Iraq was all about blood

What explains the greatest western foreign policy disaster since 1204?

This month marks the 20^th anniversary of the greatest western foreign policy disaster since the Fourth Crusade. It was the pre-eminent modern-day example of folly, driven by wishful thinking, utopianism and a lack of interest in history and how human societies differ. This was mostly carried out by good people, including our own Tony Blair, and promoted by thoughtful and humanitarian commentators who thought they were making the world a better place.

The White House regime which brought chaos and misery to Iraq were most of all entranced by The Weekly Standard, the now-defunct magazine most associated with neoconservative foreign policy. Had any of them read The American Conservative instead, they might have avoided the whole tragedy. In particular they ought have read Steve Sailer’s ‘the Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, printed in the run-up to the invasion and in which the author made a seemingly curious argument for why nation-building in Iraq would fail — its high rates of cousin marriage. 

Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, Sailer wrote that: ‘By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges’, cousin marriage ‘makes the development of civil society more difficult’. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.

Even those with a cursory knowledge of the country knew that Iraq was split between Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds in the north, each group’s area of dominance roughly corresponding to three former Ottoman provinces. However, these were further subdivided into ‘smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families — each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds’, in total about 150 tribes comprising some 2,000 clans.

Saddam’s politics were mired in blood, in both senses. He came from the al-Bu Nasir, a tribe comprising some 25,000 people based in the town of Tikrit, and his regime was filled with his relatives. His political career had begun in 1957 when the 20-year-old had joined the revolutionary Ba’ath (‘Resurrection’) Party, following his uncle Kharaillah Tulfha, who had fought against the British in the Second World War. Tulfha would become his father-in-law, for Saddam also married his first cousin, although he later took a second wife. Family life wasn’t entirely harmonious, and the man who introduced that couple, Saddam’s food taster, was later stabbed to death by the dictator’s psychotic eldest son Uday at a party thrown by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

The unfortunate food taster was an Assyrian Christian, and within Saddam’s regime religious minorities could rise high, as is often the case in empires, because they presented no threat. His foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was also a Christian, his birth name being Mikhail Yuhanna.

The family was everything in Saddam’s Iraq. Mark Weiner wrote in The Rule of the Clan of countries governed by ‘clannism’ that: ‘These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks, especially those of kinship, and traditional ideals of patriarchal family authority. In nations pervaded by clannism, government is co-opted for purely factional purposes.’  The inevitable result of clannism is kin-based corruption whereby resources, positions and other rewards are monopolised by family groups. In these societies, Weiner wrote, ‘the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organisation’.

The Weekly Standard was called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, but presumably there weren’t that many White House staffers reading the American Conservative at the time, a publication started by Pat Buchanan, the great Republican critic of neocon foreign policy. So the Coalition blundered into a disastrous invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wrecking Iraq and leaving many areas newly-divided along sectarian lines, while minorities like the Christians and Mandaeans were driven almost to extinction.

The cousin marriage question was later taken up in the National Review by Stanley Kurtz, who wrote: ‘Instead of encouraging cultural exchange, forging alliances, and mitigating tensions among competing groups, parallel-cousin marriage tends to wall off groups from one another and to encourage conflict between and among them.’

According to Kurtz, writing in a later piece for the same Weekly Standard, western analysts purposely ignored the tribal nature of Arab society for political reasons, influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism and anthropologist E.L. Peters, who argued that conflict in the region was not about who was related to whom, but about resources. ‘With many anthropologists already drawn to Marxism in the 1970s, Peters’s theory found a receptive audience,’ Kurtz wrote. But as an explanation of how the world works, Darwin usually trumps Marx.

Kurtz cited nineteenth-century British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, who did much to develop the study of kinship. In Tylor’s view intermarriage was used as a path to social peace, a feature of medieval European history where brides were exchanged between warring clans, tribes and kingdoms. The downside was that it weakened solidarity within the group.

Countries without cousin marriage have far stronger civic institutions while in contrast extended families make civil society, honest government and democracy difficult, since the aim of each individual in attaining power is to help out his clan. Corruption is the norm because in such a scenario it makes no sense not to be corrupt, since everyone else will be helping their clan. That is why there is such a strong link between a country’s corruption levels, as measured by groups such as Transparency International, and the level of cousin marriage.

Kurtz noted that this sort of clannishness was most common in Islamic societies, but rare in historically Christian countries. The reason for this is that the Western Church purposefully eroded the power of the clan for theological reasons (although materialist motives might explain some of it). 

The link between Christianity (especially Catholicism) and low levels of clannishness is very strong; Avner Greif of Stanford University wrote in 2005 that ‘Among the anthropologically defined 356 contemporary societies of Euro-Asia and Africa, there is a large and significant negative correlation between Christianization (for at least 500 years) and the absence of clans and lineages.’

The Church’s cousin marriage ban caused Europeans to become less clannish, with huge consequences for politics in later centuries. A 2012 study by Michael A Woodley and Edward Bell, called ‘Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations’ found ‘that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop’. 

This was also the subject of a 2016 paper from Nottingham University, which explored how the Church had laid the foundations of democracy centuries earlier. The author, Jonathan F. Schulz, wrote that: ‘This research advances the hypothesis and empirically demonstrates that the strength of extended kin-groups (as proxied by cousin marriage) is most likely at the core of the large developmental differences in institutional quality and democracy across countries: excessive reliance and loyalty, nepotism, violent conflict and other contingencies of strong extended kin-groups impede the proper functioning of formal institutions. Furthermore, this study suggests that a specific historic event – the Church ban on consanguineous marriage (marriage of the same blood) – constituted a critical juncture leading Europe to a special path in its economic and institutional development.’

Outmarriage changes the relative relatedness between individuals; a member of a clan is more closely related to a cousin than, say, an Englishman is to his cousin, while the Englishman is also more closely related to any random unrelated Englishman. Outmarriage also increases interaction with wider society and so ‘may change values towards a more general morality’. Schulz estimated that a 10-percentage point increase in cousin marriage is associated with a 3-point lower democracy score, a significant effect.

The relationship between cousin marriage, corruption and democracy is now much better known, and no one has done more to spread this idea, that Europe is different because of the Church’s influence, than Joseph Henrich, with his masterpiece The Weirdest People in the World. At the time, though, most people tended to focus on religion or resources.

After the 9/11 attacks it was understandable that many people attributed the Middle East’s various problems to Islam, but family structures explain far more. Where there is a religious link is that Islamic authorities were not determined to break these families, as the Catholic Church was. The irony of Bush’s disastrous war is that, shocked by a religiously-inspired attack on American soil, he invaded a secular regime and handed the country, inevitably, to Islamists.

Such movements emerge so successfully in clannish countries because religion is the only force that can overcome deep-seated tribal divisions. One of the attractions of political Islam is that Islam is seen — with good reason — as being a force for reducing corruption and improving public morals. 

A decade after the Coalition invasion, one of the many jihadi groups which had emerged in the chaos were able to use the Syrian Civil War to become something far larger and more terrifying. The Islamic State of Iraq had been behind various atrocities, such as the Baghdad church massacre of 2010, but after the eruption of the rebellion against Bashar Assad were able to expand, now as ISIS, into a quasi-state controlling more than 100,000 square metres of territory.

Their greatest victory, the conquest of Mosul, exemplified the problems facing low-trust societies. The Americans had given the Iraqi Army a vast amount of money, some $25.5billion to supply 800,000 troops, over 4,000 armoured vehicles, 137 helicopters and 357 tanks. In Mosul in June 2014 they had more than 20,000 soldiers available, yet when just a few hundred ISIS rebels moved in, the Iraqi Army fled, leaving most of their weapons in the hands of the enemy. Meanwhile in Baghdad a familiar pattern was emerging.

On the invasion of Iraq the optimistic centre-Left and centre-Right, often the nicest and most reasonable people in the world, were woefully wrong; those on the fringes, including most self-declared socialists, were absolutely right. I’m a great believer in history being a black comedy, and naturally almost all prominent advocates of the Iraq War have gone onto further career success, while Steve Sailer is even more of a fringe figure and one not mentioned in polite society (although any conservative worth reading, reads him.)

There is always a danger of over-correcting, and there is no cast iron law as to whether intervention is good or bad. The West was right to intervene in Bosnia, and I feel it is right to support Ukraine, although I’m horrified and alarmed by the death toll and destruction, and the dangers of escalation. Tony Blair did the right thing in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, for which he should receive greater credit, and something which no doubt encouraged his great Babylonian hubris. Iraq, however, was a bloody disaster, and a reminder that politicians ought to read widely before they set upon sending other people to kill in order to make the world a better place.