The events in North Africa and the Middle East, especially in Libya, makes me wonder: what would be happening now in Iraq if we hadn’t arrogantly invaded it?
In 2003, I was one of those who believed that there was no easy way to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime. There was no opposition party; all the possible rebels had been gassed and murdered by Saddam’s military, no other nation in the Middle East wanted to get involved in a war with them, and Hussein certainly wasn’t old enough to die very soon of natural causes.
But war? A war started by America, as the only way to get rid of Hussein? I couldn’t buy that. There was no humanitarian crisis or oil shortage or threat to Israel great enough, in my opinion, to justify America becoming an aggressor nation.
However, rich, corrupt, power-mad immoral men like Cheney and Wolfowitz and the rest of that gang decided that war would be a perfect cover for their plan to transfer billions of dollars from the US Treasury to private interests and criminals. Expending our military hardware and erasing the lives of several thousand American soldiers helped cover up the real crime. And the devastation visited upon a modern industrialized country, reducing it to a ragged war zone with little or no security?. Well, that never entered into Cheney and company’s considerations. “So?” as Dick would grunt.
The only answer, it seemed to me, was to wait until conditions and attitudes change, and see if there was another way – without massive military intervention.
I wrote this essay back in September of 2006, on my own webpage (which nobody ever read), long before I came to Dkos. I came pretty close to what really happened.
“…the earthshaking story here is not Muslim outrage but the universal Muslim media – something that did not exist forty or even fifteen years ago. The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (international transmissions), Abu Dhabi TV, Metro TV in Indonesia, and the two most-watched news channels in the Arab world -- Al-Arabiya and the notorious Al-Jazeera -- didn’t even exist before 1996. Some of these new TV networks are barely five years old. Before that there was only local imams controlling their own congregations and repressive state government’s propaganda and staged “riots” in their own countries. The reason some publicity-seeking Muslims make protests and violence is because the Muslim world, so long isolated and divided by its own leaders, is now being unified and connected through a universal media no ayatollah or despot can keep out.
“When the Taliban was being driven out in town after town in Afghanistan by the US-backed forces, everything it had banned magically re-appeared: caged songbirds, kites – and satellite TV dishes. Muslims are tuning into their media universe by the hundreds of thousands if not millions, seeing things on TV their governments or religious leaders don’t want them to see. The satellite TV age and shrewd Muslim businessmen combined to feed a ready and burgeoning market with networks and shows specifically tailored to the Muslim world (Did you there’s a Turkish version of “The Nanny” as a Muslim?). This is why Muslims in Indonesia can see footage of Muslims in Egypt denouncing Western cartoons one day, and become the chanting outraged Muslims seen by Muslims watching Muslim networks in London that evening.
“That a single flashpoint event can rocket through and be felt by virtually the entire worldwide Muslim community in a matter of days is definitive proof that the extremists, fundamentalists, the despots and rigid-minded ayatollahs have lost. Sure, right now it seems that the only thing Muslims are sharing over this bonding system is denunciation, outrage and violence, but that may be because the motto of the Muslim network news directors may be the same as that of Western ones: “If it bleeds, it leads.” We see the violence and demonstrations because that’s what sells – just like Americans by the millions tune into crime and violence TV shows and pass on C-SPAN.
“This violence and rejection of the West is not the beginning of a new holy war between the West and Islam – it is the death spasms of a cultural shock change. In his 1950 book, “Childhood and Society”, Erik Eriksen, renowned psychoanalyst and research clinician, addresses identity and role confusion, not only in a human being but in societies:
“’Adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies: they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity.”
“If anything squarely explains Muslim terrorist’s acts, rhetoric, and suicidal missions, this does. The “discomfort” is the forces of change crushing in upon the formerly cloistered Islamic existence, as Eriksen goes on to explain:
“’The readiness for such testing also explains the appeal on the minds of the youth of such countries or classes as have lost or are losing their group identities (feudal, agrarian, tribal, national) and face world-wide industrialization, emancipation, and wider communication’ ”. (my italics)
“This "’loss of group identity’" can also surely include one of religion.
“ The Muslims we see on TV are angry, yes – frustrated by their poverty, inability to change their governments, lack of opportunity, lack of dignity. They vent their anger against the West because it’s the traditional enemy, strange and foreign, and it's easy to hate distant vague foes. (Much like the disgruntled people in some colonies dominated by a foreign power in the 1770’s, who wrote inflammatory rhetoric, rioted, destroyed foreign property, and even fought openly). But the desire to rebel is corrosive and eventually it touches everything in the rebel’s world: these people will realize soon enough that they face evil forces much closer to home that are hated more because they have caused intimate and personal pain … the power they find in media coverage they will turn against these internal enemies with much greater effect and force. Who can forget the powerful memories of Tiananmen Square, which to this day the Chinese government must suppress and deny otherwise they would blow the country open?
“The first signs of this newfound power in the Muslim world are the protests in Lebanon, and in Egypt. The most powerful liberation force is ideas, not military might, no matter what the Bush Gang proclaims. Once the people find something that is theirs, and someone wants to take it away, they are not going to give it up. Personal property is a universal concept. Maybe people will give it up temporarily if forced to, like the Afghans who buried their satellite dishes in the desert while the Taliban was around. But the people know they have it, this thing they were given – and even if they don’t have it in hand they have it in mind, and they keep it alive and pass it on to their children as a promise. That is the poison pill to dictators, fanatic terrorists, ironfisted religious leaders – all the people in the Muslim world who controlled or tried to control everything in Islam but now see their power slipping inexorably away….”
“…If the US really wanted to positively impact the Muslim world, if it wanted to spread the idea of democracy (which is a scary concept to some non-Americans - the right of self-determination is what they should call it) and change across the Middle East, the worst possible way was by sending in the troops. It would have been easier, cheaper, much less destructive and incredibly effective to work with the tool that is already rapidly emplacing in Islam: universal media reach. Give every village an electric generator, a dozen TV satellite dishes and matching TVs and say “’Here you go, it’s a gift to you from the US, we’re outta here.’” Then isolated and eager Muslim communities could tune into the world over the airwaves, getting a rush of information that would impact their ways of thinking and living in ways no one would ever have imagined. And the future would come, maybe not painlessly, but honestly.”
And so it is happening, just like that. It’s hard to believe that an untrained professional like myself could see this coming yet the people in charge of US foreign policy, with reams of intelligence information at their command, missed it completely.
So what WOULD have happened in Iraq, now, if we hadn’t blasted our way into it and caused so much grief, resentment, and destruction? Again, I’m just a guy without a high State Department classification but I’d say watch what happens in Libya. Here you have a brutally-repressed people and non-existant opposition, an unbalanced leader who tortures and murders to maintain power and is now willing to use guns and warplanes on his own people, in a country that is fractured by intense tribal divisions, has an oil-based economy, , and whose power elite represent a very small fraction of the country’s ethnic/tribal make-up. Iraq with Saddam was pretty much the same thing. So watch what happens to Ghadahfi and Libya. I’m pretty sure he’s gone, even if he doesn’t know it yet. And then counter that against thousands dead, a trillion-dollar war debt, a nation conquered, divided and violent, the American international reputation desecrated, personal freedom in America severely curtailed, and you choose which was the better thing to do.