Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

________________________________________________________________________

 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items.  As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Robert K Merton’s (1938) version of anomie. Those wo resort to criminal acts to get what is desired are Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L, it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

‘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.)

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 ( see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory) - 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.

The Sons of Iraq – a step towards Stratified Democracy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraq is a patchwork of PURPLE and RED

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Avoiding tribal warfare in Iraq

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Tribal War in South Ossetia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RED exploiting PURPLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Putin, good Kremlin despot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what to do…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Critical Link between Failed States and Values

 Africa, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  6 Responses »
Jul 042008
 

Written by ALAN TONKINI

 

I am honoured once again to publish AlanTonkin’s work as a ‘guest blog’. Alan wrote this piece for the Global Values Network web site he runs but also thought it would be appropriate to publish it here. GVN is one of the most advanced projects in the world at using Spiral Dynamics to monitor shifts in societies and assess impacts at national, international and even global levels.

As the world seems to become an ever-more dangerous place, Alan offers this consideration as to why so many ‘Third World’ states fail to develop in positive and healthy ways for the benefit of their own peoples and the international community.

 

The latest edition of Foreign Policy magazine for July/August 2008, in conjunction with The Fund for Peace, has just published their latest rankings of Failed States with Africa occupying seven of the top ten positions. These include Somalia (1), Sudan (2), Zimbabwe (3), Chad (4), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6), the Ivory Coast – no 8 - and the Central African Republic (10).

 

The non–African countries are Iraq (5), Afghanistan (7) and Pakistan (9) which are in the Middle Eastern region (see map below – copyright © 2008 The Fund for Peace).  A further eleven African countries are included in the critical Alert list of 32 countries.  This is a total of 18 or 56% of the total and raises the question of why is this the case? The balance of 34 fall into Warning and only South Africa currently falls into Moderate.

 

Failed States Index 2008

In order to more fully understand this situation it is necessary to fully appreciate the direct link between  Failed States and Values and why the two issues are so closely intertwined. 

 

Dr Don Beck, in his ground breaking work on ‘values’ in ‘Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change’ (co-authored with Christopher Cowan and first published in 1996) explains this link.  The book is based on the original work by Professor Clare Graves at Union College in New York in the 1950s and shows how different values require different levels and approaches to leadership. 

 

Beck also visited South Africa over 60 times in a fifteen year period extending from the early 80’s to the mid – 90’s during a period of rapid political change and transition. These visits generally were on average a minimum of 15 days in length giving him an in depth exposure to South Africa covering a total period of over two and a half years.  

 

During his visits Beck interacted with a wide variety of organisations and individual leaders including top politicians from both the leading ANC and National parties as well as other political parties and groupings. He also had wide exposure to leaders in both business organisations and NGO’s.

 

How Different Values Influence Democracy and Leadership.

Beck has produced an interesting graphic to illustrate his approach and we will use this to show how different values produce different leadership.  It is also important to note that different ‘values mixes’ exist in both developing and developed countries.  This helps explain why bodies such as the United Nations are often unable to agree on how to facilitate and resolve global problems due to widely differing worldviews.

Stratified Democracy

South Africa has a dual profile with both a developing and developed component.  This scenario is often described by commentators as the 1st and 3rd World components of the South African economy.   However, even South Africa as the largest and most developed economy on the African continent still has a majority of its citizens who exhibit the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values. 

 

In looking at Sub-Saharan Africa it becomes clear that the reason why many African states behave as they do is due to the values systems present.  In considering the African countries represented in the top ten Failed States they all without exception exhibit high levels of tribalism and the influence of ‘warlords’.  Until this changes with increased stability democratic values are simply not possible. 

 

The Zimbabwe Issue

The current problem of Zimbabwe lies in the values struggle between ZANU–PF and Robert Mugabe filling the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power space with the MDC being more centred on BLUE Stability and ORANGE Growth.  The shift from Tribal Order and Warlords took place in Europe over two centuries ago.  However, until a larger number of Africa’s leaders and people make the shift into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise the continent will continue to remain a serious global concern. 

 

This is best illustrated in the graphic shown below illustrating the influence of values in The Competitive Impact of Values updated in 2002 from the World Competitiveness Report of 1992.  This shows how countries move from collective

individual values over extended periods of time going back centuries.

 

.  

It is important to note that Africa is still moving into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise and helps to explain the reasons for the dictatorships and corruption still prevalent on the continent.  At this stage much of Africa broadly compares to Europe during the 18th and early 19th Century.

 

Some Conclusions

The countries of the developed world need to more fully understand the reasons why African countries and leaders behave as they do.  They need to encourage positive change by demanding positive action on democracy and its institutions in return.  The days of not setting achievable outcomes on both aid and project financing should change to positive outcomes being rewarded by the developed economies. 

 

At the same time, the new younger generation of emerging African leadership who were not part of the transition from colonial to nationalist politics must take responsibility for the required values shifts in Africa.  This includes providing the correct messages for the population of their countries and encouraging hard work and responsibility, as has occurred in countries such as Singapore and China. 

 

At this stage many African politicians avoid criticising irresponsible RED Power language within their own countries in order to avoid confrontation with rogue elements.  Until there is a significant change in the values of the leadership in these countries this essential challenge is unlikely to happen.  In addition, there is a real risk that existing democratic institutions such as the courts may be threatened if there is no support for a set of more ‘developed values’.  This equally applies to African leaders who support advanced values criticising those who are in denial of these.

 

The new South African Constitution is an example of an ideal being ahead of the values of the broad population.  It is generally accepted that the Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world.  However, the thrust of the South African Constitution is on the BLUE Order, ORANGE Enterprise and GREEN values set.  At the same time the bulk of the population are in the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power range and this is why it is critical that the emerging ‘black middle class’ continues to grow and move into the values range as set out in the Constitution.  

 

What is also required in South Africa is a visionary leader who can integrate the wide spread of values present and move the values spread of the whole country forward.  This will involve an understanding of the Tribal PURPLE and RED Power values while at the same time moving the majority of the population into BLUE Order and ORANGE Enterprise.  A young version of Nelson Mandela is urgently required who can mobilise all the differing levels and build a shared vision of the future.  This type of leader is the one who operates at the Integral YELLOW level.    

 

If Africa is to move forward as a continent its leaders have to take more responsibility for their actions. They also need to avoid falling back into the habits of the past by accusing the developed world of not understanding its positions. We all operate in a global economy and common standards are being applied on an equal basis.  However, equally there needs to be a better understanding of the developing world by those holding economic power in order to move the development process forward.  

 

It should also be realised that this is a journey, not an event and that values change over time due to the existing life conditions.  This includes the fact that we often  only change as individuals and countries only when it is too uncomfortable to stay where we  are. This is where positive pressure and encouragement from the developed world can move developing countries forward on the values continuum.  This is also a key step in the ongoing movement against global terrorism and other threats.  

 

This process can significantly accelerate change in developing countries which can results in the shifts that have taken centuries in some regions being compressed into a shorter time frame. This is the key opportunity in the 21st Century for both the developed world as well as in those countries and their citizens currently occupying the areas of most concern on the ‘Failed States’ league table. See also Failed States Index on www.foreignpolicy.com

 

Tariq Ali gets Benazir Bhutto wrong!

 American Foreign Policy, government, society, terrorism  14 Responses »
Jan 012008
 

So that old agent provacateur extraordinare, Tariq Ali, has attacked the naming in Benazir Bhutto’s will of 19-year-old son Bilawal as her successor as leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, describing it as “a digusting medieval charade”.

(His article was the front page lead story in the New Year’s Eve edition of The Independent – and he appeared on that morning’s editon of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, reiterating his position.)

In describing the succession of Bilawal as “medieval”, Tariq was spot on! Moreover, his description of Asif Zardari, Bhutto’s widower (and Bilawal’s father), as a “feudal potentate” – a Lord Chancellor or Grand Vizier? – who will run the party until his son is old enough, is also pretty close to the mark.

Where Tariq misses the point is to call it “disgusting” and a “charade”.

He goes on to say: “How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future?”

The point is: this is very much how the politcians in Pakistan must act if they wish to design an alternative government to the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf!

Tariq goes on about the need for democracy in Pakistan. Though he doesn’t use the exact words, he seems to mean Western-style liberal democracy. (Interesting, given his history as a Trotskyist and onetime leading member of the International Marxist Group!)

Presumably the kind of democracy that Pakistan doesn’t seem to aspire to, given the convoluted history of corrupt (or allegedly-corrupt) elected despots and military dictators who have ruled the country for most of its post-colonial existence.

Presumably the kind of democracy the United States has failed to impose on Iraq, demonstrating for all the world to see that you cannot impose a government the vast majority of the people are not prepared to tolerate. (Even if you have the mighty muscle of the American army to back you!)

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he was very much the bête noire of the British establishment, Tariq Ali appeared to be driven by a RED/BLUE vMEME harmonic, a skilled and cunning advocate of a Marxist-Leninist approach to society and government. These days there appears to a decidely-GREEN tinge to his thinking; but that thinking still appears to be resolutely 1st Tier.

What Tariq needs – what Pakistan and Iraq (and Afghanistan and many other so-called ‘developing’ countries) need – is a very different approach than Western-style liberal democracy. Good, effective government for and representation of the people can take a number of very different forms (whatever George W Bush and his groupthink cronies might believe!).

Stratified Democracy
Drawing at least in part from his experiences in helping to design the early-mid-nineties transition in South Africa, Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2002) is in the process of developing what he calls ‘Stratified Democracy’. (See: Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory) This requires consideration of which vMEMES are underpinning and driving a particular mindset. This can be illustrated by looking at the 4Q/8L schematic Beck (2000) developed from applying Spiral Dynamics to the work of Ken Wilber. Check which vMEMES are driving the cultural mindset (Lower Left); then check which kind of societal institutions vMEMES create (Lower Right) to get a ‘best fit’.

While Beck has yet to produce defining statements about Stratified Democracy (and there will need to be a number of them!), effectively he means matching the form of government of a society to its cultural mindset.

Once you look at Pakistan from the perspective of 4Q/8L, it is no surprise that a large number of people (especially the rural poor and the urban disenfranchised), led by the PURPLE vMEME, focus on the charisma and magic-making power of their leaders (to whom they feel affiliated by tribal loyalty or some other form of belonging). To such mindsets the personal power and responsbility a Western-style liberal democracy would give them is nothing like as attractive as seeing the ‘magic’ qualities pass from generation to generation in a dynastic manner – as it is perceived it has from  Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to her and hopefully now will to Biliwal.

This mindset is ripe for exploitation by RED. (And Benazir clearly had plenty of that – just look at her fatal to-hell-with-consequences exposure of her head from her protective vehicle so she could revel in her followers’ adulation!)

Tariq Ali can bleat on about Asif Zardari’s alleged corruption. Providing PURPLE feels secure and has a sense of belonging, it doesn’t matter obviously that RED is corrupt, treats them as serfs and exploits them. What else would a feudal monarch do? And besides, it’s the serf’s lot in life, providing the monarch keeps order. Thus, tribes historically have mutated into feudal kingdoms.

The most recent modern example of a true RED feudal kingdom was Saddam Hussein’s pre-invasion Iraq, where his generals played the role of the ‘noble lords’ – frequently plotting against him and periodically being culled by their master. The hapless Iraqi people played the abused serfs. Saddam threw away an estimated 100,000 lives in the 1991 Gulf War and then diverted much of the revenue from the Oil-for-Food Program away from its intended recipients (hungry and sick Iraqis) and into his own coffers. Why? Because he was ‘king’ and he could do what he liked.

(The problem with a RED feudal kingdom is who occupies the throne. King John had a good head for finance and knew when to cede just enough power to keep power. And it could be argued Benito Mussolini was doing reasonably OK until he started trying to impress Adolph Hitler.)

Yet did the Iraqis eagerly grasp the chance for Western-style liberal democracy the invading Americans offered them in 2003-2004? No. Rather, there was a centring lower down the Spiral as PURPLE tribal loyalties (exacerbated by BLUE religious divides) re-emerged in the absence of a ruthless monarchial figure. (To some extent, the picture of re-emerging PURPLE tribal/ethnic loyalties after the death of strongman Marshall Tito also helps explain the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.)

 

Multiple vMEME Leaders
Of course, to see societies as simply dominated by PURPLE’s tribal loyalties or RED’s power pecking order is too basic.

Islam provides a strong BLUE veneer in many countries in the Middle and Near East; and the lawyers’ protests, which contributed significantly to the development of the present crisis in Pakistan, were a real manifestation of BLUE outrage (admittedly stirred up by some RED demagoguing!) at Musharraf’s removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Nor is the Western world of liberal democracy free from strong PURPLE influences. Though ORANGE uses her to generate large amounts of revenue from tourists, the majority of Britons still favour having a queen of royal lineage and there is some considerable anticipation of Prince William ascending the throne (assuming Charles can somehow be bypassed!). As for the United States, how many Americans liked to think that they were on the verge of having their very own dynasty in the Kennedys…? While the second Bush has lost so much favour it’s unlikely that line will produce another president in the near future, a number of people are getting very excited about the prospect of a second Clinton in the White House. (There does indeed appear to be ‘magic’ in a name!)

So an effective leader needs to be able to talk multiple vMEME languages. Neither of the Bushes were good at it. Tony Blair, prior to tripping himself into Bush Jnr’s Iraq trap, excelled at it. Talking revenge and justice (RED/BLUE) with Bush post 9/11 and then using some very different BLUE memes from the Qur’an to persuade Muslim world leaders not to oppose the American invasion of Afghanistan.

Benazir Bhutto could talk GREEN human rights, ORANGE money opportunities and BLUE military processes with Western leaders. In Pakistan she became the princess apparent, ready to ascend the throne and rule like a queen, a PURPLE/RED harmonic just right for so many of her people.

Had she lived and been elected, she may have been sensitive enough to Western pressure to keep it clean this time and possibly even help lay the foundations for the dominating Pakistani mindset to move higher up the Spiral. Though would she would have been any better than Musharraf at dealing with the dysfunctional BLUE of Isamic extremism…?

Tariq Ali would appear to have been so sucked into BLUE/GREEN ideals of Western politics, he has lost touch with his own origins. Benazir passing the claim to the throne to Biliwal, with Zardari as Grand Vizier, might indeed seem “a digusting medieval charade” to Western eyes immured in liberal democracy. But, to the medieval eyes of the Pakistani rural poor and urban disenfranchised, it makes a lot of sense.

With a cultural mindset (Lower Left) largely in the PURPLE-RED zone, Western-style liberal democracy (created by BLUE and ORANGE and refined by GREEN) is quite simply a mismatch for Pakistan. The form of government (Lower Right) must match the mindset and needs of the people to be governed in the first place. Then the higher vMEMES of the leaders can aspire to development of the cultural mindset.

Tariq Ali, for all his considerable intellectual prowess – like so many decision-makers and commentators in the West - needs to understand this intuitively if he is to make sense of what is happening in Pakistan (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).

Don Beck and Elza Maalouf of the Centre for Human Emergence Middle East anticipate significant work in the Palestinian territories (including addressing aspects of Palestine’s relationship with Israel) during 2008. It will be interesting to see how the concepts of Stratified Democracy develop further from that work.

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.