Grim's Hall

Cultural Illiteracy:

Reports on negativity about the Iraq elections appear at Belmont Club and a blog called "Think Things Through" (I often use a variant of that phrase when speaking to my son). The usual suspects are involved. There is an irony here.

Both Robert Fisk and Juan Cole are regular participants in the "Americans are culturally illiterate about Arabs" school of foreign policy studies. Among other places, Cole has lamented alleged American illiteracy here and here. Fisk needs no introduction to any reader of blogs.

The irony is that both of these writers, and all of their ilk, have completely misunderstood the Iraqi cultural reaction to the elections. American soldiers and Marines, whose warrior culture is far closer to the Arabs' than is any academic or journalistic one, understood the truth from the beginning. The problem for soldiers has only been learning to think about how they would feel if the circumstances were reversed. The problem for these proud intellectuals has been something more arcane, like demonology, trying to grasp drives whose rules they have written down, but which remain totally alien and finally not understood.

In the debate -- I have had it a dozen times in as many places, and read variants of it in far more -- this school has held that the threat of violence over the elections would make them illegitimate because it would depress turnout, and even among those who came to vote, would through intimidation influence them to make false choices. Until security was certain, there could be no free election.

The thing these debaters never understood was this: in an "honor and shame society" (to use the intellectual term for it), there is great honor to be gained when there is a threat hanging over your actions. It is the same power which drove warriors of the Algonquin Nations to count coup on the enemy.

Far from depressing turnout, the insurgents inspired it.

Wretchard wrote:

[Cole]'s appreciation was totally wrong. Think of what it means for anyone to dare vote in Fallujah at all, despite the penalties prescribed by terrorists, some of whom are certain to be kinsmen. And when was the time, at any Faculty meeting, that the halt and the blind tramped in to vote (cars are banned from approaching the polling precincts for security reasons) at the risk of death?

This is correct. And if it is to be understood in its cultural context, one must recognize what a personal act of heroism means in a warrior culture. These people -- including the young and the old, the men and the women, "the halt and the blind" -- have counted coup, to bring honor to themselves and to their project. Anyone who speaks of that project, or writes about it, must show it the honor that the Iraqi people have won for it.

To do otherwise -- to try and dismiss the results or the government that forms from them -- is to fail to understand the culture and its conception of honor. It is to put personal preference above reality, to do just the thing that the Coles and Fisks of the world accuse the American warfighter of doing. Thinking Things Through has a good laugh on the point: "[Fisk] might as well be claiming dragons are flying over the southern marshes."

Wretchard asks, "Did we win?" and answers, "Who knows? But many Iraqis think they did." Indeed, they did. Remember what they won, which by their lights as by mine is honor and glory. Remember how they will expect you to treat a people who have risen from despair to do honorable and glorious things.

* I end with an aside. If this was the maximal effort of the insurgents, the assault on Fallujah was a pure success. The insurgency remains capable of brutal and murderous attacks, but not many at once. This demonstrates clearly The Myth of the Guerrilla. I wrote about this at length in "Clausewitz & The Triangle", which looked at the Iraqi insurgency from the perspective of military science.

One of the primary tools of the guerrilla is the ruse of appearing more dangerous than he really is.

Hit and run attacks, sniper attacks, bombings and the like give the appearance of a foe who is everywhere, when in fact his numbers are limited.

The guerrilla, because he chooses the place and time of combat, can appear to be everywhere at once -- and therefore a universal feature of the landscape, even when his numbers are limited. But the election, if you know what to look for, showed that tactic for what it is: an illusion.

Today, the insurgent couldn't control the battlefield. In order to remain credible, he had to create not just one ugly incident, but widespread disruption across the country.

If the insurgents had the capability, they would have hit every polling station in the country, and they would have hit hard. At many of these stations, it would have been easy to create carnage because of the massive turnout.

In fact, they managed only about two dozen deaths nationwide. Time was -- when Fallujah was in their control, and there were safe havens for planning these things and building multiple car bombs -- that they managed to kill more than twice that many at a blow. Remember the forty children blown apart at a sewage treatment plant's opening ceremony? Terrorist attacks are down 40% since Fallujah was taken by the Marines, and that's just measuring the numbers of attacks. As you can see from today's maximal effort, the power of the attacks has also weakened.

As mentioned above, the fact is that the insugency wasn't able to put an end to voting even in Fallujah itself, where there remain sufficient numbers of closet guerrillas to kill people who voted in coming days. Last April, there was much fretting that Iraq was being lost as a surge of guerrillas and Mahdi army fighters claimed sections of nine cities across the nation. Now, the elections took place in every last city, even in the teeth of the enemy heartland.

Have we won? Not yet; there is still the hard business of setting up a government, and making it run. We will be needed for some time yet to help out in that regard. That will allow the guerrilla to rebuild his illusion; once again, he can choose one target every day or few days, and appear to be everywhere and all powerful.

But remember what it looked like when the curtain was pulled away for a moment. We are winning. We will have the victory. Time and leverage are all we need. We have plenty of the latter.