This is probably not the place to post this

[Fovea]

but I thought it might be worth your reading, even if it touches not at all on Kansas, specifically.

This rant is titled

"Why Iraq would be near my last choice for a modern, democratic nation state, after a quarter century of America fanning Islamic fundamentalism and hate for the west to whom it originally looked for salvation."

Some terms to know and share-
Fred W. Riggs
http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/Faculty/riggs/riggs.htm
gives us these--

Polyethnism - the conciousness of, and collective will of a group(s) within a state structure, or the fracture lines among a collection of Kin or Affinity based economic groups.

Polycommunalism -- more poly than communal. Think of the net relationship between individuals in a gang war. Now reduce the number firearms.

Sala- taken from the Spanish term for a room where both business and family functions are performed.
Fused system -- a political, cultural, economic system based primarily on folkways and associations between an ostensibly unified group

Diffracted system - a political, and economic system ostensibly devoid of affinity advantage in aggregation and distrubution of power and wealth. IE, 'modern industrialized capitalist nations.'

Prismatic system - a system that contains elements of the fused and diffracted systems. The coiner of the term, Fred W. Riggs is somehow both the enfant terrible, the arguable dean of, and the linguistic father of the study of Comparative Systems in Public Administration.

Clects - like it sounds, an amalgam of sect and clique. A wonton stop shopping support system/organization. Oftentimes its name suggests a western diffracted function, but belies an omnibus Chamber of Commerce, farm bureau, bank, credit bureau, and lotto.

Now let's join the freeway, which is already in progress.

You call it Iraq, but perhaps the better term is Mesopotamia. The land between the rivers is not without reason referred to as the cradle of civilization. It's people are long memoried, not because they are backward, but that they identify with their role in human history, and in many ways human history in the west rises out of the memory of their story.

That story has encapuslated over time many faiths and governances, its economies were based on global trade before the west realized it was a globe. It's evil djinn still scare our children out of restful night's sleep. Mesopotamia before the Baathists is not merely a fused society, it is a braiding of fused societies. Kurds, Sunni triangle Arabs, Shia marsh arabs, Jews, Christians, lived in proximity relying on time honored mechanisms to regulate interaction, distribute goods, and recieve tribute and honoria. It was thus during the Ottoman Empire, and it was not ignoring the implications of Turkey's secular renaissance. It just was too involved doing things the old fashioned way.

Unlike more classically Riggsian cases like Thailand or Taiwan, Mesopotamia was the very model of an ur imperial power. You can then either decide that the fact that it lacked freedom from imperial subjugation more or less consistently from that day to this is a touch of irony, or you may not. But what you cannot do is to claim that the folks down home on the Tigris were unsophisticated in governance. We tend to associate prismatic societies and salas with 'developing nations' of the 20th century. I think that it is arguable that Baghdad was adapting the forms of the imperial overlord for desirable effect or advantage within the frameworks of Baghdad's affinity groups folkways when the imperial overlords wore calligae.

However, the new clects are not same as the old clects. And really, after the Iran-Iraq war, GW1, a decade of economic sanctions, Operation Iraqi Liberaton, how could they be? Such environments lose institutional memory, which in Mesopotamian culture is like losing sight, hearing, and smell. Such environments fracture affinities and throw up generations of young turks, and mow them down virtually as quickly.
Under the Baathist mahdu, that is to say, both weapon and shield, order was maintained as the prismatized Mesopotamian clects put members of their communites into positions of power. It is beyond, I suspect our ability to now be able to assess how well the Iraqi Baathists (and it is fair probably to think of them as Iraqis first and Mesopotamians second) did at getting over the rainbow to a diffracted society in its institutions, but it is fair to say that Saddams Baghdad was better lit, and less lethal than Baghdad under the American supported (don't call it a client state) government.

So here is my go on the matter. If the Baathists were to have a fault beyond ruthlessness (and we in the west rarely invest the word with virtue regarding others) it might be that they believed that one could create a state (like Turkey) out of mesopotamia. States without clearly defined commercial relationships and unambiguous economic and social structures like monarchies in fused cultures and diffracted states fall into an uncanny valley that places them into greater risk of failure, as neither the authority of individual or collective will can be depended on uniformly to maintain the needs of the citizenry.

Rather than supporting an Iraqi state, we should encourage the creation of a mesopotamian union. Goddess knows they have enough fallow wealth to fairly (or even just tolerably) disperse within the various ethnic clects to keep things from going too far gone, seeing the collective good as essential for any ethnicity to do well.

So many functions of modern life have been destroyed in Iraq that they might very well pick and choose who is going to pump the oil, who is going to run the lights, move the mail, farm the land, etc. This would allow for a diffracted cultural environment without a state, such as the old holy roman empire did in relation to greater Germany. What we don't need is clects strong enough to have their own health care systems, such as Hamas does in Lebanon.

But I am fairly confident of this, what develops will look nothing like the 'free market' state envisioned by the folks who sent 'Viceroy' Paul Bremmer to oversee the initial looting and resale of Iraq. This is not a basis for a resurrected Iraq, it is a basis for more wealth concentration for those already bloated as a tick. Iraq will not be reborn, because we hung one of the last people who actually believed in something called Iraq. The remainder use the term, but mean mesopotamia.


Americans do not like the results of laissez faire policy, though many of them have a romanticized fondness for it. But there are only two ways to win in such an American system, dragged as it were, back into a prismatic state, you can be a crony, or a lotto winner. That is why I refer to working class Republicans as 'future lotto winners of Murika.'