The trauma, humiliation and rage of those that survive are concomitants of the indiscriminate killing with impunity and the deracination of innocent men, women and children by the invaders and occupiers of a country.

Iraq

I first encountered this phenomenon in extremis in 2011/2012 when I spent three months working as a development consultant in Iraq based in Baghdad. By that time, the country had been subjected to years of crippling sanctions and an invasion and occupation by a “Coalition of the Willing” comprising the US, the UK, Australia, and Poland. As many as 2.4 million Iraqis had been killed in the process, and the country’s institutional and physical infrastructure had been completely destroyed.

For Naomi Klein (2008), to that point, Iraq was the most glaring example of the application of the “shock doctrine”, whereby capitalist powers induce — through invasion and occupation and other means of “shock therapy” — a catatonic condition and tabula rasa in the subject nation in order to clear the way for “free market fundamentalism” and natural resource predation.

I described what for me was the most immediately striking feature of this ‘catatonic condition’ as follows:

For many citizens, perhaps most important of all, [is] the daily public humiliation at the hands of foreign occupying forces… [which] has stripped them of much of their sense of personal and national honour and pride, their dignity and their self-respect. All of this can result in something akin to mass psychological trauma in the population as a whole, and particularly among children.

…in the immediate aftermath [of invasion and occupation], for the visitor to such places, it is this feature of the state that is among the most striking and emblematic. A deep and pervasive sense of national violation, sullen resentment of chronic injustice, combined with popular antipathy towards the invader and its vestiges are palpable and everywhere discernible in the statements and body language of ordinary citizens.

These societal responses can last in uniquely damaging ways _for generations__._

Afghanistan

A couple of years later, in Afghanistan, I encountered the phenomenon again during a two-year fly-in fly-out assignment (2014-2016) that was about three-quarters of the way through a war against the Taliban initiated — as Operation Enduring Freedom (!) — by the US and its allies in 2001, a war that dragged on for 20 years.

At the time, the US-installed Ashraf Ghani was president of Afghanistan. Ghani possessed an unusual combination of relevant experience – among others, as a professor of anthropology and political science in the US, as a minister of finance in Afghanistan and, for 10 years, as chief anthropologist of the World Bank. He had relinquished his US citizenship in order to qualify for “election”.

Aptly, his most important book was entitled, Fixing Failed States ( Ghani & Lockhart, 2008).

I mention this because I felt — wrongly, it turned out — that this would be fertile ground for the application of the first two (of 10) principles for fixing failed states outlined in Ghani’s book, namely, first, the application of the rule of law and, second, the impartial use of the state’s ability to monopolise the legitimate use of violence, against both external and internal threats and those who break the law.

As in Iraq, the principal occupying forces at the time were drawn from the Anglosphere countries: the UK, Australia and Canada, led by the US.

And, as in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghan women, children and men had become direct or indirect casualties of the war. The trauma, humiliation, and simmering rage among ordinary Afghans again were palpable and widespread.

Thinking that the logic of “the fish rots from its head” might in Ghani’s case, for the reasons given, mean that “the fish thrives from its head”, I embarked on an attempt to encourage government to address what I — and others (e.g., Amnesty International, 2014) — had found to be the most corrosive and damaging feature of its management of the state, namely, its unwillingness or inability (because its hands were tied) to address the question of the thousands of Afghan civilian deaths arising from friendly fire and other illegal acts carried out by the occupying forces. Many of those killed were prisoners or unarmed suspects.

I therefore tried to persuade the (UK) donor that was paying me to allow me to investigate the matter thoroughly and to make proposals for change, noting, among others, that:

“During the last 10 years, countless [people] have been traumatised and scarred for life emotionally and psychologically because of the loss of loved ones and the horrors of what they have seen. Many of them have been incensed and alienated by what in numerous cases has been the seeming recklessness of the incidents, and the apparent disregard for civilian life and limb. But it is the perceived immunity of perpetrators to investigation or prosecution that has aroused passions the most….

“Sentiments such as those described above can clearly serve to weaken the bases of government support among local communities, or government legitimacy, and can engender sympathy for insurgent causes or lead to defections to insurgent ranks. _Rubin (2013__, p. 427) recounts one such incident involving the wrongful killing by foreign troops at a checkpoint of an Afghan boy on a bicycle. After shooting and killing the boy, the troops kept the body for three days (a grave offence in Islam), while the family waited outside of the military camp for its return. After the body was finally returned, the village elders met and decided to join the Taliban to fight the Americans. As this case dramatically illustrates, in addition to the long-lasting damage that can be caused to public confidence in government by such incidents, there can be more or less immediate detrimental effects on important aspects of local security, which can undermine the unity of the state._

“If such matters are seen by local communities not to be dealt with fairly and openly and in many cases not investigated at all (or only ‘in the rarest of circumstances’ according to Amnesty International, 2014), not only will it lead as suggested above to pervasive community antipathy and alienation that can last for generations and threaten the integrity of the state, but it will also corrode the legitimacy of the whole enterprise of ‘good governance’ reform and the credibility of both its foreign and national proselytisers” ( _Blunt, 2014_).

Despite this, and the fact that what I was proposing had its genesis partly in the views of the president of the country (and his support), the donor chose not to heed my advice, preferring instead to devote its resources to largely futile but right-sounding and politically anodyne “good governance” topics, examples of which are discussed more fully by Blunt _et al._ (2017) and Blunt _et al._ (2022).

Prevalence and consequences

I tell you all this because the crimes against humanity that have been committed — mainly by the same Anglosphere gang led by the US — in Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen are bound to have caused in those places what I found among the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The wall of hatred, incandescent rage, and hunger for revenge so engendered will last for generations. Partly for reasons discussed elsewhere, foolishly, the perpetrators of the death and destruction seem largely to ignore this, or to downplay or discount or ridicule it, or to cover it up.

In Gaza or anywhere else, an ambrosial holiday resort “like no one has ever seen before”, a “riviera of the Middle East” boasting “a colossal golden statue of Trump”, or a peace plan to bring this about that is "an amazing thing", will not make the hatred evanesce or go away.

No amount of megalomaniacal prattle and subterfuge will erase the humiliation or quell the rage and the thirst for retribution.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.