http://thisishell.net

I generally think Juan Cole is on the money about Middle East politics.  He speaks and reads Arabic and Persian, so he is not bound by the usual “expertise” which the overwhelming number of Middle East commentators are subject to.  Therefore, when he says that the US will be pulling out most of its troops from Iraq, I believe him.

Around 2-3 years ago, even with the US at the height of its nasty counter-insurgency, I remember some on the left saying, “The US got what it wanted – the oil under the ground – so did they really lose the war?”  True, it was not a Vietnam-style loss.  And as Cole points out, Iraq is currently in the US “sphere of influence.”  But that is not permanent, just as there are no such thing as permanent bases.  As Immanuel Wallerstein frequently points out (sometimes a little too confidently), Iraqi nationalism is probably the one thing we can count on in its future.  Unlike the liberal interventionist mantra of “ancient tribal/ethnic/religious hatreds” or the neo-conservative idea of “democracy, US style, at the barrel of a gun,” if we have to generalize something, I’d say it is a mutable, but easily reconstructed nationalism.

One thing that sometimes blinds US leftists from seeing the possibilities of an Iraq moving away from the US “sphere” is that we overestimate US power and underestimate how local politics actually shapes history.  Whether it is Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, or Iraq in 2010, we tend to simplify the ways in which the US tries to get what it wants, and how local operators, political entrepreneurs, and existing factions in those places use the US to get what they want.  As Cole points out, you cannot operate an empire on the old 19th century rules, simply because social and political mobilization in the Third World ended those forms of empire by the mid 20th century.  Something of that sort is even less likely today – you can run a successful guerrilla movement for next to nothing these days.  And you usually won’t learn that by reading the left press in the US, which also tends to exaggerate the power of the US – because who wants to oppose a declining superpower?

Much of left-wing history in the US is about exposing the “big lie” – usually it takes the form of a list of US-sponsored coups and their corresponding years.  I have nothing against all of us learning our own history, but in the process this sort of history erases the history of those places the coups took place.  All of the US left knows about 9/11, 1973, and the assumption of power by Pinochet in Chile, but can any of us name the political parties that brought Salvador Allende to power?  In other words, the left in the US has its own assumptions too, and at its worst, it is glaringly ahistorical.