"I never felt I need to say 'Read the whole thing' as I do now," writes Omar of Iraq the Model re Arthur Chrenkoff's truth-ringing essay on "Post-Totalitarian Stress Disorder" as an impediment to the democratic project in Iraq. Even as political parasites like Joe Lockhart intone "quagmire" and trash the magnificent, oppression-scarred Ayad Assawi* as a Bush "puppet" [via InstaPundit] -- didn't you just KNOW that's what he'd say? -- Chrenkoff offers thoughtul analysis and insight that could help guide the Administration's developing on-the-ground strategy in post-war Iraq:
But there is another aspect to the "culture matters" argument, one that does not get nearly enough attention. It has nothing to do with religion, ethnicity, or national character; it is the social and moral legacy of life under a dictatorship. Iraq, quite simply, like many other recently liberated societies around the world continues to suffer from a Post-Totalitarian Stress Disorder.
For the Westerners, the PTSD is a difficult condition to understand. We take so many things for granted -- from comedians' being able to joke about the President, to the assumption that the next government employee we encounter will not be expecting a bribe from us -- that we are quite ill equipped to fully comprehend what life under a totalitarian system must really be like, much less what mental and spiritual legacy its victims have to labor under long after the statues of the Leader are pulled down.
We all "know" about the secret police knocking on the door at night, adulatory TV programs exalting the president-for-life, the pervasive corruption, queues and shortages, or the silly propaganda. Nothing, however, in our generally safe and comfortable existence would helps us understand just how pervasively difficult, destructive and dispiriting the experience of life under a totalitarian regime is. For most of us, life in Saddam's Iraq would have been no more real than the Middle Earth of the colonial New England. And failing to understand the condition itself, by extension we find it equally difficult to understand how the mental attitudes and habits of the past cannot be shaken off overnight but instead linger on, making the reconstruction and transition to normalcy such a difficult and painful process.
I speak from some experience here. While the late communist Poland and the Baathist Iraq were in many ways very different societies, shaped and constrained by different sets of geographic, historical and cultural factors, there is a common denominator between all totalitarian societies the world over. Here are some bad habits that people consciously or otherwise pick up to help them fit in better and survive under a dictatorship, but which prove quite troublesome and counter-productive once the shackles finally fall off: Distrust of the state and the authorities . . . a prison mentality . . . lack of initiative . . . abdication of personal responsibility and distrust of others.
Is there a solution to this problem of cultural lag? How can we cure the Post-Totalitarian Stress Disorder? As the old saying goes, time heals all wounds. In the longer term, the older generations -- those most tainted by the old ways of thinking -- move on and the young ones, brought up in the new environment, slowly take their place. In a shorter term, people still change; slowly and at paces that vary from individual to individual, but change they nevertheless do. In the meantime, people of Iraq need encouragement and good example. Every small step is to be applauded because it brings Iraq closer to a better future.
Speaking of encouragement and good examples, American ingenuity and sheer goodness shine through in this must-read Wall Street Journal (subscription only -- go ahead, subscribe!) article [via Virginia Postrel of Dynamist Blog] yesterday:
Capt. Ayers, 29 years old, took a risk. He went to the village sheik's house. As a sign of respect, he said, he wouldn't search the village. But he gave the local leader 48 hours to find and return the equipment. "If we don't get the equipment back, I am going to come back with my men and tear apart every house in this village," he recalls saying. If the gear was returned, he promised to reduce patrols in the area.
The gamble ran counter to Capt. Ayers's training, which states that the longer troops wait to search an area, the less chance they'll find what they are looking for. His bosses told him he had made a huge blunder. Two days later, though, the sheik returned every scrap of looted equipment to the Army.
Fighting the volatile, growing insurgency in Iraq is putting increased responsibility on younger, lower-ranking officers, who are learning through improvisation and error. For the Army, the heavy reliance on officers such as Capt. Ayers is a significant change. As the war in Iraq has turned into a far different kind of battle than the Army expected, it is triggering major shifts in how the service uses and equips soldiers and remaking its historically rigid and hierarchical command structure.
Army officials say the service is adapting to new demands. Gen. Schoomaker says the Army is in the midst of the most wide-ranging changes since World War II, aimed at better preparing it for the kinds of wars it is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I've compared this to tuning a car engine while the engine is running, which is not only a complex task but dangerous as well," he said recently.
*Be sure to check out the Washington Post's profile of Joe Lockhart's "puppet," the "badass" Mr. Assawi. Did you know he was trained as a neurologist?
He is a man on a mission that has consumed his life, a man of single-minded focus born, perhaps, that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axes. His leg was almost severed. His chest suffered a cleaving blow. The hospital had him for nearly a year, and the quest to recover Iraq from Hussein has had him for nearly three decades more.
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