Blood debts and exotic others

Imagine this.

You live in a country occupied by foreigners. Since invading, they have thrown out a vicious despot who once reigned, but communal violence has at times been horrific. They hire mercenaries to help keep order in the occupation. In a shoot-out downtown, your little son is accidentally shot dead by one of the soldiers of fortune. None of the mercenaries are put on trial. Representatives of the occupying power do not officially apologise. But they offer you compensation, in the form of money in an envelope.

Do you reject the offer? Do you feel outraged? Do you think you are denied justice?

If so, you must be an Arab. You must be from ‘traditional Arab society’, that ‘values honor and decorum above all.’

Pardon the sarcasm, but this is what happens when culture is studied very badly.

We have been told for a while now that cash compensation is a necessary part of managing relations with the natives. But, despite the analysis of this article, which interprets Arab rage as a spasm of exotic culture, it turns out Iraqis can’t easily be bought off, that they want a formal apology for their killed relatives, and some of them want a formal trial.

The Human Terrain System itself actually has got a lot going for it. There is prima facie evidence that by getting the military to think harder about the social ecology of host populations, it has helped to depress violence and make military force more discriminate, while building greater consent amongst the people.

But culturalism fails where it interprets people as exotic, alien creatures, bound in a world of archaic tradition, without agency or linkages or resemblances to the modern West, and without multiple identities. Iraq, for example, may be a place of ‘traditional’ mores, but it was also a highly modernised, bureaucratic, literate society, mingling secularism with piety, modernisation with tribalism, and its a place where interests and identity jostle, where warriors change sides, where criminals reinvent themselves as jihadists, and where, despite the vulgar attempts to buy them off, families feel every bit as angry about losing relatives as we might.

Matt Yglesias puts it better than I can:

“It’s really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it’s not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.”

Bravo. The many shifts and changes in propaganda by Saddam Hussein should make us remember how fluid, contested and volatile culture really is. Iraqis have ‘tradition’, but they also have politics, they may have tribe, but they also have the interpenetration of ideas, technology and influence.

Unfortunately, dodgy ideas of culture are not just evident in popular media, but amongst some retired generals, academics, at least one senior cultural anthropologist, respected public affairs journals, and military doctrine. Hopefully the talented (and brave) folk at the HTS will push back against this wave.

A good pedagogy of culture and war should be attentive to the linkages, crossovers and relationships (especially the reciprocity of war itself) that mean culture is not reducible to a discourse of difference and separation, but should acknowledge global patterns as well. What Shylock said about Jews, also applies to Iraqis:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

(This is kind of a plug for a book I’m writing, as you can probably tell.)

Tags: COIN and culture