A reading of The Prize, aside from teaching one quite a bit about the history of the oil industry, makes it clear that creating a non-violent society in Iraq is going to be a challenge.
“In July 1958, [Iraqi Army] officers plotting a coup told their troops the far-fetched story that they had been ordered to march to Israel and surrender their weapons. That was sufficient to get the soldiers to support a rebellion. The coup that followed set off an explosion of violence and savagery. Crowds surged through the streets, holding aloft huge photographs of Nasser [the Egyptian dictator and pan-Arabist] , along with live squirming dogs, which represented the Iraq Royal Family. King Faisal II himself was beheaded by troops that stormed the palace. The Crown Prince was shot, and his hands and feet were hacked off and carried on spikes through the city. His mutilated body, along with those of a number of other officials, was dragged through the streets, and then hung from a balcony… ” — page 508
Life next door in Iran isn’t a whole lot more pacific.
[One of the last Westerners in Iran around the time it switched to an Islamic government was an Irish petroleum engineer named Jeremy Gilbert, hospitalized in Tehran with hepatitis.] “Very weak and hardly able to move around the ward, Gilbert was mistaken by the Iranians in the hospital for an American. A group of nurses took to gathering outside his window to chant ‘Death to Americans.’ Another patient without warning began beating Gilbert on the head with his crutches.” — page 683
And it is easy to forget that the interaction between Iraq and Iran has not been entirely peaceful in recent times.
“The Iraqis were unprepared for the ‘human wave’ assaults they encountered on the battlefield [of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War]. Hundreds of thousands of young people, drawn by the Shiite vision of martyrdom, and with little thought for their own lives, advanced on Iraqi positions in front of regular Iranian troops. Some of the young people arrived at the front carrying their own coffins, exhorted as they had been by Khomeini that ‘the purist joy in Islam is to kill and be killed for God’. They were given plastic keys to heaven to wear around their necks. Children were even used to clear minefields for the far more valuable and much rarer tanks, and thousands of them died.” — page 711
This earlier blog posting looks at what we could do domestically with the $100+ billion that we’re investing in Iraq. Those who’ve read The Prize will probably be skeptical that $100 billion will be enough to end the violence.
What is the point here?
Are you saying that violent societies cannot be transformed very quickly?
Take a look at Japan and Germany immediately after WWII until today, safer and more peaceful places than the US.
What would you say about a country who commited terrible attrocities against peasents? An example can be found here: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_intro.html
I’m writing from a small southern city with a sizeable industry of independent oil production. The year that The Prize was published, the local bookstores ran out repeatedly. It was the gift for anyone in the industry, and for good reason. It’s arguably the best non-fiction book of all time, by many standards. Every time I read something about the wonderful ruling family of Saudi Arabia, I’m reminded of Yergin’s description of how it started.
Iraq is a bottomless pit! America will spend billions only to find the next Vietnam hiding in the dust. Bush and his greedy idiots will drag the entire world down for a cheap tank of gas. When the FUCK will people learn, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it!!!!
Glenn, Iraq isn’t Germany. Before Nazism, Germany was relatively peaceful and a democracy — Nazism only came to power in the throws of an extreme depression brought on by war reparations. Germany had a long history of mixed religions and cultures, which was interrupted during WW 1 and 2.
Iraq has never been a democracy, never experienced a liberal government, and has not for a long time seen anything resembling tolerant pluralism.
The final and greatest difference is, at the end of WW2, there was a massive spending effort to rebuild Europe, and Germany was surrounded by friendly neighbors through that effort. Europe had been slowly becoming more and more liberal throughout the 1800s, and democratizing Europe (and Germany) was just the last step in that.
Iraq, on the other hand, is sociologically generations behind where Germany was, does not have neighbors which are democratizing, and does not have the same support that Germany had. We’re there for oil and nothing more, and our “nation building” exercise is a thinly disguested effort to make Iraq friendly for American corporations, not a democracy. (The two are afterall, virtually mutually exclusive)
Comparisons between Germanyy and Iraq aren’t quite so simple. One of the best gastroenterologists in my city is a scion of a family that lived in Baghdad for 500 years. Around 1950 his father decided that a move was in order. Baghdad was something like one-third Jewish under the Ottomans. It’s a reasonable speculation that a series of social shocks and upheavals undid centuries of Ottoman religious tolerance, just as WW I and its aftermath produced Nzaiism. In neither case does it excuse what happened to the Jewish commmunities. Nor does the fact that the families of the Baghdad Jews are fortunate to have left when they did. But it does appear that for a long time the Ottomans provided better security to their religious minorities than Germany did. It wasn’t post-Enlightenment Western pluralism grounded in a written Constitution, but it was certainly long-lasting.
How much of Ottoman civilization persists or is adaptable to a modern country is debatable. The decades since the Ottomans collapsed have been brutal. In general, I think you’re correct that our efforts to develop a democracy are perfunctory.
1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma
“All told, twenty-five thousand whites had rampaged through Greenwood [a Tulsa neighborhood], supremely defiant of the law and determined simply to kill as many African-Americans as possible; many of these rioters were Klansmen. Estimates [are that] … some three hundred Tulsans died, perhaps 90 percent of them black.”
1921, Mississippi
“The agonies meted out to Henry Lowry that evening were somewhat more elaborate than the treatment dealt to most lynch mob victims. But they didn’t differ in their result, the same end that had awaited thousands of black men accused of crimes against white society. Lowry was said to have died .. by inches.”
A little closer to home than Iraq, Jerrold M. Packard’s “American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow” is both an indictment of the savagry of American rasism, and a hopeful pointer to the progress that our country has made in the last 40 years.
When violence is met with peace, change will occur. Are we not able to reflect upon our nature and so change that nature? The rule of law can emerge from mob-rule — our own U.S. history is proof of that.
I should amend that last phrase to be: “our own U.S. history is frequent proof of that.”
The whole Iraq situation is nothing more than directing tax dollars into right pockets. Oil and democracy is irrelevant, really…
The suggestion that violence and misery are inherent in the Iraqi culture (whatever we think that is) and that the removal of Hussein and the Baathists was a useless greed-motiviated boondoggle comes dangerously close to a cynical suggestion that “some” people are simply better off under the pacifying fist of a “strong” leader. I don’t have to tell anyone here that U.S. culture (again, whatever we think that may be) is infected with a serious violence problem, nevertheless we are not dropped into tree shredders for exrpessing political views in public nor, any longer, will Iraqis be. That is a pretty damn good start and it’s something worth spending a lot of money protecting. The truth is that following through in Iraq doesn’t have to come at the expense of domestic social programs — the lack of investment in alleviating poverty and the health care crisis and such here at home is due to a right wing social darwinism, not because, gee whiz, they only have enough money to pay for the war in Iraq.
Certainly the U.S. takes a back seat to no nation in terms of violence and government terror (> 2 million citizens in jail). But that doesn’t mean the task in Iraq (and perhaps soon Iran if they continue making nukes) is any easier. To the extent that American society changed it changed from within and rather slowly. When the change wasn’t wanted by the locals it became very expensive (e.g., the War of Northern Aggression, a.k.a. the American Civil War). Brendan (above) cites some examples of violence in the U.S. in 1921. It wasn’t until around 1970 that nearly all elements of American society came to believe that this sort of violence was unjustified. So if it costs us $5 billion per month to hang out in Iraq and it takes 50 years for the Iraqis to decide that they want to get in touch with their inner quiet secular non-violent bourgeois selves, that’s a $3 trillion investment by the American taxpayer.
Time to go fill up the tank on my new Hummer H2 now … 🙂
Ok, I can’t top that tagline — that’s funny.
Drawing analogies between violence in American society and violence in Arab (and Iranian) dictatorships is inappropriate. These dictatorships — like their African cousins — are premised on and sustained by the calculated use and threat of violence to terrorize and intimidate all segments of the population into submission. Violence in America — as lamentable as it is — is not violence precipitated on the population by a tiny, thuggish ruling clique. In America, violence is most commonly practiced by one citizen on another.
(That said, it would be interesting to know hoew violent pre-war Iraq really was; perhaps much of the violence we hear about these ays was there all along.)
Rather than postponing the elimination of the threat posed by these extremely evil regimes while we await our own beatification — my status as something less than a moral saint doesn’t mean I can’t act against a threat to my life and wellbeing, especially if my neighbors, transfixed in a spasm of handwringing over unjustified guilt, are ignoring the threat — we should be asking why the global community continues to permit these regimes to exist.
Billg, I agree that the violence broadcast on local news stations across the U.S. is primarily citizen on citizen. However, Jim Crow institutionalized white on black violence. The purpose was to intimidate blacks through murder, arson, and perhaps more insidiously, through laws upheld by the Supreme Court that economically marginalized citizens with even “one drop” of African blood. Jim Crow is not a distant memory, rather its just one or two generations ago.
Phillip — your point that extrinsic motivation is expensive (time or money) and ineffective is brilliant. That is the difference between the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the now aborted U.N. change facilitation.
Question: how many “secular non-violent bourgeois selves” does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: none, we’re self-illuminating.
Brendan, I understand your point about institutionalized violence during Jom Crow. After all, what was slavery itself?
But, I don’t believe children should be held accountable for the sins of their parents. Even more so, I don’t believe we should anthropomorphize political structures and constrain today’s policy options by the perceived sins of our ancestors’ actions.
>Time to go fill up the tank on my new Hummer H2 now … 🙂
This is proof that Freud was mistaken when he said that only women can have penis envy.
There is one major difference between comparing violence in America/Europe that seems to be left out when compared to the Middle East (or Africa for that matter) is that the Middle East’s violence is *religious* and historic driven — religious and politics can’t be mixed. Germany and Japan didn’t use “God” to brain wash their people for war.
Ahem. Germany and Japan *did*. I realize that this may be more controversial in Japan’s case, but for all practical puposes the emperor *was* God.
Yes, the Japanese co-opted Shinto, including the belief that the Emperor was of divine descent. The Nazis co-opted Christian anti-semitism, both Catholic and Protestant. But they also co-opted an imaginary folk-paganism in the Wagnerian iconography, the nature-worship schtick, the talk of “blood” and “earth”, and that theme justified going after some “non-Aryan” groups like Slavs and Roma (“gypsies”). Some of the pagan stuff was highly dissonant with traditional Christianity.
Maybe the take-home lesson is that the real moving forces are money and power, and religion is used when it’s a convenient tool. In a lot of religious persecutions, the persecuted happen to have a lot of property and confiscating it happens to be theologically proper.
Indeed, organized religion and politics not only mix, they are one and the same…both are about social control.
No SUV slam in the tagline this time…
In regard to Japan pre-war, the Emperor was indeed a god,decended from god and treated like one. Mortals could not look at him, nobody had heard his voice until Japan surendered and the emperor was forced to address the nation in a radio broadcast.
Whilst you couldnt look at him, you could and were expected to die for him.
My point is simple, the vast majority people WANT to live in peace, they WANT to raise their children in a secure environment, they WANT to be treated fairly. Give the majority of any population this and they will take it gladly. All you then need is a good system to prevent those who would abuse the people and the system from taking power. Democracy is not needed to achieve these aims, just take a look a Singapore 😉
Democracy IMHO needs several things to exist before
it can possibly work.
a) Freedom of fear on intimidation.
b) Freedom of expression.
c) Freedom to join policital parties.
d) Freedom of the media.
e) Separation of the law makers, law enforcers and law deciders (Legislative, Police, Judicial)
f) Acceptance by all major ethnic/religous groups to work under a democratic system.
Against the common perception of Democracy=Voting. Democracy is not about having TV cameras show picture of people lining up to vote. Voting is a natural outcome of achieving the above prerequisites.
100 billion on this, do you think the national debt can handle all of this?
IMHO, it is time we acted to save democracy in the US and UK.
GWB and his cohorts are corrupting everything us Brits once admired about the US. In the dust clouds of the twin towers, we have seen the UN sidelined, international law ignored, the illegal invasion of a sovereign state, the adoption of pre-emptive aggression as a policy (hey, I’ll shoot you just in case you might hit me!)
The Geneva Convention has been torn up as our countries kidnap foreign nationals (including children and British citizens), torture them and hold them without trial. The US conducts air strikes on the territory of foreign states with which they are nominally at peace (Oman, Sudan, Libya etc.)
I will not bother sounding off about the so-called ‘Patriot’ Act.
It appears to me that we are following Israel in destroying everything we once stood for by our self-righteous aggression. Osama Bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams – we are fighting him on his terms. The war against terrorism becomes state terrorism.
Is it worth ‘winning’ the war and losing your soul?
The story about Americans being harrased in Iran is nonsense.
If anything, Americans were treated like celebrities.
The plastic keys story – which has been repeated by the Western media since the 1980’s – is also false.