The London Daily Telegraph (October 29) reports the uncomfortable conclusions of Dr. Noah Feldman, senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Feldman is a young American expert in Islamic law who works closely with administrator Paul Bremer. Says Feldman: "The end constitutional product is very likely to make many people in the U.S. government unhappy. Any democratically elected Iraqi government is unlikely to be secular and unlikely to be pro-Israel. And frankly, moderately unlikely to be pro-American." When he tells people that Islam and Islamic law are going to be in the constitution, says Feldman, people are very concerned. But, he continued "frankly nothing in Iraq is going to look the way people imagined."

Removing Saddam was a necessary but not sufficient step in changing the psychology of the Arab-Muslim world.

Neither is the "federal" plan dividing the country into 18 or so provinces, which the U.S. favors, likely to fly. The Kurds are determined to have an autonomous Kurdish region and will not support any constitutional plan that splits up their territory. There have been widespread media reports of U.S. disappointment with the Iraqi Governing Council, which made little progress in coming up with a plan for drafting a constitution, which the U.S. initially hoped to have in place before turning over authority to Iraqis. There were complaints that the Council met too little, traveled too much and, as Sen. Richard Lugar complained, "aren't doing their job." But the underlying problem is the disparate goals of the groups the Council represents, a problem evident from the beginning when members were unable to select a chairman and had to resort to rotating the chairman every few months. Shi'ites, Sunnites, and Kurds, to take only the three largest groupings, have very different views of what both elections and a constitution should be like and of what their respective roles should be in a new Iraq.

In setting unachievable goals -- a "solution" to the Israel-Arab conflict, a liberal democratic Iraq, a democratic Middle East -- the U.S. risks, indeed virtually assures, failure. Yet in setting different goals, the U.S., without major changes in what it actually does on the ground, could achieve success in what is, after all, its chief strategic purpose -- containing and defanging radical Islam. In an essay entitled "War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity" (Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2003), Mark Helprin reframes the task of the West in the Middle East. Writes Helprin:

"The object long expressed by bin Laden and others is to flip positions in the thousand-year war [of Islam against the West]. To do this, the Arabs must rekindle what the tenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, an ineffable combination of group solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps and the elation of victory feeding upon victory. This, rather than any of its subsidiary political goals, is the objective of the enemy in the war in which we find ourselves at present. Despite many flickers all around the world, it is a fire far from coming alight, but as long as the West apprehends each flare as a separate case the enemy will be encouraged to drive them toward a point of ignition, and the war will never end. The proper strategic objective for the West, therefore, is the suppression of this fire of 'asabiya in the Arab heartland and citadels of militancy -- a task of division, temporary domination, and, above all, demoralization."

Helprin says our goal must be to shift Arab-Islamic society into its other pole: fatalism and resignation. The object is not to defeat the Arabs but to dissuade them from making war on us, to convince them (as they were convinced throughout the 19th century) that taking on the West is hopeless, that they can therefore retire from the field with honor. Helprin believes the U.S. has missed the chance to do this repeatedly: in the first Gulf War when the West's overwhelming forces were abruptly and prematurely withdrawn and, he argues, in this war, when U.S. leaders "did not understand the essence of their task, which was not merely to win in Iraq but to stun the Arab World." The proper objective, says Helprin, "should have not been merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing."

That chance has passed. But if Helprin is right -- and this writer believes he is -- in arguing that our strategic goal must be to slake the fires of 'asabiya, the surge of militancy inspired by hope and portents of victory, then both our stated goals and our policies need to shift. We do not need to make Iraq a beacon of democracy nor do we even need to insist it remain a unitary state. (It might cause less trouble in the long run to its neighbors and its own people if it were divided into more homogeneous states.) This does not mean removing Saddam Hussein was a vain exercise. On the contrary, in removing him the U.S. took a crucial step in achieving our strategic goal. That Saddam was not an Islamic fundamentalist is beside the point. Saddam was a central symbol in the Islamic world of defiance of the West, and it was for this

Outpost               - 4 -               December 2003