Maybe If We Pretend Hard Enough---

Political scientists call it, "let us define our dependent variables," but little kids are more honest.  Politicians call it "nation-building," but little kids are more honest.  The UN calls it "responsibility to protect," but little kids are more honest.

Little kids call it, "Let's pretend."

And here we are today playing let's pretend under all the upscale rubrics mentioned.  We are playing it in the Ivory Coast.  We are playing it in Yemen.  We are playing it in Libya.

In each case our opponent in this great game is called a "strongman," or a "dictator," or, more politely, an "authoritarian ruler."  In each case the venue of this great game is called a "state," or a "nation," or a "country."  In each case we maintain with the straightest of faces that our goal is to "support the people," or "to promote the rights of the citizens," or, most simply, to gain "democracy," or, even simpler and hazier, to seek "reform."

All the terms, all the fine sounding words, all the lofty thoughts behind the words constitute a lie.  Perhaps not an intentional lie, but an untruth nonetheless.  Tergiversation by volitional ignorance covers the situation.

Each of the venues mentioned as well as others such as Sudan or Somalia are not by any realistic understanding "nations," let alone "nation-states."  All are geographical expressions inhabited by assorted tribal peoples of differing, even antipodal, customs, values, norms, and, most important, senses of identification.  Each of the "dictators" is actually nothing more than the accepted leader of one tribe.  None are national leaders for none has a unified nation to lead.

In the Ivory Coast the ousted former president is actually the leader by tacit acceptance if not more active support of the Southern, non-Muslim tribal confederation while the new guy is the tacitly accepted leader of the Northern, Muslim tribal groupings.  In Yemen, the embattled Saleh emerged from the base of support of one tribe and maintained his power by playing off the other tribes against each other.  And, in Libya, Brother Leader is likewise a tribal chieftain whose rivals are from another, far larger tribal assembly located in the far east of the country.

Tribal leaders are not and never will be national politicians as the term is understood in the West.  Nor are the agglutinations of tribes under their authority "nations" as the word is applied in the West.  The absence of national identity means that by definition there can be no nation-state, no truly national polity controlling the instruments of government.

Tribal leaders including the die hard "dictators" of Yemen, Libya, and the Ivory Coast are motivated by deep and powerful considerations such as personal and group honor which have been moribund for many, many generations in the US and the rest of the West.  The tribal leader incarnates in himself not only his personal honor, his personal power, but that of his family, clan, and tribe.  This is at a far cry from the motivators of contemporary Western politicos.  It is even at some distance from the motivators of more typical dictators of the ideological sort, for these may have an inflated sense of self but rarely believe the entire honor, potency, and status of a social group is embodied in their person.

When Gaddafi cried, "I am history!  I am the revolution!  I am Libya!," he was not simply exhibiting what in the West would be considered a psychopathology but stating a ground truth that would have been (and was) understood by tribal leaders around the world.  Gbagbo in his upmarket bunker understood.  So also did Saleh as the vipers on whose heads he danced squirmed and twisted.  Karzai all the way off in Afghanistan understood, despite his status as an "elected" leader.  So also did Maliki in Iraq, again regardless of the special cachet of a Western approved "election."

Tribal leaders, all of whom have "death before dishonor" in an invisible tattoo inscribed across their chests, do not think like Western politicians.  Their calculus of political rationality is completely different.  It would require the resurrection of an American politician such as Andrew Jackson to have an effective translator.  Andy Jackson, like the majority of domestic politicos of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was a tribal leader in transition.  While focused on developing a nation, these men were emerging from sectional identities equivalent to those of a tribe.

Other countries throughout the West had their own transitional figures,  men part way between the tribal, regional past and the nation-state future.  History demonstrates that the process of congealing a true national identity is one of equal parts time and blood.  War as well as the passage of decades of shared experience and defining mythology is needed to overcome the inertia of the tribal/regional past.  The West has had the time--and more to the point--the spilled blood necessary to forge national identities and politics, to become full fledged nations and nation-states.

Libya and the Ivory Coast had any organic centripetal movement put in stasis by periods of colonization.  And Yemen never emerged from a tribal, feudal dynamic.  (Neither did Afghanistan despite the existence of a monarchy other than brief periods when under external threat.)  The attempt by the well intended statesmen of the West and the diplomats and the bureaucrats of the UN to create actual functioning nation-states from the tribal cloth of the Ivory Coast or Yemen or Libya will be unsuccessful.

It is not a matter of money.  Consider that the EU and France have offered 840 million bucks to the Ivory Coast; that is not mere chump change.  Neither is the vast quantity of American and other peoples' money spent on civilian development and governance programs in Afghanistan.  The sands of Libya will ultimately soak up as much international aid as the wealth of its oil fields produced to date.  None will matter.

Money does not create a state.  Neither do good intentions.  Nor do military interventions.  American and other governments had best realize that in none of these cases as well as others yet to occur will the end product be other than confederations of tribes riven with animosities old and new.  No matter what is done by outsiders, the Ivory Coast, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, or even Iraq will not become genuine nation-states in the near- or mid-term future.

In a very real sense the less that is done by the outsiders under any of the noble terms referenced above, the better the results for the locals.  The less done for the suffering locals, the faster they will have to weld together their own nation by their own blood and sweat.  They will have to do what all of us in the West have done--bring about a national identity and a national polity by passion and suffering over time.

There is no faster way to do it.  And, history shows, no better method.  It seems to be written in our DNA, to suffer is to progress.