Cousin marriage doomed Bush’s effort to make Iraq into a democracy like us. By Ed West.
Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, [Steve] Sailer wrote that: ‘By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges’, cousin marriage ‘makes the development of civil society more difficult’. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.
Even those with a cursory knowledge of the country knew that Iraq was split between Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds in the north, each group’s area of dominance roughly corresponding to three former Ottoman provinces. However, these were further subdivided into ‘smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families — each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds’, in total about 150 tribes comprising some 2,000 clans.
Saddam’s politics were mired in blood, in both senses. He came from the al-Bu Nasir, a tribe comprising some 25,000 people based in the town of Tikrit, and his regime was filled with his relatives. …
The inevitable result of clannism is kin-based corruption whereby resources, positions and other rewards are monopolised by family groups. In these societies, Weiner wrote, ‘the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organisation’. …
The cousin marriage question was later taken up … by Stanley Kurtz, who wrote: ‘Instead of encouraging cultural exchange, forging alliances, and mitigating tensions among competing groups, parallel-cousin marriage tends to wall off groups from one another and to encourage conflict between and among them.’
According to Kurtz, … western analysts purposely ignored the tribal nature of Arab society for political reasons, influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism and anthropologist E.L. Peters, who argued that conflict in the region was not about who was related to whom, but about resources. ‘With many anthropologists already drawn to Marxism in the 1970s, Peters’s theory found a receptive audience,’ Kurtz wrote. But as an explanation of how the world works, Darwin usually trumps Marx. …
Countries without cousin marriage have far stronger civic institutions while in contrast extended families make civil society, honest government and democracy difficult, since the aim of each individual in attaining power is to help out his clan. Corruption is the norm because in such a scenario it makes no sense not to be corrupt, since everyone else will be helping their clan. That is why there is such a strong link between a country’s corruption levels, as measured by groups such as Transparency International, and the level of cousin marriage.
Christian culture banned cousin marriage:
Kurtz noted that this sort of clannishness was most common in Islamic societies, but rare in historically Christian countries. The reason for this is that the Western Church purposefully eroded the power of the clan for theological reasons (although materialist motives might explain some of it).
The link between Christianity (especially Catholicism) and low levels of clannishness is very strong …
The Church’s cousin marriage ban caused Europeans to become less clannish, with huge consequences for politics in later centuries. A 2012 study by Michael A Woodley and Edward Bell, called ‘Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations’ found ‘that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop’. …
Outmarriage changes the relative relatedness between individuals; a member of a clan is more closely related to a cousin than, say, an Englishman is to his cousin, while the Englishman is also more closely related to any random unrelated Englishman. Outmarriage also increases interaction with wider society and so ‘may change values towards a more general morality’. …
The incompatibility of the Middle East with European culture has more to do with cousin marriage than Islam:
After the 9/11 attacks it was understandable that many people attributed the Middle East’s various problems to Islam, but family structures explain far more. Where there is a religious link is that Islamic authorities were not determined to break these families, as the Catholic Church was.
The irony of Bush’s disastrous war is that, shocked by a religiously-inspired attack on American soil, he invaded a secular regime and handed the country, inevitably, to Islamists. Such movements emerge so successfully in clannish countries because religion is the only force that can overcome deep-seated tribal divisions. One of the attractions of political Islam is that Islam is seen — with good reason — as being a force for reducing corruption and improving public morals. …
[ISIS’s] greatest victory, the conquest of Mosul, exemplified the problems facing low-trust societies. The Americans had given the Iraqi Army a vast amount of money, some $25.5billion to supply 800,000 troops, over 4,000 armoured vehicles, 137 helicopters and 357 tanks. In Mosul in June 2014 they had more than 20,000 soldiers available, yet when just a few hundred ISIS rebels moved in, the Iraqi Army fled, leaving most of their weapons in the hands of the enemy. …
Hindsight and our ruling class:
On the invasion of Iraq the optimistic centre-Left and centre-Right, often the nicest and most reasonable people in the world, were woefully wrong; those on the fringes, including most self-declared socialists, were absolutely right.
I’m a great believer in history being a black comedy, and naturally almost all prominent advocates of the Iraq War have gone onto further career success, while Steve Sailer is even more of a fringe figure and one not mentioned in polite society (although any conservative worth reading, reads him.) …
Iraq … was a bloody disaster, and a reminder that politicians ought to read widely before they set upon sending other people to kill in order to make the world a better place.
Widespread cousin marriage also knocks a few points off the average IQ, which doesn’t help defeat corruption or promote democracy and trust.
