There are many more than three lessons we should take home from the experience of invading and trying to occupy Iraq, but here are three that I think are particularly poignant, because they fly in the face of certain cherished American beliefs and assumptions.
They are: (1) the unlimited right to possess firearms is a benefit to a stable society; (2) fervent belief in religious doctrines and creeds is a benefit to a stable society; (3) the most important thing in life is winning.
- The Role of Firearms in Society.
In America, the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution has been interpreted by a vociferous minority as a license for all Americans to own as many firearms they can. The supporters of this viewpoint have taken it for granted that the more universal gun ownership becomes, the safer and more stable society becomes. However, what happened in Iraq is that after the invasion, the contents of large weapons caches were distributed around the country, both domestically and from foreign sources, so that military-grade weapons are available widely and easily to Iraqis to an extent they never have been to Americans. If the pro-gun position is correct, this should be producing a calming, stabilizing, effect on the country, but in fact, it is making it easier for for both acute and chronic rage and hatred to be translated into gunfire, bombs, and casualties.
No one can deny that, the widespread availability of firearms and other munitions is a major destabilizing factor. If, for example, the occupying force had made it an early, primary goal to guard all known weapons caches, to confiscate as many weapons as possible from Iraqis, and to protect the border as much as possible against the importation of foreign munitions, the situation would have almost certainly deteriorated more slowly and much less.
Iraq has been a laboratory for the 2nd Amendment. The experimental results are in, and they are quite clear: widespread availability of weaponry has been destabilizing and has interfered with the processes of democracy. To say it another way, Iraq has provided us with a lens to view our own society, with its very high gun ownership rate and very high gun violence rate. This is an important lesson that we should all try to remember.
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Religion as a Stabilizing Force
Most Americans probably believe that it is a good thing to have a strong religious thread through their lives and through their country. Even those whose personal beliefs are not strongly religious tend to assume that the institutionalized religious aspect of our culture is a force for good. But once again, the laboratory we have created in Iraq has produced experimental results that question this widely held assumption. This is a country with a religiously oriented culture. Percentage-wise, there are at least as many highly religious individuals there as here: people who see the hand of God in nearly everything they do or that happens in the world; people who make the strongest possible effort to live according to their religious beliefs and laws. However, what we see is that across the various sectors of Iraqi society, the level of stability is inversely proportional to the degree of religious belief. That is, the Kurds, who, although Sunni Muslims with a religious background similar to that of Sunni Arabs, live a relatively secular life, have the greatest peace and stability, while the Sunnis and Shi'ites, especially those with the strongest religious identities, have the least peace and stability, and in fact are the driving force behind most the disturbances there.
I believe that there is a second lesson that we can draw from the Iraqi experience along with the one already mentioned about gun control: religion, or at least the kind that would control people's lives with religious rules and laws, does not necessarily facilitate peace and stability. And this is another kind of lens to view our own society: perhaps the reason why the most highly religious regions of America tend to have the highest crime rates is connected to the much sharper distribution of violence in Iraq. At the very least, this lesson should teach us to avoid giving religion any special place, privilege, or authority over us as Americans; I think that it should give anyone pause if they use religion (its doctrine, experience, or authority) as a decision-making aid. In our relatively secular, relatively peaceful American day-to-day existence, it is easy to pray before deciding what to do, or to avoid things that are prima facie harmless simply on religious grounds. But Iraq demonstrates plainly and clearly that this can be very dangerous if carried to an extreme, and I think that many Americans need to understand that fact.
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Winning.
Although Americans have long given lip service to the concept that it's not important whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that counts, in their behavior they have shown in many ways that it's winning that matters. We see this in the endless sports competitions, in our political system, and in the workplace. In each case, various levels of chicanery are ignored, and it is always the winners who are praised, awarded, and emulated, not the one who cheats less or who is most transparently honest. In Iraq, the calculation was made that we would win if we invaded, and we did. Now that we are an occupying power, we have clung to winning and victory as the goal. We haven't made much progress even toward defining what victory means, but more importantly, we are suffering because we are not playing the game honestly. That is, we invaded under false pretenses, we have used illegitimate tactics, we have gone along with actions that violate international law and common decency. To a certain degree, the Iraqi insurgents may be deriving a perverse sense of justification by emulating our goals and our lack of concern for honesty and transparency. The people there seem to think that victory for their side, be it Sunni or Shi'a, is the proper goal, and that decency, fairness, tolerance, and concern for legality and transparency are unimportant once victory is achieved. Yet, it seems painfully obvious that this approach to the situation is steadily worsening the situation.
And once again, there is a lesson here for America. It really is important how you play the game. If we ever reach a point where we can, as a people, value a well-played sports event, a well-spent career, or a well-conducted electoral campaign as much as one in which our own side gets the most points, dollars, or votes, then I think we will be in a much better place. Again, the softer, cushier environment in which most Americans live makes it easy to ignore basic truths: that peace comes from within, that we can achieve more from cooperation than from competition, and that we are all, really, each other's brother. It is only in the harsh caldron of a violent insurgency where these facts become inescapable.
These are simply some thoughts that emerged during a post-prandial recovery on the day after Thanksgiving. On re-reading them before posting, they appear rather simplistic to me, but I still think there may be something to the idea of trying to make use of our experiences in Iraq as a kind of laboratory of ideologies, to help correct some of the social and personal tendencies here in America that have been a major cause of the Iraq situation, and that are also creating certain dangerous trends within our own country.