On Looting ....

Well, my fears seem to have been realised up to a point. One of the advantages of a world-view encompassing imperfectibility and Original Sin is that you're not quite as horrified when people behave badly.

Reminds me of P.J. O'Rourke on the looting of Albania in his brilliant economics text Eat The Rich ......

Elmaz was studying to be a veterinarian. Everything had been stolen from his school:books, drugs, lab equipment, even parts of the buildings themselves. 'We are without windows, without doors' said Elmaz. 'We study with only desks and walls.' The desks had been stolen too, but the faculty found them in local flea markets and bought them back. 'All the horses we have were shot.' said Elmaz.

Across the road from the school was a collective farm which once had 5,000 cattle. 'They stole 5,000 cows !' I said ....'No, No, No,' said Elmaz. 'They could never steal so many cows in 1997.' 'How come?' 'Because they were all stolen in 1992 when Communism ended.'

Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. 'Then what stopped the looting?' I said. 'They were finished' said Elmaz.

 

Democracy Or Martyrdom Operations ?

In politics there always seem to be two views of 'the Other' - the Other in this case being the people of Iraq. One side says 'they're just people like us - they want the things we want', the other says 'these people are not at all like us - beware'. Historically the former view was held by the Left - think of the idealism with which the African colonies were liberated (or abandoned), or the argument that asylum-seekers will in no time be helping with the PTA and sending the kids to medical school, compared with the traditional 'right' view of peoples 'half devil and half child' or (circa African independence) 'they're just not ready for it'.

But these days its a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. The repentant Trotskyites who make up America's neocons seem confident that the whole Middle East can be 'liberated' from feudalism or theocracy, and it's the Left who are suddenly saying 'don't kid yourself - these guys are very different to you and me. Here's a more traditional 'right' view from Stanley Kurtz - and here's an interesting Guardian piece by the travel writer Jonathan Raban. It would sit well in a right-wing site - just change the title from 'The Greatest Gulf' to 'Yes, It IS A Clash Of Civilisations'. According to Jonathan, to Muslims - any Muslims, not only those of Iraq, 'who you are is: who you know, who depends on you, and to whom you owe allegiance - a visible web of relationships that can be mapped and enumerated'. Sounds like 13th century Europe to me all right - or the eighteenth-century Highlands of Scotland - a place where the first question to a stranger is 'whose man are you ?'. 'We've utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded' he writes, followed by 'Beware of the Ummah (world-wide body of Islam comprising all its believers)'. The rhetoric of Abu Hamza and Bin Laden, he warns, is now that of mainstream Islam, and Mubarak's forecast of a hundred Bin Ladens could turn out to be a serious underestimate'. Will the Iraq conflict 'open the gates of hell ? We shall soon find out'.

Now if Jonathan's essay were to be taken seriously, Tony Blair should be very worried, much more so than George Bush. There are around two million British Muslims, quite a few of whom are Iraqis (who, remember, we don't understand), concentrated in London and some midland and northern cities. In the pre-September 11 past they have taken part in large scale rioting in Oldham, Blackburn, Bradford and Leeds. In the post-Sept 11 world more than a hundred have been arrested on terrorism-related charges. British Muslims are captives of the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay. Do you see 'Rivers of Blood', Jonathan ?

Fortunately there seems to be one facet of the feudal mindset that makes these predictions unlikely - the fact that, as Raban says, 'the individual strong man is compatible with strict Islamist teaching in a way that a strong state is definitely not'. Blimey, Jon - so it's because of Islam that there are no democratic Arab states ? Islam's incompatible with pluralist democracy, then ? Seems so. 'The typical Arab ruler is likely to echo Louis XIV: the state, such as it is, is him - a warlord-like figure on a grand scale, with an army and a secret police at his disposal, like Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, King Saud, or Saddam Hussein.' 'The unwieldy assemblage of Iraq needed not a government but a ruler'. Gosh. And I bet Pat Buchanan agrees with you 100%.

Thank heavens for Emperor GWB, then, and Viceroy Jay Gardner. For despite GWBs refusal to fight a duel with Saddam, there's no doubt that he disposes of enormous strength and that he's prepared to use it. The 'Arab street' was subdued after Afghanistan. What can it do now ? Was it Caligula who said 'let them hate me - as long as they fear me' ?