Asymmetrical Information

Only the literate have historical memories.

The Romans would have emptied Fallujah and reduced it to rubble preventing the people from ever returning there. Weren't they also the folks who were into decimation - the Romans I mean.

Only the literate have historical memories.

The Romans would have emptied Fallujah and reduced it to rubble preventing the people from ever returning there. Weren't they also the folks who were into decimation - the Romans I mean.

Only the literate have historical memories.

The Romans would have emptied Fallujah and reduced it to rubble preventing the people from ever returning there. Weren't they also the folks who were into decimation - the Romans I mean.

Sorry all. Pressed the damn button too many times - just a newbie at this.

I think a lot of people who opposed the Iraq war, or who now despair over events there, are under the impression that the goal is to have the Iraqis, and middleeastern Muslims in general, like us. It isn't, which is just as well, for that is unlikely to happen. The goal is convince enough Iraqis that it is in their interest to have a state in which they lend consent to being governed, AND to have individual and minority rights protected. If this can be accomplished, and by no means am I saying it is an easy task, then the Iraqis will likely prosper greatly, at which point they can hate us for all we care, since people who are in the process of prospering greatly don't really have much time for pursuing conflicts with powerful enemies.

"That doesn't mean that the mobs are a general feature of Sunni Iraq without a dictator to hold them in check, any more than the draft riots meant, as many argued at the time, that the Irish were constitutionally unable to become good citizens of these United States."

True. But the fact that the Irish once behaved as a mob, and their descendants don't, does not necessarily mean that rioting Sunnis will someday be well-behaved. "Someday" might be 5,000 years of evolution from now, for all we know. They may, or they may not learn to control themselves in a way conducive to a peaceful, non-corrupt democracy. So far the track record of the arab people is not encouraging. That doesn't mean they can never figure it out, but showing that the Irish figured it out doesn't necessarily translate to the arabs. They are two different peoples with different temperments, cultures, histories, and perhaps even physiologies.

So I guess my point is that the fact that the Irish have learned to behave is anecdotally interesting but no sort of proof that arabs can. After all, most of us grew past needing diapers but some of use never do.

Mark's comment is about as close as you can get to an anti-Arab racist comment without using the term "Sand-N****r". Please, Mark, tell us all more about how Arabs are in need of another 5,000 years or so of evolution. What, are they lacking opposable thumbs or something?

Disgusting.

My knowledge of this history comes almost entirely from The Gangs of New York as I think does most folks. I've gotten some quick traction in immigration discussions by pointing out that the facile anti-immigrant case is basically "Butcher Bill Economics". Remember his concise indictment? "An Irishman will do for a nickel what a (you know what) would do for a dime what a white man once did for a quarter." It's a blink blink moment, I'll tell ya.
On the matter at hand, the goal in Iraq is properly decent government. Ultimately that means some sort of elective expression of consent but that could wait, frankly, in my book. The open press and closed torture chambers are a good year's work, I think.

When I first read about Falluja, I also thought of Lynch mobs - and this article that was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Recent studies sharply challenge the notion that hate crimes — or hate groups — are linked to economic hardship

"Using the hate group listings compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center for 1997, scholars Philip Jefferson and Frederic Pryor explored the characteristics of counties that had hate groups.

Of about 3,100 counties in the 48 contiguous states, 316, or more than 10%, were home to at least one hate group in 1997.

Yet counties where hate group chapters operated had unemployment rates typical of other counties. They also had typical divorce rates and typical differences in income between whites and blacks.

These results suggest that the presence of hate groups is not related to social decay or to whites who feel economically "threatened" by wealthier blacks.

Further, there was no interpretable relationship between the presence of hate groups in a county and high school graduation rates.

Jefferson and Pryor's 1999 study in Economic Letters concluded that "economic measures such as ... subsidies or ... social services will probably be much less important than strict law enforcement" in discouraging the formation of hate groups.

These sorts of results will come as a surprise to many who accepted the once mainstream academic view that xenophobia and racial hatred in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy could be directly traced to economic collapse in the 1930s.

According to the new thinking, European fascism was more due to systematic campaigns by political organizations than to economic hardship"

This kind of brutal violence isn’t particular to Iraqis or Arabs at all. But it is motivated by hate and racism.

The roots of this sort of violence aren't poverty and humliation. The roots are a fear of social change and the efforts of well-organized hate groups. Improving the standard of living for most Iraqis is a good thing, but we also have to target those particular groups.

I'm certainly not arguing that we should give the perpetrators a pass -- I'm all for going after them. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that mob violence isn't linked to economic condition; from what I know, mob violence is always and everywhere committed by the lower middle class, or below, and usually when they feel that members of the group they are targeting are a threat to their social and/or economic position. Poor southern whites were quite right to surmise that ending Jim Crow would threaten them economically, and destroy a social order in which they were ensured of never falling to the bottom rung. That doesn't mean that lynch mobs weren't evil thugs who should have been locked in the deepest dungeon available.

The question is, who should we throw into the dungeons? Just the perpetrators or the perps & leaders of the community?

The rise of the Islamic fundamentalist movement also disproves the idea that economic condition leads to this sort of extreme hatred. Saudi Arabia is the source of the extreme Wahhabi (Sunni) philosophy that has motivated most of the recent terrorist violence. They spend billions of dollars spreading this philosophy, and the resulting violence, around the world. Money helps their hate spread.

The residents of Fallujah (in the Sunni triangle) weren’t poor. According to the Christian Science monitor, that city "profited immeasurably" under Saddam’s regime.

If the research that said that racial hatred and fascism in Germany and Italy were caused by economic hardship was wrong, then we’re basing some of our policies on ideas that are wrong.

The Marshall plan worked, but it worked only after the fascist movements in those countries were entirely destroyed. Trying to improve the economic condition of areas in the grip of fascist movements may only allow those groups to thrive.

"The Romans would have emptied Fallujah and reduced it to rubble preventing the people from ever returning there."

Err, no. When the Romans conquered, they refrained from excessive killing, on the basis of not antagonising the population against the subsequent population. However, if a Germanic tribe raided Roman territority, then the Romans responded punitively. Caesar used this strategy quite effectively*; in less than a century after his conquest Gaul was effectively Romanized.

cf. Caesar's Gallic Wars, Tacitus or Suetonius if you don't believe me.

"Weren't they also the folks who were into decimation - the Romans I mean."

Decimation in Roman times didn't have the meaning we now use (in the sense of being completely routed or reduced by an order of magnitude). If a legion or cohort or maniple showed a serious breach of disclipine (e.g. cowardice in battle, excessive looting, etc.), then the punishment was that the members drew lots, and one in ten (hence 'decimate') was executed.

*Bonking one of the Gallic princes also helped in the early stages of the conquest.

Maybe it has to do with the mob's assessment of its prospects. Saddam's Iraq must have been a bleak place for anyone but a Sunni Arab and even for a lot of them. With Saddam's removal the future is brighter for Kurds and Shias, and they are jockeying for places in that future. No doubt many of the Sunni Arabs foresee a negative future for themselves with their loss of relative privilege.

I think that is what was going on with NY's Irish in the Civil War. They were being drafted to fight a war on behalf of a brighter future for the one group that they were above in the economic and social sphere. They perceived themselves as net losers in the transaction.

The Southern Poverty Law Study is suspect because membership of hate groups is quite small (thank goodness!) compared to the population of a county. It may be that the poorest whites in a relatively prosperous county feel more keenly the pressure of competition from others and fear loss of what little status they have.

Anyway, I should think that only people who feel they have nothing to lose would engage in that kind of violence. Certainly the US needs to seriously punish all the rioters that it can lay its hands on. Those folks will only listen to superior force. But the US must also do its best to keep the Kurds and Shias from leaving Sunni Arabs out of Iraq's future.

Let us hope that publication of the pictures, necessary and laudable as it was, does not lead to loss of will in this country. The prospect is troubling given the Spanish precedent.

The U.S. has a pretty large population of Arabs (over 3 million). I would suggest that the evidence shows that these Arabs have indeed "learned how to behave" as the news is not filled with stories about rioting Arab-American mobs.

Therefore, it is plausible that whatever drove the mob in Fallujah was not something intrinsic to Arabs, but rather something particular to Fallujah.

One need not even travel as far as the U.S. to make this point, as the situation even in other parts of Iraq can serve as a contrast to what happened in Fallujah. How many mob scenes like this have there been? Two? One? Zero?

The most plausible explanation for what happened has to do with who the Iraqis in Fallujah are, their former privileged status in Iraq, and the threat to their privilege if not their lives in a new world run by Sh'ia and Kurds.

This is about interest more than instinct.

The doubt expressed by Mark about whether Arabs will "grow past needing diapers" is unfounded. How about growing past collectivist explanations unmoored in fact?

The doubt expressed by Mark about whether Arabs will "grow past needing diapers" is unfounded. How about growing past collectivist explanations unmoored in fact?

I concede that it was an impolite thing to say, but I hardly think that doubts about arab ability to maintain a non-corrupt democracy are unmoored in fact. Fact: zero arab democracies exist. Fact: the likelihood that a country will develop and maintain a non-corrupt democracy strongly correlates with the race of the dominant group in that country.

In fact, I'd ask what facts would lead you to believe that arabs WILL succeed. Race actually does matter. You may not like it, but it does. A new book by an emeritus professor of anthropology at UC-Berkeley and a senior editor at Skeptic magazine refutes the current p.c. meme that race is an artificial construct. See Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Sarich and Miele, copyright 2004 Westview Press.

Of course as Mark Steyn has pointed out, you don't need to go back to the mid 19th century for Irish mobs behaving ala Fallujah. I wonder if any US readers were reminded as I was of the early 90s scene when two british soldiers got caught by an IRA mob and were beaten to death. It also was caught on camera. I don't know what will happen in Fallujah but the authorities tracked down most of the murderers in this case and put them away. Unfortunately they were all released as part of the Good Friday accord shortly afterwards with of course a fair bit of US based pressure but that was a different time. I suspect (or at least hope) the US sympathy for "good terrorists" has been somewhat diminished by the events of this century. I doubt the same will happen to the Fallujah murderers.

But the real issue is that no one seriously doubts the ability of anyone except those actually involved in the mob to behave as citizens of a democratic country. I suspect we should do the Iraqis the same favour.

Mark, there are ample reasons to explain the absence of democracies in Arab countries, and sub-saharan Africa; we needn't go about positing racist theories about genetic or cultural inferiority. For goodness sakes, if we were dogs, we'd all be the same breed.

For starters, fifty years ago, democracies were a distinct minority. One can find period pieces wondering if the Japanese or Germans could ever be democratised, the brutes. Given the recent emergence of democracy, it's not really particularly surprising that one of the world's poorest regions -- and one with few good ports, to boot -- should sport so few.

Democracy has had a very difficult time getting established in post-colonial areas. The colonial rulers, especially the French and Spanish, generally subordinated the economic, political, and civil infrastructure to the needs of their empire in ways that made them often profoundly unsuited to a stand-alone nation. In Africa and the Middle East, borders were drawn post-WWII with little regard to ethnic or historical boundaries; in the Middle East, they were generally drawn to maximise convenience for the oil companies and their sponsor nations, rather than to maximise the chances of creating a stable state; that's why you have three ethno-religious groups that don't much like eachother slapped together in Iraq. In such circumstances it's hard to build a functioning democratic government. It's also very hard to build democracy in very poor nations; the only countries in teh Middle East with much money earn all their income from commodity wealth, which supports a kleptocratic elite, and tends to discourage a middle class, the foundation of democratic government. When you consider that the middle east and africa had the misfortune to gain tehir independance when socialism (a known destroyer of democratic institutions) was at its fashionable height, I don't think we need to look for racial theories to explain why democracy hasn't flourished there.

There are few post-colonial nations where democracy is in full flower. And yet it wasn't exactly in full flower here fifty years after our nation's birth -- in 1840, we were still disenfranchising a major portion of our population on ethnic grounds, corruption was much worse than it is today (and arrogant Americans should note that we are one of only two Western democracies to rank less than a 6 --the highest possible score-- on the corruption index), and may I point out that women's rights were hardly more advanced than they are in all but the most repressive societies in Africa? We got over it. There's no particular reason, other than smugness, to think that other countries won't too. Rather, the historical evidence shows, over and over, countries that just weren't "ready" or "capable" or "fit" for supporting democracies going ahead and doing so anyway.

Referring to arab countries as being "in diapers" is insulting. The citizens of Iraq were building empires before my ancestors had even arrived in the bog where they would spend a millenium or so living in shacks and painting themselves blue. Of course, the "nativist" Americans and English overlords were happy to make just such arguments about the Celtic race, "proving" scientifically that we were animals who would never be able to govern ourselves.

It's certainly not out of bounds to ask whether a country that has recently survived thirty years of dictatorship can immediately transition to a stable democratic society; indeed, that's a question that many observers of Russia are asking. But there's no need to drag race into it -- even if it weren't the case that Arabs are caucasian, and genetically most closely related to the most successful, and highly . . . [cough] . . . democratic . . . ethnic group in America.

Jane Galt claims above that mob violence is only perpetrated by the lower classes. This was not true for the Leo Frank lynching. See

http://www.leofranklynchers.com/leofranklynchers.html

I doubt this is the only counterexample.

Jane Galt claims above that mob violence is only perpetrated by the lower classes. This was not true for the Leo Frank lynching. See
http://www.leofranklynchers.com/leofranklynchers.html

She may have indeed been wrong in using the absoltue adverb, but the case you cite reads more like a conspiracy murder than the sort of 'mob activity' we are discussing here (as would, on a side note, most of the more infamous KKK activities). Mass rioting, by and large, does seem to be perpetrated by lower-income sectors -- witness the 1991 LA riots, or the 1943 and 1967 Detroit riots. In all of these there were other triggers than economic position (race in particular), but it does seem to have been a factor.

People in lower- and upper-income areas may be equally angered by some decision -- a police action or court verdict, for example -- but those in the lower-income area have the least to lose by burning cars and looting businesses. Those in upper-income areas are more accustomed to expressing their voice through media or the courts, and for that matter may work for, or even own, the area businesses.

I doubt this is the only counterexample.

And I doubt your conterexample. Matthew Shepherd (sp?) might have been a better one, but mob actions of that type are relatively rare, while (as noted above) we have seen widescale low-income rioting in this country as recently as 1991.

Rioting appears to be an all-income phenomenon. There may be more examples of lower-income rioting readily at hand, but that's not necessarily the history. Eighteenth century England was convulsed with riots every decade, as changes and the fear of change and the disruption of communities left people with unceratinty about the future. Many of those riots involved skilled artisans in fear of their displacement.

It has been suggested that the 1863 draft riots were actually two quite separate events occurring simultaneously. There was first the economic struggle on the docks as the employers tried to cut wages and strike break against the Irish dockwrokers with black workers from outside New York City willing to work for less. One can find many examples of dock unrest in eighteenth century England and in twentieth century England over the same ssue. Then the draft riots kicked in on top.

Rioting and specific mob violence are often two quite different things. The deaths of the two English soldiers referred to in one post occurred when the soldiers were detected spying on an IRA funeral.The communal attacks on the Catholic community in Belfast in 1969 were organized and persisted because of the fears of the skilled workers in Belfast that their future was vanishing.

A propos of the Romans, history suggests that they would have leveled Fallujah. The one thing that the Roman imperial system relied upon was loyalty to the structures of the state. Persistent anti-regime activity brought substantial reprisal. The best known example is that of the destrction of Jerusalem after the rebellion of 69-70 AD,but there are others, such as the Roman management of the post-Boudicca restoration in England.

Mary, thanks for the SPLC link.

It'd be interesting to explore the "hate group county" data a bit further. Maybe such counties have similar unemployment numbers, but what about average wages? Also, I'd want to look at changes over time (eg, had "hate group counties" previously had lower incomes or higher unemployment rates, or conversely been wealthier and are now indecline?).

These sorts of results will come as a surprise to many who accepted the once mainstream academic view that xenophobia and racial hatred in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy could be directly traced to economic collapse in the 1930s.

It's not the existence of hate groups that I attribute to economic collapse, but their popularity. At any given time, there may be 5% of the population that's poor enough, worried enough, and unethical enough to find hate groups appealing. That's not enough to take over a democratic government, so how did the Nazis and Fascists succeed in getting elected? (According to this page, the Nazis received 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections.) I think the obvious answer is that the economic uncertainty was enough to sway enough of the electorate. (Along the same lines, look at how popular FDR was in this country, despite his Constitutional shenanigans.)

Rioting appears to be an all-income phenomenon. There may be more examples of lower-income rioting readily at hand, but that's not necessarily the history. Eighteenth century England was convulsed with riots every decade, as changes and the fear of change and the disruption of communities left people with unceratinty about the future. Many of those riots involved skilled artisans in fear of their displacement.

FXM, there are more examples of lower-income rioting, and also no examples of upper-income rioting. We tend to associate "skilled artisans" with the middle class, but until, oh, 1900, it would be more accurate to call them "working class".

It's not really income that's relevant here, but wealth. People who (think they) have a stake in society generally won't riot. Before the 20th century, that generally meant property-owners. And of course, people with money in the bank are less likely to panic about economic uncertainty (until the bank closes, anyway).

That said, I agree there's a difference between specific mob violence and general rioting. I haven't seen enough reports to know which was involved in Fallujah; my guess (possibly influenced by my hopes) is that it was a small mob. In which case, the best resolution would be to have the town's civil authorities turn over the perpetrators to the U.S. Or even have them tried under Iraqi law (assuming there is an accepted body of law; did we cancel all the laws from Saddam's regime?); I can't imagine murder, rioting, arson, or desecration would be treated lightly.

Fallujah wasn’t poor. From CNN: the city's Sunni Muslims were among Saddam Hussein's favored. A military base, now occupied by Americans, is at the edge of town. Fallujah was home to top officers, spies and many low-level enforcers of Saddam's regime. Its construction and trucking companies also benefited.

Like most acts of terrorism, this was a hate crime. Like most acts of Islamist terrorism, it is part of a fundamentalist movement that seeks to oppress and that seeks to preserve the status quo. Improving the economy of other Islamist regions hasn’t done anything to eliminate similar hate groups – in fact, it helps them thrive. There’s no reason to believe that it will work in Fallujah.

That’s not to say that democracy won’t work in other areas of Iraq. But trying to impose democracy without eliminating a growing fascist movement is like painting over dirt. The paint’s just going to crumble away.

The mob in Fallujah strikes me as most closely analogous to the white plantation class in the South during Reconstruction. Previously privileged, now with a highly uncertain future, and fearful both of losing their previous status, and what sort of revenge might be wreaked by those they'd previously ruled, they turned to lynchings in an attempt to regain their previous station, and strike out at those they felt were threatening them.

The problem isn’t just the mob in Fallujah, it’s their association with the insurgency. These insurgents are not powerless, they’re gaining strength, and they aren’t motivated by despair about the economy. They’re motivated by a desire to oppress other groups based on religion & race.

Improving a nation’s economy can have a positive effect, but only after these extremist groups (both Iraqi and foreign) have been destroyed. The theory that economic uncertainty causes the rise of fascist groups has already been proven wrong in Saudi Arabia & Iran.

It’s a nice theory, but its wrong. Basing policy on a mistake could be a disaster.

You're a fool. An rank fool. You're wrong - it's chaos, unraveled. Pray tell.

hi megan
"The mob in Fallujah strikes me as most closely analogous to the white plantation class in the South during Reconstruction."

i can't help but think this analogy has some issues. first, because the number of plantation owners was few compared to the sunni group. also, the sunni's and the americans have very little in common culturally (unlike the usa, all joking aside). further, the class that appears to be at issue here is the sunnis and the shiites.

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