Lee Harris: Mob Mentality

The fate of the American mission in Iraq depends on the answer to a simple question: Who is our enemy there?

If our enemy is made up of die-hard followers of Saddam Hussein, a handful of Brown Shirt Shi'ites, and/or imported cliques of terrorists, then it may be possible for the Bush administration to eliminate these highly specific toxic elements from the body politic of Iraq; and to eliminate them without evoking general outrage among the ordinary Iraqis whose future we are determined to make brighter.

But if our enemy cannot be isolated and localized in this manner, then we face an altogether different, and far less optimistic, scenario — one in which our enemy in Iraqi may not be a handful of terrorist factions, but virtually the entire population of young male Iraqis under the age of twenty-five or so, with huge numbers of them being mere boys. If so, then our battle is no longer a battle against a foreign toxin that can be localized and eliminated, but against the sons of those mature and sober-minded Iraqis upon whom we placed our hopes for a better future for their unhappy country.

Mobs of young males do not fight for a reason; they fight for turf. For them it is easy to spot the enemy: it is whoever has violated their turf. And in their reading of the American mission to Iraq, it is the United States that has intruded on their turf, and this includes the harmless civilians butchered at Fallujah just as much as the American soldiers murdered by guerilla attacks. You may fire at the mob, or scare it off temporarily, but you cannot appease its collective hatred — it will simply lie dormant until it sees a new chance to express its fury against those it sees as the intruder.

If we have screwed up here, and it seems there may have been some screwing up, it was in thinking we could open up the can of worms which was the repressed people of Iraq and have them sort themselves out into a functioning heirarchy in so short a time.

I saw some critism here the other day about how we should have imposed martial law (my words), a curfew (orignal remarkers words), etc. immediately.

However, on the plus side, I sincerely doubt that ALL the youths in Iraq will wish to fight us to the death. In fact, run away! seems to remain a very popular approach to danger among the Iraqi male population. Youth is brave and reckless, but youth is not widely suicidal. There is also the question of organization. If it were really impossible to prevent and disperse mobs there would be riots all the time in this country, and not just after really important sports championships. However, it should be manifestly clear to everyone by this time that the only thing that is really respected in these barbarian societies (for that is what they are) is the "strong horse".

This is why armys can't build nations. Armys fight wars. If all these lefties want to start a draft, let them start to draft an "army" of nation builders and send that crew in after military victory has been achieved.

More food for thoughts with some unsettling questions from Mr. Harris.

Please, let me know if you want or don't want to be pinged to Lee Harris articles.

His articles at the TechCentralStation are archived here: http://www2.techcentralstation.com/1051/searchauthor.jsp?Bioid=BIOHARRISLEE

If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-leeharris/browse

Lee Harris classics. If you have time, read these articles:

essay Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology By Lee Harris (FR post) "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," (original)
The Clausewitz Curse (FR post) The Clausewitz Curse (original)
Given our uncertainty, what alternative does this, or any, administration have?
Our World-Historical Gamble (FR post) Our World-Historical Gamble (original)
The collapse of the liberal order and the end of classical sovereignty.
The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html
America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.

His new book: Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History

There are more optimistic views on Iraq, for example from one of FR favorites: Mark Steyn. The vast majority of Iraq is peaceful and optimistic; the activization of hostilities draws of course from the local young males, but has leaders with their own agendas and is heavily supported with money from Iran and participation of foreigners.

I don't think that Lee Harris is completely right (or wrong) here. The primordial violence of the gang of boys, one of the major points of his book, is not capable to sustain itself for very long, as he himself shown in his book, unless something else happens to coalesce them into organization bigger than just a gang. Islam is definitely a force that can play this organizing role as it did many times before.

But there are other forces in play in Iraq as well. One of them is Arabs respect of power and demonstration of force and even more: their disdain for perceived weakness of not using enough force. There is no way we can back-down without a victory.

What is important is to indeed transfer rule to Iraqis on June 30. I think it WAS a mistake not to have at least temporary government ready when we went into Iraq last year. Chalabi may be a manipulating bustard, but most of democratically elected Western leaders are manipulating bustards (I am not even talking about the Third World leaders, they are worse).

The last point. The big picture is/was to remove a rogue regime that had means and desire to sponsor covert activities up to and including WMD with the help of willing terrorist groups, and to send a clear message that United States are no more shy of using force to remove "sovereign" rulers who are playing with fire. I think this goal is accomplished even without Iraq becoming a second Maryland.

quidnunc -- AKA numbnuts FR's resident un-and-anti FreeRepubilcan -- << ... neglected to include the URL >> -- and the body of Harris's opinion piece.

Here is the latter.

Mob Mentality - By Lee Harris - Published - April 4 2004

The fate of the American mission in Iraq depends on the answer to a simple question: Who is our enemy there?

If our enemy is made up of die-hard followers of Saddam Hussein, a handful of Brown Shirt Shi'ites, and/or imported cliques of terrorists, then it may be possible for the Bush administration to eliminate these highly specific toxic elements from the body politic of Iraq; and to eliminate them without evoking general outrage among the ordinary Iraqis whose future we are determined to make brighter.

But if our enemy cannot be isolated and localized in this manner, then we face an altogether different, and far less optimistic, scenario -- one in which our enemy in Iraqi may not be a handful of terrorist factions, but virtually the entire population of young male Iraqis under the age of twenty-five or so, with huge numbers of them being mere boys. If so, then our battle is no longer a battle against a foreign toxin that can be localized and eliminated, but against the sons of those mature and sober-minded Iraqis upon whom we placed our hopes for a better future for their unhappy country.

Mobs of young males do not fight for a reason; they fight for turf. For them it is easy to spot the enemy: it is whoever has violated their turf. And in their reading of the American mission to Iraq, it is the United States that has intruded on their turf, and this includes the harmless civilians butchered at Fallujah just as much as the American soldiers murdered by guerilla attacks. You may fire at the mob, or scare it off temporarily, but you cannot appease its collective hatred -- it will simply lie dormant until it sees a new chance to express its fury against those it sees as the intruder.

The hatred of the mob is the most primordial form that hatred of an enemy can take, and it exhibits the most horrendous lack of compassion imaginable -- the massacres at Fallujah witness this fact. The closest most of us can get to imagining such blind emotional fury is through an analogy: it is the way a person feels discovering his wife in the arms of other man. Blind with rage, he wants to kill, and he couldn't care less what comes after.

Now imagine feeling this way about an entire nation, and that's how the Iraqi mob feels about America. There was nothing we could have done to prevent this feeling. We are there, and we are on their turf. That is all they know, and all they need to know, in order to want to kill us.

This has nothing to do with ideology, or religion, or capitalism. It is a truth anchored deeply in human nature -- so deeply that it can sweep aside all those more serious differences that adults take for granted, like the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite.

If our enemy in Iraq is the Arab street itself, with its gangs of young males, then this fact has the following unsettling consequences.

First, it means that the U.S. cannot hope to eliminate the enemy by surgical operations against this or that isolated militant group; instead, it would mean an all out war on the Iraqi street, and, eventually, on the entire demographic group that is susceptible to the lure of a turf fight.

Secondly, it means that the cost of eliminating the enemy will inevitably mean the alienation of those mature and sensible Iraqi adults whose moderation was essential for the success of the American mission. This is because the demographic group that we see as terrorists and militants is the exact same group that they recognize as their boys. Yes, we might be able to win in a test of wills with the sons by killing enough of them; but how can we hope to persuade their fathers and mothers that anything we can give them was worth that price?

Precisely because these conclusions are so disturbing, there is a natural temptation to try to blame the outbreaks of violence in Iraq on isolated elements; but there is a point at which this insistence becomes dangerously close to wishful thinking. If our enemy in Iraq is nothing less than the rising generation of young Iraqi men, then it would be fatal to ignore this fact, especially given the danger that these young men might discover in their hatred of us a bond that unites them across divisions of tribe and sect.

Lee Harris recently expressed an opinion in TCS entitled "Orientalism as Racism."

quidnunc -- AKA numbnuts -- FR's apparently morbidly-infantile and Narcissistic resident un-and-anti FreeRepublican -- << ... neglected to include the URL >> -- and the body of Harris's opinion piece.

Here is the latter.

Mob Mentality - By Lee Harris - Published - April 4 2004

The fate of the American mission in Iraq depends on the answer to a simple question: Who is our enemy there?

If our enemy is made up of die-hard followers of Saddam Hussein, a handful of Brown Shirt Shi'ites, and/or imported cliques of terrorists, then it may be possible for the Bush administration to eliminate these highly specific toxic elements from the body politic of Iraq; and to eliminate them without evoking general outrage among the ordinary Iraqis whose future we are determined to make brighter.

But if our enemy cannot be isolated and localized in this manner, then we face an altogether different, and far less optimistic, scenario -- one in which our enemy in Iraqi may not be a handful of terrorist factions, but virtually the entire population of young male Iraqis under the age of twenty-five or so, with huge numbers of them being mere boys. If so, then our battle is no longer a battle against a foreign toxin that can be localized and eliminated, but against the sons of those mature and sober-minded Iraqis upon whom we placed our hopes for a better future for their unhappy country.

Mobs of young males do not fight for a reason; they fight for turf. For them it is easy to spot the enemy: it is whoever has violated their turf. And in their reading of the American mission to Iraq, it is the United States that has intruded on their turf, and this includes the harmless civilians butchered at Fallujah just as much as the American soldiers murdered by guerilla attacks. You may fire at the mob, or scare it off temporarily, but you cannot appease its collective hatred -- it will simply lie dormant until it sees a new chance to express its fury against those it sees as the intruder.

The hatred of the mob is the most primordial form that hatred of an enemy can take, and it exhibits the most horrendous lack of compassion imaginable -- the massacres at Fallujah witness this fact. The closest most of us can get to imagining such blind emotional fury is through an analogy: it is the way a person feels discovering his wife in the arms of other man. Blind with rage, he wants to kill, and he couldn't care less what comes after.

Now imagine feeling this way about an entire nation, and that's how the Iraqi mob feels about America. There was nothing we could have done to prevent this feeling. We are there, and we are on their turf. That is all they know, and all they need to know, in order to want to kill us.

This has nothing to do with ideology, or religion, or capitalism. It is a truth anchored deeply in human nature -- so deeply that it can sweep aside all those more serious differences that adults take for granted, like the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite.

If our enemy in Iraq is the Arab street itself, with its gangs of young males, then this fact has the following unsettling consequences.

First, it means that the U.S. cannot hope to eliminate the enemy by surgical operations against this or that isolated militant group; instead, it would mean an all out war on the Iraqi street, and, eventually, on the entire demographic group that is susceptible to the lure of a turf fight.

Secondly, it means that the cost of eliminating the enemy will inevitably mean the alienation of those mature and sensible Iraqi adults whose moderation was essential for the success of the American mission. This is because the demographic group that we see as terrorists and militants is the exact same group that they recognize as their boys. Yes, we might be able to win in a test of wills with the sons by killing enough of them; but how can we hope to persuade their fathers and mothers that anything we can give them was worth that price?

Precisely because these conclusions are so disturbing, there is a natural temptation to try to blame the outbreaks of violence in Iraq on isolated elements; but there is a point at which this insistence becomes dangerously close to wishful thinking. If our enemy in Iraq is nothing less than the rising generation of young Iraqi men, then it would be fatal to ignore this fact, especially given the danger that these young men might discover in their hatred of us a bond that unites them across divisions of tribe and sect.

Lee Harris recently expressed an opinion in TCS entitled "Orientalism as Racism."

I hope you are right about the reasons for optimism.

Al Sadr's followers declaring him to be a "Mahdi" or Truly Guided Imam is not a good sign - though to my knowledge Al Sadr has not declared himself to be a Mahdi yet. If he does declare himself a Mahdi, this could serve as the coalescing event you mention.

The good news is that historically Mahdi lead revolts in Twelfth Imam Shi'a Islam have not outlasted their initial leaders by very much. That said, this guy could be a problem for the next generation.

I also agree with you on the unfortunate necessity to apply force in order to sustain the sense of caution, called Taqiyya in Arabic that permits believers to submit to a conquerer in the interest of the faith if there is no chance of victory.

If history is any guide, we could see a "representative democracy", dominated by Shi'a Imams in a manner similar to the way the Shi'a sometimes dominated the early Sunni Caliphs.

Consuming hatred of America by America's own is a big problem indeed. There are numerous problems in America: there is no utopia in the world. But, the problems are overemphasized over the possibilities that America opens to people. America won the cold war over the Communism, but lost lots of ground to it in the education system and media. We are constantly bombarded with how bad it is and how wrong America was/is when in fact, there is nobody better then America in righting the wrongs and improving lives.

The Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Free Europe and others were instrumental in showcasing America and West to the Eastern Block. American exhibitions in the USSR in the 80th (who knows why Soviets decided to play some openness game?) were attracting mobs of people. Even American movies shown in the USSR played the role. ...Looks like we need showcasing America to America.

A new government agency was ridiculed into the quick death as a propaganda department. It is wrong to lie to people. What is wrong in showcasing to the whole world the fruits of freedom? Is there exposure to anything besides Arab governments propaganda and Al-Jasira in the Arab world? Why do we abandon them to lies?

Our enemies are winning the propaganda war. And we don't even contemplate response.

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