The Lawrence Problem

The Lawrence Problem
April 9, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, April 9 (UPI) -- Isn't it time for the scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Lawrence attempts to gavel the Arab League government to order in the noisy palace at Damascus, and every tribe attempts to speak at the same time?

As I recall, the British general just waits across town and does nothing. By the time they finish arguing about why one tribe refuses to turn on the water, and another tribe refuses to turn on the electricity, and a third tribe demands to know why they were paid in currency instead of gold, the palace is empty. Lawrence is alone. They've all decided to just loot the city and go back home.

Of course, Lawrence is carrying a guilty secret. The Arabs have done exactly what the Allies want them to do. Pretty soon there will be a meeting in London, or Paris, or Cairo, and the land will be partitioned, and puppets will be installed in regions that never existed before, under governmental structures that are cobbled together from western ideas and local customs, and business will proceed as usual, with a minimum of fuss.

As we learned this week, very little has changed since 1918. The Turks are still glowering at the borders, sulking about their lost chances. The idea of what an Arab government is supposed to look like is anybody's guess. And there are plenty of western- approved bit players waiting in line to take their shot at becoming the new shah, or emir, or, if you insist, president.

Where is Jimmy Carter while all this is going on? Isn't this exactly the moment when a call to Plains, Georgia, is in order? One thing the man does know how to do is set up a process that will lead to elections, in places where elections have never worked before.

Instead we have Ahmad Chalabi, who's already setting up in Nasiriyah with a little 600-man army to establish himself as Puppet Apparent. Chalabi has been in exile since 1958, so you can just imagine what kind of sentimental stroll around town he took after being deposited by a "Rulers R Us" military transport. Aside from the hordes sacking the hotels and government offices, we can assume the school playground probably doesn't look at all like he remembers it.

Then there's the fact that he apparently spent some looting time himself, in the form of a Jordan bank he defrauded. In 1992 Chalabi was convicted of 30 counts of theft and embezzlement, with $300 million missing after the crash of Petra Bank in Amman. UPI Reporter-at-Large Arnaud de Borchgrave interviewed the governor of the Jordanian central bank last December, and quoted him as calling Chalabi "one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East."

Chalabi is the leader of an exile movement called the Iraqi National Congress, which is, of course, totally unknown to 99 percent of the Iraqi people, as is Chalabi. And even though Chalabi has powerful friends--Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle-- let's assume President Bush is telling the truth when he says there will be no new Shahs of Iran and that the Iraqis will determine their own fate.

But the signs being carried through the streets of Basra this week read "We Want An Honest Man." Note the singular. As in all Arab states, it's all about the one, the patriarch. There were no signs reading "We Want An Honest Parliament." Saddam Hussein didn't invent the cult of the strongman, he just abused the privilege.

I'm waiting to see what the Brits and the Americans mean by "government of the Iraqis' choosing." We already know what that would probably look like, because a government was just formed in Basra, overnight, with a little prodding from the British marines. The sheikhs got together and chose a sheikh of sheikhs-- and then promptly started feuding over whether they had chosen correctly and whether he would really represent the other tribes. Nevertheless, Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa al Kanan looks like the sort of guy the Iraqis would probably entrust the government to, if given the choice. He's ex-military (Soviet-trained), Russian- educated, and wants nothing at all to do with the west. He's religious but not too religious. He hates all the right people and says all the right things.

And one of the things he says, as all Iraqi leaders will say, is that Iraq must follow the teachings of the Prophet. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when American leaders talk about what they'd like to see in the future of Iraq, the name Muhammad never comes up. And yet, if you're going to play the Great Game, which apparently we are, you have to take into account that they've just been invaded by a Christian nation. (It's happened before.) Of course, we would reply that we're not a Christian nation, we're a secular nation--Jerry Falwell notwithstanding-- and besides, we have no interest in influencing their local beliefs.

Oh, okay, in that case, if we're not going to insist on any Christian stuff, then bring in Ahmed Bakr al-Hakim, the Tehran- based leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, who would be a popular choice for most Iraqis and especially for the Shias of the South, who just lost their own hand-picked exile to assassination last week.

Why not an ayatollah for the south, a Kurd for the north, and some sort of Turkish-style Islamic secularist for Baghdad? That would probably also make most Iraqis happy, because, again like all Arabs, they're never reluctant to cut up large political entities to make tiny ones. In one sense, they'e always returning to kinship tribal structures of one sort or another anyway.

Of course, the alternative would be to say, "We're going to ram American-style democracy down their throats." The idea would be that they won't like the medicine, but it's good for them anyway, and they'll thank us when they grow up.

But we don't do things like that anymore. We don't treat cultures as children. We would never say, for example, what Lawrence of Arabia said:

"They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades. . . . They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginations were vivid, but not creative. . . . They steered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave. The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of life unquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable, entailed on man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing impossible, and death no grief."

Lawrence would have understood the looting last week, and the fires, and the assassinations. And he also would have understood the spiritual dimension of it. Not much was written about it, but the day after the worst of the looting, there were special prayer services in which several of the religious leaders demanded that certain people give the stolen loot back. And here's something else that Lawrence would have understood: quite a few of them gave it back.

It was an ex post facto police action.

We don't have that in the west. It confuses us.

So let's not confuse them. Either step in and manage it like the British did 85 years ago, or leave them to their own culture. Even Lawrence reached a point where he simply decided to go home.

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