webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2011
All rights reserved
From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sun Mar 27 2011 - 17:26:45 EST
Tribes With Flags
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opinion/23friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The Times, wrote an
article<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/africa/22tripoli.html?ref=daviddkirkpatrick>from
Libya on Monday that posed
*the *key question, not only about Libya but about all the new revolutions
brewing in the Arab world: “The question has hovered over the Libyan
uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his
cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the
clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it
fundamentally a tribal civil war?”
This is *the* question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle
East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong
national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be
called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn
in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside
their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live
together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They
are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar
and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more
artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial
powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the
modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each
tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power
or we’re dead.
It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of
the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are
modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe
and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone
against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more
tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest
for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe”
begins.
In Bahrain, a Sunni minority, 30 percent of the population, rules over a
Shiite majority. There are many Bahraini Sunnis and Shiites — so-called
sushis, fused by inter-marriage — who carry modern political identities and
would accept a true democracy. But there are many other Bahrainis who see
life there as a zero-sum sectarian war, including hard-liners in the ruling
al-Khalifa family, who have no intention of risking the future of Bahraini
Sunnis under majority-Shiite rule. That is why the guns came out there very
early. It was rule or die. Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big
tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case
by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee,
myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other’s
power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and
tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without
an iron fist.
Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract is the most important
thing America did. It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in
modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can,
possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. *But it
is still just a hope*. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer
to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way
Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is:
a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions —
Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some
may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to
democracy, but don’t bet on it.
In other words, Libya is just the front-end of a series of moral and
strategic dilemmas we are going to face as these Arab uprisings proceed
through the tribes with flags. I want to cut President Obama some slack.
This is complicated, and I respect the president’s desire to prevent a mass
killing in Libya.
But we need to be more cautious. What made the Egyptian democracy movement
so powerful was that they owned it. The Egyptian youth suffered hundreds of
casualties in their fight for freedom. And we should be doubly cautious of
intervening in places that could fall apart in our hands, à la Iraq,
especially when we do not know, à la Libya, who the opposition groups really
are — democracy movements led by tribes or tribes exploiting the language of
democracy?
Finally, sadly, we can’t afford it. We have got to get to work on our own
country. If the president is ready to take some big, hard, urgent,
decisions, shouldn’t they be first about nation-building in America, not in
Libya? Shouldn’t he first be forging a real energy policy that weakens all
the Qaddafis and a budget policy that secures the American dream for another
generation? Once those are in place, I will follow the president “from the
halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----