This morning Ralph Peters offers a pessimistic take on the current violence in Iraq. In IRAQ'S NEW
SECRET POLICE, he suggests that the best option going forward may be a military government which can impose order:
The national government is a dysfunctional collection of and ethnic mafias. Ministers serve only their own armed factions. Maliki has outed himself as a puppet of Muqtada al-Sadr. (President Bush may love old Nouri, but Nouri don't love him back.)
The Kurds are quietly, efficiently building a model state in the north. But the Arabs are building nothing beyond militias and death squads.
This really isn't our failure. The failure is on the part of the Iraqis. They had this one great chance - bought with American and allied blood - to build a rule-of-law democracy in the Arab world. They appear determined to throw that chance away, preferring to wallow in old hatreds, vengeance, corruption and the tyranny of fear.
Implicit in Peters' argument is an assertion that Iraqi Arabs are incapable, at this time, of managing democracy. Peters is one of our most astute observers of the scene in Iraq from a military vantage point and his opinion must be taken seriously. It seems to me that it raises anew a question, perhaps the key question, at the core of our battle with Global Islamic fascism: Does the Arab culture, or more accurately, does the intersection of culture and Islam in the Arab world make them incapable of making the transition to democracy?
In this week's Sanity Squad Podcast we discussed the recent uproar over an Australian Mufti comparing women to meat. He suggested that the blame for rape properly belongs to the immodest women who arouse the young men to sexual aggression. While this was a noxious and unacceptable sentiment, during the Podcast I made the point that it wasn't too long ago that such sentiments, perhaps more carefully constructed, were normative in the West, including in America. It is only in the last 30-40 years that women could enter court in rape cases and not expect that the case would revolve around their sexual histories but that the full responsibility for the sexual assault would be considered by all to belong solely to the male perpetrator. This is one clear benefit of the feminist movement, though as with all radical changes the pendulum may in some cases have swung too far. The most remarkable thing is that the cultural change in our attitudes toward women and their sexuality has only taken place in the space of a single generation.
[There is much now being written and discussed about some of the cultural changes having gone too far. The feminizing/neutering of men which has also occurred and the attendant devaluation of traditional male traits, such as aggression in the service of the community, are serious issues that put us at risk in this war, but these are not topics for this post today.]
Because I have been interested in such issues, how Arab child rearing intersects with culture and leads to our current conflicts with much of the Islamic world, I have set out on a number of occasions to write posts about the issue. Unfortunately, the issue is so complex that every attempt inevitably led me to feel that the issue deserved books, rather than a few posts. However, I do think it is worthwhile to raise some questions.
For example, there is evidence that Arab children are routinely subject to experiences that we would consider child abuse. These experiences, including regular beatings, are normative in the large swaths of the Arab world. A particular Arab cultural practice which is almost guaranteed to produce a heightened tendecy to violence and the oppression of woman is group circumcision of boys in the Oedipal, latency, and early adolescent age groups; such late circumcision during periods of life which already involve anxiety driven internal conflict and unstable body images (caused by rapid development) will have the effect of increasing one's tolerance of violence and one's propensity to resort t o violence when anxious or scared. This kind of experienced brutality enhances male insecurity about their sexuality, ie enhanced castration anxiety, which often leads to increases in paranoia and aggression. Furthermore, a large body of Psychoanalytic literature supports the finding that children who have been abused can more easily develop cognitive difficulties. All of these factors may make the Arab population more susceptible to illogical and magical thinking, including overt delusional thinking, which we see in their ability to believe that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad plot as well as Osama bin Laden's greatest triumph.
[Abuse can lead to splits in the ego which make learning more problematic. For an in depth discussion of how abuse can lead to learning disabilities as well as the kinds of damage it causes, Leonard Shengold's Soul Murder remains one of the best analytic treatments of the subject that I have seen.]
The questions I am raising here are clearly quite complex and this post does not mean to offer a definitive statement, however, if history is our guide, the near future of Islam looks grim.
In both Germany and Japan during WWII we were facing enemies in which their cultural tendency to support their racial superiority and aggression toward the other were major elements of their national character. WWII killed a significant portion of the most fanatic supporters of such beliefs. Young men were, after all, the major carriers of the memes and you could argue that the post-war progression to democracy of Germany and Japan depended on the elimination of a large portion of this cohort. In a single generation, major cultural change took place in both societies.
In our modern way of "kinder and gentler" warfare, we have largely spared the young men of Islam who carry the cultural/religious memes of violence and intolerance of others, intolerance and fear of women's sexuality, and of religious rather than racial superiority. These young men didn't return home and become members of the Rotary Club. All they knew was aggression, channeled outward, and they naturally did what they do best. It is highly doubtful that these young men can ever be engaged in the political process.
Unfortunately, it increasingly appears that there are enough of them to completely derail any attempt to establish a civil society in Iraq.
Furthermore, expanding beyond the confines of Iraq, there remains the question of Arab Culture and their resistance to change. The Saudis continue to fund the most regressive and primitive interpretations of Islam, supporting the very cultural tendencies that have led Islam into their current dead end.
It is clear that major cultural changes can come about in a single generation. It has happened in America in relation to the kind of thinking that the Australian Mufti expressed which would have been considered inelegant but not necessarily incorrect in the America of 1950 but is now seen as the pernicious and dangerous nonsense that it is.
I continue to have doubts that the Arab World is capable of making a similar change in cultural attitude. The best way for the West to help them enter the modern world was to offer an opportunity to a relatively cosmopolitan Arabic community to try their hand at modernity and democracy. This is what is happening in Iraq and unfortunately, the Iraqis offer reason to doubt their ability to take advantage of the opportunity. The second best way for the West to help the Islamic world is to stop pandering to the worst in their culture and start demanding a minimal level of accountability. Until we stop acting as if we are frightened of their aggression, they will have no reason to rein it in; after all, when something works, people tend to continue doing it.
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