The outpouring of commentary surrounding the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war can feel like déjà vu all over again. The political battle lines have changed very little over the past decade: Mostly, those who opposed the war decry the invasion, and its supporters defend it. There have been plenty of (often very good) diagnoses of what went wrong, but the parallel push for intervention in Syria and war with Iran suggests that few lessons will actually be learned from the war.
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But here's one surprising detail about the flood of retrospectives: They have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans. Indeed, many Iraqis fail to see the point of commemorating the disastrous war for the benefit of the American media.
American strategic narcissism is nothing new, of course. The notion that what the United States does is the most important aspect of every development pervades American foreign-policy punditry, whether about Iraq or Egypt, Syria and the Arab uprisings. But we really should know better by now: First, the entire point of the U.S. military's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq was to get soldiers out in to the population, meeting with people and winning their trust. What's more, the "surge" of U.S. troops in 2007 could not have succeeded without the Sunni turn against al Qaeda in Iraq, which preceded it. Second, the Arab Spring's ethos of citizen empowerment should have made it impossible to ignore the agency of the people in the region.
How American-centric has the outpouring of commentary been? Very. The New Republic got eight writers to comment on the anniversary, none Iraqi. Foreign Affairs put out a very good retrospective of its coverage of Iraq with 11 articles and 25 contributors, none Iraqi. The New York Times managed to find one, out of six roundtable contributors. And to show that there's no house bias here, the otherwise fascinating roundtable overseen by my Foreign Policy boss invited 20 significant participants in the war to talk about its lessons -- and didn't include a single Iraqi. (We've got a few pieces by Iraqis in the works for the Middle East Channel, but we could do better, too.) The bestselling books about Iraq also tend to focus on American military strategy, Washington policy debates, or Gen. David Petraeus, with only token appearances by Iraqis. Exceptions, such as Mark Kukis's Voices From Iraq, the late Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near, and Nir Rosen's exceptional reporting from inside the insurgencies only prove the rule.
This America-centric bias ensnares academics as well as policymakers. Take, for example, the best scholarly account to date of the impact of the surge, by my George Washington University colleague Steve Biddle, along with Jacob Shapiro and Jeffrey Friedman. Their article does a commendable job of dissecting the complex causation of the battlefield changes in 2006 to 2008, concluding that both local developments such as the Anbar Awakening and the surge contributed to the reduction in violence. But consider this: The underlying data for the analysis is based upon a dataset of "significant activities" (SIGACTs) recorded by Multinational Force-Iraq (MNF-I) headquarters and 70 interviews with coalition officers who fought in Iraq during this period. A collection of oral histories from Anbar Province, published by the Marine Corps University, makes it into the middle of a long footnote.
In other words, what is by consensus the best academic work on the subject evaluates the surge entirely based upon the experiences and records of the U.S. military. If MNF-I did not record an incident, it did not happen; if Iraqi voices were not taken into account by U.S. military officers on the scene, they do not exist. (I tried to incorporate Iraqi attitudes and voices into a strategic analysis of the war in this Security Studies article; judge for yourself if it succeeded.)
Myopia has consequences. Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations. The U.S. occupation also involved massive abuses and shameful episodes, from torture at Abu Ghraib Prison to a massacre of unarmed Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The moral and ethical imperative to incorporate Iraqi perspectives should be obvious.
The habit of treating Iraqis as objects to be manipulated rather than as fully equal human beings -- with their own identities and interests -- isn't just ethically problematic, it's strategically problematic. It helps to explain why so many American analysts failed to anticipate or to prevent the insurgency, why the political institutions the United States designed proved so dysfunctional, why Washington drew the wrong lessons from the Anbar Awakening and the surge, and why so many analysts exaggerated the likely effects of a military withdrawal.
Take the Anbar Awakening, which is widely considered a turning point in the war. The decision by key Sunni tribes and factions within the Sunni insurgency to turn against the more extreme al Qaeda factions took shape in 2006, long before the "surge" had been conceived, decided upon, or implemented. To their credit, some key American military commanders did manage to grasp what was happening, and were flexible enough to cut deals with groups who had recently been fighting against them. But American troop levels and strategy did not cause the Awakening.
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