Slouching Toward 2017

One way to assess the year just past is to see how it looked when its sun was still under the horizon. The last posts of 2015—one of which was “Slouching Toward 2016”—suggested that ‘16 might turn out to be a mess as seen from late December ‘15. Among the events noted in ‘15 was the “victory” of Ramadi in Iraq. Now Ramadi is 79 miles west of Baghdad; the infamous Fallujah is halfway in between. Fallujah was then still held by ISIS (and as of December 11 of this year, bombings were still reported as ISIS remnants were being swept up.) Ramadi was “taken,” but what did the Iraqi army capture? Rubble. That was then, a year ago. 2016 turned out to be a year of such victories in Syria and elsewhere. Weeks of bombing; rubble turned into smaller rubble; and a stream of refugees coming out at last as if, when you squeeze rubble hard enough, a bit of darkly-colored life flows out like near-congealed blood. Today, as I gaze at 2017 ahead, the battle of Ramadi has moved on to Mosul. That battle has been going on for a long time but still isn’t over. It takes time to make once populous cities entirely unlivable. 2017 will doubtlessly unveil the “victory” of Mosul too. But that word will be quite meaningless.

My 2015 farewell posts failed to note that 2016 would be an election year. Had that occurred to me, I’d have avoided the word “slouching” and written about about “digging a deep hole.” Election years are like that in this seemingly endless cultural sunset. Well, 2017 is not an election year. So we approach it with faint hope. Or is the future preparing even more amazingly rude surprises? Just wondering.

The Curious Ramadi Victory

The population of Ramadi in Iraq was around 456,000 in 2004; it housed an estimated 1,000 distinct clans, each with its chief.

What that population is today no one seems to know—and for a good reason. According to Iraqi News (link) 80 percent of the city had been destroyed even before the new allied bombings began; if anybody still lives there, the city is, ah, far from working. But back to numbers. The German Frankfurter Zeitung puts today’s population at 300,000—and one assumes that FZ expended no thought on that number; others, probably still highly dubiously, go back to a 1987 number: 192,000.  If we accept the last number (not that I do), Ramadi is about the size of Grand Rapids, MI. The few pictures we are shown (over and over and over again) only show half a dozen Iraqi army soldiers celebrating amidst dreary, empty ruins; a 2008 picture—from a time when two pairs of American boots are also shown—features four Ramadi citizens going about their business. Still using Iraqi News accounts, the government dropped leaflets over the city around December 26 urging the public to clear the city; but since then we’ve not been shown masses (192,000 is a mass) flooding into the desert trying to escape allied bombardment. And if they fled, where would they have gone? East of them is Fallujah (said to have been 326,000 people in 2010); Fallujah is still in ISIS hands. West, south, and north of them is desert. So what is really left of the governing city of Anwar province—beyond rubble?

A curious victory indeed. Ramadi is 79 miles west of Baghdad. Now its rubble has been liberated. Much closer to Baghdad is Fallujah, still under  ISIS control. Why did the Iraqi government target Ramadi first? Was it because it wasn’t either populated or functional? And how did they get there? Bypassing Fallujah which, like Ramadi, is on Highway 1 and on the Euphrates river. It makes one wonder what is really going on.

Letters in the News

Strikes me as interesting, if nothing else, that just days after a general called SISI was sworn in as President of Egypt a group called ISIS has overrun northern Iraq and now threatens Baghdad.

Such is my weariness of endless civil wars—or such is the poor quality of normal reporting in the media—that I had never heard of ISIS until Mosul had fallen to them. Now I learn that this group controls, more or less, significant sections of Syria and that its acronym derives from the translation of a name in Arabic, literally Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), but “the Levant” is translated as “Syria,” hence ISIS. These complications caused some interesting sputtering on the PBS News Hour by one of the anchors, telling me that they had not been all that familiar with this would-be emirate themselves.

The aggressive advance of ISIS is developing into a new uproar in this country, with some people sounding like they’re about to blame President Obama for loosing the glories won in battle by President Bush.

I would suggest calming down. We have something neither the Egyptians nor the Arabs have. We call it the MISSISSIPPI. If only we could relax, the Old Man would just keep rolling along.

Realism and Humility

Humility is not some sort of pretended self-belittling, not some kind of show to demonstrate piety. It is the consequence of observation. It arises from hard realism. A brief Sufi account about a sage illustrates this. I read it in one of Idries Shah’s book. A group of would-be Dervishes surrounded a sage to tell him how much they admired his humility. The sage dismissed them gruffly. He said: “My humility isn’t there to make impressions. It serves another purpose.”

I am thinking of Iraq. I am thinking of our unrealistic expectations that, magically, democracy will break into blossoms in that country now that we’ve removed the Overwhelm. Realism would have counseled quite another slant on things. That region, to be peaceful, has always demanded an overbearing force.

1508-1533	Safavid Dynasty of Iran ruled there
1533-1918	Ottoman
1917-1920	British occupation
1921-1958	Kingdom
1939-1945	World War II and British re-occupation
1958-1963	Republic
1963-2003	Baathist era. Saddam Hussein takes power in 1979
2003-2011	US occupation
2012-	We shall see

Mind you, this tabulation is too neat. There were regime changes during the Ottoman era as different elements of the Ottoman empire held power there. Civil and tribal wars as it were spiced up that period as well, and in the 1622-1638 period the Safavids held power again. There were coups, rebellions, and other messy situation throughout the Baathist era too. And the U.S. occupation was marked by almost constant combat.

Today my paper says that Al Maliki is embarrassing President Obama because the precious power-sharing arrangements that we forced into place there are breaking down at once. Pride—national, party, personal—prevents us from being realistic in public. Part of that is the phony pretense that our holy collective can never do wrong. Realists therefore are punished or marginalized and politicians make a huge pretense. Iraq was an unjust war, itself caused by pride. Obama did not approve of it, but now he too is dyed in the color of the same lie. It is for reasons such as the above that I assert that collectives are by definition inferior to individual humans; therefore the religion of nationalism is a kind of animal worship.

While on the subject. Iraq, the name of this place, harks back to the ancient city of Uruk once located in Sumer, the predecessor of the Akkadian, later the Babylonian empires. The Hebrew was Erech, the Latin Orchoi. It was located in the south-eastern part of today’s Iraq (link).

Calling Spades Qaeda

It’s extraordinarily difficult to make out what really goes on far away in war theaters—the reason being that our leaders and our media refuse to call a spade a spade. Now institutional anxieties within our military are causing more or less murmured agitation and advocacy for a continued role for troops in Iraq. And the reason for that (yes, you guessed it) is because amorphous Al-Qaeda is once more on the rise. But through the fog of war, PR, and proactive covering of rears, one can still with a little effort deduce what is really happening. And it strikes me that the Qaeda Thing—which our media insist on referring to as an organization—may not have anything to do with it—except lending a resonant label for something both simpler and more complicated.

There is a simple pattern here. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion a Sunni minority ruled a Shi’ite country. The Sunnis were forced from power, the Shi’ites took over. Sunni partisans mounted a resistance effort to the resulting occupation, but this activity has been renamed terrorism. Under General Petraeus some efforts succeeded in dampening down Sunni resistance by co-opting elements of Sunni tribal leadership. But the Sunni resistance was not thereby entirely extinguished. It continues to exist and, after departure of U.S. troops, will undoubtedly cause continued resistance—this time against the Shi’ite regime. But Sunni resistance has now been labelled Qaeda. Not because, in reality, there is a genuine organization that in any way resembles a coherent armed force. It is called that for political reasons because the word produces resonance.

What we have in Iraq now, had before we invaded, while we were there, and will have after we leave is a population group culturally distinct from the Shi’ite majority that refuses assimilation either into the Shi’ite majority or into the rather vaporous something we call a secular society ruled by democratic means and cohering by economic interest alone. That’s an imposition from the outside. When the opposition is labeled Baathist or Sunni, as it often is, but only in later clauses of media sentences, at least we’re close to spades. Qaeda is far away.

That our military leaders are anxious is also understandable. Once out of the line of fire overseas, they don’t want to be saddled with blame for the failure of a Mission that seemed to have been Accomplished long, long before it even began.

Al-Sadr and the Future

The U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. Just twenty-three days later, a 40-year old Shi’a cleric named Abdul Majid al-Khoei died of stab-would at a mosque in Najaf. Najaf is the third-holiest city of Shi’a Islam and, in Iraq, a kind of center of Shi’a politics. The man was the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Qasim al-Khoei. He was a moderate and revered leader of Shi’ites. For convenience I’ll call the father the Elder Khoei, the murdered son the Younger. The Elder was famed for opposing Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempts to unite all Shi’a jurists and was therefore viewed as a barrier to Khomeini’s ambitions to dominate the entire Shi’a world. Later, when, during the first Iraq war, George H.W. Bush called for a Shi’a uprising, the Elder Khoei published a fatwa calling for humane behavior by his followers and forbade vengeful attacks. Saddam Hussein arrested him when the U.S. did not quite follow through that first time around; the Elder was later released but died in 1992 while still under house arrest.

His son escaped and set up a resistance movement in London. No sooner had the U.S. invaded Iraq and, this time, signaled its intention to do the whole job, the Younger Khoei hastened to return to Iraq again and, no sooner arrived, began setting up a structure to organize the Shi’a clerics and, thus, taking up his father’s mantle. But he was stabbed to death—and because of that event, and because a young cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr was implicated in this assassination, I became aware of al-Sadr quite early and, in the process, aware also of the great complexities hidden in that social realm.

Al-Sadr comes from a rival section of the Shi’a clergy, his own father also a famed but dead leader, Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr. But the al-Sadrs represent a tradition less inclined to favor benign approaches whether to conflict or to the West. The killing of the Younger Khoei was a straightforward grab of power. And, indeed, soon after that, al-Sadr emerged as the defacto internal opposition to the American presence in Iraq. Patrick Cockburn, in a book entitled Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, gives us al-Sadr’s views. Asked what he thought of Saddam’s fall from power, Muqtada said: “The smaller devil has gone, but the bigger devil has come.” Muqtada never deviated from this course; never cooperated with the occupying power; raised, deployed, and controlled his Mahdi army; and but for his support today’s Prime Minister, al-Maliki, could never have taken power. Therefore, it seems to me, the future of Iraq and Muqtada al-Sadr are linked like Siamese twins—unless another assassin’s knife severs the two. But we shall see.

I come from a small country regularly overrun and dominated by bigger powers. Not that I experienced this, but I was steeped from childhood on in history of a certain flavor. When I see invaded countries’ leaders cooperating with us, names like Quisling rise spontaneously in my mind. And the less modern and commercialized the invaded culture is, the more often it has been oppressed from above—as Iraq was by the Ottomans, the British, the Americans and, inside that country, the Shi’ites by the Sunnis—the more I think a visceral resistance to the invader or oppressor must be given weight, at least in looking to the future. No. Democracy and the Hidden Hand are not at all innately loved objects of aspiration by traditional populations. The Civil War was singular—and happened too long ago to have left its marks deeply enough in the American soul—hence a certain naïveté permits us to engage, without much thought, in nation-building ventures. So let us watch Iraq evolve post December 2011 and learn something from the experience.

Righteous Indignation

Reading the news of departing Defense Secretary Gates’ comments concerning NATO members this morning, oddly perhaps, produced associations in me of a Wolf Blitzer interview with former President Carter some years ago. Gates criticized NATO countries of lack of enthusiasm in supporting the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The most quoted part of his speech follows:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

The NATO defensive alliance came to be formed, largely at U.S. initiative, to prevent Europe falling into the hands of the Communists. Thus it was de facto an anti-Russian alliance, but legally requires members to come to the aid of any other member nation that is attacked. Now a cold and sober view of today’s situation makes European reluctance to spend heavily on the Afghan war, be it bodies or money, quite understandable. The 9/11 attack on the United States was not by a state actor but by a terrorist group, it took place just shy of ten years ago. In that attack approximately 3,000 people lost their lives and several buildings were destroyed. The American response to this event has been way, way too excessive. It has spawned two costly wars of which Iraq was never linked to the 9/11 attack; the second began as an invasion of a country where the terrorists were located and trained their operatives. That war went far beyond destroying training camps and killing or dispersing the terrorists; it has morphed into a neo-imperialist venture under the new name of nation building.

At minimum Gates’ demands for heavy European participation in the Afghan war stretches the meaning of military alliance to unrecognizable shape. It has come to mean supporting U.S. military efforts, wherever they might take place and for whatever reason—just because, for reasons of our own, not out of any gratitude, we put airfields and troops all over Europe once to keep Europe from going communist.

So why does the Blitzer-Carter interview pop into my mind? Turns out that Gates’ speech and that interview have a common feature. They both represent distortions in reality. The New York Times positions the Gates’ story as righteous and appropriate. Blitzer displayed the same aggressive righteousness in using, back then, what struck me as an almost insulting tone when he interviewed President Carter. The occasion was Carter’s publication of a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book came out on November 14, 2006. The interview in CNN’s so-called Situation Room, took place on November 28. Carter had dared to look at Israeli behavior realistically and soberly rather than politically correctly. That last stance requires that Israeli behavior must always be presented as justified and right, whether it is or is not. Similarly the U.S. position and view of reality must always be seen as correct and right even when it has drifted into collective insanity.

Wars and Nations in These Latter Days

It’s fascinating to ponder how overwhelming military power based on huge wealth and technology have changed the nature of military conflict since the end of World War II—and in time when conflict has been swirling principally in regions that don’t really qualify as nations at all.

The last “conventional” war was the conflict between Iran and Iraq (1980-88). It’s length and horrors are not in our consciousness because it did not involve us directly; and because it did not involve overwhelming might and wealth, it harked back to the past. Our last conventional war was in Korea; it came soon after World War II. All other wars since have been of the guerrilla kind, including Vietnam and the Iraqi conflict. Iraq’s military melted away: no point in fighting shock and awe. Standing armies maneuvering over wide terrain have become temporarily obsolete. Conflict hasn’t disappeared but contenders have adapted to the American reality. Those who’d challenge us—or whose we choose to challenge—must remain invisible. They must make themselves indistinguishable from the population. They must inflict deadly damage in small but many times multiplied doses on relatively isolated pockets of the patrolling overlords. The actual fighting isn’t therefore between armies, corps, or army groups but small, ranger-style combat teams facing irregulars and road-side bombers.

Areas targeted by the us (we mustn’t really call them nations) are fragmented and therefore collectively incoherent jumbles of conflicting interests. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are obvious examples. If American force were removed from these places overnight, civil war would be the immediate consequence as these disturbed societies would once again attempt to establish a, for them, still mythical unity absent even before we came—except on the surface.

Each of these places represents a successor state to colonial rule of some sort—Ottoman, British, Russian, and the British Raj. Iraq? A rough-formed dumpling made of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish bits of dough left over by the Ottomans and re-formed by British imperial cooks. Afghanistan? The battle-ground of half-a-dozen civilizations, an unsymmetrical patchwork quilt of tribal peoples of whom Pashtuns are the most numerous—eleven different language groups. Pakistan? It was virtually impossible to separate just the Muslim parts of India and make a coherent state from it in the days of Ali Jinnah and the breakup of the British Raj. The Muslims are not all Sunni, the conflicts with the Shi’ite minority flare frequently. Nearly 3 million Hindus couldn’t quite make it out of there back in the British days. And on the western edge of the country are tribal areas literally escaping all effective rule—and these tribes intermixed and often in conflict too.

In Pakistan itself I discern five or six semi-independent forces: the military, the intelligence portion of the military, the nobility, the Sunni street, the Shi’ite minority, and the western tribes. Speaking of Pakistan as if it meant anything genuinely coherent is just a manner of speaking that remains without content until we understand exactly which parts we’re talking about and how these parts are currently aligned against and/or with others—and the ambiguous “and/or” is very pertinent to such areas as these. Not surprisingly we can intervene at will anywhere in Pakistan; there is no single power that effectively rules there.

The fighting itself is interesting. We move huge masses of troops, tanks, armor to distant lands. There we build, at vast expense, American settlements for them—with all of the necessary infrastructure not least huge embassies housed in city-sized palaces to govern over our presence. But the actual fighting is by tiny groups; ours arrive sometimes riding mules because the helicopters cannot land. Fighting is by exposure—to improvised explosive devices. Or by exposure—to sniper fire. Bombing is no longer deployed to destroy an opposing nation’s productive might. We spare factories and power plants; we need them for the soon-to-follow nation-building step. But building nations out of raw materials like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan requires millennia, not years. Bombing is of compounds or of vehicles moving on roads; collateral damage is therefore unavoidable.

But I note that our ways of thought remain behind, still rooted in modes of thinking appropriate for World War II. We still treat vast aggregations of jumbled ethnic and tribal societies as if they were nations; we act as if the enemy is centrally directed by the equivalent of a nation state; we go to war as if we’re facing armies when in fact we’re facing persistent but endlessly many pockets of resistance, people who already act as if they felt—in their bones, perhaps?—that civilization as we know is the past and not the future. But we keep stumbling, fumbling, flailing on. Why? Because we can still afford it? An image rises in my mind. It is of a theatrical company engaged in a performance. A tornado has just ripped up the theater and carried it off. The company remains on stage under the open sky, surrounded by ravaged trees. But the actors continue on; they voice lines with flawless enunciation, follow stage directions with strict discipline, stand before a mirror that just flew away, pretend to handle objects no longer there. Why? The show! It must go on!

Die Da!

The title is in German and simply means “Those there”; it’s pronounced “deed ahh.” We’ll get there. Long ago now we made a visit to the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany. We had family there. Tensions had eased enough to make the trip without concern. We went as a family, driving a little Opel we’d rented in the West, first to West then to East Berlin; we crossed at the famous Checkpoint Charlie and, once over there, navigated the horrendous bureaucratic wall (much worse than The Wall) to get permission to travel further inland. Finally we had the go ahead and zoomed off on a virtually empty autobahn into the East. It was the closest thing to time travel I’d ever engaged in: From booming West Germany in the 1970s we were suddenly transported to the 1940s. Time had literally frozen.

Some time after reunion with the family, late one morning on a weekend, Jonas, my brother-in-law (by profession he was a psychiatrist) headed out to buy the paper. Eager to see the papers myself I tagged along. We stopped at what looked like a tiny but well-stocked kiosk. I asked Jonas to point out the best paper to buy. He already had one in his hand. “Don’t bother,” he said. “There’s nothing in the papers.” Then, catching my pointed look at the paper he held, he laughed, dryly, and said: “It’s a sports paper.” His hand swept over a large display. “All of these are. Sports papers. That’s what we read here.” Intent on penetrating communism, I bought three of the ordinary papers for myself and later discovered the strangely fictional world projected by the authorities of the Deutsche Demokratische Repulik—unbelievably heroic figures of men and women who, in transports of joyous labor, climbed the steepest quota mountains and outperformed their eagerly following comrades in the production of plywood, steel, and even in milking cows.

Jonas took me on a walk and commented wryly on the strange realities on display everywhere in this frozen time. One of our stops was beside a damaged little car, a Trabant, the VW of the East. He showed me—and made me touch the surface of—its ripped fender so that I could experience a car the body of which was made of cardboard. We wandered long enough so that it was time for lunch, and on an impulse Jonas took me to a restaurant. It overflowed with masses of people, every table in crowded use. Some eight or nine people, two or three families, waited for a table. It looked like it was going to be a long wait. We were looking at each other, kind of questioning this decision, when three short, energetic, well-dressed men in suits entered the restaurant. Their leader immediately engaged the maitre’d in conversation. A fair amount of hand-waving went on; the leader spoke in a kind of stilted too-formal German. The maitre’d looked in deep pain; he seemed determined to prevail but, quite rapidly, folded. After a tiny shrug, he nodded and led the men inside to seat them somewhere—where it was impossible to see.

Jonas now looked at me. “Die da!” he said. Then he turned, and out of the restaurant we went. Communist party members in the DDR invariably wore a tiny round emblem on their lapels, the regime’s coat of arms. To indicate the identity of these worthies, East Germans had a habit of pointing a finger at the left-hand lapel and to say, Die da, the eternal them.

This memory suddenly surfaced the other day when I was reading a story about Iraq’s painfully forming democratic government. The DDR lasted from 1949 to 1990. How long would glorious new democracy reign in Iraq? And it struck me as odd that in that realm we were and are…Die da!

Principles, Realism...or What? Ooze?

One of the peculiar features of life in modern society—in which appeal to rationality and principles is but one of multiple options—is that processes that may have begun rationally enough, thus based on principle, can go on indefinitely for no good reason whatsoever. The war in Afghanistan is an example. Principles derived from game theory suggest that it’s rational to meet an attack with an equivalent counter-punch. Natural law permits self-defense. The corollary of this initial reaction is that if the other party then subsides, we should do the same. Escalation is bad strategy.

In modern times, however, where power appears to depend on the emotional state of large collectives, symbols used to rally the public take on an ever greater role. The 9/11 attack on three buildings was linked to a single person, Osama bin Laden, and an elusive movement called Al-Qaeda. We attacked both but did not achieve what we call “closure” today. But we did destroy bin Laden’s camp and drove Al-Qaeda underground. That should have satisfied us. After achieving that, we should have subsided. We did not.

We did not because symbols we raised and caused to become much larger than life persist. Our leadership raised those symbols to shape and manage public expectations, thus to maintain itself in power. And this process continued even after the leadership changed. Notice the evolution of the symbolism. It began with the names of one leader and one group. It became a “war on terror” (however one is to define that) or “Islamic terrorism,” which suddenly had us fighting all of Islam. We’ve also worshipped—ever since it escaped our grasp in Vietnam—something we’ve called Victory, and for the same reason. But this concept is sufficiently vague under current circumstances so that we cannot claim it. What is wrong?

Al-Qaeda had no borders. It just happened to have its camps in Afghanistan. We expanded the conflict to Afghanistan as a whole—and specifically to the Pashtun group that then controlled it, the Taliban—in search of a “closure” that had been expanded in definition to what? The eradication of a whole civilization or, at least, its way of life? A rational and principled response to an attack on one of our centers with an attack on the centers of those who presumably caused the attack on us has evolved into a war against Afghanistan and, because of very permeable borders, with parts of Pakistan. No end in sight. We’re now at war everywhere in a small way at least. In this process we’ve also engineered a war with Iraq for which no rational grounds existed at all.

I ponder this now that the definition of “victory” is once more complexifying. Evidently it means that Afghanistan must be turned into a republic recognizably like our own, with regular elections, a consumption culture, competing parties, a real economy, and people who look reasonably like our own so that we can finally relax. But this isn’t in the cards.

I wonder if humanity has ever encountered this particular problem before—namely one in which vast masses of voters, manipulated by symbols, call the shots without wishing to do so and cause the leaders to behave in entirely irrational ways that the public, although it does wish to do so, cannot stop.

The Turkish Context

I got to musing about the Ottomans yesterday—but in a modern context. We were discussing recent events in Iraq—and the ethnic patchwork that Iraq happens to be—and the power that once effectively governed it—the Ottomans for a long time, the “little sultan” Saddam Hussein more recently. The question arose: What does it take to stabilize such patchwork-quilts of hostile ethnicities? And the Ottoman techniques came to mind—namely an armed force and administrative apparatus which was, for centuries, an artificial culture-within-a-culture, above the ethnicities, disdainful of them but holding the sword.

The past in some ways is the present. We can see that if we suspend our faith in Progress. Change is certain, but what goes around comes around. The troubles in the Balkans had something to do with the USSR’s collapse. World War I began with a declaration of war by Austria against Serbia, one of the breakaway parts of the Ottoman realm. In the background were a series of earlier wars (Greek War of Independence, the Russo-Turkish War, the Bosnian Crisis, the First Balkan War) all of which were the consequence of a weakening Ottoman Empire. After World War I the Arab portions of the Ottoman domain became unstable—but had been in partial revolt earlier too. In the Middle East the Ottoman breakup has been followed by a century of frequently violent disorders—and no let-up in sight. Most recently the U.S. invasion has managed to destabilize Iraq. It remains to be seen if the American Way, not least its faith in democracy and money, will manage to subdue what hitherto could only be governed by force.

Seen from the Future

We have been listening today to the hearings of what the British call an Inquiry, sometimes the Chilcot Inquiry (after its chair, Sir John Chilcot), a body that here we would call a commission; here is the Inquiry’s web site. Prime Minister Gordon Brown established The Iraq Inquiry on June 15 of last year. Its mission, as articulated by Sir Chilcot: “We will … be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.” The way the yellow press would rephrase that is by saying: “Why did Britain get into the war? Was it dragged kicking and screaming by the Americans? Was Blair really Bush’s poodle?” The portion of the hearings broadcast today by CSPAN featured the testimony of Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications and Strategy to Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 2001-2003 period.

It was fascinating—in part because these Brits are so very eloquent, commissioners and witnesses both—because the tone is so much more conversational than in Congressional committee hearings where everybody seems to be posturing all the time—and because, in today’s instance, they got into the most awesome details on behind the scenes maneuvers, minute matters relating to the development and even the phrasing of dossiers on matter of intelligence, relating to personalities, to political, international, and bureaucratic relations, the tensions between the Americans and the Brits—and all this in what sounded to us as extraordinarily candid tones unimaginable in the United States.

One part of me—the glib intellectual surface—was enjoying this about like Brigitte enjoys watching Olympic skating events. Another, lower, more brutal part of me, in the process of trying to snatch a nap out of this daytime televiewing (lunch having just been had), began to grouse under the covers. As the fractal images became ever more complex at every enlargement —while sort of staying the same— my lower self wandered off into the future and wondered what they would say about all this in a time say about four hundred years out. By then this microscopic detail should have been compressed to the absolute basics. And the rude self came up with this:

America went to war because Baby Bush decided to take out Saddam if he had a chance, and he did have his chance with 911—his reason being that Papa Bush had gone wobbly in the same enterprise and drawn back from doing the job right. And Tony Blair had gone to war because he was not about to be the first British Prime Minister to part from the Americans and never mind that his public was massively against anything of the sort. As for secondary reasons, the future (four centuries out), still dreaming of the oil that had been, would also say that oil had played a role, on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bush clan, after all, came out of oil, not hard liquor, like the Kennedys. And Blair, a kind of continental born-again, had a bit of the crusader about him and Saddam enough of Satan to fit the bill.

Whoa, whoa! I cried (mentally) hearing this diatribe. What do you mean the future? What you’re unrolling here is the not-too-distant past. These were your very thoughts when the Iraq war was building. And don’t you remember my urging you to grow up and become a little more measured and analytical?

My lower self suffers being silenced, but not without a parting shot or two. He reminded me that we both had an uncle who, echoing millions in Europe, was sure that World War II was entirely due to arms manufacturers who wanted to have higher sales. And, he adds, before trying for a nap again, Eisenhower knew that—and called for the curbing of the Military-Industrial Complex after the war was over and he’d gotten what he wanted.

Not easy to live with my lower self. No it isn’t.

This Conquest May Be Hazardous to Your Culture

Flet victus, victor interiit. The conquered mourns, the conqueror’s undone.
[Roman proverb]

When this old saw is carefully unpacked, a task historians routinely accomplish long after each major upheaval, it turns out that conquerors are transformed by their victories and the culture of the conquered ultimately triumphs. We speak of a Graeco-Roman culture because Rome conquered Greece in a contest that extended over fifty-five years and ended in 146 BC. In the wake of that conquest wave after wave of Hellenistic culture transformed Rome permanently. And we, mostly descendants of the barbarians who, in the late and morbid stages of the Roman Imperium, invaded and conquered Italy, absorbed its superior culture and became its inheritors by a kind of osmosis.

Remembering this sort of thing is unavoidable for folks like me who grew up head down over big thick books—and our minds filled with the nightmare from which James Joyce tried to awaken—when we note the preparations for withdrawal from Shiite Iraq just as we step up our efforts to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A while back now I read a book entitled What Is Life? written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in which the authors present the fascinating hypothesis that evolution proceeded in part by creature eating creature, thus by conquest, as it were. To be sure, this was not the only mechanism of change, but it is thought to be one. Ingested creatures, if small enough, may find a new home inside their eater and sink anchor into the alien soil and turn into symbionts. My own earlier excursions into the nightmare of biology (echoing Joyce) had prepared me to accept this. The presence in the cell of mitochondria, little structures with their own DNA and reproductive cycles, little oxygen-generating power plants that supply the cell’s energy, seemed to say that cells have immigrants who came from elsewhere.

Other examples from a larger scale aren’t hard to find. In the New York Times the other day (June 30, 2009) is a brief story headlined When a Hybrid Takes Hold, The Outcome Can be Bad. Hybridization. The story deals with a new hybrid salamander produced in Salinas Valley in California when barred tiger salamanders, brought to the region from Texas by bait dealers, escaped and began to mate with the native California tiger salamanders. The resulting larvae, which are the food of the California newt and the Pacific chorus frog, were radically different and nearly did in all the frogs. New hybrids are sometimes indigestible, and not just in this case.

This, in turn, reminds me of “as above, so below”—which might be extended to say, “and in the middle too.” If we don’t want our culture to change, therefore, we must avoid both conquest and absorption—and we mustn’t mate with folks our parents don’t approve of. Good luck…