A matter of pride: anthropological discernment in our current conflict.

President Bush doesn't give up easily. Back in mid-July, when news of progress in Iraq hadn't yet made a dent in the political debate and even administration officials were leaking about an imminent drawdown of troops, he met with a dozen conservative journalists at the White House. In his introductory remarks before taking questions, he made a point of affirming his belief in "the universality of freedom," and called the spread of governments based on liberty "inevitable."

Nothing that had happened in the nearly six years since he launched his freedom agenda in the wake of the September 11 attacks had changed Bush's view about the universality of the desire for freedom, or our ability to actualize that desire in free, democratic governments. This is where Bush's resoluteness can fade into a blinkered unrealism. We have learned many lessons about human nature from Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, but the universal hunger for liberty hasn't been foremost among them. That doesn't mean Bush is wrong in the abstract about freedom, but he would benefit from a less reductive view of human nature that takes account of all our many motivations--especially pride.

Bush grounds his belief in the universality of freedom in his Christian faith. "I come at it many different ways," he told the journalists. "Really not primarily from a political-science perspective, frankly; it's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you, that is a principle that no one can convince me doesn't exist."

This drives Bush's critics nuts. They see it as yet another instance of his evangelical Christianity's distorting his public policy. But the belief that we have personal and moral freedom is based on a core Christian teaching (we are made in God's image), and the belief that human rights are God-given is firmly within the mainstream of Anglo-American political thought.

It's the accent Bush puts on this Christian truth above all others that is problematic, and lends itself to a sunnier view of human nature than his faith need entail. As a Christian, he could have a keener appreciation of the Fall; God may have given us freedom, but this world is shaped by our rejection of what God intended for us. As a Christian, he might look to the Ten Commandments as a rough guide to what fallen human nature tends toward--greed, hatred, envy, and selfishness of all kinds.

As a Christian, he could realize that we are made to know God and be known by Him; in other words, gaining recognition is central to who we are as human beings.

What does the stereotypical celebrity ask when he's not getting his way? "Don't you know who I am?" We are usually offended when someone forgets or mispronounces our name--because we want to be known. The Book of Revelation says that in the Kingdom each of us will receive a white stone with a name written on it that is known only to God and to us. That is our true name, a name that only God knows because only He, as Anthony Bloom writes in his book Beginning to Pray, knows us in "our absolute and unrepeatable uniqueness."

This promise of ultimate recognition is a great comfort to Christians, but most of the world isn't Christian. To fill this--to paraphrase Pascal--God-shaped gap in our psyche, we look to be honored by others. We can find our recognition in benign ways (from family, accomplishment, dutifulness), and in ways that can tip into monomania or criminality (fame, riches, power). But the drive for recognition in us is strong, so strong that for many people there is something worse than being denied freedom--being denied honor.

'GROUP EGOISM'

If this is true of individuals, it is especially true of groups, whether clans or nations. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote of "group egoism." He explained, "In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships."

It is easy for us to forget this because we live in a West where even in America the force of nationalism is somewhat muted, and in a society where the individual is paramount. But the War on Terror has propelled us into intimate contact with societies where groups--tribes and clans--still predominate, and shame and honor define life.

In this connection, the depredations of al-Qaeda seem to be less immediately a symptom of an absence of freedom than of wounded pride. Lawrence Wright's brilliantly reported account of the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, speaks of the sense of humiliation brought on by "Islam's long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna" since 1683. Al-Qaeda is partly a byproduct of the devastating encounter between the West and traditional societies over the last few centuries that historian Theodore H. von Laue describes in The World Revolution of Westernization.

"The victorious Westerners," he writes, "their own ways and self-confidence boosted by their worldwide sway, left the rest of the world humiliated and in cultural limbo." Traditional cultures were subverted by virtue of their manifest inadequacy when compared with the power of the West. "Among the majority of peoples around the world," von Laue continues, "the results were cultural chaos characterized by a loss of purpose, moral insensibility, and a penchant for violence; by social and political fragmentation; and by the psychological misery of knowingly belonging to a 'backward' society." Osama bin Laden would understand.

In al-Qaeda, we face a force that often understands the cultural landscape over which we are competing better than we do. The late, unlamented leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, once made a narrow escape from a U.S. raid by running from a car and immediately asking what sub-tribe lived in that area. He knew that was the important question. Today, in light of the revolt of the Sunni tribes beginning in Anbar Province, he could ask the same question, but it might not avail him anything.

Without suggesting any moral equivalence (obviously), al-Qaeda and the United States can be seen as having had a race in Iraq over who would most thoroughly alienate the Sunni tribes. We got off to an early lead as foreign occupiers who had made possible the rise of Shiite rule and--in response to the insurgency--killed and captured young tribesmen. But al-Qaeda eventually lapped us several times over. The Sunni sheiks may not like foreigner occupiers, but they especially don't like foreign occupiers who assassinate their leaders, insist on marrying their daughters, commit unspeakable acts of brutality, and prevent them from smoking and drinking.

We had entered Iraq as a radical force. When we allied with the tribes, we became a more conservative force, protecting the tribal way of life from those who would overturn and repress it. This turnabout--so crucial a part of the success of the surge--doesn't neatly fit into President Bush's freedom agenda.

The tribes might be protecting their freedoms in one sense (they want to do things forbidden by the Islamic extremists), but they were also reacting against outrages against their honor. The tribes tend to give their women in marriage only within the tribe. When al-Qaeda in Iraq's foreign leadership showed up hoping to marry the daughters of key tribal families to cement an alliance, trouble ensued.

"Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done," writes Dave Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert who has worked closely with General Petraeus. "AQI, with their hyper-reductionist version of 'Islam' stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes' view as ignorant, stupid and sinful. This led to violence, as these things do: AQI killed a sheikh over his refusal to give daughters of his tribe to them in marriage, which created a revenge obligation (tha'r) on his people, who attacked AQI." The revolt rolled on from there, deftly exploited by our military leadership on the ground.

The Sunni tribes want security, want protection for their traditional way of life, and want money, which we have been funneling to them through various means. These are first-order human desires, and we are better able to provide them than al-Qaeda, hence our alliance. As Kilcullen writes, "Call me cynical, but I tend to trust self-interest, group identity and revenge as reliable motivations--more so than protestations of aspirational democracy, anyway."

THE TRIBES

Tribalism in its various forms is a key part of the War on Terror, since it figures so prominently in key battlefields (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.). It is hardly the ultimate issue, even in Iraq, where it has gotten so much attention lately. The Sunni tribes predominate in the West, but Baghdad is more secular and less tribal, while other areas of the country (Kurdistan and the Shiite south) have different social landscapes. In Iraq and elsewhere there are other significant complicating factors in any drive toward democracy (the role of Islam, ethno-sectarian divisions, the absence of civil society as we know it). But tribalism is important enough that it should have been a focus prior to roughly August 2007, when the tribes' revolt in Iraq made headlines.

But both the Left and the Right have had little interest. At our universities, as much time and energy is spent arguing that the West has repressed other cultures as understanding those cultures themselves. (Too much understanding might be uncomfortable--there's a reason these cultures are so resistant to modernity.) On the right, there's never been much interest in anthropology, and a great deal of energy is devoted to defending American power against the cultural Left. So both sides tend toward navel-gazing.

While Bush was talking about the universal appeal of liberty, the tribal dynamics of Iraq were understood and exploited by the nation's keenest cultural anthropologists, most hands-on social scientists, and best foreign-aid society--the United States Army and Marine Corps. A counterinsurgency requires understanding human motivation and the particularities of a situation and culture; abstractions are useless.

This suggests an important difference between the Cold War and the War on Terror. Both are ideological struggles. And both are playing out globally. But the heart of the Cold War was Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, it removed a political and ideological obstacle between the Free World and people in the Eastern bloc who lived much as we do. In the War on Terror, the battleground is the hearts and minds of people who (many of them) have radically different mores than we do.

Winning benighted parts of the Muslim world over to modernity, then, is not just an ideological matter. In an insightful study of the British colonial experience in India in Policy Review, Stanley Kurtz writes, "The real barrier to modernity in the non-Western world lies in the pervasive and recalcitrant structures of everyday life--structures few Westerners understand. In India, the key barriers to modernization are the joint family system and caste. The counterparts in Iraq are the patriarchal family system, the bonds of lineage and tribe, and related conceptions of collective honor."

Kurtz demonstrates how it's possible to implant a democratic culture in a traditional society like India's in an enduring way--if you occupy it for 200 years, take over its educational system, and create a merit-based jobs system that exists outside of clan and caste. Obviously, nothing like this is in the offing in Iraq, or anywhere else. But we must at the very least understand the people we are trying to change, and realize we won't achieve instant results, as the Bush administration failed to do when it invaded Iraq and stood back to watch the inevitable flowering of democracy.

A realistic appraisal of the human material with which we are working needn't be a counsel of despair. Consider the War on Terror as having negative and positive aspects. The negative aspect is killing and capturing members of al-Qaeda, and should be pursued as robustly as possible. In a shame-honor society, al-Qaeda should feel the shame of defeat, of being rousted from wherever it attempts to establish itself. Al-Qaeda's vision is so extreme that the traditionalism of Muslim societies can work to our advantage, as we've seen in the tribal revolt in Iraq.

Then there's the positive aspect of the war: trying to provide a better model for political, social, and economic development in the Muslim world. Here we have to be careful, especially in pushing culture change. You can imagine the tribes' reaction if the next thing they hear from us after al-Qaeda is gone is, "Hi, we're the United States government, and we're here to liberate your women." We have to be patient and flexible, doing whatever works even if it doesn't meet our own expectations in the near term.

Even if people desire to be free, representative government relies on institutions and attitudes that have to grow and take root over time. In Iraq, for instance, no universal human desire is creating competent governmental ministries or a tradition of political compromise, loyal opposition, and adherence to the rule of law. If these things that are so essential to a functioning democracy arise, they will be the product of hard work, trial-and-error, and a lot of hand-holding from us.

In the end, the positive aspect of the War on Terror is worth pursuing, exactly because pride is such an important human motivator. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the drive for recognition is the force behind the rise of liberal democracy. People want recognition, and gaining equal rights is a form of it. They want things of which to be justifiably proud, and better governed societies can provide them. The Iraqi elections may have been as much a victory for pride--remember the Iraqis holding up their purple fingers--as for freedom.

So President Bush isn't wrong about freedom necessarily; deep down, it is the desire of every human heart, right beside pride and much else that we ignore at our peril.