sahlins the state-of-nature effect

8/4/2019 Sahlins the State-Of-Nature Effect

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/sahlins-the-state-of-nature-effect 1/626 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 3, JUNE 2011

Marshall SahlinsMarshall Sahlins is Charles

F. Grey Distinguished Service

Professor of Anthropology

Emeritus at Chicago

University. His email [email protected].

IraqThe state-of-nature effect

Iraq was once a remarkable mélange of beliefs, customs and

traditions; the killings [at Our Lady of Salvation Church,

Baghdad] on Sunday drew another border in a nation defined

more by war, occupation and deprivation. Identities have hard-

ened; diversity has faded.1

‘Another border in a nation defined more by war’:clearly sectarian identities are not just surviving forms

of traditional diversities. Largely configured and differ-

entially advantaged in colonialism, become then the par-

tisan factions of postcolonial politics, and embedded now

in agonistic global forces of capitalism and imperialism,

the sectarian identities of religion and ethnicity in states

such as Iraq incorporate in their own definition the fear

and contempt of the other that too readily turns difference

into violence.2

Nor is Iraq, then, your grandfather’s insurgency –

although the US Counterinsurgency (COIN) manual, with

its shopworn definitions and examples, assumes it is (US

Army & Marine Corps 2007). Iraq is not simply a war of

resistance or national liberation. Neither is it a classic civilwar. It is many-sided, not two-sided, with the government

itself a factional participant endowed with the advantages

of state power. At the local levels of the village and the

city neighbourhood, a great variety of parties, recruited

on different grounds and espousing diverse causes, sow

violence from every quarter. Something of a Hobbesian

bellum omnia contra omnes, the conflict has the quality

of an up-to-date state of nature – although it is the effect

of a coercive sovereign power, the American invasion,

rather than the precondition of it. With its ever-shifting

and pullulating factionalism, its contending ideologies

and reconfiguring identities, its authoritative and subaltern

discourses, its cultural hybridizations and partisan primor-

dializations, one might indeed think of the Iraq War as a postmodern state of nature.

Consider just one of the myriad such incidents chroni-

cled by Nir Rosen (2010) and Dexter Filkins (2009) in

recent comprehensive works on American military incur-

sions in the Middle East:

In April, 2006 the [Sadrist] Mahdi Army attacked a number of

high-ranking [Sunni] insurgents, including former Baathists

in Baghdad’s Adhamiya neighborhood. They captured the

suspects and left with them. Irate locals began shooting at

the members of the Iraqi National Guard (ING), and they

accused both the [Iranian-created] Badr Organization and

the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of being involved. In factit was a Mahdi Army operation. In the days that followed,

Iraqi police fired randomly in Adhamiya. They also shot at

generators and power cables to punish the residents…It was

more evidence to Sunnis that the state was at war with them

(Rosen 2010: 95).

Note the framing of the already polymorphic local

violence in terms of national and regional forces. In a

sermon a few days later, an elderly cleric set the neigh-

bourhood travails on an even larger scale: ‘This is how the

[American] occupiers want to divide the Iraqi people’, he

said. ‘This is how they want to plant sectarian division’

(Rosen 2010: 96).

Stasis: Ancient and postcolonial versionsFor all its postcolonial and postmodern attributes, however,

the current travails of Iraq in fundamental ways resemble

similar conflicts going back to the original history of

heteronomous democracies dissolving into indigenous

anarchies: particularly the civil strife ( stasis) at Corcyra

in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, as famously

described by Thucydides (1996: 3.70-85). Indeed, Hobbes

was the first to translate Thucydides directly into English;

and, as is sometimes remarked, his own notion of the

state of nature was largely inspired by the ancient histo-

rian’s narrative of the Corcyrean horror. But what notably

draws our attention now is the amount of cultural work

– political, economic, military and ideological – that went

into the violent disintegration of the Corcyrean polis. Inways much like the effects of the American invasions of

Iraq and Afghanistan, the internal conflicts in Corcyra

and other Greek cities were magnified out of proportion

by external interventions, with the similar consequence of

transforming local diversities into lethal identities.

B E N J A M I N

B O R E N

/ U S A R M Y

Fig. 1. US soldiers hand

out toys to children during

a Human Terrain Team site

survey mission in Kilabeen,

Iraq, 15 Sep. 2009.


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In Corcyra, an oligarchic party revolted against the

existing democracy. When the Spartans intervened on the

part of the privileged few and the Athenians in favour of

the democratic many, the matters at issue were amplified

far beyond all civic considerations and formulated rather

in the terms of absolute causes-to-die-for. Corcyra had

become the site of a contest for pan-Hellenic domina-

tion, and accordingly an arena of oppositions that were

effectively existential and uncompromisable: equality

versus plutocracy, imperialism versus independence, even

freedom versus slavery.Death then ‘raged in every shape’, Thucydides (1996:

3.81) wrote, and its indiscriminate toll made victims too

of justice and religion, kinship and morality. Licensed one

way or another by the showdown of absolute values, many

preexisting scores were now settled in blood. Sons turned

against fathers; suppliants were slain on the temple altars.

As I read the text, the extreme violence was largely the

counterpart of the redefinition of all sorts of privilege and

inequality as supreme political evils, notably on the part of

the democratic party that unleashed the final massacre. So

creditors were slain by their debtors, said Thucydides, for

crimes ‘of attempting to put down the democracy’ ( ibid.).

The violence was transgressive insofar as the issues were

transcendent. The specific conflicts of the adversaries had

been folded into oppositions of greater stakes and higher

purposes; accordingly, local animosities became global

enmities.

To judge from certain examples of civil strife in

Aristotle’s Politics (1958: 1303b17ff), something

analogous to the patronage politics of contemporary

postcolonial regimes could generalize disputes within

Ancient Greece’s privileged classes into factional conflicts

that mobilized large bodies of the populace on each side. It

is also of interest in relation to postcolonial sectarian strife

that among the causes of stasis adduced by Aristotle were

‘election intrigues’ and ‘dissimilarity of elements in the

composition of the state’ (1958: 1303a9).For his own part, Thucydides was a student of the soph-

ists’ fateful contrast of physis and nomos, opposing a cov-

etous human ‘nature’ to a vulnerable man-made ‘culture’

– an unhappy ontology from which the social sciences still

suffer the effects. So the ancient historian found the true

source of the atrocities he described in ‘a lust for power

arising from greed and ambition’ (1996: 3.82). Throughout

Thucydides’ History, this inherent covetousness appears as

the basis of human law, or else as the force that overthrows

it. (‘In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the

cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and

now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in pas-

sion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all supe-

riority’ (1996: 3.84).) Yet by another reading, the notionof a natural basis of cultural order and disorder could well

be reversed, for the disorder was clearly a cultural effect.

Considering the large external forces brought to bear in

Corcyra on the many civic differences, complemented by

an ideological work so intense that ‘words had to change

their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now

given them’ (1996: 3.82), one might preferably conclude

that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.

And may not the like be said of modern versions of the

ancient Corcyrean prototype among postcolonial societies

of South Asia, Indonesia and Africa, as well as the Middle

East? There follow a few summary examples.

Veena Das’ (1996: 178,195) study of the massacre of a

Sikh community in West Delhi following the assassina-tion of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards is a kind of

microcosm of the state-of-nature effect. In a description

reminiscent of Thucydides, Das tells how local antago-

nisms were integrated in the larger religious and nation-

alist narratives of the assassination and thereby given a

fatal impulse.3 The slaughter was, nevertheless, selective,

in that it engaged factions that were already at odds; a

number of Sikh groups escaped with few or no deaths, in

some cases because they were protected by Hindu neigh-

bours. The primary victims were unusually wealthy Sikhs,

whose ostentatious display of their wealth had aroused

the envy of the poorer Hindu group that led the assault.

In addition, they had built a temple on land the Hindus

considered theirs. Yet note that such antagonisms of them-

selves did not lead to deadly violence – nothing more than

stone-throwing at the worst – until they were conflatedwith larger national forces and issues. The trigger was a

drunken exchange between the headmen of the two com-

munities, who had been competing for the patronage of an

important Congress Party official and the access to state

resources this would give them. In the aftermath of Mrs

Gandhi’s death, state power in the form of the police, sup-

posedly implementing the law, joined in the attack on the

Sikhs. Now, the whole tragedy was played out on the level

of the nation – although at the same time in kinship terms.

The Hindu assailants represented themselves as sons of

Mrs Gandhi and their local Sikh victims as her assassins.

‘[B]lood must be avenged with blood,’ they cried, ‘and

you have killed our mother’ (Das 1996: 178,195).

Describing a similar but more powerful amplification of

local disputes into nationwide riots in South Asia, Stanley

Tambiah labels the process ‘transvaluation,’ referring thus

to the assimilation of particular resentments ‘to a larger,

collective, more enduring and therefore less context-bound

cause or interest’ (Tambiah 1996: 192). Specific incidents

of parochial import get absorbed in burning issues of race,

class, religion and/or ethnic differences – which inspire

all the more hostility in the measure they are abstract and

unconditional. Tambiah also notes a corollary process of

‘focalization’, in which clashes are cumulatively aggre-

gated into larger combats only indirectly connected to

the initial triggering incidents, the particular character of

which gets lost in the expansion. But perhaps not altogether. Note again the idiom of kinship in the retaliation on local

Sikhs for the death of the Indian prime minister: ‘you have

killed our mother’. The wider national crime is redoubled

as the violation of the deepest interpersonal relationships.

Indeed this kind of reciprocity between microhistories and

macroidentities is a key structural dynamic of escalating

violence, as Bruce Kapferer (2001: 53) so well observes

in the Sri Lankan context:

A seemingly minor altercation, for example, through its

dynamic has the effect of exposing or bringing forth its ethnic

and religious possibility (the larger more abstract imaginations

of reality that are already implicit in everyday activity), which

then become the principles for establishing the relations of

rioting persons and the spread of the conflict. . .The sources

of the conflict may be in economic hardship or political con-text, but once they are realized in violent acts there is pressure

towards their ultimate organization and expression in ethnic

and religious terms. This is so, I suggest, because the social

orders of economic and political life in local contexts engage

processes which are connected to the more encompassing asso-

ciational principles of Sinhala and Buddhist identity.

An account of the modern history of Sri Lanka would be

a veritable textbook of the state-of-nature effect, the ago-

nistic disintegration of the society through the intervention

of transcendent causes and external forces. Here I can only

gesture towards a few relevant themes, beginning with the

classical British colonial moves of drawing ethnic bounda-

ries and politicizing ethnic differences – which ultimately

issued not only in the bloody enmity of Sinhalas andTamils, but in violent fragmentation and cruel reprisals

within each side. For those (Americans) who think that

democracy is elections and that elections cure all, it is

notable that the cycles of violence have long been closely

linked to the electoral process. Among the many reasons is



an outsized government economic sector, largely recruited

through patronage, which effectively puts the profit and

livelihoods of people across the class spectrum at elec-

toral risk, even as it has offered opportunities for turning

political loyalty into factional thuggery. Then there is the

development of a militant, nationalist Buddhism, so well

recounted in Tambiah’s Buddhism betrayed , that disen-

gaged the religion from its traditional ethical moorings

and synthesized it with the defence of Sinhala language,

culture and territory. Militating for these causes, radical

monks appear as protagonists of anti-government revoltsas well as anti-Tamil politics, and a famously non-violent

Buddhism becomes a ‘rhetorical mobilizer of volatile

masses and. . .an instigator of spurts of violence’ (Tambiah

1992: 92). The civil strife, moreover, takes on further

cosmic dimensions when linked to partisan re-readings of

ancient Sinhala chronicles, not to mention performances

of popular rituals, that can assimilate Sinhalese presidents

to heroic kings and Tamil others to traditional demons

(Kapferer 1998; Obeyesekere 1993).

Finally, some of the worst instances of civil strife have

followed upon direct foreign intervention: in the form not

only of Indian arms and political pressure, but also of the

economic liberalization of the late 1970s, as pushed by the

IMF and World Bank, among the usual deleterious effects

of which was a widening disparity between rich and poor.

Generalizing on the insertion of Sri Lanka and other post-

colonies in such international forces of contention and

disruption, Kapferer tellingly observes that ‘the dominant

form of global conflict is now civil war’ (2001: 36).

How ‘the occupiers divide the Iraqi people’4

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 set off a ter-

rible civil strife in which a myriad of local forces killed

each other, often in the name of global causes. For all its

nation-building ideology, US policy supposed Iraq to be

historically and inevitably divided into opposed religious

and ethnic groups, mainly Sunni, Shia and Kurd, but alsoTurkmen, Arab, and others, such that national unity would

now have to be a project of ‘reconciliation’ involving par-

ties essentially defined by their differences. The ‘coalition

of the willing’ (foreigners) would have to forge a coali-

tion of the unwilling (Iraqis). Indeed there was a lot of

essentialism informing the invaders’ conquer-and-divide

policies – which ignored a long history of intermarriage

between the various groups, the mix of Shiites and Sunnis

in the Iraqi army during the war with Iran, the contin-

gent of Shiites in the ruling Ba’ath Party, and other such

preexisting conditions of national coherence.

The Shiites, for all that they were victimized by the

Sunni-dominated Saddam regime, were rather mistrusted

by the American occupying power because of their supposed ties to Iran. This was in fact true of the Badr bloc of

Shia, but they were then bitter opponents of the large Mahdi

Army of the Sadrists, also Shia. As for the so-called ‘Sunni

Arabs’ who had been deposed from their dominant control

of the state, they were largely and erroneously supposed

by the initial American governing authority to be cotermi-

nous with Saddamists, the Ba’ath Party, and the disbanded

Iraqi army. This helped make the Sunni insurgents (aka

‘Ba’athists’) the toughest and most ruthless of America’s

opponents in the early years of the war, more dangerous

than the Mahdi Army. In the so-called ‘Awakening’ of

2006, however, American policies toward the Sunnis were

reversed, as it was discovered that Sunni tribes in Anbar

province and western Baghdad had turned against theradical jihadists, particularly al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,

also Sunnis but largely of foreign origin. This alliance of

mainstream Sunnis with the Americans never sat well with

a central government that was now dominated by Shiites

and long engaged in eliminating the Sunnis from political

power – often literally so by killing or ethnically cleansing

them. Left to the strained mercies of the Shiites and the

vengeance of the jihadists when the Americans began to

withdraw, the Awakening movement dissolved into tribal

fragments, some of them not above attacking each other.

From the beginning, Iraq’s civil strife had been marked

by an ever-widening Sunni-Shia faultline and at the same

time a progressive devolution of the violence to a variety

of locally-organized tribal segments, political parties,

neighbourhood militias and criminal gangs – entities that

were often indistinguishable from one another. US jour-nalist Dexter Filkins lists 103 different insurgent groups

claiming responsibility for attacks on Americans and

Iraqis between May and October 2005 (Filkins 2009: 234-

38). For the week ending 7 October, there were on average

107 such attacks per day – and this was before the so-

called Sunni-Shiite ‘civil war’ of 2006. As already noted,

the quotidian violence of the street was joined by various

government forces, including the national, regional and

local police; the Iraqi Security Forces; the National Guard;

and commando units (cum death squads) under the control

of different government offices, particularly the Ministry

of Interior. Many of these official combatants, moreover,

were moonlighting for the two major Shiite militias, the

Mahdi Army and the Iranian-affiliated Badr Organization.

In Iraq, writes James Fearon (2007: 6), the police ‘look

like militia members in uniform’ – probably because they

are.

For all the talk of ‘civil war’ following the destruction

of the important Shiite shrine of Al-Askari at Samarra in

2006, the engagement of a wide spectrum of armed groups

practising a large variety of brutal tactics was more like a

war of each against all. Only that their antagonisms were

rendered all the more irreconcilable by being inscribed

in the primordial terms of the conflicts that originally

divided the Sunni cause from the Shia. Sermons and rituals

directly related the present struggles to the cruel battles of

succession to the caliphate that had broken out betweendescendants and companions of the Prophet. It was as if

the current sectarian killings were the sequel to assassina-

tions and usurpations of ancient memory.

Then again, the sectarian antagonisms were compounded

by their engagement in an international field of contending

forces. Initially stirred up by the American occupation,

the hostilities within Iraq motivated the interventions of

regional powers on behalf of their co-religionists – which

is also to say in their own national interests. Most notably,

Saudi Arabia on the Sunni side and Iran on the Shiite were

fighting something of a proxy war in Iraq. Here again a

certain dialogue of escalating violence came into effect,

as the internal conflicts exacerbated the opposition of the

external powers; and vice versa, the arms and warriorsfrom other countries made the Iraqi schisms all the worse.

Indeed, in March 2011, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab

Emirates sent 2,000 troops to Bahrain to defend a Sunni-

dominated ruling group under protest from the Shiite

majority of that island nation. In response, Shiites of Sadrist

persuasion in Iraq staged mass demonstrations against the

Saudis: which thereupon aggravated Iraq’s ruling Shiites,

who themselves had been fighting the Mahdi Army of the

Sadr movement.

Finally, as the American invasion became increasingly

configured as an Islamophobic crusade, the reciprocal

amplification of conflicts of lesser and greater structural

order achieved global proportions. Relevant here is the

direct relation between the scale of the contending forcesand the high-mindedness of their opposing causes. The

causes become as abstract and uncompromisable as the

conflict is universal, the two together giving transcen-

dental purposes to parochial differences. George W. Bush

set this course towards transgressive violence by declaring



1. Shadid, A. 2010. Church

attack seen as strike at Iraq’s

core. New York Times, 1

November.

2. This article is

fundamentally indebted to

the work of Bruce Kapferer

(especially 1998, 2001) and

Stanley Tambiah (1992,

1996) on sectarian violence

in South Asian postcolonial

states. Further debts to

classical anthropologicalconcepts are noted in an

earlier article (Sahlins 2005)

on the dialogical relations

of microhistories and

macrohistories.

3. Commenting on

this aspect of Das’ study,

Jonathan Spencer writes:

‘Local political antagonisms

were recast in the language

of national antagonisms:

the capillaries of everyday

agonism…became channels

for violence’ (2007: 133).

4. The discussion of

Iraq that follows is almost

exclusively concerned

with civil strife south of the Kurdish area. Another

abbreviation is the focus on

the decisive American role,

leaving aside the UK and

other ‘Coalition’ forces.

5. Dagher 2009.

6. Ibid .

7. Washington Post 2007.

14 September.

8. Dagher 2009.

9. Ibid .

10. Seemingly random

violence has affected

several professions: at least

450 academics have been

killed since the invasion;

many more have fled the

country. NEAR (Network for Education and Academic

Rights) 2011. New

crackdown on Iraqi academic

elite. 21 April. http://www.

nearinternational.org/alert-

detail.asp?alertid=588.

11. Wing, J. 2009.

Columbia University charts

ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

EPIC (Education for Peace in

Iraq Center), 26 November;

Guler, C. 2009. Baghdad

divided. International

Relations and Security

Network (ISN) Security

Watch, 9 November. http://

www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/

Detail/?lng=en&id=109316.

12. BRussells Tribunal

2006. Research on death

squads in Iraq. December,

p. 9. http://www.

brussellstribunal.org.

the invasion of Iraq in the rhetoric of the Christian cru-

sades, a misstep he then doubled and redoubled by con-

structions of the invasion as a crucial battle in ‘the global

war on terror’, as a defence of ‘freedom’ against an enemy

that despises it, and ultimately as a showdown optimus

maximus between ‘good and evil’. Fronted by al-Qaeda

in Mesopotamia, the Islamic opposition knew how to

respond in kind by bringing in jihadist fighters from many

foreign parts to attack the infidels – who could be Shiites

as well as Americans. They also seriously troubled the

Sunni areas in which they were eventually installed, notonly with the imposition of rigid sharia law, but also by

assassinating local leaders and demanding their daughters

as wives. (This was a major reason for the Sunni overtures

to the Americans that created the Awakening Movement.)

Neither did the American ‘homeland’ escape the recip-

rocal effects. The country is now beset with a spreading

Islamophobia, the latest symptom of which is a proposed

congressional witch-hunt of ‘terrorists’, inspired no doubt

by nostalgia for the late anti-communism.

COIN of the realm‘We’ve made friends here,’ Lt. Rauch said…‘They were wary

at first, but when we started paying for things they started

coming forward with requests….’ ‘I take their money but I hatethem,’ Alawi said. ‘I am cooperating with the Americans for the

sake of my country, the Americans are the occupiers. We are

trying to evict them’ (Filkins 2009: 115).

‘The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us

is because we give them money,’ Adam Sperry told me when

I visited his office in Forward Operating Base Falcon…‘The

ideological fight, forget about it,’ Captain Dehart, the unit’s

senior intelligence officer, said…‘We bought into it too much.

It’s money and power’ (Rosen 2010: 246).

Money and power: from the beginning of the war, Iraqi

society was deranged by a double dose of violent shock

treatments, the ‘shock and awe’ of the US invasion and the

neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ administered by the American

governing authority (cf . Klein 2007). The looting andlawlessness that followed the first would have lingering

effects. So too would the economic deprivations and dis-

parities that attended the second, especially considering

that the members of the disbanded Iraqi army were left

without work or pay. Unemployment in general ran at

an estimated 20 or 30 per cent throughout the American

occupation. The resentments it evoked were redoubled

when the Americans brought in workers from Thailand,

the Philippines, Bangladesh and elsewhere to do jobs

Iraqis were perfectly capable of doing. Class antagonisms

were significant conditions of the large Sadrist movement,

whose Mahdi fighting corps was essentially an army of

the poor. Yet whether or not the Americans were effec-

tively responsible for Iraqi poverty, they found it a useful basis for the counterinsurgency strategy they developed in

the country. Money could buy them friends and allies; and

even apart from the added force, friends and allies could

provide precious intelligence. Something the Americans

know as ‘bribery’ and ‘corruption’ when other peoples do

it became their own best military tactic – which is also

to say that they did not exactly practise the Friedmanite

economics that they preached.

The war has been fought largely with no-bid contracts,

and no-question compensations ranging from hundreds to

hundreds of millions of dollars, to the profit especially of

the politically powerful. Not to forget the boondoggle it

has represented for US corporations such as Blackwater

and the others of their mercenary ilk. Performing militaryservices that range from cooking to combat, and killings

that include Iraqi civilians and US soldiers, these private

forces make up a large complement of the American pres-

ence, although they are generally uncounted and unre-

marked as such. (By 2008, the number of private contract

personnel drawing US government funds was greater than

that of American combat forces.) Other American compa-

nies reap huge returns from so-called development pro-

jects that after eight years have failed to provide adequate

electricity – although sufficient amounts to electrocute at

least 15 American soldiers taking showers. For Iraq the

adage applies: developing countries, with American help,

never develop.

All the same, graft and profit from development projects

have made rich men of many tribal and government leaders

– while making enemies for them and the Americansamong those excluded from the game. The latter include

members of tribal groups of ancient standing that are being

sidelined by their foreign-backed, nouveau riche compa-

triots. ‘When the Americas began paying former insur-

gents and tribal leaders to help enforce security’, reads a

report from Anbar province on the run-up to the January

2009 provincial elections, ‘they favored some tribes over

others, in many cases displacing the old for upstarts’.5 In

the event, the elections proved to be not so much the demo-

cratic turning point the Americans fecklessly imagined as

another sectarian crisis attended by fears of violence, espe-

cially in regard to the aftermath:

Now the tribes are jockeying [for] power, and people…com-

plain bitterly that the machinery of democracy is gilding cor-

ruption, internal rivalries, and an intense feudal instinct [sic]

that regards elected office . . . as a chance for a bigger cut of

provincial resources and security forces.6

Consider the case of Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha of Anbar.

Sheikh Ahmed’s brother, Sheikh Sattar, a reputed warlord

and highway robber in his earlier career, founded the

Awakening Movement in the province in 2006 and led it

until he was assassinated by an al-Qaeda bomber in 2007.7

‘Ahmed’, a rival sheikh complained, then ‘inherited the

Awakening…and turned it into an enterprise for deals and

contracts’.8 (Another of Sheikh Ahmed’s critics, inciden-

tally, is locally known as ‘the Whale’ for the amount of

American aid he has swallowed.) By January 2009, SheikhAhmed was living on an extensive estate guarded by Iraqi

Army and police checkpoints. His sumptuous spread

included a stable of Arabian horses, a camel farm, caged

fawns, a fleet of armoured SUVs, and a fine pink mansion.

From this estate the sheikh presumably kept in contact with

his trade and investment companies in the UAE, while he

pushed for a local natural gas project worth billions of US

dollars and dreamed of turning Anbar into another Dubai.

Sheikh Ahmed’s acquisitions are particularly noteworthy

given that his subtribe was not among the most powerful

or prestigious in the region before the American invasion.9

Paying something like 100,000 Awakening fighters,

letting ‘development’ contracts large and small to Iraqis

and mostly large to Americans, footing the bill for private paramilitary units, substantially underwriting the Iraqi

government and military, compensating Iraqis for property

damage and indemnifying them for injuries and deaths,

the Americans thus made payoffs, bribery and corruption

into a major counterinsurgency strategy. COIN was a well-

chosen acronym for it.

Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy

off the Iraqis temporarily, and they distributed ‘microgrants’

to shop owners in their area. I wondered what would happen

when this massive influx of American money stopped pouring

in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the

ruling Shiites even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been

trying to exterminate until recently? (Rosen 2010: 247)

Creation and resolution of the state of nature

The spectre of Middle Eastern ‘failed states’ dissolving

into anarchy is a recurrent nightmare of the political sci-

ence of the Iraq conflict. Lebanon 1975-76 is one oft-

cited example, beginning with clashes between PLO and



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Relying on one’s tribe:

A snippet of life in Basra

since the 2003 invasion.

Anthropology Today 26(4):

23-26.

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Aristotle (trans.) E. Barker.

Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Barfield, T. 2010.

Afghanistan: A cultural

and political history.

Princeton: Princeton

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BRussells Tribunal 2006.

Research on death squads

in Iraq. December. http://

brussellstribunal.org.

Dagher, S. 2009. Tribal

rivalries persist as Iraqis

seek local posts. New York

Times, 19 January.

Das, V. 1996. Thespatialization of violence:

Case study of a ‘communal

riot’. In: Basu, K. and S.

Subrahmanyam (eds),

Unravelling the nation:

sectarian conflict and

India’s secular identity,

pp. 157-203 . New Delhi:

Penguin.

Fearon, J.D. 2007. Iraq’s civil

war. Foreign Affairs 86(2):

2-15.

Filkins, D. 2009. The forever

war. New York: Vintage

Books.

Hobbes, T. 1962. Leviathan.

New York: Collier Books.

Kapferer, B. 1998. Legendsof people, myths of state:

Violence, intolerance,

and political culture in

Sri Lanka and Australia.

Washington: Smithsonian

Institution Press.

–– 2001. Ethnic nationalism

and the discourses of

violence in Sri Lanka.

Communal/Plural: Journal

of Transnational and

Crosscultural Studies 9(1):

33-67.

Klein, N. 2007. The shock

doctrine: The rise of

disaster capitalism. New

York: Henry Holt.

Obeyesekere, G. 1993.

Duttagamini and the

Buddhist conscience. In:

Allen, D. (ed.), Religion

and political conflict in

India, Pakistan, and Sri

Lanka, pp. 135-60. Delhi:

Oxford University Press.

Rosen, N. 2010. Aftermath:

Following the bloodshed

of America’s wars in the

Muslim world. New York:

Nation Books.

Sahlins, M. 2005. Structural

work: How microhistories

become macrohistories

and vice versa.

Anthropological Theory 5: 5-30.

Spencer, J. 2007.

Anthropology, politics, and

the state: Democracy and

violence in South Asia.

Cambridge: Cambridge

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Christian militias that the army not only failed to resolve,

but in the process fell itself into factionalism and became

part of the problem. There then followed a long period of

strife involving Christian, Sunni, Shiite and PLO forces

fighting among themselves as well as with each other,

this violence in turn being compounded by the interven-

tion of the Israeli and Syrian military. ‘A similar scenario’,

writes Fearon (2007: 7), ‘is already playing out in Iraq’;

the ‘Lebanonization of Iraq’, Rosen (2010) calls it. Indeed

a similar scenario has also been playing out cyclically in

Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, mostly recentlywhen the United States made the Cold War an overtime

period of the Great Game, and then became the fourth for-

eign power to invade the country in 160 years (Barfield

2010, see especially 242ff).

The sequence of events in these cases again suggests

that Hobbes had the developmental course from the state

of nature to the commonwealth rather back to front. Indeed

he might have concluded so himself from the sectarian

strife that followed upon the breakdown of royal authority

in the England of his own day – instead of putting it down

to a rapacious human nature and projecting it back to an

original human condition.

In Hobbes’ version, the original war of each against all

ended when men, motivated by fear and guided by reason,

agreed to surrender their right to use force in their own

interest in favour of a sovereign power who would ‘keep

them all in awe’ (1962: 100). But the ‘shock and awe’ of

American power produced just the opposite effect in Iraq.

The looting that ensued not only signified the dissolution

of the state; at the same time, in this lawless condition, it

initiated the arming of the population at large. Soon the

means of force would become accessible to all through

the open sale of arms and ammunition in the marketplace,

much of it stolen or confiscated from the disbanded Iraqi

army. Instead of a reservation of legitimate force to a sov-

ereign power, the citizens having renounced their own pri-

vate rights thereto, the coercive instruments of violencehad been redistributed to the people in general, even as

the political instruments of safety and justice were sus-

pended. Everything then happened as if the social contract

had dissolved. Every kind of hostility, whether religious,

political or commercial, familial or tribal, was potentially

lethal. ‘We Iraqis’, said one of Filkins’ interpreters, ‘we

are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom’

(2009: 326).

Just so in Basra, for example, where, as recently reported

in ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY by Hayder Al-Mohammad,

‘militias, tribes, gangs and groups with their own special

interests were dominant in the city and province’ (2010:

23). Absent an effective state, the people have become

reliant on their tribes ‘to protect them and their family,homes and lands’ (2010: 26). In Basra as elsewhere,

local gangs form around parvenu strongmen who assume

the titles of tribal sheikhs and are publicly accorded the

respects that are due such status – even though privately

they may be reviled as thieves and sons of thieves. Some of

these groups indeed specialize in extortion, like the well-

armed Basra subtribe that drives into other people’s cars

and demands immediate compensation on threat of vio-

lence (2010: 23-24). But around the country, many groups,

even if operating as rogue outfits, take on the guise of sec-

tarian political parties or else declare themselves branches

of militias such as the Mahdi Army. Often confounding

piety with brigandry, the effect, again, is to bring larger

sectarian causes into the violence of the streets.Owing to its economic and military resources, including

the money and arms furnished by the US, the central gov-

ernment, although it does not monopolize force, can be

said to be the force majeure among the adversarial par-

ties. Still, like all the major blocs, the Iraqi government

has been beset by infighting, and in fact it has had more

than one army. Indeed by 2006, each of the 27 government

ministries had its own ‘facilities protection force’ (Filkins

2009: 322). The Ministry of Interior by itself was running

an armed complement of around 100,000 men – of noto-

rious repute. At one time it was said that one floor of the

ministry was staffed by the Mahdi Army and another by

the Badr Organization. On at least one occasion, the min-

istry’s troops would appear to have attacked the Ministry

of Health, kidnapping around 100 employees, apparently

Sunnis.10 Commando groups from the Interior Ministryoperated as death squads in their own dirty wars in Sunni

neighbourhoods. Those they did not kill outright might

well be tortured to death in Iraq’s gulag of secret prisons.

In the anarchic condition into which Iraq had dissolved,

where merely existing was a sufficient reason for one to

die, the violence was accordingly generalized, but it was

not altogether random. It followed tactics of reciprocal bru-

tality adapted to its lawlessness, and strategies of intimida-

tion consistent with its existential finalities. Especially in

the struggles in the villages and the city neighbourhoods,

the aim of Sunnis and Shiites alike was not so much to

defeat an enemy force as to rout a despised population. For

where the identity of the self is conditional upon hatred of

the other, the endgame is to make the situation of the latter

unlivable. In this regard, an attempt at extermination is not

nearly as effective as acts of terror sufficient to drive off

the detested others and allow one’s own to claim the space.

Sunnis were the first to rely on this tactic of displacement,

but they were soon enough matched and more by Shiites.

According to a United Nations report, more than 4.5 mil-

lion Iraqis were displaced persons in 2007, more than half

of these Sunnis (UNHCR 2008). Of the 4.5 million, more

than two million had left the country. Mixed neighbour-

hoods of Baghdad were largely cleared of their minorities,

whether Shiite or Sunni. By the end of 2008, the reduced

Sunni population had been driven to a few peripheral dis-

tricts on the western side of Baghdad, their own homeshaving been destroyed or occupied by Shiites.11 The tac-

tical brutalities that achieved these effects amount to a

dark form of symmetrical schismogenesis, based on the

principle that ‘anything you can do, I can do worse’.

From a report by the BRussells Tribunal (2006) on death

squads in Iraq, one of many such testimonies:

The citizens of Al-Mohajarea Mosque Street in Al-Gazaliah

quarter in Baghdad woke up on April 12th, 2006 to see a

number of dead bodies of some (Sunnis) thrown on their street

in order to scare people and provoke and force them to leave

their homes. Miss Maysa’ce, 19, stated that she saw corpse of

[a] (9 or 10) year old who was killed because of suffocation by

telephone wires, the other bodies were killed in the same way.12

Speaking likewise of children who had been kidnappedand killed and their bodies left on the streets – as well as

of kidnap gangs buying and selling their victims – Dexter

Filkins was indeed put in mind of Hobbesian anarchy. By

2006, Baghdad ‘was a free-for-all; it was a state of nature.

There was no law, no courts, nothing – there was nothing

at all’ (2009: 294).

If there were an inferno for Iraqi sinners, it would be hard

to determine what depths of hell and forms of punishment

they deserved. The kidnapping, torture and murder of the

innocents were among the worst of a lot that included arbi-

trary arrests and the ‘disappearing’ of people; reciprocal

assassinations; suicide bombings; car bombings; aerial

bombings; drive-by shootings and other random killings;

home invasions accompanied by theft and destruction of property; the blowing up of houses; protection and extor-

tion rackets; the denial of water, fuel, electricity, bread

and rubbish removal to whole neighbourhoods – all of

which left those who survived in a state of continual fear.

In the latter connection, note that the violence was gen-



Tambiah, S.J. 1992. Buddhism

betrayed: Religion, politics

and violence in South Asia.

Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

––1996. Leveling crowds:

Ethnonationalist conflicts

and collective violence

in South Asia. Berkeley:

University of California

Press.

Thucydides 1996. The

landmark Thucydides: A

comprehensive guide to the

Peloponnesian War (ed.

R.B. Strassler). New York:

Free Press.UNHCR 2008. UNHCR

global report 2007: Iraq

situation.

US Army & Marine Corps

2007 [2006]. The US

Army/Marine Corps

counterinsurgency

field manual . Chicago:

University of Chicago

Press.

erally not clandestine. Accompanied by dire threats and

mean betrayals, designed to terrorize through demonstra-

tion effects, it could be undertaken in broad daylight and

its gruesome results were typically left on public display.

Mangled bodies were dumped in public spaces, sometimes

to be fed upon by dogs, and severed heads placed in ele-

vated spots where the sight of them could not be avoided.

Of course, the American occupiers have been a major

party to the violence, and in the event the tactics of the Iraqistreets have infected the hearts and minds of American

counterinsurgency warriors. This is not only evident

in random killing by mercenary and regular troops, and

the imprisonment in the American gulag of thousands of

Iraqis, very few of whom were ever charged or convicted

of anything. It became fully apparent in the graphic images

of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Why take pho-

tographs, one may well ask, if they were not meant to be

displayed? The counterinsurgency adopts the mindset of

the insurgency. And then, what is the current epidemic of

so-called post-traumatic stress disorder among American

veterans of Iraq but the subjective effect of returning to a

state of society after participating in the fear and brutality

of a state of nature?The institutional side of these cruel paradoxes of the

American presence is the role taken by the ‘democratic’

electoral politics that the US would impose in Iraq. The

problem is that the all-round warfare of Iraqi politics

already resembles the American system all too closely in

respect of the eventuality that ‘winners take all’. Among

other consequences, this makes the terror of ethnic and

sectarian cleansing a useful electoral tactic, even as the

access to money and force ‘democratically’ obtained by

the victors allows them to retain power by continuing to

intimidate their opponents. No wonder then that reports of

increased violence – or nowadays a ‘return to civil war’

– intensify before and after provincial and national elec-

tions. If war is the continuation of politics by other means,in Iraq, as in similar situations elsewhere, democratic poli-

tics is the continuation of a war of terror by other means.

Perhaps still more paradoxical, the long-term effect of the

American imposed democracy has been to install an Iraqi

regime whose power has depended on Saddamist tech-

niques of state terror – by which means, if necessary, it

seems destined to control the country indefinitely.

In other words, Hobbes was right after all, at least in

the sense that a state of nature is resolved by the emer-

gence of an uncontestable ruling power – something that

would also be said of Sri Lanka, Corcyra, Afghanistan

under the Taliban, and other instances of this same phe-

nomenon. If, as the American generals now say, Iraq’s

‘civil war’ is over, it is because the central government

(whoever is prime minister) is the only major faction

left standing. Rosen (2010) makes a strong argumentto this effect – though for one reason or another, most

commonly a pending or fraudulent election, other com-

mentators in the know periodically warn of a return to

the old troubles. Moreover, there are also ongoing issues

between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the north. Still,

the radical jihadists were significantly weakened by the

American ‘surge’ and the Sunni Awakening; while for

their part, Awakening members fell into internal dissen-

sion, and once the Americans stopped supporting them,

they suffered neglect and imprisonment at the hands of

the Shiite central government.

Taken together with the massive Sunni emigration and

the driving out of Sunni from Baghdad by the Shiites, this

has meant an end to an effective Sunni resistance. The

Sadrists too have been weakened. Their Mahdi Army was

defeated and neutralized by the Iraqi army, notably with

American help in the ‘Charge of the Knights’ campaign

in Basra and other southern cities in March-April 2009;

and the movement as a whole, never wholly controlled

by its leader Muqtada al-Sadr, was subject to discord and

defection. It seems the Badr Organization too was dam-

aged in the Charge of the Knights, and in any case it dis-

engaged from its alliance with the ruling Dawa Party and

lost much ground in the 2010 parliamentary elections, only

to then be effectively excluded from Prime Minister Nouri

Maliki’s coalition government. Hence the Americans’ uto-

pian dream of ‘reconciliation’ is not how it all ends. Eventhe Kurds are reconciled only to the extent they remain

autonomous, which is to say unreconciled. It all ends, then,

as it began, with a sovereign power that can ‘keep them

all in awe’.

Yet what was a misery without end has turned into an

end with misery. With the weakening of the large con-

tending forces, violence has diminished significantly. But

the larger causes having devolved upon local animosi-

ties, there remains a level of everyday violence that, as

Rosen says, would be unacceptable in any other country.

He writes:I am often asked if it was all worth it. Would it have been better

to leave Saddam in power?. . . I never know what to say. . .

Under Saddam, the violence came from one source: the regime.

Now it has been democratically distributed: death can come

from anywhere, at all times, no matter who you are. You can

be killed for crossing the street, for going to the market, for

driving your car, for having the wrong name, for being in your

house, for being a Sunni, for being a Shiite, for being a woman.

The American military can kill you in an operation; you can

be arrested by militias and disappear in Iraq’s new secret

prisons, now run by Shiites; or you can be kidnapped by the

resistance or criminal gangs. Americans cannot simply observe

the horrors of Iraq and shake their heads with wonder, as if it

were Rwanda and they had no role. America is responsible for

the chaos that began with the invasion and followed with the

botched and brutal occupation. Iraq’s people suffered under the

American occupation, the civil war, and the new Iraq govern-

ment, just as they did under the American-imposed sanctions

and bombings before the war and just as they did under theyears of Baathist dictatorship (2010: 9).

* * *

So now they ask anthropologists to join the American

military occupation as Human Terrain specialists and

make it nice. l

Fig. 2. A US Army sergeant

provides security for a

Human Terrain Team in front

of a Stryker armoured vehicle

in a village near Kandahar

Airfield, Afghanistan.

sahlins the state-of-nature effect

Documents