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[Previous entry: "Belgium, the ICC and the neo-conservative worldview"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Tangled webs: drugs and international relations"] 01 May 2003: "This country will self-destruct in five seconds..."Yesterday, I picked up Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear at the Borders in Tukwila (they have an impressive selection - I also picked up A History of Warfare by John Keegan, and The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor); just the introduction to the 1998 edition was enough to astound me. Makiya refers to the document "Charter 91", written by some four hundred Iraqis (among them writers, artists, professionals and businessmen) in exile, which starts: Civil Society in Iraq has been continuously violated by the state in the name of ideology. As a consequence the networks through which civility is normally produced and reproduced have been destroyed. A collapse of values in Iraq has therefore coincided with the destruction of the public realm for uncoerced human association. In these conditions, the first task of a new politics is to reject barbarism and reconstitute civility.Makiya also quotes a report by Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Times from 1994: "People are terrified of what they see," said one Iraqi intellectual residing in Baghdad, who insisted on remaining anonymous. "If the regime falls, you can imagine the chaos that will result, with the poor attacking the less poor. Nearly everyone here has arms, and the country is slipping into chaos. Sometimes I think the regime encourages the idea of a breakdown. It's like saying, 'See what could happen?' if they were no longer around.Between these two quotes, I think a clearer understanding of the looting and rioting in the wake of the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime can be gained. Leading up to these excerpts, Makiya makes some observations about victimhood which I found highly resonant: In conditions like those that prevail in a Middle East torn apart by civil wars, revolutions, intifadas, individual and state terrorist actions, and nationalist totalitarianism, the temptation is great to identify with victims of gross abuse, as I have tried to do in my work. One needs some kind of moral reassurance, some handle on the hellishness of the world, in circumstances where God and religion are undeniably absent (at least for me). The alternative to identifying with the victim is a descent into the nausea of misanthropy and self-hatred, about whose destructive possibilities this century has taught us everything we need to know. The danger in such identification is that it can lead to a diminution in one's critical faculties, one's feel for the reality of the world.Holy Toledo, that's incisive thinking. Admittedly, I myself might have been more explicit in my qualifications—specifically that it is not a given that one who is currently a victim may become a victimiser in turn—but Makiya's point is, in essence, that the fact that one is currently a victim is in no way an indicator that one does not have the potential to become a victimiser oneself. This holds especially true when the condition of victimhood is applied to entire population groups, be they defined by ethnicity, religion or whatever; the fact that Bosniaks and Tutsis were initially victims on a group level did not preclude those groups—or, more correctly, members of those groups—from committing atrocities themselves. (Note: the Bosnian and Rwandan conflicts have been described in terms like "all sides are equally guilty" and "there are no good guys in this conflict." This is rubbish; it's simply that ethnicity does not determine "good guy" or "bad guy" status. In ethnic or religious strife, the possession of a weapon, be it a rifle or a machete, is the first step to realising one's potential to becoming a victimiser.) If one applies all the aforegoing to the current situation on Iraq, it's hard to come up with any definitive answers, but certain observations may be made. First and foremost, it is apparent that the country was engineered to go to hell in a handbasket should the Ba'ath party lose control; even if Charter 91's assessement of the "destruction of the public realm" was overstated when the document was published twelve years ago, and similarly the anonymous Baghdadi's nine years ago, it is not unthinkable that the situation would have deteriorated to that level in the time since. As a result, one has to wonder how much larger the Coalition ground force would have had to have been to maintain order from the very earliest moment; the likely answer is that no number of American troops would have been sufficient. Moreover, it would be a mistake to ascribe solely noble motivations to those Iraqis currently protesting the Coalition presence; it is far from unthinkable that, if anything, the protestors, having been victimised, feel entitled to now become the victimisers, and want the Coalition troops out of the way so they can get on with victimising someone. Who exactly they intend to victimise is not necessarily a consideration, as long as they get to victimise somebody. I hardly need point out that this would be unacceptable. Some critics attach blame to the Coalition forces for failing to maintain the civil society of Iraq, on the basis that the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols place the responsibility for this on the Occupying Power(s). This criticism is less than fair, nor is it entirely honest, since the Conventions etc. were not written with the possibility in mind that the structure of civil society would self-destruct; yet this is exactly what public order in Iraq was designed to do in the event of the toppling of the Ba'ath party. Clearly, Republic of Fear is going to be an interesting read. * - Makiya's book Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (1993) |
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