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•Hanna Batatu’s “Old Social Classes…” of 1978 formed the backdrop for much U.S. govt. analysis to follow, a reflection to a great degree of Batatu’s impact on the academic world. At a time when overall interest in modern Iraqi studies was amazingly low, Batatu’s study provided a fresh and invaluable baseline with useful insights throughout.

•However, there would be stunning departures in the direction of Iraqi affairs starting shortly thereafter, mainly stemming from an unexpectedly brash and aggressive Saddam Hussein.

•Further, the dramatic strengthening of Islamist tendencies throughout the Middle East dating from the late 1970’s would take Iraqi politics in a direction unforeseen only a few years before when secular, leftist parties and related movements still appeared dominant in many Arab countries.

•There were, however, many valuable, but often overlooked, warnings in Batatu’s work. In fact, in keeping with the spirit of this conference, I chose to use Batatu’s 1978 opus as my primary point of reference from which to assess some of the intelligence analysis within the U.S. government as well as some aspects of U.S. policymaking with respect to Iraq.

•Despite Iraq’s huge oil exports, mounting wealth, and rising military might back in the 1970’s, its radical foreign policy and location farther away from the Arab-Israeli arena marginalized Iraq somewhat and dampened interest (relative to subjects like Egypt, Lebanon, and various aspects of the Arab-Israeli dispute).

•My first visit to the State Dept. Library as the Bureau of Intelligence & Research (INR) Iraq Analyst in 1979 was revealing. The library’s entire Iraq holdings took up about 4 feet of shelf space, with much of even that rather dated or anecdotal. By contrast, holdings back then on Arab-Israeli matters spanned about 100-120 feet of shelf space, with much of them frequently upgraded by newer acquisitions.

•The parlous state of intelligence coverage of Iraq in the U.S. government back in 1979 also was notable. I was asked to cover Iraq part-time, while spending most of my time as editor of INR’s flagship “Arab-Israeli Situation Report.” Even the far more personnel-rich CIA had only one full-time Iraq political analyst from 1979 through most of 1980. We became fast friends.

•To make matters worse, beginning during the Iran-Iraq War but increasing dramatically following the First Gulf War in 1991, less capable authors than Batatu hammered out many articles & books on Iraq, to some degree crowding out Batatu and some of his more able successors in the public domain.

•Worst of all, dozens of military documentaries of the 1991 War and the 2003 drive to Baghdad run by various TV networks led to an underestimation of the very real potential for robust & punishing Iraqi resistance if Iraqi combatants believe they have a decent chance of inflicting heavy losses on an enemy. Batatu himself notes the well-known combativeness of significant portions of the Iraqi population at several points in his 1978 classic.

•I saw this in the Iran-Iraq War, warned about it in an Assessment to policymakers in the first week of the 2003 War regarding the impending occupation of Sunni Arab areas farther north, and was essentially ignored. Even in late summer 2003, when the Intelligence Community began to craft a National Intelligence Estimate on the sources of violence and instability in Iraq, at first I was the only representative in the room who argued that we faced a growing insurgency.

•In fact, while on matters military, and, with respect to the current situation, it also is worth recalling Batatu’s superb account of the imbalances that led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, and noting the potential danger today’s increasingly powerful Iraqi Army might pose to an Iraqi civilian government often dysfunctional at the local level, woefully corrupt, heavily influenced by exile parties, and more isolated from the populace at large. Indeed, only a massive work like Batatu’s drives home so graphically the full extent of the daunting overall challenge posed by Iraq’s complex politics and society.

•A core problem affecting U.S. intelligence analysis as well as the formulation of U.S. Iraq policy since 2003 has been an inability to grasp the full sweep of Iraq’s multi-dimensional societal matrix. Indeed, those bandying about the success of the surge and closely related developments as if they represent some magical key for profoundly and lastingly re-stabilizing a situation that remains, as the Pentagon said in Sept., in terms of progress, “fragile, uneven and reversible,” only reveal their lack of expertise.

•Certain basics have been widely ignored, such as the impact of the bombardment of anti-American teachings in Iraqi schools spanning two generations, the similar diet served up by the Iraqi and international Arabic media, as well as the reduced standing of the U.S. among Iraqis who, even before the events of 2003-2008, suffered under 12 years of largely US-driven UN sanctions.

•The authors of the war showed little interest in the vast guidance offered in the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project,” convinced that a more simplistic, broad-brush effort guided by those possessed of some sort of greater vision but little expertise was best.

•Also at work in govt. is what I have dubbed “the bad news syndrome”: pro-active policymakers often are unreceptive toward pessimistic analysis from the Intelligence Community. Taking too lightly a gloomy mid-2004 National Intelligence Estimate on the prospects for governance in Iraq, the magnitude of the problem on that front was not fully appreciated by many policymakers.

•In assessing more critically Batatu’s 1978 work against subsequent events, I must note certain cautions. As with many great pioneers in their fields, it was impossible for him to benefit from much of what we know today. So I (or we) have the advantage of that proverbial 20/20 hindsight. It also should be noted that Batatu’s book, as can be gathered from its title, was not meant to be an all-encompassing history of modern Iraq.

•And Batatu in 1978 could never have imagined the roller-coaster of shattering events initiated by Saddam Hussein, and then the US, that would so alter the Iraqi political and social landscape with which he was so familiar. Batatu rather surprisingly characterized Saddam as “very reserved, and, on the whole, not prone to hasty judgments.” Nonetheless, the difference in behavior exhibited by an understudy and a ruler, as in say Anwar al-Sadat before and after the death of Nasser, can be quite dramatic.

•Well into 1980, the Intelligence Community’s assessment of Saddam remained close to Batatu’s, despite his bold 1979 coup, making almost all concerned too slow to conclude that Saddam was capable of starting a catastrophic war with Iran.

•Batatu’s heavy emphasis upon leftist political movements suggested to readers at the time that they would remain the dominant drivers of Iraq’s political culture well into the future. And the Ba’thist regime did endure until 2003, although shorn of some of its original ideological character and much of its élan. Yet, Batatu warned of this in the context of the work of Michael Aflaq, writing that even as of the 1960’s: “A Ba’thi would have looked in vain…for a singly objective analysis of any of the serious problems besetting Iraq…Instead of thought, he could find only vague slogans.”

•Batatu also appears to have underestimated the role of Islam in the future direction of Iraq. Such neglect was far more inexcusable among others covering Iraq beyond 1978 in the light of intervening regional trends, regardless of what the Ba’thist machine of control obscured from view and repressed. But until the Ba’thist veil was ripped aside in 2003, the Intelligence Community was working with only tiny bits of data, and most of its sources, the products of a more secular Baghdadi culture, reinforced the impression that Islamist tendencies in Iraq were not all that significant. Only INR polling in summer 2003 revealed the full extent of Islamist sentiment—even militancy—that had developed in Iraq under Saddam. Although anticipated among many Shi’a, we were taken aback when, for example, 40% of Sunni Arab Fallujans, asked about their preferred form of government, responded “Islamic Republic.”

•Moving on to Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divides, Kanan Makiya wrote back in 1989: The “hidden potential for…more violence in Iraq could at some point in the future make the Lebanese civil war look like a family outing gone slightly sour.” But such dire warnings were relatively few.

•Too many took away from Batatu’s work that urbanization, modernization, more secular governance, expanding military & professional classes, the emergence of the media, etc. had given at least Arab Iraq more of a shared Iraqi national identity. And Batatu did say the anti-British revolts of 1920 ushered in a process resulting in the “gradual…spasmodic growth of an Iraqi national community.” He also said that although many differences still persisted through the 1970’s, they existed “to a lesser degree.”

•But plenty of hard-pressed US intelligence personnel did not take the time to read Batatu’s book with sufficient care. With this in mind, it is worth noting that the quote above about the “growth of an Iraqi national community” was pulled from the introduction, the only section read completely by many in government.

•More to the point, even in the introduction, Batatu says that despite what was noted above, “the new national loyalty” remained “hazy, unacceptable to the Kurds, poorly assimilative of the Shi’is, and lacking the normative ethics, the warm intimacy, and the sustained emotional support…associated with the old loyalties.” So many simply took away from Batatu and other quality authors what they wanted, although Batatu himself did lean toward the notion of an emerging nationalism.

•Too many of us in government believed the oil-driven prosperity and burgeoning bureaucracy of the 1970’s had decisively drawn large numbers of Shi’a into the mainstream. Even many Shi’a with whom I spoke during my service in and many visits to Iraq during the 1980’s spoke of themselves precisely in this manner. Intelligence analysts and policymakers alike had even gotten the impression that the horrific Iran-Iraq War had functioned as an engine of unity of sorts among many Arab Iraqis fighting a common enemy, a view apparently also favored by Batatu at the time.

•However, most of us were only really tapping into those more secular Baghdadi middle and upper classes, not the Shi’a downtrodden of what is now Sadr City or the vast numbers of more conservative, less prosperous, and more alienated Shi’a beyond Baghdad.

•Despite the lack of a unifying nationalism, a profound resentment of foreign domination and exploitation does exist deep in the Iraq Arab psyche. INR polling even shortly after “liberation” confirmed this graphically, including a majority of Shi’a. As a result, it was incredible, especially this late in the game, that US policymakers put forward a bold, demanding first draft of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) dwarfing the hated and aborted Portsmouth Agreement of 1948 in its scope.

•Returning to societal fissures, they extend far beyond the ethno-sectarian paradigm. They involve regions, classes, factions within sectarian communities, certain key families, and tribes. Saddam’s policies during the tough times for his regime following the 1991 War altered Iraq’s tribal landscape as he turned to them for support, reversing a prolonged decline in tribal—especially shaikhly—power & influence.

•Frankly, the overall Iraqi internal equation became so fractured during 1991-2003 that it was near impossible for US policymakers to sort out ways of weakening or unseating Saddam in the midst of the wreckage left behind by so many years of his unusually brutish, incredibly destructive, and often communally-targeted misrule.

•Aside from launching an awfully foolish war, American policymakers quite often have been in a rather stunned & reactive mode in the face of the veritable roller coaster of events set in motion by various precipitate & catastrophic decisions made by Saddam, the ringmaster of Iraqi leadership folly since 1980.

•The impact of all that should give pause to any American policymakers (or politicians) who delude themselves into thinking there will not be millions of Iraqis, who suffered terribly in one way or another from events triggered by the 2003 War, who probably will look back upon the war and the “occupation” as an Iraqi Dark Age of sorts. Their country was devastated by war, looting, brutal, large-scale population displacement, rampant criminality, years of insurgent, militia (and American military) violence, al-Qaeda in Iraq terror—all of which killed well over 100,000 Iraqis (and maimed many more than that).

•To wrap up, even aside from, say, the disastrous 2002 WMD NIE (which really involved the WMD crowd, not Iraq experts), there were important occasions like September 22, 1980 and August 2, 1990 when shocked US policymakers received little warning from their Iraq experts in the Intelligence Community.

•Much genuinely useful council from the Intelligence Community was taken too lightly, but then there were those other times. Saddam Hussein quite simply broke the proverbial mold to such a degree that even analysts thoroughly grounded in Iraqi affairs and drawing from the efforts of scholars of Hanna Batatu’s standing could not guide policymakers adequately.

•Yet, as I have suggested before, no-one following Iraq up to 1978—inside or outside government—could possibly have imagined that Iraq would end up in the appalling state in which we find that great country today or could have predicted the awful trail of events that brought us to this sad juncture, whether that nation is now solidly re-stabilizing or not.