James Kurth: Iraq: Losing the American Way

This blog is in a series of posts from my readings of THE RIGHT WAR? THE CONSERVATIVE DEBATE ON IRAQ. Please contribute your comments. The following is a discussion of Chapter 3, a republished article by James Kurth, March 15, 2004, THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE.


In March 2004, Professor James Kurth of Swarthmore College, published an article in Pat Buchanan's recently emerging magazine, The American Conservative. The article, "Iraq: Losing the American Way," makes a strong argument that the U.S.-led war in Iraq is a sharp departure from the traditional American way of going to war.

First, there was a difference in traditional U.S. diplomacy. The Bush Administration made a sharp departure from the long-standing U.S. diplomatic practice of obtaining some form of international approval and legitimization for our wars and military interventions. While we had some allies, our most traditional allies and much of the world's other major powers were not with us.

The second break was with the way of war itself. We deployed U.S. forces unusually few in number and now stretched far too thin. It had been long-standing practice to use overwhelming mass and material to overwhelm the enemy. Thirdly, we perverted the traditional American way of democratization by promoting liberal democracy while imposing military occupation. Kurth argues that the diplomatic damage might be overcome, but the war has caused a more long-term injury to the U.S. military and the U.S. efforts to promote democracy abroad.

By end of the 20th century, historians and military strategists agreed that the classical American way of war was characterized by such advantages as: (1) overwhelming mass and materiel, (2), wide-ranging mobility (transportation and communication), (3) high-technology weapons systems, and (4) high public support for the war. The classic examples of this were the way we approached World War II and the Persian Gulf War.

The classical American way of war has no obvious answer if the military challenge comes from guerillas and insurgents. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the Weinberger/Powell doctrine emerged saying “no more Vietnams” and “when the United States goes to war, it should do so as a nation defending its vital national interests against another nation, and when the U.S. Army goes to war, it should do so as an army fighting another army.”

Kurth comes down hard on the Rumsfeld Transformation Project which “seeks to reduce the role of mass and to accentuate the role of mobility.” In other words, Rumsfeld's approach to reshaping the military was a sharp departure from the classcial American way of war.

The only task that the new Rumsfeld Army, with its lighter, more mobile configuration, can perform better than the old classical Army, with its heavy armor and artillery configuration, will be operations against an enemy that is even more light and mobile, such as guerillas and insurgents. “The Rumsfeld project seeks to transform the U.S. Army into an instrument which will fight for peripheral, imperial interests, and not just for vital national ones. As such, the new way of war can be seen as the neoconservative way of war," says Kurth.

The guerilla threat that needed to be dealt with by U.S. military forces did not exist before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “The U.S. occupation of Iraq has created, for the first time since the Vietnam War, the very problem that the Rumsfeld transformation project was supposed to solve.” The long established, lighter, more mobile ground force had always been the U.S. Marines, but this is the very force that Rumsfeld has turned the U.S. Army into, thus leaving the new army with the inability to perform the tasks the old army could perform so well.

In regards to "democratization," Kurth argues that because the 20th century was the American century, it was also the century of democratization. Iraq is just the latest chapter in a grand American narrative that has been underway for more than a hundred years.

Kurth points out that the U.S. efforts to use force to democratize foreign countries hasn’t worked. The only examples the Bush administration and the neoconservatives provided as examples, Germany and Japan, are the only exceptions, but those exceptions are exceptions for the following reasons: (1) They had prior liberal-democratic experiences, (2) they had greater foreign threats (other than the U.S.) and so allowed the U.S. to lead the way, and (3) they had an ethnically homogenous population.

Iraq, on the other hand, “was always an unstable equilibrium, a partition waiting to happen, artificially held together by the iron bonds of an authoritarian and brutal regime … One could have an Iraq, but without democracy. Alternatively, one could have democracy, but without an Iraq. But one could not have both.” I think the prediction Kurth was making in 2004 perhaps is being seen today in 2007. While Iraqis have voted in elections and set up a Parliament, the difficulty in the new Iraq is securing order amid sectarian violence.

Kurth says that if we want a closer geographic, sociological and contemporary circumstance of how Middle Eastern Iraq might react to democracy, we should look to the Near Eastern former Soviet Balkan states. “In virtually every country in the communist world where there was ethnic heterogeneity, democratization – which included free elections – was followed immediately by secession and partition.”

Based on historical circumstances, Kurth predicts that the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq will fail because of one or all of the following reasons: (1) the cultural values, social conditions, and historical experience for democracy do not exist there, (2) the Iraqi people will come to associate democracy with U.S. occupation and thus reject it, and (3) because there is no "Iraqi" people at all, but three peoples who will use democracy to break away from each other.

And then Kurth comes to an even more frightening conclusion of where this interference in Iraq may lead us: “The failure of democratization in Iraq will discredit similar U.S. efforts elsewhere. The damage will be the greatest in the Middle East and in the Muslim world more broadly, where Islamism will be left as the only valid ideology and Islamization as the only vital political and social project.”

Will the U.S. effort to take international threats more seriously in the post 9/11 world, such as we did with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, lead moderate Muslims to reject U.S. occupation and turn to radical Islam, which in turn will bring on more anti-Americanism? That is the question of the hour.