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Sociology and the War in Iraq

Many Americans are having ‘buyer’s remorse’ over their decision to support the invasion of Iraq.  From the outset, critics of ‘regime change’ rightfully argued that the processes of removing Saddam Hussein from power and replacing him with a pro-Western regime would be fraught with potentially dire consequences.  Besides being morally indefensible, critics argued that a US-led invasion of Iraq would breach international law, inflame the global terrorist threat, create widespread bloodshed, and perhaps even destabilize the entire Middle East.  Furthermore, but no less important, critics believed it would also diminish the moral authority of the United States, reducing America to the lowly status of ‘rogue state’ in the eyes of many.  But, despite the plausibility of such warnings, the Bush administration threw caution to the wind.  In the spring of 2003, assisted by a compliant Labour government in Britain, the US military ousted Saddam Hussein.  Since then, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.  Chaos and human suffering have steadily expanded across all sectors of Iraqi society, as the situation has gradually spun out of control.  Far from remaking post-Saddam Iraq in their image, policymakers in Washington and London have been relegated to the bit role of damage control.

At varying points over the last four years, many Americans have come to realize that they were duped by the Bush administration.  The war was originally sold as a means of eradicating global terrorism. When this storyline still had credibility, most Americans supported the war.  For example, opinion polls taken in the summer of 2003 indicate that only 25% of Americans disapproved of the war.  But four years later, with the official narrative increasingly being seen as mendacious, 60% of Americans disapprove of the original decision to go to war. With increasing clarity, the majority of Americans now realise the drive to war was less about stopping global terrorism, and more about actualizing Bush’s messianic dream of ridding the world of ‘evil-doers’ and the neocons’ dream of securing Persian Gulf oil for a ‘new American century’.   

What can sociology tell us about these events?  I firmly believe that sociology, with its emphasis on understanding the dynamics and allocation of power in society, is a field well positioned to help us understand how so many people could have been so wrong about such an important issue.  The standard sociological explanation for such outcomes centres on Antonio Gramsci’s now-famous concept of ‘hegemony.’  Gramsci’s primary argument was that elites have disproportionate influence over society’s ideological, cultural, and moral frameworks, and that this influence creates a situation in which most ordinary people eventually internalize viewpoints advocated by elites.  As a result, conflicts seldom arise because widely shared norms create consensus around issues important to elites.      

Watching these events unfold in the United States, I became convinced that the concept of hegemony could not fully explain what had happened.  For this reason, I undertook a theoretical study of the various ways in which ordinary people can be convinced to support policies that, from an objective and detached perspective, would seem to conflict with their interests.  My first attempt to answer this question will soon appear in a collection of scholarly essays on power and resistance.  In this essay, I contend that ordinary people can become confused about how best to advance their interests, but that their confusion is not derived solely from a distorted political consciousness imposed upon them by a dominant ideology.  Instead, their confusion can also stem from ignorance (people not knowing about certain facts) and misunderstanding (people holding false beliefs about certain facts). 

These two factors clearly influenced events in the United States.  In the months following the invasion, a prominent polling service found that 62% of Americans thought that world public opinion supported the US-led invasion, that 48% of Americans believed evidence clearly linked Saddam and al-Qaeda as allies, and that 34% of Americans thought weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.  Of course, all three of these beliefs are demonstrably false.  Yet 60% of all Americans, according to this poll, held at least one of these misconceptions about the rationale for invading Iraq.  Importantly, once these misinterpretations become conventional wisdom, they lead large numbers of otherwise clear-thinking and rational people to draw seemingly backward conclusions about the war.  Sociologists, I believe, are well positioned to help us understand how this type of ignorance and misunderstanding can be spread within our societies.  No less than the future health of democracy depends upon it.

The page proofs of my article, titled ‘Explaining Consensual Domination’, are available from this link:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sociology/notes06/Level4/SO4530/Assigned-Readings/Lecture%2011.1.doc (Word)

Chris Kollmeyer, PhD
Lecturer, Department of Sociology