Iraq: Idle Ploughshares

In the fight fire with fire world of U.S. allied Islamic military politics, obtaining the interest of tribal leaders and loyalty of young fighters may turn more easily done than getting the near biblical conversion of "swords into ploughshares."

Ask men the job of men in tribal societies, and the job title "warrior" comes up tops and both privileged and respected.

How some Americans feel about owning guns--" . . . when they pry it from my cold, dead hands"--may be how many men in Islamic states feel about carrying them in public. Following the behavioral path of least resistance, the poet-warriors of Islam may produce language and culture fit to the pride of boyhood strut and rejecting as irritating verbal bombs delivering a veil of peace, flowers, and happiness over a reality filled with low-wage, low-esteem jobs as franchise cooks and servile janitors.

In the Land of Psychobabble, but a handful of concepts account for individual adjustment and motivation: from Maslow--"self actualization"; from others, competence seeking behavior and autonomy, in social science variable-speak, concerns with "locus of control" and "degrees of freedom".

Rightfully, perhaps unfortunately, programs that first convert boys into weapons-carrying soldiers, which speaks to more than a few deeply held and ingrained personal beliefs about warriors and their glorious role in the life of The People (in Native American parlance, The Original People, and any of them, of course), and then seeks to convert the same to peaceful but much less emotionally rewarding pursuits risks failure.

Anna Badkhen's article in Salon, "We were basically hiring terrorists," connects the relationship between the recent reduction of violence in Iraq, a good thing, with the mobilization of better than 100,000 armed guards, most of them Sunni (an American treated to the same spectacle would call it "a cop on every corner"), and then looks toward the demobilization of that force and the predicament of leaving so many young and armed men at loose ends.

The language that would pit "warrior" against "janitor" may be amiss: peace makes way also for the development of powerful personalities quite capable of standing up for themselves, earning money, and taking care of their people through construction, engineering, invention, professional services, and trade.

One of the more tortured of Islamic cultures, Pakistan's, has traveled better than half way across that bridge and does not want to turn back the clock entirely to the age of the cleric-poet and the enforcement of aesthetic ideals through the warrior's sword. However, in the most disastrous state, Somalia, I think, the playing over and over again the tribal warrior theme across loose and competing bands of "Islamists" fairly guarantees the suffering of The People as the fighting has always more to do with the testing or affirmation of power and very little with humanitarian or more practical and altogether adult concerns.

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References

Badkhen, Anna. "We were basically hiring terrorists." Salon, August 6, 2008.

National Rifle Association. "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Wikipedia, August 6, 2008.