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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (131291)	5/4/2004 9:20:42 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawkmoon, if I see a child in front of a bus, and I know the child won't be able to run fast enough to avoid being hit, my understanding that something terrible is going to happen, does not make me WANT it to happen. You can make dichotomies all you want, until the cows come home and much on them, but my (and other people) seeing no very good solution to a mess created in haste, and now repented in leisure, does not mean I (or others) wanted it to be a mess, or that we wouldn't have been thrilled if it had (or was going to) turn our differently. We're not losing the opportunity to reform Iraq, because we never had that- it was an amazingly naive dream. What we had was the dramatic opportunity to invade a country, and occupy it, which we've had some experience with before. Do I WISH that such invasions resulted in super good things? You bet I do, especially when I consider, in every detail, the cost in human life, and in cold hard cash. I STILL hope it turns out well, and there's a chance it may- but I see numerous other ends to this game, and some of them are pretty dismal. The fact that I see those possibilities, does not mean I want them to happen.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (131291)	5/4/2004 9:58:31 AM
From: el_gaviero	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

“And what we're losing is the one major opportunity we've had in the past 80 years to try and inject democratic reforms into a region dominated by totalitarian and non-democratic regimes.” Hawk, In saying that we have to bring democracy to Iraq, you show little understanding to the realities of life in that part of the world. To take a small but crucial example, meditate on this one fact: there is a very high degree of consanguinity (cousin marriage) among the people of Iraq. “In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or second cousins to each other. A 1986 study of 4,500 married hospital patients and staff in Baghdad found that 46% were wed to a first or second cousin, while a smaller 1989 survey found 53% were "consanguineously" married. The most prominent example of an Iraqi first cousin marriage is that of Saddam Hussein and his first wife Sajida.” groups.yahoo.com About half the people of Iraq are married to a first or second cousins. By way of comparison, among European peoples, the rate of cousin marriage is under one percent. The implications of this detail are vast. In Iraq, people follow what amounts to an entirely different evolutionary strategy. They form tight-knit family and clan structures, and face the world as a group of genetically linked individuals. This strategy grew out of the conditions of life in that part of the world, and carries with it all sorts of implications, e.g., morality is not adherence to a common set of rules, but whatever helps my clan and hurts yours. For us to say to the Iraqis that they should follow our system means, in the final analysis, that they should lower the level of cousin marriage and move towards our system. In order to grasp just how vast this change would be ---that is, in order to understand just how vast a project the U.S. proposes to undertake --- turn the situation around. Suppose that we were being invaded by Iraq. Suppose also that a philosopher were among the invaders, and that this philosopher were willing to explain the reasons for the invasion. “My friends,” this philosopher says to us, “I will readily admit that your political system, which you call ‘liberal democracy,’ works well in the short run. But the advantages of your system are ephemeral. The process that makes your system work in the short run brings ruin in the long. For example, your land at this very moment is filling up with ---and is being occupied by --- strangers from Mexico and many other parts of the planet. Your vision of the world does not let you see the danger of this. But our vision does. We understand the implications of these movements of population, because we have suffered them many times in the past. “We know that sooner or later you are going to be left with a world that looks like ours --- many peoples, many groups, no common vision, not enough goods, not enough assets, bitter fights for survival. “By invading you, we are doing you a favor. We want to impose our system on you. We know our system is harsh. But it works over the long term. We want to bring this improvement to you before you let even more people into your country, and make the transition to sustainability even more terrible. You curse us now. But in time you will see that we will have done you a favor. “As an intermediate short term goal, we want you to get the number of your first and second cousin marriages up by at least one percent per year.” To this we might well reply: your argument is interesting but your request is insane. You can’t ask us to change basic patterns of marriage in five years. “Ah,” says the cagey philosopher from Iraq, “what makes you think we can?”