Martin McGuinness for President?

 government, heroes and inspirational figures, politics, prejudice & discrimination, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
Oct 042011
 
Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, always good for a soundbite, is certainly making some interesting news stories these days.

His effective admission yesterday (3 October) that the Provisional IRA did commit murder when innocent people died as a result of their activities is another – major? – step forward in Northern Ireland’s unsteady and decidedly volatile route to a lasting peace. McGuinness told The Independent: “The IRA were involved in quite a number of incidents which resulted in the accidental killing of innocent people and the term used by the relatives of those people who were killed was that they were murdered. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’m not going to disagree with their analysis of what happened to their loved ones…. I accept that, in the circumstances where innocent people lost their lives, then it’s quite legitimate for the term murder to be used.”

Of course, McGuinness maintains that the army and police personnel and Unionist paramilitaries blown up or gunned down by the IRA were legitimate targets in a ‘bitter war’ - to say anything other would be to disrespect both his own past and the hundreds of IRA members who died or served jail sentences for their cause. Much as his ORANGE ambition is driving him in his quest for the Irish presidency, his PURPLE loyalties and BLUE devotion to the cause will not let him go that far.

Nonetheless, at a rally at Free Derry Corner a few days earlier (29 September), the deputy first minister, after telling a crowd of some 2,000 that his heart went out to all those who lost loved ones as a result of the conflict, added: “I am also conscious of many British soldiers, members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, and my heart goes out to all their relatives.”

It’s easy to dismiss his remarks as the kind of crass manipulation typical of the ORANGE vMEME. McGuinness, however, claims the remarks were genuine and unscripted. If so, then maybe there’s some 2nd Tier thinking emerging in McGuinness’ head if he can genuinely empathise with the former enemy…?

McGuinness the Reconciler?
As  he gets serious about his campaign to become the Republic’s president, McGuinness is presenting himself more and more as a peacemaker, someone able to bring reconciliation to the still-divided peoples of Northern Ireland.

Certainly the close working relationship he formed with the once-hated Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government of 2007 - they were lampooned as ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ by some of those close to them! - is an indicator of how much McGuinness wanted  the devolved government of the province to work. When Paisley’s successor as  first minister, Peter Robinson, had his career rocked by very public marital problems, McGuiness was one of the first to offer personal support.

McGuinness  has even reached into the thorny realms of the religious schisms fuelling much  of the suspicion, distrust and outright contempt between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists.

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Martin MgGuinness and David Latimer at the ard fheis, September 2011 [Copyright © 2011 BBC

This  September he got the Reverend David  Latimer of the First Derry Presbyterian Church to be a guest speaker at Sinn  Fein’s ard fheis (annual conference)  in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. It was a ground-breaking event on 2

accounts. Firstly, it is the first time Sinn Fein’s ard  fheis has been held north of the Irish border. Secondly, it is the first  time a Protestant clergyman has been a key note speaker at the ard fheis. McGuinness told the ard fheis: "In my experience of recent years, many within the Unionist  community are up for a journey of reconciliation and dialogue." Latimer  referred to McGuinness as his ‘brother’ on that journey.

Both  the bravery of the move and the complexity of the issues involved are reflected in the vociferous criticisms of Jim  Allister, MLA for North Antrim and leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice. He called Latimer a ‘latter day Lundy’. (Robert Lundy was the Governor of Derry in 1688 who tried to persuade his Protestant ‘Orange’ forces that resistance to the Catholic Jacobites was  useless - acts portrayed in Unionist tradition as outright treachery.)

This  weekend Latimer endorsed McGuinness’s candidacy for the Irish presidency, saying McGuinness is a man on a journey, able to bring a community attached to the gun and bomb in the direction of democracy and peace. Given the reverend probably doesn’t have the Special Branch bodyguards the deputy first minister has, it’s to be hoped he doesn’t become the victim of some extremist Unionist gunman!

McGuiness the Terrorist?
McGuinness told The Independent most people don’t care if he was in the IRA. This, unfortunately, seems to be a cack-handed  attempt at disingenuity.

It  certainly matters to Jim Allister and others like him. "This latter day Lundy [Latimer] may see McGuinness as ‘one of the great leaders of modern times’, I see him as one of the most unrepentant terrorist godfathers of modern times.”

Which begs 2 questions:-

  1. is McGuinness a terrorist?
  2. can McGuinness be trusted by Unionists?

Martin McGuinness, 1972

McGuinness  doesn’t deny he was once in the IRA. It is claimed by British Intelligence that McGuinness was an influential member of the Provisional IRA Army Council. The Saville Report (2010) indicated it was likely McGuinness had a Thompson submachine gun at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstration on 30 January 1972 but was unable to establish whether he had used it against British soldiers. He was jailed in the Republic for attempting to transport explosives across the border. It is rumoured McGuinness pulled the trigger on several executions – though no credible evidence has ever been produced.

While McGuinness undoutedly saw himself as a ‘freedom fighter’, the actions he undertook, in the eyes of the British state, were undoubtedly terrorism. Directly or indirectly, it is almost certain he is responsible for deaths - murders?

We don’t know for sure, but let’s assume he does have ‘blood on his hands’. Does that mean he hasn’t proved  a very capable deputy first minister? Does that mean he doesn’t now want a form of reconciliation and dialogue between Republicans and Unionists? Can people change?

According  to Sean Kay (2011), McGuiness told him anyone wanting to go back to violence in Northern Ireland would have to go through him.

Nelson Mandela: an example of change
It’s  instructive here to look to South Africa. Nelson Mandela, now regarded as one of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century was jailed in 1962 for conspiracy to carry out a bombing campaign in opposition to the ruling whites’ policy of Apartheid. It is rumoured that, from his prison cell, he helped organise the Church Street bombing in Pretoria on 20 May 1983 in which 19 people died and more than 200 were injured - though insufficient evidence has been produced to substantiate such claims.  However, it is unequivocal that Mandela’s then-wife Winnie endorsed the practice of ‘necklacing’ - ie: placing a tyre around a suspected collaborator and setting it alight to burn them to death. This was stated in a speech on 13 April 1986 as an explicit follow-through of Nelson’s declaration that some hideous punishment must be found for ‘traitors’, exposed during the 1962 trial.

Like McGuinness, it is likely that Mandela had ‘blood on his hands’…yet he became, with the help of Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (among others), one of the staunchest advocates of peace and reconciliation the modern world has ever seen. He is a true visionary that people around the world call for time and time again, even though his age and health problems clearly limit his potential to nothing other than the most nominal involvement.

So, if Mandela could change, why can’t McGuinness? Mandela never compromised his principle of majority rule for South Africa. But, in changed circumstances and with different voices talking to him, he found a different, more peaceful way of approaching the problem. There is no doubt that McGuinness’ objective is an ‘island of Ireland’, separate from Great Britain. But, if he’s looking at some different ways of working towards that objective than killing Unionists and British soldiers, should we forbid him from pursuing those different ways?

Understanding the milieu
McGuinness and Gerry Adams have, for some considerable time, promoted the view that there is a peaceful - though rather more prolonged - course to achieving the island of Ireland. In promoting that view, they have undermined the hard core who want to bomb and shoot their way to it. In committing themselves to democratic means, McGuinness, Adams and their like are also committed to the principle that they cannot achieve their objective until the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland also want it.

That means patience - the island of Ireland might not happen in their lifetime, if indeed ever. It also means persuasion. Adams has shown himself repeatedly to be a master of persuasion. McGuinness tends to be more straight-talking, with a tendency, in the words of the old proverb, to wear his heart on his sleeve.

That straight-talking could prove endearing if, as he appears to have done at Free Derry Corner, it leads him to an unscripted acknowledgement of the pain and misery of others, of which he is, in some small part at least, a cause. But simply dismissing his past with a bland assertion that most people don’t care about it is either crass disingenuity or a gross misunderstanding of the same PURPLE-BLUE vMEME harmonic driving the core of Unionist thinking that drives Republican thinking. As Derry priest Father Michael Canny has pointed out, McGuinness has a great deal to explain about his relationship with the IRA.

Like Mandela and his aborted bombing campaign, McGuinness has come an awful long way from the IRA gunman who toted a submachine gun on Bloody Sunday. He is one of the true architects of Northern Ireland’s fragile peace and he has been a key participant in making it work. As president of the Republic, with his knowledge of Northern Ireland politics and government, he could be an invaluable asset to the governments of both north and south in promoting greater harmony and cooperation.

To progress his campaign, though, he needs to find it within himself to reconcile his own past with the image he wishes to promote of peacemaker.

Northern Ireland…quiet for now?

 community, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

It all seems to have quietened down again but the explosion of sectarian violence in east Belfast last week was truly shocking - both that it happened at all and the scale of it. Petrol bombs and pipe bombs are deadly enough but when guns are used…as local MP Naomi Long told the BBC: “When you have guns back on streets, it is very clear that the intent here is to take life. There is no other reason why people would bring a gun onto the street…”

The violence must be deeply disturbing for the majority of people in Northern Ireland who will dread a return to ‘The Troubles’. And it will be truly alarming for many politicians, economists and business people who thought, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, that the peace process was too deeply embedded in Northern Ireland culture for the province to regress back to open and large-scale sectarian violence.

But how ever shocked, disturbed and alarmed we may be, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be lulled into a false sense of security by the news that east Belfast has been mostly (though not completely) quiet since last Monday (20th) and Tuesday (21 June). There were plenty of young men from both sides of the divide on the streets Wednesday night (22nd) but community stewards were proactive in discouraging them from further violence.

The underlying problem is that relatively little has been done in those 13 years since Good Friday to address the deep-rooted tribalism which underpins the sectarian divisions and has its foundations in history.

The large-scale settling of the northern 6 counties (Ulster) by Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th Century inevitably led to the further disadvantaging of the (mainly Catholic) indigenous Irish, already subjected to stern (and often brutal) rule by their English colonial masters following the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690). It also led to a sense of 2 large tribes, marked out by different religions and different racial/national characteristics, in competition for the same territory. That tribal competition has gone on now for over 4 centuries, sometimes in open conflict, sometimes in festering tension. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, for the indigenous Irish, made getting rid of the Scottish (now British) invaders synonymous with getting rid of their English (now British) rulers.

The history of Nationalist/Catholic-Unionist/Protestant conflict in Ireland is, of course, much more complex than portrayed in this paragraph; but, nonetheless, it does set out the core issue: there are 2 large-scale tribes competing for the same territory. There is a distinct timeline from 1707 to Good Friday, with such punctuations as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Army and the Provisionals on one side and the various Unionist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the other.

Until the issue of tribalism is dealt with, the peace in Northern  Ireland will always have the kind of fragility that the violence last week  exposed so unequivocally.

Failing to deal with tribalism – sophisticated politics and populism
Time and time again tribalism has caught sophisticated political rulers out, often resulting in barbaric tribal warfare. In recent times, just for starters, we’ve seen the tribal genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, Yugoslavia torn apart by a level of barbarity and ethnic cleansing not seen in Europe since Adolph Hitler’s storm troopers marched East, the former Soviet Union wracked by various tribal rivalries that frequently resulted in large-scale bloodshed - see ‘Tribal Warfare in South Ossetia’ as an example – and the Americans’ decidedly-vague post-invasion plans for Iraq shredded (in part at least) by Sunni-Shia internecine warfare . On a smaller scale, Spain has similar problems with the Basques that the UK has had with the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Tribalism is all around us. As Desmond Morris (1981) pointed out, it’s in the chants on the football terraces when the teams play and in the streets around the football grounds when the rival groups of fans clash. We also see tribalism in the not-always playful rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, deriving its ethos from the Wars of the Roses over 600 years ago. When I lived in Hull, triabalism manifested itself in the divisions between East and West Hull and on the huge, sprawling Bransholme estate on the northern edges of the city, where the North Bransholme, South Bransholme and Kingswood tribes each guard their territory from the others. Even in my current hometown of Harrogate, one of the most wealthy and affluent middle-class towns in the north of England tribalism is unavoidable - with gangs of kids from the secondary school tribes arranging mass fights on the Stray (the lawned common land that runs around the edges of the town centre), one school versus another.

It may even be demonstrated soon, via Alex Salmond’s plans for a referendum, that a majority of Scots want their tribal independence from England!

One of the most socially-unacceptable forms of tribalism in a modern Democracy is racism but tribalism is at the centre of the formation of every in-group and the demonisation of every out-group.

Tribalism is driven by the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging. For this vMEME, knowing who you belong to and differentiating your group from groups you don’t belong to is critical and totally normal – which raises the ugly question: Is racism natural…?

Abraham Maslow (1943) established the need to affiliate as coming before the need for self-esteem and this fits with Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory - see Prejudice & Discrimination – which proposes that it is our investment of our self-esteem in our in-group which leads us to compare our group with others and to seek to dominate or drive out other groups. Muzafer Sherif et al’s (1954/1961) Robber’s Cave Experiment is just one of a number of studies which shows how competition over resources (such as land, food supply, weapons, etc) can amplify the In-group/Out-group Effect. The formation of strategy to dominate or drive out the other groups requires both leadership and management - thus, the need for the RED.vMEME to take assertive, or even aggressive, action to ensure the investment of individual self-esteem is protected through the success of the group.

Leaders need to be strong to impose their vision on the group and they must be seen to be at least protecting and preferably advancing the interests of their group. If the leaders are on the Psychoticist side in their temperament, then this RED-Psychoticist centre of gravity is likely to be ruthless and cruel in their treatment of the out-group. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the greatest wartime leaders have been utterly ruthless in their treatment of the enemy. Hitler’s war crimes speak for themselves but Winston Churchill connived all too willingly in the firestorm bombing of Dresden while US President Harry Truman not only sanctioned the atomic bombs being dropped in on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in 1948 advocated nuking the Russians. Even Barrack Obama made sure he was photographed in the White House operations room earlier this year, watching live the execution of Osama Bin Laden from a soldier’s helmet cam.

Thus, the nature and vision of the leader are critical to how and in what direction tribalism is exploited.

So why then, if tribalism is such a fact of life and leaders need to be strong and biased in the interests of the tribe, do tribal divides catch the political leaders out so often?

The answer lies in the fact that much of the political and philosophical elite in countries think in the higher, more complex and more sophisticated 1st Tier vMEMES most of their time in public office. BLUE (do the right thing), ORANGE (individual material progress) and GREEN (egalitarianism) either despise PURPLE and RED thinking as retrogressive or simply don’t understand it. No wonder commentators frequently record that ordinary voters feel disconnected from leading politicians and the political process. The more populist politicians are often despised by their more sophisticated political colleagues…but, in fact, the populist politicians are actually better able to understand the (PURPLE/RED) concerns of the ‘common man’. Accordingly, it is usually a more populist politician who is to be found leading and/or exploiting tribal aggression. Recall Slobodan Milošević’s rousing speeches to Serbian farmers in Kossovo in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the perfect example of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism to build up his own power base.

Tribalism is alive and thriving in Northern Ireland
The ongoing problem of tribalism in Northern Ireland is recognised by some social and political commentators. For example, The Workers Party (2005) stated: “The people of Northern Ireland are now more deeply divided than ever. Sectarian antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants are as intense as ever. Recent studies show that sectarian attitudes and practices are present even among children as young as 5 or 6 years. This is at the root of the current political instability….”

A couple of years ago Johann Hari (2009) wrote in his blog: “The Good Friday Process has - from the beginning - been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness have been sitting together – inspirationally - but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Dr Peter Shirlow, of the University of Ulster, has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland – and found an almost completely segregated society. Only 5% of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68% of 18 to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side’. The young are more likely to fear and hate the ‘Prods’ or ‘Taigs’ than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture.

You can see this when you visit Belfast or Derry. To a British person, they feel like any familiar CloneZone town - except they are layered with a strange hatred you cannot grasp. Taxis will either take you to green or orange areas - never both. Even the KFC is covered with a mural memorialising a centuries-old battle. The cities are sliced by vast 40ft tall steel walls, keeping Catholics and Protestants apart. And there are more of them now than ever before. Talk to the kids, and they will gleefully tell you the other side stink, or are stupid, or lazy. We are currently spending £1.5bn a year keeping the two sides physically apart.”

In this Sunday’s Observer, writing about the violent flare-up in east Belfast, Sean O’Hagan added in another factor: “Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.”

O’Hagan neatly links the tribalist traditions to the economic disenfranchisement: “For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists.”

Again the hopelessness of these young men’s economic circumstances destabilises PURPLE’s drive to attain safety in belonging, You can hardly feel ‘safe’ in your community when the community is blighted by poverty, unemployment and despair. And, when PURPLE is destabilised in this way, unhealthy RED will rise up to fight the perceived threat. If the populist leaders then threw in a bit of ‘duty’ and ‘cause’ to feed justification to whatever nascent BLUE might on the vMEMETIC horizon of their audiences then the followers transform into that most dangerous of men: the RED/BLUE zealot….

How then to deal with the 2 factors: tribalism; and the populist leaders who exploit that tribalism?

We could, of course, ‘take out’– jail, assassinate – the leaders and that can certainly have a powerful short-term effect. It is rumoured that one of the reasons the Provisional IRA started serious negotiatons with the British Government in the early 1990s was the degree of success the British Army and secret services had had in taking out high level Provo leaders.

But the tribalism will still be there for the RED vMEME of some other would-be leaders to exploit. In fact, positively-oriented RED leadership – RED in a vMEME harmonic perhaps with ORANGE or above – can have a profoundly-beneficial effect for the community. It’s said that Northern Ireland first minister (unionist) Peter Robinson got directly involved in the negotiations with east Belfast community leaders after last Tuesday’s violence. Certainly the RED of the ‘community stewards’, who calmed the would-be rioters on the Wednesday evening in what were quite dangerous circumstances, must have been very strong!

But, if unhealthy, exploitative RED can be a real problem in situations such as east Belfast, it can only exploit what is already there or has the very real potential to be there.

PURPLE tribalism is the deeper issue.

Dealing with tribalism, honouring tribalism
From one point of view – the GREEN vMEME’s point of view – tribalism is wrong because it discriminates against those who are ‘not of our tribe’ and does not treat everyone as equal.

You can see this viewpoint underpinning The Workers Party paradigm when they
write: “There is a need to create a new political space which is neither Unionist nor Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. This should be the political priority…for all those concerned with the future of Northern Ireland.”

The problem with this theoretical foundation is that, when the PURPLE vMEME is dominant in the culture, then tribalism is natural. People who think they can eradicate tribalism are deluded. It’s a natural consequence of a certain pattern of psychological development.

Repeated, peaceful exposure to those of another culture certainly has been shown to reduce stereotyping and, consequently discrimination – and this is a principle reason why Hari advocates developing a programme of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. He writes: “A major 6-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, has looked at the long-term consequences of being schooled alongside ‘The Enemy’. They interviewed adults who attended these schools – and found that, whatever their parents’ attitudes, they were ‘significantly more likely’ to oppose sectarianism. They had more friends across the divide, and they identified as ‘Northern Irish’, rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’. Their politics were far more amenable to peace: Some 80% of Protestants favour the union with Britain, but only 65% of those at integrated schools do. Some 51% of Catholics who went to a segregated school want unification with Ireland, but only 35% of those from integrated schools do. The middle ground - for a devolved Northern Ireland with links to both countries, within the EU - was fatter and happier.”

Hari’s evidence most definitely shows a reduction in sectarian attitudes – but the bigots are still in the majority. Integrated schools will only provide a partial solution – and that solution is fragile and likely to crumble if placed upon sufficient pressure. (They had integrated schools in Bosnia and Chechnya!)

Rather, what is needed is a recognition of the tribes and that tribalism can be healthy. An honouring of these things, if you will. After all, to feel safe in your community, proud of it and your identification with it can only be beneficial, both for the individual and the group. That element of tribalism, surely, is healthy! What is needed, though, is the means to minimise inter-group strife which, Tajfel & Turner tell us, is a natural output of Social Identification.

Ways to do this might include:-

  • Facing the tribes with daunting challenges that they can only overcome by co-operation. This was how Sherif et al resolved the Robber’s Cave tribal conflicts. This concept is at the heart of Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993) Common In-Group Identity Model.
  • Creating common umbrella identities into which the tribal identities can fit - eg: English and Scots are both British identities. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) failed to reproduce Sherif et al’s inter-team conflicts with different boy scout groups because the different groups not only saw themselves as sharing the common super-identity of ‘scout’ but they also bought into scouting values. Tyerman & Spencer even found it relatively easy to increase co-operation between the different scout groups!
  • Facilitating the tribes learning from one another – so that they can see value in the ‘others’ and what they do. An example of this in Northern Ireland could be inter-community forums where solutions that one tribal group found to a problem such as getting the local council to spend money on maintaining children’s playgrounds are shared with other groups.

Preferably such strategies should be played out together as they can be mutually reinforcing.

With any attempt to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism, there needs to be the understanding that, once there is healthy, co-operative tribalism and a reduction in sectarianism, the struggle to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism is not over. As they learned in the former Yugoslavia, after more than 40 years of Marshall Tito’s particular version of totalitarian Communism – as we in the UK are learning in the Scottish independence debate - tribalism may be subsumed into a larger identity…but it doesn’t go away.

Therefore, there needs to be constant monitoring of the state of the tribalism and periodic adjustment to the strategies needed to keep the tribes co-operating rather than warring.

‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair

 Afghanistan, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international conflict, Middle East, morality, racism, religion, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  8 Responses »
Sep 072010
 

Wow, Tony Blair sure is back in the news in a BIG way! First the Gordon Brown-bashing memoirs, then having eggs and shoes thrown at him in Dublin on Saturday and being a star guest yesterday on the inaugural showing of the new breakfast programme, Daybreak. And, of course, in the Sunday Telegraph both he and Brown were bashed by former Chief of the General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt for failing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq adequately. (Dannatt was in uncompromising mood, blaming Blair and Brown explicitly and personally for needless deaths.)

Tony Blair

Perhaps the most interesting set of comments to emerge from the seemingly endless round of interviews the former prime minister has conducted were those to do with ‘radical Islam’ and the threat that would be posed by a nuclear Iran.

Talking about radical Islam in general, he described it to ABC News as “…the religious or cultural equivalent of [Communism] and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.”

Blair told the BBC: “There is the most enormous threat from the combination of this radical extreme movement and the fact that, if they could, they would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”

Referring back to 9/11, he said: “If these people could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have.”

Blair’s undoubtedly right about the threat the extremists and terrorists pose in the name of fundamentalist Islam. However, there is a need to be clear about just what Islam, in its most fundamental form, says and requires and how those use it who would dominate others and destroy those they can’t dominate, all in the name of Islam.

There are some similarities with the way the Mediaeval Crusaders twisted elements of the Christian religion to justify horrific atrocities in and around Jerusalem. Their actions were abominable but they didn’t make Christianity as a religion abominable. Nor do the modern fundamentalist Christians in the southern United States who, in God’s name, periodically shoot dead a doctor who carries out abortions. On a personal note, I was a radical fundamentalist Christian for 7 years and I never found anything in either the Bible or the teachings of my Pentecostal church to indicate I needed to go kill some abortionists.

So we need to be very careful about using phrases like ‘radical Islam’. What the terrorists did on 9/11 was abominable but that doesn’t make Islam abominable.

Blair unwittingly illustrates how complex this issue of separating out the religion from those who claim to be its followers when he referred to radical Islamists as “regressive, wicked and backward-looking”. Sounds to me like he’s using what cross-cultural researcher John Berry (1969) called an imposed etic – treating other cultures as though they should be operating from our values and then judging them negatively because they don’t. So they take Islam’s requirement for women to dress modestly to the extreme of the burka… But consider this: in the wake of the 1995 Bradford riots, one Muslim rioter told a friend of mine that it was all about driving the pimps and drug dealers out of the Manningham area. He concluded with: “Our women can walk the streets safely at night now. Yours can’t.”

Better to wear a burka or have prostitutes and drug dealers on your street corner…?

Can we deal with the terrorists?
Blair may be confusing the nature of fundamentalist Islam with those who seek to dominate and destroy in its name but he’s ‘bang-on’ in describing the determination and ruthlessness of such people. Personally I have no doubt that some of them would indeed use nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons if available when a high value target could be attacked.

Large-scale acts of destruction so appalling they defy credulity pepper the history of our planet when the BLUE vMEME is seeking to establish its one right way to be. From the Jewish genocide of the Amorites and the Hittites in Biblical times through the Catholics and Protestants torturing and murdering each other in their thousands in the early Renaissance (eerily paralleled in the Sunni vs Shia atrocities in the districts of Baghdad) to the industrial-scale death machines of the Nazi concentration camps, to Pol Pot’s extermination of the Cambodian intelligentsia in the 1970s and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Just some of BLUE’s handiwork, made that much worse when RED-driven demagogues – eg: Adolph Hitler, Slobodan Milošević – use PURPLE tribalism and racism to reinforce the notion that they are doing the ‘right thing’.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber setting off a suitcase nuke in Manhattan or central London is not just a figment of the 24 scriptwriters’ fevered imaginations. It really could happen; but, in real life, it’s doubtful there would be any Jack Bauer to save us at the very last second.

It’s a delusion to think you can deal with peak BLUE. You can’t because it only recognises one right way in that scenario and any deviation from that one right way is a corruption and must be eliminated. It’s that simple. That absolute.

As I argue in the Global feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’, you simply cannot negotiate with peak BLUE. You can only kill it. Utterly. Completely. And without mercy.

For a year or so now, views have been expressed by certain American politicians and senior military figures that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable on a purely military basis…so it’s time to talk to the Taliban. And it was reported a few days ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has now set up a ‘High Peace Council’ to do just that.

Such moves will be seen by hard BLUE as signs of weakness, reflecting the moral corruption of both Karzi’s government and the whole American ethos. To the extremists amongst the Taliban, the American (and British) ringing of hands over dead and maimed soldiers plays badly when contrasted with the implacable fortitude of their brave suicide bombers and confirms to them that they are morally superior…that they are right.

American commander in Afghanistan General David Patraeus’ approach is perhaps more realistic. Those Taliban who renounce violence are invited to rejoin mainstream (if there is yet such a thing!) Afghan society. He’s not rushing to talk to the extremist leaders. Rather, he’s whittling away at the edges of the Taliban camp, offering a way out for those are not quite so absolutely sure of their cause and/or are simply sickened by the brutality of the war.

Movements rarely stay static in terms of every member consistently adhering to its tenets absolutely for the rest of their lives. Circumstances change and many will adapt to the changing circumstances. In the early 1990s it happened in both South Africa and Northern Ireland that positions amongst a body of members (the ANC and the Provisional IRA respectively) began to shift significantly. As Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck demonstrates with the Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) (2003), without taking any pressure of the unremitting hardliners, this is the time to negotiate with the more reasonable.

It’s interesting that the Basque terrorist group ETA announced a truce this Sunday gone in a manner that was so reminiscent of the IRA in 1994 - fumbling, half-hearted, non-specific…reflecting the internal struggles and convulsions to get it this just far from the usual violence. It’s to be hoped the Spanish government responds with a multi-level approach - courting the ‘reasonables’ to the negotiating table while continuing to try to kill the extremists.

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

# The war must be pursued - there must be no let up militarily for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Ironically, Gordon Brown was right in November last year when he said that our soldiers were fighting them in Afghanistan so that there would be less likelihood of having to fight them on our own streets, in the ruins of our own bombed cities.
And when the tide turns, those who insist on fighting on must be destroyed. Utterly.

# Petraeus’ idea of escape routes for those Taliban whose commitment to their cause is shaky needs to be expanded upon. And they should be given every support in integrating into whatever it is Afghan society is becoming - including engagement in the political process.

# The Afghan economy and social and political infrastructure needs support and direction in developing. This is what we should have been doing during the wasted years in Iraq.

# The form of government Afghanistan develops needs to respect its traditions, respect the overwhelmingly-dominant religion, Islam, and reflect the tribal nature of the country – what Don Beck calls Stratified Democracy (2003) - rather than be tied to the Western dogma of one man/one (secret) vote.

What about moderate Muslims?
There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world who have no interest whatsoever in the establishment of a global Muslim caliphate. Many would be appalled at the thought of living under Sharia law.

Like Christians and Jews, they will be of varying degrees of ‘devotedness’, ranging from those who visit the Mosque only when pressured to by family and are really quite partial to Western ‘sins’ such as non-marital sex and getting ‘blathered’ (on alcohol) to those who take the Qur’an and Hadith quite literally and wouldn’t dream of not following all the rituals every day as required of a good Muslim. Those towards the latter end of that spectrum may well want the government of their country to be more influenced by notions of religious morality in its lawmaking but they’re not about to take up arms and plant bombs in furtherance of such desires.

In terms of Tony Blair’s unfortunate use of the term ‘radical Islam’, this is ‘moderate Islam’. So what has Blair got to say to them? For that matter, what do we have to say to them? It’s one thing to fight back against so-called radical Islam but how do we engage with moderate Islam? If Blair’s worldview is not to slip into the ‘Crusader mentality’ which so bedevilled George W Bush’s first responses to 9/11 and we want to avoid the West vs Islam ‘clash of cultures’ war some have mooted, then we have to find means to enable moderate Muslims to interact positively with the West and its libertine culture without disrespecting Islam.

There are obvious and not-so-obvious shifts taking place naturally anyway. You only have to walk around certain parts of Birmingham and north London on a Saturday night to see young Muslim men drinking coke while their white mates down pints of beer and young Muslim women dressed more modestly than the white girls at the next table…but only a little more modestly.

But we could do with managing such processes more deliberately so that the engagement and integration is smoother - eg: helping the young Muslim man who’s started dating a non-religious white girl deal with the reaction his family is likely to experience. Or creating more facilities to help devout Muslims carry out as many of their prayer rituals as possible without serious disruption to their work.

Of course, pretty much everything recommended above costs money at a time when the capitalist world is still teetering near the edge of global bankruptcy; but, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we’re looking to develop longer-term strategies for a safer world. From the macro - isolating and/or destroying the Taliban – to the micro - a Muslim/non-Muslim romance, it needs to be done.

Contrary to some of the stereotypes that get bandied about in the media, there are serious Muslim intellectuals, academics, clerics and politicians grappling with these very issues and who are only too keen to engage with their Western counterparts in developing ways to deal with them.

Bafflingly, sometimes it is the Western counterparts who are slow to engage.

In April this year I wrote ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ This concerned the publication the month before by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, of a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. It said that terrorism cannot be justified under any pretext through allusion to any real or alleged instances of injustice and there is no space for terrorism in Islam. I wrote the Blog in frustration at how little political and media attention had been paid to this groundbreaking fatwa. That the Blog was  republished by ul-Qadri’s people on his institution’s web site perhaps reflects their frustration too…?

Has Tony Blair, in his concern about ‘radical Islam’, been talking to this pillar of ‘moderate Islam’ who is deeply concerned about the attempted hijacking of his religion by extremists to justify terrorism?

Well, have you, Tony? If not, why not? This enquiring mind wants to know!

The Iran Question
In one of his interviews, Blair said that Iran was one of the biggest state sponsors of radical Islam and it was necessary to prevent it by any means from developing a nuclear weapon.

“I would tell them they can’t have it and, if necessary, they will be confronted with stronger sanctions and diplomacy. But, if that fails, I’m not taking any option off the table….I’m saying I think you cannot exclude [military action] because the primary objective has got to be to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon.”

2 years ago I wrote ‘Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war’ as an Integrated SocioPsychology commentary on an Israeli air force exercise to test their capability to bomb the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. At the time I was castigated for the piece by one of my A-Level Psychology students who is half-Iranian…but I stood by it then and I stand by it now.

Regardless of the ‘right’ of one country to develop nuclear weapon capability when others have it, a nuclear Iran is simply not practicable. The Israelis will not tolerate the concept – and, given Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overt hostility to the state of Israel, who can blame them?

What is important - and this is what I think Blair is getting at - is that it is a coalition of countries that restricts, forcibly, if necessary, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An Israeli attack on Iran, however ‘surgical’, would destabilise the little steps various elements in the Middle East are taking towards a workable, comprehensive peace beyond the current armed truces. It might even result in all-out war.

Far better that the ‘Quartet on the Middle East’ (United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia), for which Blair holds the position of Envoy) manage the Iran-constraint policy. Preferably by diplomacy. By sanction where necessary – as has proved necessary. By force, if no other way.

Blair is absolutely right.

And the Quartet must act strongly enough to keep the Israelis out of it.

Welcome back, Tony Blair…?
Not that he ever really went away…but he’s certainly been dominating the news this past fortnight in a way he hasn’t since Gordon Brown moved into 10 Downing Street.

Back in 2001 I was mightily impressed with Blair. He sold the American invasion of Afghanistan to the world – even learning enough about the Qur’an to justify it to the leaders of Muslim states in terms of their own values. It was a remarkable job. (I doubt George W Bush would have even known where to start!)

I was so impressed that, for a time, I wondered if Blair was able to self-actualise into YELLOW thinking. But then came Iraq. (Even now it appears his RED won’t let him be shamed by admitting he was wrong on Iraq.)

Blair was a giant of his times, setting the style of the modern British political leader – David Cameron and Nick Clegg still come off like Blair wannabees on occasion! As has been said many times, perhaps more froth than substance; but a very artful persuader nonetheless.

His return to the daily headlines is welcome - not least for the fact it’s a timely reminder to the Labour leadership contenders what a charismatic party leader should look and sound like.

The fact he’s chosen to major on ‘radical Islam’ as one of his key themes is good in one respect. He’s solid steel on the need to tackle the extremists at a time when most Western leaders are more focussed on the body bags being flown home than what might happen if the extremists aren’t stopped.

But his language and choice of terminology is still regressive from where he seemed to be in 2001. If the extremists are really to be stopped, then they need to be isolated from the broad body of Muslim opinion using ACE-based strategies. Strength is just one (very important) tool. The broad body of Muslim opinion rejecting terrorism and its advocates unequivocally is arguably more important in the longer-term.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa is a foundation stone to that strategy. Tony, pick up the phone and give him a call.

Iraq – time to stand aside…and let them get on with it?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
May 222007
 
We – the Coalition of the United States and Britain - invaded Iraq in 2003 and thereby triggered the progressive deterioration in intercommunal relations in that country. Against the express wishes of the United Nations and most governments in the world – and (especially in Britain!) the express wishes of large parts of our civilian populations, we invaded a sovereign state (an undeniable act of war!) and overthrew its government. The supposed justification for this unprovoked aggression was ‘intelligence’ that Iraq still had hidden stockpiles of ’weapons of mass destruction’ and was not co-operating with the United Nations weapons inspectors. While the actual intent in these respects of the then-Iraqi government is still a matter of contentious debate, the post-war search for these ‘WMD’ failed completely to find anything remotely resembling a capable ’weapon of mass destruction’. There remains much speculation that the American and British governments manipulated the available ‘intelligence’ to make ‘the case for war’.
 

So, as we have watched the near-daily slaughter escalate over the past four years, I have felt that, because we triggered the mess – ie: at root, it’s our fault! - our troops should stay and try to contain the deteriorating situation while ‘political solutions’ were sought. Unfortunately those who were doing the trying and imposing of ‘solutions’ seemed to have little idea of what might actually work.

 

Reluctantly, over the past couple of months, as the much-vaunted American ‘surge’ in Baghdad has succeeded only in displacing insurgents to wreak havoc in areas outside the city (as well as deadly effective bombs inside it), I’ve begun to think that maybe it is time to stand the troops down and let the factions get on with their bloodbaths. That, for the time being at least, Iraq is lost.

 

In April 2007, 12 British soliders died, 104 American troops and approximately 1,500 Iraqi civilians.

 

The latest Chatham House Middle East briefing paper is ‘Accepting Realities in Iraq’ by Gareth Stansfield. It notes the following:-

# In the South British troops are fighting Shia militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr; 
# Also in the South there is much in-fighting amongst Shia groups;
# In Baghdad there is effectively a Sunni-Shia mini-civil war;
# In the centre Sunni tribesmen and insurgents are fighting Sunni forces linked to al-Qaeda;
# In the North and the centre the Americans are fighting a Sunni militia;
# In the North Kurds are fighting non-Kurds (Sunnis, Shias and Americans if they get in the way);
# In and amongst this bands of criminals operate across the county with virtual impunity.

There simply appears to be no end – and no possible end – to the killing in sight.  

What are the options?
The United States military is the most awesome force ever conceived this side of a science fiction blockbuster. It does have the technology and the firepower to close and hold down a country even the size of Iraq.

 

What the US lacks is the willpower. No President wants to preside over bodybags arriving home by the planeload on an hourly basis – and how would he or she stop the media reporting the sheer brutality of the methods used and the hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of Iraqi lives such an endeavour would cost? And how would America square its strategies with both the resultant horror and anger in the Islamic world fuelling new wave after new wave of anti-Western terrorism and the repugnance in much of the rest of the world at such measures?

 

With no understanding of how to create workable political solutions, American forces could be tied up on such a colossal basis for years, leaving the country vulnerable militarily and drained financially even to the point where it ended up no longer an economic superpower. 

 

The status quo is not an option because there is no status quo. The US and Britain are losing – both politically and in lives – with Iraq sliding almost daily into greater turmoil. The Coalition needs to throw a lot more lives at the problem before they make any kind of positive difference.

 

Nor is complete withdrawal any answer – no matter how much certain politicians and sections of the media call for it. And no matter how much significant numbers of the general public want it too.

 

For one thing the Middle East has massive geopolitical importance – not least because of the massive oil deposits along the Gulf of Arabia. Maintaining influence on – if not outright control of – that oil is a key strand in America’s strategies to maintain its economic lead in the world.

 

Then there is the cause of the United States’ friend, Israel, surrounded by implicitly-hostile countries like Egypt and explicitly-hostile ones such as Syria. No American President can afford to offend the ultra-powerful Jewish lobby in Washington while Israel tends to champion American interests in the Middle East. The prospect of Iran developing an offensive nuclear weapons capability is something neither Washington nor Tel Aviv will countenance. If the Americans don’t take care of it either diplomatically or through a ’surgical’ military strike, then Israel will. Given the Israelis’ past record on these sorts of things, it would be doubtful if their strike would be anything like as ‘surgical’ as an American one.

 

Then there is the problem of ‘Kurdistan’. If the Americans abanoned Iraq, that would effectively give the Kurds in the North the green light to break away from Iraq and seek to entice the Kurds in the South-East of Turkey to join them in creating Kurdistan. Such moves would almost certainly bring military intervention from Turkey and could lead to destabilisation of that country, a member of NATO.

 

If the Coalition withdraw completely, there is every likelihood Iran would intervene actively to support the Shias in Iraq – possibly even to the point of seeing Iranian tanks on Iraqi soil. There is little chace Saudi Arabia would stand by while Iraqi Sunnis were massacred in large numbers by Iranians or the country became a satellite of Tehran. Of course, the Saudis don’t have much in the way of military capability (relatively speaking) but their money and their oil have made them powerful friends, most notably the United States. And here’s where the Americans are caught on the horns of yet another dilemma: if they don’t play the Saudis’ game, that will almost certainly result in the dreaded al-Qaeda increasing their influence in the country.

 

So, no win for the Americans there. Withdrawing completely is not a feasible option.

 

That probably leaves the best short-term option as standing by and letting them get on with it – ‘holding the ring’ as it were by keeping the Iranians and other interested parties out while the Iraqis resolve their internal disputes in blood. The Americans have the technology to monitor Iraq’s borders and the resources to mount interventions from carriers in the Gulf and air bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Turkey to prevent outside interference. It might be possible to wind Colation troop levels inside Iraq down to near-nominal level while strengthening a sort of ‘ring of steel’ around the country to minimise outside intervention.

 

Effectively the option I’m (somewhat reluctantly) advocating here is to throw the various Iraqi factions into a secured bear pit and say, “Fight!”

 

Horrible! Hundreds of thousands – possibly millions! - will die. Many more will be injured and maimed; and most likely tens of millions of people will be displaced. The country would be devastated for the best part of a decade.

 

But Western military casualties should be relatively light; and it should be possible, for the most part, to keep the Iranians, the Syrians, the Saudis and al-Qaeda out.

In face of such an apolyptic prospect, many Iraqis may blink and step back from the abyss, withdrawing their support for the extremists and isolating them. Hopefully many of them would do that sooner, rather than later.

 

It may be that media reporting of the unrestrained bloodletting shames many governments in the rest of the world into providing sufficient support to the Americans in troops and logistics that a truly comprehensive and sustainable occupation of Iraq could be implemented.

 

It could be that, after several years of largescale carnage, enough Iraqis to make a difference tire of the killing and start demanding peace. (Conflict after conflict, from the American withdrawal from Vietnam to the collapse of terrorism in Northern Ireland, has shown so often that when the bulk of the general population grow weary of the bloodshed and withdraw their support from extremist positions, then is the best chance to work for peace.)

 

How ever Iraq comes to the point where enough of the population want peace for it to be feasible, rather than a fantasy, then those who started this and have enough firepower to enforce a peace at least in the very short term – ie the Americans -must be ready to step in with political and social mechanisms that the Iraqis understand, want and can use.

 

To find your way around, it helps to have a map
It is now generally acknowledged that, when the Coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, the military planners knew how to win the war – which they did in fairly spectacular style – but few people in the Washington decision-making loops seemed to have much idea how to win the peace.

 

Beyond expecting Iraqis to greet the incoming troops as ‘liberating’ them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime – which initially many Iraqis did – little thought seems to have been given to how to rebuild the country with a form of politics the majority of people could subscribe to.

 

There has been much speculation as to how such sophisticated and advanced thinkers as the analysts and strategists working for the White House, the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the State Department and 10 Downing Street could have got it so badly wrong. Clearly there was a lack of 2nd Tier thinking. But the more limited 1st Tier approaches were reinforced by the phenomenon Irving Janis (1972) named ‘groupthink’. Key decisions were taken by George W Bush, Donald Rumpsfeld, Tony Blair and small self-contained groups who rarely referenced outside their own immediate circles but instead played back to each other their ever more fantastical conceptions of what is and what should be. It is common knowledge that Blair (who himself was kept out of some of Bush’s decision-making loops) ignored the majority of his Cabinet’s reservations about going to war with Saddam and tended to discuss it almost only with those who reinforced his views.

 

Thus, the American planners made little attempt to understand the complexities of the very different Iraqi society – societies? - and instead assumed a minimalist force of occupation could set up Western style democratic institutions.

 

If the planners had used the Spiral Dynamics map of emergent motivational systems to understand Iraqi culture(s), attitudes and behaviours as part of their pre-invasion planning, they would have seen that a quite different politcal set-up was required to the Western democracy model.

 

John Berry (1969), the acclaimed psychologist specialising in cross-cultural studies, would consider the attempt to impose Western democracy an imposed etic. In other words, we have assumed the values, practices, traditions and other characteristics of our culture are the universal norm and, as such, are applicable to all cultures.

 

The alternative – at least politically - is the concept of Stratified Democracy put forward by Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2002). (See: Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory) This proposes that different cultures and sub-cultures will be at differing stages of social development and, therefore, need different forms of representative (ie: democratic) governance, economic distribution, etc. Achieving the most appropriate form of Stratified Democracy for a culture or sub-culture will, in Beck’s view, be an output of a MeshWORK mapping process.

Let’s apply a brief and basic hypthetical MeshWORK analysis approach to Iraq…

# BEIGE
Basic foodstuffs and clean drinking water are in short supply in some areas while electric power is often intermittent at best.

Conditions in the hospitals are primitive by Western standards, with anaesthetics and many medicines in short supply. Emergency wards are frequently overwhelmed in the aftermath of a bombing.

In many parts of the country there is no or little work, making it difficult to get the means to stay alive. As a result many men are driven by economic necssity to join the police. Hence the attraction of lengthy and slow-moving police recruiting lines for bombers.

Personal security is frequently at risk in many parts of the country. Indiscriminate bombings, sectarian killings (often prededed by torturing the victims) and both political and criminal kidnappings are the main hazards.

The Coalition and the Shia-dominated governments they have propped up have been fairly slow and largely ineffectual in establishing the basic necessities of ‘civilised’ life in Iraq. So it’s hardly suprising that life in the worst-hit parts of Iraq is pretty ‘uncivilised’. (The Americans and the British made similar mistakes in the southern part of Aghanistan and are paying for them with a resurgence of the Taliban.) Talk of ‘democracy’, ‘the political process’ and ‘the vote’ tends to be pretty irrelevant to people who are preoccupied with surviving and being safe unless such politics is going to have a fairly immediate impact upon having such vital needs met.

# PURPLE
This vMEME is big in Iraqi culture. Its focus on group identity and its territorial nature mean it defends its turf against outsiders – and the more pressure it is under the more aggressive it becomes. Thus the ever-increasing segregation in Baghdad. Wherever the American and British go, they are resisted as they are always outsiders on someone else’s turf. The ‘liberators’ were very quickly seen as ‘occupiers’ on land that didn’t belong to them.

Tribal culture is still dominant in much of Iraq. What the tribal elder says is relevant and to be honoured; what some American or some ‘Government spokesman’ says on the television is just an ugly noise to be ignored or despised. So, if the tribespeople vote, they vote according to tribal affiliations and how the elders tell them to vote.

‘One man, one vote, think for yourself’ politics is way removed from the daily reality of most of these people. Trying to impose it is a futile and dangerous exercise – not least because it challenges the traditions of the tribe and portrays them as somehow deficient.

# PURPLE / BLUE Harmonic
The BLUE vMEME has brought religious affiliation to PURPLE to create the super-tribal and very dangerous identities of Sunni and Shia. Now, the other lot are not only ‘of a different tribe’ but they are heretics defiling the one true religion. Thus, they are dehumanised and criminalised further, making their death and destruction that much easier.

With the Kurds BLUE has played the nationalism card so that all real Kurds now should aspire to bring the great goal of Kurdistan into existence.

# RED / BLUE Harmonic
As has been seen in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and now Iraq, when BLUE structure and order break down, RED’s ‘power pecking order’ tends to come in to replace it.

 
The Iraq of Saddam Hussein was more of a RED Mediaeval kingdom (with Saddam’s generals in the role of the King’s scheming ‘noble lords’) but there was a degree of BLUE social infrastructure. Saddam used this BLUE infrastructure (in tandem with PURPLE tribal loyalties) to control his people in ways not altogether dissimilar – eg: police state apparatus – to those of the Soviet oligarchs. However, the dominant vMEME in Iraq was RED, exemplified in the cult of personality Saddam revelled in and his government promoted.
 
Just as in Mediaeval kingdoms, the death of the King often created a power vaccuum, so has Saddam’s deposition (and death). Hence, the struggle for power, supported by competing tribal loyalties (PURPLE) and religious denunciations of others (BLUE).
 
Again, ‘One man, one vote, think for yourself’ democracy is pretty much irrelevant in situations where who has the power is what matters.

BLUE (and beyond)
It would seem nodal BLUE, outside of the universities, industry and religion is in short supply. For example, the police – stalwart BLUE in most Western countries - are notoriously corrupt and riddled with PURPLE/RED partisan loyalties.

There’s not much evidence of ORANGE other than the Western businesspeople out to control Iraq’s oil. And quite possibly GREEN’s only representatives are the brave/foolish aid workers still in the country.

Reconstructing Iraq for the Iraqis
If the option of ‘holding the ring’ while the factions slaughter each other – how ever horrific and unpalatable – appears to be the only viable one in the short/mid-term, then the Americans and the British need to prepare quickly for negotiations to create a new social and political Iraq. It needs to be done quickly as one can only hope a critical mass of Iraqis wanting peace builds rapidly, rather than takes years and years of carnage.
 
As soon as there is anything like a significant ‘window of opportunity’, the Coalition need to be ready with strategies that will work.

To do this, the Americans and the British need to work with where much of Iraq is at – ie: PURPLE and RED – not where they themselves are at – ie: BLUE, ORANGE and some GREEN. In other words, they need to use Stratified Democracy.

This may mean working with tribal elders and Islamic clerics and accepting that they will tell their unthinking followers what to do. In their context, that is what is more likely to be right for them than exhorting everyone to cast a considered but anonymous vote in a polling booth.

It may be that government in Iraq needs to be restructured in line with tribal identities and territories. It may be that the country needs splitting into 3 or more federated states. It may be that Iraq actually needs to be broken up, with 3 or more autonomous states emerging from the wreckage. It may be that a new supraordinate ‘Iraqi identity’ can be created that all Iraqis can buy into.

How ever it works out, the solution(s) must fit with the values of the vast mass of the Iraqi people and be something that Iraq’s neighbours will respect.

In this sense, as well as working with their client groups on the ground, the Coalition will almost certainly need some form of dialogue with Syria and Iran (as the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report of December 2006 recommended). These are the two major Arab military and political players in the area; both have anti-Western agendas but have reasons to co-operate with the West. (Syria wants help getting the Golan Heights back from Israel; Iran needs to find a non-military resolution to the impasse over its nuclear ambitions.) Both understand the PURPLE-BLUE Islamic loyalties, rivalries and tensions intuitively in a way few Western diplomats could even dream of.

Getting the cooperation of Syria and Iran in presenting new realistic opportunities for Iraq could also be tied in with intiatives to resolve other linked-in problems in the region – not least the status of the Palestinian territories, the ‘Kurdistan issue’ and the role of regional superpower Iran in a realigned Middle East.

So, opportunity is not lost in the longer term. Indeed, there seems every opportunity and everything to play for. But in the short term only death, destruction, injury and misery for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis.

It is abhorrent, not at all a pleasant prospect. But it seems there may be no other real option. Only when the bulk of the Iraqi nation no longer support the extremists and stand up against them will there be a real chance for peace.

Of course, while holding the ring, the United States and Britain must be developing new, realistic initiatives based on real Iraqi values and looking for and recruiting influential Iraqis to their cause. Then, when war weariness starts to set in, they are ready with the right men and the right intiatives to start building a momentum for a genuine and sustainable peace. 

 

First Kosovo, then Northern Ireland?

 international conflict, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 232004
 

So Kosovo’s back in the news. 31 people dead. The return of tribal bloodletting and ethnic cleansing. Only this time it appears to be the Serbs that have been getting the worst of it.

Seemingly triggered by the stupidity of Serb youths hounding (literally, with a dog!) a couple of young Albanian children to their deaths in a river, what increasingly looks to be a well-coordinated campaign by Albanians to drive Serbs out of their homes suddenly materialised from nowhere. And now the dream of an Albanian Muslim Kosovo, independent of Serbia, is equally suddenly back openly at the top of certain extremist groups’ agendas.

The speed with which the situation in Kosovo deteriorated clearly caught the NATO troops and the United Nations mandated administration off guard. As I write, several thousand addtional NATO troops have entered Kosovo and a relative calm seems to be returning to the Serbian province.

Yet the sheer ferocity of this sudden outbreak of ethnic violence raises questions about the viability of the UN strategy for it not only exposed the fragility of the NATO-imposed peace but also its shallowness.

On the face of it things had been going reasonably well in Kosovo for the UN. There had been no signifcant ethnic violence since NATO entered the province in 1999. Kosovo’s Albanian-dominated devolved government and the Serbian government in Belgrade had been making progress in discussions on issues such as energy. Kosovo’s top Serb and Albanian politicians had reached agreement on how the ethnically-divided city of Mitrovica should be run. Gracious, Serbs and Albanians had even begun talking to each other in the streets again!

Now, nobody other than the extremists seems to know what to do next. On Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme late last week, I heard one fellow from the UN say the multi-ethnicity of pre-1991 Kosovo had to be restored. (1991 saw the start of the breakup of Yugoslavia with the secession of Slovenia.) Did this guy think Kosovo had once been some model of ethnic cohabitation? Didn’t he know that the visit of Slobodan Milosevic to Kosovo in April 1987 was one of his key stepping stones to power? When Milosevic heard the complaints of the downtrodden minority Serbs and made a rousing speech promising action against their Albanian ‘oppressors’, it was a call to Serb nationalism.

Two tribes go to war!
Kosovo had been a running sore on the body of the Yugoslav Federation for years. There were many reasons for this; but a key factor was quite simply that the Albanian Kosovars were not Slavs. ‘Yugoslavia’ was a bold attempt in the aftermath of the First World War to create an overarching identity for the Slavic states and thus bring stability to the Balkans.

The Balkan tribes cohabiting peacefully under an umbrella identity was a fragile condition, as demonstrated only too horrifically by the Croats’ murderous persecution (under German auspices) of the Serbs during the Second World War. To knit Yugoslavia together again after that needed something way beyond tribalism – and that ‘something’ came in the form of the Communist state and its overlord, Marshall Tito.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, tribalism is a manifestation of the PURPLE vMEME. Since PURPLE seeks safety in belonging, by default it delineates between those who are of-our-tribe and those who are not-of-our-tribe. However, it is possible to build super-tribal identities.

For example, in England Liverpool and Manchester might be rival centres of trade, industry and power – and fans from the two cities’ football teams might clash violently. However, they are all Lancashire people and the historical prejudice against Yorkshire, which still surfaces from time to time, is something many from both cities will subscribe to. Lancashire and Yorkshire people both tend to see themselves as ‘Northerners’ and will all too often disparage ‘Southerners’. Englishmen from across the country will – and have in the past! – united against the Scots. Both Scots and English will fight together under the umbrella of ‘Britons’ – as they have done in the 300 years since the Act of Union.

The taller the hierarchy of tribal identities, the more BLUE structure it needs to hold it together and to suppress tribal rivalries lower down the hierarchy.

In the Communist state Tito established a BLUE system which did exactly that while promoting the concept of Yugoslavia – ‘All the Slavs’. It also helped that Tito had high RED which made him both charasmatic and ruthlessly controlling.

Thus, Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrans could all be ‘Slavs’ equally in Tito’s land. The Albanian Kosovars, of course, weren’t Slavs but claimed descent from the Illyrians, supposedly the original settlers of the Kosovan lands. It is perhaps a credit to Tito’s genius that he more or less managed the ethnic tension in Kosovo – moving from suppression of the Albanians to partial liberalisation – but Kosovo remained a problem throughout his time as leader of Yugoslavia.

After Tito’s death in 1980 and coinciding with the slow but sure collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia equally slowly but surely began to unravel until the early 1990s saw Slav slaughtering Slav in the Serb-Croat wars. With the BLUE structure of Communism gone and RED demagogic leaders like Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman unleashing the PURPLE-BLUE beasts of nationalism, the identity of ‘Slav’ was replaced by the lower tribal identities – Croat, Serb, Bosnian, etc – and in PURPLE it’s okay to kill those who are not-of-our-tribe if they are seen to threaten our tribe.

Of course, the rigid BLUE Procedures of organised religion can add mightily to tribal tensions. Thus, Othodox Serb Christians can kill Catholic Croatian Christians (and vice versa) for not worshipping in the same way and following the same rituals. There are relatively few differences between Catholic and Orthodox Christians in the grand scheme of things. Create a super identity of ‘Christians’ – subscribed to by both Catholic and Orthodox – and BLUE will legitimise the wholesale slaughter of Muslims who don’t just not worship correctly but actually worship the ‘wrong’ manifestation of God and a ‘false prophet’. (Equally BLUE Islam will legitimise the slaughter of Christians – just ask al-Qaeda!)

It’s notable that, after all the turbulence of the 1990s, the two remaining real hotspots in the Balkans are Bosnia and Kosovo. In both instances PURPLE tribalism and BLUE religious hatreds are at the centre of the divides. In both instances a BLUE structure of order is imposed by a Western military force.

GREEN thinking predominating in much of Western thought on resolving the Balkan conflicts talks of restoring multi-ethnic harmony as though the people there will be naturally tolerant and respectful of their neighbours’ different tribal origins and religious beliefs. Its assumption that all should think similarly is flawed…fatally flawed! What is not needed, when dealing with PURPLE tribalism and BLUE dogma, is GREEN liberalism. What is needed is the kind of BLUE structure, capable of repression, that Tito built. For sure, GREEN informing that BLUE structure so that all can function to some degree under it is helpful; but control, not freedom, needs to be the main priority.

However, GREEN wouldn’t tolerate the human rights abuses that tend to go with such regimes and the capitalist thinking of the ORANGE vMEME in the West couldn’t stomach actually facilitating state control on that level. So a Tito-type solution is unlikely to come from the West.

Writing in this weekend’s ‘Observer’, Tim Judah, author of ‘Kosovo: War & Revenge’, recognises the strength of the ethnic divide and, somewhat tentatively, proposes partition as perhaps the only way out. That, as he ruefully acknowledges, more or less legitimises the ethnic cleansing necessary to create partitionable geography.

Partition seems to be working after a fashion in Cyprus. It’s highly debatable if it can be said to have worked in Ireland.

Lacking a Super Identity
Mulling over the explosion of violence in Kosovo, tangentally I began to think of Northern Ireland. It suddenly came home to me just how fragile that peace is.  

As with the Muslim Albanians and the Christian Serbs in Kosovo, there is no Super Identity the Republican Catholics and the Unionist Protestants can buy into. The Republicans see themselves as Irish; the Unionists see themselves as British. On the religious front, Rome and Canterbury might be carrying on periodic flirtations but there are still huge barriers (not least the ordination of women and then the whole issue of homosexuality) to be overcome before there can be any meaningful reconciliation. In any case the Church of England is virtually papist to the likes of Ian Paiseley – and there are a lot like him in the more Protestant Protestant churches in Northern Ireland.

Like Kosovo, quiet for over four years, the PURPLE tribalism and the BLUE divides of national allegiance and religious bigotry are there just below the surface in Northern Ireland.

There are some key differences, though between, Ireland and Kosovo. For one thing, after 25 years of ‘The Troubles’ failing to achieve anything, a lot of people in the province were worn out with it all. For all their efforts, the terrorists (or, freedom fighters, according to preference) couldn’t beat either the BLUE machine of the British Army or the BLUE resolve of the British political establishement.

But perhaps more importantly, a lot of people in the South lost interest.

Following the 1922 partition, Eire enshrined (BLUE) in its constitution its (PURPLE) claim to the 6 counties it had failed to recover from the British. PURPLE’s affiliation to the physical geography cannot be understated – though it is frequently ignored! Thus, as so often has been said, it became the duty of every Irishman to get the 6 counties back – and thus the ambivalence of many Irish governments towards IRA-type operations in the North.

However, the remarkable transformation of the Irish economy in the mid-1990s (helped by bucketfuls of European Union money) changed the perspectives of a lot of people. Whether the success of the economy led to the emergence of the ORANGE vMEME at a major cultural level or whether it was ORANGE which made such a success from the EU handouts is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. What we do know is that, for many people in the South, bettering themselves became more important than championing historical causes. When the Good Friday Agreement was voted on in 1998 – with its requirement that Eire drop its constitutional claim to the 6 counties – it breezed through in the South. In the economically-depressed North, where BLUE polarisation dominated, the Agreement barely got through.

A number of the key decision-makers in both governments and both communities recognise that economic prosperity is one of the keys to Northern Ireland not slipping back into violence. If ORANGE, in its wealth-making mode, can undermine the polarisation of BLUE but use BLUE order to suppress those, for whom BLUE dogma and PURPLE tribalism is what it’s about, then Northern Ireland might have a good chance.

Moving back to Kosovo, even though around 90% of the population are Albanian, the Serbian national psyche has a deep emotional root in the province – ‘Old Serbia’ as it is known to Serbs, being the heart of mediaeval Serbia – a mediaeval Serbia which was broken in defence of Western Christianity at the Battle of Kosovo Polje, trying to hold back the Muslim hordes from the Ottoman Empire of the Turks.

ORANGE-ification
Letting go of Kosovo is for the Serbs the equivalent of Eire abandoning the 6 counties. However, for the Serbian economy, still recovering from wars and sanctions but tempted by the carrot of EU membership, an Eire-type ORANGE-ification is not beyond the realms of possiblilty.

It is exactly this kind of strategy for the Palestinians that Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan discussed with the US State Department during Bill Clinton’s first term. Using Eire as the blueprint, the idea was to pump money into the Palestinian economy in the hope of stimulating a cultural emergence of ORANGE. The hope was that Palestinians would become more interested in bettering themselves than killing Israelis – and that would then remove the Israeli justification for continued occupation of the Palestinian areas. (For various reasons the talks with the State Department stalled but Beck has since discussed variations on that theme with foreign policy interest groups at the European Parliament and the European Commission.)

Perhaps some kind of partition of Kosovo along the lines suggested by Tim Judah will provide a partial and at least temporary solution. But, as the Irish Catholics proved, partition borders don’t tend to hold people back for very long when there are few jobs one side of the border and a shortage of labour on the other. And then the pre-partition probems are re-engaged.

As most MeshWORKERS know, there are rarely final fixed solutions when managing vMEMES. A constant vigilance for changing scenarios and the capability to respond to those changes are necessary to anticipate and resolve problems.

In Kosovo – just as in Ireland – the PURPLE tribalism will never go away but it can be superceded by a ‘greater PURPLE’ identity – eg: ‘Yugoslavia’ – and held in check by powerful and efficient BLUE. The propagation of GREEN humanism to undermine some of the BLUE religious dogma will also help. In the right conditions, contained tribalism can even be rendered irrelevant by the emergence of ORANGE at a cultural level.

The key then to managing conflict is understanding and manipulating vMEMES. PURPLE tribalism can be managed and controlled but its power to re-emerge as a powerful and potentially destructive force should never be underestimated.