The road traveled from despotism to democracy is a difficult and painful one, no matter how enthusiastic, well-equipped and prepared a country's occupying liberators are. Shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein I read the book Inventing Japan by William Chapman, which, in its narration of the islands' postwar struggle, offered a vital perspective on the second of two campaigns begin waged in Iraq: that of Iraqi society, more or less free from violent interference by terrorist saboteurs, rebuilding and aligning itself with the new demands of free living. Two passages have appeared on this weblog, one about the difficult living conditions of the first few years and the other illustrating, through popular contemporary fiction, the agony synonymous with leaving an entire history behind for modern democracy.
Today, Zeyad lists the acute shortcomings of Iraq's mismatched industrial society, from unreliable communications to untrustworthy home amenities, including electricity; to a thriving black market and the peculiar crime, a favorite of crooks in Britain, known as "phone-jacking." But through it all, perseverance:
It is also not uncommon to trade your position in the [petrol] queue with someone far behind for an appropriate price which gets higher the closer you are to the station. This has become a profitable business for a few, and an effortless one for that. After all, you can find all the services you can imagine at the queue, tea stands, cigarettes, soda drinks, tasty Felafel and boiled egg sandwiches, hot chick peas, beans or turnips, beer (at certain hidden locations), even people renting out pillows and blankets in case you need to spend the night waiting in the queue.
It's impossible to miss echoes of the American frontiersman in these descriptions of surmounting hardships through enterprise and sheer endurance. Life is certainly not nearly as comfortable as it could be or will be in Iraq, but one can understand what regional dictators fear in the future plotted out today by such natural capitalist stalwarts as the Iraqis. And they are right to fear freed, capable men.
