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’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘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.)

Tony Blair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Similarly a multi-level approach is required in Afghanistan…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blair is absolutely right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, religion, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Apr 122010
 

Are Western leaders and the Western media missing a critical opportunity to exacerbate the divisions in our Muslim communities, between the minority who advocate the use of terrorism to achieve the establishment of an Islamic hegemony and the majority who do not support such tactics and may even abhor them…?

For about 5 hours on 2 March it was hot news: Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a leading Islamic scholar, had issued a detailed 605-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism. He 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.

He regretted the fact that the Islamic teachings, which are based on love, peace and welfare, are being manipulated and quoted out of context to serve the designs of vested interests (such as al-Qaeda). He said that Islam spelled out a clear code of conduct during the course of war and gave complete protection to non-combatants including women, the old, children, etc – with trading centres, schools, hospitals and places of worship deemed to be ‘safe places’.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is far from being the first to condemn terrorism. As a reaction to 9/11, just days later Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar, Tariq Bishri, Muhammad Awwa and Fahmi Huwaydi, all from Egypt, Haytham Khayyat of Syria and American imam Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Alwani issued a combined statement: “All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorise the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment. … [It is] necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and [punished] appropriately. … [It is] a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means.” Their statement was just one of many condemning fundamentalist terrorism at the time. In July 2003 Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of the Al-Azhar mosque of Cairo – considered the highest authority in Sunni Islam – said groups which carried out suicide bombings were the enemies of Islam. In January 2004 Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Shaykh ‘Abdul-’Azeez Aal ash-Shaykh told 2 million pilgrims: “Islam has forbidden violence in all its forms. It has forbidden hijacking airplanes, ships and other means of transport and has forbidden all acts that would undermine security.” Later that same year a group of prominent scholars (including ash-Shaykh and ul-Qadri) got together to issue ‘The Amman Message’ and a number of scholars, including ul-Qadri, have issued shorter, simpler denunciations since then. What makes ul-Qadri’s new fatwa different is the sheer depth and breadth of religious and legal scholarly argument it goes into to support its pronouncements. Also it declares someone who undertakes terrorist activities to be an unbeliever who cannot go to Heaven.

Ul-Qadri has effectively refuted all the fundamentalist arguments that the radical imams put forward to support terrorism. These arguments essentially cluster around 2 key ideas:-

  • It is a Muslim’s duty to use violence to relieve fellow Muslims from oppression by unbelievers (Sura 2: 191, 193). What tends to get twisted or ignored, though, is the ending of 193: “…if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.”
    ‘Oppression’ clearly is the tricky word here. Civilian Afghans being slaughtered by American helicopter gunships is unequivocally oppression…while the act is taking place. Is it still oppression when the act is stopped and the American military apologises and takes measures to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again? Living by choice as a minority under a government which allows you freedom to worship but doesn’t espouse your religious values in its social policies – the position of the Muslim communities in the UK, for example – is that oppression?
  • The belief that a warrior slain in battle for Allah will go to Heaven and be wedded to 72 beautiful virgins. This last highly-effective meme is created by putting together disconnected verses – eg: Sura 9:111 with Sura 55:46-78. This running together of different concepts to create a new idea is typical of the way religious philosophers manipulate ‘holy book’ text to create something the original writer(s) may not have intended. Radical imams certainly do it – but they’re not the only religious leaders who do it or have done it in the past. From the Crusades and before through to World War II and after, Christian leaders have manipulated Bible text in a similar same way to justify slaughter of the ‘enemy’ (including civilians).
    Sura 4: 29-30 makes it clear that suicide is wrong for a Muslim. So the imams have to twist it that a ‘suicide bomber’ blowing themselves up to destroy the ‘enemy’ (civilians) is not actually deliberately ending their own life (suicide) but is a martyr dying in battle in the service of God. Otherwise, the suicide bomber can’t expect to go to Heaven and claim his virgins.

Ul-Qadri can’t rule out jihad but he can and does hedge it about with teachings about how war is to be fought in a way that protects the innocent and preserves the integrity of both the cause and God’s will.

Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is the unequivocal Islamic denunciation of terrorist tactics Tony Blair called for from Britain’s Muslim leaders in the wake of 7/7. (Ul-Qadri’s choice of London to launch his fatwa was undoubtedly a deliberate part of his strategy.)

So how come the Western media has paid it so little attention? And, by largely ignoring it, are Western governments missing a key opportunity?

Helping out a different perspective on religious leadership
Unlike the Christian churches, there is no clear and rigidly defined hierarchy of leadership in either Sunni or Shi’a Islam. Rather leadership is envisaqed as a trust (Rafik Issa Beekun & Jamal Badawi, 1999). Leaders have to win and maintain the trust of their followers and their leadership is then recognised – eg: ‘Ayotollah’ is a Shi’a term of recognition for an expert in Islamic studies who will usually hold a teaching post. ‘Mullah’ and ‘immam’ are terms that roughly equate to ‘priest’; but there is no hierarchy equivalent to, for example, curate, vicar, deacon, archdeacon, bishop, archbishop in the Church of England.

Islamic scholars and teachers tend to gain influence from the numbers of their followers and the respect the followers show for the cleric’s teachings, rather than simply from the position they hold.

Thus, Ul-Qadri’s fatwa is not to Muslims like the edict of the Pope to Catholics. He is but one of hundreds, if not thousands of Islamic scholars, seeking to establish influence from their interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. So it is not a case of Ul-Qadri has pronounced; now all Muslims will oppose terrorism. Those Muslims who follow Ul-Qadri should now take his position as the definitive statement on the matter. Those who are unsure whether terrorism can be justified from scripture now have a very powerful voice giving them the soundest theological arguments as to why it can’t possibly be. Other open-minded scholars, hopefully, will test Ul-Qadri’s arguments and find they can support them and disseminate his messages through their own followers.

Since Ul-Qadri’s position is not like the Pope speaking to millions upon millions of Catholics through a hierarchical route of command expected to produce obedience, surely it is in the West’s interests to help Ul-Qadri spread his message and increase his influence?

For all we know, the intelligence agencies (CIA, MI5, etc) may be working covertly to support anti-terrorism Islamic leaders; but in public at least there is the proverbial deafening silence. There has been scant media coverage of Ul-Qadri’s fatwa and its reception in the Islamic world – which is where it really counts – beyond the day of its launch. To me, this is decidedly puzzling.

Other Muslim-sponsored events which take an anti-terrorist stance also tend to go unreported on in the West – eg: the Anti-Terrorism/All India Conference of February 2008, the National Peace Conference in Pakistan (April 2009). And attention is rarely given to Muslim anti-terrorism web sites such as the Free Muslims Coalition.

The general impression given in much of the Western media is that the majority of Muslims go along with or are indifferent to the extremists. In fact, there is real evidence that there are distinct anti-terrorism movements amongst the Muslim communities around the world and that there is an intellectual and spiritual battle on for how Islam deals with its relations with both ‘oppressors’ in particular and unbelievers in general.

So, why, oh, why are Western leaders and the Western media largely ignoring these movements when they offer ways to engage with peace-supporting Islamic leaders with the means of influencing millions of Muslims around the world and isolating the extremists?

Just think: if the news bulletins covering last month’s suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro had carried interviews with ul-Qadri quoting the Qur’an to denounce the terrorists as ‘unbelievers’ and stating that they would not go to Heaven…. How powerful a message would that have been?!?

The likes of Ul-Qadri being consulted on TV would increase their influence – especially amongst the millions of Muslims living in the West. Surely we want their views to be more influential than, say, Osama bin Laden’s?!?

If the neo-Christian West wants a peaceful relationship with Islam, both within and without its own domains, then we need to engage actively, supportively and publicly with Muslim leaders who are anti-terrorism in their views.

Seeing the likes of Ul-Qadri denouncing terrorists on TV will also help to ‘normalise’ the concept of Muslim leaders airing their views via a national medium and will present a much more positive image of Islam to the non-Muslim majorities in the Western countries.

Isolating the Extremists
At the beginning of this Blog post, I talked about exacerbating the divisions in the Muslim communities. This means isolating the extremists and shrinking their numbers while boosting the standing of Muslims who want to pursue their faith in a manner which allows for co-existence with unbelievers and at least tolerates, even if in disgust and seeking change through peaceful means, the laws of a country in which they are clearly the minority population.

This inevitably means that the extremists will attack the non-extremists as ‘traitors to the cause’ and will force the non-extremists to defend themselves.

The Assimilation-Contrast Effect (ACE) Don Beck (2003) developed from running the vMEMES of Spiral Dynamics through Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland’s Social Judgement Theory (1961) demonstrates that the more extreme someone’s position on a policy or philosophy the more likely they are to see moderate positions on their own side as being more like positions on the other side. From the extremist perspective, this Contrasting Effect puts greater distance between extremist positions and more moderate positions on the same side, even to the point of demonising the moderates as effectively being in league with the other side. (The Assimilating Effect is seen when moderates from different sides minimise or turn a ‘blind eye’ to very real differences between them, in order to accentuate their commonalities. An example of this are the inter-faith movements.)

To some considerable extent the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have already demonstrated the Contrast Effect by carrying out ‘takfir’ on moderate Muslims opposed to them. Takfir is the act of declaring another Muslim to have committed aposotacy and become a ‘kafir’ (unbeliever); since apostacy is punished by death (Qur’an 5:32), this enables the Taliban (and al-Qaeda) to justify killing moderate Muslims. (In ACE terms, this is the ‘Zealot’ punishing those who deviate from what it decrees is ‘the one true way’.)

Since Islam is a brotherhood and Muslims are obliged to support and protect one another (Sahih Bukhari Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622), from a theological point of view takfir is necessary for one Muslim to kill another. However, ul-Qadri’s fatwa effectively declares takfir on terrorists and suicide bombers. Thus, moderate Muslims who subscribe to fatwas such as ul-Qadri’s, can now legitimately kill terrorists and suicide bombers because they are apostate.

To further this division between the extremists and the moderates, the neo-Christian West must increase the commonalities with the moderate Muslims – thus, increasing the Assimilation Effect between moderate Muslims and Westerners willing to engage with them as respected equals. As those commonalities are increased, so a common identity needs to be developed - as per Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993)  Common In-Group Identity Model (1993) – which separates the moderates from the extremists in conceptual terms.

Western ignorance, Western arrogance or Western scheming?
With ul-Qadri’s fatwa having the potential to change the entire relationship between Islam and terrorism, it remains a baffling mystery why so little attention seems to be being paid to it.

Could it be that potential is not recognised?

In which case, people in high places and their advisors are not paying attention. Perhaps their attention is elsewhere – Barack Obama fretting over his health care bill; Gordon Brown consumed with how to salvage the general election…? Perhaps, after nearly 9 years of the ‘War on Terror’, there still aren’t enough senior figures in the White House or Whitehall who understand Islam and how it works, to recognise the significance of ul-Qadri’s fatwa…?

As for the media, as we know all too well, bad news sells more newspapers than good news – and it’s a lot easier to drag a story about ill-equipped British troops in Helmand out for several days than it is to explore the subtleties and nuances of a scholarly and religious exposition day after day.

Perhaps it’s due to arrogance – the West can sort it out without understanding Islam?

The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) displayed the West at its most arrogant and foolhardy. Well over a million Muslim lives and the lives of several thousand Western military personnel have been lost since 2001 because so little detailed consideration was put into the follow-throughs. As military operations, both invasions could hardly have gone better; but the soldiers have paid the price since because the politicians and the strategists didn’t understand. They didn’t understand Islam and they didn’t understand tribal cultures; they simply thought they could impose Western-style Democracy and that it would work more or less smoothly from the off. Just how many lives might not have been lost had those politicians and strategists not been so arrogant and bothered to understand before they decided…?

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the first signs of acknowledging diversity and wanting to understand the local varieties of Islam and to get to grips with local tribal cultures are coming from frontline intelligence officers in the US Army. In their paper, ‘Fixing Intel: a Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’, Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger & Paul Batchelor (2010) describe pilot schemes of bottom-up engagement with local tribal elders in Southern Afghanistan which have transformed relations between the tribespeople and the military and seriously disadvantaged local Taliban. And now Colonel Fred Krawchuk – a commander in the Baghdad ‘Surge’ (2007-2008) who used Spiral Dynamics for insight into dealing with local factions – has asked Don Beck to go to Afghanistan to advise the intelligence effort.

But, as Flynn et al argue, this new, developing approach has to go right up through the chain of command to the top – to president and prime minister. We simply can’t afford for the arrogance which led to years of failure in post-invasion Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq to continue to blind us to on-the-ground realities. (No wonder both Clare W Graves (1978/2005) and Abraham Maslow (1956) considered 1st Tier ways of thinking to be delusional!)

Is the West scheming – do Western leaders actually want there to be moderate Muslims?

Perhaps there is an agenda suited by the term ‘Muslim’ equaling the term ‘terrorist’? In which case, moderate Muslim leaders who have the influence to undermine the arguments of the fundamentalist clerics are not people Western leaders would wish to support and promote.

We’re clearly on the verge of conspiracy theories here – George W Bush’s use of the term ‘crusader’ in 2001 was a parapraxis (‘Freudian slip’) – there really is a crusade against Islam; the 2003 invasion really was all about getting control of Iraq’s oil; etc, etc. I’m not about to indulge in such speculation but there are numerous instances in recent history of democratically-elected governments manipulating information and  the way it is presented to sell dubious ideas to their populations.

While it’s every government’s job to put the interests of its people above all others, in today’s interconnected world, with economic meltdown triggered by overlending banks halfway around the world, plagues able to travel around the globe on passenger aircraft and nuclear obliteration of the planet still a real (if probably receded) possibility, the days of Bismarckian scheming to set one lot warring against the other for your own national advantage should be long gone.

Which leads us back to the central question: why then so little attention paid to Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s 2 March fatwa?

Afghanistan: sex or starve! What's the issue?

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 172009
 

If the stories are true - and there does seem to be some confusion in the accounts – then Hamid Karzai’s government sneaked into law on 27 July an amended version of the Personal Status Law for Afghanistan’s minority Shi’ite population. (Around 15% of the country’s 30 million citizens – the vast majority of whom are Sunnis, to whom the new law does not apply.) 

The coming into law of this measure certainly does seem ‘sneaked’. With the likes of Barrack Obama, Gordon Brown, France’s Human Rights Minister Rama Yade and NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer joining the international chorus of protest against the original version of the bill in the Spring, Karzai promised to review the measure before implementing it. Now, just days before the increasingly tightly-contested elections, he appears to have sneaked it into law with some different words but the same meanings.

Human Rights Watch says it has seen a copy of the final law that requires Shia women to satisfy their husbands’ sexual appetites at least every 4 days, an article which critics have said could be used to justify marital rape. It enshrines a husband’s right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to comply with his sexual demands. (Cue: Western media frenzy about frustrated husbands starving their wives…!)

The law also requires women to get permission from their husbands to work and grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. Additionally, it is claimed that it effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’ to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

The law was designed, initially in secret, by a powerful, hard-line Shia leader, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, and is supported by conservative Shia leaders in parliament. And it is clearly the votes of Shia fundamentalists Karzai is hoping to win with this measure.

The fact the new law is actually in flagrant contravention of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban constitution simply doesn’t seem to bother Karzai. Small wonder that the Pashtun people, who comprise most of the Taliban’s cannon fodder, regard Karzai’s people as far less trustworthy than the fundamentalists.

Which leads to the question: has the West once again, through an inability to understand cultural differences - different memes for the BLUE vMEME - inappropriately backed unhealthy, corrupt RED? (In recent history just think: the Shah in Iran…Saddam Hussein in Iraq….)

Perspective needed?
Of course, to Western GREEN, Karzai’s new law is horrendous – a betrayal of both the rights of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban women (supposedly protected by the constitution) and the democratic values the West’s costly military mission is meant to support.

But maybe some perspective is needed here…?

Certainly Karzai’s regime is riddled with corruption. The man himself appears neither to have the dread authority of a feudal lord nor the understanding of Western-style Democracy and the commitment to make it work. As such, he seems unfit to lead Afghanistan through the transition from primitive theocracy vs warlord banditry (pre-2001 invasion) to multicultural Democracy, the West’s avowed aim for this society. Yet the West, by its espousal of the bloodstained warlords of the Northern League and its use of their men as its footsoldiers in the 2001 invasion, approved corruption, blood lust, rape, torture, war crimes, etc, by small-minded leaders. What kind of people did the West really expect to emerge from the dust of battle to assume power in its new regime?

Karzai’s record shows him to be a formidable operator but he seems completely at sea at times in mastering his own government. It’s not beyond possibility that he personally is relatively clean; it’s just his regime, born from the Western-backed excesses of the Northern League, seems irredeemably corrupt.

If Karzai is becoming more and more a weakling desperately trying to cling to power through foul means or fair, then let’s not forget WHERE he came from and WHO put him where he is.

As to marital rape - and Mohseni denies his law explicitly authorises this as Islam is against women being forced to have sex – how ever offensive the very concept might be to sophisticated Western thinkers in the first decade of the 21st Century, let’s not get too precious about this. It was only in 1994 that the Criminal Justice Act made marital rape illegal in the UK.

Though there’s a good deal of no-consequences RED driving decisions at the personal level – eg: the recent expenses scandals – at the strategic/policy level British political thinking tends to have been dominated post-1960s by the BLUE, ORANGE and, increasingly, GREEN vMEMES. Afghanistan is largely dominated by the PURPLE, RED and, to some extent, BLUE vMEMES. So it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect Afghans overall to share the same values as a modern Western democracy. On the Spiral their thinking overall, as a society, is just not where much of the West is…yet.

(Which is not to say there aren’t individuals and even sections of Afghan society with much more complex thinking, just as there many parts of Britain where PURPLE and RED dominate the thinking of local populations, rather than BLUE or ORANGE.)

Using the Lower Quadrants of 4Q/8L, therefore, we can see that, if there is to be balance - homeostasis – then the thinking of the people in terms of what is socially acceptable behaviour (Lower Left) – has to be reflected in the laws under which they are governed (Lower Right). Actually, when you think of the Personal Status Law in these terms, Karzai has matched a law specifically to the sub-culture concerned. How ever offensive GREEN-led Westerners might find this law, in terms of 4Q/8L, it may not be too bad a match.

As to males having exclusive guardianship of children, as any Social Anthropologist will tell you, pre-industrial societies in Africa and the East often have had ways of managing descent and parenting which seem at odds with modern Western values - yet these ways have worked successfully for their societies for generations.

When the Western media work themselves up into the kind of outraged frenzy they have over the past 48 hours, it does nothing for the causes of our troops and diplomats in Afghanistan. All it does is drive another wedge between the Afghan government and the West and convince the hardliners that we have no understanding or respect for their values.

Of course, the Personal Status Law should be reported on - as should the marches against it in Kabul in April by women protestors (and the rough treatment they received) - but in ways that seek to understand it in terms of their culture primarily, rather than ours. Otherwise, we operate from 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.

Afghanistan has greater priorities – first things first!
In the grand scheme of things, allowing a smallish ethnic minority to conduct their marital relations in a way many Westerners consider offensive these days is proverbial ‘small beer’.

What is ‘big beer’ is defeating the Taliban militarily while sucking their less ardent supporters into more mainstream politics. Using the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, we need to draw the moderates into consensus, not drive them into the arms of the extremists by condemning their values.

Does that mean I would condone a woman being faced with having to give in to her husband’s demands or going without food? Does that mean I want women being controlled by men?

Not a bit of it! But I don’t have to share Ayatollah Asif Mohseni’s values to appreciate that they are what we have to work with for that group of people.

From Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) through the Graves Model (1971) to Spiral Dynamics (1996), the principle is clear: lower level needs and aspirations need to be met before people can move onto higher level needs and aspirations. First things first! PURPLE tribes need safety and security and good intra-tribal health which their leaders’ RED does not abuse to the point where trust in them becomes compromised. BLUE needs to really get into the machinery of the state to make it more efficient and less corrupt. BLUE also needs to dump the RED-BLUE zealots out of the mosques and make sure what is taught is focussed on those Pillars of Islam, such as Zakah (charity), which build up community cohesion.

Then ORANGE entrepreneurship can get on with wealth creation and the development of future-focused leaders, allowing GREEN to start to work its way through with the egalitarianism which will undermine male control of women and eventually outlaw marital rape.

Working through 4Q/8L’s Lower Quadrants, we need to make sure every level is developed healthily…organically. We can’t jump levels or apply incredible pressure and expect it all suddenly just to fall in place. Each level needs to be nurtured to its nodal peak and then encouraged to give way to the vMEME which is next.

Thanks to Don Beck’s MeshWORKS (1998) concept, it is possible to work with multiple vMEMES at once, thus making the process both faster and much more integrated. But close attention still needs to ensure that, as one vMEME’s health is developed, it supports the development of the health of the next vMEME above it on the Spiral.

Thus, from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, through gritted teeth, we can let Hamid Karzi introduce his ‘obnoxious law’ as a means to an end, knowing the respect it shows Shia traditions and values will help to minimise drift to the Taliban. And we know also that, eventually, GREEN will be strong enough in Afghanistan to dissemble that law.

But only if we work with the values those people have now – what is – rather what we think they should be. As John Berry undoubtedly would say, healthy cultural development is grown, not imposed. It’s a mistake the West has been making for 600 years – and it’s time we stopped!

Why we must win in Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Britishness’ at the Regent’s College Summit

 community, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, regeneration, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  27 Responses »
Jun 302009
 

Down in a basement meeting room of the Holiday Inn Oxford Circus…that’s where the Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) was born on the afternoon of Friday 26 July 2009. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck, Jon Freeman (author of ‘God’s Ecology and the Dawkins Challenge’), Rachel Castagne, Lynne Sedgemore CBE,  Ian MacDonald of the Integral Centre,  the veteran activist and author Rosemary Wilkie and myself harmonising an intent – creating a spirit, if you will.  That intent is to build MeshWORK alliances to design natural solutions to local problems in the context of a globalised world.

The next 2 days, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th, saw CHE-UK host its first event, ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ at Regent’s College. Don, Rachel and Jon led the event and old HemsMESH colleague Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke flew in from Switzerland to lend his talents to a task-and-feedback session on the Sunday.  About 50 people joined us to get a feel for what the real issues are confronting the UK and what we might do about them.

The general consensus was that in the UK a lot of the positive influence of the BLUE vMEME has been diminished by the emergence of GREEN (a not-uncommon pattern in much of North America and Western Europe).  This weakening of BLUE has had a number of negative effects – ones especially noted were:-

  • the lack of discipline in our culture, particularly amongst young people – resulting in RED excesses such as binge drinking and violent rowdiness on our city centre streets at weekends
  • the collapse of effective regulation in our financial markets, resulting in toxic ORANGE taking the kind of foolish gambles on debt and investment which have brought the banking systems to their knees
  • the RED, thoughtless greed of many politicians milking the expenses system to and beyond its limits – with some clearly having committed fraud

The ‘expenses scandal’, it was generally agreed, served as the tipping point for so much anger amongst the general population that has been building up, suppressed and simmering, for so long.  The occupants of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the cradle of modern Democracy, are now perceived far and wide to be ‘on the take’ just like the officials of those corrupt regimes our government used to be so fond of criticising.  That only about a third of MPs have been exposed in this way and the actual sums involved are piddling in the grand scheme of things –  eg: National Debt estimated at £1.3 trillion!! – are beside the point.  As a kingdom, we are humiliated and in one hell of a mess.

As Lynne commented, people are now genuinely outraged.

A deeper malaise?
There was a recognition that there was a lot of variation in just how far the recession was affecting people in different parts of the country. Ali Gibson made the point that in leafy Buckinghamshire £200-£300 on a new handbag was still a ‘normal’ purchase while in a neighbouring health authority hospital waiting times were way below national targets due in part at least to lack of funding.

As a northerner I was keen to stress the ‘disappearance’ of much the traditional male working classes in the north of England, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands and the effect on the health of PURPLE and RED that was having in their communities. For many in those classes, the recession began in the 1980s and has continued more or less since. (See my previous Blog, ‘The Thatcherite Era is ended. Whither Britain?’, for more on that.)

But, interestingly, in our discussion groups the sense of an even deeper malaise began to emerge as we talked about what it mean to be British…the nature of the British identity. The source of that malaise, it was felt, was the loss of Empire. Britain through the16th-19th Centuries was an invader and a conqueror. With our Empire eventually stretching over a third of the habitable globe, much of the world’s story in that time was our story. There was belief in ourselves and the religions we espoused – all those Christian missionaries! – which fed a stream of great innovations, from the road building of Thomas Telford to George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the medical breakthroughs of Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner to the astounding engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A sense of: “We are British. We can do.”

As a trained historian very aware of the horrors of colonialism – knowing that many of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are rooted in the European boundaries which cut right through tribal territories and made artificial nations of unwilling tribal slices mixed with unwilling tribal slices – I found the thought that there could be any good in ‘Empire’ initially quite a challenge to my GREEN.

However, as Don pointed out, the rights and wrongs of what the colonialists did, in the context of our current discussion, were only relevant in that GREEN was still castigating us for the evils done. The question, then, is: does this castigation actually obscure the damage to our RED pride and BLUE nationalism by the loss of Empire…?

Add to that the fact that the once-mighty conquerors are increasingly looked upon as a liability by our military allies. Our army, having relied on American air support in Helmund province and still being unable to suppress the Taliban, American troops are now flooding in to do the job we can’t.

Discussion then raised the issue that, as an island nation, not invaded since 1066, do the recent waves of immigration constitute an invasion of sorts? Thus, the mighty invaders and creators of ‘Empire’ are now themselves diminished and invaded. For me, this was all a series of challenges that became ‘ah-ha moments’. I had previously tended to see racism and ethnic hatred as simply PURPLE’s rejection of those ‘not our tribe’ – especially when security (jobs) are threatened. But, for the British at least, is there also an element of invasion and loss of national pride involved?

What made these discussions particularly astonishing were that there were people in the room from the former Empire – Asians, West Indians, etc – whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been subjects of British rule and its many indignities. But nobody got upset. Nobody got overly-emotional. Nobody wanted to decry the Empire and rake over the ‘evil coals’. Everybody was completely focussed on the collective character of the British psyche, where it was now and why and what needed to be done to lead that British character to a new place.

These were truly 2nd Tier discussions that transcended personality and history. Truly, truly astonishing!

Of course, not everyone there was well-versed in Spiral Dynamics. But a couple of brief-but-potent presentations from Don gave everyone enough of a flavour to contribute to the discussions. Another pleasure of the weekend for me was seeing so many people get turned on to the power of the Spiral Dynamics model to explain human motivation.

Hope from the mess
In discussing the nature of the British character, we also identified many positives. We are and remain:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric – often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threat – eg: the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being rediscovered in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombs in London. (See Dave Lowe’s comment on the Blog ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’) Under pressure, the identity of the tribe expands to include all on our side.
  •  Humour-full – we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

These exercises  gave us the sense that there is still much Britain has to give the world; but, to do that, we have to sort out our current problems and believe in ourselves again. As Rosemary put it: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”

We need strong RED proud in the BLUE frame of responsibly  ’doing your duty’ as just the start of creating that new story.

But our new story has no place for the prejudices, discriminations and abuses that have sometimes sullied our past. One of the most interesting tales of the weekend was one with which Rachel effectively closed the summit. She had been to a folk festival recently. One of the performers, the traditional singing legend June Tabor, had asked the audience what it meant to be English. After some repartee and banter, Tabor answered her own question: “If you love this land, then you’re English.”

Of course, there is no single homogenous English identity. And there certainly isn’t a British one – just ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish! But there is a sense of being English…and there is a sense of being British, whichever of our 4 constituent countries you come from. And, using Tabor’s definition, if you’ve just arrived in this kingdom for the first time but you love this land, then you’re one of us.

At the end of the 2 days, we hadn’t come up with magic solutions. We didn’t have an agenda to present to Government. Those things will come in time; but we had made a start on serious work.

And there were a lot more of us at 5 PM Sunday than there were at 5 PM Friday. Welcome. Juliana. Welcome, Denise. Welcome, James. Welcome, Jon (Twigge). Welcome, Willa. Welcome, Ali. Welcome, Faheed. Welcome, Richard. Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome, Carragh. Welcome, Dave. Welcome, Julian. Welcome, Laura. Welcome, Eileen. Welcome, Shaun. And so on…and so on…and so on…and so on…..

There will be 4 more summits to follow on from this weekend and then there is the EuroConfab at Gatwick 23-25 October – the first time the Confab has been held in the UK. If you’ve a mind to understand and a heart that loves this land, then please join us!

[For a more formal description of the founding of CHE-UK, see: ‘From Rule Britannia to Cool Britannia to Integral Britannia’.]

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The risk of dissipating goodwill

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Speaking to vMEMES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Iran: jaw, jaw or war, war?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  5 Responses »
Jul 012008
 

Early in June the Israeli airforce carried out an exercise – sending 100 F15s and F16s out over the Eastern Mediterranean and Greece – supported by aerial tankers for in-flight refuelling. It was an impressive logistical feat and is being portrayed in the media as a dry run for bombing the Iranians’ principal nuclear facility at Bushehr. Interestingly it was not the Israelis or any of the other Middle Eastern states which ‘leaked’ the story but the Americans – with the spin that the Israelis were demonstrating to Tehran that they do have the capability of getting as far as Bushehr.

As the news leaked (June 20), the Israeli government stepped up the war of words with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (struggling to regain domestic credibility after more corruption allegations) saying “Iran will not be nuclear.” Even more ominously Deputy Prime Minster Shaul Mofaz told journalists a strike on Iran was now “unavoidable”.

Arch neocon John Bolton, one-time US ambassador to the United Nations, has gone on record as saying he believes Israeli will strike in between the presidential election in November and the inauguration of the new President. A strike before the election might influence it unduly; if Barack Obama were to be elected, the strike would need to take place before he took office and implented his ‘jaw, jaw before war, war’ policy.

Around the same time as the Israelis carried out their remarkable air exercise, Washington revealed that it had presented Tehran with a further batch of irrefutable evidence of large-scale shipments of explosives and other weaponry to be used against American and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it’s open news that Congress has approved $400M for covert action in Iran to destabilise the country, using mainly Iranian dissidents. However, it’s almost certainly true that US special forces in Iraq have already been operating under cover across the Iranian border.

One of the effects of this war talk is to escalate the price of oil just as there were tentative signs of a slight reduction – Iran is the world’s fourth biggest provider of oil. In the event of an Israeli attack, Tehran has said one of its first actions would be to close the Strait of Hormuz – through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes. Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff of the US Fifth Fleet, stationed in Bahrain, has stated that the Strait is international waters and the Navy will keep it open.

Practical Difficulties

Despite the Israeli airforce’s impressive performance in early June, there are still tremendous practical difficulties to be overcome by any strike force.

 

Firstly Israel (theoretically) would have to get the permission of either Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Jordan to cross that country’s airspace – or risk their planes being attacked way before they reached their targets. While it is unlikely any one of those countries alone could take out a sizeable Israeli force, they might inflict sufficient damage to cause the mission to abort. Given the anti-Israeli sentiments held by large numbers of their populations, none of those governments could risk giving permission for Israeli planes to cross their territory to carry out what would be technically an unprovoked attack. The most likely scenario is the Turkish, Saudi or Jordanian planes stay grounded but the fragile diplomatic links between Israel and those countries are seriously damaged.

Once the Israeli planes are over Iran, they will have to attack a number of scattered targets if they really want to inflict major damage on the Iranian nuclear effort. The dispersal of the task force would make them much more vulnerable to counter-attack than if they were attacking a single target – as they did with the 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor (to which the potential attack on Iran is being compared somewhat erroneously).

Then there is simply the fact that the facilities at Bushehr and some of the other nuclear facility sites are buried deep underground berneath tons of concrete. To get through, the Israelis would have to use the type of ‘bunker buster’ bombs the Americans used so effectively when destroying the mountain strongholds of the Taliban in late 2001. The problem is these bombs are so powerful they will shred any vestige of life caught in their explosion – remember how the Americans had to use DNA from small flaps of skin and flesh as the only way to identify which Taliban leaders they had killed? There are an estimated 300 Russian technical advisers in Bushehr – and Moscow can hardly be expected to take kindly to their annihilation.

Then there are the consequences of an Israeli assault.

If Iran reacted overtly, it has medium-range intercontinetal balistic missiles which could reach Israel and just about all the American bases in Turkey and the Middle East. The Americans allege (with some credible evidence) that the Iranians have stockpiles of chemical weapons that they could deliver with these icbms. However, the Americans have also made it clear that any use of chemical weapons against its forces would result in the use of at least battlefield nuclear weapons.

Iran would perhaps more likely play the ‘Muslim brotherhood’ card of taking the moral high ground of being the victim of an unprovoked assault and calling upon Muslims all over the world to join them in attacking Israel and the ‘Great Satan’ of America in whatever way possible. Since Muslims (like Christians) are theoretically a brotherhood (Sura 21:9) and have the duty to defend their brothers against oppression from unbelievers (Sura 2: 191, 193), we would be likely to see a substantial increase in the kind of attacks taking place almost daily in Iraq and Afghanistan and more occasionally in other parts of the world.

Plus, it’s worth noting, since a number of learned commentators compare an attack on Bushehr with Osirak, that the Israeli assault then was nothing more than a relatively minor set-back to the Iraqi nuclear effort and only increased Saddam Hussein’s determination to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

There are a number of factors that don’t fit the attack scenario. George W Bush, for one, almost certainly would prefer a solution to the Iranian issue that didn’t involve an outright war. Secondly, when Israel has achieved at least passable relations with Egypt and Jordan and is in on-again negotiatons for a comprehensive settlement with Syria, an attack on Iran would have to be condemned by these countries and Syria at least would be very vulnerable to being sucked into a war scenario. How ever much they might fear and despise Iran – Sunnis in the region view an Iranian-supported hegemony with real trepidation – they cannot continue to have any kind of positive relations with Jews when their Muslim brothers have been attacked. The thousands of radicalised mullahs in those countries would see to that.

So the question is:-

Are the Americans and Israelis creating a story to put pressure on Tehran…?

Or

Are the Americans and Israelis preparing their populations for military conflict with the Iranians…?

Or

Is the warmongering talk a sign of the pressure the Americans are under, with events threatening to slip from their control…?

Iranian Radicalism and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the Problem #1

Since the 1979 ‘Islamic Revolution’, Iran has provided the West with real difficulties in its espousal of spreading Shia Islam and its criticisms of Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians particularly and Western decadence and neo-imperialism generally. Hence, not altogether unsurprisingly Western support, covert and overt, for Iraq in its war eight-year war with Iran.

Iranian governments since 1979 have been distinguished primarily by just how radical the key players were – but current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to have outdone his competitors quite handsomely.

Whether he actually meant Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’ literally in his speech at the 2005 World without Zionism Conference is open to debate – there is no equivalent to ‘wipe off the map’ in the Persian language. There have been apologist explanations attempting to say Ahmadinejad was misunderstood and really meant the Jewish regime of the land currently called ‘Israel’ should be destroyed. Ahmadinejad himself has said he has nothing against Jews or Christians per se. However, he has never distanced himself from the ‘wipe off the map’ interpretation.

Add to that his description of the Holocaust as a ‘myth’ and the allegations of anti-Semitic programmes being broadcast unhindered on Iranian tv and you can understand why the Israelis view this man having access to nuclear weapons with sheer dread and/or determination to stop him.

It would seem that Ahmadinejad is driven primarily by a harmonic of the RED and BLUE vMEMES – or, as Don Beck (2003) might describe him, he is a ‘zealot’. He wants the world to live by the rules as he personally sees it. His take on things is the only way things can be – any differing view is simply wrong and needs to be eradicated.

Of course, in a country where one’s political influence is often marked by how radical your public statements are, Ahmadinejad is far from being the only one to allude to the destruction of Israel. For example, back in 2001 then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani postulated that, if Muslim states had nuclear weapons, they might use them against Israel. But Rafsanjani, for all his rhetoric, was a pragmatist, his ORANGE able to anticipate the swings and shifts in the very dangerous political arenas of Iran. He made extreme statements at times for domestic consumption; yet at the same time showed a pragmatic willingness to do at least a limited amount of business with the West.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, seems oblivious to many of the realities of international relations. There appears to be something Psychoticist in his impulsive, compulsive and remorseless behaviour. Indeed, it might even be at times he moves beyond being merely Psychoticist into actually being psychotic; certainly he shows signs of being both delusional and paranoid.

Was his idea that he and George W Bush could actually face off in a grand debate at the United Nations General Assembly merely a stunt – or was he actually deluded enough to think he could make it happen?

Certainly not an easy man to countenance doing business with!

American Foreign Policy and George W Bush – Root Problem #2

Since the inception of the state of Israel in 1948 the United States, under the influence of the powerful ‘Jewish lobby’, has dealt consistently unfairly with the Middle East.

 

Certainly the modern state of Israel has needed overt American support for much of its existence, surrounded as it is by neighbours of varying degrees of hostility.

 

That support has all too often been given blindly. The Israelis have been allowed to treat the Palestinians in ways which at times were not altogether dissimilar from some of the treatment meted out to European Jews in the 1930s and early 1940s. That inevitably offends the PURPLE/BLUE harmonic running throughout much of the Arab world, – PURPLE loyalty to the Arab peoples and fellow Muslims and BLUE strictures of Islam demanding that those fellow Muslims be rescued from oppression by the unbelievers.

 

The United States has tended to favour one or two power brokers among the Middle East states – eg: pre-revolution Iran, pre-Kuwait invasion Iraq, Saudi Arabia – to maintain its regional interests (primarily oil and keeping them from uniting too strongly against Israel.)

 

That lack of fairness and clear self-interest has played straight into the hands of the Islamic extremists and fed an increasing hatred of all things Western and decadent. Moreover, the fact that the United States has been so transparent in its uneven dealings and ruthless self-interest has made it hard for moderate Muslims to get a hearing.

 

If Iranian extremism has reached its apogee in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then American self-interest and short-sightedness has reached its equivalent in George W Bush and in particular the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

 

Just exactly what the reasoning of Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumpsfelt, Paul Wolfowitz and their clique (sometimes including Tony Blair) was – we’ll have to wait for the memoirs and declassified documents to find out – but it certainly wasn’t the 2nd Tier thinking some apologists have described it as. (Leave Aghanistan to fester in post-Taliban squalor while invading Iraq on a false pretext without a plan for post-war government – and 5 years later we’re not winning ongoing wars in either Afghanistan or Iraq!)

 

In fact, it’s probably the best example of groupthink since Irving Janis (1972) popularised the concept from studying how the Kennedy White House got itself into the Bay of Pigs fiasco back in 1961!

 

Bush, in his thinking, is not entirely unlike Ahmadinejad – again it seems a RED/BLUE (I’m right – I know how it should be!) mode of thinking dominates. Only Bush lacks Ahmadinejad’s eloquence!

 

His unthinking crusade against a War on Terror that is a much a war-on-anything-that-opposes-his-version-of-America’s-interests and can take on any vendetta his RED fancies has driven outraged and disaffected young Muslims into the arms of al-Qaeda and their like right around the world – from the streets of Leeds to the slums of Gaza. They could hardly have asked for a better recruiting sergeant than George W!!

 

The mess we’re in…

The irony is that technically Iran currently seems to be working within the remit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty – as the Russians are quick to point out. (Notably Israel is not a signatory!) Under that treaty Iran has the right to develop nuclear capability for its energy needs.

 

The problem comes from the fact that in 2003 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) exposed an 18-year secret uranium-enrichment programme in Iran – hardly in keeping with the development of nuclear energy for purely peaceful purposes! These activities were ostensibly terminated – but Iran continued to work on uranium enrichment for domestic energy purposes and succeeded in achieving nuclear function status in 2006.

 

Despite the Americans’ own 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to the contrary, since 2003 Iran has never even come close to satisfying the international community as a whole that it does not intend to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Limited and inconsistent cooperation with the IAEA have only served to heighten suspicion and the United Nations has demanded Iran ceases uranium enrichment. Even the Russians and the Chinese have agreed to limited sanctions against the Iranians.

 

Various offers have been put to the Iranians over the past few years – initially to persuade them to give up attempts to enrich uranium. More recently IAEA supremo Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested the Iranians be allowed to enrich uranium but under strict IAEA supervision to ensure no fissile materials are diverted for military purposes. The Americans have proposed effectively normalising relations with Iran – effectively broken off in 1979 – lifting trade embargoes and unfreezing frozen financial assets if the Iranians will cooperate.

 

So far the Iranians will agree only to a temporary 2-year suspension of uranium enrichment.

 

While the 2007 NIE stated that the Iranians seemed far less interested in developing nuclear weapons capability, it did acknowledge it was possible (though unlikely) they could have an atomic bomb by the end of 2009.

 

It is this nightmare possibility that is driving Israel. For Israelis, this is BEIGE survival.

 

And Israel’s concerns impact upon the United States. Even Europe, tentatively playing the international elder statesman, is involved. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has warned that war is possible if Iran does develop nuclear weapons capability: “We will not accept that such a bomb is made. We must prepare ourselves for the worst.”

 

Through the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the Twin Towers, Bali, Madrid, London and and a host of other terrorist incidents, al-Qaeda has succeeded in making Islamic extremism one of the key issues of the early 21st Century. The thought of a state led by Islamic militants, already associated strongly with anti-Western activities and anti-Israeli rhetoric, having access to nuclear weapons is something to concern most Westerners, let alone most Israelis!

 

So what to do?

For some time I have thought that, if the Americans don’t take care of Iran, Israel will.

 

So here we are with the open threat of an Israeli strike that may buy some time. 2012 might be the timeline for an Iranian bomb, rather than 2009. But the cost of that time at best would be an escalation of Islamic jihad around the world and at worst the eruption of full-scale war in the Middle East, with the possible use of chemical and battlefield nuclear weapons.

 

But the Israelis cannot afford to sit back and do nothing. (Visit ‘The Unthinkable Consequences of an Iran-Israel Nuclear Exchange’ for a possible scenario of what might just happen if Iran did get the bomb…)

 

And that puts incredible pressure on the international community – but especially the Americans.

 

George W does appear to have escaped groupthink to some extent, as wiser voices have prevailed against direct military action in the short term – after all, the US is already failing to win 2 wars without going into a third! (Having said, that perhaps the US is already fighting Iran via its proxy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?…and some might argue the way to win those wars is to take on Iran directly?)

 

However, the public announcement of $400M to interfere in the affairs of another sovereign state smacks of all the familiar arrogance of the Rumsfelt-Wolfowitz era.

 

Quite how George W intends using that money is a mystery. Certainly there are Iranian dissidents, both in and out of the country, who will eagerly take some of that money to make mischief for the regime. But the Iranians are a proud people – direct descendants of the Persians who dominated the Middle East in ancient times. A combination of PURPLE/BLUE loyalty to the nation and BLUE righteousness make it unlikely the vast majority of Iranians would support any kind of insurrection if it was thought to be in any way sponsored via the Great Satan.

 

One thing that is most clearly needed is a strategy that clearly separates Islam from terrorism – that way moderate Muslims can have their voice and any actions taken against Iran and al-Qaeda are against terrorists, not Muslims. The work of people like Dr Akbar Ahmed, former High Commissioner of Pakistan to the UK who spoke at Don Beck’s ‘SDi Confab’ this year, is critical for both Muslims and non-Muslims wanting to understand how Islam doesn’t have to be in outright confrontation with the forces of globalisation. Instead, as Ahmed points out, Islam can interact positively – and, in so many places, already is – with non-Muslim communities. Ahmed’s site is definitely recommended for those wishing to explore this issue.

 

Another thing essential is the accordance of respect to Iran. It wants to be a regional superpower. It can be that without directly threatening Israel. (In fact, it would most likely be the Syrians who would have their noses put out of joint by the Americans and the Europeans courting Iran as a partner in the region.)

 

For all his stage charisma and popular support, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not an absolute tyrant. He does have the support of many leading mullahs, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i. However, if Iran as a country and Islam as a religion, were shown respect by the West and seen as partners rather than opponents) in the emerging global structure, that would take away the reasons for supporting a zealot like Ahmadinejad and would give political pragamatists like Rafsanjani more chance of exerting influence.

 

Then, as the so-called ‘oil era’ starts to approach end-game, there is every reason for the West and Iran to collaborate on managing the remaining oil and meanwhile working on new energy sources – including nuclear. It is to the economic benefit of both Iran and the United States to reach a level of normality in trade relations. One of the unfortunate by-products of the trade embargoes on Iran is that they helped freeze Iranian Islam in a particularly vicious and extremist mode. While many Islamic states have problems with extremists, many are also developing into something that might be thought of as a hybrid between traditional culture and Western consumerism – and that is, in part at least, due to regular exposure to ideas beyond traditional culture.

 

Of course, in all this, the United States has to become fair in its treatment of Israel and the Arabs. For sure, Israel will need American guarantees – but that doesn’t mean Bush’s successor shouldn’t take a very dim view of what Israel’s doing in Gaza. And, if human rights continue to be violated by the Israeli military, as they so often are, can’t the United States threaten sanctions in areas that don’t undermine Israeli security? As for the West Bank, exactly as Don Beck and Elza Maalouf have postulated: with help the West Bank can be grown into a nation-state partner for Israel. Where then would that leave the hapless extremists of Hamas in impoverished Gaza?

 

And then the unthinkable…if Israel and Syria can edge closer to a deal, it surely can’t be beyond the bounds of possibility that one day Israel and Iran could do a deal?

 

So, extremists can be undermined and isolated; and diversity understood, valued and connected.

 

But time is important here. The world can’t afford a nuclear Iran led by Ahmadinejad – and the Israelis certainly can’t!

 

The events of June have shown we may just be on a timetable to disaster. There is still time for jaw, jaw but the diplomats and the trade negotiators and the inspectors must move quickly. If not, we may just find ourselves in the middle of a war, war!

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 Dr 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 rerely 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). 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.