GO to .....DC on Saturday. Road2DC
Raise A Little Hell! I can't demystify the Iraq Occupation, the Iraq War of Attrition, the Rape of Iraq for Oil, the Imperialist Iraq Incursion....I can't do it all by myself anymore!!!
I need your help. Because when you come right down to US boots on the ground, it looks like this from far, far away:
This is an Iraq War diary, but hang on to your hat, because we're going to take the trip I took not long ago. Enjoy the music! Click the screen for Queen.
Our beautiful marble comes down to very little land mass:
That's it, folks. That's all she, Mother Nature, wrote. Very small amount of habitable land at that. We are so lucky to be living in the richest nation on earth!! Most of the US is quite comfortable and habitable except for the 30% that is being DESERTIFIED, but more on that below. The point is that the strongest social organizations are a direct response to mortal threats, like famine and drought.
The blue areas in the map are soothing, inviting, reminding me of beaches and relaxing vistas, our primordial roots. But none of the blue areas of water, absolutely none of that water is drinkable.
Most of the rest of the earth is not habitable. Not at all. Life is a bitch of a struggle on a daily basis, and not because of poverty alone. The Fates have placed many of our brethren in some ruthless barren places where all the money in your pocket won't buy you a drink of water and all the money in the world won't buy you a meal!! Best to plan ahead, and stay out of troubled climes like these...
(Have a look at this map first)
Asia contains some 1.7 billion hectares of arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid land reaching from the Mediterranean coast to the shores of the Pacific.
[snip]
Degraded areas include expanding deserts in China, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan, the sand dunes of Syria, the steeply eroded mountain slopes of Nepal, and the deforested and overgrazed highlands of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. In terms of the number of people affected by desertification and drought, [Asia] is the most severely affected continent.
Latin America and the Caribbean, although better known for their rain forests, are actually about one-quarter desert and dry lands. Poverty and pressure on land resources are causing land degradation in many of these dry areas.
[snip]
Much of the [Saharan] Northern Mediterranean region [of Africa] is semi-arid and subject to seasonal droughts. It is also marked by high population densities, heavy concentrations of industry, and intensive agriculture. Mediterranean land degradation is often linked to poor agricultural practices.
The level of soil degradation is high through much of Central and Eastern Europe, and very high in some parts, for example along the Adriatic.
30% of the land in the United States is affected by desertification.
Local rock stars are good hunters. Small tribes' villagers know that when their Jagger or their Bono goes into the bush (if they even live near a hunt-able area where there are small animals), their clan will eat. Water nearby will provide essential sustenance, but drought will mean death certain or a hazardous migration where several of the clan will die.
We're seeing drought in a large swath of our limited land areas. Desertification is where you thought it was, in the deserts, but it is also happening in unlikely places like the Middle East and, as we now know, further east. (Warning: 261-page .pdf file from UNESCO, but well worth every single page...
HEY! Where am I?
This map above is a close up map of Afghanistan (and if you don't speak Farsi, well, good luck to you just pronouncing the village names!)
It's been diaried in so many places, but nobody seems to suss the thing right. Look here:
...and here:
...I love maps...
If you travel southern Russia...
...from Ukraine to Turkmenistan, and northward to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and east to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and west again to Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and south to Saudi Arabia, and Oman, Yemen and further west across the Red Sea to Eritrea and Djibouti, throughout Africa to Kenya and Tanzania to Congo....
...you will find local people who identify themselves as members of one tribe or another with no regard for any of their current geopolitical bordered nationalities.
In Iraq...
Many Iraqis identify more or less strongly with a tribe ('ashira), and some feel a stronger loyalty to their clans or tribes than to any national government. Thirty of the 150 or so identifiable tribes in Iraq are the most influential. Tribes are grouped into federations (qabila). Below the level of the tribe, there are the clan (fukhdh), the house (beit) and the extended family (khams).
Among Muslims... predominantly in Arabic language (because Muslims all study the true believers' Wahabbist K'ran, the common conversational language is Arabic with painful extended conversational translations of local dialect in Farsi) ...they will all know each other by religious sect only secondarily if at all.
Read more here:
The term tribe, derived from the Latin tribus, refers to a group of persons forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor. In the Middle East and North Africa, unlike many other parts of the world, claiming tribal affiliation often positively affirms community, identity, and belonging. In the mid-to late twentieth century, nationalist leaders in some regions rejected claims to tribal identity as "primitive" or potentially divisive to national unity. In the early twenty-first century in Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan, tribal affiliations figure implicitly in electoral politics in many regions, although other aspects of personal and collective identity also come into play. In the Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein (1979–2003), the mention in public of one's tribal identity, outlawed in the 1980s in an effort to forge national identity, crept back into common usage and regime practice by the mid-1990s. Tribal identities remain important in many regions of the Middle East. They provide the basis for many forms of communal and political solidarity, although never exclusive ones, in many parts of the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, among Arabs in Israel, and in the Palestinian areas.
Nationhood is such a recent, contentious and transitory concept, that many don't even think of it unless they're traveling out of their protected tribal territory. One may have been born one nationality, lived partly as another, and then, incredibly, a third after that!! Russia today is a model of the divisions that may occur in future because of external threats of famine and drought...but this is an Iraq War diary, right?
Huh...Tribal identity: It's as preposterous to US sheeple here as me calling myself a member of the Tribe of Queens County---2.65 million people in my big tribe!! Here's where my clan lives:
I can call myself a New Yorker and a US Citizen, but if this is Iraq, my tribe provides safety and security. It's my PERMANENT lifelong IDENTITY! And that's my local safety net right there: my local chapter of 'one-tribe-or-another.' They have so many confusing names, too.
For more information about what we're dealing with in the Middle East, read this book: Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, edited by Philip Shukry Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, 1991. Please see the html preview here, and don't let any latter-day military Petraeus or Dick Cheney tell you differently: If we leave, there will be peace throughout the Middle East. We have put the muscle in our Naval and Air Force Command presence in the Gulf to enforce it from offshore. No, neighboring Syria, Iran and Turkey will not invade. Russia now knows better, too.
Any of these fine references will clarify the extraordinarily complex and ever-changing meaning of tribal identity:
(Many thanks and acknowledgements are due to Dale F. Eickelman, the bibliographer.)
Eickelman, Dale F. The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002. See chap. 5, "What is a Tribe?"
Khoury, Phillip S., and Joseph Kostiner, eds. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. An indispensable review of the topic.
Peters, Emrys L. The Bedouin of Cyrenaica: Studies in Personal and Corporate Power. Edited by Jack Goody and Emanuel Marx. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A classic reference.
Shryock, Andrew. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Varisco, Daniel Martin. "Metaphors and Sacred History: The Genealogy of Muhammad and the Arab 'Tribe.'" Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 1995): 139–156.
The scenario's been gamed to death for half a century, and they know it...and now, you know it.
The reason we are arming the mullahs and Mujehideen is just a divide and conquer effort at attrition to make the country safer for oil exploitation. The entire surge is cover for extending our stay, but we are all smarter than that; it will soon be exposed by the resurgent Fourth Estate.