Why we must win in Afghanistan

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, government, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Jul 152009
 

The West simply cannot afford to lose its war in Afghanistan. As the soldiers’ bodies come home in ever-increasing numbers, pressure will inevitably grow for a withdrawal. Already an unpopular war in continental Europe, it will become increasingly difficult for the American and British governments to keep their resolve if media and public pressure focus on the costs in terms of lives and money and there is little sign of real progress.

Unfortunately military experts anticipate 2-3 years of hard combat and several more years of Western military presence if the South of the country is to be stabilised. But, if we don’t pay those costs, then the Taliban are likely to take over government again in Kabul. It is thought that, in spite of their apparent significant defeat in the Swat Valley, their eyes are set next on Islamabad and the prize of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Even if Pakistan doesn’t fall, Afghanistan will continue to flood the West with heroin (in spite of the Taliban officially being against opium production!) and it will almost certainly go back to being a training camp for al-Qaeda terrorists.

What do we need – another 9/11 or 7/7 – to remind us what British and American troops are fighting and dying for?

Part of the problem: the nature of the Taliban
When the Americans smashed the Taliban in 2001, they were perceived by many Afghans to be liberators. The Taliban’s 5 year regime had been brutal, repressive (particularly for women and non-Muslims) and economically disastrous.

What should have been the opportunity for the West to be seen as helping the Afghans rebuild their shattered country was fumbled when George W Bush decided to bring down Saddam Hussein. American energy went into first of all justifying an assault and then pursuing a war that turned into a bitter, costly and lengthy occupation. Not only did the reconstruction of Afghanistan go very much on the back burner; but increasingly the war in Iraq was seen as an anti-Muslim war in most Muslim countries – with the result that many young Muslims from relatively moderate backgrounds were radicalised. The mess in Iraq helped breathe new life into the Taliban who began to creep back in force while the Americans were too busy trying to prevent outright civil war in Iraq.

What also helped the Taliban come back was that the government structure the West helped set up and is now trying to sustain is demonstrably corrupt – arguably from Hamid Karzai down. It needs to be remembered that many officials, especially in local government, were once the bandit leaders of the Northern Alliance which the Americans used as their ground troops in 2001. Using the Northern Alliance that way certainly saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives but it also opened the door into legitimate government for those who were ruthless robbers and murderers. In Spiral Dynamics, terms the RED vMEME was given the opportunity to use BLUE structures for its own ends – so all but inevitably it lined its own pockets! In the South of the country locals say they prefer to use Taliban judges rather than their government counterparts because they are more honest.

In the South (and across the border in Pakistan) the Taliban are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the Pashtun people. The Pashtun tribes are a good home for the Taliban. For the most part, rural, poor and religious, the Pushtans have little in common with the urban elites of Kabul – looking to gain from the Westernisation of their country – or the other tribes from the North. The Pushtans are primarily dominated by PURPLE tribalism, undoubtedly led by leaders with strong RED while the mullahs peddle a RED-BLUE hardline form of Islamic zealotry. The BLUE-ORANGE-GREEN values the West wants to promote of respect for human rights, gender equality, religious moderation and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy simply don’t fit with the Taliban/Pushtan mindset. The values mismatch is huge.

When the Americans smashed the Taliban, they drove out what little BLUE culture there was in Afghanistan. As we know all too well, when BLUE goes, RED steps into the vacuum. No wonder Afghanistan is a violent and corrupt place! When the Taliban started to creep back, they offered some sense of order against the corruption and secularisation emanating from Kabul. If the Americans had hoped ORANGE-driven modernisation would take root in Kabul and spread from that centre, it was a clear lack of understanding that, for healthy ORANGE to grow, there needs to be foundation of strong, healthy BLUE. Although they were very different countries, the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Yugoslavia did not open the door to ORANGE’s MacDonaldisation strategies; instead the loss of that BLUE superstructure let loose RED gangsterism and PURPLE tribal enmities. If anyone in the White House or the Pentagon had thought it through, what has happened with the resurgence of the Taliban was, in fact, predictable.

The problem with the convergence of  ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pushtan’ is that the Pushtans comprise around 40% of Afghanistan’s population and are the largest single ethnic group. That’s an awful lot of people to fight.

Part of the Problem: the West is confused
What do we want in Afghanistan – other than for our soldiers not to be killed and our much-needed money not to be haemorrhaging away? (It is estimated that the war will cost Britain £3.4 billion this year alone.) And once our objectives are clear, do we know what we have to do to achieve them?

Beyond ‘winning’ – presumably meaning breaking the Taliban for good? denying al-Qaeda the use of Afghanistan? – and getting out, it’s not entirely clear just what the objectives are. Certainly, as in Iraq, not enough thought has been given to the post-invasion reconstruction – and what thought has been given has been based on erroneous assumptions. Ie: that with a little money and a little effort, we can make them just like us – capitalist consumers. It’s a mistake the West has been making repeatedly ever since Walt Rostow (1960) came up with his 5-stage Modernisation Theory for saving the Third World from Communism.

What Spiral Dynamics shows us is that we have to work with where people are at – and, if the Pashtuns aren’t ready yet for gender equality, then we need to put that on the back burner until they’re ready to grow into it. Offending their values is just going to get them reaching for their AK47s.

Our objectives need to include helping develop an Afghanistan where the tribes can co-exist peacefully, where people can take pride in being Afghan, where there is respect for a universal and fairly-applied legal system. Gender equality and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy can come further down the line. What matters now is that people feel safe, have respect for themselves and others and there is confidence in the government and the law. And, of course, that law needs to be compatible with a form of Islam that emphasises charity, faith and order. Such an Afghanistan would be distinctly unappealing to the Taliban who feed on dissatisfaction.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg recognised some of this when he said NATO should not be over-ambitious “by trying to import overnight a Western-style democracy in a country that has never had a functional government” but instead should aim to stabilise Afghanistan “to provide a space for the state to grow.”

If we are clear on our objectives, then can we implement the strategies to achieve them?

Because it contributed significantly to the relative calming of Iraq, the concept of high visibility patrolling the streets with the overtly-stated aim of protecting the ordinary citizens from the insurgents (Taliban) is being tried now in Afghanistan. High visibility, of course, means easy target – and that’s one of the reasons the British casualties have increased. (Apart from the fact the troops claim to be significantly under-resourced – attributed by many commentators to be result of big cuts in defence spending. (A lack of big picture thinking in BLUE-ORANGE short-sighteness!)

Lord Paddy Ashdown, himself a former royal marine, thinks the protect-the-citizens strategy is an error – saying: “The army’s job in a war is to find and kill the enemy.”

Actually we need both strategies. Protectors of those who are reasonable and want to be safe and proud. Killers of those who are determined to kill us and cannot be reasoned with. But no more robot drones wiping out innocents at wedding parties! Thankfully, all of this – including avoiding civilian deaths – is endorsed by the new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

We must find ways of removing the dissatisfaction that the Taliban feed off. Strong support in Afghanistan for an Islam that emphasises charity and justice for all. Rebuilding the physical infrastructure. Redeveloping the economy, including crops that are a viable alternative to opium poppies. Creating hope. Building a sense of national identity. Etc. Etc.

As part of building a national identity, we need to find ways to demerge ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pashtun’. As a people the Pashtuns have a proud and ancient heritage, their traditional Pashtunwali code of honour promoting self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness and tolerance. It’s a stain on that code that they allow the brutal and repressive ways of the Taliban to influence them to such an extent. Like many peoples in our troubled world, the Pashtuns need to rediscover themselves.

Some of what is needed in Afghanistan, I have mentioned above. But what is needed really is a full MeshWORK analysis, looking through 4Q/8L at the health of all the vMEMES in play and then deciding what needs to be done. Multiple strategies will need to be employed simultaneously so that nothing is missed. And, as much as possible, the decisions and actions need to be undertaken by Afghans – otherwise they are the work of an occupying force. And, if the decision-making isn’t ‘democratic’ but the Afghan way (tribal/feudal), then we westerners need to allow them to be that way.

Yes, it will be hellishly expensive – in both money and lives – but we are in a war and wars are costly. The sooner Britain and the United States – and Europe, for that matter – accept we are at war, the better. Plus, it is a war we have to win. But it is a war of hearts and minds as well as bullets and bombs.

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

 American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, schemas & memes, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  2 Responses »
Feb 252009
 

Since shortly before his election last November, I’ve seen a number of articles putting forward the view that Barack Ombama is an advanced thinker. I’ve even seen it proposed by some on the Spiral Dynamics e-lists that he is a ‘2nd Tier thinker’. Even that the TUQUOISE vMEME is activated in his head.

 

Alongside the jubilation in many parts of the world at his election was the expectation that now things would be different – things would change. Obama would make America better and that would help make the world better. I doubt there has been so much excitement and so much expectation of an American president since John F Kennedy. The anticipation has been of almost of messianic proportions!

 

And Obama got off to a great liberal electorate-pleasing start. On his second day in office, he signed the order which will effectively close Guantánamo Bay. From there, he went on to do another electorate pleaser – by blocking the bonuses of many of the ‘fat cat’ bankers whose greed has all but brought Capitalism to its knees.

 

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

 

Last Friday’s decision to stand by the position of George W Bush’s administration that the so-called ‘enemy combatants’ held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase have no legal right to challenge their detention is astonishing – especially since the decision was made public on the day Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made it clear she would raise human rights violations with the Chinese government on her visit there.

 

How can the United States castigate China on the issue of human rights when it is plainly denying them to its own detainees?

 

Last Summer the US Supreme Court gave al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects held at Guantánamo the right to challenge their detention there. On the back of that, the relatives of 4 Afghan citizens held at Bagram petitioned the Washington DC District Court that the US military was holding them without charge and repeatedly interrogating them without any means for them to contact an attorney.  The Bush White House supported the military’s response that the detainees were ‘enemy combatants’ whose status is reviewed every 6 months, taking into account classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.

 

When Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it would stand by Bush’s argument. In a 2-sentence filing last week the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airbase cannot use US courts to challenge their detention. Effectively Obama’s White House has said the detainees have no constitutional rights.

 

Or, as Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, put it: “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”

 

The risk of dissipating goodwill

I’ve actually no idea whether Obama thinks in TURQUOISE. Since politicians in elections usually talk bollocks in their efforts to get elected, I’ve not paid Obama’s words that much attention prior to him taking office – preferring to see what he actually does once his hands are on the levers of power.

 

And this is a myopic blunder of enormous proportions that might seriously derail Obama’s train before it’s even got fully out of the station, crashing Obama’s reputation with it.

 

Human rights attorney Tina Monshipour Foster summed up the disappointment: “The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped. We all expected better.”

 

And what message will the Bagram decision have on the millions of people in other countries who’d hoped for a new America that really would be the good guy it claimed to be, rather than the dangerous, overbearing bully it had become during Bush’s second term?

 

Obama’s election generated an enormous amount of goodwill right around the world, particularly from Muslim moderates and liberals trying to restrain their anti-American radicals. How easily could that goodwill be dissipated if Obama is perceived to have the same contempt for Asian and Arab lives that Bush had?

 

The fact that Obama is black/mixed race will actually work against him if he sanctions actions which are perceived to be racist. He will be the ‘Uncle Tom’ who sold out to the ‘Crusaders’.

 

If Obama does think in the 2nd Tier, then there will be a healthy dose of pragmatism to balance out his idealism. 2nd Tier thinking would have no hesitation in sacrificing a few for the good of the many. There may be tears in its eyes and a heavy sigh of the heart but it would do what needed to be done. The CIA and the military may well have presented evidence to Obama to convince him that they can’t just let very dangerous men walk free out of Bagram.

 

But keeping them outside of any recognised judicial system in a place associated with torture and other human rights abuses under the Bush administration is not the answer.

 

Guantánamo was a public relations disaster for the Americans. How many more recruits al-Qaeda picked up as the memetic allegations of mistreatment and torture (often evidenced) spread around the world time and time again will probably never be known – but after 8 years of the Americans’ concerted action against it, there seems to be no shortage of passionate and embittered young men (and women) all too ready to die if they can kill Americans (and Western Europeans) doing so. As for wiping the Taliban out of Afghanistan, they are now acknowledged by military experts to be stronger than at any time since the  invasion at the end of 2001.

 

The fact that the Americans could only muster enough evidence to convict 3 Guantánamo detainees in any kind of recognisable legal process while the Pentagon today announced that 1 in 10 of the detainees freed so far has been involved in anti-American/terrorist activity certainly shows the failure of the detention process at Guantánamo. The Pentagon has tried to present the 1 in 10 figure as recidivist – ie: they were going back to what they did before. An alternative interpretation was offered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands: some of those 1 in 10 will not have been previously involved in terrorist activities – if the Americans had proof, then why weren’t they put on trial? But they will have been so radicalised by their treatment at Guantánamo that they have since turned to terrorism. Of course, strongly suspecting something and offering a degree of proof acceptable in a court of law are not the same thing – but Sands’ argument seems equally, if not more, valid to me than the Pentagon’s.

 

With Guantánamo closing, more and more attention is likely to be turned to Bagram which already has an extremely toxic reputation. By supporting Bush’s policy on the Bagram detainees, Obama really does risk being tainted with its poison.

 

Speaking to vMEMES

There are ways of presenting messages which can speak to multiple vMEMES. Just think of Hilary Clinton’s statements about her talks with the Chinese. Yes, she was most definitely going to raise human rights violations with the Chinese – thus, appeasing GREEN to some extent – but that was not going to get in the way of the United States and China focusing on bettering trading relations between the two economic giants – thus, pleasing BLUE in its need to manage systems – as one strategy in turning the global economy back on the right path – thus, stimulating ORANGE’s striving to achieve targets. Plus, there is a promise of a trickle-down of greater financial security for PURPLE’S safety needs. Clinton – not usually someone to whom 2nd Tier thinking is ascribed – actually pulled of a good balancing act, hitting a number of buttons quite effectively.

 

Last Friday Obama – who, in his methodology, had seemed such a unique and effective communicator in the election campaign – looked a dullard by comparison.

 

For all I know Obama does have TURQUOISE in his vMEME stack. He may turn out to be a great American president – perhaps he will become as inspirational a statesman as Nelson Mandela. But he needs to consider how his actions are perceived.

 

It is one thing to know what to do in the interests of your own people. It is another to consider how your actions may be perceived by other peoples and what effect that perception may have on those peoples’ attitudes towards your people.

 

Obama’s blunder puts me in mind of the blunders of another man to whom TURQUOISE thinking has been attributed at times: Prince Charles. The man is a true visionary – a would-be philosopher of sorts – who has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands upon thousands through the work of the Prince’s Trust and been involved in developing models of sustainable farming and rural life. Yet he has alienated politicians he could have influenced, with his nagging letters and is caricatured in the media as an eccentric who talks to plants and maltreated his first wife. The phrase “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use” would be unkind but his seeming inability to get the right messages out to the right vMEMES has significantly undermined what he could have achieved.

 

Obama needs to recalibrate and recognise his need to speak to multiple vMEMES. He also needs to recognise his blunder and find a way back from it before he replaces Bush as the best recruiter al-Qaeda ever had.

Prisoner abuse and the mess in Iraq

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, meta-programmes, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  9 Responses »
May 102004
 

So Donald Rumsfeld has not only admitted to Congress that, yes, American soldiers have been doing rather nasty and degrading things to Iraqi detainees but there is, in fact, far worse to come - including videos! (It’s already been confirmed that two Iraqis have died in US custody – one with ‘strangulation’ identified as the cause of death on his post-mortem report! – and there will almost certainly be more come to light if allegations of firing on unarmed prisoners from a prison watchtower are accurate.)

However, the abuse, according to Rumsfeld, has not been ‘systematic’ but merely the actions of some ‘bad apples’. As his President, George W Bush, points out, there are some 200,000 American troops in Iraq and the vast majority are doing a demanding and highly-dangerous job with bravery and integrity.

In the larger scheme of things, the average ‘GI Joe’ in Iraq is probably epitomising Bush’s case on a daily basis.

Unfortunately for Bush and Rumsfeld, the International Committee of Red Crossty, Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have them squarely in their sights.

According to the Red Cross, they recorded regular abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Grhaib jail between March and October 2003 – the worst being in the October – and presented the evidence to Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in January this year. Partly as a result of this presentation and partly from some internal whistleblowing, a low profile investigation was launched. It is claimed Bush was not told – becoming only aware when the now-notorious photographs of sadomasachistic and sexual abuse were broadcast on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes on 28 April.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, however, have been alleging abuses at Abu Grhaib and other prisons for most of 2003. Amnesty filed its concerns with the US Government and the Coalition Provisional Authority as far back as the July – 3 months before the Red Cross were finally stung into action. Amnesty claims it received no response and was consistently denied access to American detention facilities.

For an America supposedly dedicated to bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to Iraq, the revelations have been, as Rumpsfeld put it to Congress last Friday, “a catastrophe”.

The whole issue of abuse of Iraqi prisoners may prove to be a very personal catastrophe for Tony Blair. With the Daily Mirror – without any advance warning – having published photographs on 1 May of British soldiers maltreating Iraqi detainees, the Ministry of Defence is now admitting to serious concerns that abuse has taken place – the Mirror’s photographs are thought to be fake reconstructions of a real event. Although at least one Iraqi has died in British custody – the abuse by British troops is thought to be on nothing like the scale of Abu Grhaib. (In contrast to the American non-response, Amnesty International say the British government has been engaged in dialogue with them about their concerns since last May.)

According to the polls, the majority of the American public supported the war on Saddam Hussein’s regime. With mass demonstrations in the UK in late Winter 2003 against the proposed war, Blair had to make it an issue of his personal integrity and overstate the (notorious ’45 minutes’) threat posed to get Parliament to approve military action. While Bush, at least until the outbreak of serious violence in Falluja and Najaf this April, generally enjoyed public support, Blair has been on the receiving end of relentless criticism from both politicians and the media almost since the official cessation of hostilities.

The ferocity of the American response to the April uprisings has not gone down well with either the British media or the British public. The revelations about Abu Ghraib have further underminded British taste for what is more and more perceived to be ‘America’s war’ – complemented by suspicion about just when the Blair and/or the Ministry of Defence first knew about the abuses – British or American.

The last thing Blair needs now is abuse by British soldiers to be proven – even small-scale abuse and even if it only involves a few rogue elements. 

The Animal in Man
At a meeting in South-East WakefieId in October 2000, I recall Spiral Dynamics co-developer Dr Don Beck saying: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing attrocities.”

Don is echoing a First World War British colonel who said: “I’ve seen my own men commit attrocities and should expect to see it again. You can’t stimulate and let loose the animal in man and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment’s notice.”

That ‘animal’ is what Spiral Dynamics terms the RED vMEME - the most extreme manifestation of what Sigmund Freud (1923) termed the ‘Id’. The animal’s motif is: “I’ve got the power and I can do whatever I want.” Freud saw sex and aggression as being the two prime drivers of the Id – and that’s exactly what a number of the photos from Abu Grhaib depict!

So, what  Don Beck is saying is that, in the heat of battle, we need the RED express-self-without-consequences vMEME to be high in a soldier’s consciousness. (We don’t, after all, want soldiers worrying too much about taking a bullet or getting blown up – they might refuse to fight or run away!) But that ferocious RED will not always be subsumed on demand by the order and discipline of the BLUE vMEME. In effect attrocities are an almost-inevitable by-product of war.

Historically warfare is littered with attrocities. For example, in Burma in World War 2 British troops frequently executed Japanese prisoners (in total defiance of the Geneva Conventions). (At least the Japanese took prisoners – even if they then worked many of them to death.) In the 1950s torture of rebel prisoners by the British and the French was commonplace in Kenya and Algeria respectively. The My Lai massacre in March 1969 was the single worst attrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam. Amnesty International has alleged abuse and torture by British troops in Northern Ireland while the latest ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry still rumbles on…. Etc, etc, etc.

Don Beck, like the First World War colonel, is saying that attrocities will happen. So those in government need to accept that, obviously have means to try to prevent it but also have a way of managing it when it happens.

This is especially difficult when there is a ‘free press’. The Pentagon tried to dissuade CBS-TV from running the Abu Grhaib photos and failed. Parliament, in all its BLUE pomposity, has called into question the motives of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan for publishing photos he didn’t know to be real, which have damaged the reputation of British forces and may expose them to greater danger. The fact is that the harmonic of RED and ORANGE which drives so much of the Western media is generally more concerned with sales and advertising revenue than the ‘greater good’ – whatever their protestations to the contrary.

Demonsing the Other Side engenders Abuse
Every side in a war portrays themselves as the ‘good guys’. So attrocities are problematic. The good guys aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. It becomes particularly problematic when a side claims to be fighting a ‘moral war’. The war against Saddam is arguably the most moral war fought by American forces since World War 2. Then General Patton, one of the senior American commanders in the European theatre, conceded: “There would unquestionably be some raping.” He described the anticipated rapes as “a little R&R” for the troops. Hang on! Wasn’t it the Nazis who were supposed to be like that?!?

Or, maybe it’s okay to maltreat the other side’s women if you can demonise them as ‘Nazis’ or ‘Nazi women’ or ‘women of Nazis’ or ‘women who are complicit in Nazis running their country’…?

The PURPLE vMEME likes to discrimate between ‘our tribe’ and ‘your tribe’. The more obvious the distinctions between tribes the greater the discrimination – and in times of trouble that discrimination readily turns into demonisation.

In World War 2, for all that they were ‘Nazis’ and spoke a different language, the Germans at least were similar in appearance to the British and Americans troops they fought against. Not so the ‘slant-eyed, yellow-skinned Japs’. Treatment of German prisoners by the Allies was, in general, markedly more humane than that of Japanese prisoners (when they were taken alive).

In Iraq, it’s almost a PURPLE set-up: American soldiers in Star Wars stormtrooper uniforms, mostly white/some black, largely Christian vs a civilan population, swarthy-skinned, men in ‘dresses’, almost everybody with ‘teaclothes’ around their heads, universally Muslim. And PURPLE’s village gossip mentality turns it into a pastiche of: The Great Satan vs the hijackers who flew planes into the twin towers.

With PURPLE drawing that kind of demarcation – reflected in Donald Rumpsfeld having to remind himself (and Congress?) that “Iraqis are human beings” – licence is given for RED to do as it will. Mikhail Bakhtin (1941/1965) calls it ‘Authorised Transgression’.

Of course, it works both ways. RED, licenced by Iraqi PURPLE’s demonisation of Americans, had a great time killing the four American contractors in Falluja in early April – the incident which triggered the American seige – and then mutilating and burning their bodies.

‘Bad Apples’?…or ‘Systematic’?
So far we’ve looked at the effect of the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in this type of situation. Now let’s look at the role of BLUE.

Following the Second World War, there was much concern about how an advanced civilisation like Germany could have conducted the Holocaust as well as a near-genocidal campaign against the Slavs of Russia and Eastern Europe.

One sociologist who researched this issue was Theodore Adorno who developed the ‘Fascism Scale’, designed to measure what he called the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ (Adorno et al, 1950). This type of person would have rigid beliefs and a general hostility towards other groups, be intolerant of ambiguity and submissive to authority figures.

Adorno didn’t know it at the time (1950) – because Clare W Graves had yet to commence the remarkable project from which Spiral Dynamics would be developed – but he was effectively measuring Graves’ D-Q (BLUE) system.

In one of the variations of Stanley Milgram’s notorious Obedience’ experiments, Milgram’s assistant Alan Elms (Elms & Milgram, 1966), Elms found that high scorers on Adorno’s Fascism Scale administered stronger ‘electric shocks’ than low scorers when ordered to do so by an authority figure. (The shocks and the cries and pleas for help were fake; but nearly all Millgram’s ‘volunteers’ believed they were electrocuting the ’victim’ for real.)

The US Army, like any effective modern military force, has a high BLUE Obedience culture. It has to have for such a disciplined structure to work. In basic terms, subordinates obey superiors – for the most part unquestioningly.

In most documented accounts of military attrocities, torture and abuse, the authority figures have condoned the activities – either implicitly (turned a ‘blind eye’) or explicitly. In some cases they have ordered them directly – as with the infamous Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai.

The BLUE vMEME, in its quest for conformity to the right way to live, is highly responsive to instructions from the correct authority figure. In the Army, the correct authority figures are superior officers.

One of Calley’s soldiers, when explaining why he personally had killed over 50 Vietnamese at My Lai, said, “Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like I was doing the right thing.”

So has BLUE been involved at Abu Ghraib – or has it just been a rather unfortunate excess of RED ‘animal’ licenced by PURPLE demonisation? In other words, a few ‘rotten apples’ or systemised abuse?

There is evidence emerging that the R2I – Resistance to Interrogation – programme is being deliberately employed in Abu Ghraib. This involves sexual jibes and stripping prisoners. Major-General Antonio Taguba, in charge of the US military investigation, has discovered that US military intelligence officers and private intelligence contractors – including CACI International – have influenced the way the abused prisoners have been treated. Whether this has been by direct instruction or by suggestion is not yet in the public domain (to my knowledge, at the time of writing) but interviewed guards have apparently stated that they thought it was their duty to ’soften up’ the prisoners for questioning.

It’s worth noting here that the Washington Post has claimed that in April 2003 the US Defence Department authorised interrogation techniques for the notorious Camp X-Ray in Guant á namo Bay, Cuba, which included stripping inmates, subjecting them to bright lights and loud music, and depriving them of sleep. The Post also claims that similar methods have been authorised for use in Iraq with detainees with links to terrorist or insurgent groups.

Undoubtedly, human rights groups would consider such techniques to be abuse and possibly torture – and there is no doubt of the higher authority from which they originate.

Interestingly, the Amnesty International allegations take in Camp X-Ray as well as Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan – and that may link to Taguba’s discovery that Afghan prisoners are being flown into Abu Ghraib by ‘other government agencies’ for interrogation.

Such manipulaton smacks of some pretty powerful ORANGE strategic thinking.

A few ‘rotten apples’? The abuse scandal appears increasingly to have more of a systematic element. How far the ‘abuse element’ went up the Pentagon/Defence Department hierarchies we have yet to find out, but the Washington Post claims include one that some of the techniques used in Guant á namo Bay had to be authorised by Donald Rumsfeld himself. Claims that the Americans are liberators now look rather grubby and stained. Some observers last year joked that it was difficult at times to tell who was the madman with the weapons of mass destruction: Bush or Saddam Hussein. Whether he knew about the abuses or not, whether he is genuinely apologetic or not, Bush’s regime is now tarnished with some of the approbium he so readily heaped upon the former dictator.

2nd Tier Hegemony?
Last year some informed observers stated that they perceived elements of what Spiral Dynamics calls ’2nd Tier thinking’ in the American approach to Iraq – and beyond.

This approach reputedly comes from the so-called ‘Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Doctrine’ – devised by Donald Rumpsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz when they were out of White House favour during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

This ‘Doctrine’ is aimed at securing American global economic – and, where necessary, military - hegemony in the first decade of the 21st Century. Supposedly it even includes a strategy for taking on China – increasingly acknowleged as developing into the world’s second largest economy by 2010. George W Bush is said to have been much influenced by this Doctrine. Few have seen the core documents – so some caution is needed when commenting upon the Doctrine.

One can see how a ‘Pax Americana’ – spreading the values of ‘democracy and freedom’ around the world – might appear to have 2nd Tier characteristics to some. And since TURQUOISE is said to be willing to sacrifice some for the greater good of all, a war to rid the world of a near-psychopathic ‘evil’ threat like Saddam would fit too. I’ve even seen one comment that maybe the concept of abusing prisoners to obtain critical information reflects YELLOW’s pragmatism!

Franky, I can’t see it. The sheer narrowness of White House/Defence Department thinking and the lack of forward thinking doesn’t seem very 2nd Tier to me.

During the short war the American military were apparently equally surprised by the speedy collapse of the regular Iraqi army (RED trying to run an under-resourced and antiquated BLUE machine?) and the ferocious resistance of the irregular Fedayeen fighters (PURPLE loyalty to Saddam and/or their land?).

The Coalition Provisional Authority seemed to have no real plan of what to do with Iraq once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Resoration of basic utitlities has been painfully slow – leaving people coping at times with basic BEIGE survival needs. The abysmal failure from the start to ensure adequate security – remember the stories of American troops standing by while hospitals and museums were looted? – undermined PURPLE safety needs, leading to a real lack of confidence in the conquerors and facilitating the growth of RED lawlessness.

The Americans have been bounced into many key decisions – from the decision to hand over nominal sovereignty on 30 June to restoring elements of the Iraqi Army they disbanded to police Falluja after the ill-fated seige.

And now, either lack of control (the ‘bad apples’) and/or ill-designed control (systematic, abusive interrogation methods) has produced the abuse scandals, further inflaming Iraqi PURPLE hatreds and justifying RED animal excesses against Coalition troops.

A great deal of what has gone wrong in Iraq was predictable, having an open mind and using a tool like Spiral Dynamics. (Didn’t anybody in the White House, the Pentagon or the Defence Department run a Move Away From meta-programme to work out what could go wrong?)

If the war and occupation of Iraq does not come from the 2nd Tier – and it doesn’t look that way to me  – then it is tempting to assign RED revenge/take-the-law-into-our-own-hands and/or ORANGE oil-greed motives to the Americans. But I wasn’t party to any of the decision-making processes – so I simply don’t know. To speculate probably isn’t helpful.

What is needed now is an honest acknowledgement and thorough analysis of the mess and an assessment of the options available.

It’s notable that Tony Blair is now leading the call for Pakistan to get heavily involved in providng troops to Iraq under a new United Nations mandate. As both a staunchly Muslim state and an ally in the United States’ war against the Taliban, they probably stand some chance of being acceptable to both sides.

Perhaps Blair is yet capable of redeeming himself. I was much impressed with the way he sold the war on Afghanistan to moderate Muslim states – in a way Bush probably couldn’t have done - even learning pertinent parts of the Qu’ran to support his case. At the time I wondered if Blair was indeed capable of YELLOW pragmatism. The way he then tied himself to Bush, come what may, in a largely-futile attempt to influence policy over Iraq has proved very damaging to his credibility domestically, in Europe and around the moderate Muslim world.

Now, though, Blair might be able to influence Bush after all. The President desperately needs some new thinking in his policy making – as Albert Eistein reputedly said: “Problems cannot be solved by the same complexity of thinking which created them.”  This means, to some extent at least, breaking with the closet group of advisers (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice – even Colin, if appropriate) - to allow the input of fresh and different thinking.

Studying the 1961 ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco, Irving Janis (1972) noted President Kennedy had a similar closet group of advisers at the time - Janis termed this kind of limited input conferring ‘groupthink’ and observed that it is at its most closed when under external pressure.

Bush needs to break out, not close in. He needs a way out of the mess – a new vision, if you will, before his presidency terminates in ignominy. Blair needs to regain his lost credibility. Bush taking Blair’s advice to heart for once might give them both an important first step.