Nation Building -- A Different Perspective on Saddam Hussein

I do not favor the concept of "nation building" in any sense of the term. In theory and at best, it is an exercise in social engineering, handing down from on high the terms and conditions of a new social order, dictating to people how they shall live and how they shall be governed. It is the opposite of the American ideal of "We the People" sorting government out for ourselves.

In practice, nation building is always bloody and tyrannical.

Of course, in the USA, we have not followed our Republican ideals and our nation was indeed built by the fiat of our supposedly greatest leader, Abraham Lincoln. Instead of a collection of sovereign "States" with the right of self-determination, Lincoln visualized a modern nation-state with a monopoly on ultimate power held by the Federal Government.

This building of the modern American nation was bought at an horrific price:




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War


Over 600,000 dead. Over a million casualties. Eighteen thousand political prisoners. The 1860 Census put the American population at 31,400,000. This works out to a casualty rate of 3.2% of the entire population. Extrapolated to today, that would mean more than 10,000,000 wounded or dead.



Of course, I am not even addressing the consensus within our fronteir culture that systematically exterminated the original inhabitants of the continent. I have read estimates of how many were slaughtered in this "winning of the west" that vary by a factor of ten or more -- at a bare minimum the casualties from this front on the war to build the modern American nation go well into seven figures.




That was then. This is now. You can make the case that civilization has progressed since the 19th Century. American democracy has evolved into a more broad based sovereignty; Europe has let go of its empires; the idea of individual rights has gained a lot of ground all around the world -- even if it is not yet a universally respected value.

For that reason, we hanged Saddam Hussein. His Stalinesque strategy of making himself a cult of personality backed by arbitrary and bloodthirsty state power is utterly repulsive to me, and to most Americans and Europeans. Even though I am opposed to the death penalty on principle, I will not miss Saddam Hussein.

As we are learning on a daily basis in Iraq, however, there was a definite method to Saddam Hussein's sadism. He tried and failed to make a nation out of a gaggle of tribes, preaching a secular gospel of pan-Arab power. His career was one long answer to the film, Lawrence of Arabia -- an effort to forge the medieval mindset of the nomad into an oil-wealthy force in modern world affairs.

He failed. As you see suicide bombers blowing themselves up on a daily basis to prove some point of honor between two competing interpretations of Islam, there is a strong temptation to agree with the words the scriptwriter put in T.E. Lawrence's mouth: They are a silly people.


I do not see how the gaggle of tribes in Iraq can be integrated into the peaceful family of nations without the kind of brutality and tyranny that snuffed out the American Indians, that burned the farms between Atlanta and the Atlantic Ocean, that gassed the Kurds, that collectivized Soviet agriculture.

Maybe being a nation is not such a good thing.

And after the original 13, only two more states have become part of the union from the paper status of 'sovereign nations.'

Yeah, the Americas would likely have been better off without European colonists; but it's a bit late to worry about that.

about the end of slavery. One of the greatest accomplishments in history -- absolutely.

How many other countries had a civil war to end it?



You make another excellent point concerning the native American population -- it is a bit late to worry about that. Looking back across the centuries, you find a lot of unsavory stuff and who today is responsible for Wounded Knee or the blankets laced with smallpox?

But that just raises again the point I wanted to make. What is the statute of limitations on genocide? How old does the atrocity have to be before we quit worrying about it?

Iraq is going through some changes that have some things in common with our own history. If we excuse our heroes like Andrew Jackson from the crime of slaughtering members of an inconvenient tribe of Others, what exactly is our beef with Saddam Hussein?

I am not challenging the beef -- I am calling for an honest rendition of what it is that are condemning. I am also challenging the pardon we give to all of our first 20 or so American presidents, including Lincoln, who used state terror to create the moral, social and political order that prevails today.

So many interesting topics, so little time... Sorry for my brutish and brief sketchy strokes, but here goes.

I'm not sure whether the term "nation building" is what it is, the way you're using it, and then there's the definition of "is" itself of course. But even sticking to a minimalist interpretation as "the process of creating a nation", I submit more or less humbly that practically without exception throughout History (ahem) there's an inherent collectivist action of an active minority acting at least presumptively at the behest of a large(r) majority.

If you accept that (big if) the nucleus of your criticism aims at the heart of collectivist action; acting for the "greater good" and all that jazz, whammo: out of the window as suspect of crass mass manipulation that results by way of its victorious imposition in violence of one kind or another inflicted on the "nation".

Ouch. Not sure I can go along with that line, to be honest.

On the other hand, with a more morally / philosophically aseptic approach, I think it's reasonable to assert that -- the condition of humanity being what it is -- leverages its flaws and virtues in almost logarithmic fashion when forces coagulate into aggregate socially (politically) active forms. Which, as far as I'm concerned, results in the somewhat paradoxical situation that even the most "peaceful" movement inherently creates forceful dynamics that end up causing harm.

The reason I typed this previous paragraph is that, if the human condition -- warts and all -- is accepted at face value as an inescapable reality, the debate over whether "the common good" is admissible in pursuit of change, trading off the future (desired) benefits against the harm that pursuit may cause. Militaryspeak would refer to "collateral damage". So, in my view, the question is not whether social damage is acceptable, but instead a twofold how much damage is acceptable, together with how much benefit will be obtained, or is reasonably projected to be gained by the whole exercise.

I'm not willing to impose my framework here, but (again) if that's an acceptable departure, the model is more comparable to, say, democracy, where the "warts and all" aspect is illustrated in Winston Churchill's deliciously wry aphorism that it's the worst of all possible systems, except for all the others. That view embraces the virtues of a democracy at the expense of its flaws; it's the cost of doing business.

Now, whenever "nation building" is involved, that typically entails a previously existing geopolitical situation; a bit as with Newton's assertion that no two masses can occupy the same space, the borders and internal workings of the preexisting geopolitical distribution of land and people inherently and inevitably conflict with the project of nation building. People are on aggregate much inclined to resist radical change; only when the balance of cost and opportunity is considered by a sufficient (or sufficiently powerful) group of people to favor change, can such change be practically effectuated.

So far, nothing but boring trivia. My apologies for that. But the resulting conclusion is, once more, twofold. First, that the operative or driving factor is the degree of dissatisfaction with the preexisting situation (or, in opposite terms, the "satisfaction gap"). And secondly, that the quantity and quality of such collective "force" pursuing change determines the resulting outcome. Once more, I don't think neither conclusion is a shocker in and by itself.

But since earlier I mentioned the human condition, I think it's pertinent to bring in another fairly common trait, namely a disposition to accept the existing situation, certainly when it operates as a fundamental and large-scale environment, as a given. People have a remarkable ability to settle into a situation, whereby acceptance oftentimes grows into embracing that situation. That human trait is, I believe, responsible for much of the basic "change-averse" predisposition of human beings. Moreover, borrowing again from physics, there's a natural tendency to neutrality or "balance" where diverse forces eventually cancel each other out; this would explain why not every revolution results in success, and even those that for one reason or another are considered a success, aren't as "complete" in their success as one might have read in the intentions of the revolutionary leaders.

So now what do we have? Let's sum up some salient bits. In my view, the key elements are that: large-scale change in society is a matter of complex dynamics; there's a certain inevitability of "collateral damage"; people on an aggregate scale, averse to large-scale change as they are, tend to accept some half-way ("imperfect") end result before reaching the stated ideal; and most importantly, that force is an inherently essential component of change, certainly wherever large-scale change is involved.

Okay, back to your issue here. I know of very few cases where "nation building" was a bloodless consensus-seeking process. Come to think of it: I know exactly none. Whether by conquest, revolt or otherwise, new collective homes are the result of a relatively drastic and inherently violent process of change in the environment of both the change-seeking actors involved and their counterparts.

This is a very convoluted way of restating that "violence" is, in the large scale of nation things, practically inevitable whenever dissenting humans undertake nation building enterprises at the expense of one or more preexisting nations - whether they are or were artificial, or not.

So once more, the degree of such violence, as well as the quality and quantity of resulting (pursued) change(s) are what will drive the "acceptability" of the resulting situation. What this double exercise of arriving at the same conclusion leads me to is a startling thought: it's not the notion of "nation building" that should give pause to any violence-averse person, it's the human condition itself.

It's convenient of course to revise history with the comforts of hindsight, especially when such revision is done as a practically passive intellectual excursion, while it's also true that "one can't change history by changing perspective". Taking for example the present-day case of the Americas, it's straightforward to assert that "nation building" -- if at all one chooses to call it that -- is an extremely violent business. The case of a present-day but historically very artificially created Iraq isn't any different.

If one takes the somewhat Hippocratic perspective that inflicting harm and violence is to be averted, the inevitable conclusion is that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq is unacceptable, even if it assumes a perpetuation of "preexisting inherent" violence perpetrated at the hands of a terribly brutal despot. Presently, 1.8 million Iraqis live abroad, with more added every day, feeling the atrocious civil conflict induced by a corrupt invasion. The so-called "controversial" excess deaths inflicted on that country with that invasion are quite probably exceeding 650,000 people. It all adds up to a revolting indictment of the so-called "moral argument" to "liberate" Iraq.

What I believe taints much of the discussions surrounding the specific case of Iraq is that the somewhat morally arrogant presumption of improving the lot of Iraqis as an argument in favor of the invasion and occupation doesn't but clash with the appalling human cost in Iraq of that enterprise. The destruction of Iraq in order to save that country is all the more questionable, given that it is an externally imposed "revolution"; the balance of power was altered not by Iraqis, but by foreigners.

With the preexisting geopolitical infrastructure of that country destroyed, the until then "balanced" internal social forces have been unleashed, further propelled by the incompetent security policy enforced by the invading alien forces. At this point, a hypothetical division into three smaller countries (i.e., a subdivision into sovereign predominantly Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions appear plausible) may well be what the doctor orders for a restoration of a "balance" of sorts. But if by any combination of luck and skills such "nation building" succeeds, it will not be a happy end that can justify the prior bloody warpath. A narrow escape not an excuse makes for the inexcusable arrogance, incompetence and above all invasive violence exercised by the invading aliens.

If one looks at the present-day Americas, there's just as much a violent past hiding underneath the present-day borders; yet today, it's fortunately hard to conceive open warfare among the currently existing nations. And even in the case of Europe -- the cradle of most of modern-day inhumanity -- a staggering string of wars and massively violent outbreaks have merged into a curiously violence-averse geopolitical entity, supported a lot more by a shared material interest than by common sheer philosophical idealism. Even more curiously, "project Europe" (the EU) is a case of sustained peace and prosperity arriving on the wings of expansion and aggregation - not subdivision and fraction.

What I mean is this: "nation building" is hard to categorize as inherently virtuous (or not). And that's where I think the crux is: the virtue (or "merits") of a nation (re)building enterprise can't and shouldn't be measured by simple dimensions such as the use of violence. For example, the absence of violence in the process of building a nation can actually lead to a later eruption - especially when the unified forces under the ideal of creating a new entity subsequently fall apart under their own weight.

That's why I think that the cost of doing business varies too much to reject or accept a nation building "project" beforehand. So...

Maybe it's humanity that is not such a good thing.