TALKING SMACK ABOUT IRAQ

Maxed out has a pretty long, but accurate, comment regarding our pathetic media, their seemingly coordinated trivialization of the voting in Iraq, and the turnout. BUT there is something much bigger here that isn't being covered anywhere that I know of.

The "Iraqi" army does not exist, even on paper. In the south, Iran and Sadr effectively control everything. The Shia "army" is just that: Shia. They don't care about Iraq, all they want is an Islamic state dominated---controlled---by the Shia clerics from Iran. Saddr thugs control most of the south and they are immune from control by Baghdad.

In the North, the Iraqi army is Kurdish. They don't like anybody from the South and are not reliable for any action south of their invisible border.

The central part of Iraq has furnished a reasonable facsimile of an army, but nobody knows just which faction they will support. I have written many times here about the tribal nature of all of Iraq, loyalties going back a few thousand years to these tribes, and the impossibility of controlling the country by any means other than a vicious strong man capable of doing anything.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to — the culture of their own armies in their own countries — defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors. Arab officers are not concerned about the welfare and safety of their men. The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.

Don't be surprised if the Iraqi "army" fucks up. It is a lead pipe cinch that they will be useless when we leave

Iraqis are seeking a strong man---a nice one natrually---to take over and they will find a couple of them. Here's the guts of my prior post

Who were the original Iraqis and what influences from way back when still obtain there? It can be said that they invented the farm collective, a necessity because of the flooding of Tigress and Euphrates Rivers. The Iraqis were known as Sumerians. Sumerians invented writing, double entry accounting, private property (even the King was held to contracts); they invented both the wheel and the plow, as well as the first mathematics system (based on 60). Their society was "matriarchal" meaning women had rights. They, not the much later Arabs or Greeks, invented banking. It was the ancient Iraqis and not the Greeks who invented the long narrative, they wrote stories down; their most famous narrative includes Noah building a boat to save himself and civilization from a flood, before the Jews and before the Bible. They invented an alphabet and the first calendars. We know they invented bureaucracy and that they had a yearning for some order. We know they had arts, statues, tall buildings called ziggurats, and that they traded with others.

Well the Sumerians got knocked off by the Akkadians, a Semitic people said to be descended from Noah (you know where this will lead, eventually) spread all the way to Lebanon and then got knocked off by a Sumerian revolution. By this time the transfer of power by war was fully in place. So Mesopotamia took over. Everybody agreed that The Garden of Eden was in Mesopotamia and it just so happens that the most war like people at this time were the Assyrians (like in Syria) who lived there too so all hell broke loose forever. So it came to pass that the country was united by a guy named Hammurabi (a hostile takeover), the empire was known as Babylon and he invented law, known as the Hammurabi Code. The Code is considered the earliest legal comprehensive code of laws known in history. A copy of the code is engraved on a block of black diorite. A team of French archaeologists dug up this block and it is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The good old French have taken one of the great prizes of ancient Iraq.

I could go on with the Hanging Gardens, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon's Temple, The Assyrian takeover (war again), then Cyrus the Great (war) Alexander the Great who died there (war), and lots of others tramped around Iraq. Persia (Iran) took over til the Arabs (Muslims) marched in and took over.

Baghdad become the seat of the first Muslim Caliphate and the city became the center of Islamic civilization. Baghdad was important both commercially and culturally as well as a famous center of learning in the Middle Ages. It was regarded in the tenth century as the intellectual center of the world, the cultural capital of the Islamic world, and a center of power in the world. It was where Arab and Persian cultures mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory. This era is remembered throughout the Arab world, and by the Iraqis in particular, as the pinnacle of the Islamic past.

If all that weren't enough, mathematics was invented there too. Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi (680-750 AD), discovered algebraic equations, and some credit him with the invention of zero (before the Mayans). He introduced Hindu numbers to the Arab world. "Abu Ja'far" wrote a math book so influential that the title Abu Ja'far gives us the word "algebra". His books were translated into Latin and hit renaissance Italy like tactical nuclear culture shock. They couldn't speak Arabic, of course, so his name came out as "Algorismus". His name (misspelled again!) has gone into mathematics and computerspeak as Algorithm; for a step by step process for performing computations.

So there you have it, 4,000 years of hostile takeovers for one of the most creative people who have ever hit the planet. Yet democracy is nowhere in their culture. Nowhere in their civilization. Saddam imposed himself after the Shah, promising "better things". He seized power by force, normal in that part of the world so there was nothing culturally different from what they had been used to, and made a lot of the country more or less western in so far as streets, sewage, electricity, and TV goes. He, like Tito in Yugoslavia, suppressed all tribal (cultural) wars by killing anybody who crossed the line, which was nothing different from Cyrus or Alexander, and he tried to impose his will on his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, not unlike the great Hammurabi or other leaders in that part of the world.

The big question for us right now is: How can Iraq embrace what they know nothing about? How can they embrace "democracy"? Especially since autocratic systems produced one of the greatest and most creative civilizations in the History of the World. Something for all of us to think about. Not that it can't be done, Europe had nothing but thousands of years of Kings and they did it, but it took 500 years from Magna Charta to evolve. Suppose they DON'T WANT REAL DEMOCRACY? 4,000 years of Iraqi culture is against it.

And don't forget the rampant corruption in every Muslim state and now appearing in Iraq. Bakshish rules. From an old post:

Whether you call it mordida (the bite), un pot-de-vin, or just bribery, nowhere on the planet is it as universal as in Middle East. There, under the term "bakshish", it controls every form of business or government service. You cannot get a job without bakshish, roads don't get built, you can't sell so much as a date on the street without bakshish.

Buy stock? Oh no! A powerful person (or people)simply takes 10% of the stock and agrees to pay for the stock when the accrued dividends match the stock price at time of "purchase"; in addition he gets a seat on the board of directors PLUS a salary. In exchange, the business won't have tariff problems, labor problems, or any problems. Judges take money from both sides and routinely rule in favor of the biggest bribe (he keeps both bribes); hospitals have two sections, one for the people who have paid a bribe and one for those who have not.

Hospital doctors are the ones who paid the most in bribes to the government guy in charge of hospitals, business executives are where they are only because of bakshish, army officers, artists whose works are shown, and so on, pay bakshish. It seeps into every facet of society. This has been going on for thousands of years. When you pair bakshish with the "shame/honor" of the society at large you have hell on earth. Any criticism of a doctor puts shame on the doctor. To regain his "honor" he will go to the guy above him, the one to whom he paid bakshish in order to get his job in the first place, and the guy above him will go after the complainer and perhaps put him in jail. Nobody cares if the patient dies....unless the patient had paid bakshish to somebody much higher than either of them, etc., etc., etc.

It is a nightmare because any complaint is shame. Praise is honor. Everyone walks the line of shame, honor, bribery. Naturally everybody lies in that society. It is the only way a man can stay alive. The main reason everyone comments on the extreme politeness of Arabs is that every word is measured in honor/shame/bakshish. Who are you really? This is who I am (pretend). This food is good (because I might be killed). Everyone honors everyone and lies like hell to get what they may want. If your son wants a government job and goes to your tribal leader to ask for one the tribal leader cannot say "no", because a "no" would shame both his family and his position as leader of the tribe. He has to "see what I can do". Then he may have to go to the head of another tribe who works in the correct section of the government. Haggling is done. If the government guy already "owes" a favor then the deal can be done relatively quickly, perhaps for a consideration later. Otherwise a deal must be made so that nobody is shamed. The unqualified kid becomes an official for the right consideration and everybody has honor. The parents of the kid "owes", the kid "owes", the tribal leader looks strong, the father of the kid looks like a strong parent and so on. It is a society built on lies.

Right now we are in a place where the Saudi family tells Americans one story and a completely different one to the Arabs on TV at home. This is normal. Nothing wrong with it. What is really going on? Honor is going on. The Arab people know what was told to Americans and by telling the opposite story to them on TV the Saud family shows "honor" by both lying to the Americans and getting away with it. But suppose the Saudis told us the truth and lied to their own people? That's OK too, the Saud prince shows he can conduct smart business. The Saudis may have made a secret deal with Powell by telling Powell that they would have to lie to their people but that they are telling the truth to Powell.

Get it? Arabs lose wars because their generals are only there because of bakshish. Their scientists are there for the same reason. There is not one aspect of their lives where competence is the criteria for position. Period.