Stanley’s the expert on this, but I don’t recall what he’s said about getting past the debilitating prevalence of cousin marriage in the Middle East. I was struck by a letter on this from one of our officers in Iraq that Sailer posted noting that the problem of tribalism is less severe in Kurdistan, and I got to wondering whether they have Saddam to thank for that. In other words, did Saddam’s depredations — including the destruction of thousands of villages and later the flight of millions to the mountains after the first Gulf War — kind of “reshuffle” the deck of Kurdish society, making the old ties of clan, and related practices like cousin marriage, less important, and thus making the Kurds more susceptible to modernity? This wouldn’t provide much of a guide for American policymaking, obviously, since nothing even in the zaniest Kos-ite’s fevered imaginings about the mind of Dick Cheney would do the job; but it might suggest that the benighted societies of the Islamic Middle East will only be able to modernize after going through the kind of extraordinarily disruptions more familiar to non-Islamic minorities there — Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Assyrians, et al.