After teaching sociology for 50 years, I never expected that my discipline will be called upon to step in where generals are failing. I was hence delighted to read David Brooks, in his New York Times op-ed, observe that "now, at long last, the smartest analysts and policy makers are starting to think like sociologists." Better yet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, is putting a sociological way out of Iraq up for a vote in the U.S. Senate.
Sen. Biden, along with Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), has proposed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill based on his plan for Iraq. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that it will be a part of the package of Iraq-related amendments which will be put to a vote over the next week.
The essence of a sociological approach to exiting Iraq (a place most of my colleagues and I argued against going in the first place) is to build on the existing social contours of the society rather than to try to force it into an imported format. Iraq is a tribal society, like Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and even, to a certain extent, Belgium. Although in Iraq, as well as in these other countries, the nation does command some loyalty, when it comes into conflict with tribal ones, the latter win hands-down. The sociological approach builds on these tribal loyalties rather than fantasizing that they can be wiped out or even merely subordinated to the common good.
To start, each tribe should be charged with providing security within its territory -- using its own forces. The failed U.S. policy of positioning the armed militias of the Sunni inside Shia-dominated areas and vice-versa was based on a naïve and profoundly un-sociological assumption that this would effectively promote national loyalty. Instead, the U.S. must allow each community to police itself. In the Kurdish regions, and increasingly in the Shia south, this is already happening. Even in Baghdad, where roughly 70 percent of the neighborhoods are ethnically homogenous, those controlled by the Mehdi army have been relatively secure. Indeed, practically all the recent security successes of the troop surge are the result of working with local tribes, rather than relying on the "national" Iraqi policy force and army.
If the U.S. and its allies would follow this sociological approach on a much larger scale, their footprint could be much reduced. By allowing and encouraging each community to police itself, U.S. forces could limit their involvement to protecting the borders between the tribes and securing the few remaining heterogeneous areas, as well as helping protect the international borders of Iraq. Such moves would enable the U.S. to draw down its troops significantly.
The U.S. should not pressure families to move out of mixed neighborhoods and regions. Such forced ethnic segregation offends our humanitarian precepts. However, sadly it has already been completed in many areas of Iraq where it was not already long established. Under the tragic circumstances in Iraq, it offers just about the best way out one can hope for.
This approach does not refer to dividing Iraq into three nations, which if undertaken would be likely to draw Turkey, Iran, and possibly Saudi Arabia into a broader regional conflict. The sociological approach merely favors some sort of federation rather than the highly centralized state now promoted by the U.S. The representatives of the various regions would work out their differences, speaking for their communities rather than as legislators who represent a nation -- the misleading imagery that the U.S. continues to insist on.
Long experience -- in Belfast and Beirut for instance -- shows that the best way to slow down and ultimately stop the vicious circle of revenge killings and other ravages of ethnically driven civil war is to separate the parties. Although the erection of barriers and security checkpoints in Iraq will continue to raise hackles from those who view them as new Berlin walls, they are needed as security enhancing measures -- at least for a cooling off period.
As the U.S. policy in Iraq adapts to sociology 101, it can also apply it to Afghanistan, where the war against the Taliban was won by working with the various regional tribes, but where, since the initial victory, vain attempts have been made to nationalize the local authorities and make them represent an imaginary national unity government in Kabul. Next, sociologists can show that despite a decade of efforts, Bosnia and Kosovo are still largely tribal. Meanwhile, though, Iraq is where these lessons are best applied here and now. War is too important to be left to generals and to the utopian imaginations of overly ambitious social engineers. Sociology may yet point to a way out on relatively good terms.
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Microblogging: Oil tycoon Boone Pickens predicted that a barrel of crude oil will cost 100 dollars next year. I heard this prediction before, in 1979, when working in the Carter White House, just before the president made his malaise speech. Don't bet on it.
Amitai Etzioni is Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University and author of Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy.