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Reading Machiavelli in Iraq
From the Nov-Dec 2012 issue.By Kenneth M. Pollack*
24.10.2012.
Source: nationalinterest.org
At the end of The Prince, Machiavelli famously cries out for some great Italian lord to employ the methods he described to save Italy from its foreign foes and from itself by uniting the country and building a strong state that could quell internal divisions and resist external domination. To many readers, it seems utterly incongruous coming at the end of a long, dispassionate discourse on the callous truths of politics, war and diplomacy.
Looking at Iraq across the oceans, it is tempting to make a similar plea—to cry out for some powerful but well-meaning nation to rescue Iraq from itself and from its neighbors by championing the cause of Iraqi democracy against its myriad foes, foreign and domestic. But there is no point in doing so. The only nation with the strength to do so is the United States, and the United States has departed from Iraq, never to return. The next U.S. administration—whether it is the same or different—is not going to return thousands of troops to Iraq. Nor will any Iraqi government invite Washington to do so anytime soon.
Iraq is passing beyond America’s power to shape it. The United States largely gave up that power, squandering it under Bush 43 and surrendering it under Obama. Unfortunately, the continuing global addiction to oil means that Iraq’s future remains of great importance to the United States, and its resurgent failings raise concerns that in the future it will create as many problems for the United States as it has in the past.
Still, there are things Washington could do to coax Iraq toward a better path. American diplomats were critical to brokering the partial—but very hopeful—deal on oil exports struck between Baghdad and Erbil in September, indicating that there are still opportunities for the United States to have a positive impact in Iraq. We could rebuild our leverage with Baghdad by offering a wider range of military and civilian aid. Perhaps of greater value, we could continue to call Iraq’s political leaders on their actions, defining what “right” looks like and using our moral authority as the architects of Iraqi democracy to see its leaders conform to both the letter and the spirit of its system. But we must recognize that even that will be of limited value. As great a nation as the United States is, its power is limited—especially when there is no will to wield it.
Today’s Iraq owns its future. It looks uncertain at best, and we may not be able to escape the consequences should it fail. After Machiavelli finished The Prince, Italy endured four and a half centuries of further civil strife, foreign invasion, misrule, poverty and weakness before emerging as something vaguely like what he had envisioned in the Discourses. Would that Iraq does better.
MOST AMERICANS know Niccolò Machiavelli only from The Prince, a sixteenth-century “audition tape” he dashed off in lieu of a résumé to try to land a job. It’s a shame. Not only was Machiavelli the leading advocate of democracy of his day, but his ideas also had a profound influence on the framers of our own Constitution.
It’s even more of a shame because the corpus of Machiavelli’s remarkable work on democracy, politics and international relations is easily the best guide to understanding the dynamics at play in contemporary Iraq and its situation within the wider Middle East.
Iraq today is a place that Machiavelli would have understood well. It is a weak state, riven by factions, with an embryonic democratic system increasingly undermined from within and without. It is encircled by a combination of equally weak and fragmented Arab states as well as powerful non-Arab neighbors seeking to dominate or even subjugate it. Iraq’s democratic form persists, but its weakness, combined with internal and external threats, seems more likely to drive it toward either renewed autocracy or renewed chaos. It cries out for a leader of great ability and great virtue to vanquish all of these monsters and restore it to the democratic path it had started down in 2008–2009.
That course seems less and less likely with each passing month, and it may take a true Machiavellian prince—one strong and cunning enough to secure the power of the state but foresighted enough to foster a democracy as the only recipe for true stability—to achieve it. Unfortunately, in all of human history, such figures have been rare. It is unclear whether Iraq possesses such a leader, but the reemergence of its old political culture as America’s role ebbs makes it ever less likely that such a remarkable figure could emerge to save Iraq from itself.
The Prince of Baghdad
As always, any discussion of Iraq’s problems after Saddam Hussein’s fall needs to start from an understanding of America’s endless mistakes there. The catastrophically mishandled American occupation of Iraq following the 2003 invasion created a political and security vacuum in the country that produced an ethnosectarian civil war by late 2005. Those mistakes brought forth a new Iraqi political leadership comprised largely of exiles and militia chiefs, many of whom were focused primarily on aggrandizing their own wealth and power.
Nevertheless, the “surge” of additional U.S. troops and the shift to a population-protection strategy (often referred to erroneously as a “counterinsurgency” strategy) temporarily suppressed the security problems and generated important political progress. Thus, between the spring of 2008 and the spring of 2010, a nascent democracy flourished in Iraq. The U.S. military had snuffed out the civil war and prevented all political groups from pursuing their agendas through force. Moreover, Washington insisted that Iraqi political leaders play by the rules of the new democratic system and did what it could to diminish graft, bribery, extortion and other means of political manipulation. As a result, for the first time in their history, average Iraqis wielded real power over their leaders—and used it to hand the militia-backed parties that ran rampant during the civil war resounding defeats in the 2009 provincial and 2010 national elections.
Unfortunately, at that moment the United States turned its back on Iraq, politically and militarily. By turning the reins of government back to Iraq’s leaders prematurely, the Americans allowed a Hobbesian state of nature to reemerge.
The shift occurred first in the realm of politics. The 2010 national elections should have been a huge step forward for Iraqi democracy since the majority of voters, Sunni and Shia, had endorsed the two parties seen as most secular and least tied to the militias that had waged the civil war. Unfortunately, the elections proved to be the exact opposite. Rather than insist that the party that had secured the most votes in the election (the secular but mostly Sunni Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi) get the first chance to form a government—as is the practice in most democracies—Washington (and the UN) took no position on the matter. This threw the Iraqi political and constitutional systems into paralysis.
Frustrated with this impasse, the United States simply embraced the party of the incumbent prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, which had received the second-most votes. Regardless of Maliki’s qualifications for the position, this sent a disastrous message to both the Iraqi people and the political leadership: the United States is more concerned with expediency than with enforcing the system’s rules; there will be no punishment for subverting the system or rewards for playing by the rules; power will be distributed not according to the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box but by political machinations carried on in traditional, cutthroat Iraqi fashion. In effect, the United States announced that it would not prevent the reemergence of Iraq’s bad, old political culture because it would not continue to enforce the new, democratic rules of the road. At that moment, even those parties that had benefited from Iraq’s budding democratization (including Iraqiya and Maliki’s State of Law coalition) knew that the rules had suddenly changed. The referee was gone, and Iraq’s leaders now were free to go back to the old rules, which had produced Iraq’s tragic twentieth-century history.
The following year, Washington made little effort to retain a meaningful residual military force in Iraq, and the Iraqis refused to extend the kind of legal guarantees that would have allowed even a token presence to remain. Consequently, in December 2011 the last American combat units departed Iraq.
They left behind a weak government without any civic culture or strong institutions, presiding over a deeply fragmented society with a history of intercommunal violence both long and recent. It was the kind of circumstance that Machiavelli would have understood well. It was the world of fifteenth-century Italy, with its small, weak and divided city-states, constantly at war with one another and themselves. It was the world of Machiavelli’s prince.
The Iraqi Art of (Political) War
What Machiavelli understood explicitly, what Iraq’s political leaders “got” intuitively and what American political leaders missed altogether was that in a state such as Iraq—weak, divided, tortured by internal rivalries and dominated by fear—the government is not a party to the conflict. Rather, it is the prize of the conflict. To a certain extent, it may be that by framing the problem of Iraq as one of “counterinsurgency,” the United States helped foster its own mistaken approach to Iraq. Was there an insurgency in Iraq? Yes, but it was not the country’s principal problem. That was the security vacuum that had unleashed an intercommunal civil war.
Defeating an insurgency and ending an intercommunal civil war actually overlap significantly at the tactical military level. However, at the strategic and political levels, they are very different and require very different approaches. Insurgencies break out as a result of the unpopularity of the government, and therefore the key to a counterinsurgency effort is to simultaneously suppress the guerrilla movement and rebuild the government’s popularity.
Civil wars, in contrast, are contests for power, including control of the government. They occur when the group on top loses its monopoly on violence, opening the door for other groups to try to seize control of the government. In an intercommunal civil war, radical leaders on all sides typically seek to gain control of the government to use its power against rival groups—to disenfranchise them, oppress them, expel them or even massacre them.
One of the last mistakes the United States made in Iraq was to misread its conflict for an insurgency rather than an intercommunal civil war. At first this mattered little because, at a tactical level, the early stages of an effective counterinsurgency campaign are identical to the early stages of an operation to suppress a civil war. However, over time, these courses of action diverge in important ways. In particular, a counterinsurgent must build up the strength and “legitimacy” of the government. Once the counterinsurgent has accomplished that, he can leave. In a civil war, the goal is to establish strong new governmental institutions that can withstand efforts by any group to subvert them in order to advance its own narrow agenda. This is why the military task of shutting down the fighting in a civil war is typically brief if done properly (recall NATO in Bosnia in 1995; the Australians in East Timor in 1999; and the United States in Iraq in 2007–2008) and can in some ways precede the major tasks of political reconstruction. But it is also why an external military presence is so important during the long years of political reconstruction that must follow, to prevent any group from reverting back to violence and reassure all parties that there will be neutral referees to enforce proper conduct while all parties learn to play by the new rules of the game.
In Iraq, in part because the United States mistook a civil war for an insurgency and in part because the Obama administration came to office determined to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, the United States pulled its troops out and withdrew assistance before Iraq’s governing institutions or political culture had been strengthened and democratized adequately to ensure that they could survive the inevitable political infighting that would follow a U.S. troop withdrawal. It is why Iraqi democracy today is hanging by a thread.
We may never know the whole story of what happened in Baghdad in December 2011 and January 2012. But the demonstrable facts are nevertheless disturbing on their own.
While Prime Minister Maliki was in Washington that December to see President Obama and discuss the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations after the American troop withdrawal, his government arrested several of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi’s bodyguards on suspicion that they were involved in terrorist activities. Hashimi is a senior Sunni political leader within Iraqiya, leading many to suspect that the charges were trumped up by Maliki’s camp against its principal political rival. Upon returning from his U.S. trip, Maliki was told by his aides that Hashimi’s bodyguards had not only confessed involvement in terror operations but also claimed that Hashimi himself was the ringleader and that Hashimi—possibly in league with other Sunni political leaders—was planning a coup to take over the government. (Of course, the opposition insists that Hashimi’s bodyguards were tortured into making these claims.)
The prime minister quickly ordered security personnel to lock down Baghdad’s center and confine the Sunni Iraqiya leaders to their homes. Tanks and soldiers were deployed outside the houses of Hashimi and other Sunni leaders. Taped confessions—genuine according to the government, coerced according to the opposition—by Hashimi’s bodyguards were aired on television before any trial or even charges were filed against them. Dozens of lower-level Iraqiya officials were arrested. Eventually, a warrant for Hashimi’s arrest was produced—although Hashimi had already fled to Iraqi Kurdistan. When Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq criticized these steps, pronouncing Maliki a dictator, the prime minister and cabinet deposed him from his position—although the Iraqi constitution states that only the parliament can do so. To a great many Iraqis, this series of actions seemed to signal Maliki’s determination to establish his own autocratic power.
Naturally, this terrified many Iraqis, including Shia groups ambivalent or antipathetic to Maliki—such as the Sadrist Trend—as well as the Kurds, particularly Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has always disliked Maliki. These groups banded together and attempted to oust the prime minister by a vote of no confidence in the parliament. For several months, the different groups jockeyed for position, working to secure enough votes. But Maliki proved the more skillful, and by summer the threat of a no-confidence vote had evaporated.
Maliki’s success was born of several factors. First, the prime minister quickly recognized that he had frightened a number of Iraqi political leaders who might have been more agnostic (even sympathetic) had he acted more carefully. So the government pulled in its horns. Many arrested Iraqiya members were released. Tanks and troops were removed. Maliki even reconciled with Saleh al-Mutlaq. Second, the prime minister managed to splinter members of the rival parties, particularly Iraqiya. When Iraqiya mounted a boycott of the cabinet (and threatened to do the same in the parliament), Maliki announced that cabinet posts would be redistributed to government allies. This forced the opposition to end its boycott lest it lose critical sources of patronage (and graft) by which all Iraqi politicians reward their constituencies. The government then reached out to various Sunni tribal sheikhs and other political leaders—as well as some Sadrist leaders whose loyalty seemed negotiable—to bring them into the prime minister’s camp through promises of government positions, jobs, largesse, protection and, reportedly, outright payoffs.
Finally, Maliki reached out to Iran. He is no puppet of Iran. In his own way, he is a staunch Iraqi nationalist and, like most Iraqi Shiites, appears to dislike the Iranians more than he likes them. It is noteworthy that Maliki’s most important act as prime minister—and a critical element of the surge’s success—was his Operation Charge of the Knights, which ousted the Iranian-backed Jaish al-Mahdi militia from Basra, Sadr City and other cities of southern Iraq in 2008. This broke Iran’s power in Iraq (at least for a time) and persuaded Iraq’s Sunnis to participate in the new government.
Nevertheless, as the United States has pulled back from Iraq, Iran has moved in to fill the gap. Tehran, not Washington, was the key to engineering Maliki’s reelection in 2010. Iran strong-armed the Sadrists into backing Maliki’s return as prime minister despite their hatred of him. Once Maliki had the Sadrists, it meant he effectively had a lock on Iraq’s Shia majority, which in turn convinced the Kurds to go along. Despite all of this critical assistance, Maliki has tried not to become too dependent on Iran, in part by maintaining some relationship with Washington as a counterweight to Tehran.
The Iranians are not fools. They have never forgotten that it was Maliki who humiliated them in 2008. Tehran reportedly tried to find an alternative to Maliki but decided that the likely candidates—such as former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari or the diabolical Ahmad Chalabi—were worse. Hence, they put intense pressure on both the Sadrists and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which shares a long border with Iran, persuading both of them to back Maliki. Without them, Iraqiya and the KDP simply did not have the votes, and the entire campaign collapsed. Maliki prevailed.
The prime minister’s moves are widely seen as an effort to consolidate power. There is nothing wrong with that, especially in the face of the political and security vacuum that threatened to emerge after the withdrawal of American troops. In fact, the Iraqi state’s survival required that the government consolidate power.
However, by acting to consolidate power the way that a dictator would—regardless of whatever his true intentions may have been—Maliki sent the worst possible signal to the rest of Iraq. Such actions create precedents and generate fears that are incomparably more pernicious than when opposition figures act illegally or immorally. Those fears have been heightened in Iraq by Baghdad’s trial of Vice President Hashimi in absentia, the court’s guilty verdict and its imposition of a death sentence in September. Such actions smack of vengeance and perpetuate the dread and mistrust that pushed Iraq into civil war in the first place.
If The Prince is the work of Machiavelli’s incisive mind, the work of his inspiring heart is his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. As he wrote at length in The Prince, Machiavelli was not under any illusions about how people would behave when the state was weak. He knew that most would be driven by fear to act badly in the absence of a powerful set of institutions to constrain their behavior and compel or enable them to act nobly. In the Discourses, he employed the Roman Republic as a practical model for the kind of democratic state that could give Italy a better society—one strong enough to keep Italy’s foreign foes in check and also ensure internal stability, justice and prosperity. It was a product of his fourteen years as an official and champion of the brief Florentine Republic that ousted the Medicis but was later deposed again by them. The central lesson of that experience and his reading of past successful states was that only a prince could build the ideal republic once state and society had collapsed into anarchy. But the republic—the state system—would ensure its long-term tranquility, safety and prosperity, not the prince. The system mattered, not the man.
So too in Iraq today. If Iraqi democracy is going to be saved, it will not only take a great individual but also a leader willing and able to restore the system. Likewise, the problems of Iraq are much less the problems of a specific personality (whether Nuri al-Maliki, Massoud Barzani, Ayad Allawi or someone else) and far more the problems of the structure and nature of current Iraqi politics. They are the problems created by the unfinished transformation that the United States left behind in 2011. The incentive structure that compelled most (and allowed a few) Iraqi political leaders to act like good democratic stewards in 2008–2010 was still an artificial one, imposed from the outside by the United States. By 2011, that incentive structure had not had time to take root and supplant the incentives of the bad, old system. When Washington removed that external incentive structure prematurely, Iraq’s political leaders went back to what they knew best and what they expected to prevail anyway.
Thus, many—even most—other Iraqi leaders probably would have acted as Maliki did had they been prime minister. And many of those same people would have acted as Ayad Allawi did had they found themselves in the opposition. It is not that these people are somehow uniquely bad or that the problems would not exist if the government or opposition were in the hands of someone else. Iraq’s problem is the incomplete transformation and the stumbling democracy that the United States left behind. As prime minister, Maliki is no worse than many of his rivals might have been—and arguably better than many. Although in some cases he has undermined Iraqi democracy, in others he has abided by democratic rules even when he was not compelled to do so. Moreover, he has taken other actions—most notably Operation Charge of the Knights—that undeniably established his commitment to Iraqi nationalism, even if the sectarian chauvinism that fueled the civil war often seems to be an ever-present motivation.
Still, Maliki’s ultimate victory in 2012 was important to Iraq in two unfortunate ways. First, the methods by which the prime minister triumphed reinforced a widespread sentiment that Iraq’s brief experiment with democracy and the rule of law was over and that politics were reverting to the old ways of violence, subterfuge, graft and betrayal. Iraq was falling back from the world of the Discourses to the world of The Prince. Moreover, while Maliki’s success represented a major victory over Iraq’s political center—in the literal and figurative sense—both the victory itself and the manner of its realization had alienated key elements on the periphery of Iraqi politics: the Sunni regions in the West and North, the Kurds, and the Shia of the deep South represented by the Sadrists.
In Baghdad, Maliki reigns supreme. In person, he is far more at ease and confident than he was in early 2012. He and his senior advisers appear to recognize that they have effectively crippled Iraqiya, their most powerful parliamentary adversary. And with their absolute control over the Iraqi military and judiciary, they have nothing to fear from Iraq’s other political parties.
But elsewhere in Iraq, the prime minister’s problems persist and in some areas are worsening. Many Sunnis saw Maliki’s victory over Iraqiya as the first step in the establishment of a Shia tyranny that would oppress them as the Sunnis had oppressed the Shia under Saddam. Maliki has made deep inroads with some Sunni leaders in places such as Mosul, where his efforts threaten the dominance of the Nujaifi brothers, key leaders of Iraqiya. However, many other Sunni tribal leaders are rearming with help from Saudi Arabia, which is encouraging them to resist Maliki and provide aid to their tribesmen across the border in Syria who are fighting against the Iranian-backed, Shia Assad regime. The result has been a notable increase in violence perpetrated by various Sunni terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa Naqshbandia. The rebirth of such groups is less the product of Saudi aid—or the diminution in Baghdad’s counterterror capabilities resulting from the departure of U.S. forces—than of the erosion in Sunni trust in government. In many areas, this has resulted in a resurgence of support for Sunni terrorist groups that had nearly disappeared several years ago. AQI itself was effectively dead in 2009, unable to mount more than token attacks. It is now carrying out simultaneous countrywide operations. Indeed, AQI has become strong enough to contest government control of parts of Diyala Province, something unimaginable even two years ago.
Potentially even more dangerous has been the reaction of the Kurds. Many Kurdish leaders, in particular Barzani and the KDP, are pessimistic about their ability to make their relationship with Baghdad work. They seem to believe that independence (or virtual independence) may be a viable option in the medium term. This perspective—the expanding threat from Baghdad coupled with a perceived growing opportunity for independence—is evident in all of their political calculations in a way not seen as recently as last year. On the threat side of the ledger, they believe that Maliki intends to crush Kurdistan as he crushed Iraqiya as soon as his military is fully armed by the United States. The Kurds are nervous that the Iraqi army is growing in strength and capability whereas the Peshmerga, Kurdistan’s de facto army, have lost considerable capability since they defeated the Iraqi military in 1970. This creates a sense among Kurds that time is working against them and they need to settle matters relatively soon. However, all of this is somewhat counterbalanced (or even contradicted) by the positive trends they see toward genuine prospects for independence.
Turkey looms large on this side of the ledger. The Kurds see Turkish energy needs as necessarily tying Ankara to Erbil. Kurdistan’s industrious minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, argues that Turkey soon will be able to rely on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for its energy needs. To that end, he has been forging a mix of pipeline deals with Turkey, as well as oil- and gas-production deals with major international oil companies. These deals have been moving ahead smartly, much to Baghdad’s fury, with Exxon, Chevron, Total and Gazprom. In addition, Erbil expects to have both oil and natural-gas pipelines linking Kurdistan and Turkey operational within a few years. The critical energy questions are complemented by a number of factors: the growing economic interdependence of southeastern Turkey with the KRG; Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s own deepening antipathy toward Maliki; the way Syria is driving Turkey and the KRG together (and pulling Turkey away from Iran and Iraq); and the shifting regional balance as a result of the Arab Spring. Consequently, many Kurds believe they will be able to count on Turkish support for a declaration of independence in the next two to three years, especially if the security situation in the rest of Iraq continues to deteriorate.
Finally, even the Sadrist movement is turning against Maliki, demonstrating the unhappiness of the Shia of the deep South with Maliki’s consolidation of power in the center. Although Iran’s pressure forced the Sadrists to abandon ambitions of unseating Maliki, they have done little to hide their hatred of him. Moktada al-Sadr has called Maliki a dictator and demanded his resignation. Across the South, there are reports of low-level violence between Sadrists and Maliki allies—bombings, assassinations, vandalism and kidnappings. Like the reemergence of Sunni terrorism, this is still at a low level relative to where Iraq was during its darkest days in 2006, but the trend reflects the increasing resistance of the periphery to Maliki’s center and the return of Iraq’s old tradition of violent politics.
The next big moves are likely to be Maliki’s. He will have to decide how to react to the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Sadrists—not to mention the Turks and the Saudis. A great statesman would recognize that now is the perfect moment to act magnanimously and make concessions to bring his rivals back into the governmental fold. Having disarmed them, Maliki could safely pursue such a course, and doing so would undermine the claims that he is attempting to make himself the new dictator of Iraq. Indeed, this is probably the only move that might allow the country to return to the slow path toward democracy by resurrecting the prospect of true power sharing among Iraq’s factions. Maliki’s willingness to strike a partial deal with the Kurds on oil exports in September represented a hopeful step. But it was only a baby step and may reflect nothing more than a realization that Baghdad had no other options—except force—to compel the Kurds, and so the government grudgingly gave in. Indeed, so far neither the prime minister nor his aides have shown much inclination to embrace such an approach wholeheartedly. They often seem to believe that any concessions would be seen as weakness and thus encourage greater efforts to overthrow them.
The great danger is that Maliki eventually will resort to violence to deal with his increasingly well-armed rivals. But this time a resort to force would likely look very different from his past moves. Subduing the Kurds, the Saudi-backed Sunni tribes or the deeply embedded Sadrist militias would require much larger military operations—which likely would result in clashes and could easily provoke one or more insurgencies against his government. This would be dangerous and potentially disastrous, however historically commonplace. This path, embraced by the three dictators who preceded Saddam Hussein, failed consistently. Learning the lessons of his predecessors, Saddam determined he had to rely on genocidal levels of violence to slaughter and terrorize his people, and he held on to power for over thirty years only because he did so.
The Florentine Histories of Iraq
Among the least well-known of Machiavelli’s major works are his Florentine Histories. More’s the pity, because the dynamics of the weak and chaotic Italian city-states mimic those of the Middle East today, and Machiavelli’s historical insights are a perfect guide to Iraq’s relations with its neighbors.
Like Machiavelli’s Italy, today’s Middle East consists mostly of weak, internally fragile states, all of them divided by factions. Moreover, in many cases those factions span national borders. Like Machiavelli’s Italian city-states, the Middle East’s polities are marked by internal competition—often bloody—among various groups. Sometimes the divisions are ethnic (Arab vs. Kurd, Arab vs. Berber, Arab vs. Black African).
Sometimes they are religious (Sunni vs. Shia, Muslim vs. Christian, Maronite vs. Druze). Sometimes they are geographic (Basrawi vs. Baghdadi, Baghdadi vs. Muslawi). Sometimes they are ideological (Baathist vs. Islamist, liberal vs. Salafist, nationalist vs. royalist). Thus, like the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence, Milan and Pisa, so too the Sunni and Shia of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria—or the Kurds of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey—see their interests communally even as they strive to dominate their own states as well.
For all of these groups, the government of their state is a weapon to be used against their rivals and a purse to reward their constituents. That means no faction accepts the domination of the government by a rival, all constantly scheme to take back the government, and every faction goes looking for support from similar factions in neighboring states and from larger states that border the region (such as Turkey and Iran) or more distant powers with interests in the region (such as the United States, Russia and China). Thus, factions in one state will line up with the same factions in other states, or they will strike alliances with unlike factions in their own state that will bring with them alliances—and enemies—in other states. Finally, as the Italian city-states learned to their dismay when they foolishly brought great powers such as France, Austria and the Turks into Italian politics, Middle Easterners who seek advantage by relying on external great powers often have found that their own interests are trampled by those of the great-power invitees.
Because of its own weakness and the efforts of various internal factions to secure the help of like-minded foreigners, Iraq’s relations with its neighbors have become horrifyingly convoluted. Its two main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, have forged a good working relationship with each other, although this may only last for as long as PUK leader Jalal Talabani lives. But the KDP is heavily backed by the Turks, whereas the PUK is dominated by Iran (and not in a benevolent way). Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are backed by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan and, to a certain extent, Turkey. Ankara has tried to serve as a bridge between the KDP and the Sunni Arabs; this, coupled with their common fear and hatred of Maliki, has brought them together more than usual. On the other side, Iran backs all of the Shia groups to a greater or lesser extent, with some important exceptions such as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has broken with Tehran and is trying to subsist as a purely Iraqi entity, with distressing results so far. The other major Shia factions all rely on Iran, even though the two most important—Maliki’s State of Law and the Sadrist Trend—hate both Iran and each other.
Much of Iraq’s internal politics is being driven by the interests of these external states.
Iran has made huge gains in filling much of the void left by the American withdrawal. This is important for Tehran because Iraq is a key neighbor, trading partner, former foe and potential rival Shia power. Moreover, Iraq is now important to Tehran as a conduit to smuggle out Iranian oil exports, a channel to provide support to its oldest ally, the Shia Alawites of Syria, and a potential replacement if the Alawites ultimately lose the civil war there. But Turkey and the Gulf states fear Iranian domination of Iraq just as much as the Iraqis do. In 2006, when it seemed as if the Iranian-backed Shia militias were winning the Iraqi civil war, the Saudis famously threatened to intervene militarily on behalf of the Sunni groups. Today, Ankara has assured the Kurds that if Maliki attempts to use force against them, Turkey will intervene to stop him. And, while Turkish officials duly intone their traditional preference for Iraq’s territorial unity, there is far less vehemence about this than in the past. In fact, some in Turkey are beginning to argue privately that there are worse things for Ankara than an independent Iraqi Kurdistan.
Not only are Iraq’s neighbors trying to pull the country in very different directions—and threatening to tear it apart in the process—but spillover from the Syrian civil war also is antagonizing and galvanizing its factions, prying at these same fissures. The Shia parties that dominate the government increasingly side with Assad’s Shia Alawite faction in Syria (in part because of Iranian pressure to do so). And in similar fashion, many Iraqi Sunnis sympathize with their coreligionists across the border. The fact that many Sunni Arab tribes span the border simply adds fuel to that fire: the Shammaris, Dulaimis, Ubaydis and other tribesmen of Iraq are glad to help their cousins across the border fight the Shia regime in Damascus. Likewise, the Kurds of Iraq feel kinship with the Kurds of Syria, and there is a struggle between Barzani’s KDP and the anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party, allied to the Alawite regime. This reinforces the KDP’s rivalry with Maliki.
With all of these machinations playing out across the country and the region, it should not be surprising that tensions are rising and violence is slowly increasing in Iraq.
Iraq Adrift
At the end of The Prince, Machiavelli famously cries out for some great Italian lord to employ the methods he described to save Italy from its foreign foes and from itself by uniting the country and building a strong state that could quell internal divisions and resist external domination. To many readers, it seems utterly incongruous coming at the end of a long, dispassionate discourse on the callous truths of politics, war and diplomacy.
Looking at Iraq across the oceans, it is tempting to make a similar plea—to cry out for some powerful but well-meaning nation to rescue Iraq from itself and from its neighbors by championing the cause of Iraqi democracy against its myriad foes, foreign and domestic. But there is no point in doing so. The only nation with the strength to do so is the United States, and the United States has departed from Iraq, never to return. The next U.S. administration—whether it is the same or different—is not going to return thousands of troops to Iraq. Nor will any Iraqi government invite Washington to do so anytime soon.
Iraq is passing beyond America’s power to shape it. The United States largely gave up that power, squandering it under Bush 43 and surrendering it under Obama. Unfortunately, the continuing global addiction to oil means that Iraq’s future remains of great importance to the United States, and its resurgent failings raise concerns that in the future it will create as many problems for the United States as it has in the past.
Still, there are things Washington could do to coax Iraq toward a better path. American diplomats were critical to brokering the partial—but very hopeful—deal on oil exports struck between Baghdad and Erbil in September, indicating that there are still opportunities for the United States to have a positive impact in Iraq. We could rebuild our leverage with Baghdad by offering a wider range of military and civilian aid. Perhaps of greater value, we could continue to call Iraq’s political leaders on their actions, defining what “right” looks like and using our moral authority as the architects of Iraqi democracy to see its leaders conform to both the letter and the spirit of its system. But we must recognize that even that will be of limited value. As great a nation as the United States is, its power is limited—especially when there is no will to wield it.
Today’s Iraq owns its future. It looks uncertain at best, and we may not be able to escape the consequences should it fail. After Machiavelli finished The Prince, Italy endured four and a half centuries of further civil strife, foreign invasion, misrule, poverty and weakness before emerging as something vaguely like what he had envisioned in the Discourses. Would that Iraq does better.
*Kenneth M. Pollack is a contributing editor to The National Interest and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. The title of this essay is, of course, an appreciation of Azar Nafisi’s remarkable work, Reading Lolita in Tehran.
From the Nov-
Source: nationalinterest.org
At the end of The Prince, Machiavelli famously cries out for some great Italian lord to employ the methods he described to save Italy from its foreign foes and from itself by uniting the country and building a strong state that could quell internal divisions and resist external domination. To many readers, it seems utterly incongruous coming at the end of a long, dispassionate discourse on the callous truths of politics, war and diplomacy.
Looking at Iraq across the oceans, it is tempting to make a similar plea—to cry out for some powerful but well-
Iraq is passing beyond America’s power to shape it. The United States largely gave up that power, squandering it under Bush 43 and surrendering it under Obama. Unfortunately, the continuing global addiction to oil means that Iraq’s future remains of great importance to the United States, and its resurgent failings raise concerns that in the future it will create as many problems for the United States as it has in the past.
Still, there are things Washington could do to coax Iraq toward a better path. American diplomats were critical to brokering the partial—but very hopeful—deal on oil exports struck between Baghdad and Erbil in September, indicating that there are still opportunities for the United States to have a positive impact in Iraq. We could rebuild our leverage with Baghdad by offering a wider range of military and civilian aid. Perhaps of greater value, we could continue to call Iraq’s political leaders on their actions, defining what “right” looks like and using our moral authority as the architects of Iraqi democracy to see its leaders conform to both the letter and the spirit of its system. But we must recognize that even that will be of limited value. As great a nation as the United States is, its power is limited—especially when there is no will to wield it.
Today’s Iraq owns its future. It looks uncertain at best, and we may not be able to escape the consequences should it fail. After Machiavelli finished The Prince, Italy endured four and a half centuries of further civil strife, foreign invasion, misrule, poverty and weakness before emerging as something vaguely like what he had envisioned in the Discourses. Would that Iraq does better.
MOST AMERICANS know Niccolò Machiavelli only from The Prince, a sixteenth-
Iraq today is a place that Machiavelli would have understood well. It is a weak state, riven by factions, with an embryonic democratic system increasingly undermined from within and without. It is encircled by a combination of equally weak and fragmented Arab states as well as powerful non-
That course seems less and less likely with each passing month, and it may take a true Machiavellian prince—one strong and cunning enough to secure the power of the state but foresighted enough to foster a democracy as the only recipe for true stability—to achieve it. Unfortunately, in all of human history, such figures have been rare. It is unclear whether Iraq possesses such a leader, but the reemergence of its old political culture as America’s role ebbs makes it ever less likely that such a remarkable figure could emerge to save Iraq from itself.
The Prince of Baghdad
As always, any discussion of Iraq’s problems after Saddam Hussein’s fall needs to start from an understanding of America’s endless mistakes there. The catastrophically mishandled American occupation of Iraq following the 2003 invasion created a political and security vacuum in the country that produced an ethnosectarian civil war by late 2005. Those mistakes brought forth a new Iraqi political leadership comprised largely of exiles and militia chiefs, many of whom were focused primarily on aggrandizing their own wealth and power.
Nevertheless, the “surge” of additional U.S. troops and the shift to a population-
The shift occurred first in the realm of politics. The 2010 national elections should have been a huge step forward for Iraqi democracy since the majority of voters, Sunni and Shia, had endorsed the two parties seen as most secular and least tied to the militias that had waged the civil war. Unfortunately, the elections proved to be the exact opposite. Rather than insist that the party that had secured the most votes in the election (the secular but mostly Sunni Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi) get the first chance to form a government—as is the practice in most democracies—Washington (and the UN) took no position on the matter. This threw the Iraqi political and constitutional systems into paralysis.
Frustrated with this impasse, the United States simply embraced the party of the incumbent prime minister, Nuri al-
The following year, Washington made little effort to retain a meaningful residual military force in Iraq, and the Iraqis refused to extend the kind of legal guarantees that would have allowed even a token presence to remain. Consequently, in December 2011 the last American combat units departed Iraq.
They left behind a weak government without any civic culture or strong institutions, presiding over a deeply fragmented society with a history of intercommunal violence both long and recent. It was the kind of circumstance that Machiavelli would have understood well. It was the world of fifteenth-
The Iraqi Art of (Political) War
What Machiavelli understood explicitly, what Iraq’s political leaders “got” intuitively and what American political leaders missed altogether was that in a state such as Iraq—weak, divided, tortured by internal rivalries and dominated by fear—the government is not a party to the conflict. Rather, it is the prize of the conflict. To a certain extent, it may be that by framing the problem of Iraq as one of “counterinsurgency,” the United States helped foster its own mistaken approach to Iraq. Was there an insurgency in Iraq? Yes, but it was not the country’s principal problem. That was the security vacuum that had unleashed an intercommunal civil war.
Defeating an insurgency and ending an intercommunal civil war actually overlap significantly at the tactical military level. However, at the strategic and political levels, they are very different and require very different approaches. Insurgencies break out as a result of the unpopularity of the government, and therefore the key to a counterinsurgency effort is to simultaneously suppress the guerrilla movement and rebuild the government’s popularity.
Civil wars, in contrast, are contests for power, including control of the government. They occur when the group on top loses its monopoly on violence, opening the door for other groups to try to seize control of the government. In an intercommunal civil war, radical leaders on all sides typically seek to gain control of the government to use its power against rival groups—to disenfranchise them, oppress them, expel them or even massacre them.
One of the last mistakes the United States made in Iraq was to misread its conflict for an insurgency rather than an intercommunal civil war. At first this mattered little because, at a tactical level, the early stages of an effective counterinsurgency campaign are identical to the early stages of an operation to suppress a civil war. However, over time, these courses of action diverge in important ways. In particular, a counterinsurgent must build up the strength and “legitimacy” of the government. Once the counterinsurgent has accomplished that, he can leave. In a civil war, the goal is to establish strong new governmental institutions that can withstand efforts by any group to subvert them in order to advance its own narrow agenda. This is why the military task of shutting down the fighting in a civil war is typically brief if done properly (recall NATO in Bosnia in 1995; the Australians in East Timor in 1999; and the United States in Iraq in 2007–2008) and can in some ways precede the major tasks of political reconstruction. But it is also why an external military presence is so important during the long years of political reconstruction that must follow, to prevent any group from reverting back to violence and reassure all parties that there will be neutral referees to enforce proper conduct while all parties learn to play by the new rules of the game.
In Iraq, in part because the United States mistook a civil war for an insurgency and in part because the Obama administration came to office determined to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, the United States pulled its troops out and withdrew assistance before Iraq’s governing institutions or political culture had been strengthened and democratized adequately to ensure that they could survive the inevitable political infighting that would follow a U.S. troop withdrawal. It is why Iraqi democracy today is hanging by a thread.
We may never know the whole story of what happened in Baghdad in December 2011 and January 2012. But the demonstrable facts are nevertheless disturbing on their own.
While Prime Minister Maliki was in Washington that December to see President Obama and discuss the future of U.S.-
The prime minister quickly ordered security personnel to lock down Baghdad’s center and confine the Sunni Iraqiya leaders to their homes. Tanks and soldiers were deployed outside the houses of Hashimi and other Sunni leaders. Taped confessions—genuine according to the government, coerced according to the opposition—by Hashimi’s bodyguards were aired on television before any trial or even charges were filed against them. Dozens of lower-
Naturally, this terrified many Iraqis, including Shia groups ambivalent or antipathetic to Maliki—such as the Sadrist Trend—as well as the Kurds, particularly Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has always disliked Maliki. These groups banded together and attempted to oust the prime minister by a vote of no confidence in the parliament. For several months, the different groups jockeyed for position, working to secure enough votes. But Maliki proved the more skillful, and by summer the threat of a no-
Maliki’s success was born of several factors. First, the prime minister quickly recognized that he had frightened a number of Iraqi political leaders who might have been more agnostic (even sympathetic) had he acted more carefully. So the government pulled in its horns. Many arrested Iraqiya members were released. Tanks and troops were removed. Maliki even reconciled with Saleh al-
Finally, Maliki reached out to Iran. He is no puppet of Iran. In his own way, he is a staunch Iraqi nationalist and, like most Iraqi Shiites, appears to dislike the Iranians more than he likes them. It is noteworthy that Maliki’s most important act as prime minister—and a critical element of the surge’s success—was his Operation Charge of the Knights, which ousted the Iranian-
Nevertheless, as the United States has pulled back from Iraq, Iran has moved in to fill the gap. Tehran, not Washington, was the key to engineering Maliki’s reelection in 2010. Iran strong-
The Iranians are not fools. They have never forgotten that it was Maliki who humiliated them in 2008. Tehran reportedly tried to find an alternative to Maliki but decided that the likely candidates—such as former prime minister Ibrahim al-
The prime minister’s moves are widely seen as an effort to consolidate power. There is nothing wrong with that, especially in the face of the political and security vacuum that threatened to emerge after the withdrawal of American troops. In fact, the Iraqi state’s survival required that the government consolidate power.
However, by acting to consolidate power the way that a dictator would—regardless of whatever his true intentions may have been—Maliki sent the worst possible signal to the rest of Iraq. Such actions create precedents and generate fears that are incomparably more pernicious than when opposition figures act illegally or immorally. Those fears have been heightened in Iraq by Baghdad’s trial of Vice President Hashimi in absentia, the court’s guilty verdict and its imposition of a death sentence in September. Such actions smack of vengeance and perpetuate the dread and mistrust that pushed Iraq into civil war in the first place.
If The Prince is the work of Machiavelli’s incisive mind, the work of his inspiring heart is his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. As he wrote at length in The Prince, Machiavelli was not under any illusions about how people would behave when the state was weak. He knew that most would be driven by fear to act badly in the absence of a powerful set of institutions to constrain their behavior and compel or enable them to act nobly. In the Discourses, he employed the Roman Republic as a practical model for the kind of democratic state that could give Italy a better society—one strong enough to keep Italy’s foreign foes in check and also ensure internal stability, justice and prosperity. It was a product of his fourteen years as an official and champion of the brief Florentine Republic that ousted the Medicis but was later deposed again by them. The central lesson of that experience and his reading of past successful states was that only a prince could build the ideal republic once state and society had collapsed into anarchy. But the republic—the state system—would ensure its long-
So too in Iraq today. If Iraqi democracy is going to be saved, it will not only take a great individual but also a leader willing and able to restore the system. Likewise, the problems of Iraq are much less the problems of a specific personality (whether Nuri al-
Thus, many—even most—other Iraqi leaders probably would have acted as Maliki did had they been prime minister. And many of those same people would have acted as Ayad Allawi did had they found themselves in the opposition. It is not that these people are somehow uniquely bad or that the problems would not exist if the government or opposition were in the hands of someone else. Iraq’s problem is the incomplete transformation and the stumbling democracy that the United States left behind. As prime minister, Maliki is no worse than many of his rivals might have been—and arguably better than many. Although in some cases he has undermined Iraqi democracy, in others he has abided by democratic rules even when he was not compelled to do so. Moreover, he has taken other actions—most notably Operation Charge of the Knights—that undeniably established his commitment to Iraqi nationalism, even if the sectarian chauvinism that fueled the civil war often seems to be an ever-
Still, Maliki’s ultimate victory in 2012 was important to Iraq in two unfortunate ways. First, the methods by which the prime minister triumphed reinforced a widespread sentiment that Iraq’s brief experiment with democracy and the rule of law was over and that politics were reverting to the old ways of violence, subterfuge, graft and betrayal. Iraq was falling back from the world of the Discourses to the world of The Prince. Moreover, while Maliki’s success represented a major victory over Iraq’s political center—in the literal and figurative sense—both the victory itself and the manner of its realization had alienated key elements on the periphery of Iraqi politics: the Sunni regions in the West and North, the Kurds, and the Shia of the deep South represented by the Sadrists.
In Baghdad, Maliki reigns supreme. In person, he is far more at ease and confident than he was in early 2012. He and his senior advisers appear to recognize that they have effectively crippled Iraqiya, their most powerful parliamentary adversary. And with their absolute control over the Iraqi military and judiciary, they have nothing to fear from Iraq’s other political parties.
But elsewhere in Iraq, the prime minister’s problems persist and in some areas are worsening. Many Sunnis saw Maliki’s victory over Iraqiya as the first step in the establishment of a Shia tyranny that would oppress them as the Sunnis had oppressed the Shia under Saddam. Maliki has made deep inroads with some Sunni leaders in places such as Mosul, where his efforts threaten the dominance of the Nujaifi brothers, key leaders of Iraqiya. However, many other Sunni tribal leaders are rearming with help from Saudi Arabia, which is encouraging them to resist Maliki and provide aid to their tribesmen across the border in Syria who are fighting against the Iranian-
Potentially even more dangerous has been the reaction of the Kurds. Many Kurdish leaders, in particular Barzani and the KDP, are pessimistic about their ability to make their relationship with Baghdad work. They seem to believe that independence (or virtual independence) may be a viable option in the medium term. This perspective—the expanding threat from Baghdad coupled with a perceived growing opportunity for independence—is evident in all of their political calculations in a way not seen as recently as last year. On the threat side of the ledger, they believe that Maliki intends to crush Kurdistan as he crushed Iraqiya as soon as his military is fully armed by the United States. The Kurds are nervous that the Iraqi army is growing in strength and capability whereas the Peshmerga, Kurdistan’s de facto army, have lost considerable capability since they defeated the Iraqi military in 1970. This creates a sense among Kurds that time is working against them and they need to settle matters relatively soon. However, all of this is somewhat counterbalanced (or even contradicted) by the positive trends they see toward genuine prospects for independence.
Turkey looms large on this side of the ledger. The Kurds see Turkish energy needs as necessarily tying Ankara to Erbil. Kurdistan’s industrious minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, argues that Turkey soon will be able to rely on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for its energy needs. To that end, he has been forging a mix of pipeline deals with Turkey, as well as oil-
Finally, even the Sadrist movement is turning against Maliki, demonstrating the unhappiness of the Shia of the deep South with Maliki’s consolidation of power in the center. Although Iran’s pressure forced the Sadrists to abandon ambitions of unseating Maliki, they have done little to hide their hatred of him. Moktada al-
The next big moves are likely to be Maliki’s. He will have to decide how to react to the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Sadrists—not to mention the Turks and the Saudis. A great statesman would recognize that now is the perfect moment to act magnanimously and make concessions to bring his rivals back into the governmental fold. Having disarmed them, Maliki could safely pursue such a course, and doing so would undermine the claims that he is attempting to make himself the new dictator of Iraq. Indeed, this is probably the only move that might allow the country to return to the slow path toward democracy by resurrecting the prospect of true power sharing among Iraq’s factions. Maliki’s willingness to strike a partial deal with the Kurds on oil exports in September represented a hopeful step. But it was only a baby step and may reflect nothing more than a realization that Baghdad had no other options—except force—to compel the Kurds, and so the government grudgingly gave in. Indeed, so far neither the prime minister nor his aides have shown much inclination to embrace such an approach wholeheartedly. They often seem to believe that any concessions would be seen as weakness and thus encourage greater efforts to overthrow them.
The great danger is that Maliki eventually will resort to violence to deal with his increasingly well-
The Florentine Histories of Iraq
Among the least well-
Sometimes they are religious (Sunni vs. Shia, Muslim vs. Christian, Maronite vs. Druze). Sometimes they are geographic (Basrawi vs. Baghdadi, Baghdadi vs. Muslawi). Sometimes they are ideological (Baathist vs. Islamist, liberal vs. Salafist, nationalist vs. royalist). Thus, like the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence, Milan and Pisa, so too the Sunni and Shia of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria—or the Kurds of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey—see their interests communally even as they strive to dominate their own states as well.
For all of these groups, the government of their state is a weapon to be used against their rivals and a purse to reward their constituents. That means no faction accepts the domination of the government by a rival, all constantly scheme to take back the government, and every faction goes looking for support from similar factions in neighboring states and from larger states that border the region (such as Turkey and Iran) or more distant powers with interests in the region (such as the United States, Russia and China). Thus, factions in one state will line up with the same factions in other states, or they will strike alliances with unlike factions in their own state that will bring with them alliances—and enemies—in other states. Finally, as the Italian city-
Because of its own weakness and the efforts of various internal factions to secure the help of like-
Iran has made huge gains in filling much of the void left by the American withdrawal. This is important for Tehran because Iraq is a key neighbor, trading partner, former foe and potential rival Shia power. Moreover, Iraq is now important to Tehran as a conduit to smuggle out Iranian oil exports, a channel to provide support to its oldest ally, the Shia Alawites of Syria, and a potential replacement if the Alawites ultimately lose the civil war there. But Turkey and the Gulf states fear Iranian domination of Iraq just as much as the Iraqis do. In 2006, when it seemed as if the Iranian-
Not only are Iraq’s neighbors trying to pull the country in very different directions—and threatening to tear it apart in the process—but spillover from the Syrian civil war also is antagonizing and galvanizing its factions, prying at these same fissures. The Shia parties that dominate the government increasingly side with Assad’s Shia Alawite faction in Syria (in part because of Iranian pressure to do so). And in similar fashion, many Iraqi Sunnis sympathize with their coreligionists across the border. The fact that many Sunni Arab tribes span the border simply adds fuel to that fire: the Shammaris, Dulaimis, Ubaydis and other tribesmen of Iraq are glad to help their cousins across the border fight the Shia regime in Damascus. Likewise, the Kurds of Iraq feel kinship with the Kurds of Syria, and there is a struggle between Barzani’s KDP and the anti-
Iraq Adrift
At the end of The Prince, Machiavelli famously cries out for some great Italian lord to employ the methods he described to save Italy from its foreign foes and from itself by uniting the country and building a strong state that could quell internal divisions and resist external domination. To many readers, it seems utterly incongruous coming at the end of a long, dispassionate discourse on the callous truths of politics, war and diplomacy.
Looking at Iraq across the oceans, it is tempting to make a similar plea—to cry out for some powerful but well-
Iraq is passing beyond America’s power to shape it. The United States largely gave up that power, squandering it under Bush 43 and surrendering it under Obama. Unfortunately, the continuing global addiction to oil means that Iraq’s future remains of great importance to the United States, and its resurgent failings raise concerns that in the future it will create as many problems for the United States as it has in the past.
Still, there are things Washington could do to coax Iraq toward a better path. American diplomats were critical to brokering the partial—but very hopeful—deal on oil exports struck between Baghdad and Erbil in September, indicating that there are still opportunities for the United States to have a positive impact in Iraq. We could rebuild our leverage with Baghdad by offering a wider range of military and civilian aid. Perhaps of greater value, we could continue to call Iraq’s political leaders on their actions, defining what “right” looks like and using our moral authority as the architects of Iraqi democracy to see its leaders conform to both the letter and the spirit of its system. But we must recognize that even that will be of limited value. As great a nation as the United States is, its power is limited—especially when there is no will to wield it.
Today’s Iraq owns its future. It looks uncertain at best, and we may not be able to escape the consequences should it fail. After Machiavelli finished The Prince, Italy endured four and a half centuries of further civil strife, foreign invasion, misrule, poverty and weakness before emerging as something vaguely like what he had envisioned in the Discourses. Would that Iraq does better.
*Kenneth M. Pollack is a contributing editor to The National Interest and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. The title of this essay is, of course, an appreciation of Azar Nafisi’s remarkable work, Reading Lolita in Tehran.