Wednesday, April 7, 2004 |
16:51 - State of a Different Union
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2004_01-03/deatkine_iraq/deatkine_ir
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If you're interested in getting a nice, thorough, realistic view of the state of things in Iraq, you could certainly do worse than this piece by Norvell B. DeAtkine, forwarded to me by JMH. It's by no means a glowing report, but it provides a better-fleshed-out picture of what's really going on than what most of the commercial media outlets are letting filter through, for reasons that become clear in the narrative.
It's a great portrait of the various factions in the country and what they all mean to each other, and what the prospects for democracy really are, not to mention what would be likely to happen if we were to pull out before the proper infrastructure for government is set up, or to turn it over the the illustrious United Nations.
Feedback from focus sessions and my own conversations with educated Iraqis confirm that there is an association of democracy with chaos. Moreover the lack of a civil society or even a civic consciousness in Iraq will be a monumental and long-term problem to solve. It entails reeducating the entire Iraqi society. For example, Oxford University conducted the most comprehensive survey of Iraqi attitudes in the November-December timeframe and discovered that seventy-nine percent of the population did not trust the Coalition. Of course, this was the news in the American media. The much more relevant finding, however, was that less than ten percent trusted their neighbors. This is the effect of thirty-five years of Ba’ath rule and intimidation. An entire society had been corrupted. This endemic distrust among all the Iraqis, even to the point some Iraqis would not tell their relatives that they worked with the Coalition, is no doubt the greatest obstacle to the implementation of democracy. The same survey indicated the Iraqis overwhelmingly welcomed democracy, rejected the idea of a religious government, and did not consider democracy some sort of nefarious Western import, as many of the religious Ulama preach.
Also don't miss the discussion of Kurdistan, what the cities there are like, how astonishingly modern and optimistic an area it is-- and how bewildering to them our policy of trying to pacify the Sunnis with magnanimous gestures must be, considering that the Kurdish cities are such a good example of what we'd like places like Baghdad and Basra to become.
We're getting there, but succeeding will take time. I'm sure everybody understands that, including the people who want us to get it over with in a matter of weeks. (We know what they're hoping for.)
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