House of War

Arnold Kling, drawing on the work of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, says in a January 2007 article for TCS that Iraq “under Saddam Hussein was a limited-access order, or “natural state.” And, furthermore, that “Iraq was never on the “doorstep” of becoming an open-access order.”

His analysis uses a model of macro-socio-economic development that begins with the simplest type of hunter-gatherer societies, referred to as “primitive orders”, progresses through “limited access orders” or “natural states”, the first and most enduring civilisational mode, and finishes with the historically recent advance of “open access orders”. A “limited access order” is North et al’s term for a society that “strictly limits access to positions of power within political, economic, and religious systems.” An “open access order”, on the other hand, is a society “characterized by open political and economic competition, rather than the limited political and economic privileges enjoyed solely by elites in natural states.” Transition between the two is rare (Spain, Ireland and Taiwan are some of the latest), because “the state’s foremost task is securing its own survival”, and so it feels the process of change as a threat to its very existence – and the existence of the elites it serves – which, of course, it is.

For that reason, Kling concludes that the US will never succeed “in its objective of establishing an open-access order in Iraq.” At present, the country is barely any kind of order, limited access or otherwise, and the thought of creating a liberal democracy with a vibrant market economy seems faintly ridiculous, certainly premature. Start with a limited access order, he advises, which can provide security and can establish and consolidate the necessary preliminary stage of economic development. Without the self-interest of an elite who feel that they have “a stake in peace”, Iraq will stall and remain a failed state.

I have previously wondered whether it is wise to be resuscitating, or helping to resuscitate, ethnic, tribal identities to shore up the fall-out from the destruction of the Iraqi state. Perhaps we are simply facilitating, entrenching and developing sectarianism. However, the implications of Kling’s article are that progression to a democratic market economy is impossible without first developing as a natural state, as unpalatable as that may be to westerners. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” and as such we will have to give elites preferential access to political and economic power, or deny them at the cost of state failure and realising Iraq’s potential as an eventual open access order.

Robert Kaplan wrote a recent op-ed for The Atlantic, in which he noted that,

Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.

It seems that a year since Kling wrote “Iraq’s Natural State” in TCS, the US military is acting out his suggestions. Petraeus, and the new COIN-as-anthropology approach he implemented, seeks to work with the grain of existing cultures rather than attempting to impose new rule-sets from the top down. As the natural state develops out of the centralisation of power in the hands of dominant groups, a natural state is precisely what is developing in Iraq with the empowerment of the tribes. Given a stake in the maintenance of order, i.e. they feel they have more to gain by participating, they uphold the state.

Perhaps this might even aid the state moving up the order-type value chain. Pluralism or plurality of access to economic and political power is, after all, part of what makes open access orders what they are. Such a situation is doubtless more fragile – Saddam found it easier to be a tyrant than the US is finding it to be a liberator – but also more worthwhile: for greater risk (and associated cost), there is greater return.

The still unanswered question is whether the various tribal powers, religious factions and ethnic groups can all be reconciled to the natural state of Iraq. Can be power be centralised and dispersed at the same time? Federalism is probably the most realistic and sustainable solution.