Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

 Rory Stewart’s book The Prince of the Marshes about his experiences as a British administrator in the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar in 2003 and 2004 is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the the unraveling of Iraq since March 2003.

The Queen of the Quagmire - The New York Review of Books, October 25, 2007

Some suggest today that the US failure in Iraq is due simply to lack of planning; to specific policy errors— debaathification, looting, the abolition of the army, and lack of troops; and to the absence of a trained cadre of Arabists and professional nation-builders. They should consider Bell and her colleagues, such as Colonel Leachman or Bertram Thomas, a political officer on the Euphrates. All three were fluent and highly experienced Arabists, won medals from the Royal Geographical Society for their Arabian journeys, and were greatly admired for their political work. Thomas was driven from his office in Shatra by a tribal mob. Colonel Leachman, who was famed for being able to kill a tribesman dead in his own tent without a hand lifted against him, was shot in the back in Fallujah. Bell’s defeat was slower but more comprehensive. Of the kingdom she created, with its Sunni monarch and Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish subjects, there is today no king, no Sunni government, and something close to civil war. Perhaps soon there will be no country.

Bell is thus both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for “nation-building.” Despite the prejudices of her culture and the contortions of her bureaucratic environment, she was highly intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Her colleagues were talented, creative, well informed, and determined to succeed. They had an imperial confidence. They were not unduly constrained by the press or by their own bureaucracies. They were dealing with a simpler Iraq: a smaller, more rural population at a time when Arab nationalism and political Islam were yet to develop their modern strength and appeal.

But their task was still impossible. Iraqis refused to permit foreign political officers to play at founding their new nation. T.E. Lawrence was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.

de Bellaigue, Turkey at the Turning Point? - The New York Review of Books, october 25, 2007

It is hard to take seriously the more alarmist statements of Turkey’s die-hard secularists. As Erdogan deliberated on whether or not to run for the presidency, for example, Sezer claimed that Turkish secularism faced “its gravest threat” since the Republic’s inception—a statement that ignored the Islamist uprising that convulsed the Kurdish southeast in 1925 and the massacres of Alevis, members of a sect of heterodox Muslims, by Sunni bigots in the 1970s.

Since it came to power in 2002, the AKP has passed no overtly Islamist legislation. Erdogan tried to outlaw adultery, and some AKP mayors of provincial cities briefly set up alcohol-free zones, but these schemes met with protest and were abandoned. Erdogan’s education minister has been accused of Islamizing textbooks, and of packing his ministry with former employees of the Religious Affairs Directorate, but education remains, for the pupils at most state schools, a resoundingly secular experience. The AKP has not tried to limit or ban usury. Although it came to power promising satisfaction to those who chafe at the head-scarf ban, a highly controversial symbol of the secular–Islamist divide, it did not, in its first term, try to reverse this ban, and the sixty-two women it put up for election in July were all bare-headed. Moreover, over the past few years, the government has brought about what a recent report on women’s rights from the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank, called “the most radical changes to the legal status of Turkish women in 80 years.”[1] Under these reforms, rape in marriage and sexual harassment in the workplace were made criminal offenses, and sexual crimes in general were classified as violations of the rights of the individual. They had formerly been defined as crimes against society, the family, or public morality.

Gideon Levi [Levy], Twilight Zone / Black holes - Haaretz, October 4, 2007

A visit to Ein Beit-Ilma refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. We proceed from house to house through the holes made by soldiers in the walls of the rooms. From the home of the Yunes family, our hosts, we make our way to the Rajab family through the hole in the stairwell. From the Rajabs we go on to the Namruttis, this time through the hole in the bedroom wall. From there to the Taha family, now through the living room. “Let’s go back to the street,” says Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, director of Palestinian Medical Relief Services in Nablus, after we have passed dustily through half a dozen homes without having emerged into the street. “We are not soldiers,” he says.

The neighborly relations in this shabby camp are now more open: You can ask a neighbor for salt without having to leave the house. Whole streets can now be traversed indoors, through the walls, one gaping hole after another. The Israel Defense Forces banged its head against the wall, so to speak, until its soldiers found the terrorist who planned to commit suicide, as well as his squad, which had already sent the explosive belt to Tel Aviv.

Along the way, the IDF killed a disabled man, half of whose body was paralyzed, though the IDF claimed he was armed with an M-16 rifle; demolished a five-story building, leaving five families homeless; damaged dozens of other houses around the demolished building; and made the many holes in the walls. One soldier was killed here, Staff Sergeant Ben-Zion Henman, from Moshav Nov, in the Golan Heights, and we are now standing at the spot where he fell.

The IDF was here for three days and four nights in mid-September. Hundreds of soldiers went from house to house, leaving destruction and terror in their wake, arresting many dozens of camp residents, before leaving in the early morning hours of September 21. A large-scale terrorist attack was prevented, and the refugee camp is licking its wounds and calculating the damage.

Dobson has made this threat before, but Christian Right strategists like Ralph Reed know that the only way they can achieve any of their goals is by remaining in the GOP. If conservative evangelicals voted in large numbers for a third party, they would simply be helping to elect the Democratic nominee. That said, most Christian conservatives will vote against Giuliani in southern and western primaries and many will refuse to vote for him if he is the GOP candidate even if this means helping Hillary Clinton become the next president.

James Dobson, The Values Test,New York Times, October 4, 2007

REPORTS have surfaced in the press about a meeting that occurred last Saturday in Salt Lake City involving more than 50 pro-family leaders. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss our response if both the Democratic and Republican Parties nominate standard-bearers who are supportive of abortion. Although I was neither the convener nor the moderator of the meeting, I’d like to offer several brief clarifications about its outcome and implications.

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

The other issue discussed at length concerned the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values. Though there was some support for the proposal, no consensus emerged.

Religious extremists killing women in Basra, Iraq, McClatchy Newspapers, www.kansascity.com, October 4, 2007

BASRA, Iraq | Women in Basra have become the targets of a violent campaign by religious extremists, who leave more than 15 female bodies scattered around the city each month, police officers say.

Maj. Gen. Abdel Jalil Khalaf, commander of Basra’s police, said Thursday that self-styled enforcers of religious law threatened, beat and shot women who they thought weren’t sufficiently Muslim….Often, he said, the “crime” is no more than wearing Western clothes or not wearing a head scarf….

The vigilantes patrol the streets of Basra on motorbikes or in cars with dark-tinted windows and no license plates. They accost women who are not wearing the traditional robe and head scarf known as hijab. Religious extremists in the city also have been known to attack men for clothes or haircuts deemed too Western.Like all of southern Iraq, Basra is populated mostly by Shiite Muslims, so sectarian violence is not a major problem, but security has deteriorated as Shiite militias fight each other for power. British troops in the area pulled out last month.