The Sons of Iraq – a step towards Stratified Democracy?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Aug 282008
 

The level of violence in Iraq has decreased to the point where troop withdrawals by both the British and the Americans are once again being discussed seriously. Iraq and the United States have reportedly set a preliminary timetable to start withdrawing American forces from Iraqi cities from next June, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari last week after his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

The Zebari-Rice agreement would link troop reductions to the achievement of certain security milestones. But, given how cautious President George W Bush has been to committing to a timetable for American withdrawal, for his Secretary of State to agree to one at all is an indicator of how much better things have become.

And, of course, a few weeks before, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a statement to Parliament announcing the intention to further reduce British troops in 2009.

Who would have thought it a year ago? Certainly I didn’t when I wrote ‘Iraq – time to stand aside…and let them get on with it?’ for this Blog last June.

So, what’s changed the battleground so much in the past 14 months?

Partly the much vaunted ‘surge’ of American troops in Baghdad, while merely displacing many insurgents to other parts of the country, did create short-term some of the essentials for peace at least in parts of the capitol – short-lived windows of opportunity, some of which do seem to have been used.

Partly it’s the training and arming of the Iraqi military and police who have experienced success in a number of operations against the insurgents. As they have grown in confidence and expertise, so the Coalition forces have dropped back from true joint operations to becoming more background support.

This, of course, has emboldened Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki who is celebrating any and every victory of the Iraqi security forces and now pushing for the Americans to leave. (Recent government successes in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul seem to have convinced Maliki’s inner circle – cue groupthink! – that Iraq’s army does not need American help as much as it used to.)

However, a key factor in the calming of Iraq has been the so-called ‘Sons of Iraq’ – men paid $300 a day by the Americans to keep the peace in their area and to inform on anti-American insurgents and al-Qaeda personnel. The Americans provide (very) basic training – but no weapons – and they are only allowed to take defensive action for and within their own area. Most of these vigilantes are armed – indeed many are former insurgents changed sides – and there have been reports of offensive actions, brutality and reprisal atrocities. Hardly surprising, given the blood feuds and tribal and religious enmities in Iraq! Yet, by and large, the Sons have had a positive and calming effect, first helping the Americans and Iraqi combat forces clear out al-Qaeda fighters and then keeping them, other insurgents and criminal gangs out of their districts. And in some areas – such as Risala – the Sons have got involved in the infrastructure repair first the Coalition Provisional Authority and then Maliki’s government have often failed to provide, organising rubbish pick-ups, rebuilding schools and installing street power generators.

There are now reported to be over 100,000 Sons of Iraq on American pay. Approximately 80% are Sunni and 20% Shiite. General David H Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, has told Congress that the rise of the Sons has reduced American casualties, increased security and even saved American taxpayers money – “The savings and vehicles not lost because of reduced violence far outweighed the costs of their monthly contracts.”

Yet Senator Joe Biden (installed this week as Barack Obama’s running mate) is just one prominent American politician who has raised concerns that, by facilitating the Sons, the United States is perhaps unwittingly creating an alternate army to the official one and one inherently weighted against Maliki’s Shi’ite-dominated government.

For Maliki the Sons are a real problem. Not only is his government running slow on the agreement to absorb around 25% of the Sons into the Iraqi security forces but Sons leaders are now being targeted for arrest and the government is working openly on strategies either to disarm the Sons or drive them away. There seems little intention to pick up American projects aimed at developing vocational skills and employment prospects amongst the 75% of the Sons who never had any chance of going into Iraq’s police or official army.

Iraq is a patchwork of PURPLE and RED

As much as the Americans had a plan for Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it seems to have been little more than to somehow magically impose the one person/one (secret) vote Western model of Democracy. This was supposed to somehow magically turn Iraqis into a democracy-loving neo-modern people.

 

After several false starts and an awful lot of casualties, the ‘democracy plan’ has given Iraq a government of mainly Shi’ites, with a Kurdish rump who can barely be bothered to disguise their longer-term intention of creating a separate Kurdistan carved partly from Northern Iraq and partly from Eastern Turkey. All efforts to bring the Sunnis into the government have failed. There have been many more casualties and even the Shi’ites are split into several different rival factions, with most notably a very tense truce only just holding between Maliki’s government forces and the southern militia of Muqtada al-Sadr.

 

Those who know Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck’s (2002) concept of Stratified Democracy – see: Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – will not be surprised that the ‘democracy plan’ has not worked. The ‘democracy plan’ was very much the product of BLUE thinking – there is one way to create representative government of a people: the one person/one (secret) vote Western model. Stratified Democracy proposes that there are several different ways of creating representative government, each related to the cultural mindset of the people requiring government.

 

Saddam Hussein’s RED vMEME ran Iraq like his personal fiefdom. It is probably the closest recent times have seen to an approximation of a medieval kingdom. Saddam was the king; the generals were his scheming lords; and the lords ‘lorded it’ over the serfs (the ordinary people). And just like in Medieval England, the King’s structure favoured Normans over Saxons, so Saddam’s structure favoured Sunnis over Shi’ites (and Kurds).

 

And, just like parts of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, when the governing repressive BLUE or, in Saddam’s case, RED-BLUE structure is removed, what emerges is PURPLE tribalism. The mindset of the repressed peoples does not usually jump up the Spiral to BLUE or even ORANGE as one person/one (secret) vote democracy requires but settles down into natural PURPLE with the RED of some individuals driving them to become the new local leaders. They lead the tribe initially in the interests of the tribe – though as their power grows, their RED may well lead them into personal aggrandisement.

 

Thus, Iraq has become a patchwork of tribes led all too often by those with a nose for power.

 

In 4Q/8L terms what we have is a form of government (Lower Right) that matches the mindset of the people (Lower Left) with the thinking of the individuals who become leaders (Upper Left) just far enough ahead in complexity to manipulate that government.

 

The story of the Sons of Iraq illustrates these points rather well.

 

In the 2-3 years following the invasion Sunni tribesmen allied themselves with al-Qaeda in a bid both to drive out the invaders from their land – territory is very important to the PURPLE vMEME – and to prevent the Shi’ite majority from gaining the upper hand in the government of the country.

 

What has come to be known as Sahwa – the ‘Awakening’ – began in Anbar in late Summer 2006 when the tribal sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha broke his ties with al-Qaeda and approached the American military with the offer to turn his guns away from the Americans and onto al-Qaeda. (Some accounts have the first breaks with al-Qaeda occurring in late 2005.)

 

Risha’s motivation was not to embrace the Western model of democracy but to drive out al-Qaeda whose extreme religious zealotry and brutality in the pursuit of their war was increasingly alienating and disgusting their more moderate Sunni allies.

 

There were also disputes over who controlled what trade and territory – remember how important the land is to the PURPLE mindset!. But perhaps even more unsettling for Risha and other Sunni leaders was the flagrant disregard of al-Qaeda for their traditions. According to David Kilcullen, a counter-terrorism expert and sometime advisor to General Petraeus, a key al-Qaeda strategy for embedding themselves into local communities in Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan was to marry senior operatives to local brides. Among Iraq’s Sunnis it was simply not their tradition to marry their women “to strangers, let alone foreigners”.

 

Although Risha was assassinated by al-Qaeda in September 2007, Sahwa continued to spread throughout Sunni areas, facilitated by the American military. According to Washington Post staff writer Greg Bruno: “In nearly every case, local security forces were created from the ground up, with sheikhs, tribal leaders, and other power brokers entering into security contracts with coalition forces.”

 

While few other than Bush and Maliki have been so brave/foolish as to say al-Qaeda is beaten in Iraq, the turning of so many Sunnis from insurgents into American allies has most definitely led to major successes in Iraq.

 

The question now, for observers and policy-makers alike, is where do the Americans, the Sons of Iraq and Maliki’s government go from here?

 

Avoiding tribal warfare in Iraq

Walt Rostow (1960), founder of Modernisation Theory, saw traditionalism (PURPLE tribalism) as the greatest hindrance to developing Western-style consumer societies (the product of BLUE-ORANGE workings) in Third World Countries. Those who chose to ‘democratise’ Iraq should have taken note of Rostow and other sociologists like Talcott Parsons (1964) who saw the need for major shifts in values if traditional societies were to be modernised.

 

Apparently there were those in the Pentagon in 2003 who wished to engage with Iraq at a tribal level. It’s a pity their voices didn’t prevail. Thousands upon thousands of lives might not have been wasted and ruined!

 

An American infantry officer interviewed by the BBC this week conceded that districts under the control of the Sons of Iraq were effectively run as if by mafia-type gangs.

 

The approach of Stratified Democracy is to deal with whatever form of government works best for the mindset of the populace. If the men of the tribe are happy to live and sometimes die by the autocratic orders of their sheiks, then that works for them at this time. In these Life Conditions, as Don Beck might say.

 

Trying to impose Western-style democracy is pointless. All that has done in Iraq is to put in charge of a would-be monolithic structure a tribal leader, Nuri al-Maliki, whose RED and PURPLE look first and foremost for the interests of those Shia tribes loyal to him. It is unlikely Maliki can bring a peace to Iraq which benefits all its many tribes.

 

The Americans clearly want out of the fighting in Iraq – although, equally clearly, they have a strong interest in the oil there; and there is also much speculation that they would like permanent military bases there. (Ready to take on the Iranians, if need be, presumably…?)

 

The danger is that, by the Americans withdrawing as an intercessionary force  and leaving Maliki in power, already starting to pursue overt anti-Sons of Iraq/implicit anti-Sunni strategies, Iraq will be spiral down into large-scale religious and tribal warfare.

 

Those who would bring peace to Iraq need to deal with the tribal leaders as they are – often autocrats – and find the common ground between them. Maliki is, effectively, not a prime minister of a unitary and united country but one of the more powerful tribal leaders and needs to be treated as one – without, if this is possible, him losing too much face. (RED won’t be shamed!)

 

The in-group/out-group functioning of PURPLE is vulnerable to super-identities being created. For example, sparring ‘Yorkshiremen’ and ‘Lancastrians’ will respond to the call to be ‘Englishmen’. ‘English’ and ‘Scottish’ – at least in the past! – have responded to the call to be ‘Britons’. A number of people across Europe now see themselves as ‘Europeans’. The lower-down identities are still there and can be aroused – often with highly-negative consequences – if the suprer-identity breaks down. (Viz: Yugoslavia.) But the successful creation of a suprer-identity can unite lower-down identities – though the supra-identity often requires a substantial amount of maintenance.

 

Iraq, if it is to avoid tribal warfare, needs its super-identity rebuilt (for a uniting PURPLE) while the interests of the RED-driven leaders need to be aligned as far as possible.

 

Interestingly the Sons of Iraq might offer some possibilities here. First, the name refers to the geopolitical entity of Iraq – something all the tribes (at least the Sunni and Shia tribes!) can relate to. Secondly, there are 20,000+ Shi’ites among their number. How did they get there, sharing an identity and a cause with over 80,000 Sunnis? Granted the Sons of Iraq is actually an umbrella name for a number of diverse and independent groups – but does the concept offer some possibilities for bringing Stratified Democracy to Iraq?

Tribal War in South Ossetia

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Aug 152008
 

As the Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia inches towards a volatile, dangerous and perhaps quite short-lived peace, it is a good time for those who would intervene – ‘soft cops’ like France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and ‘hard cops’ such as American Vice President Dick Cheney – to study the nature of such conflicts, how they arise, how they can be managed, hopefully resolved and, better still, prevented. Better informed, their interventions may have a chance of working.

With ethnic Russian breakaway forces in Abkhazia equally determined to resist Georgian attempts at reintegration and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pronouncing that Moscow cannot work with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, with both armies bloodied and ready to resume combat at the slightest provocation, with civilian dead estimated in the thousands and the two governments hurling accusations of ethnic cleansing and would-be genocide at each other, there is every potential for an awful lot more lives to be lost in the next few months.

At root South Ossetia is a conflict of PURPLE tribalism. The PURPLE vMEME seeks security in belonging; in belonging to some, it demarks itself from others – all too easily leading to prejudice and discrimination against those who are “not of our tribe”. Thus, it marks the tribe of Lancashire as distinct from the tribe of Yorkshire and the clan of MacDonald from the clan of Campbell. But where super-identities can be created, Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen are both ‘English’ and MacDonald and Campbell are both ‘Scottish’ and England can be marked as distinct from Scotland. English and Scottish can – and have been – ‘British’  when dealing with external ‘beyond’ challenges – eg: building the British Empire and fighting the Germans in two World Wars. Now, of course, Britons and Germans are ‘Europeans’. Yet still there is prejudice between Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen and between MacDonalds and Campbells.

Racial, religious and political differences can all be used as tribal markers by PURPLE. In fact, anything that distinguishes your own tribe from another.

So ethnic Russians, as they see themselves, are not from the same tribe as ethnic Georgians, as they see themselves. The ‘other lot’ are not from our tribe.

That, in itself, need not be a problem. Psychologists from Clare W Graves (1978/2005) to William Samuel (1996) have reported that studies of tribes untainted by anything beyond their own tribal existence describe them as showing little aggression. When they do become aggressive, it is a defensive aggression to protect themselves and/or their resources – and one of the most important resources for a tribe is its land. So South Ossetia, like Bosnia and Kosovo before it, is a tribal conflict over land.

Unfortunately there seems to be little appreciation of PURPLE tribalism in the more sophisticated thinking of key Western policymakers. Some 12-years-plus after the start of the tribal wars which tore Yugoslavia apart, the United States’ invasion of Iraq got bogged down in internecine tribal wars which the invaders had failed utterly to anticipate. Even now it can be argued that one of the single biggest obstacles to progress in Iraq is the US determination to impose one man/one (secret) vote democracy – a BLUE system beyond the understanding of many Iraqis whose PURPLE looks to their tribal leaders to be told what to do and how to think.

RED exploiting PURPLE

Of course, the situation in South Ossetia is more complex than a straight-forward tribal war. Like Bosnia and Kosovo, South Ossetia was part of a BLUE large-scale governmental hegemony in which a number of tribes were compacted together into a super-tribal identity. In part, the tribes were encouraged to associate into that super-identity – eg: Yugoslavia: ‘all the Slavs’. In part, the super-identity was imposed through a totalitarian police state – eg: both the USSR and Yugoslavia – with any dissent being ruthlessly crushed.

When those hegemonies began to collapse at the end of the Cold War – what emerged from their suppressions? Primarily PURPLE tribalism. Because the supra-identities were tied into the governmental hegemonies, they tended to melt away with them. Even Czechoslovakia disintegrated once the structure of totalitarian Communism was dismantled.

But the Czech and the Slovak tribes parted company without bloodshed. Why then, in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, have the partings been so brutal and bloody?

Jerry Coursen (2001), a neuroscientist and Complexity Theory expert from Arizona State University, has put forward the idea that RED inevitably emerges in the leadership of a tribe. (Logic: to be a leader, no matter how low profile, RED must be there in the asserting of your ideas.) RED – and vMEMES higher in the Spiral – then exploit PURPLE tribalism for their own agendas. Since RED is focussed totally on itself and doing what it wants to do, the cost to others is unimportant. Depending on temperament – ie: if there is high Psychoticism – and what schemas are held – eg: killing is OK – RED may actually gain pleasure from the exercise of  brutality.

One of the most significant examples in recent times of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism was Slobodan Milošević’s emotive address to Serb nationalists at Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 after they had been roughed up by the police, largely composed of ethnic Albanians. As Milošević was reputed to have said, the (BLUE) dream of Yugoslavia died that day – and his own ascent to power began. And how many people died over the next 13 years as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of Milošević’s lust for power…?

In South Ossetia there are striking similarities in the way Mikhail Saakashvili used the issue of the secessionist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and talk of reclaiming Georgian land to propel his presidential re-election campaign at the start of 2008. The assault he unleashed on Tskhinvali on 8 August was out of all proportion to the provocative attacks on Georgian forces by Ossetian separatists over the preceding week and, even by conservative estimates, careless of the loss of civilian life in the extreme. Another sign of RED driving Saakashvili’s thinking was the apparent blindness to consequences. Russia had given explicit warnings it would intervene if there was a major military offensive by Georgia.

In comparison to the ruthless and bloody strategies of Milošević and Saakashvili, the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’ of the Czechs and the Slovaks was helmed by ‘big picture’ thinkers like Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar who saw the need for and the benefits of separation and planned it in meticulous detail. Neither side was significantly disadvantaged by the separation and relations between these two tribes are often described these days as “better than ever”

RED is far from being the only vMEME to exploit PURPLE in the South Caucasus. American BLUE/ORANGE  – which views the RED/BLUE policies of the Russian government and their sometime echoes of the Communist era with deep suspicion – has encouraged the idea of Georgia and the Ukraine joining NATO. Thankfully, wiser (and more complex-thinking) voices such as France and Germany have stalled this extreme provocation to the former Cold War enemy. In the meantime Western ORANGE has profiteered by selling arms on a sizeable scale to the Georgian military.

No wonder that Russian BLUE is sceptical of American airforce planes flying in humanitarian aid to Georgia’s civilian victims of the Russian counter offensive!

Vladimir Putin, good Kremlin despot

Although now prime minister, rather than president, Vladimir Putin is still widely acknowledged as the principal decision-maker in the Kremlin. Given the ruthless manner in which he pursued a military solution in Chechnya, the Russian military response to the Georgian onslaught on Tskhinvali was entirely predictable (except presumably to Saakashvili’s myopic RED!).

RED, clearly, is a major player in Putin’s vMEME stack. However, he also shows much BLUE in his thinking. In many ways, he is what Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2003) would call a ‘Zealot’. He knows how it should be and he will make that happen.

After the chaos of the immediate post-Communism years, when RED ruled much of Russia through widespread corruption and the activities of Mafia-style criminal gangs, when many people in Russia were longing for the ruthless discipline of the Communist years to return, Putin was very much the man for the job.

Under his iron fist, Russia has reinvigorated itself and prospered mightily from its gas and oil businesses. If ORANGE does flit about in Putin’s thinking, it is often put out of business by RED and BLUE. If Putin does often seem like an old-style leader of the Soviet Union, well, that’s because at heart he is. He even uses Russian’s mushrooming economic clout as a weapon to keep order in Russia’s interests. The most notable sufferer of Russian strategies in this way has been the Ukraine’s struggle with the prices for the Russian gas on which it very much depends.

American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice showed just how much she doesn’t get it when she said, “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslavakia, where Russia can invade its neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.”

Not in Vladimir Putin’s head they haven’t. He’s doing what a good Kremlin despot does. He’s keeping order on behalf of Russia’s interests.

And what can the US do about it other than huff & puff and sell more arms to the Georgians? The American military are already failing to win two wars – in one of which they invaded a sovereign country, occupied its capital and overthrew its government. With the Iranians also still dragging on not going nuclear, overt military operations in the South Caucasus – even in a very limited manner – is not an option. No American GIs are going to die for Georgia.

So what to do…?

Essentially RED has to be restrained and the PURPLE of both Georgians and South Ossetians made to feel safe.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s 6-point ceasefire plan is a good start but it’s merely a short-term holding operation. It doesn’t even attempt to address the underlying tribal disputes but calls for ‘international negotiations’ on the future status of South Ossetia and Abhkazia.

According to reports coming out of  Tbilisi and Gori, many Georgians blame Mikhail Saakashvili for the mess their country is in. Now would be a good time for a vote of no confidence in him in the Georgian Parliament, leading to fresh elections. The last thing the United States should do is attempt to shore up Saakashvili’s government. He has to go.

Of course, the US has to go through the motions of chiding Russia for its military intervention in Georgia but relations should be re-normalised as soon as possible. Putin has given the Georgians a very bloody nose for daring to attack Russian citizens and it will be some time before Georgia’s military infrastructure is back to where it was. His popularity is as great as ever and the Russian electorate generally seem pleased with the decisive response. Putin can afford to be generous and the US should show him and his country the respect his RED requires, drawing him into co-operation, rather than berating him into a dangerous isolationism. And, of course, since it was Georgia who pushed skirmishes onto a war level so the US has reason it should follow to stop selling Georgia arms – on an unofficial understanding the Russians also stop arming the separatists. (Putin’s RED should enjoy this top level negotiation behind closed doors!)

The difficulty between now and any conference on the future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be the very real likelihood of Georgian reunionist extremists and the separatist militias keeping the conflict going at a very low level – but always with the potential for it to explode once more. All interested governments will need to work at restraining those they can influence and to avoid getting sucked into military operations again.

Then, as they approach the ‘international discussions’, all negotiators need not only to understand the dynamics of geopolitics but also how PURPLE tribalism works. South Ossetia particularly is an interweaving patchwork of Georgian and Russian villages, with a high representation of both tribes in many of them. What ever solutions are proposed, they need to both honour the tribal identities and fulfil PURPLE’s need to feel safe by belonging.

In any part it plays in such negotiations, the United States needs to lose its dogma of one man/one (secret) vote democracy. Many of those attending a conference to resolve a PURPLE-driven conflict will have the RED-fuelled mindset of a warlord, rather than a liking for Western democracy. Solutions proposed need to take in the current level of thinking of those involved – not seek to impose some idealistic but unrealistic and unworkable form of government. Don Beck has put forward the concept of Stratified Democracy – the development of forms of representative decision-making pertinent to the cultural mindsets of the constituent populations.  (In 4Q/8L terms, this is matching the Lower Right Quadrant to what’s prevailing in the Lower Left. See also Stratifed Democracy vs Modernisation Theory .) Barack Obama needs to understand this and flow with it. George W Bush appears not to understand this – and there’s precious little evidence John McCain does.