We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Ralph Peters bangs one out of the park today, echoing and expanding on the sentiment behind my earlier post on “I hope we win”. A few tidbits:
The truth is that today’s media shape reality – often for the worse. The media form a powerful strategic factor. They’re actors, not merely observers.
The media is a key strategic factor today. And it is profoundly dishonest for so powerful a player to pretend it bears no responsibility for strategic outcomes.
The selectivity with which the news is reported shapes opinion, here and abroad. The news we see, hear and read from Iraq is overwhelmingly bad news. Thus, the picture the American electorate and foreign audiences receive is one of spreading failure – even though our occupation has made admirable progress.
We’re on the way to talking ourselves into defeat in the face of victory. Much of the media has already called the game’s outcome as a loss before we’ve reached half-time. Even though the scoreboard shows we’re winning.
To an extent few journalists will admit, terror as we know it depends on the media as its accomplice, amplifying the terrorist’s deeds and shaping successes out of terrorist failures – the opposite of the media’s approach to American efforts.
From the terrorists’ perspective, 9/11 was, above all, a media event – a global demonstration of their power.
This is not an argument for propaganda, or for turning our press into mindless red-white-and-blue cheerleaders. But the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence.
The terrorists, from Arafat to Hussein to bin Laden, all count on the media as a critical element in their campaigns, relying on the faux objectivity of “the cycle of violence” and moral relativism to conceal their barbarity, counting on the instinctive oppositionism of the Western media to undermine support for the war, and relying on the “news appeal” of bad news to give their side the bully pulpit while draining the life out of our victories.
The media have to understand that they are not neutral bystanders, but, against their will, have been made into combatants in this war. The only question is, whose side will they aid? So far, the verdict is pretty clear that the mainstream media, unwitting as it is, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as “Pierre55”, suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.
There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington…
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing out this Reuters story. It seems Polish force have found some brand spanking new 2003 dated French Roland missiles in an Iraqi arms dump.
It just goes to show: where there’s a customer, there’s a way.
The third post by Our Man in Basra about his observations from both Iraq and the West, to which he has now returned.
I have noticed that most Westerners tend to form one of two opinions about the situation in Iraq and about what we should be doing. One opinion is what I would call Idealistic. Iraqis are human beings just like us and so deserve democracy and freedom just like us. Therefore we should give them these things, as soon as possible. This viewpoint seems to be held by Americans who do not work with actual Iraqis, and by many libertarians.
The second opinion, which I shall call Realistic, is that the Iraqis are fundamentally different people to us. They have a different culture, a different religion, are basically untrustworthy, and uncivilised. They like stealing from and killing each other. They need a brutally authoritarian regime to keep them in order, and basically we are wasting our time trying to teach them anything else. This point of view tends to be held by those who deal with Iraqis day-to-day and is most acutely felt by ex-Idealistic Americans who simply cannot understand people who, instead of repairing their country, trash it.
The problem with the Idealistic theory is that Iraqis have been traumatised by thirty five years of brutal kleptocracy. They have no experience or understanding of what democracy, or even freedom, actually mean. For example, the end of Saddam’s rule in Basra was taken by most Basrans to mean the end of traffic rules as well, so they now drive like suicide bombers.
This is similar to what occurred in Central Europe after communism. Most people had little understanding of what a free market meant. They tended to think that capitalism meant a free license to rip off your customers. They also expected that the coming of freedom would mean instant wealth like in the West. They took a while to realise that it meant the freedom to build yourself wealth like in the West. The same is true, but twenty times more, in Iraq. At least the Central Europeans had a past history of civil freedom, and neighbours to learn from. None of this is true for the Iraqis.
The Realistic viewpoint, on the other hand, is intrinsically, if unconsciously, racist. There are objective differences between Iraqis and Westerners due to Islamic faith and tribal traditions. But these are not genetically encoded and impossible to change. In fact there are aspects of both Islam and of tribal traditions that are perfectly compatible with democracy and freedom. And indeed, the argument that Iraqis are lazy and stupid simply does not reflect the facts to be seen on the streets of Basra. You can see Iraqis driving cars that are little more than steering wheel, engine and a few road tires, but they keep them moving. They may be destroying their own infrastructure, but they show incredible determination and inventiveness while doing so.
What astounds me about both viewpoints, which are held by many intelligent people, is how absurdly simplistic they are. Iraqis are for the most part rational people, whose behaviour can be rationally explained. They react rationally to the environment they are in, which includes their experience under Saddam and their fear of his return. It may not make sense to give them complete democracy and freedom immediately and this point was made to me often by Iraqis, who insist that we should not try to govern Iraq with Western laws. They keep saying that Iraqis are different and need a strong fist.
But to suggest that Iraqis cannot learn to operate in a free and capitalist society is absurd. The problem here is the time scale. Neither viewpoint seems to take account of what of the blindingly obvious – you cannot rebuild the entire Iraqi society in a matter of months. The war ended at the end of May and we have only had four months so far. The reconstruction of Germany after World War II took about a decade.
Having been in Basra for some months, I am convinced, as are most Iraqis, that it will be a rich and prosperous city somewhere around five to ten years from now. As long as Iraqis have security from Ba’athists and from the neighbouring states, they will achieve this themselves. But with the French manoeuvring to give the UN political primacy in Iraq, the question is not: will Iraq be rebuilt, but who will get the credit?
There is little doubt there has been a perceptual disconnect between the reports from the hotel bar in Baghdad and those of virtually everyone else on the scene. The difficulty for someone sitting a long distance away is to judge who really is the more accurate.
Lazarus Long, or more accurately his creator Robert Heinlein, said “If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.”
Earlier this month I decided to take a closer look at the relevant figures. I’ve been tracking the results on a day by day basis ever since. As it is now the end of the month, I am publishing my results.
D.Amon, all rights reserved, may be used with attribution to Samizdata
The graph is rather striking in its clarity. There are three phases visible. March and April are quite obviously the period of major combat. The second is May; combat deaths plummet to almost nothing while the accident rates skyrocket. The third period is one of minor combat. Accident rates fall drastically but combat deaths climb to a minor peak before tailing off slowly. At present the combat death rate is running an almost insignificant amount over the accident rate.
My interpretation of the graph is:
- March and April are clearly the period of major combat.
- May is a postcombat month. Remnants of the regime are dispersed and disorganized. There are a lot of dangerous ordinance laying about. Soldiers are tired, ease up slightly and have more accidents because of it.
- June through the present is a period of low intensity conflict. One can read the state of the opposing forces in the short-lived secondary peak followed by a long tail off. That tail-off is their journey into oblivion.
It will be interesting to see if the end comes with a bang or a whimper. One could imagine a last desperate and suicidal offensive by the remaining Saddamites. Alternatively, if Saddam is calling the shots and is taken out of the picture the remnants might just quit and go elsewhere. The most likely scenario – in my opinion – is an exponential tail-off in as the remnant forces are killed or captured
I think our attitude toward America should change … we have a chance, in America, to be the moral leadership of America. The problem is when? It will happen, it will happen [Allah willing], I have no doubt in my mind, Muslims sooner or later will be the moral leadership of America. It depends on me and you, either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country. And I [think] if we are outside this country we can say ‘Oh, Allah destroy America,’ but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it.
– Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a prominent American Muslim leader
Islamic culture gets bashed quite enough in the blogosphere without me sticking my oar in, but I wonder what the kumbayah singing disciples of multiculturalism think of this?
A strict Kurdish Muslim who slit his daughter’s throat after she started seeing a Christian boy has been jailed for life. Abdalla Yones, 48, tried to commit suicide after murdering 16-year-old Heshu and pleaded with the Old Bailey to pass a death sentence on him. Heshu was beaten for months before the “honour killing” and had planned to run away from home, begging her father to leave her alone.
The court heard Yones was “disgusted and distressed” by her relationship with an 18-year-old Lebanese student and launched a frenzied attack at their family home in Acton, west London. Heshu was stabbed 11 times and bled to death from her throat being cut.
Sentencing Yones, Judge Neil Denison said: “This is, on any view, a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of western society.”
Or more correctly, a tragic story arising out of an Islamic Kurdish culture with no real notion of objective moral truth beyond what they have been told is written in some book and a Western one which at least imperfectly aspires to find such a thing.
All cultures have problems, flaws and idiocies but that does not therefore mean all cultures are equal. When Islamic culture is not tempered by secular influences, it is particularly prone to produce monstrous crimes like this one. Not that irrational secular creeds cannot produce evils aplenty (such as fascism and other forms of socialism), but at least most strains of Western Christianity and Judaism have had their more demented fundamentalist edges worn off by centuries of secularism.
Brave individuals can use reason to transcend the confines of their culture, but all cultures are not the same and I do so wish some people would stop pretending otherwise.
There are those who think the United Nations does a good job of “nation building”. I’m among those who think otherwise and I’m happy to see there are those in “high places” who agree with me:
When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems it can create a dependency. For example East Timor is one of the poorest countries in Asia yet the capital is now one of the most expensive cities in Asia, local restaurants are out of reach for most the Timorees and cater to international workers who are paid probably something like 200 times the local average local wage. At the cities main supermarket prices are reportedly on a power with London and New York or take Kosovo a driver shuttling international workers around the capital earns 10 times the salary of the University professor, 4 years after the war the United Nations still run Kosovo by executive fiat. Decisions made by the elected local parliament are invalid without the signature of a U.N. Administrator and still to this day Kosovo ministers have U.N. overseers with the power to approve or disapprove their decisions. Now that’s just a different approach I’m not saying that maybe okay for Kosovo but my interest is to see if we can’t do it in a somewhat different way. Our objective is to encourage Iraqi independence by giving Iraqis more and more responsibility over time for the security and governance of their country.
I find myself in violent agreement with SecDef Rumsfeld yet again.
You cannot train an army over night. You certainly cannot instantly ingrain alien concepts like “human rights” into rebuilt remnants of Iraq’s security forces. It takes time but we are now seeing results.
Iraq’s own forces are now controlling the Iran-Iraq border. Congratulations to them, and congratulations to the fine people who trained them.
With solid foundations in place, we will now be seeing Iraqi’s take over their own security at an accelerating pace.
Our Man in Basra (now back in the UK) has some thoughts on the difference between how the media reported Gulf War 1991 and how they reported Gulf War 2003 and why that matters.
During the Gulf War of 1991, media reporting went something like this: About a month of showing pictures, entirely controlled by the US military, of Allied airplanes flying over Iraq, followed by the announcement by General Schwarzkopf that the war was over and we had won.
Although they had their suspicions, none of the journalists, all kept behind the lines in Riyadh, knew that Allied troops had crossed the border into Iraq until three days after the ground offensive had started, the Republican Guard in Kuwait had been virtually destroyed, and Schwarzkopf announced victory. This severely limited the opportunity for the media to criticise the conduct of the ground war.
The above is a simplification, but it covers in essence the way the media war was fought in 1991 – by the journalists out there, by the military out there, and as it was seen by everyone else on their TVs. Naturally, the military regarded this as a great success. Equally naturally, the media regarded it as a disaster. The viewing public generally seemed satisfied, bar a few dedicated peaceniks, who wanted pictures of military screw-ups.
Two factors therefore set the context for the reporting of Gulf War 2003. First, the media were determined not to allow the military to keep them away from ‘the story’, the way they were kept away in 1991. → Continue reading: The media in the Gulf
It is a beautiful day here in London, the sun is shining, I am looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend in the countryside. So this story comes along to make me lose a bit more sleep at night.
Whatever you think about George W. Bush’s pre-emption doctrine – and I confess to being a bit more doubtful than some more hawkish folk – this is worrying. Iran may still be some way off from developing nuclear weapons, but it appears the threat is getting closer. Stay tuned.
Another ‘truth’ constantly parroted at us is bin Laden would never work with Saddam. As with the bin Laden was trained by the CIA meme, it can be difficult to remember or find the refuting evidence when you need it. Fortunately, someone has done it for us.
It is a good summary, but Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) left out at least one item.
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