Saturday, November 25, 2006
Understanding Iraqis
When I was doing field work in Shiraz in 1958, interviewing a wide variety of people on aspects of Iranian culture, I was often frustrated by the evident unwillingness of my informants to tell me what they really thought. One of my worst experiences was when I set up a meeting between a friend of mine and a Foundation scout looking for likely prospects for a psychology scholarship at an American university. I had spent a lot of time with this thoroughly secularized Persian scholar. He had impressed on me that this was the kind of opportunity he was looking for. But when the meeting took place, he refused to acknowledge that he might be at all interested in such an opportunity. One day I asked the local university librarian why I was having this difficulty. His answer was that it would be hard for me to really understand the centuries that Iranians had suffered under an endless series of oppressors. This national experience had led them to distrust everyone, particularly outsiders who asked questions. One never knew how the answers might be used.
I thought of this exchange when I read NYTimes Op-Eds recounting the experience of Iraqis who had tried to work with Americans, but had been forced to back off. One Iraqi translator concluded: "America did well to liberate Iraq. But Iraqis were used to tyranny and afraid of freedom. The Americans entered Iraq without a psychological program for dealing with this fact. Iraqis had been programmed according to another system of thought and feeling. America should have considered that." Another Iraqi who had tried to explain journalistically to the Iraqis what the American were doing wrote: " The American policy people wanted to give us democracy and liberty the same way you give me a shirt, so I can wear it right away. But a common Iraqi view is that America went into Iraq to terminate Islam and Muslims. Those who aren't so extreme say that America invaded Iraq only to steal the oil. The American army destroyed everything and thought they could rebuild from scratch. Maybe this could have worked if people loved Americans or understood what they were doing. But by this time the people already hated America."
This author goes on to say that we should have removed Hussein and installed another dictatorship, albeit a new dictatorship. It could have imposed martial law and done what the Americans were not able to do by cutting power away from the old leaders and their followers. Four or eight years later there could have been an election and then Iraqi society could "take baby steps down the long road to democracy and liberty". Now, he concludes, experience with "American democracy" will make the process of attaining real liberty a much longer road.
Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
