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Any historian with an ounce of common
sense is instinctively nervous when politicians turn to historical precedent
to justify contemporary policy.
This is not because history cannot provide us with important lessons
– although, of course, appealing to history these days all too often has
been little more than saying, “look at the Nazis.”
Nor is it because the politicians of today are necessarily poor
historians, but because the one thing history is absolutely not, is predictive. The appropriateness of a particular future
action based on the evaluation of multiple unknown variables is a job
for ethics, theology, strange clausal forms from Donald Rumsfeld (“I know
that you know that we don’t know what we could know”), maybe ideology,
if you’re being resolutely unfashionable, but certainly not history. History will not tell you that, just because
German reconstruction following World War Two worked, Iraqi reconstruction
will work too. History will
not tell you that failing to appease Hitler in the thirties means we can’t
appease the North Koreans today.
What it may be
able to do, though, is suggest that if Iraqi reconstruction does work,
its success may repeat key features from the era of German reconstruction. What I want to argue is that post-Civil War American Reconstruction
may indicate some of the ways in which Iraqi reconstruction might fail,
if it does go belly up. That
is, were things to screw up, these might be the ways in which the screw
up happens.
At first, the comparison
seems a facile one. Little
seems to be shared apart from the word “reconstruction.”
The American Reconstruction era is separated from the Iraqi one
by nearly a century and a half; the resources available to the American
government today would have been unimaginable then; Radical Republicans
didn’t enjoy the advantages of ‘full spectrum dominance’; Southern reconstruction
took place within a single nation, albeit at the time a fairly fragile
one, and was thus relatively unencumbered with the additional complexity
of the word ‘imperialism’; the complex rivalry and co-operation between
fragments of pseudo-socialist dictatorship and ultra-clerical activism
in Iraq today don’t match the tightly unified ruling elements of the nineteenth
century South, which to all intents comprised a single body or class.
But there are some
similarities, too: in both instances the US federal government forcefully
imposed an ethical reformation of an illiberal regime from without, for
a combination of both principled and unprincipled reasons; in both instances
the losing parties failed to be persuaded of the incorrectness of their
ideas and the essential components of former principles were retained
and incorporated into the new society; in both instances the first casualty
in the post-war era was the rule of law; in both instances the role of
organised, endemic violence was critical in determining the economic development
of the recovering region; in both instances the battle was with domestic
public opinion as much as the opinions of those being reconstructed.
So, if we accept the initial premise, that a spurious comparison
such as this cannot predict whether or not Iraqi reconstruction is doomed
to failure, perhaps it might suggest critical ways in which failure might
come about if things do go wrong.
So what are some
of these?
1.
Solutions imposed by the will of a determined executive or legislature
are notoriously open to modification. The unapologetic
stance of Southern white society in the South in the first couple of years
after the Civil War ended pushed Northern opinion from relative magnanimity
into an endorsement of black suffrage and expanded federal involvement
sixty years before the New Deal, and eighty years before the Civil Rights
movement. In many ways the scale and ferocity of
the desire to reform the South and open it up to the ways of Western market-driven
liberalism were profound and impressive. But the will to reform disappeared over
ten long years of frustration and distraction. Even if George W. Bush wins the 2004 campaign the period of
Iraqi reconstruction will be under at least one other President, possibly
more than one; whilst the indigenous opponents of the Bush Doctrine in
Iraq have no real choice but to stay and continue to fight.
Standing less than a year from the end of major military combat,
we have seen only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Annual commitments of $80-90 billion are unlikely to be forthcoming
from too many Congresses to come.
And there will always be a Rutherford B. Hayes waiting around the
corner should the public tire of its commitments and start thinking about
its problems at home.
2.
Those who appear to be one’s closest friends can often turn
out to be your worst enemies. Northern Republicans, who imposed the Reconstruction
settlement and defended black voting rights in the late eighteen sixties
and early seventies, left their allies swinging in the wind when the economy
turned and problems in the North took precedence.
They engineered a settlement that radicalised the Southern white
population behind a supremacist, segregationist, paramilitary agenda,
then left Southern blacks to reap the whirlwind.
Since the exigencies of politics tend to trump principle over time,
and since the principle of anti-racism was fairly thin on the ground anyway,
the effective reversal of African-American liberties cost most Northerners
little sleep. Invidious comparisons between the fearful
mobs of European immigrants invading Northern cities, of races, religions
and tongues unfamiliar to Anglo Protestants, with the supposedly lazy
and dishonest Southern Negro, only helped push the North into a more sympathetic
posture. Should the US government
and Bush neo-imperialism suffer the decisive defeat wished for by much
of the modern left, it is unlikely the alternative will be greater involvement
or more comprehensive commitment, either. The Democrats today, who appear to be so much more vocal about
Iraqis and true needs of “the people” than the Republicans, could easily
shift to the Kucinich/Sharpton wing of total withdrawal, disengagement
and hand-washing should the economy fail to rebound, or other domestic
crises emerge to divert their attention away from the Middle East. This is probably true even if “the world” was somehow involved
in the process of Iraqi occupation through some inconceivable generosity
proffered through the United Nations. This would threaten to leave an Iraq but half-reformed, and
all the more dangerous for it, since to reactionary attitudes would then
be added instability.
3.
Regimes cannot be so easily decapitated. You can send
Jeff Davis to prison, remove the right to vote from a whole swathe of
his supporters, but sometime sooner or later you have to deal with the
realities of political power in the regions, and you have to talk with
the local figures who determine who does what and when.
For Republican Reconstructionists the crucial choice to be made
was between accommodation with the old forces of control, and a major
reform of property ownership patterns and social behaviour – the latter
with attendant risks of long term instability, perhaps even guerrilla
warfare. Unsurprisingly, the quick solution of moderate reform and limited
changes in the basic power structure in order to guarantee the “rule of
law” and the control of labour won through. Old magnates simply out-waited the carpetbaggers. George Bush cannot seriously expect to
create a New Iraq as long as law and order remains his first priority,
because the people who hold the keys to controlling the public are the
same people they always were.
4.
Early signs of success may belie big problems to come. Shifting
from a non-capitalist to supposedly “free labour” economic system, with
large subsidies and investments from a determined federal apparatus brought
about surprising economic growth in the early years of Southern Reconstruction. Thousands of miles of railroads were built,
networks of local merchants and businessmen developed, banks were set
up, and crop exports grew. But
the rapidity of the growth, and the fact that it came not from a Northern
and international capital market with newfound faith in the South but
instead government subsidy, led to both widespread corruption and the
risk of excessive and ill-directed investment.
What quickly followed was a loss of faith in Reconstruction governments
as individual money-grabbers were exposed within the new political parties
and patronage systems, and a broader depression fuelled by a collapse
in the value of railroad stock and a precipitous decline in cotton prices. Should the Bush government push too hard
for results in the short term, imprudent economic decisions and both local
and international corruption may prove crucial in discrediting reconstruction
efforts and sapping the will to continue.
Should the Bush government’s oil focus lead to instability in prices
for this commodity, it may be that only OPEC holds the balance between
disaster and triumph for Iraq. The
result for the South was general impoverishment, a consolidation of power
in the hands of the old planter elites, and a transformation of traditional
yeomen and small landowners into property-less tenant farmers suffering
from crippling interest rates on excessive debts; we shall wait to see
where the new big money goes in the case of Iraq.
5.
Violence does work. Beginning as an expression of Southern white impotence
in the face of a triumphant Union army, a wave of terror characterised
the fifteen years following Appomattox.
This violence quickly shifted from being directed against the invading
army to the local allies of the occupying power – as the army isolated
itself for security reasons and the softer targets of local politics remained
in the open, unprotected. It
made the organisation of an effective political alternative to the old
rulers next to impossible, and by the late 1870s was seen less as a symptom
of Southern white weakness and more a demonstration of the impotence of
the federal government. The
US army may be able to guard itself against attacks directed against its
troops and the employees of KBR, but keeping violence away from political
organisation and elections will prove, in the next decade, to be a far
more demanding task.
6.
Freedom never tastes so good if it’s not taken. Indeed
there is a certain philosophical sense in which freedom cannot be unless
it is asserted by the individual or group in question, since without the
act of taking it remains only a preferential status determined by the
whim of another. Whilst thousands of African-Americans
participated in the Civil War - once they’d been allowed to by a racist
Northern military leadership - and had resisted the slaveholding classes
in all manner of other ways not only during the war but in the antebellum
decades before, the resolution was unequivocally one that was imposed
from without by the North. Efforts
by historians to give the African-American agency in the process of liberation
are well-intentioned, but often overstate the reality of the case. Of course, the consequences of segregation
and racism in the United States are still with us today, but a second
reformation in the position of blacks in America one hundred years after
the constitutional abolition of slavery, directed by African-Americans,
toward goals of freedom as defined by African-Americans, gave a far more
powerful sense of resolution than the awkward and ambiguous Reconstruction
era, where housing, vagrancy, literacy and employment laws quickly re-established
many of the de facto conditions
experienced by blacks before the war, and worsened others, particularly
in terms of social exclusion and segregation.
For exactly the same reason, Bush and the Neo-conservative movement
cannot expect a freedom imposed from without to match exactly a freedom
demanded from within, and they cannot expect anything other than a negative
reaction from determined nationalists to even well-intentioned heavy-handedness
from the US military. Neither
can they expect the people being reformed to agree about how a new freedom
should be constructed; such divisions may act in the US government’s favour,
or they may not.
If you want to
know what’s going to happen in Iraq over the next decade, don’t ask me. But if the pessimists amongst you are looking for disaster
in the Middle East, then these lessons might suggest from where failure
might come. In the end, the
efforts of Southern Reconstruction, and particularly the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, ensured that the region would never wholly return
to the dark days of explicit, legalised slavery and absolute power wielded
along arbitrary racial boundaries.
Over the long sweep of history the result for African-Americans
was a step closer to truly meaningful freedoms.
The New South was for that a wholly superior place to live than
the antebellum world, and few slaves, however materially difficult their
lives after the war, would have traded the New South for the Old.
But the transition to freedom brought its own punishments, and
we should not be surprised if times in Iraq similarly remain tough for
a long, long time to come.
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OTR Politics - February, 2004