Hi Rob,

Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
Not only do they require someone saavy on politics, and the culture of the politics at work, but a senior level mis-step can have far reaching and enduring ill effects. Also, the longer it takes the Iraqis to build their institutional bureaucracy, the less stable, less effective and more vulnerable the overall governmental structure will be to internal and external pressures. Unfortunately the uniformed side does not have allot of experience in this, in fact most of our culture goes far out of its way to stay out of it.
Great series of posts! I'd like to pick up on this particular point and make a few observations. For most people in the West and ex-colonies, "bureaucracy" has a very specific meaning which was pretty much defined and laid out by Max Weber in his Theory of Bureaucracy (a good synopsis available here). There are, however, competing theories of bureaucracy and other models for it, for example Confucianism and, if we go back further, the Temple States model from, you guessed it, Iraq (okay, it was 6-3.5 thousand years ago, but...).

One of the reasons why the reconstruction of Germany post WW II went to well was that we had almost exactly the same conceptualization of bureaucracy. Japan's was roughly similar, but embedded in a radically different cultural matrix; still, there rapid and recent industrialization paved the ground for adopting Western bureaucratic models (they already had them in their industry and military).

Iraq is another story altogether since almost all of the bureaucratic tradition goes back to the Temple States (weird, but it does). Part of this is because of the cultural matrix which defines the responsibilities of key social systems in a totally non-Western manner, i.e. a balance of areas between the Temple (nowadays the Ulama, Imams, etc.) and the State. This is totally different from the Western traditions where "religion" was, following the breakup of the Roman Catholic hegemony ~1500 or so, placed in a subservient position to the State and, in most Western nations, eventually relegated to the personal sphere and occasional ceremonial functions (this is he process of secularization). BTW, all of this is actually implicit (and sometimes explicit) in Machiavelli's The Prince (look at his discussion of government types).

Any long-lasting and effective bureaucracy will have to a) match up with the cultural matrix and b) have a solid, culturally-based justification ("Charter" in Malinowski's terms).