Democracillin - the cure to what ails you

On my cold, wet, wintry-mix walk home today I listened to NPR, as is my custom. Terry Gross was interviewing a variety of people about Iraq, asking the question "When and how should we get out?" I hate to admit it but I often ignore such conversations as I find them pointless and frustrating. However, my hands were too cold to get my mp3 player out of my pocket to change the station, so I listened. The first guy she talked to was one of the ones who "planned" the initial invasion and he of course supported the effort, saying things have only improved since we "changed strategies" last year and we just need to "stay the course", whatever the fuck any of that means. (While he was talking I stopped in a second-hand shop to find a hat and stopped paying attention.)

When I went back out (after failing to find a hat) I resumed listening but now the guest was an Iraqi woman speaking on the status of women in Iraq since the invasion. According to the guest, violence against women, such as murder for not wearing burkas, etc. is at unprecedented rates in almost every major city in the country. Essentially, since the US invaded, such extreme, fundamentalist sanctions have only escalated.

Duh. This was not at all surprising to me, not because I'm really smart or I can tell the future. I would have expected that because I took an introductory level anthropology class. In the class we talked about female circumcision and how it becomes more prevalent in the presence of outsiders. A simple fact of anthropology is that when colonizing nations show up in a place, the indigenous citizens often become more fervent in their traditions, religion, and customs. The presence of outsiders creates the need to solidify group identity and combat the new customs and ideas which threaten the indigenous culture.

Anyway, the point of this whole blog is, if I knew this basic fact after taking one freaking college class, who the hell decided our strategies in Iraq and what the hell were they based on? Like, did anyone do any research before we invaded? I mean, you can't even write a college paper without cracking a few books and citing some sources. Shouldn't the invasion of a country, during the process of which many many people can and will die, demand a sufficient amount of research to develop strategies? Like, shouldn't the government consult some anthropologists and economists and political scientists before just showing up? What on earth would lead one to believe they could go into an incredibly complex, vastly different society and culture and expect to change a bunch of shit around? I cannot comprehend the ignorance and ego someone would have to have to think they could.

It's like a drug company CEO (who majored in business instead of chemistry) mixing some chemicals together (Democracillin) and then selling it to the public as "the cure to all social ills", without any trials or lab tests or PROOF that it would work. And so of course the public thinks it's bogus and doesn't buy into it, and the people who do buy it die. Yes, that's exactly what Iraq is.

The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get. The World Bank, the IMF, the UN, all of these organizations are running around the world telling other countries what to do and fucking things up. (Only recently with micro loans did "development initiatives" actually start helping those countries instead of hurting them.) Essentially they mess with nation's natural economies, crops, and cultures, and apply some formula which just makes the countries prisoners to shitty, unfair global markets. The story goes like this:
UN/IMF/World Bank: You must produce and export corn and soybeans!
Developing Country: But those crops don't grow well in our climate...
UN/IMF/World Bank: We don't care!
Developing Country: But then we won't have time to produce the things we normally do...
UN/IMF/World Bank: We don't care!
Developing Country: But if we export all the corn and soybeans, and don't have our normal crops what will the people here eat?
UN/IMF/World Bank: We don't care!
Developing Country: If our production is based on a global market how will we ever make enough money to get out of this rut?
UN/IMF/World Bank: We don't care!

Etcetera. Now some might say "well, we've got to do something to help the Third World countries. God knows they're so poor and AIDS-ridden and their economies and governments are unstable." Those people are idiots. Do you want to know why there's so much political instability in the global south? Colonialism. For hundreds of years, whitey (my ancestors too...) sailed round the world fucking shit up, systematizing racism, etc. India for example had a very functional, prosperous economy before the British showed up. Yeah, they might've been agrarian systems, but people worked and ate and there wasn't this outrageously polarized, fantastically terrible poverty.

Then the idiots might say "well colonization ended like a while ago, why haven't they gotten their acts together?" Because "development" picked up where colonialism left off. Development agencies export western notions of effective economy and society, which are all normative and biased. All of these freaking "development" agencies try to "help" these countries and "end global poverty." Do you think Bono and Jeffrey Sachs are revolutionary? They're not. The UN's current initiatives are hardly different than the ones from they had in 1950's. Western agencies talk big lofty goals, and try to achieve them by applying our western knowledge to entirely different cultures while the natives look around and are like "what the fuck are you doing? We already know what crops grow here, we know our culture, but the big system is so broken, and you guys just keep making it worse."

The thread that ties it all together: cultures are like nature. You know when some ecosystem has a problem and some idiots are like "ooo we should bring in this plant and it'll fix it!", and then that just creates a problem about a hundred times worse than the previous one? Governments are the same way. Countries and cultures are incredibly delicate. There's a balance between religion and ethnicity and economy far too complex and intricate for an insider to entirely comprehend, let alone an outsider. This isn't to say one country should never attempt to help another, but rather, these problems must be approached delicately. First, as with any problem in any subject, the scope of the problem has to be defined. You can't just say "They need democracy" or "Let's end poverty." Anyone who's ever taken any sort of science class knows that you have to operationalize the variable. What measureable thing is wrong? How are you going to measure those goals? We're never going to get out of Iraq because no one ever claimed clear goals about what we wanted to achieve in the first place. We can't ever succeed. "Democracy" can't be measured.

Why the fuck do we learn this shit in school if our leaders just do whatever the hell their enormous egos tell them to? From what I can see, our invasion of Iraq followed zero principles of international relations or effective political science. From talking to my friend Stacy, (who was a neighborhood planner in Baghdad), our government-sanctioned tactics break all of the rules which anthropology has shown to be effective. In the development field none of the lofty goals about "eradicating poverty" have ever been achieved - because they're not measurable. And no one is held accountable for them. So the UN and all the world governments who sign on to these agreements (like the Millenium Development Goals) which promise to fix shit don't have to answer to anyone if they fail. And they have failed for about 50 years.

I guess I just think whoever is running the world sucks at it. If you want to improve a place maybe you should go ask the people who live their what they think the problem is. If you want to know what works you should probably observe before you solve. I obviously don't think Bush intended to solve anything. But whatever his goal was, I think he failed. Even idiots should know the scientific method. Even if his goal was evil I wish he had operationalized it, because then we wouldn't be stuck in a war we can't win. You cannot accomplish a vague, subjective notion by virtue of the fact it's subjective. That's why we can't win the war on terror or the war on poverty.

End.