The death of actress Jean Stapleton, who played the archetypical Edith Bunker on television's "All in the Family," causes me to reflect on the changing role of women in American society, and societies around the world. Many women in developing countries still face the same struggles Edith faced. Indeed, Edith, despite her "oppression," would be viewed as having a luxurious life in some developing countries because she didn't have to work outside the home for the family to make ends meet.
When I was living in central Turkey for two years, many of the families I met reminded me of the Bunker family -- a father who was taught to believe he would be the autocratic leader or king of the family, a mother/housewife and children who pushed gently against the limits of that power and conservative social convention. It reminded me of America before the feminist revolution. It's not hard at all to imagine Edith as a good, conventional Muslim woman wearing a scarf and faithfully attending mosque in central Turkey.
In the fragmented entertainment world of today, it may be hard to believe that a single television show could have a big impact in opening minds and shaping American culture. But "All in the Family" certainly did. Today, a popular show like "Breaking Bad" might attract an audience of at most three million viewers. In the 1970s, an average episode of "All in the Family" attracted well over one third of the entire television audience, or 21 million viewers, at a time when the nation's population was 100 million less. (Source.)
When I was a teenager, Archie reminded me very much of my father. The show helped me learn to laugh rather than to be constantly outraged by his prejudices. I suppose, as we engaged in frequent shouting matches, I reminded my father of the character of Mike Stivic, Archie's son-in-law, strident liberal, and "Meathead." And nowadays, the tables have turned; the roles have reversed. With a sometimes surly teenager of my own, who likes to make outrageous and strident statements just to get a rise out of me, I sometimes remind myself more of Archie Bunker as defender of authority, tradition and convention, than of Mike Stivic, constant questioner of authority, tradition and convention. My teenager has taken on the "Meathead" role. I try not to take my son's bait, but alas, in moments of weakness, I do.
My mother was not subservient like Edith. She worked outside the home for most of her work life as a schoolteacher, and asserted herself in ways Edith never would. Yet she admired Edith's sense of justice, fair play, commitment to family and to creating a loving, nurturing homelife. And I suppose the character of Edith Bunker helped enlighten my mother and make her more aware of the ways in which women were unnecesarily subvervient, and made her more aware of the emerging feminist movement in the U.S.
"What Edith represents is the housewife who is still in bondage to the male figure, very submissive and restricted to the home,” Ms. Stapleton, a confirmed if not necessarily outspoken feminist, said in an interview in The New York Times in 1972, with the show still early in its life. (It ran until 1979, and a continuation, “Archie Bunker’s Place,” that starred Mr. O’Connor but not the rest of the cast, lingered until 1983.) “She is very naïve, and she kind of thinks through a mist, and she lacks the education to expand her world.”
And yet, in the show's eight years, Edith grew increasingly assertive, as The Times story illustrates. I sense that is happening today in certain developing countries like Turkey. It's too bad they don't (as far as I am aware) have an extremely popular television show like "All in the Family" to spur them on.
Rest in Peace, Jean Stapleton, for your wonderful contribution to American culture in giving us Edith Bunker.
I've often classified Democrats as "the Mommy Party" -- the "nurturing parent" emphasizing stereotypical mother qualities like compassion, empathy, fairness, interdependence, and communitarianism. The Republicans as I see it are "the Daddy Party" -- the "critical parent" emphasizing father qualities like "tough love," self-reliance, self-discipline, pushing oneself beyond limits, and independence. Both roles are needed in a family, in a society and in the political realm, of course. I'm by no means the first to think of this. Many others have also discussed "the Mommy party" vs. "the Daddy party" as a way of understanding American politics.
Among my Facebook friends are people on the far left and far right. Judging by their Facebook feeds, they seem to live in alternative universes, blaming each other for the sad state of the world and locked into permanent battle. Each side seems to be unaware of their political shadow. When I see posts by liberals portraying conservatives as the enemy and posts by conservatives portraying liberals as the enemy, I think that their minds are paying tricks on them. They are thinking in opposites, in an either/or kind of logic, when in reality, as Jungian psychologist James Hillman points out, "this isn't how the world really is."
For example, most people think that the opposite of white is black. But there are shades of black -- from blackberries, to black coal or blackbirds -- that have nothing to do with white. The point is to learn how to evaluate each issue on its own merits without having to bring up the opposition's point of view. In therapy, when you have a dream of your mother, for example, you don't necessarily have to talk about your father as a supposed opposite...
There are other ways of putting things together so they're not necessarily opposed; there is the idea of collaboration, or the phrase "coterminous," meaning where one appears, the other has to appear. Chinese culture has the Yin Yang symbol, with its interwoven extremes. It seems to me that we lack this kind of complex imagery in the media. Television foments this by bringing two people together from opposing positions -- as if every situation has just two sides...
...If a political party is seen only this way or that way, then we prevent what else might possibly be going on in their psyches, and we're not bringing any insight to the process.
For example, if I have a wife and I only see how mean-spirited and quick-tempered she is, and I see her that way all the time, then she becomes fixed into that character definition, and nothing else.
He goes on to talk about how Democrats and Republicans, whether they like it or not, are in a marriage, or intimate relationship with each other. But in society today, they too often act like complete strangers who never truly listen to each other. The talking heads on cable news -- particularly Fox News and MSNBC -- are like parents constantly in a shouting match. It is, of course, much easier to label and demonize the opposition -- those "cruel, heartless Republicans" or those "power-mad, fraudulent Democrats," than to truly listen, engage in dialogue and try to understand, putting yourself in the shoes of the opposition.
Are we as Americans loosing our ability to truly listen to and understand each other politically? We should Beware the Shadow in politics as well as in personal relationships.
Erik Qualman, the creator of this video, has certainly generated curiosity about himself. I've now Googled him and checked out his Wikipedia profile. He's coined a word, "socialnomics: word of mouth on digital steroids."
The video is a good promotion for the growing importance of social media: "90% of consumers trust peer recommendations," compared to only 14% who trust advertising.
And I want to know more about how "we will no longer search for products and services...they will find us via social media."
I do think there's still a tangible sales pitch to be done on the ROI on social media, not simply that, as Qualman says, the ROI "is that your business will still exist in five years."
The quick factoids in this video raise a lot of questions:
I hadn't thought about this song from the musical "Showboat" for a very long time, until I heard it on the radio today: "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine." This is from the 1936 movie, considered the best film rendition of "Show Boat." Lyrics that a modern feminist wouldn't be caught dead singing. It has a controversial racial history as well. Many other renditions are posted on Youtube.com as well. The song is a real throwback to the era before civil rights, equal rights and feminist "enlightenment." And yet it's a sweet ode to marital commitment after "the bloom is off the rose."
And the mescegenation scene was way ahead of its time:
Religion asks you to accept a lot of things "on faith" without thinking them through, the young skeptic of religion says, calling himself a disciple of logic, reason and science. In the Christian Church, for example, one is expected to recite the Apostles Creed, to swallow it hook, line and sinker, which he isn't prepared to do. He doubts whether Mary, the mother of Jesus, was actually a virgin, and doesn't necessarily believe Jesus' miracles were performed in the way they are described, and he doubts whether the laws of science and gravity were broken and the body of Jesus "rose from the dead," levitated to heaven, where the body was healed of all earthly wounds, then flew back to earth to encounter the followers of Jesus on the road to Emmaus. Was that really Jesus or an apparition in the minds of his followers? How did Jesus "die for our sins"? he asks. How could that be possible? Not only did Jesus somehow die for the sins of all those believers who came afterwards, Christianity asserts, but at least some of those who lived before? All that could be a lot of hocus pocus, he suggests, theological constructs, not too different from what the Greeks and Romans thought about the imaginary gods they created.
I reply that it's good he's thinking about these things, and yes, such details can be stumbling blocks to faith. But they don't have to be. The Gospels were written, what, 60 years after the events occurred, and if the writers got some details wrong, it's not a big deal to me. I don't consider doubts about any of those details to be barriers to participating in a Christian community.
The trouble with scientific atheism, I ask ironically, is "how do you live with your doubts?" By that I mean those moments when the spirit of God seems real, and you feel in harmony and at one with nature and the universe? Most if not all of us have such moments, as well as moments of doubts. Few people are religious believers all the time, every moment of life, and few people can sustain atheism or agnosticism, complete cynicism and doubt, through every moment of life either.
In closing oneself off from God, Allah, the Force, a higher power, or whatever you call "it," from a spiritual community, in proclaiming dogmatically that the spiritual world does not exist, one is closing the door on a whole dimension that makes life more meaningful and can help us get through disappointments, rough patches, bumps in the roads, disasters. Which nearly everyone, sooner or later, experiences.
I contend that one's understanding of various theological questions will change and develop over time, and no one will ever have a complete understanding. Words crafted by humans can be a pretty inadequate way of describing that which is so much larger than we are, often beyond our full grasp-- the divine and the eternal.
Perhaps the crux of Christianity is the belief /hope/ faith that God cares enough to intervene in human affairs. He sent his "only son" or another way of saying it, Himself incarnate, as an example to humans on how to live, with love as the foundation of life. And that humans, in their half-hearted and sinful nature, denied and crucified Jesus.
And yet the spirit of Jesus was so strong despite the attempts to kill Him off through crucifixion. The resurrection might mean simply that His spirit survived death and still thrives in the hearts of men and women who open themselves to that spirit, from that day to this day and into eternity. And that God continues to intervene in human lives throughout the world. Our task is to be open to it, to try to comprehend it and try to be a part of God's love and work here on earth.
One doesn't need to accept or comprehend it all, certainly not all at once. I said I currently have a problem with the concept of heaven as a place of eternal reunion with loved ones with whom we "live" for eternity. Nice thought, but actually we are altered by death and by separation from our bodies. We can no longer be the same. And after 100 years or so, the individual personalities of nearly everyone who lived -- except for a few historical greats -- are forgotten, because there's no one around who remembers them.
So, the notion of my loved ones' individual spirits surviving or being active "until the end of time" seems improbable to me. But, what do I know? The notion of spiritual reunion after death is a nice, warm, comforting feeling and hope and if it's true, that's wonderful. If it's not, well, this life might be all there is, and it will have to have been enough because there's not much we can do about it.
What seems most important is that the spirit of God -- I might add Allah, or the God of other major faiths (the same by different names and with different cultural interpretations) -- the spirit of love, the spirit of Jesus, survives and thrives until the end of time. And that we all become part of that spirit, if we so choose or if it chooses us.
Those who don't develop their spiritual side are dead when their body expires because there's nothing to pass on or to the spiritual world. But I've met only a few people in my life who seemed to have no spirit whatsoever or a purely malevolent spirit. So who's to know or to judge? Not humans, for sure.
Many of these questions evoke mysteries which we cannot fully solve in this life.
My friend Bruce Johnson also had some thoughtful answers to these questions. He writes:
There's a beautiful Talmudic essay asking why the psalmist asks God to place his words "on" the psalmist's heart rather than "in" it. The answer is that if our hearts are closed, the prayers can then fall into our hearts when we open them. The same I think is often true of words we say about faith - they come back to a person years later, an experience I've had both with things I've heard and things I've said to people.
My overall view of faith is similar to yours. Faith is above all a mystery. We can't pin down the precise truths because our experience doesn't yet allow for it, any more than a baby, before birth, could understand what the outside world is like. Not only do the mystics testify to this, but St. Paul says it explicitly ("We see now as in a glass, darkly") and Jesus does too ("the kingdom of heaven is LIKE . . .", he constantly says, because it can be expressed only by analogy).
In the end, my own faith I suppose is my trust that there is Someone who both cares about me and about everybody I care about and who has the power and the wisdom to make that caring effective, even if I only faintly comprehend it.
As for Heaven, it's sort of the ultimate mystery, but my basic faith is that there is a part of me and you that is realer than whatever this stuff is that SEEMS so real but which physicists tell us is basically a bunch of electrical force fields perched precariously on the edge of dark matter that cancels out the anti-matter that would otherwise destroy it and whose appearance as we perceive it is somewhat deceptive. And that whatever that part of us is, once it's separated from all its emmeshment in this world of appearances that can be both so enticing and so frustrating to deal with, will have all the fog cleared away and will see that Someone with a clarity that is impossible now, though we have faint glimpses or hints.
Interesting that we've both had recent thoughts that were quite similar about death - it did strike me forcefully recently that when we die, the part of us that can find distraction in selfish pursuits will be gone. The only part of us that will be left will be the part that loves and that is committed to what really matters. Which should motivate me to try to break free from some of those distractions before I don't have any choice but doing so, and be open to the real reality becoming a bigger part of my living, now.
Colonial Era. British and French dominate -- they carve up countries and create artificial borders (1878-1948).
Independence movements (1878-1967). "Al-Nahda" renaissance movement in North Africa, Egypt and Syria/Lebanon. With crucial US support, Israel is founded in 1948. Arab countries face ignominous defeats in efforts to drive Zionists into the sea. Attempt to create "Arab Nationalist" movement fails.
Cold War Era (1948-1990), in which Soviets and Americans compete for regional dominance, quashing independence movements. Egypt invites the Soviets in, then kicks them out in the 1970s, turning towards Americans. US engineers Israeli peace with Egypt and Jordan. Declaring a national security interest in Middle East oil, US installs or supports dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria. US is demonized by Iranians for thwarting democracy and installing brutal Shah for 25 years. Iranians break international law by invading US embassy and holding hostages, seek to export Islamic revolution to the region. In eight-year Iran-Iraq war, US supports Saddam in Iraq against Shiite revolutionaries in Iran. US supports anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan who defeat Russia but eventually merge with Islamic radical groups Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which are virilantly anti-American.
American dominance, 1991-2011/14. With collapse of Soviet superpower, America, the only superpower, fears Saddam Hussein, when he invades oil-rich Kuwait, will fill power vaccum in Middle East. US launches Gulf War to free Kuwait, sets up brutal Iraqi sanctions to force regime change, installs "infidel" military bases in holy Saudi Arabia, which inflames Al Qaeda. In 2003, US topples Saddam and engages in eight-year war in Iraq. US backs Israel against Palestinians; US backs authoritarian Mubarak in Egypt until his domestic support evaporates. US supports the seemingly successful Kurdish Independence Movement in Iraq. Exhausted from resource drain, America withdraws from Iraq, 2011, and Afghanistan, 2014, and shows reluctance to back rebels in Syrian civil war against dictator Assad.
I would add that we're already seeing a new if possibly short-lived era in the Middle East:
the Arab Spring (2011- ). Region-wide uprisings against dictatorships. Civil conflict and even civil war (lack of consensus) in Iraq, Syria, Egypt,
Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia.
What's next? I see three roads ahead:
a) Region-wide tribal civil war. Conflict could expand to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon. If we see long-term tribal civil war, and Iranian-sympathizing Shiites gaining a foothold in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iran, starting to dominate the region, there will be a lot of second guessing about American actions in the region since 1991. Maybe the US should have left Saddam in power, even let him have Kuwait in 1991. Yes, he was a brutal dictator but until 1991 he was our ally and a counterweight to Iran. When the US removed Saddam, did it ultimately gave Iran freedom to dominate the Middle East?
b) Return to Authoritarian Rule? We are already seeing some nostalgia for Mubarak in Egypt and nostalgia for Saddam in Iraq. Will we see a military junta in Egypt to restore order? Dictatorship in Iraq?
Assad survive in Syria or another (hopefully less brutal) authoritarian emerges?
Radical Islamists (backed by Iran) seize power in Syria?
c) Best-case scenario: After period of instability, democracy and consensus emerge in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and other points in the region. Assad opposition coalesces into peaceful coalition. The Arabs work out their own problems without the intervention of the US, Europeon powers, or Iran. At this stage, this seems like wishful thinking rather than a plausible outcome. If I had to bet, I would choose b), with hope that over time, the region can make baby-steps, like Turkey has done since the 1980s, toward stability and democracy.
But Turkey has going for it a strong sense of secular nationhood, created by Ataturk. The Arab countries, with the possible exception of Egypt, do not, for the most part, have that strong sense of national identity, nor charismatic unifying "founding fathers." As I wrote previously, they are far more tribal than nationalistic.
"The term 'Arab nationalism' is a misnomer. It represents not a genuine national movement or ideal but is a euphemism for raw imperialism. There is not and has never existed an "Arab nation" and its invocation has been nothing but a clever ploy to rally popular support behind one's quest for regional mastery. Before the 1920s and 1930s, when Arabs began to be indoctrinated with the notion that all of them constituted one nation, there had been no general sense of "Arabism" among the Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East. There was only an intricate web of local loyalties to one's clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect, or localized ethnic minority—overarched by submission to the Ottoman sultan-caliph in his capacity as the religious and temporal head of the worldwide Muslim community." -- Misunderstanding Arab Nationalismby Efraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2001.
A reader sends me a link to a map of the first "Arabic Empire" that spanned from Southern France to Northern Africa to the borders of modern-day India and Russia, he says, for 300 years. Indeed, the Muslim Conquests expanded from 622 to 1800.
However, the map is misleading in that it ignores the tribal nature of the Middle East, which has always hindered grand generalizations about "Arabs." Yes, the Umayyad Caliphate -- not a 300-year empire but just 89 years, from 661-750 -- was important in spreading Islam, the Arabic language, in making Arabic the administrative language of a wide swath -- 28% of the world's population in the 7th century -- creating a common currency, and briefly, a concept of Islamic unity and Arab nationalism.
"The first five centuries after the emergence of Islam, spanning the seventh through the twelth centuries, was the age of the great Islamic empires that dominated world affairs," wrote Eugene Rosen in "The Arabs." "Arabs had an international presence stretching from Iraq and Arabia to Spain and Sicily. The era of early Islam is a source of pride to all Arabs as a bygone era when the Arabs were the dominant power in the world, but resonates in particular with Islamists, who argue that the Arabs were greatest when they adhered most closely to their Muslim faith."
But underneath the Arab nationalism and "empire" was "a severe case of tribal animosity," according to Wikipedia, especially with the Hashimites, beginning before there even was an empire, in 624 with the Battle of Badr. Put another way, there has always been a rich diversity in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The Arabic of Northern Africa could even be understood by the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent or the Arabian Peninsula. Cuisine, architecture, and musical traditions were all different.
As historian Rogan pointed out, the 89-year Umayyad dynasty, ruled from Damascus, while the Abbasid caliphate that followed and dominated the region for more than 500 years, ruled from Baghdad. Five more Arab dynasties, most prominently the Mamluks (a military caste of warriors, some of whom were not even Arabic and not even Muslim), ruled from Cairo from 1250 until the Ottomans took over in 1517. The Ottoman Turks' seat of power was Istanbul.
"From 1517 onward, the Arabs would negotiate their place in the world through rules set in foreign capitals, a political reality that would prove one of the most defining features of modern Arab history."
Arab nationalism existed only briefly, from the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, to the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War with Israel. Nowadays, as the region experiences numerous sectarian conflicts, civil and political warfare, the notion of "one Arab nation" seems as elusive as ever.
To understand the psycho-cultural heritage of Arab societies, one must appreciate that a foundation of Arab culture was a nomadic tribal system that enabled them to survive in a tough desert environment. "To maintain this system, a strict patriarchal authority was needed to protect the collective interests of the tribe. Life within a tribal system is characterized by fanatical identification of its members with the tribe, and full submission and obedience to the tribal leadership." The group's cohesion is paramount, rather than an individual's ideas and decisions. Individuals have little autonomy by Western standards and must avoid actions to weaken the strength of the tribe, so that it can withstand external invaders or threats...Individualists can be seen as disturbers of collective harmony, a threat to the authority of leaders....Honorable behavior maintains group cohesion and serves its interests, while shameful behavior disrupts or impairs group cohesion. Attempts at democracy in the Arab world often incorporate tribal perspectives. Voters are often heavily influenced by family, clan, tribe, religious or sect affiliation.
--
Counseling And Psychotherapy With Arabs And Muslims: A Culturally Sensitive Approach to Psychology by Marwan Dwairy. (See reviews of the book on Amazon.com.)
From afar, I suspect most Americans look at the Middle East as a dangerous, hopeless mess, unworthy of more time and attention because it is mystifying in its violent complexity. But living in Abu Dhabi, UAE, a peaceful, stable and economically vibrant city on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, I'm trying unravel the mysteries of the region.
Sleeping in an Arabic tent on the side of Jabal Shams, Oman's Grand Canyon, I was reminded of a trip to the American West a few years ago, when I slept in a Native American teepee on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. In both cases, I could hear the wind whipping through the camp and flapping the cloth "doors" of the tents. It got me to thinking of perhaps one way for Americans to begin to understand the Middle East.
Imagine that there was no significant European colonization of North America, no "Trail of Tears," and no deadly smallpox virus that wiped out hundreds of thousands if not millions of Native Americans. Imagine that the Native American tribes, some of them warring with each other, continued to grow, multiply and develop into the 20th century in North America.
Bedoin and Native American tribes had similar lifestyles. Mostly patriarchal societies based on kinship, they both lived off the land. Many were nomads without formal education who road horses. They had a rich oral history and honor code; followed the traditions of their ancestors; felt spiritually connected to nature; followed the stars and had a strong use of astronomy. They built forts for protection. They hunted and fished, consumed beef and grew vegetables, gathered around campfires, smoked, danced and played drums. One raised and depended on buffalo; the other camels. Today, they each sell colorful jewelry and crafts by the roadside.
Then imagine that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Powers disdainfully sought to manipulate and control these "primitive savages." The Ottomans of Turkey, who dominated the Middle East for more than 350 years, came to view the Bedoins as a threat to state control and "progress." So they tried to force them to stop their nomadic lifestyles and stay in one place. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 20th century, Britain and France decided to carve up the Middle East, establishing "countries" with artificial boundaries or borders, and installing governments, rather than letting the natives decide for themselves what they wanted.
If this happened in North America in the early 20th century, where would it be today? How many power struggles, how many land disputes, how much infighting or sectarian violence do you think there would be 100 years later?
Perhaps not just students of Native American history can understand or empathize with this history. Descendants of Scotch-Irish clans, who once fought each other bitterly as well as the English, can perhaps begin to understand the violence that might have continued if there had been no assimilation into the American melting pot.
The analogy only goes so far, and is controversial when applied to the weakness if not collapse of the modern Arab states of Iraq, Syria, Egypt; internal disputes in Tunisia; Libya; Kuwait and Bahrain; and rising tensions in Saudi Arabia. But from it you can get a sense of the legacy of the last 100 years in the Middle East, and of the current struggles.
His thesis is disputed by many observers in the comments section, and the blog Karl Remarks offers a good counter-argument. The debate is illuminating for those of us trying to understand the Middle East.
But one thing is for certain.
Tribal loyalties have survived, and remain strong in the Middle East, even with urbanization. More than 70 Bedoin tribes still exist; there are more than 100 tribes of Arabia listed online; 150 tribes of Iraq; 13 major tribes or royal families in the Arabian Peninsula in the 20th century. "From the Gulf to Iraq to Syria, the area is interlinked in a complex web of tribal relations," columnist Hassan Hassan wrote in The Guardian. Tribes neglected by Bashir Assad's regime in Syria are mobilizing against his Baathist regime. In another article for The (UAE) National, Hassan argues that deeply rooted tribal bonds between Syrians and Gulf State Arabs are solidifying as a result of the Syrian crisis, despite Baathist attempts to undermine such connections.
A Syrian friend explains to me that when she returned to Syria after a decade in the United States, her last name immediately identified her to strangers as a member of a certain tribe and religious sect. There is no escaping your identity or your tribal loyalties in the Middle East.
And certainly, tribal loyalities and differences between Sunni, Shia, and Kurd help to explain the continuing conflict in Iraq, a conflict that Americans greatly under-estimated when they launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Roy Parker Jr., founding editor of The Fayetteville (NC) Times and my first boss, has passed away at the age of 83. I learned about it from a post by my former colleague Seth Effron on Facebook. I'm very saddened by this news. I followed Seth into the position of Roy's assistant, and he was a great boss, giving me freedom to cover a wide variety of topics and to write editorials, always accenting the positive in his reviews of my work. He was a good teacher and mentor, and I think of him often. I wish I weren't so far away and could attend his service.
I was in awe of his ability to pound out, in about two hours, three well-written editorials on almost any topic -- from politics to international, national and local history to birding and bicycling -- and of his deep connections within the community and throughout the state of North Carolina. He also had a talent for expressing political disagreement without being disagreeable, frequently looking for areas of agreement with those who had a different ideology.
Penny Muse Abernathy's inspiring UNC Journalism School tribute "from the heart" is here. Obituary here, linked to some great Facebook comments from journalists far and wide. Gene Smith, the Observer's senior editorial writer, offers a fine character sketch of Roy, titled "What Made Roy Run? Progress, Mostly."
There's a wonderful Fayetteville Observer editorial tribute
here, describing Roy as a "restless man," quoting Thomas Edison: "Restlessness is discontent," Thomas Edison wrote, "and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure."
And yet Roy's life is a testimonial to the notion of staying in one place, developing deep roots and committing oneself to a community. He had lived and worked in Fayetteville since 1973, made frequent trips to the legislature in Raleigh and the university in Chapel Hill, and cast long shadows in all three places. Few of us will make such a deep mark.
At this time, I especially remember Roy's irreverant remark that journalism may not pay very well, the hours may be long and hard, but after a long career, you can be sure "you'll get a great obituary." In Roy's case, every word of tribute is well-deserved.
An American correspondent emails me: "We erred thinking that the Iraqis would prefer freedom to Saddam. Some people are freedom-loving and some aren't...Like in WWII, we came to Iraq as liberators, not conquerors. But the Iraqis didn't get it.
My response: No, the Americans didn't get it. Many if not most Iraqis were indeed, initially, happy that Saddam was gone, but were suspicious of the motivations of the Americans. Then they watched as the Americans rushed in to guard the oil fields, fire the Baathist police force, the army, the bureaucracy, and dismiss the Baathist party which had ruled since 1963. The Baathists, for all their brutality, at least knew how things worked, had maintained order and the power grid. Without them, law and order fell apart and disorder prevailed. (See "10 Mistakes of the Iraq War," from the perspective of Col. Ted Spain.)
We sent only about 100,000 troops to Iraq. We probably needed about half a million troops to restore and maintain order, but President Bush could not rally or muster support from the American people for that strong a commitment, especially after no WMDs were found. As Iraq descended into civil war, he finally understood the need for more troops in 2006. With the troop surge, we were able to pull the Iraqis back from civil war and re-establish enough order so we didn't leave Iraq with an ignominous defeat. However, now that we've left, Iraq seems to have returned to if not large-scale civil war, small scale civil war. Not a good outcome for them, or us.
You are exactly right......I have said for years that it was dumb to disband the Iraqi army. Turns out that the idiot who was put in charge (US envoy Paul Bremer) did that without Presidential approval...Bush didn't know it happened until after it happened. Things started going wrong when Bremer told his predecessor who was working with the sheiks, etc. to form a government to thank the Arabs, but they could go home..."This is an American show."
Factually incorrect. Bremer communicated with President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staffs in advance stating that the plan was to disband the army; they acknowledged his plan and didn't object to it. Bremer's decision was rational at the time because the U.S. certainly didn't want to trust Saddam's army and Saddam's bureaucracy. This revealed how poorly thought out the whole operation was because there were few Iraqis we Americans trusted to run the country.
So, you're saying, due to America's poor planning, Iraqis saw their country dissolve into violent chaos?
Yes. Looters and criminals had free reign. Al Qaeda, which Saddam had not tolerated, saw a great opportunity, and rushed into sew more chaos. The Sunni minority, feeling displaced by Saddam's ouster and the growing political power of the Shias, organized an insurgency. Al Qaeda moved into the power vaccum to create further chaos by launching car bombs.Then as the American army was placed in charge of the country in order to restore order, the Iraqis knew it was an occupation not a liberation.
You know, Americans made mistakes in their occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II as well. But that didn't prevent the Germans and Japanese from creating what everyone now agrees were "economic miracles." It's past time for the Iraqis to stop blaming the Americans, take responsibility and pull themselves up after all the largesse we've given them.
The historical circumstances and internal dynamics of Iraq are completely different from post-war Germany and Japan. Iraq has long been hindered by factionalism and held together as a nation by totalitarianism. In the jostling for power, the Sunnis, who represent about one-fifth of the population, got more and more upset when they saw incompetent Shia whom they distrusted installed in the government to lord power over them, and Nouri Al Malaki, a Shia with connections to Iran, was picked by the American ambassador to be Prime Minister because he was perceived to be at least somewhat independent of Iran. Sunnis determined they had more freedom and privileges under Saddam, their benefactor.
The long-oppressed Shia, representing about three-fifths of the population, saw the demise of Saddam as an opportunity to create a state allying with their tribal brothers in Iran. Yet they knew the Americans wouldn't agree to that. Both Sunni and Shia saw the American occupiers as the enemy. The Sunnis, now feeling displaced and oppressed, are angry and allying with their Sunni brothers in Syria, and the Shia are angry and allying with their Shia brothers in Iran. In our ignorance of the region, we have empowered two potentially warring Islamic sects if not semi-states.
Sunni/Shia is sort of like Protestants and Catholics fighting to determine the true doctrine. But, man, they did that 500 or 600 years ago. Where were these people in the Middle East that they didn't get the message that religion isn't worth fighting over? Peoples of the West pretty much figured that out centuries ago...
How soon you forget. Protestants and Catholics were fighting in Northern Ireland up until 20 years ago. It was a big deal when Protestant America elected a Catholic president in 1960. These were political power struggles more than religious struggles, and the same is true for Sunni and Shia in the Middle East.
You also seem to forget that the Middle East was under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, or Turkey, for more than 350 years. During most of that time, Sunni and Shia got along peaceably. Then in the early 20th century when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the colonial powers France and Britain stepped in. Arabs wanted a unified Arab state, but France and Britain, to advance their own interests rather than respecting Arabs' rights to self-determination, insisted on carving Arab "countries" up into Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, with artificial borders to keep the tribes and sects disunited and at each other's throats so as to maintain neo-colonial power in the region.
The Bush administration reflected a kind of neo-colonial attitude when, during the recent occupation, it "organized the new political system in Iraq on a sectarian basis," writes Adnan Pachachi, an Iraqi who initially supported the invasion, in an article titled "The Road to Failure." The Americans "had the preconceived idea that Iraqi society by its nature was divided along sectarian lines. That was a fallacy. As a result, the secular groups did not receive the recognition they deserved, and the government fell under the influence of religious and ethnic parties. Fully exploiting their built-in advantages, they established a regime that proved over the years to be incapable of governing the country."
Sure, the Americans misjudged terribly in Iraq, but give them credit for at least trying...that is what pisses me off...people who expect perfection from imperfect people. And, that was my original beef....instead of holding people up for ridicule they should be recognized as having tried to create something good only to fail.
So this is your response to a war that cost American taxpayers $767 billion and was a strategic victory for Iran?? A war in which the Inspector General has determined that at least eight billion of $60 billion spent on Iraqi reconstruction was completely wasted?? You might not take such a forgiving attitude if you read We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, by Peter Van Buren. It's an American foreign service officer's caustic account of his time in Iraq. The first chapter is available for free on Amazon.com. All you can do is laugh at the absurdity of the American mission and how ungrounded in reality it was. As an American taxpayer, you should be absolutely appalled at the waste, fraud and abuse.
The waste of resources was phenomenal -- unqualified contractors were paid $250,000 a year to go to Iraq without even being interviewed first -- former yoga instructors became "women's empowerment specialists"; $80,000 was spent to translate American classic books into Arabic, only to be dumped into garbage bins because the Iraqis had no capacity to teach or understand such books. As a taxpayer, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
I have no doubt billions were wasted and that the operation probably should not have taken place as it did. Not my argument. My argument is to give them credit for trying to do something worthwhile.
You give them credit?? Where is your outrage as a taxpayer? $767 billion was spent on an operation that wasn't just a failure of American aspirations to rid Iraq and the world of a ruthless dictator and impose democracy on Iraq. IT IS, most probably, A STRATEGIC VICTORY FOR IRAN. It isn't just a terrible misjudgment if not dishonest assessment of wmds that did not exist, in that the President and his advisors were close-minded and pressured the CIA and other agencies to tell them only what they wanted to hear. They ignored or buried intelligence from high-level sources close to Saddam that WMDs had been destroyed, and ignored former Marine and weapons inspector Scott Ritter's very public declaration that all Saddam had was "harmless goo."
They not only misled the American people, and waged a war on false pretenses. They are responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans, well over 100,000 Iraqis, and more than 700 BILLION down the drain, more than the cost of the Marshall Plan. It's an outrage.
It has been said that Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War fiasco cost liberals not only the 1968 and 1972 elections, but it cost liberals a reputation for good foreign policy judgments for a generation, specifically for 24 years. It was not until the 1992 election that they recovered from the Vietnam syndrome. Twenty-four years. The Iraq war fiasco ought to deprive neo-cons of the presidency for equally as long.
Sounds like you are looking for vengeance. Tell me....if you were a President with 3,000 people dead in your streets and the destruction of billions in property....do you think that might affect your judgment?
It might. But aren't our leaders accountable for their decisions? In Britain at least they launched an inquiry and held hearings on the mistakes in Iraq, and forced Tony Blair to defend his judgments. I daresay George W. Bush could not defend himself as well as Blair.
Yes, I think 9/11 rattled and spooked Bush and co. They panicked in a crisis, and demonstrated very poor judgment in Iraq. Shouldn't they be held to account? Or does America's leadership prefer not to look back and learn from its many mistakes?
Americans have a difficult time understanding why the rest of the world doesn't love us since we are beneficient in foreign aid and trumpet universally-recognized human rights. We say we want to spread democracy and self-determination around the world. And yet for all of this, we are called imperialists. Why, for example, are the peoples of the Middle East so suspicious of America's "good intentions"?
Why don't the Iraqis thank us for our eight years of sacrifice? We added to their pain, they say. In an article titled "Iraq's pain has only intensified since 2003," Sami Ramadani charges that for 30 years, the US supported the dictator Saddam Hussein and shored up his Baathist Party. The US gave Saddam no indication we'd oppose his annexation of Kuwait. Then after he did it, we reversed ourselves, and inflicted mostly pain on the Iraqi people for another 20 years through two wars, and "murderous sanctions." Once the US toppled Saddam, it nurtured a political process "designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord." He writes bitterly:
Using torture, sectarian death squads and billions of dollars, the occupation has succeeded in weakening the social fabric and elevating a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day, salivating at the prospect of acquiring a bigger share of Iraq's natural resources, which are mostly mortgaged to foreign oil companies and construction firms.
In opposing the 2003 war, Ramadini, a British citizen of Kurdish origin who fled Iraq after opposing Saddam, questioned whose interests would really be served by the invasion -- he suspected only certain American and British interests would be served -- and concluded war wouldn't give his people their freedom.
"In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam's party, the Ba'ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats; it backed the Ba'ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs..."
Ramadani's charge that the CIA was complicit in the 1963 coup of a democratically-led government of Iraq is backed up by the memoirs of CIA operatives. In fact, Wikipedia has details on secret CIA involvement in coups of democratically-led governments in 11 countries between 1949 and 1981 -- including Syria, Iran, and Turkey in the Middle East.
Syria's president in 1949 opposed an oil pipeline American business interests wanted built, so the CIA overthrew the government and installed a criminal to make sure the pipeline was built. Once the pipeline was finished, the Syrian president was allowed to return to power.
In the early 1950s, multi-national oil companies asked President Truman to have the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran because the prime minister threatened to nationalize the oil companies. Truman refused. But when President Eisenhower came to power in 1953, the oil companies asked again and got their wish. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow the Iranian government and install the shah, who was a brutal dictator for 25 years.
In America's defense, its leadership saw these coups in the context of the Cold War and the "twilight struggle with communism." Most governments around the world were forced to align with either the United States or the Soviet Union, as allies, proxies, puppets or satellites. Turkey, because of its strategic location, was especially filled with "spy vs. spy" tension. And yes, business interests, especially oil companies, exploited Cold War tensions to gain economic advantage.
Democratic development in the Middle East for centuries has been hampered by big-power politics, and the rise and fall of empires. For 500 years, the Middle East was part of the Turkish-Ottoman empire. After World War I, that empire collapsed, and the British and French stepped in to create artificial borders advantageous primarily to themselves. Their empires collapsed, and the Americans stepped in -- through foreign aid, coups, shuttle diplomacy, and the wars in Iraq -- to maintain access to cheap oil and to protect Israel and pretty much support everything Israel does.
Those have been America's two main interests in the region. We haven't cared much about human rights in the Middle East, especially for Egyptians and Palestinians, despite our professed values. With generous foreign aid, the US shored up the dictatorship of Mubarak in Egypt for nearly 30 years, effectively blocking regime change there because he supported peace with Israel. And we've put almost no pressure for an end to illegal West Bank settlements on the Israelis, despite our stated belief that's the only way a two-state solution -- and peace -- can occur.
That said, in my experience the peoples of the Middle East find much to admire about America and Americans and welcome us as individuals to their region.
Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, four popular myths about the war should now be dispelled:
Evidence presented to American and British leaders was overwhelming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. NOT TRUE.
"Bush lied" about WMDs and the rationale for war. NOT TRUE.
WMDs were the central reason the US invaded Iraq. NOT TRUE.
If the WMDs had been found, the war would have been justified. NOT TRUE.
New evidence reveals American and British intelligence officers were informed by reliable high-level sources in Iraq (1, 2, 3--video available only if you have a British IP address) before the invasion that Saddam did not have WMDs.
In addition, former US Marine and Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ridder in 2002 waged a very public campaign to persuade American and British officials that whatever biological weapons Saddam stored from the late 1980s had turned into "harmless goo."
A U.S. Senate report concluded that American leaders discounted this evidence and "misled themselves." After 9-11, they were guilty of fear-mongering and hysterical group-think.
Intelligence officers had a "fixed mindset" that caused them to "see only evidence that supported this possibility" that Saddam had WMDs, US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer has concluded. The Bush administration chose Duelfer to him to head up the US investigation of Iraq's weapon's program. In a March, 2013 essay, Duelfer maintained "no books were cooked," but that "alternative possibilities fell by the wayside." Intelligence officers "fell victim to fabricators who told us what we expected to hear." Nevertheless, "intelligence reports should not be the only basis for making decisions, and they were not for the Bush administration."
Even if it were known that Saddam had no WMDs, a sizeable number of policy-makers favored his removal anyway. For them, wmd's were beside the main point. Remember that the desire for regime change in Iraq was a US goal since 1998, because of the belief that Saddam Hussein represented a long-term threat to his neighbors and ultimately, US and British interests.
"Imagine, for a moment, that US infantry units rolling into Baghdad in April, 2003 had found a couple of warehouses full of VX gas and mustard gas component chemicals and warheads, or a refrigerator full of botulinum toxin. That would have been enough to 'prove' the Bush administration's case for war - 'pre-empting' the threat posed by Saddam.
But would proving that Saddam's regime had some unconventional weapons capability have made the Iraq war any less of a debacle? That invading Iraq was an epic blunder is a commonly held view today in the US strategic establishment, and any discovery of stocks of WMD on Iraqi soil would not likely have altered that assessment. The problems inherent in the case for war were obvious to anyone who cared to ask the more difficult questions." -- Tony Karon, The (UAE) National newspaper, in an article titled "Media Failed to Ask Right Questions on Weapons Claims."
Why would the possession of WMDs by Saddam necessarily require war with Iraq? The question applies not only to Saddam's Iraq, but nuclear weapons in Iran, and biological weapons possibly used by Assad's forces in Syria.
In none of these cases can the governments prove they do not possess such weapons. Even giving United Nations' weapons inspectors full, free and permanent ability to search for "needles in haystacks" would not necessarily prevent a rush to war. Weapons inspectors who declared definitively that Saddam had no WMDs would not have been believed. Or if they were believed, Saddam would have been exposed as vulnerable to his enemies, foreign and domestic. He had a stake in making the case on WMDs ambivilant.
So, the continuing debate over WMDs ("Bush and Blair lied; people died") is a great over-simplification of the rationale for the Iraq war. They should not be accepted as "gospel truth," Duelfer writes. "Certainly, there were plenty of mistakes made then that should be avoided in the future. However, many of these arguments seem grounded in politics rather than reality."
Yes, the Bush administration, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war -- magnifying Saddam as an "imminent threat" because he supposedly had WMDs. Over-selling was a marketing and public relations tactic to manipulate a divided public to support war.
But it was not nearly as bad as the far more substantive blunders that were made. Americans had nearly complete lack of understanding or appreciation of Iraqi history, culture or even understanding of the Arabic language on the part of intelligence officers. The US Embassy in Iraq, with more than 1,000 staffers in 2006, had only six fluent Arabic speakers.
In the run-up to the war, as Fred Kaplan reported, Bush was warned by Iraqi exiles that American forces "would have to tamp down the sectarian tensions that would certainly reignite between Sunnis and Shiites in the wake of Saddam’s toppling.
Bush looked at the exiles as if they were speaking Martian. They spent much of their remaining time, explaining to him that Iraq had two kinds of Arabs, whose quarrels dated back centuries. Clearly, he’d never heard about this before.
Few things are more frightening than ignorance in action, the German philosopher Goethe said. Bush made the same mistake American presidents made in Vietnam -- stumbling and bumbling arrogance and ignorance of the history and culture of the country the US was invading.
Those opposed to the US/UK intervention in Iraq are obliged to ask, "Would the country, or the region, or the world be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power?" Sure, the intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was wrong, but wmd's were only one reason for the invasion and occupation. On the 10th anniversary of the war, some argue that Iraq, the United States, and the world, would be better off if Saddam were still in power. Saddam's Sunni brethren are merging with opposition groups in Syria, and organizing in opposition to the central governments of both Syria and Iraq, the Wall Street Journal reports. To stop civil war and stabilize the country, the Iraqi prime minister may become a dictator like Saddam, many predict.
This may be shocking, but as someone who encountered everyday people in Russia -- bus drivers, clerks, even school teachers -- who longed for a leader like Stalin, it's not terribly surprising to me. Saddam idolized Stalin and modeled his regime on Stalin's, biographer Said K. Aburish said in an interview for a PBS Frontline broadcast in 2000.
"Stalin is his hero. (Like Saddam) Stalin came from a humble background. Stalin was brought up by his mother. Stalin used thugs. Stalin used the security service. Stalin hated his army. And so does Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein models himself after Stalin more than any other man in history."
Imagine if the US had invaded Russia, toppled Stalin and tried to establish democracy in Russia in the early 1950s. What a backlash that would have created. Some citizens favor a strong-man form of government, even if it's a dictatorship, because they value "law and order" -- security and stability -- above all else.
Unlike Stalin, Saddam had "no ideology whatsoever." He was "into realpolitik. He wanted to take Iraq into the 20th century. But if that meant eliminating 50 percent of the population of Iraq, he was willing to do it," Aburish observed.
The argument has special relevance because of what's happening in neighboring Syria. "Saddam was probably 20 times as bad as Assad in Syria," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a recent interview justifying the toppling of Saddam. "Just think (if Saddam) was trying to suppress an uprising in Iraq. Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power."
If the US/UK had not intervened in Iraq, once the Arab Spring came, Saddam would have either slaughtered his people or there would have been a long, bloody war to topple Saddam (or his successor sons) like the war to topple Assad in Syria. In the first two years, more than 40,000 Syrians have died in civil war. The death toll in Iraq from a campaign to topple Saddam would probably have been far worse, many believe. And the United States, as well as the international community, would have faced enormous pressure to intervene in Saddam's Iraq, just as they do today in Assad's Syria.
Yet in all likelihood, Saddam would have survived the Arab spring, reporter Bobby Ghosh wrote for Time magazine, because of his ruthless brutality and willingness to restrict access to the outside world.
Even some Western analysts wonder if Western interests would be better served if Saddam were still in power. Toby Dodge, a British strategic thinker on the Middle East, told Thomas Ricks of Foreign Policy magazine:
Well, you used to have an oppressive dictator who at least was a bulwark against Iranian power expanding westward. Now you have an increasingly authoritarian and abusive leader of Iraq who appears to be enabling Iranian arms transfers to Syria.
Dodge writes elsewhere that "the trajectory of Iraqi politics clearly is heading towards a new authoritarianism with the concentration of power in the hands of one man, Nuri al-Maliki." Dodge fleshes his argument out in a new book out, Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism.
Nostalgia for Saddam can still be found in Iraq, especially in his hometown of Tikrit, Salam Faraj of Agence France reports. The country was relatively stable when he was in power, secular in outlook, and independent of Iranian influence, Tikrit residents say.
Iraqis still come to Saddam's hometown to pay homage, though his gravesite is now closed. "Most visitors said they recalled days under Hussein when their children could go to school without fear of improvised explosives on roadways and when the electricity stayed on far longer than it does these days," Aaron Davis reported for The Washington Post in 2011. “He was a dictator, but he was one dictator; now we have many,” said one Sunni.
Joost Hiltermann, who has studied the Iraq conflict for the International Crisis Group, said the increase in visitors to Hussein’s grave represents only a swath of Iraq’s population. “There are many Shias and Kurds who say, ‘The dictator is gone and we live more freely now.’ But Iraq is still an unhappy place,” Hiltermann said. “A significant part of the population is nostalgic for strong leadership, unhappy about the endemic instability, and fears growing influence by Iran and senses that Iraq as a regional power is weakened.”
In Baghdad, residents recalled that they had full electricity under Saddam, and the regime ran a substantial food-for-the-poor program.
Banen Al-Sheemary, an Iraqi-American student at the University of Michigan, asked her parents what Iraq was like in their youth, during Saddam's early reign. She blogs:
During the seventies and eighties, Iraq was a powerhouse of academia, with a thriving economy. In 1979, an Iraqi dinar was equal to $3.20. Nowadays, an Iraqi dinar is practically worthless. Saddam’s effort to lead in the Arab world led to many positive reforms, especially for women. My mother enjoyed free transportation to work as required by the state and a six month fully paid maternity leave. Despite his cruel methods of subjugation and obsession with monopolizing and maintaining power, his push to make Iraq the leader of the Arab world, meant economic and social reform.
It was after the first Gulf War, particularly with international sanctions against Saddam's regime, that life in Iraq deteriorated greatly for Banen's parents, and they fled the country for the US.
During Saddam's reign, Iraq had about 1.5 million practicing Christians. But after the American invasion, Christians were targeted as an "alien and infidel minority supposedly in league with the West," David Blair reported for the (UK) Telegraph. About 85 percent of Christians fled the country, leaving only about 200,000 struggling to survive. While Shia and Sunni clerics have issued a rare joint fatwa forbidding attacks on religious minorities, Christians are still under a lot of pressure in Iraq.
Some Sunnis, particularly in places like Fallujah, say Saddam's government treated them more fairly than the current Shia-led government. The government of Nouri Al Maliki is increasingly allied with the Shiites and Iran. The Sunni vice president was arrested on terrorism charges, and the Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, told the BBC's Robin Lustig that "he regards Mr Maliki as a worse dictator than Saddam Hussein."
Yes, Saddam ruled by autocracy, and fear if not terror -- those who did not obey Saddam were ruthlessly oppressed, tortured or killed. One cannot really say that life was better under Saddam until one reads the full litany of the crimes he committed, as exposed in his trial. A PBS Frontline documentary, "The Survival of Saddam," aired in 2000 and explored the secrets of his life and leadership.
In the run-up to both the first Gulf War and the American war in Iraq, U.S. propagandists portrayed Saddam as either stupid or crazy, a megalomaniac as dangerous as Adolph Hitler. But in reviewing the archives of Saddam's reign, historians are coming to a different conclusion. Mark Stout of Johns Hopkins University and co-editor of The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime 1978-2001, told reporter Omar Karmi that Saddam was "a very capable leader."
"He was neither stupid nor crazy. He was very good at what he did, which was to survive in a cut-throat political environment."
If Iraq cannot establish stability, another totalitarian like Saddam may be in its future.
Which begs a difficult question:
Ten years after Assad goes, might there be Syrians and international historians who argue that Syria was better off when he was in power?
Former President Bill Clinton on Dave Letterman Show in 2002 sure bought into the faulty intelligence on Iraq, and greatly under-estimated the ease of toppling Saddam: “[Saddam] is a threat. He’s a murderer and a thug. There’s no doubt we can do this. We’re stronger; he’s weaker. You’re looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then I’d be astonished if this campaign took more than a week. Astonished.” (Hat tip, AndrewSullivan.com, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion.)
"If he's got these stocks of chemical and biological weapons, and if he knows he's toast, don't you think he'll use what he can and give away what he can't to people who'll be using them on us for years to come so he can have the last laugh...."
Mr. Clinton clearly supports his successor.
"I think the President is doing the right thing to go to the United Nations, to ask them to do something and I hope that whatever we do - I think we need to turn up the heat, I think it's just a mistake to walk away from this," said Mr. Clinton.
But he finds the idea of the U.S. acting against Iraq - with only British support – problematic. Even President Bush has expressed such reservations.
Mr. Clinton told Letterman that - for now - the next step should probably be more weapons inspections.
"I wouldn't be opposed to trying these inspections one more time because I know that they did work even when he was trying to undermine us, we kept getting tons of stuff out of there," he said.
Clinton also wrote an op-ed for the (UK) Guardian urging Britons to trust Prime Minister Tony Blair's judgment in favor of war. In 2004, he told Time magazine that "I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over." President Bush, he said, "did the right thing" on Iraq. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out Clinton's "dishonesty slide" on Iraq when he thought he could help Hillary's 2008 campaign.
Many Democrats still bitterly believe that a "stolen election" in 2000 -- Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million -- and that an illegitimate leader and stupid George W. Bush caused America to stumble into a disastrous war in Iraq. Yes, it's true that Gore presciently warned against the invasion in 2002, and as president may not have pulled the trigger on Iraq. But Gore's vice president, Joe Lieberman, his national security advisor Leon Fuerth and former President Clinton were in favor of removing Saddam and under-estimated the difficulty of governing Iraq afterwards. "Given the changed climate produced by Sept. 11, 2001, we should aim from the beginning to destroy the Iraqi regime, root and branch," Fuerth wrote in November, 2001.
Kenneth Pollack, a member of Mr. Clinton’s National Security Council staff, would later write in 2002 that it was a question of “not whether but when” the U.S. would invade Iraq. He wrote that the threat presented by Saddam was “no less pressing than those we faced in 1941.”...We owe it to history—and, more important, to all those who died—to recognize that this wasn’t Bush’s war, it was America’s war.
Clinton was more popular than Gore in 2000, and if he were constitutionally allowed to run for a third term, he probably would have handily beaten Bush. Ironically, his third term -- or Gore's first term -- could have ended disastrously, with a quagmire in Iraq and Democrats deeply divided over that quagmire, not unlike what Lyndon Johnson faced on Vietnam in 1968.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” -- Mark Twain, "Innocents Abroad."
Or, sometimes, if one doesn't probe deep enough, travel can reinforce stereotypes. In some societies, especially those with lots of "guest workers" where your passport pre-determines how much money you make and your station in life, and people generally live in segregated compounds based on nationality, one has to make a special effort to see beyond stereotypes. The default position is to think of certain nationalities as the "servant classes," and certain nationalities as the "ruling classes." And yet, paradoxically, "guest workers" in wealthy countries who send money back home are viewed by their compatriots as having escaped the economic confinements of home for adventure and success abroad.
It is fascinating to discover American military historian Robert Crowley's collections of essays on counter-factual history known as "What If..." He edited three volumes between 2000 and 2004, in which prominent historians explored some of the close calls of history. Among the eminent historians contributing to these volumes were Stephen Ambrose, David McCullough, James McPherson, and Robert Dallek.
The American Revolution, Civil War and World War II provides many plausible alternative histories. Crowley, et al. explore:
Thirteen ways the Americans could have lost the revolution.
What if Britain had kept the 13 colonies? Historian Caleb Carr makes a number of assumptions about how the 19th and 20th Century would have been different and in some ways, better off.
What if the South had won Antietam (Sharpsburg) in 1862? Instead of a battle to a draw, the South could have inflicted devastating losses on the North if Gen. Lee's plans had not been leaked to Yankee Gen. McClellan. What if the South had won Gettysburg? Heavy losses in either/or both of these battles could have put enormous pressure on President Lincoln to negotiate a settlement with the South, allowing the Confederacy to survive.
Journalist-historian Tom Wicker asks what would have happened if Lincoln did not make the emancipation proclamation or if the 14th amendment granting full citizenship to freed slaves in the South was not enacted.
What if Lee had not surrendered at Appomatox? What if the North, in John Wilkes' Booth's wildest dreams, imposed such harsh punishment on the South that guerilla warfare broke out? America might resemble Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
How Hitler could have won the war. What if Hitler had not attacked Russia when he did? He might have moved into the Middle East and secured the oil supplies the Third Reich so badly needed, helping it retain its power in Europe.
What if the Battle of Midway had been won by Japan? Or if Japan had never bombed Pearl Harbor? Would Americans have entered the war?
What if D-Day had been a failure? The Soviet Union might have controlled all of Europe. Ambrose suggests that Allied defeat on D-Day would have meant nuclear devastation for Germany in the summer of 1945.
"What if" Eisenhower ordered American forces to seize Berlin ahead of the advancing Red Army in the spring of 1945 and Stalin quickly retaliated by firing on Americans? World War III could have developed quickly from the ashes of World War II.
Drill Deeper:
The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.
An American correspondent emails me: "I don't need to read books to know how they (the Iraqis) live.....I suspect they lead a miserable existence. And, looking at photos of their life before 2003 they led a miserable existence then. All you have to do is look at their ramshackle houses and dirty streets to know that. And, they were hungry under Saddam...imagine they are hungry now."
Erbil has been named the 2013 Tourism Capital by the Arab Council of Tourism. By 2014, Erbil expects to have four million tourists.
Perhaps so, but they need to get a better PR person....the only photos I've seen is narrow streets, brown adobe type houses, dirty streets.......I have to draw my conclusion with what the press presents since I have not been there and have no desire to go.
They do need better PR, and recognize that they do. However, I doubt a big PR campaign will change the point of view of those who pays so little attention to Iraq news in particular or foreign news in general. They just don't want to hear about Iraq these days. That's probably because Americans feel rejected by the Iraqis, my correspondent contends.
Ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, the country shows some positive economic news on which to build:
Iraq's oil industry has come back in a big way, April Yee reports in The (UAE) National newspaper. "In a relatively short time it has lured the world's biggest oil companies to redevelop its fields, topped its pre-war peak pumping levels and become the second-top producer in Opec."
Iraq's business tourism industry is growing rapidly, from 237,000 in 2011 -- 30,000 a year -- to a projected 350,000 in 2015. Major international hotel chains, including Marriott, Hilton, and Intercontinental, are opening hotels in Iraqi cities within the next two years, mainly in the stable northern region of Kurdistan.
Iraqis are becoming tech-savvy. "Mobile penetration is at 83 per cent in Iraq. Internet penetration, while still low, is growing and satellite channels number in their hundreds," The (UAE) National newspaper reports. About one-quarter of the population has easy access to a computer, 10 percent of the population uses the Internet, and Facebook is growing wildly, connecting young people to a global social network. Facebook is the most visited website in Iraq, according to web measurement company Alexa.
International fund managers "show very optimistic data for Iraqi GDP growth and massive share-price upside" on the Iraqi stock exchange, James Doran reports in The (UAE) National newspaper. The Iraq stock exchange has grown from 15 companies participating in 2004 to 88 companies participating in 2013, The combined market capitalization of listed companies in the exchange has grown five to seven times since the exchange opened in 1997.
The American decision to invade Iraq in 2003 will be debated for decades. From afar, it still looks like a catastrophe, with frequent news of suicide bombings, sectarian strife, and undependable electricity. But if you visit the thriving oil-rich Iraq city of Irbil, you'd probably say the decision was a good one. An economic boom fueled by oil production is helping the northern Kurdish region to develop rapidly, making it prosperous as well as stable. Sympathy for America runs strong in the Kurdish region, the AP reports, on the 10th anniversary of the American invasion:
Rebaz Zedbagi, a partner in the Senk Group, a road construction and real estate investment company with an annual turnover of $100 million, said his success would have been unthinkable without the war. The 28-year-old said he won't do business in the rest of Iraq, citing bureaucracy and frequent attacks by insurgents, but said opportunities in the relatively stable Kurdish region are boundless.
"I believe Kurdistan is like a baby tiger," said Zedbagi, sipping a latte in a Western-style espresso bar in the Family Mall, Irbil's largest shopping center. "I believe it will be very powerful in the Middle East."
Iraq's overall economy is improving significantly. It is reliably and methodically producing oil again. In 2012, Iraq produced more oil than in any year since the first Gulf War. By some estimates, Iraq will soon overtake Russia as the world’s number-two oil exporter. (Source.)
In Abu Dhabi, I met an educator from an elite private school in Irbil who reported on the city's remarkable progress over the last decade. I also spoke with an American army veteran who talked about how much he loves the Iraqi people, and how industrious they are. In Turkey, I met businessmen who invited me to accompany them on one of their frequent trips to northern Iraq. As an American, I demurred, thinking it unsafe. But now I wonder if I was too influenced by sensationalistic media reports. All of these encounters have challenged my negative preconceptions of Iraq.
So you're saying America's mission in Iraq has not been a complete catastrophe?
Not completely. The long-oppressed Kurds in the north, representing about one-fifth of the population, saw the weakness of the central government as their opportunity to create a long dreamed of semi-independent Kurdish state, a wealthy one with oil. They are actually doing better than they were under Saddam and have taken ownership of their own provincial government. In that sense, they are grateful to the Americans.
Perhaps the American venture will be considered one-third successful if Kurdistan's "liberation" holds. But there are serious dangers because the central government wants much more of the massive oil revenues the Kurds are producing, so they may fall into civil war with Baghdad.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has inherited his father Ron's impressive Internet organizing and fundraising network. He has nothing to lose by launching -- early -- a campaign for president in 2016. At the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he won the straw poll of nearly 3,000 attendees, with 25 percent of the vote, besting Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Not too surprising since Paul's father, Ron, won the CPAC straw polls in 2010 and 2011. It will be interesting to watch how fast the Rand Paul 2016 Facebook page grows -- it's now at 807,454 "likes," compared to 454,823 "likes" for Marco Rubio's Facebook page.
If nothing else, expressing interest early makes Paul the de facto leader of the libertarian and Tea Party wings of the Republican Party. In a crowded field, he'd have a good chance of winning the early Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, making him a strong contender, Guardian blogger Harry Enten observes.
Paul won plaudits even from liberals for his 13-hour filibuster against President Obama's domestic drone policy, and for his advocacy of significant cuts in defense spending.
Traditional hawks like the editorialists for The Wall Street Journal, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have mocked Paul for showboating. Paul's filibuster was a "stunt" to "fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms," McCain charged. "We've done, I think, a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them believe that somehow they're in danger from their government. They're not," he said. "But we are in danger from a dedicated ... enemy that is hell bent on our destruction."
To become a majority party again, the Republicans will have to unite anti-government Tea Party libertarians, who detested the 2008 government bailouts of banks, and Wall Street, which gladly accepted the bailouts. The party will have to decide whether to take a consistent, principled free market approach or whether it simply favors, as the Bush administration demonstrated, huge deficit spending, crony capitalism, "socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor."
It will also have to unite the internationalists and neo-cons, who strongly favored the Iraq war and want to hike defense spending before cutting the deficit, with the neo-isolationists, like Paul, who are disillusioned with aggressive American action in Iraq and Afghanistan and prefer to slash defense spending.
Whether the Republican Party can bring these contradictory factions together will be one of the great political questions of 2016. At this stage it seems a libertarian like Paul could engender passion among a core group of ideologues and do well in certain primary and caucus states. But it's doubtful he could garner a majority of Republican primary votes without severely compromising his principals. He opposes the income tax, and would eliminate Medicaid. He has taken domestic positions in favor of marijuana legalization, in opposition to civil rights -- opposing the Violence Against Women Act and going so far as to say business owners have a right to refuse service to customers on the basis of race. "Paul's libertarian streak ends on same-sex marriage and abortion. Paul is against both. Americans are for both," Enten points out.
I've suggested before that both the Tea Party Movement on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left originate from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the financial crash and bailouts of 2008/9, and loss of confidence in the financial elites and the political establishment. They might unite around an agenda of breaking up the big banks, ending corporate welfare, ending the war on drugs, restricting both corporate and government surveillance, opposing Internet censorship, demanding more transparency and fairness in the financial system. That's a good agenda for the next few years.
If Paul could help enact it and unify libertarian impulses on both the right and left -- he might have a chance to actually win as either a Republican nominee or as a third party candidate in a general election. He'd probably have to drop his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, positions inconsistent with libertarianism.
In an insightful article, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner point to ways the Republican Party can modernize, "How to Save the Republican Party."
Both Paul and Rubio are up for re-election in 2016, so they both could be forced to decide early whether to run for re-election or run for president. It's a gamble, as Senator John Edwards (D-NC) discovered when he started grooming for a presidential run just two years after winning his Senate seat, and announced he would not seek re-election 16 months before his seat was up in 2004. Constituents back home resented his decision, thinking he never really intended to serve them, but only his own ambitions. He never secured his base in North Carolina, and his popularity in the state waned. Years on the road also took a psychological toll. Eventually, his promising career -- and his marriage -- were completely destroyed.
Edwards provides a cautionary tale for both Paul and Rubio.
Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
-- Buddhist Karma. Why Believe in Karma?
Recent Comments