Personal Nar. pt 2

     According to Robin Fox, Author of The Kindness of Strangers, oil was not the largest reason for invading the Middle East. In order to increase national security, it was deemed wise to at least plant the seed of liberal democracies in the heart of an otherwise Arab totalitarianism culture. This turned out to be much more of a challenge than first thought.  The Kindness of Strangers gives us several examples of why it would be so hard for the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East to establish such a government.
     The problem in uniting the Iraq people is that many of them are loyal to their own individual "governments." For their entire lives, when their government provided them with little to no resources they turned to their families for help. What continued to evolve out of a lack of organized government, was families sticking together to create paternal based clans. These families would all work for each other invest in each other, and in the case of larger family clans, pay tribute to the "father" of the clan that would distribute the money as he saw fit. There were stories of corrupt Clan leaders that would embezzle their money, abuse their power, and even go to war with other clans, however for the people of Iraq whose roads were paved and farms fertilized by their own family, the prospect of a foreign country trying to create a new government in their homeland, seemed quite unappealing, almost degrading. While these Clans proved for the most part, successful in benefiting the families well-being (for the most part) the Iraq Government does not recognize them as having any political recourse.
     Located in Baghdad are some of the more powerful families. In 2003 A reporter for the New York Times by the name of John Tierney, realized that every week in his Baghdad hotel were weddings in which cousins were marrying cousins and more often than not they were first cousins. They were usually from the same paternal clan as well, however sometimes like in Saddam Hussein's case, it was was a woman from the mothers paternal clan. These families were choosing the "Mafia Solution," keeping the marriage in the family, which is one commonest form of preferred marriage in Arab society.  When the reporter asked why they chose to marry their cousins, they replied "Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger?." The "trust no strangers" mentality is quite common among the Paternal Clans and to a lot of the Iraq people. Knowing this, it makes perfect sense why we met so much resistance establishing our influence in the Middle East.

Work Cited
Fox, Robin. "The Kindness of Strangers" spcoety 44.6 (2007): 164-70. Print