Why we must win in Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama a 2nd Tier thinker?

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

And now he’s stumbled. Badly.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The risk of dissipating goodwill

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Speaking to vMEMES

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Israeli Stupidity in Gaza!

 international conflict, schemas & memes, terrorism  4 Responses »
Jan 102009
 

Want to seem like brutal stormtroopers butchering children? Want to undermine a relative moderate (Mahmoud Abbas) and turn his people against him? Want to have Arab governments with no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas forced into denouncing you by the protesting hordes flooding on to their streets? Want to swell the ranks of al-Qaeda with bitter young men and women dedicated to killing Jews and Americans? Want to have massive anti-Israeli demonstrations in the capitals of all the countries you used to call your friends?

 

 

OK, let’s really go for it: want to seem like the SS in the Warsaw ghetto?

 

Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni could not have got it more wrong. Of course, Livni is right: Hamas need to be destroyed (“toppled” is the word she reportedly used). As do all terrorist organisations locked into rigid RED-BLUE thinking – see the feature, ‘Killing the Terrorists’ in the Global section. But this brutal onslaught on the Gaza Strip, one of the poorest and most populous places on the planet, is not the way to do it.

 

The Israeli military are doing their best to keep foreign journalists out of Gaza; but, in these days of the internet and video uploads from mobile phones, it’s impossible to impose a complete news blackout. We certainly know it’s bad, with an estimated 800 Gazans dead already and thousands more injured and maimed. Just how bad we might never really know if the Israelis manage to clean up a lot of the mess before the news crews arrive on mass. But it’s bad.

 

Ostensibly it’s Jews having a field day killing Arabs. That’s how it comes across on thousands of TV channels and internet news sites right around the world. Just imagine what the radical imams are ranting in the mosques!

 

So Israel alienates its friends and empowers its enemies. If Osama Bin Laden is still alive, he must be laughing and slapping his knees with delight!

 

Of course, we can safely assume the Israeli military are not deliberately targeting innocent civilians – so the Warsaw ghetto analogy is mischievous on my part – but the impression is one of complete, callous indifference on the part of the Israeli military to the loss of innocent lives and the suffering. It’s on a par with the Americans counting American and British dead in Iraq but no attempt to count Iraqi dead. The message taken by millions around the world is that Iraqi and Palestinian lives are not as important as American and Israeli lives.

 

And, for many, that has a racist sub-text: if Arab lives aren’t as important as American and Israeli lives,  that must be because they are considered inferior.

 

Add to all this the fact that most Palestinians and Iraqis are Muslim and it’s all too easy to portray the Israelis and the Americans as anti-Muslim. So, for hundreds of thousands of Muslims all over the world, the Gaza video footage and the ranting anti-Zionist rhetoric that usually goes with it becomes a call to arms to rescue or avenge their Muslim brothers from the oppression of the Great Satans, America and Israel.

 

Of course, Hamas show an equal lack of concern for the lives of the Gazans they are supposed to govern. In their RED-BLUE zealotry, they refuse to sign up to the Franco-Egyptian ceasefire plan because it would mean the end of their arms supply route through Egypt. So being able to resume their war against Israel is more important to them than the deaths and suffering of their own people.

 

But Hamas have got better PR than the Israeli military. They’re the plucky little guys with peashooters taking on jets and tanks in the name of Allah. And, when they’re killed, why, they’re brave warriors for Allah, guaranteed a place in heaven.

 

And the ordinary Gazans who survive through this…will they spit on the name of Hamas? Unlikely because the memes which are replicating fastest are that it’s the evil Jews, with their American sponsors, who are responsible for the carnage. And Hamas were heroes who fought for Allah and the Palestinians.

 

Why now?

The Israeli military have an enviable record for surgical missile strikes taking out Hamas officers and officials with a relative minimum of civilian casualties.

 

With the aid of American spy satellites, couldn’t the Israelis simply step up the surgical strikes? Every time a Hamas rocket takes off for southern Israel, it leaves a heat trail a spy satellite in anything like correct position should be able to pick up. It’s doubtful the Israelis could take out all the Hamas rocket sites this way but they could certainly inflict serious damage on Hamas’ capacity.

 

As to the supply tunnels from Egypt, couldn’t the Americans and the Israelis have incentivised the Egyptians to close them down? (I’m sure Hosni Mubarak would far rather have done that than have the streets of Cairo filled with outraged demonstrators!)

 

Or what about covertly beefing up Fatah to take Gaza back from Hamas? (Not very democratic – since Hamas were actually elected into power – and Fatah would have to be resourced to beat Hamas quickly and decisively to avoid a neo-civil war.)

 

If the Israelis really felt there was no alternative to going into Gaza, wouldn’t it have been better to go in without all the ‘shock & awe’ and hunt Hamas down in the streets and apartment blocks. For sure, the Israeli casualties would be much, much higher but the Palestinian dead would be a lot less and perhaps there wouldn’t be yet another generation of Palestinians growing up determined to kill Jews. How many more Israelis, Americans and probably Europeans too will die in the future at the hands of Palestinian terrorists because the Israelis blasted into Gaza the way they did? PURPLE will tell the tale again and again of how the Jews slaughtered innocent Gazans until it is yet another key tragedy in Palestinian folklore and yet another reason why the Arab can never trust the Jew.

 

Of course, Tivni is facing an election and her Kadima party is under pressure (in no small part because of Olmert’s incompetent handling of the 2006 Lebanon war and the corruption scandals he is implicated in). So truckloads of dead and wounded soldiers arriving home would not be conducive to a strong election campaign.

 

But something had to be done about Hamas resuming large-scale rocket attacks and a ‘shock & awe’ spectacle showing how strong a leader she is should have made good TV. Only Tivni’s myopic, power-seeking RED clearly hadn’t thought things through. That and/or she really doesn’t care – about Palestinian loss of life or about how she and her country are perceived in the outside world. Since rumours are starting to circulate that the Israeli military were to some extent unprepared for the kind of assault they’ve made on Gaza, it may indeed be that Olmert and Tivni did bounce them into it.

 

800-and-counting, plus all the lives that will be lost in the future for Palestinian/Muslim vengeance, with destabilisation of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and unrest in Egypt and Jordan, is a hell of a price to pay for looking good in an election campaign!

Bye, bye, Mugabe?!

 Africa, community, human rights, international conflict, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics  7 Responses »
Dec 132008
 

Surely the days of Robert Mugabe’s regime in Harare are numbered…? In the last week alone British prime minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, and Condoleeza Rice, the outgoing US Secretary of State, have all called for Mugabe to resign. Two leading Anglican clerics, Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, and South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have called for African nations to come together to use military force if Mugabe refuses to go. Additionally Tutu has stated that Mugabe has committed “gross violations” against Zimbabwe’s people and ruined “a wonderful country” while Sentamu wants Mugabe put on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. More worryingly perhaps for Mugabe and his cronies is the call by Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga for African governments to oust Mugabe.

 

There is immense pressure on Zimbabwe’s neighbours to do something. With Zimbabwe’s inflation at 11,000,000% and ongoing violence against members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and other non-Mugabe supporters, there has been a growing trickle of economic and political refugees seeping through the porous borders –  perceived as an economic burden by many of the indigenous peoples. (In South Africa there have been reports of vigilante groups of white farmers rounding them up and sending them back!) Now, of course, some of those refugees will be cholera carriers with the potential to spread the disease throughout southern Africa and beyond. (It is estimated that cholera will have infected a minimum 60,000 Zimbabweans by Christmas.)

 

The PURPLE vMEME, acting as a collective, rejects those-who-are-not-of-our-tribe and will become hostile when economic resources are at stake and/or the outsiders introduce a deadly disease. This can create a tremendous upward pressure on  the leadership to take action to prevent the outsiders coming in – particularly when the thinking of the leaders may not be that much more complex than that found in the mass of the population. Thus, the leaders of Zimbabwe’s neighbours are not pressured for action by GREEN’s concerns for human rights – as so very much in the West – but by much more fundamental concerns as basic resources

 

If Odinga were to get a couple of other neighbouring countries to join the Kenyans and South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, long a Mugabe sympathiser, could be persuaded at least not to interfere, then a military intervention could be a possibility.

 

How much resistance ZANU-PF and Zimbabwe’s military might put up to such an invasion is difficult to predict.  According to Gordon Brown, the Zimbabwean state and its apparatus have effectively ceased to function. However, reports that the true number of people hospitalised by malnutrition and/or cholera is being covered up would indicate some sort of state machinery still exists.

 

The following e-mail from Zimbabwean John Winter – received via Alan Tonkin of the Global Values Network – most definitely portrays a functioning state machine, if a malignant and brutal one….

 

I reckon that these are the last days of TKM and ZPF. The darkest hour is always before dawn.

 

We are all terrified at what they are going to destroy next…. I mean, they are actually ploughing down brick and mortar houses and one family with twin boys of 10 had no chance of salvaging anything when 100 riot police came in with AK47′s and bulldozers and demolished their beautiful house – 5 bedrooms and pine ceilings – because it was “too close to the airport”. So we are feeling extremely insecure right now.

 

You know,  I am aware that this does not help you sleep at night – but if you do not know, how can you help? Even if you put us in your own mental ring of light and send your guardian angels to be with us – that is a help – but I feel so cut off from you all, knowing I cannot tell you what’s going on here simply because you will feel uncomfortable. There are no ways we can leave here so that is not an option.

 

I ask that you all pray for us in the way that you know how, and let me know that you are thinking of us and sending out positive vibes…that’s all. You can’t just be in denial and pretend/believe it’s not going on.

 

To be frank with you, it’s genocide in the making and if you do not believe me, read the Genocide Report by Amnesty International which says we are – IN  level 7 – (level 8 is after it’s happened and everyone is in denial).

 

If you don’t want me to tell you these things – how bad it is – then it means you have not dealt with your own fear, but it does not help me to think you are turning your back on our situation. We need you, please, to get  the news OUT that we are all in a fearfully dangerous situation here. Too many people turn their backs and say – oh well, that’s what happens in Africa

 

This Government has GONE MAD and you need to help us publicise our plight – or how can we be rescued? It’s a reality! The petrol queues are a reality, the pall of smoke all around our city is a reality, the thousands of homeless people sleeping outside in 0 Celsius with no food, water, shelter and bedding are a reality. Today a family approached me, brother of the gardener’s wife with two small children. Their home was trashed and they will have to sleep outside. We already support 8 adult people and a child on this property, and electricity is going up next month by 250% as is water.

 

How can I take on another family of 4 – and yet how can I turn them away to sleep out in the open?

 

I am not asking you for money or a ticket out of here – I am asking you to FACE the fact that we are in deep and terrible danger and want you please to pass on our news and pictures. So PLEASE don’t just press the delete button! Help best in the way that you know how.

 

Do face the reality of what is going on here and help us SEND OUT THE WORD. The more people who know about it, the more chance we have of the United Nations coming to our aid. Please don’t ignore or deny what’s happening. Some would like to be protected from the truth BUT then, if we are eliminated, how would you feel? “If only we knew how bad it really was, we could have helped in some way.”

 

(I know we chose to stay here and that some feel we deserve what’s coming to us.)

 

For now, we ourselves have food, shelter, a little fuel and a bit of money for the next meal – but what is going to happen next? Will they start on our houses? All property is going to belong to the State now. I want to send out my Title Deeds to one of you because if they get a hold of those, I can’t fight for my rights.

 

Censorship! – we no longer have short wave radio (which told us everything that was happening) because the Government jammed it out of existence – we don’t have any reporters, and no one is allowed to photograph. If we had reporters here, they would have an absolute field day. Even the pro-Government Herald has written that people are shocked, stunned, bewildered and blown mindless by the wanton destruction of many folks homes, which are supposed to be ‘illegal’ but for which a huge percentage actually do have licenses.

 

Please! – do have some compassion and HELP by sending out the articles and personal reports so that something can/may be done.

 

“I am one. I cannot do everything, —but I can do something.. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do.” – Edward Everett Hale

 

Is Mugabe mad, as Winter implies? I doubt it. Some might argue he must have been deluded, thinking he could sustain Zimbabwe’s agriculture-based economy while slicing up white-owned large farms into black-owned smallholdings. Others might argue he is simply in denial as to how bad things really are. Yet others will postulate that Mugabe has a paranoid personality disorder, the way he so readily accuses others of attempting to undermine him personally and his country. (The latest manifestation of this is the Herald’s declaration that the cholera outbreak was a “serious biological chemical war … a genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British”.)

 

Yet in the very week there was finally open talk of a military intervention, just yesterday Mugabe at last did a deal with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai on the structure of the joint power-sharing government they first agreed to back in September. After keeping Tsvangirai dangling for 3 months. And the deal was brokered by Mbeki. Which means he has a credibility investment in it and will want it to work – or, at least, have time for it to work. Which means Mbeki will not allow Odinga or whoever to invade Zimbabwe.

 

As for the leaders in the West, preoccupied with the banking crises and the global turndown and with Britain and the United States still caught in the Iraq and Afghanistan traps, they will be relieved to allow Mugabe and Tsvangarai their chance to work together, thus putting Zimbabwe back on the ‘back burner’, if only for a while.

 

Mugabe psychotic? More likely he’s extremely Psychoticist – totally ruthless, completely self-centred, effectively psychopathic. And the way he’s manipulated Mbeki and Tsvangarai shows his RED vMEME is strong and robust. The only thing, of course, is that someone with a highly Psychoticist temperament and led by the RED vMEME will not think much about either the future or anyone else’s needs. Mugabe’s sole intent is to sustain his power. He has little concern about Zimbabwe’s multiple crises – other than how they affect his position personally – and that means he has even less idea how to sort out the mess. And, if Tsvangarai should actually ever get to sit in Mugabe’s cabinet, then he will make the perfect whipping boy – a scapegoat – as Zimbabwe plunges further into chaos.

 

Because that lock of Psychoticist temperament and RED-led motivation means Mugabe will only change if in danger from a power greater than his. United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and MEP Glenys Kinnock are just two public figures who recently, from personal experience, have talked about how incredibly difficult it is to reason with Mugabe.

 

Sentamu, Tutu and Odinga are right. For Zimbabwe’s sake, Mugabe must go. But he has protected himself again…for a while.

 

So John Winter’s darkest hour can only get darker. And white Winter and the black brother of his gardener’s wife share the same paradigm of terror.

 

Winter’s original e-mail was sent in mid-November. As Christmas approaches, we can only hope Winter and the black brother of his gardener’s wife are still alive, still have a roof over their heads and some food to put into theirs and their families’ bellies.

Should the Democrats have chosen Hilary?

 American Foreign Policy, government, schemas & memes, society, Spiral Dynamics  5 Responses »
Sep 142008
 

To an outsider looking in, it seems astonishing that on 4 November 2008 John McCain might actually be voted the next president of the United States of America. According to the latest Gallup Poll, Barack Obama has a slender lead of 2 points (47:45) but running mate Sarah Palin is said to be stealing large numbers of female voters over to McCain’s side.

How, I ask in wonderment, is this possible? This election terminates one of the most woefully-inadequate American presidencies in modern History.

 

Think about just how incompetent and/or deluded George W Bush has been. One vital military victory (Afghanistan) derailed by 5 years of not winning another, totally-unnecessary war (Iraq), with world-wide sympathy for 9/11 and tolerance of the Afghan invasion turned to detestation of the United States as the world’s bully boy. (A perception only just begiining to change as Russia is now up for the title!) Incompetence reflected in Bush’s simply not knowing what to do as the federal government’s inaction cost lives in New Orleans 3years ago – reflected in the federal government’s missupervision of the sub-prime lending market becoming a catalyst for a partial meltdown of America’s – and thus the global – economy.

 

How, this outsider asks, can the average American want anything to do with the Republicans after this debacle of a presidency?

 

The answer might lie, in part at least, with the re-election of Bush in 2004. Or, as the Daily Mirror headline (04/11/04) put it: ‘How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?’

 

The Democrats then, as today, had an apparently-decent, mildly-liberal man (John Kerry) as their candidate. And he was slaughtered at the polls. And he had the advantage of being white!

 

In a country where government-sanctioned racism has only been dead for a little over 40 years and where there are still quite healthy pockets of intense racism, being the first black presidential candidate is certainly ground-breaking and attention-grabbing – but, whether it’s a vote-winning quality is a moot point. (I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been an assassination attempt yet!)

 

The race issue aside, if Obama is more or less cut from the same cloth as Kerry, what makes the Democrats think this time it will be different? Obama’s certainly got much more charisma than Kerry ever had; but will that alone be enough?

 

PURPLE/RED/BLUE or BLUE/ORANGE/GREEN?

Why in November 2004 did so many Americans vote for George W, rather than Kerry?

 

Things domestically/economically were reasonably OK; but Iraq was already becoming  a major thorn in Bush’s side Although the mess was still a way off the deepest depths it would reach, it was already clear things were going badly wrong. No ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ – the pretext for the invasion – had been found, the first major prisoner abuse scandal (Abu Grhaib) was in full swing and the insurgency was gathering pace.

 

I’m going to postulate that a very large proportion of the American electorate is governed by the PURPLE, RED and/or BLUE vMEMES. Memes such as loyalty and patriotism, pride in oneself and one’s country and sacrificing your own interests to do what’s right easily turn into people’s schemas when those vMEMES are in charge. Bush, whose head certainly seems very dominated by RED and BLUE, talked about “standing fast” and “winning through”; Kerry, apparently led by the GREEN vMEME, talked about “bringing the troops home”.

 

Those Americans whose thinking was dominated by PURPLE, RED and/or BLUE didn’t want to be told that their president was a lying self-server who had got it wrong and they would lose the war. They wanted to be told it would be okay if they remained steadfast, trusting in God and their president.

 

Obama’s taunt that a McCain presidency “equals 4 more years of Bush” may ring true as exactly what they want to those PURPLE, RED and BLUE thinkers. A self-fulfilling prophecy?

 

Of course, there are many Americans whose thinking is dominated by higher vMEMES. John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton could never have made the White House otherwise. However, their ORANGE ambition was powerful enough for them to put on a ‘common touch’ masquerade sufficient to resonate with the lower vMEMES and catch a substantial part of that vote. (Conflict Management theorists Robert Blake & Jane Mouton (1964) called this style of matching others to lure them: ‘Opportunism – Exploit & Manipulate’.) In contrast a number of commentators have noted how GREEN and intellectual Obama’s thinking is. That will go down well with GREEN+ thinkers – but will it appeal to PURPLE, RED or BLUE? There’s certainly some BLUE and ORANGE in Obama’s proclamations; but communicating large-scale with PURPLE and RED is more difficult for him.

 

GREEN was clearly a strong influence in the higher echelons of the Democratic Party, as the nominees for presidential candidate were whittled down to a woman and a black man. How more politically correct could that be?

 

Hilary Clinton, I suspect, was badly advised. She fought a hard-nosed and sometimes overly-dirty campaign, with the result that the Democrats chose the nice black guy over the white bitch. The Democrat faithful may well come to rue that choice – especially now McCain’s ORANGE has stretched up to borrow a touch of GREEN and call in a woman to bid for being the United States’ first female Vice President! So McCain may well be able to steal some of the wavering GREEN thinkers who might otherwise have been more likely to vote Democrat.

 

Hilary, like her husband, appears more dominated by ORANGE than GREEN. Not least in New York she has shown she can masquerade and stretch down to mix it with the lower vMEMES.

 

4 years on those voters, whose PURPLE, RED and/or BLUE led them to vote for Bush, can take satisfaction that their steadfastness is being rewarded. They made the right choice. Iraq is slowly going the United States’ way. However, America still needs to still be vigilant. As exiting commander General David H Petraeus has said, the gains made “are not irreversible”. And, then, of course, there is still Afghanistan to be put right. So PURPLE, RED and BLUE can see the need for a war-hardened leader still – and, hey, isn’t McCain actually a war vet?!

 

The swelling financial crisis is a different matter. But, while Obama can point to the Bush regime’s economic mismanagement, neither side has any real answers which will make a significant short-term difference. In any case, economics at a level beyond the immediate household budget is largely too complex for PURPLE and RED thinking – so arguments about it are likely to be ignored.

 

My hunch is that Hilary could have generated enough of the common touch masquerade to have got through to at least some of the PURPLE, RED and BLUE thinking. Obama, though enormously popular with certain societal groups, has yet to show he can do that on any kind of significant scale. There has to be doubt whether he can beat McCain without it.

The Sons of Iraq – a step towards Stratified Democracy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraq is a patchwork of PURPLE and RED

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Avoiding tribal warfare in Iraq

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Tribal War in South Ossetia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RED exploiting PURPLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vladimir Putin, good Kremlin despot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what to do…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tariq Ali gets Benazir Bhutto wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Message for Tony Blair?

 American Foreign Policy, community, human rights, international conflict, society, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jul 022007
 

Well, Gordon Brown certainly had an ‘interesting’ introduction to his new life as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 3 British troops killed in Iraq on Thursday 28 June (the day after his assumption of power), 2 car bomb plots somewhat miraculously foiled in London in the early hours of Friday 29th and the dramatic Cherokee Jeep bomb attack on Glasgow Airport Saturday afternoon (30th).

British troops are being killed or injured in Iraq now on a fairly regular basis; so there may or may not be any significance in the timing of the Basra roadside bombing. But there is much speculation about the supposedly-linked London and Glasgow attacks and what their meaning might be. A number of commentators are of the view that the car bombs are some kind of message from al-Qaeda to Gordon Brown.

Quite what that ‘mesage’ might be is harder to fathom – especially since there has yet to be any kind of statement from a recognised agent of the terrorist network. Nor has there been any indication so far that the police have relevant information on either motive or instigating source from the suspects they are interrogating.

Certainly Brown has signalled that ‘change’ is going to be his motif in a wide range of policies. And, while he is on record as openly supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he has never appeared the hawkish warmonger that Tony Blair has at times. He is unsullied by all the shenanigans – ‘dodgy dossiers’, 45-minutes-to-impact declarations, etc – that Blair used in building up his justifcations for going to war. He is not identified with the failed Iraq policy in the way Blair is; and he is clearly much more cautious about the wisdom of allying Britain to American causes.

So perhaps it would be easier politically for Brown to withdraw Britain from the Iraq debacle. And, perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, the London and Glasgow attacks are al-Qaeda’s way of putting pressure on Brown to do just that.

However, while we must wait patiently either for al-Qaeda to make an announcement or the police and security services to tell us who planned the attacks and why, I’d like to host an alternative possibility…

The message wasn’t so much for Gordon Brown; it was for Tony Blair.

Tony Blair: MIddle East Envoy
In the last weeks of Blair’s premiership, George W Bush lobbied hard for Blair to take on a new position as the envoy of the ‘Quartet’, the loose confluence of ’big influencers’ (the USA, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) hoping to mediate an eventual 2-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict scenario. With Israel and Fatah president Mahmoud Abbas approving of the choice of Blair, Bush was able to overcome Russian resistance to get Blair the job.

However, reaction in the Middle East to Blair’s appointment was extremely mixed. A representative of Hamas, who have taken Gaza off Abbas and Fatah by force, said, “It was not helpful in solving the conflict in the Middle East” -  arguing that Blair’s position mirrored that of Israel and the United States. It is conceivable that Abbas’ support for Blair’s appointment might have more to do with getting Western aid for his struggle with Hamas than a real appreciation of what Blair might be able to contribute to the the Middle East peace process (such as it is).

The biggest problem for Blair is that he is ‘damaged goods’ – the Americans’ stooge who sold his country into war and the Middle East into further devastating turmoil for the privilege of praying with George Bush. (Probably a ridiculous and untrue caricature (in part, at least); but that is how many see him.)

Theoretically Blair’s role is to be limited – initially – to Palestinian governance, economics and security. However, on past form, his ORANGE will soon drive him to go beyond that brief and try to establish himself as a pivotal player in the region.

The irony is that Blair *is* a skilled negotiator and has some most notable successes to his credit. Only at his final Prime Minister’s Questions was Ian Paisley paying tribute to Blair’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process. He persuaded Bill Clinton that NATO had to intervene in the Yogoslav wars of the 1990s; and one can but marvel at Blair’s persuading almost every Muslim government in the world to sanction the American invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

For a while I really did wonder if Blair was capable of 2nd Tier thinking. It was quite astonishing the way he went meta to – beyond – his own neo-Roman Catholicism to study the Qur’an in such detail that he could use Islamic precepts to justify the American invasion to Muslim leaders.

It was something few world leaders could have – or would have – done. Nelson Mandela is the only one who springs readily to mind. Certainly Bush wouldn’t even have tried. But Blair was phenomenally successful!

Yet, less than 2 years later – possibly substantially less if some reports are to be believed! – Blair shackled himself to Bush, locked into the Iraq venture. It seems a RED/orange vMEME harmonic – short-sighted but ambitious – possibly with a sense of BLUE righteousness playing in the mix led Blair into the most incredibly bad judgement.

Over half a million lives later, countless injured and hundreds of thousands of refugees, Bush asks the Middle East to accept Blair as his new envoy. Something like the Devil dispatching his right-hand demon…?

Last week on Radio 4′s Today Jeremy Bowen, the veteran BBC correspondent, while believing Blair is more likely to fail than succeed, put forward the view that, if Blair could offer the Palestinians an economically-viable and truly-independent Palestinian state, they would be unlikely to hold Iraq too much against him. However, Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Institute of International Affairs doubted Blair would be able to make that kind of offer : “It’s a most unfortunate idea. It implies Tony Blair still has no notion of the repercussions of British intervention in the Middle East. It will do Mahmoud Abbas no good and could harm him. Tony Blair will be associated with an approach that wants a Palestinian state that is no more than useful to the Israelis and ends up enabling and sustaining the occupation.”

What Bowen, for all his experience, seems to miss is the concept of Muslim brotherhood. Which makes Iraq a very hard thing to forgive indeed.

Brotherhoods – Muslim and Christian
Many Muslims see themselves as part of a worldwide brotherhood – drawing inspiration from such verses as:-
“Verily, this brotherhood of yours is but a single brotherhood.” (Sura 21:19); and
“The believers are but a single brotherhood.” (Sura 49:10).

Such a brotherhood transcends citizenship of any one nation. It’s driven by a harmonic of purple/BLUE – so that such Muslims do ‘the right thing’ for those to whom they belong, regardless of the cost to themselves or non-believers. The extent of this commitment is perhaps best summed up by this extract from the Sahih Bukhari:-
“A Muslim is a brother of another Muslim, so he should not oppress him, nor should he hand him over to an oppressor. Whoever fulfilled the needs of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs; whoever brought his (Muslim) brother out of a discomfort, Allah will bring him out of the discomforts of the Day of Resurrection, and whoever screened a Muslim, Allah will screen him on the Day of Resurrection.” (Volume 3/Book 43/Number 622)

And the Qur’an allows that violence can be used against oppressors of Muslims – eg:-
“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

From these teachings, we can understand why young men from Blackburn and Leeds go off to Aghanistan to shoot their fellow Britons or become suicide bombers in Iraq…or even Glasgow. Their Muslim brothers come before their country; they are simply doing their religious duty.

Of course, Christianity also embodies the idea of brotherhood – eg: 1 Peter 2:17 – and the notion that obeying God comes before obeying men – eg: Galatians 1:10. And, while the New Testament generally advocates non-violence, more than a few *Christians* down the centuries – armed also with examples from the Old Testament such as the God-ordered genocide of the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 20:17) – have disobeyed their earthly rulers to commit violence in the name of Jesus. The Muslim suicide bomber is not that far from the fundamentalist Christian shooting medical staff involved in carrying out abortions. Their BLUE vMEME perceives itself to be serving God.

Thankfully, most Christians and most Muslims see more in their sacred texts that lead them to disavow violence in most circumstances.

Nonetheless, the very notion of brotherhood being above nationhood, strikes deep chords in believers. In a Mori poll after the 2005 London bombs, 53% of Muslims questioned thought that “the war in Iraq is the main reason London was bombed”. In a Pew poll a year later 35% of Muslims under 30 questioned believed suicide bombings to defend Islam were justified and 13% termed the 7/7 bombers ‘martyrs’.

When Tony Blair said in a Channel 4  documentary this evening that British Islamists were ‘absurd’ to protest that they were being oppressed by the United States and Britain, citing several ‘civil liberties’ available in these countries but not many Muslim ones, he was either being disingenuous or had missed the point. It is the (BLUE) duty of these people to feel oppressed because their Muslim brothers are oppressed.

From initial impressions, it would appear that the foiled London car bombings were hardly the work of seasoned al-Qaeda operatives – while Glasgow appears to be the work of rank amateurs. (For certain there would have been terrible death and destruction if the plans had succeeded; but their bombs were fairly primitive in construction, suspects have been tracked down with almost unbelievable ease and the Glasgow incident would border on the farcical but for its tragedy!) At this stage it is possible these weren’t trained terrorists but al-Qaeda sympathisers who simply got themselves too wound up and finally turned endless hours of rhetoric shared on mobile phones and the internet into hastily thrown together missions.

And the catalyst? Probably not Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister. That had been an inevitability for many months. But possibly Bush getting his way with Blair’s appointment – which did take some by surprise.

New Thinking Needed
Given the Bush/Iraq bag ‘n’ baggage he brings with him and the very limiting conditions the Americans and Israelis are likely to impose on any tentative negotiations, is it possible Blair can make any positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian impasse?

Of course, you should never say ‘never’. But he needs some new thinking if he’s to have any chance. He needs to shed the Bush’s poodle image and display more of that meta-thinking that enchanted Muslim leaders 6 years ago.

However, the world is a very different place to how it was 6 years ago. Blair needs to find ways to change the terms of the debate away from talk of ‘oppression’ to concepts such as co-operation, co-existence and even collaboration. If he (and others) can do that, then that removes the cause of the brotherhood to defend itself and isolates the extremists who are hellbent on establishing Sharia Law across the earth. Most Muslims are happy to co-exist providing they can pursue their religion and live more or less according to Muslim values. (Both domination and co-existence can be justified from the Qur’an – as indeed they can from most sacred texts.)

There is a small but growing number of people across the divides in Jerusalem who are beginning to see just what it is that really separates them. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has been working with ‘Emergence activist’ Elza Maalouf to facilitate workshops with open-minded Israeli and Palestinian influencers and thinkers. Together they are learning about the fallacies of 1st Tier thinking and how to surmount those limitations.

Now, if only Tony Blair would tap into what they’re doing, then he might have something new, daring and radical with which to challenge the old, old preconceptions….!

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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