Lawrence of Arabia and the Perils of State Building
by John Hulsman, Ph.D.
Heritage Lecture #900
October 6, 2005
heritage.org
Since the end of the Cold War, America's efforts at state building--be it in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, or Iraq--have suffered from a tendency to reinvent the wheel. That is, policymakers have acted as if these efforts have never been tried before, and consequently, vital lessons that might have been learned as to how the process might better work have instead been neglected. For example, the United States is not the first country to try to forge stable political entities in the Middle East: The lessons of British efforts at state building in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I have been almost entirely neglected, to our peril.
With serious problems arising from the efforts to transform Iraq into a stable democratic society, it pays to look at the lessons of history--which leads us to Lawrence of Arabia and British efforts in the Middle East in the early 20th century....
The Early Career of Lawrence of Arabia....
Lawrence's Genius in Dealing with the Arab World....
Working with the Grain of History: Lawrence's Political Philosophy....
...In August 1917, at the height of the Arab war for independence from the Turks, Lawrence prepared his "Twenty-seven Articles" for British military intelligence as a practical manual for political officers, explaining how best to work with their Arab allies. In so doing, Lawrence did nothing less than create a template for working with developing peoples in times of both war and peace.
The "Twenty-seven Articles" were personal conclusions arrived at gradually while at work in the Hejaz and put on paper for British beginners in dealing with Arab armies. I think it is clear that they have a far broader application for use today. For what makes the "Twenty-seven Articles" so arresting is that Lawrence accomplished something too often neglected by today's policymakers: He grounded high political theory in the Burkean soil of very practical day-to-day operational examples. In other words, theory flowed from practice, and not the other way around....
...The Ghost of Lawrence: Explaining the Difficulties of America's Efforts at State Building in Post-Saddam Iraq
In assessing America's present-day experience in democracy building in Iraq, it is important to keep Lawrence's general lessons regarding state building in mind.
Lesson #1: It is critical to accurately assess the unit of politics in a failed state.
In the case of modern Iraq, the unit of politics is religious and ethnic, with the three primary building blocks being the Shiia (60 percent of the population), the formerly ruling Sunnis (20 percent), and the Kurds (around 20 percent). Early utopian efforts to ignore this reality and talk of supporting "Iraqis" rather than working with Iraq's genuine building blocks has died down, blunted by the gloomy day-to-day political realities.
Lesson #2: To work against the grain of history is to fail at state building.
To immediately and artificially impose Western economic, social, sociological, historical, and anthro-pological standards on a failed non-Western state while disregarding their own unique culture and history is to court disaster. American efforts to limit the role of Islam in the new Iraq did little more than alienate Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the key representative of the Shiia, who Washington slowly came to see as broadly sharing American goals in Iraq.
Sistani, unlike Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, has shunned direct power. His representatives have placed Islam at the center of the Iraqi interim constitution, saying that although it is the primary source of law, it is not the only one. In retrospect, this, coupled with a generous bill of rights, is the best political outcome America could have hoped for. Antagonizing Sistani by initial dreamy hopes of some sort of Western separation of church and state almost succeeded in alienating the man who has become, interest-wise, America's greatest ally in the country.
Lesson #3: Local elites must be made stakeholders in any successful state-building process.
In disbanding the Iraqi army, Paul Bremer, the head of the allied coalition, unwittingly laid the groundwork for a period in which it was the American-led coalition, rather than a fusion of American and Iraqi security forces, that became responsible for the security of the country. This was perhaps America's greatest mistake in state building in Iraq, for it meant that the West, rather than Iraqis themselves, took the lead in rebuilding the country.
As such, the Bush Administration walked directly into the trap of political legitimacy. Every Iraqi who helped the dominant Americans could be branded a collaborator rather than a patriotic citizen helping to rebuild their country. It was not until January 2005, with the Iraqi elections and increased efforts to quickly build up Iraqi security forces, that the political game of catch-up that this blunder ushered in began to wane.
Lesson #4: Avoid a cookie-cutter approach to state building.
The Western approach to state building in the 1990s operated under a depressingly familiar rhythm. Whether the case is Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the West attempted to reconfigure centralized control over a failed state without looking at the reasons such a state came apart in the first place. It is unsurprising that such flawed analysis has led to disaster time and time again.
If any general rule does hold true, it must be that a more bottom-up and decentralized political outcome (federation or confederation) ought to prove more effective in restoring a state that fell apart because of centrifugal forces in the first place. Neoconservatives, who have looked to either Chalabi or Ayad Allawi to be a new strong man in Iraq, miss the vital point that the state's falling apart in the first place is emblematic of the need for a more decentralized outcome--if the new regime is to outlast the American occupation.
Lesson #5: A degree of humility ought to be professed while state building.
Western leaders should lower the stakes following a successful intervention and tone down the rhetoric when embarking on post-war state-building efforts. In the modern era, policies are judged by the rhetoric in which they are packaged. By promising too much, Western leaders can be held to a standard that they cannot possibly meet. Worse, it is a standard of the West's own making. The goal should always be to leave a people better than they were before the state-building enterprise. Such modest and achievable goals would do more to resurrect the badly damaged notion of state building than any other single act.
Lesson #6: Beware of the Imperial Trap.
This corollary to the importance of local legitimacy dictates that a Western great power must know when to let the local elites take the reins in the state-building process. This is the ultimate litmus test as to whether a state-building effort has been successful--when the Western powers depart, the new political entity is capable of self-government.
As Lawrence urged in his Round Table article, Faisal's new government in Damascus should be accounted a success only if it became a full-fledged member of the British Commonwealth, drawing on British advice and know-how but practicing domestic self-government. To leave too early is to see the effort at state building collapse. To stay too long is to practice top-down imperialism, meaning that Western troops are doomed to stay in an inhospitable climate; in such a case, any local government will be seen as a Western stooge.
Timing is absolutely critical to the successful state-building process. In the case of Iraq, this is probably the biggest task still confronting the United States. To leave before enough Iraqi troops are trained to bolster the new regime or before the final constitutional settlement is worked out is to court disaster. However, to linger over-long is to become a recruiting poster for al-Qaeda, with its shrill charge of America as "Crusader Imperialist."
Lesson #7: A Western country should engage in the arduous process of state building only when primary national security interests are at stake.
In the Great War, Lawrence became convinced that the defeat of Turkey was possible through energizing the Arab Revolt and that this defeat was greatly beneficial to a hard-pressed Britain. American efforts at state building ought to be discussed in similar hardheaded terms. The 1990s American efforts at state building display an undifferentiated quality in terms of American national interests. The Clinton Administration never met a failed state it did not want to intervene in, however peripheral to American interests (Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia).
The differentiation of when and where to engage in state building, guided by national interest calculations, will stop an overextended (and violently disliked) America from frittering away for little gain the competitive advantages that have made it the dominant power in the world. Sometimes the answer is no. As John Quincy Adams put it, "America is the well-wisher to the freedom of all. She is the guarantor of only her own." State building is simply too complicated to be attempted more than necessary--it should be engaged in only when primary American interests are at stake.
Lesson #8: At root, almost all state-building problems are political and not military in nature. With political legitimacy, military problems can be solved.
During the Great War, Lawrence intuitively realized that success was certain if the people of the Hejaz united behind the Arabs' guerrilla campaign, not divulging the whereabouts of Faisal's legions to the Turks. Likewise in Iraq, the insurgency will wane if the people of the country come to believe that the insurgents are doing great harm to their country, to their government, rather than to the American occupiers.
The problem, then, is primarily political and psychological. If they can be persuaded (by their local elites) to believe the insurgency is crippling the new Iraqi state, there is little doubt that intelligence regarding the whereabouts of the insurgents will improve dramatically. On the other hand, without local political legitimacy, no amount of military effort will overcome the basic problem.
These are the precepts that Lawrence established. They are the yardstick that must be used to judge whether future state-building efforts in Iraq lead to success or failure.
John C. Hulsman, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. This paper was presented at a German Council on Foreign Relations Conference, "Unprepared? Germany in a Globalizing World," in Berlin on March 12, 2005.
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