Honor and Two Reconstructions: Iraq and the American South

August 27, 2003

This op-ed appeared in the Charlotte Observer, among other newspapers, Sept. 2.

By: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Bertram Wyatt-Brown is the Richard J. Milbauer professor of history at the University of Florida.

American indifference to Iraqi society and values is proving calamitous. That’s because American authorities remain dismissive of Middle Eastern culture, in which the powerful and ancient code of honor determines behavior and ideals. That code fuels the enmity of our opponents throughout the Arab world. Yet Washington policymakers seem oblivious to Arab motivationn and how best to deal with resistance to American peacekeeping.

We should know better about how cultural differences powerfully affect events from our own historical experience in the Civil War. With their defeat in 1865, Southerners claimed to have lost all “save honor.” Retaining their long held sense of insulted honor, they boiled with resentment of the Northern occupiers, brutally suppressed freedmen’s rights, and eventually overthrew Northern-imposed Reconstruction.

In Iraq today, humiliation under the coalition forces sparks a mounting hatred of their presence and a hunger to restore Iraqis’ pride. An appetite for rekindled self-respect resembles that of the Johnny Rebs of 1865. Honor in Middle Eastern societies serves not as a benchmark of upright individualism. It requires demonstration of martial valor, family loyalty, and male power over possessions both material and human, most especially female dependents. The West no longer values the ethic of honor, but in the non-Western world honor traduced incites quick and bloody retribution.

The Middle Eastern expert Raphael Patai observes that the many shapes, in which honor is molded, envelop “the Arab ego like a coat of armor. The smallest chink can threaten to loosen all the loops and rings.” Honor was avenged when thousands of irate Muslims protested a helicopter’s attempt to take down a religious flag flying over a Bagdad minaret. The flag’s dismantling signified to the Iraqis American contempt for them as if they were a conquered, not liberated people. The speed of the coalition’s triumph has left the Iraqis free of tyranny, as we promised. But they are now subject to Arab neighbors’ scorn for alleged cowardice in the briefest war imaginable.

In dealing with Iraq, we can learn a sobering lesson from the policy misjudgments of the post-Civil-War era. In the glow of victory, the victorious Republicans had hoped to fashion a bi-racial, two-party democracy in the South. Their experiment failed. In occupying the former Confederacy, Northern forces were too few to control the murderous assaults on Republican state administrations and their black and white constituents. So the Yankees wearied of constant regional turmoil and withheld taxpayers’ dollars for rebuilding the vanquished southern states and policing them with sufficient troops. Sadly, that could be our destiny in Iraq.

The zealots’ sabotage heightens Iraqi insecurity and fear. It also suggests American vulnerability. With neither enough military personnel to secure the peace, nor enough experts to restore electricity, nor enough resources to put matters right, we resemble the undermanned Union peacekeepers in the Reconstruction South. By Middle Eastern standards of honor, America now appears shamed by displaying inadequacies that almost beg Iraqi contempt and retaliation.

The recent tragic bombings of the Jordanian Embassy and the UN headquarters in Bagdad are designed to destabilize the American occupation. They also were intended to restore Arab and Islamic honor, as the terrorists see it, even if it means misery for the people themselves. In the case of the embassy’s destruction, it’s possible that Saddam Hussein’s enemies sought to punish Jordan for the lavish hospitality shown to his relatives–with tacit American compliance. Or Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda operatives could have been the perpetrators because of Jordan’s crackdown on their conspiracies. Those who committed these atrocities no doubt thought that their honor is vindicated in dramas of death and retribution that degrade the American efforts of stabilization.

To pull out of Iraq or let it fester in uncertainty would fatally diminish our sway throughout the Arab world. Moral retreat had also confronted the nation in 1877. Newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes caved in to southern demands for removal of all Union forces from the former Confederacy. That withdrawal prompted one-party rule, an epidemic of lynchings, Jim Crow laws, black and poor-white disfranchisement, and the demolition of equitable governance.

By means of ritual, gesture, and subtle formalities, honor masks raw power and lends it the dignity of authority. We must win respect by appreciating Iraqi customs, conceding power gradually out of strength and not fatigue. To appear less than overwhelming in command would prove no less catastrophic for transforming Iraq than it was for Northern authorities at the tragic close of southern Reconstruction. By all the means necessary, including the aid of allies, American policymakers must not only suppress terrorism and armed resistance. They must also understand the venerable codes of honor, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Our leaders would then be enabled to bring peace to that troubled region and not be forced to say all was lost “save honor.”