Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning FW: Perspectives: Friedman & La Chapelle On Iraq

IRAQ WITHOUT SADDAM
By Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times
September 1, 2002

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/opinion/01FRIE.html

As I think about President Bush's plans to take out Saddam Hussein and
rebuild Iraq into a democracy, one question gnaws at me: Is Iraq the way it
is today because Saddam Hussein is the way he is? Or is Saddam Hussein the
way he is because Iraq is the way it is?

I mean, is Iraq a totalitarian dictatorship under a cruel, iron-fisted man
because the country is actually an Arab Yugoslavia -- a highly tribalized,
artificial state, drawn up by the British, consisting of Shiites in the
south, Kurds in the north and Sunnis in the center -- whose historical
ethnic rivalries can be managed only by a Saddam-like figure?

Or, has Iraq, by now, congealed into a real nation? And once the cruel fist
of Saddam is replaced by a more enlightened leadership, Iraq's talented,
educated people will slowly produce a federal democracy.

The answer is critical, because any U.S. invasion of Iraq will leave the
U.S. responsible for nation-building there. Invade Iraq and we own Iraq. And
once we own it, we will have to rebuild it, and since that is a huge task,
we need to understand what kind of raw material we'll be working with.

It is instructive in this regard to quickly review Iraq's history before
Saddam. Romper Room it was not. It was a saga of intrigue, murder and
endless coups involving the different ethnic and political factions that
were thrown together inside Iraq's borders by the British. In July 1958,
Iraq's King Faisal was gunned down in his courtyard by military plotters led
by Brig. Abdel Karim Kassem and Col. Abdul Salam Arif. A few months later,
Kassem ousted Arif for being too pro-Nasserite. Around the same time a young
Saddam tried, but failed, to kill Kassem, who himself executed a slew of
Iraqi Nasserites in Mosul in 1959.

In 1963, Arif came back from exile and killed Kassem. A short time later
Arif, and the Baath Party thugs around him, savagely slaughtered and
tortured thousands of left-wingers and Communists all across Iraq. Arif
ruled until 1966, when he was killed in a helicopter crash and was succeeded
by his brother, who was toppled in 1968 by Saddam and his clan from the
village of Tikrit. That's when Saddam first began sending away his opponents
to a prison called Qasr al-Nahiya -- "the Palace of the End." Since 1958,
every one of these Sunni-dominated military regimes in Baghdad began with a
honeymoon with the Kurds in northern Iraq and ended up fighting them.

The point here is that we are talking about nation-building from scratch.
Iraq has a lot of natural resources and a decently educated population, but
it has none of the civil society or rule of law roots that enabled us to
quickly build democracies out of the ruins of Germany and Japan after World
War II. Iraq's last leader committed to the rule of law may have been
Hammurabi -- the King of Babylon in the 18th century B.C. So once Saddam is
gone, there will be a power vacuum, revenge killings and ethnic pulling and
tugging between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.

This is not a reason for not taking Saddam out. It is a reason for preparing
the U.S. public for a potentially long, costly nation-building operation and
for enlisting as many allies as possible to share the burden. There is no
avoiding nation-building in Iraq. Because to get at Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction we'll need to break the regime open, like a walnut, and then
rebuild it.

What's worrying about the Bushies is that they seem much more adept at
breaking things than building things. To do nation-building you need to be
something of a naï¿½ve optimist. I worry that the Bushies are way too cynical
for nation-building.

My most knowledgeable Iraqi friend tells me he is confident that the morning
after any U.S. invasion, American troops would be welcomed by Iraqis, and
the regime would fold quickly. It's the morning after the morning after that
we have to be prepared for.

In the best case, a "nice" strongman will emerge from the Iraqi Army to
preside over a gradual transition to democracy, with America receding into a
supporting role. In the worst case, we crack Iraq open and it falls apart in
our hands, with all its historical internal tensions -- particularly between
its long-ruling Sunni minority and its long-frustrated Shiite majority. In
that case, George Bush will have to become Iraq's strongman -- the iron fist
that holds the country together, gradually redistributes the oil wealth and
supervises a much longer transition to democracy.

My Iraqi friend tells me that anyone who tells you he knows which scenario
will unfold doesn't know Iraq.ï¿½

------------

OF WARRIOR KINGS AND VISION
David La Chapelle <dlachape@...>
August 30, 2002

What awaits us in Iraq: Warrior Kings and the test of True Vision

"The skies roared with thunder and the earth heaved,
Then came darkness and a stillness like death.
Lightening smashed the ground and fires blazed out;
Death flooded from the skies.
When the heat died and the fires went out,
The plains had turned to ash."

This is a fragment of dream, from a story inscribed in stone that once
adorned a great city built around 2700 B.C. in what is modern day Iraq.
Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Mesopotamia, had this dream he was journeying
to subdue the demon of the forest and cut down the cedars necessary to build
his city of glory.

During the gulf war the coalition air force dropped 140,000 tons of
bombs. Take the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and add six more and you
would have an equivalent fire power. Since the Gulf war the skies of Iraq
have continued to rain death. In 1999 alone more than 1,100 missiles were
launched against 359 Iraq targets. Over 200 military planes, 19 naval ships
and 22,000 American military personnel are committed to enforcing the
"no-fly zones" at a cost estimated at around one Billion dollars a year. The
skies have roared with thunder and the earth has heaved.

The debate about whether we should go to war with Iraq has successfully
skirted the fact that we are at war with Iraq and have been since the
invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that the United States was instrumental in
arming Saddam Hussein in the conflict with Iran that took at least a million
and half lives. And in a now famous meeting on July 25th 1980 with April
Glaspie, the American Ambassador to Iraq, Saddam Hussein was assured that
America would not get involved in the dispute with Kuwait. This refusal to
stand ground was immediate permission for Saddam to invade, which he did a
week later.

If we take the long view of history this area has seen a remarkable
number of "regime changes". The Summerians, Akkadians,Kassites, Mitanni,
Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans,
Mamluks,Safavids and British all conquered the land in an ongoing succession
of power. In this century at least nine coups were attempted in a constantly
shifting game of murder, military uprising and revenge. Most were successful
and left a legacy of instability which only the ruthless tactics of a true
dictator could change. It was not until Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979
that any period of stable rule was established. And yet he very quickly
launched the devastating war with Iran, followed by his invasion of Kuwait.

Destruction is a near friend of this land.

Much as been created as well. This fertile land has also been the birth
place of many of the tools we take for granted in forming what we call
civilization: legal codes, writing, large scale public works,
administrative infrastructure, record keeping, banking, abstract
mathematics, city building, urban planning, private property, and medical
practices on an organized scale. These all appeared with the Summerian
peoples around 2700 B.C.

Destruction and creation seem to dance in an interwoven embrace in this
fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the beginning it
was in fact the rivers themselves that demonstrated this tension. The
flooding of the rivers created the fertile soil in which civilization was
born and also brought the kind of death and destruction that civilization
organizes to forestall with their floods.

The great cities of the region, Ur, Ninevah, Uruk, Babylon, Baghdad were
constantly being created and destroyed as new waves of invaders would seek
to control of the fertility and the critical trade routes to the East.
Cities of remarkable beauty were created. The hanging gardens of Babylon
became one of the wonders of the ancient world. At its high point in 800 Ad
Baghdad was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Two vast
semicircles twelve miles in diameter occupied both sides of the river and
included palaces, gardens, aviaries, hunting preserves, wide streets and
intricate aqueducts. Flowers, trees, social order and elegant architecture
supported the home of the million people who had gathered there.

Babylon was sacked several times in its earlier incarnations. Nineveh,
Ur, Uruk and other cities would fall as the various invaders sought to
assert their control.

When the Mongols sacked Baghdad it was estimated that 800,00 people were
put to death in forty days and the streets were said to run with blood. The
utter annihilation of Baghdad broke the power of this land for centuries
afterwards.

Since cities first arose destruction has come their way on a regular
basis. The land in which our attention is being driven by the current talk
of invasion has probably the most consistent history of regime change of any
place on the planet. This perspective may be useful in considering the war
talk of the present administration. We are assured that the peoples of Iraq
will rise up in a spontaneous support of open democratic process. The
complex structure of Iraq belies this palliative assurance. The modern state
of Iraq is actually a bit of a fiction. The lines were drawn on the map by
British interests guided to a large extent by an iconoclastic English woman
named Gertrude Bell. She was a wealthy heiress who had taken to wandering
through the deserts of the mideast and had come to know many of the
principle players in the complex web of tribal relations. She settled in
Baghdad and helped craft the modern state of Iraq until her she took her own
life after World War I. Competing factions and tribal interests were
corralled by the British into forming a nation.

The current lines on the map display the tensions that exist within
Iraq. Two no fly zones protect the north and south of the land and their
respective peoples. Only the middle is held by Saddam Hussein.

We are asked to believe that the collapse of the middle under the weight
of our technologically advanced armed forces will some how assure democracy
for the country. This logic is difficult to understand.

We had a chance to try this at the end of the Gulf war and we turned our
back on supporting the rebel uprising, sentencing thousands to death,
because we did not want a divided and weakened Iraq.

No amount of advanced technology is going to transform the deep currents
of history that blow with the desert winds across the land of Iraq. Before
we rain more death down out of the skies it might be worth understanding the
appointment with destiny that we seem determined to keep.

There is something about the land we know of as Iraq that invites the
acting out of mythic battles. The origins of these impulses go back
thousands of years. One of the great protagonists was Cyrus the great, a
Persian warrior who had adopted a radical new religion of his time and
conquered much his known world. He was to subdue the land between the
Tigris and Euphrates sometime around 550 B.C. The radical dualism of
Zoroastrianism held that the universe was a battleground between the forces
of darkness and those of light. Cyrus took it upon himself to battle for the
light and in doing so inaugurated the most deadly of marriages: that of
religion and war. It became one's religious duty to conquer the world. The
seeds of the twin tower's demise were sown in the blood shed by Cyrus's
sword.

Saddam Hussein has ample credentials for a warrior and he has repeatedly
attempted to cast his actions within the context of a Holy War. It is easy
to cynically decry this urge as a cover for his pure lust for power, but to
do so would be to turn our backs on history. The deeper matrix of Saddam's
intentions spring out of resonance of warriors vying for spiritual dominion
and the inevitable pendulum of civilizations exchanging their grounds of
temporal power. His actions betray a kind of cruelty that is associated with
earlier times in humanity's development. But they are embedded in the
lineage of the warrior-king. These actions have a logic of their own that
is grounded in the soil of Iraq. To miss this vital point means that if we
should behead him he would arise again in another form, just like a figure
out mythology, unless a new vision of leadership can be demonstrated.

Saddam has proven his capacity for death and destruction. Under his
command over the last thirty years tens of thousands of Shiites, more than
250,000 kurds, unknown numbers of other nationalities, 17 ministers and two
of his sons-in-laws have been killed. He has gassed villages, created one of
the worst ecological nightmares on t he planet when the Kuwaiti oil fields
were ignited, launched two wars that have killed nearly 1,700,000 people.
The long term effects of the Kurdish gas attacks continue to manifest in the
people who managed to survive. His sophisticated attempts to forge weapons
of mass destruction inform us that he is not only ruthless, but organized
and willing to use the most advanced technology in the service of his goals.

And yet in the face of this brute force the most compelling challenge
awaiting us in Iraq is not military. It lies closer to the heart of the
human soul. Can we move beyond the cycle of violence that has been the
signature of the fertile crescent for thousands of years?

We assuredly cannot wait for Saddam Hussein to correct this difficulty.
Saddam Hussein does not live in a vacuum. He lives in the cradle of
civilization, with the echoes of history resounding clearly around him. His
behavior is a clear and even consciously articulated, attempt to recreate
the glories of earlier warrior-kings. But it is darkly skewed because he has
no fundamental anchor in the true responsibility such earlier kings
articulated for the benefit of all their peoples. He is frozen in the myth
of the possible past and as such is bankrupt as a leader of common good. We
are not fighting an isolated despot. We are entering into a very odd
appointment with the birth place of our own civilization.

There are very deep forces at work in these gathering storms of war.
Hammurabi, an early warrior king of the era, articulated an understanding
that was born of the fierce battles of will that accompanied the birth of
civilization. In his extensive code of behavior, which enumerates hundreds
of specific prohibitions, he has two which found their way into the west
through the spread of Christianity.

The two read: "If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put
out. If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked
out."

The present administration is proposing to install democracy on advice
of this ancient king. By using the brute force of our arms we are being
asked to believe that we will usher in a regime change that will be more to
our liking. President Bush is being cast as a warrior-king of his own, who
will make his own mind up and act unilaterally in the best interests of not
only our own country, but the world. Our secretary of defenses assures us
that seeking unanimity with our allies may cloud our ability for rigorous
thinking and action. If we take a bold stand then surely the world will
follow in our footsteps.

The sheer logic of history should make it clear that every action has an
equal reaction. If we act in a dictatorial manner we assure a reaction
commensurate to the exercise of that force. What made the birth of our own
country unique is the fact that a vision of a new way of being together as a
nation was introduced into the stream of events. A government was conceived
of the people and for the people. And an elaborate system of checks and
balances were introduced to assure that unilateral action,and the dangerous
concentration of power that such a gesture creates, would be balanced by a
collective and deliberate wisdom.

The danger of the current war plans in this country go far beyond the
immediate potential of death and destruction of a technologically enhanced
armed forces. They are greater than the possibility of alienated allies and
further enraged arab populations. The lack of consensus building, the
refusal to adhere to a code of international law, and the blind belief in
our own manifest destiny threatens to make mockery of the very democratic
ideals that we are purporting to give as a gift of victory to the Iraq
people. This is a dangerous collapse of vision. And without vision, the
people will die.

The ancient warrior-kings of Mesopotamia gave birth to the idea of a
divine kingship. These lines were used to describe Gilgamesh, one of the
first great warrior-kings:

"The one who knew all I will tell about....
He saw the great Mystery, he knew the Hidden:
He recovered the knowledge of all the times before the Flood.
He journeyed beyond the distant,
he journeyed beyond exhaustion,
And then carved his story on stone."

And Hammurabi, the man who gave us an eye for an eye, had a clear vision
of what leadership meant:

"The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd,
whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my
breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my
shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed
them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the
widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high
their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven
and earth, in order to declare justice in the land, to settle all disputes,
and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my
memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness."

It is sad to see that these lofty sentiments are often missing in our
current national debate after nearly four thousand years of human effort.
They are not to be found in the repression of freedom in Iraq and
unfortunately they are not easily found in a deeply suspicious view of the
world as a series of dangers to be contained by ever more elaborate use of
force which the current administration offers as a rallying point for
action.

Certainly the danger of terrorism and the use of weapons of mass
destruction call for vigorous action and defense. But if this action is not
grounded in a more inclusive vision of what it means to live together on
this planet they will be doomed to failure.

The current discussion of war is being articulated as a reactive pattern
of aggression. If we do not strike first, then we will be struck. If we need
a preview of what this kind of behavior will produce then we only have to
cast our glance to the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. What is missing in the
national debate is true vision of a common good that can provide a unifying
force of inspiration and vision of how all peoples of the world might live
together. Are we simply going to systematically bomb country after country
that pose a threat to our well being and truly believe this will create
national security?

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man, capable of
great destruction. And there is no doubt that our world would be a safer
place without him. But to strike him down with an eye for an eye and tooth
for a tooth is to help hold our future hostage to a distant past.

World epochs are often shifted by fundamental changes in the way we
perceive the world. Newton ushered in the mathematics, conceptual clarity
and understanding that seeded the industrial revolution. The view of the
world that is emerging at the cutting edge of physics and even biology is
that our reality is constructed out of a contextual relationship. Stem cells
migrate to become differentiated depending on their location. In Quantum
physics it is understood that the observer is a part of conditioning the
actual effect of the outcome of events in the physical world.
If politics are to reflect the kind of context sensitivity which such
discoveries are revealing then we need to deepen our capacity to include
those that beyond our borders in our decision making.

The old warrior kings were grounded in a fundamental dualism that made
their job description straight forward: they were to stand as intermediaries
between the gods and humankind. Their force of arms helped manifest divine
will.

Unfortunately our current administration is acting as if they have a
divine mandate. Unilateral leadership, we are assured, is a sign of
strength. In actuality, in the the face of the daunting issues facing our
planet , it has never been a greater sign of weakness.

It will be our ability to draw forth the collective wisdom of all
peoples that will allow us to face the many challenges ahead. Acting as
ancient kings will only assure that history will repeat itself.

We have the military capacity to neutralize any threat on the planet. Or
so we would like to think. But the use of excessive force seems to only
create the seeds of the next dictatorship. The harsh terms of the Versailles
treaty at the end of World War I assured that Hitler would rise to power.

What is needed to respond to Saddam Hussein is not more force. The
firepower of the Gulf War was more than adequate to shift the battlefield.
What happened in the Gulf War is what may very likely happen if we enter on
a new adventure in Iraq: a lack of strategic planning as to what the
aftermath of the war might entail meant that Saddam Hussein was allowed to
stay in power. Until our administration can demonstrate in actions that it
truly believes in democracy as expression of the collective wisdom of the
people for the people then its leadership must inevitably be questioned. We
are being told by the current leadership of the United States that
precipitous action is our only option. If democracy is to truly emerge as a
global process then we must be able to model it in our dealings with other
countries and peoples. We need to act as if they mattered and are not
ciphers in a vast game of global power.

The vision necessary for our emerging planetary crisis is one that
necessarily needs to be synthetic, multidimensional,adaptive, courageous,
respectful and be based on a willingness to let our strength be in service
of a common good. The planet has grown too small to remain isolated and
truly survive. A consistent pattern of unilateral action from environmental
concerns to military decisions seems to say that what is good for America is
in fact good for the world.

If we are going to engage the forces of creation and destruction that
seem to inhabit this land called Iraq, then we had better have a vision
equal to the powers that abide there . The ghosts of ancient kings wander
the rivers. Cities more beautiful than we have ever seen once lived there.
Our civilization was born there. Surely we can find the national character
to meet this appointment with destiny using the same degree of vision and
courage that brought our nation into existence. Our nation was born with the
force of arms, but its true birth came from a much deeper wellspring. We are
called upon to express a vision of the possible future that might move us
beyond the cycles and cycles of violence and repression.

This is the real debate that needs to be had in Congress, in the Press
and in our homes. Without it an invasion of Iraq will only mean that we have
become seduced by the rhythm of history. Returning to the birth place of
civilization we will have said in essence, "We never grew up."

FW: Perspectives: Friedman & La Chapelle On Iraq

🔗Dante Rosati <dante.interport@...>

🔗monz <monz@...>