Aftermath

"Nir Rosen is a very good reporter who spent a long time in Iraq in extraordinarily dangerous situations, talking to Sunni guerrillas fighting the Americans and the Shia government. So it is very much on the ground. It has a very good summary and understanding of what the surge – which was billed as a great military success in the US – was really like. In fact it was much more complicated than that, and this is a view from the ground as to what happened. The reason I have chosen this book is that it gives one of the best and fairest summaries of what happened during the US occupation in the surge, and is very up to date and well worth reading. It is also good at conveying the sense of how military occupation by its very nature generates violence and local opposition. In Iraq, Americans became pretty unpopular fairly fast. In Afghanistan they were quite popular to begin with. The one thing that comes across in both countries is that foreign occupation armies tend to be very unpopular. If they aren’t unpopular at the beginning, they will be at the end. One should discount propaganda stuff you see on television about patrols going through villages, winning hearts and minds. In much of Iraq and much of Pashtun Afghanistan they really don’t like foreigners of any description, and tend to shoot at them. I think that there is an underestimation of the degree to which they make the situation worse in the country that is occupied. Often they are justified initially for humanitarian reasons, and the same is true of Libya. But foreign involvement often exacerbates local conflicts and deepens divisions within these countries. In all three cases, you essentially have a civil war in which foreign powers are participating. So it’s not surprising that they tend to exacerbate that civil war. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter You could say they should not have invaded, despite humanitarian reasons. I would also say that they might have gotten away (I am talking primarily about the US, Britain and their allies) with an overthrow of Saddam Hussein if they had then got out. People said “but if they get out there will be turmoil and violence”. But, of course, they stayed and there was terrible turmoil and violence. So I think that in all these cases, when you look at what actually happened on the ground from the point of view of intervening powers and the point of view of the indigenous inhabitants, it would have been better if they had kept out."