The "new" Iraq

Courtesy of the US government.

Iraq women are very concerned about a decision by the IGC to give control of marriage and divorce laws to religious authorities. Under the directive, which was approved by the IGC in 15 minutes, when none of the council's women members were present, Muslim and Christian clergy will have final say about issues involving marriage, divorce and inheritance - matters that under Saddam Hussein were handled in civil court. If the directive becomes law under a new Iraq government, religious authorities would be able to dictate the number of wives a man may have, who gains custody of children in divorces, and whether girls and women may inherit property, and how easily a man can get a divorce. ...

One aide to the IGC said the decision shows the determination of "some powerful Iraqi figures" to institute Islamic law to govern personal life,

according to the January 21 Christian Science Monitor.

Women are not the only ones with legitimate fears of what they face in the new "democratic" Iraq. Hundreds of intellectuals, including educators, doctors, lawyers, judges, city managers, and others have been assassinated over the last several months, chillingly reports the New York Times on February 7.

"They are going after our brains," said Lt. Col. Jabbar Abu Natiha, head of the organized crime unit of the Baghdad police. "It is a big operation. Maybe even a movement."

These white-collar killings, American and Iraqi officials say, are separate from - and in some ways more insidious than - the settling of scores with former Baath Party officials, or the singling-out of police officers and others thought to be collaborating with the occupation.

Estimates of the dead range from 500 to 1,000 with an unknown number more threatened and sometimes intimidated into leaving their posts. Everyone seems to agree the attacks have been coordinated in some way - that is, these are neither random or revenge killings but chosen targets. So who is behind them and what is the purpose?

The American authorities say foreign terrorists may be behind the attacks. ...

The Iraqi authorities point to former Baath Party elements or displaced military officers. ...

Colonel Natiha, the head of the organized crime unit, ... blamed the general sense of lawlessness in Iraq, which is still struggling to form its own police forces.

In other words, "we have no clue." But if there is a plan or at least a "movement" to target the intellectual class for death, there must be some reasoning behind it, some point being pursued, some concept being endorsed.

So let me suggest one.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, the question on millions of confused American lips was "Why do they hate us?" There were various answers, some factual, some fanatical, some fatuous. But they all revolved around us. "They" "hated" our freedom, our foreign policy, our success, our role in their impoverishment, our support for Israel, whatever, it was always our something. The idea that it was not all about us never seemed to occur.

But it never was about us in particular. We were just the most obvious symbol, the biggest target. What is was about is fear. Psychologists have long recognized that the single factor uniting conservatives of all stripes, cutting across age, race, gender, religion, nationality, across all categories, is fear of change. They are, I would put it, rooted in the past, their self-identification found in "ago." (This also, by the way, serves as an explanation of the broadly true idea that people tend to become more conservative as they grow older: They become more removed from the condition and events in which their self-image was formed.)

This is clearly true of our home-grown reactionaries. Scratch the surface of Bill Bennet, Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, any of the crew, and you'll find underneath someone griping that it ain't the way it used to be - or at least the way they imagine it used to be. Do the same with the right-wing militias, the "white power" groups, the assortment of antigovernment fanatics, you get the same result. Some of these people are powerful and use corporate funding and think tanks to carry their fight; others are powerless and turn to guns or violent fantasies (or both) for their comfort - but they are all scared. Scared of the present and even more of the future.

As it is with political and religious fundamentalists at home, so it is abroad. In the months following 9/11, I had some exchanges with email friends about the "why do they hate us?" business. In one, from October 2, 2001, I suggested that the answer could be found by seeing the world through the eyes of an ordinary Muslim on the ground in the Middle East.

For centuries the West has looked down on you, regarding you, your culture, and, if non-Christian, your religion as inferior. (There is a reason bin Laden keeps referring to American "crusaders.") They think of you as "ragheads" or "towelheads."

Every time a strong Arab leader rises and tries to become independent of the West, they get slapped down. The only regimes that survive are those too weak or too corrupt to threaten Western interests. (One such "threatening" government was that of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 after he attempted to nationalize oil reserves. The result was the 26-year reign of the Shah, whose army was practically stamped "Made in the USA.") Yes, you resent the West's wealth but it's not so much that they're rich and you're poor, it's that they're rich because you're poor, that their wealth is built on exploitation and economic domination.

In just the past 20-plus years, you've seen the US pick a fight with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra, bomb Tripoli, openly try to kill Moammar Khadaffi, bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the spurious claim it was a chemical weapons factory (leading to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of deaths due to inadequate supplies of medicines), stand by along with the rest of the West while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia (stepping in only when European interests were threatened), shell Beirut, shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan.

Then there's Iraq, it's infrastructure systematically destroyed in a war which it seems to you had nothing to do with the West except to humiliate another strong Arab leader. In the runup to that war you saw foreign troops stationed near the holy sites of Islam at the insistence of the US despite Saudi Arabia's reluctance and warnings that doing so would be deeply offensive to conservative Muslims - which it was. (One thus offended being Osama bin Laden.)

For 10 years you have seen the bombing of Iraq continue, so much so that a few months ago a Pentagon press representative referred to one such raid as "routine." Sanctions imposed by the West have cost the lives (by UN estimate) of 500,000 Iraqi children over the last 10 years, a death toll which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright described in 1996 as "worth it." Worth it, yes, you say - as long as it's Arab children who are doing the dying. [Some sources dispute that total, saying it may have been "only" 370,000.]

And you see the US justify both the bombing and the sanctions on the grounds that Iraq "defies UN resolutions" while at the same time it pours billions of dollars in economic and military aid into Israel despite the fact that for 30 years Israel has openly defied UN resolutions about Palestinians and the occupied territories. It's not even so much that the US supports Israel, it's that the US does it to the detriment, the denigration, the denial, of the Palestinians.

If that was your world, what would the West, what would the US, look like to you? Like a noble friend? Or like a selfish, conceited, arrogant bully which figures it can do as it damn well pleases without cost to itself? And amid all this, what is the only force that has offered you hope, offered you help, offered you a model that has defied the West, offered you self-respect? Islamic fundamentalism. Seen through such eyes, the question "Why do they hate us?" answers itself.

That is, there was a profound sense of defeat, of humiliation, of suffering through a long trail of abuses. And a strong sense of self, without which any one of us is lost, was maintained by clinging ever more tightly to their own version of what in the US reactionaries would label "traditional values." Such turnings backward are common in times of social stress. Again quoting from a personal letter, this one from November 29, 1993.

Are we really to think, for example, that it's coincidence that the right wing gained strength in the wake of the '60s, which challenged previously 'self-evident' beliefs on an unprecedented scope and demanded people rely on their own wits to judge moral and ethical questions? Are we likewise to think it coincidence, to return to an earlier theme [I actually had been discussing the development of conservative religious movements], that puritanism gained strength and adherents during a time when not even one but two supernovas visible in broad daylight occurred (1572 and 1604), so thoroughly shattering the centuries-old and blindly accepted Aristotelian notion that the heavens were eternal and unchanging that even the Catholic church hierarchy couldn't maintain it?

I've for a long time argued that the great emotional attraction of conservatism in all its forms is its certainty: You don't have to decide if something is fair or unfair, right or wrong, good or bad. You just have to know what someone else told you. It's already been decided. The doubt, the fear, the questions, the responsibility are all gone. The power of David Koresh was rooted in the emotional desperation of his followers: It wasn't his theology, which, from what I know of it, was infantile, but his certainty that captured their hearts, their minds, and ultimately their wills.

And certainly there has been more than enough social stress over the last few - several - decades in the Middle East.

What I'm suggesting here is that there are some who for a variety of reasons in the range where the political, the cultural, and the personal (in which in this case I'm including the religious) cross, have for the sake of their psychological integrity (i.e., wholeness) come to identify themselves so strongly with a particular set of values that the advance of a different set threatens not only their "way of life" but their very sense of self and so becomes something not only to be resisted but destroyed.

That's not a particularly insightful view of the mind of a terrorist, but a useful one in considering what appears by at least some accounts to be a deliberate pattern of murder of intellectuals in Iraq. (Sidebar: I'm actually considering conservative, i.e., what could reasonably be called right-wing, terrorism. This is not to deny the existence of left-wing terrorism; the difference there is that the values embraced are more "aren't and must be" rather than "are and must remain.")

Clearly, there are those in Iraq who hope to use the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a means of establishing a conservative Islamic regime there; thus, for example, the move to subject women to Islamic law regarding marriage, divorce, and so on. The example of Iran, where the reactionary mullahs emerged victorious from the chaos that followed the Shah's ouster, is, I'm sure, an example to them.

But there are those for who even that would not be enough. Traditional law is not enough - traditional culture, in its broadest sense, is what is required for them. Thus, anything "new," especially if it is "foreign" (perhaps especially if it is Western, the source of their long humiliation), is a threat. And just like all frightened people, they invest their enemies with magical powers of influence and persuasion. (Something, again, we have experienced to some degree: Consider the efforts to "cleanse" education of "un-American" teachers from McCarthy right up through the Iraq war because, as we all know, being exposed to a single dissident teacher would outweigh every other experience and influence in a student's life. Consider, too, all the Falwells of various stripes and times horrified by the prospect of homosexuals "recruiting" people. Consider, for that matter, any anti-Semitic tract about the "influence of the Jews.") The "new" influences can't even be allowed to coexist with the "old" any more than the "foreign" can share space with the "traditional" because such coexistence is impossible and a source of inevitable defeat at the hands of supremely powerful enemies.

There were those in the wake of 9/11 who said "they hate us" because "they hate modernity." I expect because that answer was not about "us" in particular, it never got much traction except among those who used it as a basis for racist putdowns of Arabs in general - and Arab Muslims in particular - as "backward" members of "failed societies." And certainly in the case of 9/11 is was inadequate: There was far more to that event than simple cultural rejection of Western-style "modernity" and those who planned and carried out the attacks had no hesitation about using hi-tech means to act, keep in contact, and broadcast their views.

But in the case of Iraq I think it has a certain degree of validity - or, to be more precise, is valid for a certain portion of the resistance. That is, there is a portion of the insurgency that does in a sense hate "the modern." What keeps leading us astray is that it's not a matter of hating "us" in particular (no matter how much we cling to American exceptionalism) or hating the West in general or even of hating what is "modern" per se. It's a matter of hating (because of fearing) what is "foreign" and "new" because those are the aspects that threaten their sense of self. I maintain that even an Islamic state, if "modern" in terms of technology and a progressive interpretation of Islamic law (which would allow rights for women, for example), would be insufficient for them.

If this is accurate, and I admit it to be somewhat speculative (which is nothing new for me), it not only indicates the source of the otherwise unexplained assassinations of doctors, educators, and technocrats, it also indicates how difficult the situation is. Persuasion and logical argument will not succeed, nor will appeals to moderation or patriotism, nor indeed will appeals even from moderate clerics, who would likely be regarded as traitors to the True Cause. How do you approach, how do you deal with, people who feel they have no stake in the world around them, indeed who see what is emerging around them as a product of the very forces that they believe (not without cause) have driven them down and deny what they hold to be most valuable?

The answer I would give, the only answer I have, is the same answer I give to other forms and roots of terrorism: Act with justice in the world. Strive to give people a reason to believe that they do in fact have a stake in the world, that they do have a place, a value, a worth. Contrary to popular belief, violence doesn't arise from low self-esteem but from weak self-esteem, from self-esteem that is easily threatened. I have previously called terrorism the outgrowth of "desperation-driven fanaticism." Give people, to the extent you can, greater cause to be hopeful about their futures and you will to that same extent make them less desperate about their present.

I know that sounds easy and soothingly philosophical. I don't mean it to. Because what it means is that this is not going to be dealt with easily or quickly and no "transfer of power" to an Iraqi council, even if it were to be a genuine transfer, will put an end to it. There is a serious long haul in front of Iraqis.

Update: Edited to correct a couple of typos.