Words and War

Most political catastrophes come from using the wrong words. Words influence not only how others see a problem but also how you think about the problem yourself. In the case of Iraq policy makers were mislead by the term state. They assumed that they were fighting a state when in fact they were fighting a mafia.

The essence of a regime is its ability to compel compliance with its will. A state compels compliance by organs of state: a system of laws administered by employees of the state. They are governed by rules and impersonally administered sanctions. At the top of every state must be some political entity, something that is governed by personal loyalties and ties, but the state itself it separate from the political entities at the top and outlasts changes in the governing political group. A mafia compels compliance by the ability to administer personal violence at the discretion of individuals and based not on impersonal rules but on highly personalistic loyalties.

Iraq had the appearance of being a state but had long since degenerated into a mafia that simply controlled an unusually large amount of territory. Therefore, when the ‘state’, the buildings and official rule making entities, were captured by the coalition forces at the end of just a few weeks of fighting the coalition mistakenly assumed that they had won the war. They assumed that without the things through which a state rules—rule making and enforcement organs, the ability to pay and fire the visible administrators of the state’s power—they assumed that the war was over.

But in fact they had only inconvenienced the enemy regime. The power of the enemy regime was never based on the administration of rules but on the maintenance the ability to sanction people for not doing what the leadership wants—the ability to kill people. Taking away the organs of the state inconvenienced rather than crippled the enemy regime.

We were also mislead by the connotations of the term guerrilla war. For us it meant fighting in the jungle as we did in Vietnam. There were no jungles in Iraq so we assumed we were home free. But what a guerilla hides behind are not trees but people. They trade on their willingness to sacrifice their own civilians and our own reluctance to inflict civilian casualties. Of course part of the reason that we miss this is that we again think of Iraq as a state and the people there as citizens. Our own soldiers would never think of blowing up our own citizens or using them as shields for enemy fire so they had trouble anticipating the use of such tactics by the enemy. It would have been easier to foresee and adjust to such developments had language not lead us to expect their ‘soldiers’ to act like soldiers. If we had remembered that they were Mafiosi we would have understood that the bulk of the people in Iraq are better thought of as prisoners or prey than as citizens. The willingness of our enemy to use their living bodies as protective shields or their dead bodies as propaganda tools would have been less surprising.

We would also have been better able to deal with the support—strikingly small as a percentage of the population though it is, all polls that I know of putting it as less than %15—that the insurgents enjoy. We should think of it more as an instance of mass Stockholm syndrome to be dealt with by liberating the hostage population from the threat of their captors than as a legitimate expression public opinion to be dealt with by negotiating with their captors.

Of course, among the cheif reasons for our mis-definition of the situation is our continuing attachment to the United Nations. By allowing the emisaries of mafia families and legitimate states to sit at the same table as equals, it inflates the status of the one and dimishes the status as well as thinking processes of the other.