The other night, as I watched the engrossing, if challenging, film
Syriana, I was struck by the
portrayal of the grim, shabby lives of the oil workers for the vastly wealthy Saudi families -- those "pliant dictators in oil-producing countries" enabled by U.S. intelligence operations, "the American penchant for military intervention," and Texan oil CEOs (whose idea of recreation is a canned hunt on Texas ranches, an apt metaphor for how they like to set up their business deals).
The CEOs, the Middle East dictators, and the U.S. and Israeli policy makers -- utterly removed from the low wages, terrible housing, lack of health care, and family crises of their worker bees (including minimum wage workers in the U.S.) -- think that military might, invasions, and submissive compliance of their own citizens, by ratcheting up fears of terrorist attacks, will keep their populations in check.
Syriana "opens with a shot of desi oil workers struggling to get onto a crammed Tata bus. ..."
Later in the movie, a shady oil company merger triggers layoffs. A Sikh foreman gets on a megaphone to Pakistani workers, telling them they've been fired, they must surrender their badges, and unless they find another job soon they have to report to immigration within two weeks and be deported. ("Sepia Munity")
In the ongoing Lebanon crisis, while the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other nations fail to "get it," Hezbollah has emerged victorious -- not because of its daily rain of rockets on Israel but because it has grown grassroots support in the alleys and streets of the less-advantaged Shiites of southern Lebanon.
So writes a U.S. Marine infantry officer who served in Iraq in "Learning From Hezbollah" printed in the op-ed pages of today's Washington Post.
Marine officer Brian E. Humphreys concludes:
The lessons should be clear. To engage in insurgency or counterinsurgency -- fancy terms for grass-roots politics by other means -- one must be willing and, most of all, able to work in the underbelly of local politics, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. It is the politics of getting people jobs, picking up trash and getting relatives out of jail. Engaging in this politics has the potential to do much more than merely ingratiate an armed force with a local population. It gives that force a mental map of local pressure points and the knowledge of how to press them -- benignly or otherwise -- to get desired results.
Some may say that this is just standard insurgency-counterinsurgency doctrine. True, but one has to ask why Hezbollah has been able to pull it off in Lebanon, while young Americans continue to endure a host of nasty surprises in Iraq.
I've been thinking about this for some time.
In a comment at No Quarter the other day, I posed some of my thoughts when I wondered aloud why Israel and the U.S. didn't, instead of spending untold millions on cluster bombs and tanks, support the Lebanese government with aid that matched, per capita, the aid that Israel and Egypt get annually (around $3 billion each). And what if that aid were closely monitored so that a more than fair share went to the poorer Shiites of southern Lebanon, supplanting the generous aid that Hezbollah currently gives those Shiites.
The Russians and Iranians are ready to pour millions into rebuilding southern Lebanon. Why haven't Israel and the U.S. offered the same?
The Gulf
Not that gulf. This gulf: "From my first day in Iraq as a young infantry officer, I was struck by the huge perceptual gulf that separated us from the Iraqis," writes Humphreys.
It is a huge disconnect:
At a deeper level, the motives of the local populace [in Iraq] remained largely invisible to us, as people smiled one minute and attempted to blow us up the next. We knew little or nothing about their grievances and aspirations, or where the political fault lines ran in the cluster of small cities in the Sunni Triangle we were tasked with pacifying.
We experienced many periodic spasms of violence that seemed to come out of nowhere before disappearing again. Of course they came from somewhere, but it was a somewhere we didn't understand. In a battalion of more than 800 men, we had one four-man team assigned to interact directly with the local population, and even this team was frequently sidetracked to deal with routine translation duties or interrogations.
The U.S. and Israeli military approach is a clear failure, especially contrasted to "Hezbollah's success as an effective practitioner of the art of militarized grass-roots politics."
The news out of Lebanon has millions of people thinking. In the August 5th story, "War News From Lebanon Gives Egyptians a Mirror of Their Own Desperation," the NYT observes from Cairo:
The scene has become routine: day and night, in small, run-down teahouses all over this teeming city, men sit quietly smoking harsh tobacco from water pipes with their eyes glued to television news from Lebanon. And around the city, there is a similar reaction: despair.
Not despair over Lebanon -- that provokes anger. The hopelessness has begun to boil over as Egyptians see their own country's problems in the mirror of Lebanon. They are feeling the powerlessness of living under an autocratic system, and confronting the poverty and corruption of their third-world economy.
It's clear that unrest is growing throughout the Middle East, and not because of "Islamo fascists."
Syriana's oil company CEOs and dictators don't see, or care, about how they amass their wealth and power:
South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the great mass of the population. [Dubai's] building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat... Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor."
Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an exposé on Dubai, "The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British." ...
Dubai's helots are also expected to be generally invisible. The bleak work camps on the city's outskirts, where laborers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, are not part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury without slums or poverty. In a recent visit, even the United Arab Emirate's Minister of Labor was reported to be profoundly shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor. Yet when the laborers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested. ... ("Sepia Munity")
As the Syriana character Prince Nasir Al-Subaai says about the United States, "When a country has five percent of the world's population but spends fifty percent of the world's military spending, that country's persuasive power is in decline."
Persuasive power. Ah yes. The old-fashioned diplomacy now so out of favor with the Bush administration, despite the pleas of many for dialogue. It was rather poignant, last night on PBS's The Charlie Rose Show, to listen to Imad Moustapha, Syria's Ambassador to the United States, ask for the communications that Syria has had with the U.S. in the past.
It was even more poignant to listen to former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke yesterday say that he was glad to get a chance to speak out on the current Middle East crises. Holbrooke told NPR's Day to Day that he "believes the continued U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon could spark a wider regional war -- and that it's a bigger threat than the Cuban Missile Crisis." (Listen.)
If only Holbrooke -- or George Mitchell or others -- were enlisted to talk with Syria and Iran, and if only the U.S. State Department (or other U.S. agency) were drafted to dispense monitored aid that helped the ordinary citizens of Lebanon and other Middle East countries.
Guns or butter? Or butter and guns? Writes Humphreys:
Whatever the objective truth of Hezbollah's motives, its many supporters in southern Lebanon believe fervently that it is their organization, not an Iranian surrogate. Few if any American units in Iraq have achieved anything close to this level of success in winning the support of the local population. (Of more concern is the fact that few Iraqi security units or political leaders appear to have done so, either.) Commanders have come and gone, elections have been held, Iraqi soldiers trained, all manner of strategies for dealing with the insurgency attempted -- but with only limited and localized successes. Hezbollah's success among civilians in Lebanon, which is only reinforced by a ruthless pummeling from a reviled enemy, contrasts sharply with the continued fragility of the much more modest U.S. gains in Iraq, achieved at a much higher price.
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A variation is posted at No Quarter.