Thomas Hobbes’ vision of a dangerous and brutal society has been widely seen as fitting and congruent with life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The U.S. invasion and its plan to build a ‘new and better life’ in postwar-Iraq are thus likened to the mission of Hobbes’ Leviathan. However, rather than reflecting Leviathan’s dream of a ‘commonwealth of nations’, this imagery expresses ethnocentrism, if not racism, in an attempt to renew its global supremacy.
No philosopher has been so popular since the Iraqi crisis as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). The British thinker, in dealing with the nature of man and power, was so obsessed with problems of the preservation of authority to end anarchy that he ended up with a vision of dominant norms and values as necessary institutions to guide society. While he neither longed for, nor predicted a totalitarian monster, his vision renders the need for an authoritative sovereign he called ‘the Commonwealth’ (Civitan).
Hobbes-inspired theories, therefore, remain relevant for the establishment or authoritarian views in the modern times.
The Arab anthropologist Talal Asad, however, has re-interpreted Hobbes’Leviathan (1651) as a vision of a social life striving for common prosperity (‘commonwealth’) among ‘nations’ (or ‘communities’); where neither norms nor contract are seen as holding the society together.
‘The Sovereign’, portrayed by Leviathan, is here perceived as the outcome of individuals’ consent, born out of the society itself. Hobbes’ vision is thus a dream, whose aim does not greatly differ from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – except that the latter believed in reason and was not preoccupied with ‘things that hold the society together’.
Interestingly, American intellectuals have recently shown a greater interest in Hobbesian world views as well. Robert Kagan’s influential Of Power and Paradise (2003) has made much of the popular, ‘authoritarian’ interpretation of Hobbes, evoking the image of Saddam’s Iraqi social life.
Kagan seeks to explain the differences between the American and European global views in terms of Hobbesian versus Kantian perspectives. With the U.S. being the only superpower, now endowed with an unprecedented might, it tends to see things in a ‘Hobbesian’ way. Thus, Kagan emphasizes the unique post Sept. 11 psychological momentum that the greater the power, the more vulnerable they feel when they face a threat, however small, real or perceived.
It’s not difficult to see the implication of Kagan’s view since the reality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq can now be seen by the pro-war camp as confirming the ‘good’ nature of the force that stands on a high moral pedestal ready to implement a noble mission into the ‘evil’ world of Saddam’s Iraq: In order to terminate it, as it is perceived to be an immoral and dangerous type of social life – one which Hobbes has famously described as ‘solitary, brutish, poor, nasty and short’.
A decade earlier, an Iraqi dissident who is also a Harvard researcher, Kanan Makiya, using the pseudonym Samir al Khalil, published Republic of Fear, The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (1989), a celebrated work that demonstrated much of that Hobbesian outcome of Saddam repression.
Hobbes did not describe an occupied country. Leviathan’s mission, in his view, was to preserve and defend a society from possible foreign invaders. Hobbes’ Leviathan was actually a man with authoritative institutions that were the product of the original state and society itself, not a project of foreign invaders trying to impose regime change.
Makiya’s brilliant analysis of Iraq in the 1980s precisely describes that kind of society with Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party acting as its Leviathan, albeit a ruler who effectively built a ruling party and ruthlessly maintains the state power. Now, as the U.S.-led coalition prepares to conquer Baghdad and the political and diplomatic discourse focuses on the post-war ‘nation-building’, the U.S force, aspiring to act like Leviathan, is expected to rebuild Iraq into a ‘democracy’ as an exemplary model for the region.
However, as the Western experience itself suggests, democracy has to be homegrown rather than imported or imposed. Iraq will not be another Vietnam, though Baghdad could become a Beirut or Mogadishu. However, in the absence of an Iraqi Leviathan rebuilding the immediate post-Saddam society, will the American Leviathan be able to rule and remodel the Iraqi society after the heavy suffering from the ongoing bombardment?
With the exception of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupation of Japan following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, no occupied countries have successfully built a democracy out of the debris of a war and people’s suffering. Few expect that the foreign invaders will quickly win the final battle for the capital. Even the British troops – the most experienced in urban warfare, due to their campaigns in Northern Ireland – had to fight a difficult battle in Basra.
Finally and most importantly, no war of aggression may be expected to easily win the hearts and minds of the occupied populace – look at the Dutch debacle in Indonesia, the French in Vietnam and Algiers, the Indonesian army in East Timor, the Russians in Chechnya etc.
Yet, according to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Brussels last week, that American Leviathan will be represented by a U.S. military governor who will rule for 90 days and be responsible only to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The images of Americans in Iraq reflects the ethnocentrism of the new global supremacy. No dictators, many of whom were former U.S. allies during the Cold War, have been portrayed as bad or as cruel as Saddam Hussein despite the fact that some could be even worse. Soeharto, whom John Pilger recently calls ‘the Prince of Massacres’, to take but one example, can be said to be responsible for the Matebian killings in East Timor (1977-79) just as Saddam Hussein was for the massacre of the Kurds in Halab’jah, Northern Iraq (1988) – each has taken hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian lives.
Yet, in the U.S. campaign for the war, Hobbes-inspired prejudice about Iraq’s ‘evil’ social life has been combined with an attempt to demonize Saddam as the ‘new Hitler’ threatening the West. In fact, no European observer would consider the Saddam-Hitler equation as serious since Germany in the 1930s was a much stronger industrial state than Iraq ever was – certainly not after a decade of U.S.-British supported UN sanctions that killed a half million children and only strengthened Saddam’s rule.
It is one thing to assume that the Iraqi quality of life under Saddam is ‘brutish, nasty and short’, it is quite another to take for granted that they would thereafter accept even greater suffering as a result of weeks of bombardment, and yet would readily welcome a new life as conditioned and dictated by the foreign invaders.
That would presume the Iraqis as exceptional human beings, malleable to any wishes of any Leviathan. It smells like a new blend of racism that occurs as the new form of U.S. imperialism is unfolding.
