But even if that’s true, and let’s hope it is, that’s only half the story. Because there were influential voices advocating the war with Iraq who treated this mojo business as a casus belli, not just because Saddam Hussein’s own mojo was thought to be so dangerous, but because he’d taken away America’s own.
Yep, this is another one of those columns where I wish I were kidding. But no.
In the sometimes overlapping worlds of psychological operations, neoconservative philosophizing and self-professed expertise on the Arab world, bizarre propositions occasionally are put forth in jargon that true believers find perfectly convincing.
Well before the invasion of Iraq, for instance, former CIA employee Reuel Marc Gerecht, now with the influential American Enterprise Institute, popularized the atavistic notion of hayba as a way to understand the Middle East and America’s role there. Hayba is an Arabic word that Gerecht translates loosely as “the awe that belongs to indomitable authority”–a kind of supermojo. For a ruler or for a nation in the Arab world, the ability to inspire awe is more important than the mere exercise of power. If the image of invulnerability seems unassailable enough it can contribute to real invulnerability, or so the argument goes.
Better still, there’s a liturgical quality to this argument that fits neatly with this administration’s religiosity. Awe is a very Old Testament concept. Awe is what you feel for some entity so magnificent, or so terrible, or so frightening or glorious that even to think about it overpowers you. Awe is what you probably ought to feel for a righteous nation doing God’s work bringing light to the dark corners of the world, which is the way some folks like to see the American mission in the Middle East.
By Gerecht’s analysis, the United States used to have hayba, but Saddam Hussein took it away. He defied American will and weathered American attacks for more than a decade. He “cracked the awe of America in the Middle East,” said Gerecht. And without that aura of invulnerability, unprecedented and unthinkable things could happen: terrorists could even dare, as they did on September 11, 2001, to attack Americans on their home soil. It didn’t matter if there was a direct operational connection between Iraq and the terrorists, Gerecht argued that the defiant Saddam would have to go “if we really are serious about regaining the essential fear and respect without which American interests and American citizens simply are not safe.”
The appeal of this argument, of course, is that it cuts right through the Gordian knot of diplomatic, political, cultural, legal and economic interests that might normally be the complex foundations for modern power, and even the cornerstones for lasting peace. If you focus on fear and respect, it would seem, everything else follows. Or at least people are scared of you and keep their distance. And if the policy fails, the answer is always “more fear, more respect.”
Gerecht’s was only one voice in the cacophonous neoconservative choir, and many other factors played into the final decision to invade. But the idea of inspiring awe, in just so many words, was central to the whole project. Saddam, moreover, was a perfect target. His defiance had deprived us of our own strength, perhaps, but his weakness made him a pushover on the battlefield.
The initial bombing campaign, waged against a country which had no operational air force, was called “shock and awe.” On the ground, U.S. technology made American firepower simply overwhelming. “I have been trying to think when in history there was a greater imbalance in forces,” an American colonel in military intelligence said soon after Baghdad fell in April. “I thought maybe Cortez with guns against Moctezuma without. But, no, even that was a more even match.”
Yet one of the greatest failings of the Iraq invasion and occupation is precisely its inability to inspire awe among the Iraqi people, or anyone else. Before the war, Iraqis on the street thought the United States could do just about anything it wanted. Other Arabs in other countries saw Saddam as a great symbol of defiance, but his own people viewed him as nothing more or less than a ferocious thug who seemed to have nine lives. Many believed he remained in power not in spite of the United States, but because all-powerful Washington, for one conspiratorial reason or another, still wanted him there.
During the war, there were no uprisings in support of the Americans, or against Saddam. Even the soldiers in the Iraqi Army just put down their weapons and walked away. They were not awed by the Coalition onslaught, nor were they implicated in the fight for freedom. They chose to be spectators to the liberation of their own country, and they left it to U.S. troops to pull down the statues of the dictator.
Mobs did not hound Saddam through the streets. Informers did not turn him in, even for a $25 million reward. The search was left entirely to the U.S. troops. The Iraqis got on with their lives as best they could. After 35 years under Saddam’s reign of terror, many retained a superstitious fear the mustached bogeyman might somehow stage a comeback, but that was not a daily concern.
Meanwhile, familiarity bred contempt for the not-so-awesome power of the United States forces on the ground. There weren’t enough troops to establish order in the streets, and they didn’t think that was part of their job description. Not only were they something less than supermen, they weren’t even very good policemen, or electricians, or plumbers! So many problems could have been solved with a few hundred portable generators.
The Americans isolated themselves in heavily protected compounds with even more security surrounding them than Saddam had in his day. They didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand the culture. Those who ventured out on patrol proved to be very vulnerable targets indeed. The American death toll mounted into the hundreds. The monetary cost into the hundreds of billions.
Still, the hunt for Saddam went on. Like Tarot figures, the faces of more than 40 of his cronies turned up with Xs across them on the famous pack of cards. But the infamous Ace of Spades remained at large.
And then, on a sweet Saturday evening, there he was, hands raised coming out of his hole. Saddam, who compared himself so often to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, had been driven like the Biblical despot in the Book of Daniel to live with the beasts of the field, his body wet with the dew from heaven, his hair grown long like feathers, his nails like claws. For those Americans who convinced themselves that the dictator’s mojo, er, hayba, was a threat to the United States, this scene was worth more than finding phantom weapons of mass destruction or tenuous links to terrorism. It was the culmination of a mystical struggle in which the dictator who dared to defy the United States would be brought low and his conqueror exalted.
Yet, five days after the event, it’s fair to say the capture of Saddam has changed next to nothing on the ground in the Middle East. When his former subjects heard the news of his arrest, they poured from their shops and houses to celebrate, but just for a few hours. Today life and death in the streets of Iraq continue as before.
Other leaders in other countries whom the United States clearly intended to awe with the Iraq adventure have somehow failed to see the light. Iran’s mullahs, for instance, know perfectly well that the Shiite south of Iraq, where they have long and deep involvement, holds the key to American success or humiliation in this venture. If they push it toward rebellion, the whole American project in Iraq will go belly-up. That’s not what you could call an indomitable position for the U.S.A.
Indeed, one of the greatest tragedies for America in Iraq is the way Washington has managed to squander its moral and political strength. With all the money, the brainpower, the imagination and initiative the United States has at its disposal, the world’s greatest democracy really does have the potential to help Iraq to a magnificent future. But when it begins to confuse hyperpower with hayba-power, a facile construct of cheap orientalism confirming the truism that “all these Arabs understand is force,” the United States lowers itself to the level of its most unworthy enemies. There’s nothing Saddam ever had that we needed, least of all his hayba, his mojo, his blind and bloody passion for “fear and respect.”
