Iraqi Homeland Security

Iraqi Homeland Security
March 28, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, March 28 (UPI) -- New York is full of émigrés who have lost their homelands. They linger here with varying degrees of success. Most of them, especially the old ones, never adapt.

If you go to Brighton Beach, and order a kvas and some pelmeni and ask the old men about Odessa, their eyes will light up and they'll tell you how they miss it still. Most of them were expelled from Ukraine because they were Jews, or encouraged to leave because they were considered criminals, or fled on their own because they were afraid of some desperately homicidal party leader. But would they go back and fight for Ukraine if it was invaded? Of course they would.

Would they fight even if Ukraine was led by a corrupt power- mad brutal despot? Of course they would.

It's their homeland. Is that so hard to understand?

Many of the Pakistani cab drivers in New York are bitter men. They were engineers and university professors when they were forced to emigrate. Here their degrees are worthless. But if India invaded Pakistan, would they fight? Of course.

The businessmen of Chinatown love their American freedoms, which were similar to the ones they had in Hong Kong before it was returned to the Communists. They hate the Communists, but would they fight for China? Absolutely. Even the Chinese- Americans took the side of China in the international dispute over the capture of an American spy plane two years ago--because it's their homeland.

And so it goes, through all the 186 ethnic groups of New York. They're right in front of our eyes--you would think we understood this stuff.

Yesterday an American commander expressed his frank amazement when men in pickup trucks, carrying only rifles, charged out of Nasiriyah and took on some Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Of course they were mowed down. In the purest military terms, they were suicides. But perhaps something else is going on.

Much has been made this week of the Iraqi will to fight. It's couched in military terms, of course. There are "pockets of resistance." There are "units of irregulars." There are "paramilitary death squads." There are people who seem to be "fanatically loyal" to the Iraqi regime.

But could there be another explanation? Could they simply be fanatically loyal to Iraq?

One of the early expectations of the American army was that the Shias in the south would rise up immediately and welcome the Americans in order to be rid of the Baath party. When that didn't happen, the explanation was that they were afraid of being shot by the Republican Guard.

But the Republican Guard can't watch you 24 hours a day. Could it be that they look at Saddam Hussein's thugs as the lesser of evils?

When a country is invaded, it strikes at every man's self- respect. It doesn't matter that the invader uses the word "liberation." The past use of that term is not particularly reassuring. The Jacobins were liberators. The Bolsheviks were liberators. And Hitler called himself the liberator of Poland. We should get a new word.

But more to the point, a man can enter into the "my country right or wrong" psychological state for a number of reasons, and one of them is that his opponent is simply overwhelming. The very fact that the odds are a thousand to one will cause certain men to rise up and say, "I'll stand with you." When I see an Iraqi woman with children trudging down the road alone, I wonder, "Did the father and husband sign a death pact with the army?"

Of course, it will be argued that these men have no choice. For some of them that's true. But I think too much is being made of the fact that some of them are fighting at gunpoint. Officers with guns have been used to stop desertion and cowardice in even the most civilized armies. There are numerous stories from our own Civil War in which a Captain or a Colonel shoots at his retreating men to turn them back toward the enemy.

Then there's the sticky matter of the expatriates returning to Iraq to get involved in the war. This looks bad. And it doesn't help that our ally is the British. The Iraqis remember the British, and not fondly. They hated the Brits long before they hated us.

And finally there's the matter of these people being accustomed to rule by monarch. As many historians have pointed out, you can't move from a kinship society to a monarchy to a democracy without going through a long period of educating a middle class that ends up running the country alongside the monarch. If you try to jump one of the stages of history, terror results. The most famous example is Russia, but we have numerous others, especially from recent decades in Africa.

Until you reach that stage, people love the kingship. That doesn't mean they love their king. It means they love having a king. It's fruitless to tell them that they're short-sighted adolescents who don't understand freedom. They have to internalize freedom, and the way you do that is by a more and more limited monarchy working alongside an educated prosperous class of businessmen and tradesmen. It takes a few generations. There are no shortcuts.

A man is not born knowing what kind of government he lives under or what political scientists say about the shape his country should take. All he knows is the colors of his village at dawn, the sounds the children make, the things that delight him and the things that terrify him. He may accept them and he may fight against them, but there's something going on at a deeper level, and the word for it is "homeland."

It shouldn't be so surprising.

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