You know, for example I don't think I could name you a single third cousin of mine but that is not nearly considered so distant a relationship.Īlso there is a lot of first-cousin marriage in Iraq and so I think it is very complicated exactly how you are related but you know, men very typically call each other either or uncle depending on the age difference. How important was it to establish his personal background and tell us what you discovered about his personal story?ĬHRIS WILSON: Sure, well, you know the first thing is that extended families are very important in Iraq, much more so certainly than you know in America or in I think kind of most western countries. That is, your given name, your father's name, your grandfather's name, your family name and then sometimes a fifth name which is where you are from and you know, most of the officers I spoke with just didn't know that when they got to Iraq and if you look through the names as they were presented at the invasion, many of them are incorrect because we didn't understand how their names were constructed.ĮLIZABETH JACKSON: In fact you make the point in your articles that perhaps the best weapon the military could have had was a sociology degree.ĬHRIS WILSON: Absolutely and one of the very fortuitous things about the 4th Infantry Division particularly that the First Brigade Combat Team that was in Tikrit where Saddam you know went to hide was that there was an officer named Lieutenant Colonel Brian Reid who in fact had a Masters in Sociology so that was very fortunate.ĮLIZABETH JACKSON: Now in the case of Saddam Hussein, there were five families with whom he was very close. They certainly, they have made a lot of improvements in the last 10 years or the last five years but you know furthermore I think that we, it sort of, it is not that we particularly thought that there was going to be organised exactly like us but we didn't have a particularly clear idea of just kind of how Iraqi society functioned such that it would feel intuitive that things were very networked.Īnd a very good example is that men in Iraq have, there is a very formal like the way their names are kind of constructed. It is hard to imagine that they wouldn't have explored those paths?ĬHRIS WILSON: In some sense, yes and certainly when you sort of steep yourself in this for a while it does begin to feel very intuitive but you know the fact of the matter is that you know in the, in through the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, kind of cultural studies just simply warrant a particularly prominent part of kind of the officer training program. You know maybe your bowling club or your drinking buddies or your church mates, you know and that is exactly what Saddam Hussein did.ĮLIZABETH JACKSON: But why wasn't the military thinking like that anyway? It does seem so logical. It would be your family and the people you really trust. Who would you turn to to kind of help, try to survive and try to organise a resistance and he said you know, it wouldn't be the mayor or you know the local bureaucrat. He said you know imagine America was attacked or your country was attacked and he said you know there was this enemy in our midst.
That is simply not true anymore.ĮLIZABETH JACKSON: Now your articles make the point very clearly that, interestingly, it was Saddam Hussein's social network rather than the official military intelligence that was ultimately the key to locating him.ĬHRIS WILSON: Absolutely and you know I was talking to a military sociologist for this article who put it to me in a very interesting way. We are well past the point where, like in World War II we were fighting a known enemy that was kind of organised the same way we were such that we could kind of make assumptions about you know their behaviour based on what we knew about ourselves. You need to know the enemy and you need, more importantly perhaps, to know how the enemy society and government is structured.ĬHRIS WILSON: Absolutely. Having read your articles, I suppose the overwhelming message is that you can't take a formulaic approach to modern-day warfare. He was able to get unparalled access to the US military investigators to find out how social network analysis helped capture Saddam Hussein. It wasn't until the military embraced the concept of social network analysis, that their efforts began to pay off.Ĭhris Wilson is the associate editor of Slate magazine, an online publication.
That's because for many months they were following all the wrong leads. It took American investigators a long time to find Saddam Hussein. ELIZABETH JACKSON: Now for a brief step back in time.
0 kommentar(er)
