Carrying the 'White Man's Burden' in Iraq

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 7, 2005.

Last week, on the precious real estate of the right's flagship, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Iraq war-hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman (D?-CT) let slip another unspoken reason why we remain in Iraq more than two and a half years after achieving our stated goal of "disarming" Saddam Hussein.

Lieberman wrote that the Iraqis are on the brink of transitioning "from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood." That is, "unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn."

It's noteworthy that Lieberman portrayed the old government as "primitive," despite the fact that we were talked into attacking Iraq because it had what President Bush called the "deadliest" weapons "known to mankind." They were, presumably, quite modern.

And that fits reality. Iraq under the Baathists was many things, but primitive wasn't one of them. Before two decades of infrastructure-smashing war, Iraq was considered to be as advanced as many countries in Western Europe. Its universities were the envy of the Arabic world, as was its health care system, which featured the most modern hospitals in the region.

Lieberman contrasts this "primitive" Iraq with the "modern" self-governance that the "great American military has given them."

If this strikes a familiar note with students of history, it should. In earlier iterations, the notion that the West had an obligation to drag their primitive charges into the present was embedded in the "civilizing missions" undertaken by the French and British in India and Africa, it was in the White Man's Burden invoked by Kipling and the "Hamitic Myth" favored by German intellectuals to justify its colonial possessions.

Even the Portuguese, the poorest, least educated, least powerful of the European colonial powers cooked up an ideology known as "Lusotropicalism" to justify keeping its African possessions into the 1970s.

All of these ideologies shared two things in common: the idea that the people they were subjugating were primitive -- the "natives" were frequently portrayed as children in contemporary art of the times - and the claim that what may have seemed like exploitation backed by the gun, was in fact a wholly beneficent attempt to bring the poor, brown people in question a taste of "modernity."

In 1839, six years before he coined the term "Manifest Destiny" in calling for the U.S. to annex Mexican Texas, well-known columnist John L. O'Sullivan wrote that America had been chosen for the "blessed mission" of subjugating those who "endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts," because only America "is destined to be the great nation of futurity."

We can call the modern iteration in Iraq, as expressed by Lieberman (and many others), simply "American exceptionalism."

Atwa

Believing in our unique ability to "modernize" and "democratize" Iraq has a clear danger: it precludes our strategic elites from considering the idea that the country might best be served by letting Iraqis try to hammer out a home-grown solution to what has become an enormous mess.

A few weeks ago I caught up with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), one of Congress' most outspoken opponents of the Iraq invasion. His predictions about the consequences of our Iraq policy have, unfortunately, been proven correct at every turn.

McDermott's analysis of the situation on the ground in Iraq is as far from the apocalyptic "clash of civilizations" tripe peddled by the Liebermans of the world as one can get. He asked me, "Why don't we ever assume that the Iraqis love their families and prefer to live in Peace? Why do we assume they just want to kill each other?"

I asked him what he would do to extricate the United States from Iraq. He didn't hesitate before responding: "I'd encourage the Iraqis to convene an atwa."

The atwa is an old and venerated system of dispute-resolution practiced in the region for generations. McDermott learned of the tradition during a recent trip to Jordan from influential Iraqis who had the means to flee the violence that's plagued Iraq since the United States' attack.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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