Shame and Honor, Terribly Twisted: A central truth of Arab culture is on full display in Iraq

Like all Arabs, Iraqis live in what anthropologists call a shame society, and this generates common values that all can share, to that extent acting as a social glue. The key to motivation in such a society is the acquisition of honor that brings high status to the individual, and conversely the avoidance of shame that is a guarantee of low status. To complete the anthropologists' schema, Westerners live in a guilt society, whereby whoever does something wrong feels conscience- stricken about it, even if nobody ever finds out what he did. On the shame-honor scale of values, the individual who does wrong need feel bad only if he is discovered. If he gets away with it, he can congratulate himself on his cleverness. What can look like lying or dissembling on the part of Arabs, or in contrast boasting, is often prompted by the shame-honor calculus invisible to the outsider.

In this culture, honor implies victory and triumph, while defeat brings unmitigated shame and disgrace. In that spirit Saddam likes to assert that the 1991 Gulf War was a famous victory worthy of constant celebration. In that same spirit, the Egyptians have built a museum in Cairo in the pretense that the 1973 war was a famous victory, when in reality the Israelis were ultimately in a position to annihilate the Egyptians on the near side of the Suez Canal, and capture Cairo on the far side. Attempting to convert the reality of defeat into the illusion of victory, Palestinians on the West Bank have built shrine-like models of the sites where suicide bombers have done their work, complete with mock-ups of dead Israelis.

Constructing a heroic biography for himself, depicting himself all over Iraq in the poses of a ruler fit to be compared to the greatest in history, and defying the might of the United States, Saddam knows he can count on the appeal to honor. A strong man earns applause because he is capable of deeds the weak could never even contemplate. Utterly bewildering to Westerners, the spectacle then arises of people coming to admire the tyrant who oppresses them. Promoting hierarchy and obstructing trust, shame-and-honor values appear to be the main obstacle to democracy in the Arab world. Usually, Islam is considered a more significant obstacle to democracy; it has separatist aspects, to be sure, but its vision of equality and justice may reasonably be considered democratic.

On the opening day of hostilities, apparently having just survived a missile attack directed at him, Saddam in a television address gave a perfect example of shame-honor rhetoric (allowing for the awkwardness of instant translation): "These days will add to your record, your bright record, all you male and female dignified people. This is your share of dignity and victory, and everything that will raise the status before God and will let the infidels down . . . And your enemies will be in humiliation and defeat, God willing." One of the less amiable verses of the Koran concerning the treatment of enemies is "Cut their throats, and be patient," and that is what Saddam exhorts his people to do. All his speeches contain characteristic sentiments of this kind: God sees war against the West as "a source of honor, pride, glory, and blessing for you in this life and the hereafter." So homogenous is the culture that Yasser Arafat's speeches are indistinguishable in tone and language.