Some of the Concrete is Under Deep Water. Notes on the Iraq War.

May 3rd, 2008 Posted in Concrete incident or process, Conflict

War, and specifically the ongoing war in Iraq, is an interaction sequence whose parties attempt to impose contradictory social orders on each other using forceful and fraudulent means. The key for the sociologist is in the interaction. The acts of the players are, to some extent, mutually contingent. No one knows the outcome in advance. It is only revealed in the doing.

There is complexity which can be posed as questions of the familiar who, what, when, where and how variety, essentially the order of battle. And these details, which the professional players strive to know, become more transparent during the unrolling of the sequence.

The actual encounters of real opponents, the primary actors, are here and now, moment by moment experiences whose outcomes set the stage for further acts and altogether sum up into patterns. Awareness of these events among others is never complete. Reports are gathered in command centers and mapped as a general situation. Further abstracted and sometimes doctored dispatches are issued to the various media who inform the awaiting interested audiences. We all remember the television images of the Secretary of Defense accompanied by a senior military officer talking to a room full of journalists about military actions that none of them actually experienced. But what gets through to us is still stark and vivid.

It is complex but we can think it a series of interrelated interactions. It comes to us over time. A narrative in the form of this happens then that happens. The this and that give us the images of the social order then.

We, the ordinary citizens and sociologists, get mainly hearsay of the battle and associated activities peppered with photographs of the physical residue and by an occasional direct statement from a participant. And in fact the actual event of war, dangerous and destructive and morally ambivalent as it usually is, is only a bit of information that gets its larger social meaning from its part in the whole. The cadre functions of planning, coordinating, initiating action and reaction require a standing back to see as much of the the whole as possible. The commanding general grappling with an enemy agent, and some of them are very good at it, is not doing his job.

But these fighting formations, unless they are criminal gangs only out for their own profit, represent a larger political unit of governance and ideology, and this tracks back in our system to civilian leaders. They are the directorate and the rest of us provide the support however tenuously. We provide the soldiers, the equipment and supplies and the motive. We, however distant, are involved.

The concrete sociological subject is like the black hole in astronomy, it attracts everything around it to it. We are tempted in all directions but our media, the blog, has a short and light footprint. We have to focus.

So far we have established, or tried to, that…

(1) conflict interaction is progressively revelatory. As the sequence proceeds the nature of what the action is about and who and how it is being conducted and the options for further unfolding become clearer to the more primary actors first and then those of us following however inexactly.

(2) the information available to the ordinary sociologist and all those similarly situated is limited, abstracted, and managed, and we do not know how far off it is from the pattern seen at command center. The rarest fish are in deep water.

(3) my own part in the complex event is clearly as part of the support base for the American agencies and agents primarily involved. I have not addressed my own ideology or emotional commitment or hopes and fears. Partly I hide behind a discredited objectivity, but I am blocked too by an ambivalence over options. Whatever my bias is, you can probably sense it in my writing here.

Now to characterizing the interaction sequence. It is too dense, and too distracting in its concrete minutia (even if I could gather and present it all) to be useful raw. So we will attempt to order it crudely into stages (or acts as in acts of a play). I find that each stage seems to have a governing simile or metaphor or model that initially describes what is happening, but the mood and understanding implied always proves transitory. The understanding shifts with the unrolling of the interaction sequence. The governing images appears to have informed the order projected by the players at the time (which I will not try to prove now) but they certainly were my own perceptions either then or now looking back.

(1) The invasion seems at the start to be an act of liberation similar in form to our liberating invasion of Europe in World War II. The fantasy: the people will welcome us and with our guidance construct their democratic traditions to replace the overthrown dictatorship. The military movement is swift, reminiscent of the German Blitzkrieg except the follow up infantry formations required to occupy the country are undermanned. The just prior invasion of Afghanistan seemed initially to have succeeded with special forces and air power alone. The infantry was supplied by northern tribal militias who were already in place. This image of the local militias of Kurds and Shia on call turned out to be limited to the local setting. The supporting Sunni militia in Sunni areas mobilized against the invasion–more and more actively as time passed.

At first the TV screens show the people greeting us and we have the supposed proof in the picture of the dictator’s statue being pulled down.

At the moment of apparent victory the leading American general retires without explanation or warning. He had the outsize personality of the successful military commander we have grown to expect. He should have become the chief honcho of the occupation according to prior image and expectation. Instead he is replaced by men of bland, bureaucratic and restrained character who seem strictly under the control and limit of the Secretary of Defense who is a business administrator with no experience of battle and mayhem nor governance of an occupied country.

(2) But then an unanticipated looting of all institutions including schools, museums, medical facilities, factories and, most unfortunately and ominously, ammunition dumps. There is no remnant of formal government left and the civic infra-structures of the society have been dismantled. Iraq has no bones. The fantasy: A flowering of freedom, exuberance. A bacchanalia. A Mardi Gras. The people run into the street and express their relief of the burden of the dictator as the dodo bird would. In their exuberance they foul the nest. The kissing and hugging and dancing and playing music, and shouting and crying with joy as the French would, is stretched with perverse insanity into an attack on their own world and space. The exaggerated separation of the sexes has unexpected consequences. No kisses for the liberating troops.

Meanwhile the borders are open. Journalists and writers and tourists and youths seeking adventure and businessmen with sample cases, spies (I presume) and shadowy figures dash in like the 49ers into the gold fields of California. Every hotel in the country is booked past capacity. Iraq locals with even a hint of a foreign language, with patched together cars, with skills useful or otherwise gather around and shape-up. All the miners are hiring. A lot of action. Contact. Astonishing, but temporary, exchanges. Bonanza time.

3) Turns out militarily that the chase is the thing. The ardent suitor wins the maiden and finds her a bore. Catch Moby Dick at great cost and throw him back into the sea. What now, brown cow? Turns out that the post conquest phase has received little planning attention. A junior general has been appointed civil administrator and given a tiny staff and no orders or instructions. He is in the chain of command and isn’t prepared to act independently. The commanding general, el supremo, is packing to go home. And the civilian and military order of Iraq has evaporated. It does not exist, replaced by a vacuum and over twenty of the dictator’s marble palaces and the empty office buildings of the departed governing bureaucratic cadres.

The State Department reacts and appoints as governor a career diplomat who has the character to organize a governing response quickly, with beautiful informality (I am still impressed by his desert boots and checkered shirt) and he became the occupation administrator representing the American executive at the center. The civilian and military occupation were divided against American tradition in which these two roles are joined in the commanding general (a la Douglas MacArthur). And the unexpected American occupation of a middle eastern country begins. The war is declared over by the administratively disengaged president, but as we all know it is to continue on and on.

(4) The counterattack takes the form of a hydra headed guerrilla war. The multi-part Iraqi social order produces its militias and gangs that move into offensives in all directions. They prove ingenious, aggressive, alert, swift to react. They have different objectives, many at cross purposes, and do not present a united front. For the Americans the enemy order of battle is a mystery and the gathering of information of who is doing what to whom and why is a primary concern. As we have noted the interaction, the actual experience painstakingly interpreted, supplies the answer. As I write now from the distance, and with the partial blindness imposed by my ordinary access through the media, I am much closer to knowing who it is we fight and why than I have been in following the story over the years. Through the glass darkly I see a little more.

For an earlier model we have the counterattack by guerrillas instead of line troops that occurred during the American occupation of Mexico City in the mid-19th century. The battle tactics used fitting the logic of the possible. There is also Mao’s precept–the fish in water, the activists hidden among the people.

The American response is professional but to the home front observer lethargic. The ripostes to the suicide, car, and roadside bombings come slowly. The source and direction of the other’s attacks are not totally obvious. Kidnappings, ritual executions, infiltrated enemy agents, street demonstrations, mortars and rockets, bullying and intimidation of the local people. All needed to be sorted out. Back at headquarters confusion, plans distorted. Rotation of personnel to the unexpected fronts stressing the entire military system. Large numbers of Iraqi civilians displaced, many abroad.

( 5) Abe Lincoln would have figured it out by trial and error but the executive at the center proved unable to appreciate the tactical impasse and held tight to the hunker-down and not working system in place. The political coalition of fossil fuel industry leaders and religious fundamentalists cracked in mid-term elections and the error prone executive’s party lost control over the federal legislature. The political critique of the war that has developed since except for wildly demanding immediate withdrawal of troops has proved incoherent otherwise. The center adjusted by retiring the Secretary of Defense and placing a duet of intellectuals, a Ph.D. general and a diplomat, in charge of what was called a surge–a sudden overpowering swelling and multiplication of an event like an incoming tide. This has been the governing image. Essentially the combat troops occupied neighborhoods instead of retiring at night to large insulated bases and bearded the terrorists in their local command centers and began to reduce the intimidation used against the ordinary people.

Against war eventually is a reassertion of what I take to be a universal urge to commit to the family life cycle (however locally defined). Ironically we are told that at the top of the terrorist informal hierarchy are men with multiple wives and large broods of children. They aren’t permitting war to hinder their cycles, are they?

The surge was helped a lot by what at the distance seemed the sudden conversion of the Sunni sheiks against the weird suicide prone foreign fundamentalist terrorists. We are told that the local American troops have forged alliances with these tribal militias and have quieted things down some though the mayhem continues.

War is hell.

Notes

The concrete is the theater of the journalist and the historian. The here and now to the reporter; the there and gone to the later story-teller. The sociologist might have something to add: a missed pattern, a different viewpoint or he might add confusion or a benign nothing but another voice. This futile spinning of wheels is the third risk after errors of fact and interpretation.

The interaction sequence (however complex) is like a growing plant. There is an onset and then a progressive evolving that moment by moment reveals what it is. It starts as mystery and ends as a particular history. It teaches us who and what it is in its becoming.