The Negotiation Workshop Goes To Iraq

In last week’s New Yorker, George Packer added his own voice to the growing calls for a proper counterinsurgency strategy. Packer's "Letter from Iraq" details the “Lesson of Tal Afar,” an Iraqi city near the Syrian border, which has been a center of insurgency since the beginning of the American occupation. Packer investigates this “notable success” of the new counterinsurgency strategy, painting a now-familiar picture of administrative incompetence and a total lack of vision or guidance from the heads of the American campaign.

Packer essentially blames the current quagmire in Iraq on the Administration’s early refusal to admit the existence of an insurgency. This, it seems, was the strategic error. As Colonel McMaster, whose regiment had been stationed in Tal Afar nine months last year, explained, “Militarily, you’ve got to call it an insurgency…because we have a counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to access.” That doctrine is, of course, the famed British Malaya doctrine, and Packer joins the bandwagon cheering on its efficacy and civility (minimum amount of force necessary, 20% military, 80% political), and asserting the American military’s peculiar unsuitability to such military operations.

The glowing reports of the Tal Afar success provide some interesting insight into the wishful thinking of the current political climate. Packer’s account of counterinsurgency in Tal Afar reads like a negotiation handbook. It is as if all of Iraq’s problems can be resolved by proper communication—between US forces and local groups, between Shia and Sunni populations, and between Iraqi forces and town residents. McMaster trained his officers for Tal Afar in Colorado. But the preparation did not involve tank battle drills; it was something more akin to role-play exercises, acting out “realistic scenarios, with soldiers and Arab-Americans playing the role of Iraqis,” right down to the filming of exercises and subsequent break-down of the film to analyze tone and body language. McMaster drew up what Packer calls a “counterinsurgency reading list” including such insightful texts as T.E. Lawrence’s 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom.' One officer “described it as a kind of training in empathy. ‘If I was in a situation where my neighbor had gotten his head cut off, how would I react? If it was my kid that had gotten killed by mortars, how would I react?’”

Packer’s celebration of this counterinsurgency preparation and its supposed results seems to say that all the US forces need is to put themselves in Iraqis shoes, and then they’ll know how to deal with the situation empathetically and appropriately. This search for a technical fix invades almost all discussions of what to do next in Iraq. Even arguments for withdrawal are made from the perspective of what will “work best.” As Barry Posen characterized it in his article, “Exit Strategy,” in the Boston Review, such pragmatist thinking is sensible, saving scarce time and energy by not addressing questions of principle. To argue for withdrawal on the basis that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place is thought to stem from an unconstructive righteousness or to have little utility. Better to be “forward looking” and “based on American national interests.”

The degree to which these pragmatist approaches psychologize the situation is laid bare by the closing segment of Packer’s article. There he visits an Iraqi psychiatrist who sounds like Packer’s symbol of the flickering hope for Iraq’s future. The psychiatrist has been pursuing “with great persistence and idea that had first come to him after the fall of Saddam: he wanted to open a ‘psycho-social rehabilitation clinic’ that would rebuild the humanity of his countrymen.” The reason, “Iraqis need to learn to talk, to think, to tolerate,” as if the problems for Iraq are to be found at a personal, individual, and communicational level.

For the negotiations specialist, as for the pragmatist, there are no irreconcilable interests, there are just misunderstandings and problems of technique or process. These theories come across as the utmost in naiveté, and almost as a willful denial of the one clear issue: the competing interests between an occupying force that has totally destroyed the existing political order and the society to which it remains an external intervener.