish al-Mahdi forces disappeared. Fartosi and other notorious leaders left Iraq altogether.

A few days later Iraqi forces occupied all the Jaish al-Mahdi strongholds. The insurgency in Basra was over and it had nothing to do with the Brits or the Americans but backroom deals between Middle Eastern players. In an ironic way it was a triumph because it showed that normal Middle Eastern politics, with all its corruption and sectarian horsetrading, had been restored.

But there was nothing the British C-in-C, Brigadier Julian Free, could do ‘to restore American faith in British competence’ (p.339).

Epilogue: summer 2011

In Fairweather’s view the retaking of Basra was a watershed. The Iraqi army then retook Amara (where Sergeant Danny Mills and his sniper platoon had such a torrid time in 2006) and routed Jaish al-Mahdi from Baghdad.

In the January 2009 provincial elections Maliki’s party defeated Sadrist politicians (i.e. politicians loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr). Maybe it was even some kind of democracy. A very corrupt form of democracy, Iraq sits on the fourth largest oil reserves in the world. Fortunes are made by politicians with fingers in the pie. Leaked documents and other evidence show the Iraqi police force settling back into old Saddam methods of arbitrary arrest and gruesome torture.

In Iraq’s March 2010 elections the slippery old chancer Ayad Allawi won the popular vote, with the backing of Saudi Arabia, because he is a Sunni Muslim. (On a simple geopolitical level, Iraqi politics are riddled with the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia to the south and Shia Iran to the east). However, in the backroom horsetrading Iran leaned on Muqtada al-Sadr to get his supporters to support Maliki who therefore re-emerged as Prime Minister in November 2010 (serving till 2014).

Through the summer of 2009 the British troops left Basra airbase. In total more than 120,000 British soldiers served in Iraq. As many as 15% of them might be expected to suffer mental illness as a consequence i.e. 18,000. 179 British personnel died, 5,970 were injured. Best guesses are that in the region of 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives.

Fairweather’s figures are that the war cost roughly £1 billion a year, total about £8 billion. Fairweather injects a political note (remember he wrote for the Daily Telegraph, what is now a very right-wing newspaper):

As schools go unbuilt in the UK, hospitals close, and tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, soldiers and policemen lose their jobs, the Iraq war has become a symbol of the profligacy and waste of the New Labour government. (p.344)

As to Afghanistan, in 2009 the Americans were forced to intervene as the British, yet again, lost control of the situation, sending a surge of 30,000 US troops to retake the province from the resurgent Taliban. The economy is still dirt poor. And there is no educated middle class to provide administrators and politicians.

As of summer 2011, 374 British service personnel had died in Helmand, 1,608 had been injured, 493 seriously. More than 10,000 Afghans had died. Gordon Brown estimated the war cost Britain £10 billion.

And Haider the interpreter, the Iraqi who Fairweather uses as a kind of barometer of Britain’s failing efforts in Basra? At the time of writing he lived in Hull, in accommodation provided by the British government, with his wife and two children. He’d like to return to Iraq but is still scared to.

The blame

As you’d expect, Fairweather holds Tony Blair chiefly to account for committing Britain to two wars it couldn’t win – but he’s harsher on the army. Senior generals gave consistently poor advice and the army as a whole was guilty of institutional failings, most importantly it’s continually over-optimistic predictions, its wrong assessments of the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, its insistence it could carry out both deployments with what quickly became clear were inadequate men and resources. In both places they ignored the well-informed warnings of experts in the field.

Most tellingly, senior officials at the MoD and armed services have come to see war as a way of maintaining their budgets. Fairweather wonders if the fact that this is the only way the MoD can secure adequate funding explains why Britain’s armed forces have been in conflict almost continuously for the past 15 years.

Short-termism. All kinds of delusions led planners to think a 3-year deployment to Helmand would be enough. The average length of a counter-insurgency campaign is 14 years. Proper state building takes even longer. Either commit, or don’t intervene.

Summary

This is an outstanding chronological history of Britain’s deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fairweather not only explains the complex political and financial realities at work in the British government and the fraught relationship with our American ‘allies’, but switches scene and focus with extraordinary confidence.

He gives what must surely be definitive accounts of specific firefights and battles (his 5 pages describing the murder of the six military police is exemplary) but he is just as confident describing conversations between the top power players, be they Yanks like Rumsfeld, Rice and Bremer, or Brits like Blair, Brown and Campbell.

And his narrative introduces us to an extraordinarily wide range of named individuals through whose stories and eyes we get really insider insights into every aspect of the situation, from Brits appalled at decisions in Whitehall or the chaos of the CPA, through the civilian governors struggling to control their provinces, to the experiences of scores of officers and men involved in fierce firefights on the ground.

It’s a panoramic, encyclopedic account. It really is outstanding.

P.S. A study in ignorance

Seen from another angle, this excellent book a study in several types of stupidity and ignorance.

The obvious, easy-to-see kind of ignorance, is how everyone involved in the planning and implementation of the quick invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and then the painfully slow, ineffective ‘reconstruction’ of the ruined country, had poor-to-zero grasp of the reality of Iraqi society, politics and culture. That was obvious to anyone with a brain before the war started, and became obvious to people without a brain, eventually even to the American neoconservatives who had planned and launched the war, as the years went by and their efforts became evermore expensive and futile.

The less obvious kind of ignorance is a fundamental premise of this blog and my worldview, which is that we don’t understand our own society or our selves. In his 2015 book, ‘The Soul of the Marionette’, John Gray explains that there will never be true artificial intelligence because nobody understands what human intelligence is. Sure, we can define and measure numerous aspects of intelligence like solving complex maths problems or winning at chess, but the full package of what makes a human being human, the complex interplay of calculation, hunch, guesswork, emotion and intuition – nobody understands it, how it works, let alone how it is produced by the brain.

So if we don’t understand what intelligence is, how can we artificially create it? We may be able to produce computer programs which solve problems faster than any human, and are able to teach themselves better and better techniques etc, and can answer any question plausibly, but it will never be anything like human intelligence, and those who think so are fools.

Same with democracy. Simpletons like George W Bush and Tony Blair thought all you had to do was overthrow a dictator and organise some cobbled-together elections, and you’d have yourself a functioning democracy. What this imbecile level of naivety shows is not so much that neither of them had a clue about Arab or Muslim societies, and about Iraq in particular (which they didn’t, and which this book demonstrates at humiliating and embarrassing length) – what it showed is they hadn’t a clue about how our own democratic societies work.

1. The civic basis of democracy

They didn’t have a clue about their own political evolution: about the very long history, the centuries-long evolution, through trial and error and revolutions and civil wars, and the taming of religion and the controlling of aristocracies and oligarchies, and the campaigns of working class parties and trade unions and then the long struggle for women’s suffrage – which lie behind the present form of the far-from-perfect, so-called ‘democracies’ which operate in the USA and UK.

2. The Christian basis of democracy

And that’s without going into the huge part of the story derived from religion: the slow evolution of Christianity with its emphasis on the value of the individual, through the overthrow of Catholic ideology at the Reformation, and the Protestant Revolution which ushered in new ideas about the individual, about individual agency, responsibility, rights and duties, which had to be painfully thrashed out during centuries of civil war and political turmoil, the overthrow of kings, the grudging allowance of limited forms of religious tolerance in Britain the late 17th century, which struggled against the odds throughout the 18th and inspired the American revolutionaries to their clear statement of principles in the American constitution. There’s no evidence of this kind of huge, conceptual, long-term evolution taking place in the political-religious ideology of modern Islam. The opposite: reactionary forms of Islam have been on the rise throughout the Middle East since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

3. The economic basis of democracy

And all that is without going into the economic history which lies behind our democratic societies, whose development paralleled the political, religious and philosophical strands. Modern progressives are keen to attribute the rise of the West to ruthless exploitation, to the profits from the Atlantic slave trade and the rapacity of European imperialism. The older, traditional school of history attributed ‘the rise of the West’ to a huge range of intellectual inventions, from the establishment of the Bank of England and a national debt, through the invention of copyright and business law which created incentives for innovators and inventors, to the inventors themselves who devised the seed drill or the steam engine among thousands of other world-changing technologies (ideas handily summarised in Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest).

However you combine these and other elements to explain ‘the Rise of the West’, there’s no denying that Britain, most of the other European nations, and then America and Japan, represent a level of legal, social and technological achievement which far outranks the other 180 or so nations on earth.

Neo-con delusions

Now do you get a sense of the depth of the ignorance of the American neo-cons and their poodle, Tony? They thought overthrowing a dictator and getting his dazed population to line up at voting booths would be it, job done, creation of ‘democracy’. They thought creating an unstable government and holding a few phoney elections amounted to ‘nation building’ and stood any chance at all of transforming Iraq in a few short months into a beacon of peace, plenty and democracy for the rest of the Middle East to follow.

That’s what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and their supporters thought would happen. Surely the word ‘imbecile’ isn’t forceful enough to describe this level of fatuous ignorance – not only about what Iraqi society was like, but about what makes their own country tick – about what makes the 20 or so developed western nations what they are, and why this unique religious, philosophical, legal, cultural, social, economic and technological history can’t just be bundled up into vacuum packs, flown into a developing country in the holds of Hercules transport planes and handed out to cheering crowds like bottled water. What morons!

Credit

A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq by Jack Fairweather was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 23, 2023

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Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart (2007)

‘If you put my cousin on the council, I will slit his throat.’
(Typical threat from an Iraqi sheikh, Occupational Hazards, page 231)

Rory Stewart

Stewart (born 1973) is posh. He comes from a family of Scottish landed gentry. Like lots of poshos born into a family which helped administer the last shreds of empire, Stewart was born abroad, in Hong Kong in his case, and then brought up in Malaysia. He, of course, was sent back to the old country to be educated at Eton and Oxford. After a brief spell in a posh regiment in the British Army (the Black Watch) he went on to work in the Diplomatic Service. Absolutely stock, standard posh-boy career. Then, in the footsteps of the posh travellers of the 1920s and 30s (Wilfred Thesiger et al), he left the Diplomatic Service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and then, of course, wrote a best-selling book about the experience, ‘The Places in Between’ (p.8).

Post-war Iraq

Stewart’s posh boy qualifications, his experience in the Foreign Office, his (supposed) knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture (he’s very candid about his shortcomings in speaking or understanding Arabic, as he is about everything else) meant that when the Coalition Provisional Authority (the provisional Western power set up in Iraq after the American invasion of March 2003) put out feelers to the British Foreign Office for volunteers to work as ‘governorate co-ordinators’ in the southern provinces of Iraq (which had been assigned to the British to manage) Stewart was a prime candidate.

In fact, surprisingly, he received no response to his initial application and so, with the confidence borne of his Eton-Oxford-Foreign Office pedigree, he flew to Jordan, took a taxi to Baghdad and lobbied for the job on the spot. He was vouched for by the Director of Operations and Infrastructure at the CPA, Andy Bearpark and was duly appointed (p.73).

Stewart in Iraq timeline

Thus it was that on 28 September 2003 Stewart found himself on a flight from Baghdad down to Amara, capital of Maysan Province in southern Iraq (p.10). Here he worked as ‘governorate co-ordinator’ running a team of ten or so civil affairs officers, alongside the British Army’s (completely separate) military operations for the next 6 months.

Map of Iraq’s provinces, by Orthuberra and published under Creative Commons attribution Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

In November 2003 the American diplomat Molly Phee arrived, assuming the position of Governorate Co-ordinator and Rory switched to become her deputy (p.188). A few days later, Paul Bremer announced the CPA would hand over authority to a provisional Iraqi government on 30 June 2004. In the same month an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Iraqis described the allies as ‘an occupying force’ (p.220).

In January 2004 the security situation suddenly deteriorated and the compound at Amara started coming under attack (p.288).

In March 2004 Stewart was moved from Maysan to its western neighbour, Dhi Qar, and its capital Nasiriyah, where he served as senior advisor to the civil affairs team. There were mounting attacks on occupation garrisons throughout Iraq.

In April 2004 the Shiite cleric, politician and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr unleashed his supporters’ insurgency against the occupying forces, leading to attacks against Coalition offices throughout Iraq, and against Stewart’s compound in Nasiriyah. The very fierce fighting would continue until al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in September 2004.

Meanwhile, in June 2004, the Coalition Authority handed all its powers over to the Iraqi Provisional government, and Stewart’s job came to an end.

He revisited Iraq a couple of times, later in 2004 and in 2005, but his day-to-day involvement at that point came to an end.

A memoir not a history

I bought this paperback when it came out in 2007. I remember being disappointed. Now I realise this was because I was expecting a historical overview, a comprehensive chronological account of the coalition invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and Stewart’s book is definitely not that. For that kind of objective, historical and analytical overview, I recommend Jack Fairweather’s thorough and authoritative account, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq (2012).

I now realise I was disappointed by Stewart’s account because it is something else entirely: it is a highly personal memoir of the day-to-day challenges he faced, first in Maysan and then in Dhi Qar, and doesn’t even attempt to be an overall survey.

Instead, it is much more like a diary account (it’s not quite a diary because, as he tells us, he didn’t have time to keep a day-by-day record) of where he went and who he saw, and the issues and challenges he had to address, of the countless conversations and arguments with innumerable Iraqi officials, political leaders, sheikhs and clerics, interspersed with conversations with senior officers in the British Army in both provinces, and occasional meetings with masters in the CPA up in Baghdad. Above all, it is an odyssey through the amazingly convoluted networks of tribes and parties and gangs and warlords and militias which made up the immensely complicated tapestry of political life in his province.

And it is very deliberately provincial in focus. Occasionally he mentions politicking up in Baghdad or outbreaks of violence in the rest of the country, but only the briefest of mentions because his focus is overwhelmingly on the multiple parties and sects and forces at work in his province that he has to deal with.

This explains several things about the book:

1. At 434 pages, it is surprisingly long. But as you get into it you realise this is because it takes a long time to get to know all the many, many tribal and political leaders in Maysan. Stewart’s understanding only inches forward via long conversations, arguments, meetings, pledges, threats and unexpected revelations. In all these ways his book is more like a novel than a history: it’s not to be read for the facts; it’s to be read so as to allow the behaviours, conversations, promises, threats and actions of the various factions to slowly build up a complex, multi-layered portrait.

2. It also explains why, right at the start of the book, there’s a 4-page list of dramatis personae i.e. key figures from the narrative, just as in a classic nineteenth century Russian novel. Initially I thought I could skip these, but slowly realised that reading the book only makes sense if you maintain a good grasp of who’s who and, more to the point, who is conspiring against who, rubbishing them behind their backs, and why. Or at least, why Stewart thinks they’re doing so.

At which point I realised something quite important: that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The clash of cultures

This point brings us to one of the two central themes of the book which is the immense, unbridgeable cultural gulf between this highly educated, objective and dispassionate civil servant, and the maze of Iraqi politicians he struggles to understand and manage. Over the book’s 430 pages he (and we the readers) obviously gain insight into people’s characters and motivations; but it’s delusive. Tribal leaders still abruptly reverse their positions, or pull out of agreements, for no motive that Stewart can fathom. One minute he’s enjoying a cup of tea in his pokey office in the CPA compound in Amara with a Shia cleric who promises to work with Stewart’s plans to set up a provincial council. A week later the same person is leading an angry mob on the same compound, inciting them to riot, chanting ‘Death to the Coalition’ and publishing a leaflet calling for all devout Muslims to assassinate CPA officials like Stewart (p.228). It is an impassable gulf:

Even in the stable context of our office, with good translators, it was often difficult for us to understand Iraqi guests and for them to understand us…the truth was that the most basic concepts like, ‘civil society’ or ‘sharia law’, meant very different things to each of us. (p.242)

The more he understands, the more he realises he’ll never understand. Not least because quite a few of the local players themselves don’t fully understand what’s going on. In a Hobbesian world where everyone’s hand is against everyone else’s, nobody can be sure of any of their pacts or alliances or deals.

‘These people talk randomly,’ said the governor in a tense, tired, quiet voice. ‘Even among themselves they agree about nothing. It is impossible even to get a consistent demand from them.’ (p.294)

This explains something else absolutely central which is that, when push comes to shove, if you’re in doubt about who was your ally and who was conspiring to have you assassinated, the One Thing that was guaranteed to win you brownie points with almost all the other Iraqi parties, was declaring ‘Death to the West! Death to the Coalition!’

Stewart doesn’t say it in so many words, but it emerges naturally from his countless stories of promises broken and double crosses, that opposition to the Coalition, to the occupying forces, and the West in general, was so vehement because it was, at bottom, the only policy on which almost all the squabbling Iraqi parties could unite on.

Being political illiterates, having absolutely no concept whatsoever of democratic processes or conventions, ‘Death to the West’ was the one and only policy that could (for a while) unite parties, tribes and interest groups who were, otherwise, at each other’s throats (for example, at the first meeting of the council Stewart has himself selected, p.277).

Security, security, security

All of which is related to the other, deeper, central message of the book which comes over loud and clear. Young Rory arrived with the naive belief that people are basically decent; that, if given space, law and order emerges naturally from the culture of a society; and so he initially allowed himself to be dazzled by the enormous number of economic and social development projects being worked up by the ten-person civil society team which he found in Maysan before him.

Only slowly and brutally, does he realise that the locals don’t give a monkeys about educational programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism and constitutional reform (p.82) or ‘gender-awareness workshops’ (p.83).

What they wanted was security security security. What they wanted was law and order. What they wanted was to be able to walk down the street at night (or even during the day) without being held up, mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held to ransom, or tortured and murdered.

And that, as it turned out – the provision of basic security, elementary standards of law and order – was something the occupying forces turned out to be completely incapable of providing. And Stewart’s account is a priceless testimony as to why. You might as well try to get a box of frogs to put on a military tattoo as get the endlessly bickering Arabs who Stewart profiles to agree about anything.

The rivals

Amid the blizzard of other projects and responsibilities, the central consuming project of the first, Maysan, part of the narrative, is Stewart’s attempts to appoint a provisional council which can then meet and agree a) a new provincial governor and b) a new chief of police.

The police are poorly trained, cowardly and corrupt (p.83). For example, tribal leader Abu Rashid drafted hundreds of his militia followers into the police, some of them as young as 12. The day before a meeting with Rashid Stewart hears that, when Abu Rashid’s mother had been told to wait when she went to hospital, some of these boys had drawn their weapons and threatened to shoot the doctors unless she was treated immediately (p.87). What can you do with a society split into such fiercely partisan warlord groups, and where that kind of instant resort to extreme violence is normal?

Pretty much all the sheikhs and party leaders he has to deal with are criminals. When Stewart appoints Abu Rashid chief of police it is in the knowledge that Rashid’s cousins run the major smuggling operation in the area. Stewart’s thinking is it’s better to have the big gangsters inside the organisation and let power slowly educate them, than simply making them eternal foes.

Most of the leaders he deals with are involved in some kind of criminal activity, such as smuggling drugs or diesel. Most have threatened to assassinate each other and some are responsible for murders, while most had had some member of their family killed over crime or tribal vendettas. Most of them run extortion and blackmail rackets. All the contractors he allots CPA funds to for ‘development’ projects, skim some or most of the money into their personal accounts, with sometimes hilarious results.

‘There were 54 political parties, 20 substantial tribes, and a dozen leading political figures in the province’ (p.169). Broadly speaking there are:

  • tribal sheiks: there are two massive tribes in the province but innumerable sub-tribes and smaller tribes all jostling for power, slow to forgive ancient feuds (‘Most urban Iraqis perceived the sheikhs as illiterate, embarrassing, criminal, powerless anachronisms,’ p.231)
  • some of these sheikhs had forebears who had proudly fought against the British occupier and coloniser in the 1920s and so, even if they’d wanted to be co-operative, family tradition and pride insisted that they be seen to be as unco-operative and obstructive as possible
  • there are the various candidates and parties which are all fronts for the self-styled Prince of the Marshes, a charming, educated and thoroughly untrustworthy figure, who leads a gang of semi-literate criminals who, immediately after Saddam’s fall, comprehensively looted Amara
  • clerics, all Shia, but with a surprising number of fierce rivals; incongruously to British readers, many of these religious leaders have their own militias which regularly kidnap or assassinate opponents
  • Iran-backed parties: during Saddam’s long tyranny (1968 to 2003) tens of thousands of political and religious leaders fled abroad; only a handful of them were ‘secular’ (or what passes for secular in a Muslim country); most of them were various flavours of Shia and fled east to Shia Iran; here they were kept on the Iranian government payroll awaiting the day when Saddam (a Sunni) was overthrown; so Stewart had not only to deal with Shia clerics who remained in the country, but with a whole cohort who had returned from Iran and were all, to some extent or other, in hock to Iran and carrying out pro-Iran policies; thus, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was funded by Iran and represented Iran’s interests (p.65), lobbying for wilayat-e-faqih, meaning government of the jurists i.e. a Shia theocracy identical to Iran’s
  • then there were the Sadrists, followers of Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who shouted the same kind of anti-Coalition slogans from their pulpits as the returners-from-exile but with one key difference: Muqtada had never gone into exile and was a fierce Iraqi nationalist i.e. opposed the Iran-backed parties as violently as they opposed the Coalition; his militia calls itself ‘the Army of the Redeeming Imam’ (p.86); Muqtada ‘created his own armed militia, assassinated clerical rivals, declared an alternative government and called for the immediate departure of the infidel Coalition’, p.253; Stewart makes the point that all the Shia groups seem to be represented by younger and younger men who reject the moderation of their elders; in other words, political Islam was becoming more unstable (p.230)
  • there weren’t many Sunnis in Maysan (the further south in Iraq you go, the more Shia it becomes) but by and large the Sunni were more moderate and better educated than the Shia, who they regarded as uneducated, backward heretics (p.46)
  • last and least, quavering in the shadow of all these fierce and violent factions, were the handful of genuinely secular, middle class, liberal democratically minded Iraqis and the handful of ‘feminists’; none of these stood a hope in hell of being elected to anything but Stewart and his boss, Molly Phee, appointed some to their provincial council because it’s what the CPA in Baghdad, and all the Western politicians bankrolling the whole thing, had told their populations we were doing in Iraq – building a modern democratic state which respects the human rights of all blah blah blah

The point is that nobody in Iraq trusts anybody else; they are all prepared to believe the absolute worst of all the other tribes, clans, groups, militias, police forces and so on; and, knowing no other way of calmly settling disputes, and also conceiving of power as a zero sum game where you are either in total control or nothing, they routinely try to kidnap or assassinate each other.

A society where nobody believes in anybody else’s good intentions, yes, it probably does require a strong, authoritarian ruler to quash all these rival sources of authority and, above all, of violence. Only a really strong, violent man with a strong, violent security apparatus can quell all the other violent rivalrous groups into submission. Stewart starts off believing this is anti-Arab propaganda, but runs into trouble when Arab after Arab tells him it is true.

‘We Iraqis, we admire strong men. We have tough heads. You must be strong.’ (His first Iraqi interpreter, page 32)

How many Iraqis are you going to ignore when they tell you point blank that their society just won’t function unless it is governed with a fist of steel? It may be racist for us to make such sweeping statements, but isn’t it just as racist to ignore an Arab’s description of their own society because we supposedly know better than they do?

Thus various tribal and religious and political leaders tell him again and again that only an extremely strong, dictatorial authority can enforce security in Iraq (pages 59, 81, 82). When he and Molly finally agree settle on the members of the provisional council they’ve nominated, Stewart gives a characteristically droll summary of them:

I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modelled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others old oil on the black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies which made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from the same tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. (p.268)

And at their very first meeting the Sadrist member announced that the council was illegal, poisoned by the presence of the Coalition and forbade anyone from taking their oaths. Lolz, as my kids would say.

Or when, after the first guy they appointed as chief of police is assassinated, after much heart-searching Stewart and Molly appoint the Prince of the Marshes’ brother, Riyadh Mahood Hatab on the basis that he is a competent administrator with 20 years experience in the civil service, the respect of the ministry directors, the power of his brother’s militia behind him and contacts in Baghdad. Yes, he’ll do. And then the comic horror with which Molly and Rory listen as the newly installed chief of police outlines his programme: he wants to take full control of the police, set up a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had insulted him and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council (p.275).

This is how everyone they try to negotiate thinks about power; it is a zero sum game and, if they are given a position of power, they must immediately move to assume complete control as quickly as possible in order to forestall the inevitable attempts and assassinations and coups which all their rivals will mount against them. Given half a chance, everyone turns into Saddam. No-one turns into the kind of mild liberal democrat the CPA in Baghdad, and their masters in Washington and London, fantasised about.

Violent rhetoric

In the build-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein promised the Mother of all Battles but as soon as the invasion started most of his soldiers ran away (some didn’t; some stayed at their posts and fought very hard until obliterated by bombs from the air). I have read serious, sympathetic, Arab writers trying to explain that flowery and impassioned rhetoric is part of their culture. Alternatively, maybe they genuinely are as bloodthirsty and cut-throat as the characters in Stewart’s book suggest.

Stewart visits one of the many schools he’s helped refurbish with CPA money only to bump into the Prince of the Marshes who is ranting about the shoddy quality of the plasterwork, leading up to the blood-curdling threat:

‘Now I need to know the name of the contractor who did this work – tell me his name and I will rip out his tongue.’ (p.98)

Is this bombastic showing off, especially as he said it for the benefit of the school’s headmistress who was standing nearby? Even so, it’s hard to fit this kind of language into anything that might be said in a civilised society. Or was it meant literally? After all, there was always a low level current of mafia-style violence across the province and that was before the insurgency began, which itself degenerated into sectarian civil war, when thousands of people were kidnapped, had their eyes gouged out, their kneecaps drilled through and otherwise hurt in the most cruel and sadistic ways imaginable.

If it was rhetoric, it paved the way for real life atrocities. But more likely, the language just matched the actions.

Tribal fights were still very common – it was not rare for two or three men to be killed in a week in tribal disagreements. (p.143)

Stewart helps a sheikh of the Suwaad tribe who graciously invites him for lunch. Next day the sheikh’s house is firebombed. At an art exhibition he is introduced to Dr Kifiyah, a confident woman who is working for an aid organisation educating women (p.175). He supervises the election of a mayor for the town of Ali Al Sharj. Three days later, the mayor is ambushed and killed (p.226).

The central event of the first section, set in Maysan, is the assassination of the chief of police who Stewart and the CPA had put all their hopes on, which unleashes a kidnapping, and various forms of sectarian violence. The point is that everyone has so many enemies that they’re not at all sure who carried out the assassination.

Under siege

The first 300 pages chronicle Stewart’s time in Maysan. Around page 300 he leaves that post and is driven across the border into Dhi Qar province and on to the Coalition’s base in the provincial capital, Nasiriyah. He discovers it is a far bigger, more populous place than Maysan. He discovers that the team here held elections to appoint a provincial council and they were judged a success, shedding light on his decision to appoint a council, which led to all the problems which made up most of the text about Maysan.

The next most important thing he discovers is the military presence here is Italian and, living down to their hard-won reputation, they are useless. Never on time, never serious or committed, they rarely lose an opportunity to run away from a fight. To be fair this was because, a few months earlier, in November 2003, a huge truck bomb had detonated at the Italian headquarters in Nassiriya, killing 17 Italians. At which point Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his 2,300-strong contingent not to take any risks. Any more casualties and negative public opinion would force him to withdraw from the Coalition. There were strong political and operational reasons for the Italians’ tardiness and unreliability.

All of which is important because Stewart is in Nassiriya when the dual insurgencies, of Sunnis in Fallujah and Sadrist Shia militias across the entire south, kick off in April, and the CPA compound in Nassiriya comes under sustained attack. It’s a really serious situation, with the compound besieged, running low on water, two guards at the gate are seriously injured, scores of mortars and RPGs attack the compound continuously, the entire civilian staff have to take cover.

Eventually he manages to get them extracted from the besieged base in a convoy of armoured patrol vehicles, only for them to trundle straight into an ambush and be bombarded with machine guns and RPGs and, having remained behind in the base, he has an agonising half an hour wondering if he’s just sent his entire team to a violent death, before getting a phone call to confirm that they had all arrived safe at the allied base at the airport outside of town.

Even here there’s Waughesque comedy, as the incompetent driver of the first APV unexpectedly throws it into reverse, nearly running over Stewart and a colleague who were remaining behind. When his infuriated commander leans down to cuff the harassed driver round the ear, he then accelerates into a pile of barbed wire which promptly tangle up the wheels and prevent it going any further, till the wire is slowly painfully untangled.

There’s page after page detailing the amazing ineffectiveness and cowardliness of the Italians, and it’s not just Stewart who is gobsmacked. A team of British and American security contractors from Control Risk Group (CRG) remain in the base with him and cannot believe how useless the Italians are (pages 390 to 393). Eventually after 3 days of siege a Coalition Spectre plane uses its night sights to locate the mortar bombers and pick them off one by one, killing or wounding the entire insurgent group. Next day the city is back to its normal bustling self. Stewart is full of praise for the consultants (aka mercenaries) who manned the machine gun posts and prevented the Sadrists storming over the walls and massacring Stewart and the garrison.

But Baghdad orders the compound to be evacuated. Obviously, the minute they’ve left the looters move in and strip the place of any moveable values, right down to the wiring, before gutting and burning it.

Once safely ensconced in the Italians’ main base at Tallil Stewart comes to like them. Wherever they go, they build pizza ovens and their food is extraordinary. In fact, once you stop thinking about the Italian Army as soldiers, but actually as great chefs in fancy uniforms, what’s not to love about them?

The CPA

In case I’m accused of being anti-Arab, Stewart also has a chapter devoted to a visit to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Baghdad which overflows with details of the inane, out of touch, ludicrous, over-ambitions of inexperienced Yanks who worked all the hours that God sent and yet somehow presided over a complete shambles (pages 105 to 121). I particularly liked the deliberately comic passage where he describes going to one of the evening discos in the Green Zone and being introduced to two men who were both under the impression they had been appointed acting Interior Minister. A little later he meets two men who both think they are the Media Commissioner (p.112). Chaos.

More seriously, Stewart describes talking at different times to two soldiers, one American, one British, who both try to get him to admit that the whole war and occupation was to do with taking Iraqi oil. If even the troops on our own side believe this myth, Stewart reflects, what hope of stopping most of the Iraqi population from believing it, too (p.108). After all, Iraq is sitting on the second biggest oil reserves in the world and yet throughout the Coalition’s rule, ordinary Iraqis had to form long lines at petrol stations. Why else could that be except that the West was stealing their oil? The real explanation, that Saddam’s extraction and refining industry was on its last legs and insurgents kept blowing up pipelines and facilities, was believed by no-one (p.152).

Talk of blowing up stuff raises the point that the Iraqis devoted an extraordinary amount of energy not just to killing each other, but to destroying the infrastructure of their own country (pages 205 to 206). The Great Looting in the days after the allied victory wasn’t an anomaly but a revelation of the true character of the Iraqis, a nation of looters and thieves.

Long after those days of chaos the looting continues. Everything not tied down is stolen. Factories are looted, warehouses are looted. In January, rioters storm the governor’s compound and loot every single piece of moveable furniture or equipment, even the filing cabinets (pages 289 to 297).

Several times Stewart mentions the practice of Iraqi criminal gangs who blow up power pylons so they can strip the copper from the coil, melt it down and sell it on the black market. The criminal gangs get tens of thousands of dollars from the venture but it costs the Americans tens of millions to rebuild series of pylons and rewire them. Obviously, most of the rest of the population suffers even worse power shortages than they already did.

As soon as he, the Italian garrison and the mercenaries withdraw from the CPA compound in Nasiriyah, it is comprehensively looted and trashed.

In a sentimental mode he describes the huge mudhif, a building built entirely out of marsh reeds using ancient skills of local builders, which had been constructed in such a way as to let light through a latticework of openings. It is ornate and beautiful as a cathedral. The Sadrists burn it to the ground.

When you have a people so absolutely determined to loot and vandalise their own country, what can you do? Leave them to get on with it.

On 28 June the CPA formally handed over authority to local council and governors in Iraq’s 34 provinces. The ones Stewart was involved in immediately plunge into chaos and violence. The Prince of the Marshes promptly allies with the Sadrists against the Iranian-backed parties. He shoots the chief of police of Majar dead. The remaining Coalition compounds such as the one where Stewart spent his first 6 months, in Amara, are now under continual, ferocious attack.

Church and state

It’s my view that it took hundreds of years for us in Britain to break the power of religion over the state. Three hundred years ago it took a civil war and a revolution to loosen the grip of the church over the nation’s political life. During the long Victorian century and well into the twentieth, the Christian denominations still exercised a very negative, anti-progressive influence, especially on what is loosely called the nation’s morals (anti-sex, anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti-gay). It was a long, hard battle to overthrow religious influence on our national life.

Here, in this book, are countless examples of Muslim clerics insisting that their religion, their religious values, their ancient forms of social organisation and their dark age forms of political process eclipse, trump and obviate the need for ‘modern, ‘western’ ideas like democracy or human rights or women’s rights. A cleric named Seyyed Faqr puts it with particular clarity:

‘What matters is not the law. What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.’ (p.222)

But what happens if two clerics claim to represent God, a Sadrist and an Iranian? And if you throw in a Sunni cleric? And one from this tribe and one from that tribe? And they all claim a direct line from God so that they can’t negotiate or compromise? Then you have a recipe for endless civil war, as in Libya, Sudan, the Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Only when all sides agree to abide by a law which is above all of them, impersonal and objective, and agree to thrash out their disagreements via legal channels, can you have a civil society. This is the lesson the Coalition Provisional Authority should have been trying to teach the fractious Iraqis. A legal system to which everyone submits, an independent judiciary, and an impartial police force, these are the bedrock of a civilised states, not the flashy trappings of elections. Elections and the trappings of democracy are a subset of law and order, which trumps every other concern. (cf p.315)

Humorous stories

Anyway, so far this summary has failed to mention the single most important thing, not about the book’s subject and themes, but about it’s style and manner. For this is an extremely readable and enjoyable book. I thought I’d had enough of books about Iraq and took it down off my shelf one evening only because I was bored watching TV. To my surprise, the next time I looked up, I was on page 50. I was hooked.

Occupational Hazards is beautifully written and by far the easiest to read of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of that is down to Stewart’s appealingly British irony and deadpan humour which you may or may not attribute to classic upper-class sang-froid and irony. He expects things to go wrong and is never upset when they do. Many of the accounts of his meetings, with tribal leaders or top army officers, or foreign civilians in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end with a bathetic, ironic, darkly humorous punchline.

It helps that so many of the facts are themselves blackly, bleakly comical, in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic accounts of Africa, walking a fine line between horror and hilarity. The secret is in the very dry, clipped phrasing. Here he is reflecting on the rather ludicrous title the Prince of the Marshes had awarded himself:

In truth, of course, Iraq didn’t have princes any more, and it hardly had marshes. The last princes were murdered on the kitchen steps of the palace in 1958 and disembowelled and mutilated in the streets, where the mob used the Regent’s intestines as necklaces. (p.18)

This is the Waugh tone, the casual, ironic, drawling half-humorous description of shocking criminality or scandalous behaviour:

I had spent my first two weeks almost entirely in my office or in camp and I was eager to visit rural towns, which I had heard were bastions of corruption, inefficiency and political tension. (p.90)

On one of these rural rides Stewart stops at an isolated compound to chat with a genuine farmer, not some politico with an axe to grind:

As I left I asked him what I should be doing. ‘Don’t trust the police chief, he replied. ‘He is a gangster. Don’t trust anyone who lives south of Al Amara. They are thieves and bandits.’
‘But you live south of Al Amara,’ I protested.
‘Don’t trust me either,’ he said. He presented me with a live guinea fowl in parting as a gift. (p.96)

The guinea fowl clinches the comedy of the anecdote. Whether this encounter ever happened or took place as Stewart recounts it, who cares? It’s not as if it made the slightest difference to what actually happened in Iraq. It’s these throwaway details at the end of each anecdote or cadence which give it the true Waugh feel.

The Bazun sheikhdom was in dispute between the two main families, one of which had stolen all the heavy digging equipment from the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. (p.234)

And:

We drove past the main government building, which Nate had seen demolished by rockets: only a fragile facade of coloured tiles remained, and a sculpture commemorating the Iraqis’ 1920 uprising against the British. It depicted a British officer being shot in the back of the head. (p.303)

Of course horrible things happen. For example, quite a few of the Western civilians, administrators and soldiers Stewart meets on his first arrival end up dead, shot or blown up in suicide attacks. And then, in April, the four US contractors are lynched and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah (p.342) which so infuriates President George W. Bush that he orders the US Army to storm the city to find their murderers and ‘bring them  to justice’ ho ho ho. In the same week Muqtada al-Sadr starts his Shia rebellion across the whole south of the country. Hundreds and then thousands died as a result of these parallel insurgencies, one by Sunnis (Fallujah), one by Shias (Muqtada’s).

Black comedy

An extended comic sequence is provided by the story of the kidnapping of a British hostage, Gary Teeley. The first part is all panic and concern among CPA officials and the military to establish who kidnapped him and why and how to get him back. In the event, some of the many tribal leaders Stewart has been having lengthy discussions with simply turn up at the gates of the compound and hand over the filthy and disorientated Brit, directly to Stewart, in person, expecting thanks.

Over the next few days various other tribal and religious factions, including the Sadrists, contact Stewart to claim the credit for releasing Teeley, even though it seems fairly certain that some of them were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place.

But that’s just the start. Stewart debriefs the shattered and disorientated hostage, who had been kept blindfolded for a week, then packs him into an ambulance to be taken to the nearby Italian hospital. Walking back through the compound he is accosted by an irate British woman who tells him she is a hostage negotiator who has been on high alert for 3 days, why didn’t he contact her? Because he didn’t know she existed. Why did he hand over Teeley to the Italians? Because he clearly needed to go to a hospital to be checked over. Yes, says the woman, but he should have been sent to the British hospital at Basra.

By now Stewart realises there is a propaganda battle going on between the British and Italian military, both wanting to be seen to be the hostage’s liberators, not least for the benefit of the Americans and the CPA in Baghdad. Thus the Italian commander sends an email round claiming the release was the result of the Italians working with their favourite tribal leader, Sheikh Talib of the Beni Rikaab tribe.

But it’s not finished yet. The released Teeley turns out to be selling his story to the papers, and – in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of Fleet Street, Scoop – three different British newspapers print three completely conflicting accounts of his ordeal. The Daily Telegraph leads with a big photo of the Italian general shaking hands with Teeley as if the Italians negotiated his release. Then The Sun reported that Teeley had been released by Italian forces who used a helicopter to track a suspicious car to an apartment which they then stormed, discovering the captive bound by the legs. Then The Mail on Sunday led with the scoop that the Italian forces who had been credited with finding and releasing Teeley were in fact elite SAS officers wearing Italian military outfits!

Three different packs of lies, each more outrageously untrue than its predecessor.

The moral(s) of the story

1. Stewart’s book shows in more granular detail than any other account the sheer folly of expecting a backward, illiterate, tribal, sectarian society full of cut-throat, corrupt, criminal and hyper-violent tribal, religious and political leaders to become anything like a democratic society in the sense we understand it.

In Stewart’s account any Iraqi leader who gains even a modicum of power immediately moves to reinforce their position, arm their followers, and harass, arrest or assassinate any possible rivals. Saddam politics. This is what even the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malaki, did as soon as the Americans finally withdrew, in 2011. I love the fact that the very day after the last US forces withdrew, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for his own vice president, the Sunni Tariq al-Hashemi, who was forced to flee to Turkey and, convicted of terrorism, was swiftly sentenced to death in his absence. Saddam politics.

2. If there’s one message from all this, as from all the other books I’ve read about the British effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not to believe a word about the Britain’s foreign exploits, either a) given in press releases by the military but b) even more by the British newspapers, who will fall over themselves to invent any old lies to promote their respective agendas (The Sun: ‘Our Brave Boys Save The Day’; The Telegraph: ‘Secret SAS Mission’; The Guardian: ‘Shame of British Troops’ etc).

Lasting thought

As I closed the book and reflected on it for a few days, one thought rose above all the others, which is that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan. OK, not saying things the Coalition or the West or Iraqi apologists or themselves would be very pleased to read. But all the other books I’ve read focus on Americans and Brits and Westerners and the occupiers – Stewart’s book, alone, goes way out of its way to focus on the actual Iraqis he met and talked to and tried and failed to manage.

In fact, this ends up being the conclusion of the epilogue he added to the paperback edition of the book published in 2007. By that point the insurgency had become general and had evolved in many places into a sectarian civil war. Stewart criticises politicians, academics and journalists for dealing in fine words, abstract concepts and abstract statistics.

No one is offering a granular and patient account of the insurgency in all its evolving and surprising multiplicity. We prefer the universal and the theoretical: the historical analogy and the statistics. But politics is local, the catastrophe of Iraq is discovered best through individual interactions.

And it’s precisely a multitude of such ‘individual interactions’, bleakly disillusioning though most of them are, that this impressive, illuminating and drily humorous book offers, in abundance.

Credit

Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart was published by Picador in 2006. References are to the revised 2007 Picador paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

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Posted by Simon on October 18, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/occupational-hazards-rory-stewart/

New world disorder reviews

These are my reviews of books or exhibitions about wars since 1990 (with the exception of ‘Afgantsy’ which is about the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989, but which provides useful background to the later, Western invasion, of 2001).

As to the phrase ‘new world disorder’, according to this review by Joseph Larson:

The political scientist Ken Jowitt first used the term ‘new world disorder’ in the title of a 1992 essay. His purpose was to describe the ideological vacuum created by the Soviet collapse; he argued that new ideologies would rise up and challenge the hegemony of liberal democratic capitalism. More than two decades later, Jowitt’s phrase is pervasive in international relations jargon.

The outstanding books here include Michael Ignatieff’s ‘Blood and Belonging’ – which explains the core concepts of ethnic versus civic nationalism with beautiful clarity – in fact the entire series of Ignatieff’s books presents a panoramic overview of the new disordered world, asking what we should make of the terrible wars of the 1990s (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia), how we in the West should respond to humanitarian crises in the Third World, whether we should intervene and, if so, how much and for how long.

The other star book is Thomas E Ricks’s ‘Fiasco’, which describes in mind-boggling detail the ignorance, arrogance and incompetence which undermined every aspect of the US invasion of Iraq, not least the chronic undermanning which led to the great looting of Baghdad, the shameful catastrophe which Edward Said laments in his 2003 Preface to ‘Orientalism‘.

Jack Fairweather’s book does the same sort of thing for the Brits, detailing the incompetence and bad decisions made by British politicians and British Army top brass in the Iraq and Afghan wars, while Frank Ledwidge’s ‘Investment in Blood’ details the costs of Britain’s rash involvement in those two wars, the financial and reputational costs to the UK (namely that the Americans will never trust the British army again) and the terrible physical and psychological legacy of the soldiers who were killed or seriously injured.

The best Africa book is David van Reybrouck’s one about the Congo, which includes a good account of the Rwanda genocide and how that, in turn, triggered the catastrophic Great War of Africa.

What I’m conscious is missing from this list, apart from one chapter in Antony Loyd’s first book, is anything about Russia’s wars against Chechnya (1994 and 1999-2009) and Georgia (2008) which I’d like to know more about, especially in the light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Paul Danahar gives an OK summary of the Arab world in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring but I’d like to read more up-to-date accounts of the civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria, which I have so far been unable to find.

There’s nothing about Latin America or south or east Asia (Ceylon, Timor), omissions which I hope to rectify soon.

Books

Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff’s books cover modern conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, and develop theories not only about their origins but their impact on the West and how much we could or should intervene.

Antony Loyd

Loyd is an acclaimed British foreign correspondent whose books combine blistering descriptions of war zones with a strong autobiographical element.

Africa

Iraq and Afghanistan

Women in war

Exhibitions

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Posted by Simon on September 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/29/new-world-disorder-reviews/

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)

‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)

Disappointment

Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.

The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.

Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.

And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.

The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the  thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.

With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.

The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.

But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.

And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.

The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.

He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.

Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.

Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.

In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:

“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)

Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.

He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.

A literary account, alas

Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).

So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.

Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.

On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).

Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life  is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.

His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.

And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:

I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)

Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…

I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.

So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.

Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.

The facts

The book consists of three elements:

  1. Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
  2. interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
  3. actual historical facts

When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).

In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.

Rwandan history

In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.

Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.

Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.

Hutus and Tutsis

For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.

The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)

Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.

Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.

When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.

The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.

The Hutu revolution

Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.

1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)

Independence 1962

Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)

More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.

The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.

To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.

Habyarimana’s coup 1973

In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.

Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).

In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda

But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.

Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.

With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.

Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.

You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.

In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.

But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to  think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.

The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994

At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.

The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.

Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).

Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.

The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.

Fragile peace 1993

By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.

It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).

When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.

Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.

On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).

Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).

The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi  presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.

Trigger for the genocide 1994

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister,  Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.

The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.

The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.

You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.

The genocide – 100 days in 1994

Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:

1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.

2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.

3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:

The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)

I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!

Number killed

At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.

What’s Somalia got to do with it?

Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.

This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.

A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.

French involvement and guilt

By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.

From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)

Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:

‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)

The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.

The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)

Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.

End of the genocide July 1994

By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.

The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)

Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)

Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)

Aftermath – flight of the Hutus

As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.

And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.

But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.

Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996

The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.

In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.

First Congo War 1996 to 1997

Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.

But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.

France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)

Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).

Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.

Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.

In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).

When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:

  1. protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
  2. to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
  3. to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure

The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.

But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.

Fall of Mobutu May 1997

It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).

As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.

The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003

Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.

The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.

The post-genocide period

The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).

He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.

At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.

Stupid remarks

Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.

Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)

Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)

They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.

Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.

He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.

We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)

(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.

If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.

He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:

I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)

I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.

There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.

The big takeaway

Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.

In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).

But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.

For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.

Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.

But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.

In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…

A correct understanding of human nature

The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.

But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.

We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.

For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)

The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.

Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.

Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.

It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.

The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?

Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.

Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)

It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.

The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.

It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)

Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).

On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?

The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”

But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.

In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the  exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.

It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).

Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.

Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.

For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.

Cecile Kayirebwa

We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.

Credit

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 11, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 11, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/10/11/we-wish-to-inform-you-that-tomorrow-we-will-be-killed-with-our-families-philip-gourevitch/