September 24, 2006
Closing of a Nation
By DAVID BROOKS, NY Times

It’s an elementary principle of child psychology: safety leads to exploration. The child who feels securely loved at home will venture out and try new things. The child who is insecure will be more passive and cling to what is known.

What’s true of children is true of adults, and in Iraq we now have a case study in human insecurity. The people of Iraq have endured decades of dictatorship, war, insurgency and civil strife, and the psychological costs have been ruinous. Iraq is the most xenophobic, sexist and reactionary society on earth.

Researchers from the invaluable World Values Survey have interviewed over 2,300 adults from all over Iraq. The results have just been published by Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel and Mark Tessler in the journal Perspectives on Politics.

Inglehart, Moaddel and Tessler describe a people who, buffeted by violence, have withdrawn into mere survival mode. They are suspicious of outsiders and intolerant toward weak groups, and they cling fiercely to what is familiar and traditional.

The researchers asked the Iraqis if they would mind living next door to foreigners. In most societies, there is a small minority who say they would mind. Nine percent of Americans say they would mind, and in the median country internationally about 16 percent say they would mind. Ninety percent of the Iraqi Arab respondents rejected foreigners as neighbors.

As Inglehart, Moaddel and Tessler write, Iraqis “reject foreigners to a degree that is virtually unknown in other societies throughout the world, including more than a dozen predominantly Islamic countries.”

Iraqi Arabs almost universally reject Americans, Britons and the French, and roughly 60 percent reject Iranians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians, the groups they are least hostile to.

Iraqis also viscerally resist social reform and deviation from the traditional ways of doing things. For example, 93 percent of Arab Iraqis said men made better leaders than women, the highest proportion of any group in the world.

Iraqi Arabs were asked which values they would like to instill in their children. They emphasized “obedience” and “religious faith” more than any of the 80 other societies that have been studied. They were less likely to try to instill “independence” in their children than people in 74 of the study’s 80 societies.

Meanwhile, Iraqis cling fiercely to their primal identities. Roughly 86 percent of the Arab Iraqis said they were very proud to be Iraqi, and the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds were very likely to trust members of their own community. Such in-group solidarity is almost without precedent.

Iraqi Kurds stood apart from the world in all these various measures, but Iraqi Arabs stood apart even more. This suggests that Saddam’s tyranny had already had a corrosive effect on Iraqi society by 1991, when the Kurds were effectively liberated, but over the past 15 years, things have become much worse. It’s impossible to tell how much of the trauma has been caused since the American invasion.

We do know, however, that American policy makers were surprised to learn how religious Iraqi society had become during the 1990’s. (Iraqi exiles had not prepared them for this.) And we also know this climate of opinion works against the Iraqi leaders as they try to create a functioning nation.

In essence, Iraqis are like turtles trying to pull into their shells, but the big tasks now require non-shell behavior. They require getting Shiites and Sunnis to trust each other enough to negotiate a settlement on sharing oil revenue. They require getting Shiite policemen to crack down on their own, and on Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia.

The larger lesson, as we think about future efforts to reform the Middle East and combat extremism, is that the Chinese model probably works best. That is, it’s best to champion economic reform before political reform.

We know from a wealth of historical experience that when people see their standard of living rise, they reject the reactionary survival mentality and they become more open to others and to change. If people already see their lives improving materially, they will be more likely to keep their cool as their political institutions are reinvented.

In the age of terror, statesmanship means knowing how to create a sense of security so you can lead people on a voyage of reform. Most of all, it means that if you’re going to do nation-building, you have to understand the values of the people you’re going to build a nation with.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Somewhere or other on this or another thread I went into my excruciatingly complex conspiracy theory on that.

Basically, it's this: He didn't disarm. His generals disarmed but didn't tell him for fear of Saddam's displeasure. This is why all of the decrypted intelligence indicated that WMD were still present. This is why the coalition forces went in with full NBC, Saddam ordered the military to use WMD that they didn't have but had left Saddam to believe they had.

Worse, the Iraqi generals couldn't tell the UN about the destruction of the WMD because Saddam would know they disobeyed orders and they feared Saddam far, far more than they feared the UN or USA.

That Saddam had WMD is an indisputable fact, established by thousands of dead Iranians and Kurds. There was a clear paper trail of importation of chemical precursors capable of producing tens of thousands of tons of WMD. There is no paper trail indicating the disposition of those precursors.

B

i like it.

it has very compelling ideas.

tom w

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

The disappearance of his WMD is a mystery. I wonder whether we will ever learn the truth behind all this. If we do, it will probably have some elements of your theory.

Changing the subject doesn't help answer the question - where is your evidence that Saddam was not contained when we invaded in 2003?

I agree. Now that we've ascertained that Saddam was a threat to his neighbors, America, Israel, a good portion of his own country and anyone else he disagreed with and thus a huge problem left very much unsolved we can move on.

What proof do you offer that shows that Saddam, Uday and/or Qusay were contained and confidently foretold they wouldn't become uncontained in the future?

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

If we agree that Saddam was a threat, which I think we can to varying degrees, the bigger question is whether or not full on invasion was the best way to deal with it. I didn't think so and the results so far are not looking too good.

We had a good relationship with the Kurds, we could have moved to make them fully independent and F*** Turkey. That would have removed roughly half of Saddam's oil revenues from his monopoly stash. Iraqi Kurdistan is land locked, that would have been a problem, but not an insurmountable one IMO. Turkey is wanting all sorts of things from the west, we had leverage available to bring them in line.

And besides, Turkey's repression of their Kurdish minority has been way harsh, not that different from Saddam's. It would have been in their best interests to arrive at a better long term solution to the whole drawn out imbroglio.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

It almost sounds as if you might be remotly coming close to admitting that there is some strategic and tactical advantage to having US troops on the ground in that area of the world.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Why would you say something like that?The proof that he was contained, in a nutshell, is that he had not taken any meaningful action against anybody and that his military had become a bad joke. Before we invaded, he looked weak. After we invaded, his weakness was plain for all to see.

I see no proof that he would not become uncontained in the future. That's why it would have been necessary to keep ramping up the pressure on Saddam to make sure he didn't get out of his cage.

Who would ramp up the pressure and continue to contain him (and pay for it)? The same people that had been doing it for 12 years? How would this containment work absent any restrictions on trade with a large financially lucritive influx from Russia, China and France?

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I don't have answers to any of those questions, but we had a duty to explore options before invading. IMHO.

Even if none of those options worked, there was little harm in trying. If we had tried, then we could say with a straight face that we exhausted all alternatives before we invaded.

Those answers are self evident, based upon Hussein's actions, the actions of the UN and the Russians, Chinese and French. Indeed, we tried that approach for twelve years. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look that it was being unraveled at blinding speed by both Saddam and the countries mentioned.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I guess I must be thick because the evidence I see doesn't show Saddam unraveling anything other than himself. There was no there there. You keep making these statements that Saddam wasn't contained or that Saddam was unraveling something. Will you please give us even one fact to support your claim?

I despised Saddam and his sons. I was schizo in the run up to war cause part of me wanted to smash the prick but the other part kept saying that it was the tar baby/hornets nest combo. Plus, I didn't think DUBYA had sufficient smarts to pull it off, nor the other two guys who were really running the show anyway.

I dunno, I'm half nuts. There are times I think I'll be pulling for nuking some of the you-you-laters in the not to distant future.

But, I think tissue rejection is always going to be a factor, specially in that part of the world. Did you read that David Brooks column I posted? Iraq is one of the most virulently anti-foreigner societies in the world. And Brooks was pushing for invading Iraq back in the 90s. For him to be bringing this stuff up is interesting.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Too much ambition is this crowd to be patient. They figured spring '03 was the best time cause they had a year and a half til the next election. Spring '04 was too risky, might not have it mopped up in time.

Geo. Schultz, Dubya's original major presidential sponsor/kingmaker, was said to be very horny to invade Iraq. Bechtel did end up getting major contracts (fancy that), many of which it doesn't look like they're going to be able to deliver on.

Oh well, they still got the money.

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Te futueo et caballum tuum

1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K