2 -- GO LOCAL

The universal celebration of what President Bush is calling the “victory of freedom” in last Sunday’s election in Iraq is prompted, in my view by the rediscovery of one of the most powerful of human forces: locality.

Somewhere in the basalt level of our DNA wiring is a sense of home – safe, ours, to be protected, and source of pride in the collective modi vivendi. Equipping ourselves with the apparatus of ever more impressive nation-states we’ve not paid much attention to this seemingly primitive sense of community. “Get big” has been the watchword for the several centuries of the modern era. The surge of Iraqis into voting queues reminds that “go local” may be a more useful – and even more modern – guide.

Meaning? Meaning that the organizing, civilizing energy of modern communities wells up from local communities – places where people stand in line to cast ballots one by one, places where people feel a personal relationship between their own hardihood and their collective arrangements for food, water, shelter, work, play and transcendence.

Relevance? The entire American gameplan – such as it was, and it wasn’t much – was organized around a colonial idea: an assumption (seemingly automatic and never questioned) that “we” Americans needed to help “them”, these poor, ignorant natives organize themselves. Never mind that Iraqi’s were easily the most modern, educated, emancipated peoples in the region despite Saddam’s depredations. In our automatic superiority we set out, not on a nation-building enterprise, but on a top-down, centrally planned state construction project which Marx would have approved and Stalin could have run with his left hand.

We should have done on Day One what, exhausted and idea-less, we finally allowed to happen of itself on 30 January: Iraqi’s organized and voted in an election substantially on their own.

Lesson: realign our occupation to gently support – from behind – Iraqi community building.

Go Local.

1 -- UNDERWAY

What better guest speaker to launch this blog than Amos Oz? I’m hopeful he would not mind being enlisted to smash a bottle of virtual champagne across the bow of this craft and speak a few words as it slides into the water.

Here’s Israeli writer Oz at some length from his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, taken from our copy, with signature and Shalom, a souvenir of his recent visit to Seattle:

“In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted. It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

“That may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

“The Europe that abused, humiliated, and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East—in Zionist guise this time—to exploit, evict, and oppress all over again. And when we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads, and grown mustaches, but they are still our old murderers, interested only in slitting Jew’s throats for fun.”

Often the first and never-noticed error of those sitting on the edges of today’s pitched battles, be it “just politics” or armed and lethal fighting, is to assume that the conflict is binary: us-them, Red vs. Blue, rebels against the government, Israelis and Palestinians, a pair of opposites locked in the arena.

As Oz suggests, the realities are always different (at least so far I’ve found no exceptions). The wars in Colombia and Sri Lanka have gradually expanded to put every socio-economic and political sector of the society at every other faction’s throat. As the conflicts stretch out, ordinary criminality gradually rises to submerge everyone and all their agendas in the chaos of violence. Disconnected, drowning in the human sewage of violence, the actors loose their grip on the way out. A dreadful and instructive example: Algeria.

Why is this important? Because it means that among other problems:

· one cannot easily pick out the good guys from the bad guys – and having identifiable villains is usually a prerequisite for outside intervention whether from the UN, the US or another great power;

· negotiations between the pair of antagonists who headline the bill will not solve the underlying problems that are preventing peace; and

· one side cannot “win” by crushing another with a military campaign.

Conclusion: we’re going to need a different kind of approach to building the foundations of peace if we are to help get ourselves out of the multiple deadly conflicts that are killing so many people and their societies today. The familiar strategy we’ve been trying – military power and negotiation – may be part of the answer, but misapplied makes the problem worse.

Thanks, Mr. Oz.