August 20, 2006
SHORT MEMORIES
Our foreign policy is just plain wrong (Menzies Campbell, The Observer, August 20, 2006)
Foreign affairs is a world of relative values; it is no place for evangelism, which elevates belief over knowledge, conviction over judgment and instinct over understanding. In the Middle East, knowledge, judgment and understanding are more useful allies than belief, conviction and instinct, particularly when all three are wrong.The real argument over the Iraq adventure is not about its impact on the opinions of the Muslims living in Britain, but that it was wrong in conception and execution. The same evangelical impulse lumps together different situations that present different problems and require different solutions.
'Axis of evil' and 'an arc of extremism' are lazy descriptions of complex problems, as if you can solve them more easily by describing them more simply, as if a soundbite description will allow a soundbite solution.
There is a real threat from Muslim fundamentalism, but it takes many forms and arises for many reasons. If you do not understand or accept its variety, and treat all examples of extremism as if they were the same, you make it harder to deal with and end up playing into the hands of its advocates.
By seeing disparate elements of extremism as a global conspiracy, you grant extremists the status and legitimacy they crave. What better reward for jihadists than to have their criminality and callous disregard for life described in their own apocalyptic language.
How easy it is to forget what the world looked like exactly five years ago in August, 2001. A huge and contiguous swath of the globe from Lebanon through Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was openly hostile to the West, crushing any kind of liberal dissent, spewing uncontrolled menacing rhetoric, boasting of terrifying weapons and fostering lethal, uncontrolled terrorist militias funded by limitless Saudi money. The UN and the entire Western transnational community wallowed with equanimity in a celebration of mau-mauing barbarity at Durban and spent long hours in workshops trying to fashion universal human rights out of the vilest anti-Semitic rhetoric this side of Julius Streicher. And then on September 11th, we all learned just where unchallenged and unchecked hate can lead and how morally obtuse the root cause crowd were.
When President Bush promised a long war, most of us were still feeling the fears and emotional searings from 9/11.We told ourselves we were up to the challenge. For about a year, the left was mute and the self-abnegating moral relativism that had led us blindly to such danger was relegated to the fevered margins. But then the worst possible thing happened to undermine our resolve–-early, dramatic success. Both Afghanistan and Iraq fell quickly, Syria retreated from Lebanon, the Saudis became hostile to terrorism, Pakistan was forced into a pro-Western, cooperative stance and domestic security thwarted any more of the terrorist attacks we all “knew†were unavoidable. Rather than rationing, war bond drives and the re-tooling of factories, the war years have been marked by an historic real estate boom, unprecedented personal consumption (and debt) and national angst over the saga of Brad and Jen. Few are left who really believe any of us but soldiers are “at war†in any but a remote, abstract sense.
Bit by bit the fellow-travellers in the media and academia emerged from their hiding places and used these very successes to argue that the whole thing was unnecessary and unprincipled. For many, the defence of the world against madness has morphed into just another foreign adventure with no discernable connection to our future beyond the size of the national debt. We do not know whether Mr. Campbell has any clear notion of what he thinks might have happened had President Bush and Prime Minister Blair not drawn lines in the sand, but it seems pretty clear he has no fear of being asked.
Mr. Campbell believes the enemy is fundamentalist thinking, which presumably he would define as the belief that any principle is worth fighting for. Of course, he fails to see his own frightening extremism. His is the voice of the fanatical mediator who is so determined to understand and validate opposing viewpoints, however vile, that he makes a point of proudly having no ideals of his own. The avoidance of conflict is not just his highest principle, it’s his only one, and as he knows of no others worth defending without compromise, he is open to allowing himself to be convinced barbarity is just an alternative life style and civilization is conquering oppression. Such fools have guided the West intellectually for close to a hundred years now and several times we have had to wrench control of the zeitgeist from them to confront menacing catastrophes looming right before our eyes. As they seem to be such resilient parasites, some days it is hard not to regret we’ve been so good at it up until now.
Good observations concerning the heads in the sand.
Don't expect any logic or consistency from the left on these issues. Their coalition of outsiders, those we call folk-enemies and culture-traitors, reflexively opposes our entire civilization.
Add to that the peace-creep culture, which holds that because they are afraid of force, force is always wrong, then throw in all the tax eaters dependent on socialism in all its forms for their daily bread, and you have a formidable front.
That "long war" the President speaks of is actually going very well, as well as could be expected. "Confusion to the enemy," is falling into our hands and unraveling the entire old, rotten world (LG code words!) of the middle east.
The "long war" has the hoped-for long-term goal of reformation. Perehaps, but never forget that the path to the reformation of neo- and paleo-paganism in the twentieth century lay through Dresden and Hiroshima.
In the Fifties, George Kennan promulgated the theory of containment in the face of Soviet expansionism. It was flawed, but after several decades it did work.
The Bush Administration does not seem to have a coherent theory. It has the WOT and the idea that democratization will bring improvements in troubled parts of the world, which will bring the WOT to an end. However, the persecution of the WOT is not aimed at victory and promoting democratization can just as easily lead to more extremism as liberalism. Witness Hamas.
The UN, much of Europe, and much of the American Left seem to be developing a theory of postponement, promoting cease fires and banking on diplomacy to minimize hostilities for as long as possible without ever getting to any kind of resolution.
What a depressing muddle.
Posted by: Ed Bush at August 20, 2006 12:50 PM--In the Middle East, knowledge, judgment and understanding are more useful allies than belief, conviction and instinct, particularly when all three are wrong. --
He's targeting that opinion to us, but he just described the evangelical ME. muslim.
Posted by: Sandy P at August 20, 2006 1:23 PMContainment worked for the 20+ years it was practiced on a bipartisan basis. However, after Vietnam the Democrats decided that containment was too difficult/ineffective/morally wrong. So they began to advocate a policy of accommodation and convergence (aka postponement, with no awareness that a bill would ever come due). Leading directly to both the invasion of Afghanistan and the embassy takeover in Tehran. Reagan pursued the novel policy of rollback, which actually completed the task.
Don't know what will replace/supplement democratization over the course of the long war, but to dismiss it now is like calling containment a failure once the Chinese came south of the Yalu.
Kelly, they would have succeeded were not for Reagan, Limbaugh and the blogosphere.
Posted by: erp at August 20, 2006 1:31 PMBut wait. Containment worked very well.
We kept them at bay with credible deterrent for all those years. "Credible" here meant the enemy never doubted that we were willing and able to kill them--all of them.
While credible deterrent held them down, their contradictions took them deeper and deeper into economic failure. Then communications technolgy let their people, including their ruling class, understand their failures.
Finally, they grasped at economic restructuring, if only to ape our efficiency, allowed openness as a means to restructuring, and the rest is the end of history.
I continue to hold that the "long war" is going very well. The problem is what it alway has been, exactly what plunged the world into World War Two. The peace-creep side enables the enemy to think they may win because we do not have the will to kill them all if they insist upon it.
This problem presents a very real set of dilemmas concerning the future conduct of the long war. We know that the enemy is accustomed to unlawfully hide and treacherously strike from behing protected persons and places. Soon they will cross the nuclear threshold, and have the capacity to strike our air bases and naval forces with atomics, launched from behind helpless civilians.
The answer to this threat is deterrence. Away with the nonsense that those people are not deterrable! It is only that they think of us as Hitler thought of the representatives of the West he met at Munich, as little worms.
Posted by: Lou Gots at August 20, 2006 7:10 PMSO the elements of extremists exist but global is just a conspiracy which simply emboldens the extremists.
Mr. Campbell cannot see what has occured in the Sudan and is now moving into Ethiopia? In Indonesia, Malaysia throughout Europe?
What does Mr. Campbell think about when he hears Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden, Nasrallah, Azzam Tamini, Al Zarkawi say that Islam will dominate the world while ridding the world of those evil Zionist-controlling/evil Christian pigs.
We will not fail. Islam offers either submission or death and neither is a choice free people will want to succumb.
At some point the threat will be so obvious that even the pacifists, the idiots, the apathetic, the brainwashed, the sympathizers will recognize that this war is going to be a very long war. Though it has been going on in various forms since 635AD it has never faced a weapon of freedom or democracy before.
Posted by: syn at August 20, 2006 7:20 PMionolsen19 Hello Jane, great site!
Posted by: thomson at October 16, 2006 10:36 AM