Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by Keen David

Author:Keen, David [Keen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300162745
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

When the Arab Spring sprung, it did not dissolve these interests overnight.

If we turn to the case of Iraq, we see very strongly the vested interests that have grown up around the military in what has been, in effect, a permanent emergency since at least 1974. That was the year of a Kurdish revolt, ruthlessly suppressed by Baghdad, and followed, from 1977, by mass deportations of Iraqi Shia into Iran.104 Iraq's devastating war with Iran in 1980–88 was followed by Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and resultant Western attempts to police and punish Iraq in the 1990s. Then there was the US-led invasion in 2003, and the conflict that ensued. Although these various crises are often treated as discrete events, the earlier conflicts actually fed strongly into those that followed. As so often, war begat war. It is a story that shows yet again that, once a huge war machine has been put in place, this machinery can be remarkably difficult to demobilise.

Iraq's army was expanded rapidly in the 1970s, along with the police and the Ba'ath party militia.105 In his classic book Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) argued plausibly that Iraq's machinery of internal repression, once it reached a certain size, seemed to ‘demand’ an external enemy. Meanwhile, Iraq's population was, for the most part, too terrified to question an arbitrary definition of the enemy handed down from the political leadership. A relatively minor border dispute with Iran rather suddenly assumed an importance that not many people would have guessed at a few years earlier.106 As Makiya put it:

Eventually expansion of the means of violence – army, police, security apparatuses, networks of informers, party militia, party and state bureaucracies – underwent the classic inversion: from being a means to an end, the elimination of opponents and exercise of raw power, they became horrific ends in themselves, spilling mindlessly across the borders that had once contained them. War, any war, it does not matter against whom, is a not unlikely outcome of the unbridled growth of the means of violence, particularly when it is so structured as to compromise literally masses of people in its terror.107

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