Blaming a single person for deep structural flaws is a favorite American game. The current administration is trying to climb out of a policy sinkhole it created by digging deeper into it -- it is all Rove and Cheney's fault. Well, throw in Bush too for good measure. Israel and the Palestinians are still at each other's throats? Blame Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas. We are just two weeks away from learning officially that the surge of troops in Iraq did, at best, limited good. The main culprit? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, who has been besieged with criticism and calls for his replacement from Capitol Hill and elsewhere. The Knight Ridder Tribune believes that: "The al-Maliki government cannot control its parliament; it can't control its army; it can't control its police force; it can't get the water or electricity running; it can't broker a deal on oil profits; it can't protect its citizens, and it can't stem the sectarian violence." A USA Today editorial states: "Al-Maliki is almost universally seen as a weak leader... Iraq has no single leader or faction with anywhere near the power and charisma to force unity."
Blaming a single person allows one to avoid the difficult task of understanding the often-complex underlying factors that caused the mess, as well as the even more challenging task of figuring out ways to change these factors. It is much easier to just call for replacing the non-leading leader. It fits well into the American predisposition to psychologize everything and sociologize nothing.
Take Iraq. It is a territory that was occupied by the Brits after WWI, who took a bunch of tribes that had little in common and boxed them into one state. It took a brutal dictator to hold them together. Saddam oppressed the two major tribes (Kurds and Shia) by drawing on the smallest of the lot (Sunni), who knew damn well that they would lose everything if they did not support him. The US came in and kicked over this structure, but failed to replace it with any viable alternative. It does not side with the Shia majority, because it tends to ally itself with Iran, and might impose a theocracy and kill many thousands of Sunnis. Nor does the US ally itself with the Sunnis, because they are a minority, and many Sunnis are former supporters of the Saddam regime. Instead, the US clings to a fantasy in which Shia, Sunni and Kurdish militias become loyal national forces, and a Shia leader acts as if he was a national one. Fat chance.
In contrast, if the US forces allowed each tribe to rule itself in its own territory, and the tribal chiefs to negotiate with one another as representatives of semi-independent states, effective leaders might emerge.
Alternatively, take the matter of oil revenues, the number one source of income for the Iraqi government. Most of the oil is in the Shia areas. The Sunnis have a thirty-year history of siphoning off major portions of these revenues. In the new Iraq, they will have to do with much less. Surprise, surprise: they're having a hard time accepting their much-impoverished lot. If, instead of blaming Maliki for not working out a deal with the Sunnis, the US would get the oil companies or Saudi Arabia to step in to make up for the Sunni shortfall, Maliki would suddenly shine (at least for a while).
Americans do not have to look far to see that changes in historical forces make for "great" leaders (most of which are associated with wars) and that leaders have rather limited effects on historical forces. A 2004 Newsweek article on Bush's post-9/11 transformation puts it well: "In his first eight months in office, [Bush] had to struggle against the perception that he was an accidental president, elected on a fluke, not quite sure whether he really belonged in the Oval Office. Then came 9/11... three days later he was standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center, waving his bullhorn and speaking with a conviction that gave heart to his countrymen."
Bush's conversion also reminds us that we should be careful less we get what we pray for. More and more Americans are coming to believe that to the extent that the post-9/11 Bush led the nation, he marched it in the wrong direction. (The same holds for Tony Blair, another once much-admired leader). Strong-minded elected officials are welcome, but only as long as they either convince the majority of the people of the legitimacy of the policy they favor -- or adjust course to heed the voice of the people.
Nowhere is the American preoccupation with personalities more evident than in the current presidential campaign. Talking heads on TV acts like petty psychologists. One candidate is too smooth, the other too young, still another too lazy. I'm sorry to say that unless one looks beyond personalities, Americans will again be disappointed with whoever gets elected. As long as various factions in the Democratic Party cannot agree with each other what should be done about Iraq and Iran, as long as the major segments of the Republican Party continue to pull in a still different direction, the next president's Middle East policies will vacillate forth and back among various clear alternatives. He or she will reduce our forces in Iraq but remain mired in it; encourage Israel and the Palestinians to settle their differences but get nowhere, and will be declared weak for not finding an effective way to deal with Iran.
We should stop blindly pinning the tail on whoever is the current head of state and instead try to expose the underlying forces at work. We should see if we can work with others to support or even fashion new historical forces that will make it possible for those who are supposed to lead us to do their jobs right.
Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at the George Washington University and, most recently, the author of Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy.