Re: My poor misguided/misinformed friends

On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:36:48 -0800, wf3h wrote:

On Dec 29, 8:19 am, "Kleuskes & Moos" <kleu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 29 dec, 13:46, wf3h <w...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


So you invaded a basically secular country, which isn't even arab.

no arabs in iraq?

I did not say that. But there's a lot of non-arabs aswell. Kurds, Much
of the Shia population...

gee. i left your words intact above. you said iraq isn't arab. it's
about 70% arab.

and, yes, it's logical to invade a 'secular' arab country for the
basic reason that there are no 'secular' arab countries.

Define "secular", since we seem to have some difference of definityion,
here.

i don't know what you mean by 'secular'. that's why i put the term in
quotes. you used it, so you tell me.


I can recall reading quite a few times over the years that Iraq was
in fact a rather secular (in the plain vanilla sense, non-religious)
society with a Westernized middle class, and I realize that's not
true of Iraq presently, or at the time of the 2003 invasion, so I
did a little googling to see whether my memory is failing me. It
seems not. The consensus seems to be that Iraq had such a secular,
Westernized middle class before the 1991 Gulf War, but that middle
class was gradually destroyed by the sanctions that followed that
war and replaced by the religious/tribal factions we are all so
familiar with now. see, for example, the Pew Forum interview of
Dr. Vali Nasr, Professor of National Security Affairs at the (US)
Naval Postgraduate School, at
http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=91 :
<quote>
(Interviewer:) Can I ask you to elaborate on the point you were making
in the discussion earlier, that the U.S. did not adequately gauge Iraqi
society in terms of its religiosity versus its secularism?

(A) We didn't have a window into Iraqi society because we were not traveling
there or having contact with Iraq. We relied heavily on impressions we had
of Iraq before the war of 1990-91. Iraq at that time had the highest number
of engineers per capita in the Arab world, had a highly secular society and
was pluralistic. It might have been run by hardheaded authoritarians, but
Iraqi society was fairly modern. It had the lowest rate of infant mortality
and the highest life expectancy in the Arab world. The whole paradox of Iraq
in the late 1980s was that the most modern Arab society had the most medieval,
dictatorial Arab government. In fact, we were somewhat driven by this vision
that Iraq would be easy because its society was so modern.

What we did not adequately gauge was how Iraqi society had changed in the
1990s. Iraq's middle class began to disappear because of the sanctions.
Religion began to make inroads into Iraqi society, both among the Shiites
and the Sunnis in various ways. Many of the elements of modern secular
behavior began to disappear. This was a key point, particularly among
the Shiites, because Saddam did not really allow for any Shia political
institutions. Shias participated in the Ba'ath Party -- they went up,
they got thrown out, they were purged -- and within the military it was
the same. There were no real Shia institutions that represented the Shia.

<...> So when the lid was taken off, there were no secular Shia institutions
to which the Shia had any allegiance or with whom they had relationships.
Those who were secular were outside Iraq. <...> So we ended up not only
with a society that was more religious than we thought, that had become
more lower and lower-middle class than we thought, but also a society
whose leadership was more clerical than we thought, assumed or hoped for.
</quote>

One lesson I read in this is that the sanctions did not foster a
democratic revolution in Iraq. There are other lessons there, too.


show me an arab country that, when given the chance to vote, didn't
vote for the most fundamentalist, regressive parties that could be
found.  hell, look at iraq today with al sadr, etc.

That "given the chance to vote" rather limit's the choice. None of the
arab nations qualifies as a democracy in any definition of the word.

ever hear of algeria? they had an election several years ago. they voted
for extremists. palestine? they voted for hamas. local elections in
saudi arabia have always gone to the most extreme islamist candidates.



Dr. Nasr, at the URL I gave above, wrote an article in 2005 on "Muslim
Democracy". He has this to say:

<quote>
I use the term Muslim democracy as a parallel to Christian democracy in
the same way in which Catholic parties became active in Europe when that
opening occurred. It did not mean that these were religious parties;
rather, it meant that they were democratic parties whose platform reflected
the religious values and demands of their constituents.

This is still a very young phenomenon in the Muslim world. What we are
seeing in the Muslim world is that when you allow many parties to compete
-- in open electoral politics -- you are likely to have forces dominate
that tend to be right of center, forces that are Islamically conscious
but not necessarily fundamentalist or Islamist. Those who dominate the
strategic middle (the center of gravity in politics) can come from either
direction. They could be reformed Islamists, like the AKP (Justice and
Development) party in Turkey, or they could be secular parties that
adopt a sufficient degree of religiosity to become appealing to the
majority of the population. In some ways, it is not different from the
tenor of American politics or how American politicians operate. We now
think the center of gravity in American politics is to the right and
believes in Christian values. This leads secular politicians not to
become completely religious but to try to appeal to these key values.

This is what might happen in the Muslim world. The approach I suggest
is not to focus on the actors. Are we going to have the perfect actors?
Are we going to have the perfect democrats, the perfect moderate Muslims?
Rather, I suggest that we should focus on having the right arena. The
arena will produce the right actors because in a fully competitive arena
in which neither side can dominate, and you have competition, ultimately
the Islamists will have to moderate to compete and the secularists will
have to Islamize a bit to compete, and then that will determine the middle.
</quote>

I'm quoting this at considerable length because maybe it will keep
the discussion from getting sidetracked onto non-issues like whether
Iraq is an Arab country. (Of course it is.) You say that Arabs will
always vote for the most regressive, fundamentalist party that can
be found. Dr. Nasr says the facts are somewhat more complex. In hard
science, simple answers are considered desirable; in matters of
human behavior, simple answers tend to be less true than complex
answers.

the objective should have been the construction of a secular,
democratic state which gave all of the arabs..and kurds...equal
opportunities regardless of whether they were sunnis or shi'ites.
this would have served as a role model for other arab...and
islamic...cultures (such as iran and pakistan).


That's a noble objective. I could sign on to that objective myself.
As a reason for invading Iraq, though, it doesn't convince me, because
I don't believe an invading Western power could make it happen. To see
why I don't believe it, look at your own arguments. Your working definition
of a fair, democratic election is one that produces the results you want.
If you really want to see fair, open, democratic elections in the
Arab Muslim world, you'd better be prepared to accept some results you
don't like.

The Pakistani's do enjoy reasonably free and democratic elections every
now and then. So does Indonesia.

indonesia does quite well. pakistan does not. even though islamist
parties there only get about 10% of the vote, the islamists are so
powerful they control much of the military and the FATA's where bin
laden is probably hiding.

Nice going. If "breaking the hold of fundamentalism" was the goal,
why not invade Saudi Arabia or Iran? Shit, why not start at home?

iraq was a logical place to start because it was the most virulent
arab country. it had had WMD development programs. it had invaded its
neighbors. it had used WMD's. it had the largest army in the middle
east.

Ah... They had WMD programs. GREAT! Where? why weren't they being
paraded on CNN?

it's probably the case that english isn't your first language. the
construct 'had had' means the past. it was the case, IN THE PAST, that
iraq had WMD programs. it certainly retained this knowledge.

And " the most virulent arab country" is a qualification which is
impossible to objectify. Hence it's no more than sloganism.

it ran WMD programs. it gassed its own population. it invaded its
neighbors. it threatened others.

how would YOU qualify 'virulent'?

And at the end of all the niggling, so what? Weren't we talking
about creating a secular, democratic state to serve as a role model
for other Arab/Islamic cultures? Aren't there more sensible ways to
do that than to invade an unstable, fractured, factionalized nation,
dismiss its government, and fire its army? Saddam was a monster, but
removing him the way we did has not made life better and earned us the
gratitude of his subjects and his neighbors, has it?

The frustrating thing about watching your performance here is that
you're half right. There are bad guys who are Muslims, and it's
important to do something about that. But then you go for the
simple answer, and the simple answer is wrong. Saddam was a bad
guy, but that doesn't justify the invasion. There were other
choices than just (A)"invade Iraq" and (B)"do nothing".

That's the point you keep missing. You raise the volume so high
that the only response you can hear is shouting, and when people
shout, they are more likely to say things like "YOU DUMB IDIOT"
than, well, something more complex. But simple answers to complex
problems is a chump's game. You always lose.

John

.

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