In the summer of 2004 I accompanied an old Russia hand named Moses Sands to the Staked Plains in Texas so
he could sit on a rocky outcrop and tell me how democracy could succeed in Iraq. Unlike most, he was optimistic
then, and remarkably, three years later, he still is. “Natural laws are at play there if we’ll just recognize them.”
However, he’s become unhappy at how America’s power to affect democracy has become marginalized.
This is a follow-up to "Prospects for Democracy in Irag/Middle East" VB
The formula is simple: Democracy in Iraq (or the whole Muslim world) can succeed only if it’s like the American
democracy, built from the bottom up. From-the-top-down democracies such as found in Europe are pre-destined to
drift toward bureaucratism, stagnation and eventual statism. “Their democracies were not designed to liberate, but
to keep order and protect the ruling classes.” When populations are homogeneous, it can more or less work… “for
awhile.” But as populations become diverse, as with the Muslim influx into Europe since the 1960s, those systems
begin to fall apart, “…only, and here’s the rub, the ruling bureaucracies are always the last to recognize it. The
guys the people hired (bureaucrats) to steer their ship are so self-involved and vain they never see the barbarian
at the gate. The comfort class never can.” When the choice becomes chaos or dictatorial rule, there is only one
beacon that leads the people out of the dark. The
House.
What we’re seeing develop now in Iraq government are tribal and clerical middlemen vying for positions of
strength, depending on which alligator they see most likely to eat them last; Iran, Al-Qaida, or some feudal lord. “I
see no mention of the Arab House anywhere, so the real people these elected officials are supposed to answer to
are still ignorant of all their new possibilities.” At the heart of true democracy is the
House, which Moses defines as a spiritual thing, not a building or piece of real estate. He believes that the desire
for freedom is the oldest impulse in humankind, and that at the heart of every man and woman is the desire to be
able to “build and own their House, grow it, pass it on, and to be able to create reciprocal relationships with their
neighbors in order to protect the process. That is a cornerstone to both Declaration of Independence and the U.S.
Constitution, and is probably the only idea on which Jefferson and Hamilton could agree. It is the source of all
liberty. It is the anthem of the common man.”
Staring over the llano estacado Moses said that two things had to happen in Iraq. One, kill all the bad guys who
want to fight…”until you make ‘em sneak and cheat…like they have to in Arkansas. Once criminals begin to hire
lawyers, you know Law has the upper hand.” This he called “cleaning up Dodge.” And two, place the idea of the
House squarely in front of the average Iraqi. Not through middlemen, mullahs, or tribal leaders, mind you, but
straight in front of his nose. “Where power or tradition keeps men tied to the land, or just a single valley, the House
is that one symbol he will immediately and instinctively recognize as ‘freedom’. His world immediately gets wider.
Most of the world has been waiting hundreds of years for what now lays in front of the Iraqi and Afghani
people…only, best I can tell, no one has bothered to tell them just what it is they have. The idea of the House is
the only thing that will break the ties of clan, or even religion, that keep men tied to a single place. America proves
that a man will move fifty miles, a hundred, even a whole continent…if he has to, just to be able to build his own
House.
“That’s how it happened in America. You want true democracy, you have to be able to sever those ties, to re-
define the terms between the traditions that keeps a man around his father’s house for a thousand years. It’s the
same as getting saved in a household full of heathens. Sometimes you just have to pack up and move…’though,
sometimes you do get to stay around to patch fences. But either way, a new day has dawned in your green
valley.”
Moses asks why it is that clerics in America always have to stop at the front gate of the House. “Why can’t they
just barge in like Janet Reno or Yassar Arafat and start snatching people? Take my mother for instance. She
thought the police should go to the house of every layabout in town who was sitting on his front porch enjoying a
beer during Sunday service, and march ‘em off right to church…or jail. A humorless Anglican, she wanted the Ten
Commandments to be the law of the land. When I was sixteen I asked her how would she prove a ‘covet’ in court.
She slapped the gum right out of my mouth. “But
my mother never got her way, for no one dares to cross that line into the free man’s House in America …well that
may be changing, too. This rule includes Muslim America, I might add. To fester sedition here mullahs have to lure
men out of the House and into a public place, like a mosque, of all places, to talk ‘em into it.”. But the House in
America represents a line that doesn’t even exist in the rest of the Muslim world, no more than it did in communist
Russia or China.
Since few read what Moses said about the House in 2004, he was not surprised that nothing has been done to
hammer home the notion of House in Iraq so far. Bureaucrats and planners don’t see the world from the bottom
up. Instead, America’s decided to work through existing tribal links…”in much the same way democrats have
worked through middlemen such as Jesse Jackson to elevate the lives of African-Americans in America. We know
how well that’s worked. You can’t get there from here.” Moses warns that you cannot breed democracy through
middlemen.
So, I traveled to Arizona in the spring, and asked him to be a bit more specific about what needs to be
done.
After much talk, he decided we shouldn’t publish details. “Let’s say someone in position in government thinks
this is a good idea. It’s not expensive. It can’t hurt, because all it does it create attitudes about democracy in Iraqi
(and Afghani) men and women that make them demand greater accountability in their elected
leaders.
“The fly in the buttermilk is that so many political leaders not only in Iraq, but in the US government, and
Congress, have views contrary to the idea of the House, and they would torpedo any open project. If anyone in
government wants to do it now, it has to be covert…and it has to be small…village to village or tribal area to tribal
area. We always had to be under the radar screen of the media, but now we can’t even let the Iraqi government in
on it, as at least a third of them are against the Iraqi man ever knowing about his House and freedom. In Congress
it could be nearly
half.”
We believe there should be all over Iraq and Afghanistan subtle media messages pushing the idea of House…in
news, film, television and advertising. He compared it to the media of the early 1900s, or the Depression era, in
films, comics, radio and newspaper. “A man couldn’t go to a movie, or pick up a newspaper, or a kid in the
Saturday matinee or the Sunday comics, without seeing some image of mean ol’ Mr Potter, or some thug, trying to
separate a man from his House. The message was clear, and the lesson indelible.”
Of course, the House won’t matter if the new government continues to be supported by men with their own
armies. “The rule is still the same, clean up Dodge and build up the idea of the House. But the House can never
be a reality in ordinary men’s lives as long as so many men have so many automatic weapons. We still have to kill
them, or take away all their AK’s and RPG’s…then, and this is my view, give everybody a pistol. That levels the
field. Don’t try to turn the place into San Francisco in 2006. Turn it into Kansas in 1876. Let ‘em work up. That won’
t take care of Al-Qaida, but it will the rest. And then the rest will take care of Al-
Qaida.
“Americans seem to think it was just our natural decency that kept us from killing each other as we moved
westward, before the reach of civilization and law got there. Not so. When the few could get the edge over the
many, they did. But the technology hadn’t advanced so that ten men could take a thousand hostage like they can
now. Nor could men who couldn’t afford to feed a sparrow be able to get hold of that kind of technology. Now you
have men who can’t buy a clean change of underwear carrying around ten thousand dollars’ worth of
firepower.
“But I can tell you, had anyone in the silver fields of Nevada had access to the same kind of arms the militias
have now, they’d have used it…and we’d still be trying to smoke ‘em out. The sky determines and we are now
confronting issues we simply got to avoid a hundred years ago. Common-sense Americans, not bureaucrats,
figured it out then. I rest my case.
“The idea is to equalize the playing field, first by killing the bad guys, disarming the rest, and blocking re-supply.
Then give everybody a Colt. Then the House, not guns, will peel people them away from the tribes, mullahs and
militias just like an onion. Properly done, I figure four years and it’s set into stone. Ten to seal it. I figure we can
‘sell’ the House to the Iraqis and Afghanis for less than than fifty million a year, so that’s not a bad
investment…considering.”
Moses believes we would have done a better job of cleaning up Dodge in Iraq before turning things over to the
Iraqis. And he thinks the Pakistan border should not be a barrier to our going to get the Taliban and Al-Qaida in
Pathan country. “Most of those people should be dead
now.”
“After we did our work in ’03 I’d always pictured Iraqi soldiers using garottes and knives, violating all sorts of civil
rights, mopping up the vestiges of armed resistance there. But I never saw them as a vanguard, which is being
suggested now. Now more than ever I know our military has to disarm Iraq’s militias, as well as the tribal bandits on
both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, no matter whose toes we step on, or it won’t get done. Ever. That son of
a billy goat, al-Sadr; the Iraqis will never settle with him and his army, and there will never be democracy in Iraq as
long as he lives. We have to kill him…and every other mother’s son and husband who carries a gun in his name. It
will be a bloodbath…but it has to be done. There’s no doubt who will win if we set our whole mind to
it.
“Once done there will be a hush over the land. Trust me. Once done we can secure the borders from Sunni
Baathist re-arming from the west or Shiite Irani reinforcement from the east…and pass out garottes to the Iraqi
cops. In fact, right now, if the Iraqi army should succeed it on its own, it would not be a good thing. It would be so
powerful as to be able to appoint its own president. That’s how Saddam got started, and that’s a place we don’t
want to go back to. The free Arab House is the only counter-balance to a strong military, since everyone has a
vested interest in it. The House has to move apace with the Iraqi military. Give the Iraqi his House, and in few
years, no colonel would dare taking
control.
“So first, we have to begin making sure the ideal of the House gets out in front of every Iraqi and Afghani. It
wouldn’t hurt if we were doing this too in Venezuela, too. Maybe even France. But we have to do it away from the
eyes of politicians in Iraq and America, who want to see it fail.”
As Moses would say, “There you have it.”
– Vassar Bushmill, 2006
DEMOCRACY AND THE ARAB HOUSE
By Moses Sands as told to Vassar Bushmills