The Importance of Treating Culture as a System: Lessons on
Counter-Insurgency Strategy from the British Iraqi Mandate
Strategic Insights, Volume IV, Issue 10 (October 2005)
by Maj. William D. Casebeer, USAF, Ph.D.
Strategic Insights is a monthly electronic journal produced by the Center for Contemporary
Conflict at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The views expressed here are
those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of NPS, the Department of
Defense, or the U.S. Government.
For a PDF version of this article, click here.
Introduction
The United States and its coalition partners have been militarily involved in Iraq since March 19,
2003, when Operation Iraqi Freedom I began. Two years later, Operation Iraqi Freedom I has
ended, “major combat operations” have ceased—and Operation Iraqi Freedom II is now in full
swing, with coalition forces stabilizing the country until full sovereignty for Iraq becomes a
practical reality.
Aside from traditional generic concerns about nation-building, one could be forgiven for thinking
that there would be relatively little that region-specific recent history might have to offer coalition
forces as they confront a nascent Iraqi insurgency; but less than 80 years ago, America’s closest
coalition partner—Great Britain—had similar experiences in the same country during their
governance of it as a mandate. British lessons from the 1920s—when Iraq was first founded—are
more pertinent for us than ever. In this paper, I argue that British “lessons learned” can be
summarized in one sentence: during occupation and reconstruction, great powers must be
sensitive to the fact that culture is a system. If political realities are to shift and nations are to be
built, or at least reconfigured, then we must take into account political and social mechanisms
operative on the ground in the region we wish to influence.
To make this case, my charter is four-fold:
1. First, I’ll briefly establish a theoretical framework for thinking about “culture as a system,”
moving beyond Talcott Parson’s mid-Twentieth century model to a more subtle biological
cum psychological conception of cultural processes.
2. Second, I’ll discuss two major accounts of British experiences with the Iraqi mandate—
that of Toby Dodge in his 2003 opus Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a
History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press), and that of Charles Tripp in his
recently revised 2000 book A History of Iraq (New York: Cambridge University Press). I’ll
focus in particular on Dodge’s account of five factors the British failed to take into account,
arguing that Dodge’s concluding chapter does not do full justice to the lessons that
actually follow from taking his theses seriously.
