Defence Against the Dark Arts
So too with a post Mesopotamian War middle east. What would emerge I imagine would be far more congenial to open, democratic, liberal societies. Those who began and ran the wars would have far less control over their societies, and such a war would spur the west into far more use of domestic oil, nuclear energy, and other alternative fuels. They would emerge with far less inherent wealth and clout with the world.
"Dark and difficult times lay ahead. Soon we will have to decide between doing what is easy and what is right."
So I'm excited about the latest Harry Potter movie that just premiered in cinemas here, but that quoted line provides a disturbingly relevant perspective in events running parallel in reality to Rowling's fictionalised world of Hogwarts.
austin bay recently posted seven scenarios that might manifest themselves in the event of a withdrawal from Iraq by the US:
Judging from the fact that the Iraqi Parliament is still nowhere near reconciliation with the Sunnis in drafting a proposal that would entail the disabusing of the possibility of sectarian division of the entire country, the first scenario may appear to be enticingly attractive especially in light of political gridlock of the past few years, for those who wish to see change and flux in the political scene - any change. Realistically speaking, this fragmented pseudo-state entity that is Iraq may hold up for longer than most might expect:
Even the Kurds have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even though it is already proving that one may not have their cake and eat it too - violence has been inching closer to Kirkuk in recent weeks. Nevertheless, the peshmerga are probably confident they can inflict serious pain in Shi'ite and Sunni neighbourhoods should the Kurdish territories be besieged. By espousing the continuation of federal autonomy within the political framework of a fragile Iraqi state, the Kurds can play upon the sympathies of both the international community and the US. An independent Kurdistan that is potentially as militarily robust and amenable to US interests in the region as Israel would unquestionably ruffle feathers in Tehran and Ankara. Staying in Iraq allows the Kurds to play the 'violation of sovereignty' card should Turkey attempt to increase the intensity of incursive anti-PKK operations into Kurdistan. Already, Iran is rumoured to be collaborating with Turkish authorities on this issue.
austin's third prediction that Turkey might actually attempt to absorb Iraqi Kurdistan to end the war with the PKK is a valid one, but if only Ankara seriously considers that territorial expansion that would inevitably result in an internal civil war with Iraqi Kurds within Greater Turkey is worth sacrificing EU membership and relations with Europe and the US. Turkey has always been the conduit between West and East, nestled in between both and struggling to find its identity. With the EU members being increasingly blatant and vociferous in their opposition to Turkish admission into the transnational project, those within the Islamic establishment might convince the populace that looking west is a futile attempt to gain entry into Europe, and Euro-advocates who support political reform and secularist gains of recent years to meet the prerequisites may lose their own trump card against the Islamist ideologues. The US might then find itself having to preserve the elite technocracy and bureaucracy of secularists against the creeping Islamification of Turkish society - much like Pakistan in a sense.
Yet I find it unlikely that the mullahs in Tehran would actually continue to encourage the expansionist ambitions of Turkey, since there is a significant Kurdish population within Iran itself. austin posits that both regional powers would, in the wake of the eruption of chaos in Mesopotamia, continue to exert influence while maintaining a safe distance from each other, perhaps engineering an agenda of constructive engagement, especially where the opportunity for such collaboration is ripe in Iraqi Kurdistan. The status quo provides both Iran and Turkey with ample room to curb the ambitions of their common adversary without unnecessarily agitating any sentiments that would send the Kurds into a frenzied rage of declaring independence. I believe that Ankara still harbours very serious intentions of remaining a valid candidate for the EU, and that Iran knows better than to incite serious backlash from its own restive minorities.
rob mandel in that thread commented:Wars, especially long and brutal ones, change even the victorious nations in ways they could never foresee. Look at post Civil War or post WW2 US. The former saw a vastly expanded federal power, the latter an internationalist and interventionist world power. The social changes from both, not the slavery issue, but the progressive movements of the 1880’s, as well as the civil rights and women’s movement both have their genesis in the wars that preceded them. While the goal was to defeat an enemy, at all costs, what emerged was entirely new and unforeseen.
It is easy to underestimate the obstinacy of Arabs bent on destruction of the West and Israel - what would you consider to be the lesson learnt from the Six Day War, Yom Kippur, the intifada and the summer war of Lebanon? In my honest opinion, the Arabs have distilled the essence of prolonged conflict: failure, however devastating and demoralising, is merely the prelude to the eventual victory. The will of the Arabs is interlocked in their hardened disposition towards the West, the ability to perceive defeat as victory, to see the reason for living in the consummation with the Reaper - to see war as a natural cleansing option to wipe the slate clean and restart the cycle of bloodshed and carnage. Not that different from the intellectual psyche of pre-1914 proto-fascists and adherents of militarism on the European continent, such as the German general Helmuth von Moltke.
It is just as easy to underestimate the galvanising power wielded by ideological leaders in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and exerted on the Arab street that stretches from Sudan to Egypt, winding through the alleys of Damascus and Baghdad, snaking through the buildings in Amman and Beirut, traversing the destitute shambles of Palestine or the beautiful architecture of Istanbul. Sure, perhaps one could point to the increasing outscourcing activity of state-sponsored terrorism perpetuated by Syria, Iran and the Saudis. Such decentralisation of autonomy of action and power of inflicting harm may dilute or hamper the effectiveness of the mullahs or sheiks in ensuring that the outcomes of events don't spin out of control.
But these crafty ideological devils aren't that concerned about control like the British or French were over their vast empires. Then, decades of colonial oppression and discrimination coupled with the shattering of the myth of Western superiority in the wake of the Japanese occupation in South-East Asia to herald the age of decolonisation. Control was everything to the colonial masters, and it was sustained by cash and the omnipresent threat of military intervention. After the Second World War, the British were saddled with huge debts and their military was incapable of even mustering enough troops to defend itself, let alone its colonies on the other side of the world. Unable to maintain its military presence and pay off the bureaucrats, political elites and collaborators in the colonies, the British let decolonisation do its work and thereafter lost control.
The issue here is management. Even after the disastrous consequences of the Six Day War, among other conflicts that merely served to underline the yawning gap of military capabilities between Israel and its Arab neighbours, nothing has changed. The ideological superstructure has been bolstered by increasing hordes of fanatical zealots lining up at suicide-vest-fitting stations at your local grocery store, heartened and emboldened by the complicit acquiescence of dhimmi leaders in Europe and the US. Ideological control is no longer an issue because nobody has been able to pry open any cracks in the compelling narrative of Islamism or the seductive efficiency of cleansing through the spilling of the blood of the kuffar. Even without fatwas or doctrinal decrees from Tehran or Riyadh, local Islamist/jihadist governments and groups have initiated their own purges and terrorist operations with increasing autonomy.
Ideological elites are also comforted by the fact that Arabs in the Middle East who adhere to the ideology of Islamism and the regressive culture of death and suicide are perpetually doomed to repeat the cycle of endless sacrifice and martyrdom, regardless of the painful consequences of the conflict. Just look at Palestine - it provides evidence that you don't need cash or military troops to sustain the degenerate culture there. It feeds on itself, picking off its own adherents to serve and fuel the ideological furnace in order to perversely boast about the lengthening list of martyrs, as if that alone justified the purpose of their 'struggle'. In all actuality, it has monopolised not just their objectives, but their lives.
Even if a Mesopotamian War were to erupt, there would be little flux in ideological terms. Terrorism, corruption and martyrdom will remain as cornerstones of the dysfunctional regimes of the Middle East. Ideological control would be automatically reinforced by the never-ending lexicon of defeats and sacrifices. Management such as that by the Iranians in their tenuous relationship with the Turkish authorities, or that employed by the Saudis in ensuring that the Sunnis will always get their message across, regardless of whether it's aQ or simply insurgents looking for funding: management in the broadest sense of the word can be carried out by any jihadist leader or advocate, because in Islamism as well as in the very concept of terror, there is no such thing as 'too much'. Communists or Fascists in Europe were limited by the risks of discrediting themselves should they venture beyond the fringes of acceptable politics. Far Left and far Right parties in Europe who resorted to extra-parliamentary methods of assassination, kidnapping and coercion consigned themselves to irrelevance in the 1970s.
Terror knows no boundaries. It needs only the mere act of perpetuation to manifest itself again. It recognises no restraints on its terrifying potential, and will vengefully exact a disproportionate price on those who seek to control it for themselves.
And it will stay that way regardless of whether the US withdraws or not, but it will be allowed to fester and manifest in ever-greater degrees of malevolence until even territorial borders fail to contain the jihadist beast in the Middle East if we retreat to the false sense of security by withdrawing. No longer are we attempting - or even capable of - to maintain control of events and circumstances. The US is not a puppet-master with its proxy regimes being propped up, engineering a liberal revolution across the Middle East; the key is management - as the scenarios present themselves, we take into account the past and present, history and precedent, all in what seems like a vain attempt to deal with the bewildering chaos of events happening all around us.
Precedent tells us that if we ignore precedent itself, we will pay - disproportionately.
Post-script: wretchard has also posted on this.
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Middle East
3 spoke up:
Amazing how the West thinks in terms of who should and should not be divided! Yes North and South Korea and Vietnam worked out so well... didn't they? How about East and West Berlin and Germany? Why, thank god there are two of them! Lovely palliative, that, to not stand up to totalitarianism and say: we are war weary, don't grab at what you can't grasp as that will come back to haunt you. And so it did, as you note, in Hungary and the welded together Checzoslovakia. Yes, they were one Nation... now two because of incompatabilities in ethnic outlook. Then there is this thing that the West in its grand ideals, made of disparate peoples and called it Yugoslavia. That worked very well, didn't it?
This 'deciding the fate of others' deal has a long history going back further than the Tripartite division of Poland, which resurrected itself out of the ashes of the Empires that divided it, only to be subjugated twice more due to Western inability to stick to its word: first to Fascist Germany and then to the USSR. 'Realism' is an excuse to put money ahead of liberty, and this idea that the West can do more than just guide post-war situations and *not* control them, is something we must get over. Western culture cannot force people to be free, but it can teach what the cost of liberty and freedom *is*.
Whenever we decide on the 'realistic' course, the US denies its history of being a Revolutionary Nation that has long-term commitment to its ideals. Strange to say, but 'idealistic' outlook can be quite pragmatic and yet understand that to coddle tyranny is abhorrent to a Free People.
And how dare the US put 'benchmarks' upon other governments when it can adhere to NONE of its own? While we are, indeed, committed to securing our own liberty, we do forget the responsibility of a post-war situation to help others understand what it means to secure liberty for themselves. That is *not* a cost-free situation, and yet we have a political class that believes otherwise.
No, let some magnificent 'moral equivalence' reign, in which black is white and torture is a bad night's sleep. Or that mere commerce is the be-all, end-all to liberty... forgetting that it is liberty that builds commerce to make one free to utilize the benefits of one's own work. The defeatism that we see is pure cowardice: an unwillingness to put any cost forward as worth it to build freedom and help others realize what it costs to secure liberty.
Fukiyama was blandly incorrect to assume an 'end of history' and the inevitability of Western culture and outlook. There is no such thing as inevitability in history. There may be 'tides in the affairs of men' but men are not King Canute commanding the tide, we ride it and sink or swim on our own basis... and sometimes we can get to higher ground and deny the tide its reach. That is contingency in history, based upon the actions of individuals. Our actions create history, even if the tide runs counter to it actions can and do make a difference. Even with the tide turning on human liberty and so many willing to see it gone, the goal of swimming for liberty and trying to reach higher ground to escape tyranny is worth the cost and struggle.
Because stopping is fatal.
Now we hear the insane ideas that running from helping others will have desireable outcomes... people that we committed to in overthrowing a tyrant. Be it right or wrong to do the overthrowing, the responsibility is to help guide these people on why we did it as a free people, and for them to determine their own course as a free people. I am more than willing to pay that price as a civilization, as *not* to pay it is lethal to us. That poison already drips into our mouths and its bitter taste is awful. Yet the sweet words of 'just swallow the poison' is heard again.
'We can't mediate a civil war.'
-Show me the 'civil war' by the ancient standards of honorably standing up a government and fighting FOR something, and I will tell you if it is something to take part in or NOT.
No, those ancient standards that we know are not the ones of modernity... *anything*, literally, is 'civil war' now. So blind terrorism masked as sectarian strife to give murderers cover... that is 'civil war'.
Not barbarians behaving barbarically against innocents.
'We can't figure out their problems for them, so just stand by the sidelines. Divide up their Nation.'
-Well if we can't figure it out, then 'why' is it a good thing to divide them? After THREE democratic elections, ONE to make a Constitution, a SECOND to ratify it and a THIRD to elect a government as a unified Nation, how can we say it should be divided? North-South, like Vietnam and Korea? East-West like Germany and Europe were? Or Tripartite like Poland?
Those *failed*.
Welding together people who did not want to be in a Nation together *failed* in the Balkans and for the Checzoslovakia.
The People there have spoken, wisely or unwisely, as a People. Can we abide by that or will we, as with Argentina under Allende, or S. Vietnam under Diem, invalidate their elections by our 'wisdom' being unable to figure the place out? Argentina and S. Vietnam worked out so well in this 'deciding for them' business, didn't it?
How come, in Austin Bay, I hear the same, old, tired and *wrong* ideals being given to us for the defeatist option and NO ONE willing to call them for the old, tired and *wrong* things they have given us in the past? I literally cannot name places where they have WORKED. The Ottoman Empire under lovely Wilsonian ideals? Free now with trade, right?
Those things are *excuses* not to do the right thing and hold on grimly to liberty as the cost of NOT doing that is an invalidation of liberty and freedom for ourselves. That cost was plainly told the US in the Revolution and for the world to witness: 'No taxation without representation' and 'The price of the Tree of Liberty comes in the cost of the blood of tyrants and patriots'.
'Divide up those that we cannot understand!
Or Unite them!
Or call genocide by the name 'civil war'!
Just RUN!
For god's sake don't stay and FIGHT to be FREE!!'
What is the cost of liberty?
-The last free person on the planet FIGHTING to be free, and dying for liberty. Nations rent asunder to do that. Peoples dead for that. All treasuries spent for that. The planet laid waste because slavery of the human spirit and soul to tyranny is NOT worth the price of living as a slave under *any* system.
That started in 1776.
Yet I find few defenders of this concept any more.
How do you justify defeat when it means being a slave to the fear of death?
And soon just being a slave as those that threaten know no bounds.
It is a stark, nasty, and permanent cost to be paid again and again and again. Generation upon generation, until we see that All men are created EQUAL.
The cost of liberty is all Peoples realizing the cost of that freedom is liberty's awful and awesome tree... which gives shade and shelter from tyranny only if it is defended. In blood. Until all men are free.
I am an absolutist Jacksonian on warfare. You fight to win. You help the fallen after. You help those tyrannized to be free. You help up honorable enemies who abide by their word to find the path from tyranny.
And to those that will not give up on tryanny?
You fight until they are dead.
Or you are.
If we cannot hold to that ideal, as a culture, then no amount of 'volunteering to fight' will help, as the culture is debased and will not cash in on the good blood spilled to create liberty. A culture debased is not worth fighting FOR.
Run from this fight and we will find few defenders left, anywhere.
And the Revolution restarted here, in the US.
I do my duty as Citizen to BE Citizen to show the better way to ensure that blood spilled is liberty gained. Not just in Iraq. But here, at home.
"You must pay the price, to secure the blessing." - Andrew Jackson.
That it took a West German himself to disregard the acquiescence and stifling inertia of the greater powers at work, and to propose the initiative to unite the two halves of his country - that alone is telling in terms of the extent to which the West believes that principles can be sacrificed in order to gain stability in world order. Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was borne out of a burgeoning frustration with the realisation that the FRG's Western backers weren't going to risk continental war with the USSR to unite a divided Germany. The US was more than satisfied with that partition of Berlin, convinced that the Soviets' claim of territory was legitimate and deserving of official recognition, since the Red Army had indeed contributed to defeating Hitler's Fascist hordes. It also allowed the US to assure European nations that a divided Germany would not pose any threat to security, and the former demons of Prussian militarism and expansionism would not yet again surface for the third time in a century - the French had to be convinced first and foremost.
In retrospect, even as early as the 1960s when the full extent of Stalin's crimes were already being denounced by Khrushchev, Western European nations were caught up in fanciful idealism and thus consciously turned a blind eye to their eastern counterparts. It was as if they were willing to sacrifice half the continent and condemn them to their fate under Communist repression for the sake that they could preserve their own freedom. Did the West 'decide' the fate of Central and Eastern Europe? Perhaps not directly, but it was certainly complicit in its acquiescence in conceding them to the Soviets.
It all depends on whether Western culture makes an indelible mark on the democratic traditions of the nation before totalitarianism or its spectre descends upon the people. For the peoples of Central Europe, especially the Czechs who have one of the longest traditions of democracy in Europe, the twin periods of discontinuity under Nazism and then Communism represented severe lessons in what the cost of liberty and freedom meant. Every single day endured was a lesson remembered simply by invoking the lingering legacy of Western culture that remained embedded in Czech memory.
Communism as a totalitarian, pervasive ideology attempted to remake History by invoking the sacrifices of its own adherents and justifying them in light of the 'natural' progression of society from capitalism to the end-state of Communist utopianism. The objective of ideological indoctrination by the Communists did in fact succeed to a large extent as its ideas found resonance and credence in intellectual circles in the West, but were slowly but surely discredited by Soviet repression and military intervention in satellite states. Ideologues might have succeeded in maintaining ideological control or silent acquiescence from the peoples in nations where authoritarianism had reigned before, but Communism failed to find a foothold in the younger generations of intellectuals who were disenchanted by the fallacious promises of the ideology. The legacy of Western culture had indeed been preserved and re-invoked by these new pioneers.
For peoples of Eastern Europe who had been born under the conditions of Soviet repression, that brutal reality was all that they had ever known. Western culture was denied to them twofold - firstly by the continuation of authoritarian control of thought and action, thus severing the present from the legacy of the past; secondly by the conscious abandonment by Western Europe and the US. Thus, the opportunity for Western culture to 'teach' the cost of liberty and freedom was robbed.
Time itself represents a certain obstacle to memory: the reason why you don't hear what should be the unanimous discrediting of those same old ideas is that people who have never understood what it was like to experience freedom and liberty, and then watch with unimaginable horror as they are forcefully wrested from their bare hands and rendered non-existent indefinitely - these people have never been able to learn for themselves the actual cost of liberty is. And they are by no means ready or willing to bear the cost themselves, because as long as they can find others to feed and appease their adversary - as long as it's not them - they are willing to do so to preserve for themselves the advantages of liberty and freedom while ensuring that others pay for it with their lives.
Sooner or later, the entire argument metamorphosises into a veritable slippery slope: able to accept sacrificing just about anything to avoid war, fighting or personal loss. Liberty itself, when perpetuated and flourishing, can be contagiously appealing - the reason behind its appeal is that people are willing to fight for it, to die for it, to protect its tenets and ensure its longevity. That alone represents a beacon of inspiration and hope to peoples in faraway, oppressive regimes.
Each time we fail to display that desire, that inherent tendency to stand up for what we believe in, it sends a very clear message to those very people: that liberty isn't worth defending, that its defenders are losing heart and conviction in the belief that they can stem or extinguish the flames of authoritarianism. Its basic appeal is thus dulled, and people retreat to that selfish human nature of sacrificing anything - relationships, property, rights - to preserve oneself. They indulge in corruption, slander, clientelism and the wholesale atomisation of society to protect themselves and offer someone else to the altar of ideological purification.
That is exactly what authoritarian ideologies exploit to further their control over the masses.
Harrison - Damned straight!
The Czechs and the Poles, both, have long memories of freedom and electing government, although the Poles have always had a xeno-phile/-phobe problem internally and difficulty in getting a representative system together, the concept they had as a People dates back to the 10th century. While so many on the Right like to cite how the Poles loved Reagan, they forget that Reagan did very little to actually *help them* after the Allied promises pre-WWII had been broken. The Poles also remember early America, and sending cavalry and troops to help the new Nation be born and they remembered that, too. For all the lovely fact that the US could outspend the USSR the hard blows to they system were not delivered by the West but by Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Romanians, East Germans... the USSR went down and there was Poland, re-born. Again.
The authoritarian politics that the Poles fought against, to them, by the USSR was not different than the various Tripartite repressions previous to that or various other rulers and dictators that had over-run Poland. Communism held nothing for the Poles as it denied their communion with the Church and once that was re-established, Communism was seen as imposed from the outside for all the fact the xenophiles would go to it. Unlike Prague and Hungary the Poles knew the best way to resist was to just *resist* - don't let the culture change, don't let the tyrants undermine the community and don't let the idiot neighbors who sign on to it get you down.
The lesson for Western politics and outlook is that authoritarianism *works* if it can be legitimized by those under it. In Romania the rehabilitation of Vlad Tepes, however, reminded the People there that they had, indeed, fought hard for themselves before. Tepes, for all his brutality, was a man who enforced order and accountability for security. Communism seeked to suppress accountability and be the order in and of itself, and by trying to emulate the Son of Dracul, Ceausescu would remind people that he was no Dracula. By reminding the People of History they were not doomed to repeat it, and the dictator never did get to where Dracula was killed.
The Communist oppression, no matter its place, though, turned from high ideals to petty theft and deceit. When more than 1 in 10 works for the secret service what you get is paranoia, not order, and the attempt to ensure that what is not forbidden is pressed the maximum. China has that now and being unable to restrict speech in sexual mores, they find the leadership ridiculed in that realm. In China the slow liquidation of the culture is not leading to adhering to the Government or the Nation... just the anarchic and anomic doing anything to *forget* you are oppressed. When things get to Saddamist levels with 7 or so secret police, each run separately and antagonistically to each other and the population, you get pure brutality and destruction of self and society. After 30 years of that I am amazed that there is still resilience in the Iraqi People. Cambodia, of course, was worse by orders of magnitude... and Vietnam... using death to submissive obedience to the State. Communism had problems practicing that in Europe, but the Middle East and parts of Asia seemed to have found a home in some cultural conflicts that have lasted for millenia.
Whenver the West attempts to practice some 'nuance' in post-war situations, you know that someone is about to get shafted. I support no 'nuance' either in diplomacy or warfare: you either believe that your outlook is right and stand by it, or you do not, in which case you will not be talking about it or let other folks do as they will. That very, very basic outlook gets lost in 'diplomatic nuance' and when that 'nuance' replaces the underlying ideological views of the Nation, all suffer from it. For all the fact the Red Army was large at the end of WWII, the USSR had to *steal* German factories because they were a damned sight better than anything they had. Actually dismantle and ship them out sort of theft: uproot and take it. East Germany was de-industrialized and impoverished.
The Balkans, however, have had both Capitalism and Communism applied to it and both have failed in reconciling such a diversity of people in a small area. Liberty, freedom and democracy have yet to take root there and have little history in that area. The grand idea of lumping it all together to form Yugoslavia was insane: the basis for WWI should have reminded us of that, with a small Serb population wantint to affiliate with a different population. Czechs and Slovaks were likewise grafted together... and then, at Munich, it was ceded along with its gold reserves which would then fuel the massive German build-up of 1938-39. Divided to appease a dictator after being grafted together without finding out if that is what was wanted.
The lessons *just* of two World Wars should tell us what *not* to do in Iraq. But looking to history beyond anything starting with 196_ is too difficult... as you point out, it has no 'feel' to the generation that only remembers it with rose colored glasses and, for those born after, it is dead history. Transnationalists want us to forget history so that they may divide up the present... be it on the Right, Left or pure Terror side, each wants free people to give up being free. Deny that history has any import on the present. And give up even memories of freedom. That will, assuredly, get us all if we do not stand up for that past... so we may have a present and a future.
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