Ayatollah Sistani says he wants the commission that decides on his country’s new constitution to be elected. Ayatollah Bremer says he wants the commission that decides on Sistani’s country’s new constitution to be sorta-kinda-well– not exactly elected.
Who will decide between these two views?
Unlike Ayatollah Tom Friedman, I happen to think it should be the Iraqi people who decide. Which makes the results of a recent survey on Iraqi opinion released by a group called Oxford Research International particularly relevant.
The survey sampled the views of 3,244 Iraqis picked out by random sampling, who were interviewed in their homes in October and early November. They were asked to rate their confidence in 11 different organizations including the Interim Governing Council, the rebuilding Iraqi Army, the UN, etc etc.
Of the eleven different bodies, Ayatollah Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority won the laurels for “most distrusted”: some 57% of those questioned said they had zero trust in the CPA and 22% said they had “very little” trust in it (for a total distrust index of 79%). A resounding eight percent said they had “a great deal” of trust in the CPA.
As for the (slightly general) category of religious leaders, they reportedly won the laurels for “most trusted”. 42% of respondents said they had a great deal of trust in the RLs, and another 28% expressed “quite a lot” of trust in them (for a total trust index of 70%). Around 11% said they had “no trust at all” in the RLs.
Month: December 2003
A globalized ‘Manifest Destiny’
Buried down at the bottom of the long post I put up here yesterday, “Sistani speaks” were some slightly derogatory comments on something my old buddy Tom Friedman put in his NYT column. I guess what had gotten me really upset was reading the part where he said:
- This war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan… It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot…
Anyway, nothing like a bit of emotion to get my writing juices flowing. Today I had to write a column for Al-Hayat. So, based on my reading of Tom’s statements as expressing a peculiarly American view of the US people’s “Manifest Destiny” to spread its system of government over ever greater and greater portions of God’s earth, I wrote a piece that explored the whole idea of “Manifest Destiny going global”, and the fact that Tom Friedman is just the latest in a long line of self-described “liberals” in western society who have put their liberal ideals into the service of imperial ventures.
I can’t say more about the content of that column here. (Hey, you’re supposed to go out and buy the newspaper once it comes out, and read it there. If you read Arabic, that is.)
But seeing as how I grew up in a rapidly and determinedly de-colonizing Britain– a place where the whole discourse of colonialism and imperialism was viewed as incredibly 19th-century, very distasteful, and embarrassing in the extreme– I never actually learned about the American “Manifest Destiny” thing in high school or college.
(I did ask Bill, the spouse, about his recollection of how it was taught to his generation– he went through a public high school in Southern California in the late 1950s. He said that there, similarly, the general impression was given of ‘Manifest Destiny’ as being something 19th-century and slightly embarrassing.)
But guess what, folks! Manifest Destiny, that same old ideology of expanding the lebensraum for “freedom” that in the 1840s sent the US Cavalry off to capture control of the whole area of the today’s continental United States, is now alive and kicking at a global level in the thinking of American “liberals” like Tom Friedman.
I did, of course, have to go into the web and do some quick online research into the history of the MD concept here in the US. I did a quick Google search and came up with some interesting results.
Geneva Accord– strengths and weaknesses
The ‘Geneva Accord’ signed today between non-governmental negotiators from Israel and Palestine was a great achievement, despite its many evident limitations.
Chief among the latter is the fact that neither of the two negotiating teams has any governmental mandate to negotiate. (Though it should be noted that Yasser Abed Rabboo, unlike Yossi Beilin, is a close associate of the two persons wielding leadership in his own society.) There also seem to me to be some weaknesses in the content of the plan. But these are minor compared with its achievements. The main achievements are, in my humble opinion, threefold:
- (1) The ability of these two teams to reach agreement in spite of the continuing levels of violence their societies suffer from, and despite the tepidity of support coming from the world’s sole superpower, shows that there is some hope, and some good reason to keep hope alive.
(2) On both sides, it shows the doubters that despite all their hopelessness and cynicism it is still not true to say that “There is no-one to talk to on the ‘other side’. All that people ‘over there’ ever understand is the language of force, not reason.” Instead, yes, there is someone to talk to; and reasoned discussion can lead toward a sufficiently good–even if still not ‘perfect’–outcome.
(3) The single greatest achievement of the accord: to point definitively to the need to define an agreed “final outcome”, and then work perhaps incrementally towards it, rather than continuing to toil endlessly and without gain over ever smaller and smaller subsets of the interim.
As the (upcoming in February) report of the International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict argues, the obsession with incrementalism that has plagued all US efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace for the past 25 years always led to a decrease in confidence between the two peoples rather than the increase in confidence that its advocates always promised. Returning the focus to finding a final outcome that the two peoples can both live with, and then working towards it, is the only possible way out of the current mess.
So thanks, Yasser and Yossi, for achieving those things. The language of negotiation and compromise is the only thing that will bring this conflict and the immense suffering it continues to inflict on both palestinians and Israelis, to an end.