Time Is A Cultural Artifact

Anthony Shalid, In Iraq, Western Clocks, but Middle Eastern Time

The story in Iraq is unfinished, whatever the Obama administration, and the generals and diplomats who do its bidding, may say. The country is neither occupied nor independent, but rather in a limbo whose descriptions are as pliable as the pretexts for the invasion that began America’s seven-year involvement here. Through those years, the experience was colored by promises that sometimes sounded like propaganda to Iraqis: democracy, good governance and better lives. But its one constant was perhaps time.

Iraq today is replete with American-ordered deadlines, timetables and benchmarks that sought to create realities where realities never existed. The administration is leaving now on its own terms. Perhaps staying would make an already traumatized Iraq worse; much of its dysfunction dates to the American occupation and its earliest days. But the very nature of America’s departure — with no government formed, an unpredictable Iraqi military, and deep popular disenchantment with a hapless political elite — underscores one of the most enduring traits of American strategy in the Middle East.

Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time, at least not in the way it is acknowledged by Islamic activists willing to serve decades in jail, Syrian presidents assured that American policies will eventually change, and Iraq’s neighbors, who bide their turn to fill the vacuum left by an American departure.

Its policies — support for Israel and authoritarian Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan — may shape sentiments toward it. But time, an American measure of it, often shapes the way it acts.

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The Middle East has long suffered under a peculiarly American notion that if the world’s greatest power wants something, it will somehow come to pass, on its schedule. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Syria, the messy realities never quite fit. Since 2003, they rarely have in Iraq, either.

The occupation ended, at least formally, in summer 2004, before Iraq’s midterm elections. Elections proceeded whether Iraq was ready or not, sometimes helping exacerbate divisions rather than bridge them. The American withdrawal may reflect a new reality, but its timing has proceeded regardless of political progress.

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American officials’ perspective on the withdrawal usually dictates how they see this notion of time, in particular whether deadlines reflect the ambiguous reality here these days. The military calls the timing right, as do many diplomats, even if they acknowledge the impact of American domestic politics.

Americans are impatient, and see time in a Taylorist fashion: something to measure productivity by. In other cultures, time plays at a different pace, or seems unpaced, emerging like smoke from events, as opposed to being the metronome driving us forward.

We are blinded by our tools, as well as helped by them.

To step outside of the limits of our understanding requires something more than discipline, or science. It requires a greater wisdom than our leaders possess or our society will accept.