Vodkapundit - Lion and the Lamb

Lion and the Lamb

Posted by Stephen Green · 30 August 2002

David Ignatius on our course in the Middle East:

What the Bush administration needs to do now is fashion a strategy for the Middle East in which its strike against Iraq won't seem crazy, but part of a sensible plan for a new and stable order in the Middle East. That shouldn't be impossible; the status quo, after all, is a mess -- and has been for decades.
That's the problem with those who argue for caution and inaction. They're defending a status quo that's rotten -- one that has left the Arab world perpetually unstable, and one in which U.S. interests seem constantly at risk. A new order would benefit everyone, most of all the Arabs.

You read much the same thing on this site two days ago. Ignatius is right – the status quo is far worse than most any outcome of war with Iraq. And that only deals with the most immediate threat we face from the Middle East.

But then what? Here’s where Ignatius gets interesting – and wrongheaded.

But how to get there? The wisest comment I've heard recently came from French defense analyst Francois Heisbourg. He observed this week that if the administration is serious about bringing democracy to the Middle East, it shouldn't be thinking in terms of a battle that lasts six months or a year, but of one that requires a decade or more. In that sense, this conflict is the equivalent of the Cold War: a careful, patient struggle rather than a quick firefight.
The way to begin this long campaign for democracy, argues Heisbourg, is to make human rights an issue in every meeting the United States and European nations have with each Arab state. That's the kind of slow and steady pressure that produced the Sakharovs and Sharanskys who transformed the Soviet Union.

It sounds like a fine plan, and a method we’re used to both as a people and a government. There’s just one problem – we’d be trying to sell suspenders to a snake. Let me explain.

Russia, to steal P.J. O’Rourke’s phrase, was the retarded stepsister of Western Civilization. During its days as the USSR, Russia still spoke a very Western language. Soviet philosophy was based, so it thought, on the rights of the people. Communism, for all its tragic flaws, was at least western in its conception, ideals, and desires.

Communism spoke the language of liberation, of rights, of modernity. The fact that it didn’t achieve, nor could it ever achieve, any one of those things isn’t the point. The masters of the Kremlin really did, at least at first, believe they were riding the Western wave of the future.

That’s why Sakharov’s denouncements hurt them – a physicist, a man who should see the scientific principles of Communism instead saw its horrors. That’s why they couldn’t cope with being called an evil empire – it showed that their new morality was just an old brutality. That’s why the whole rotten system collapsed so quickly at the first breath of freedom – they’d been held hostage to their own aspirations.

With Russia, we could point to Sakharov’s internal exile and say, “See? And you claim to bring liberation to the people?” We could rub their “modern” noses in our new Commodore 64 home computers and F-15s and fax machines. We not only spoke their language, we corrected their pronunciation.

Russia’s leaders were hypocrites -- and we won in large part because we made them recognize it.

We have little such leverage with Araby. Leaders there do not speak of the Rights of Man, but of Submission to God’s Will. They do not offer liberation, but shari’a. They do not claim to bring modernity, but to return to the glories of the past.

The Cold War was a civil war for the soul of Western Civilization. It was, except for a few, awful sideshows in Asia and Africa, an internal struggle over the future of our common home. This New War might not measure up as a full scale Clash of Civilizations, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the leaders of the Arab world will blush when we show them up as hypocrites.

Because they aren’t hypocrites. They have what they have and they are what they are because these are the things they want and want to be.

UPDATE: One Hand Clapping provides some excellent (if inadvertant) support for my thoughts with this excellent essay.

Comments

You are quite right about the tyrants who rule the Arab and Muslim world. However, what about their subjects? If we can talk over the heads of the rulers and mullahs to the people some of them will respond to our call. The Muslim world has been desperately casting about for some means of modernizing for the last two centuries. Every means adopted has failed. If we offer a new approach we may attract support. It can't hurt.

Bernard Lewis, in "What Went Wrong", noted that the Arab world adopted Freedom to mean Independence. When they got independence and still failed it soured them on the idea of Freedom. The alternative to them is justice, which is what the Islamists claim to bring, a just society.If we can redirect their attention to freedom and show that such freedom will also be a just society, I hope we can win them over. But first we shall have to beat the hell out of them to convince them we are correct.

The Frenchman you mention is correct. We should be looking at staying in Iraq ten years and directing change, chivvying the locals into a better way. I thought we ought to do that after the Gulf War in 1991, which if we had we might be done by now. Let's do it right this time.

Posted by: Michael Lonie at August 30, 2002 12:41 AM

I'm a historically illiterate fool. I could be mistaken but wasn't the Cold War a protracted low intensity conflict due to necessity. The Soviets had a huge and formidible military and, of course, nukes, and both sides were weary after the destruction of WWII. If we could have intervened in, say Hungary or Czechoslovakia, we could have ended the Communist nightmare decades earlier. But it wasn't realistically feasible.

With Iraq, more so than any other of our numerous enemies, we have the ability to do something ahora, instead of waiting 50 years while generations (theirs) are lost and the aftermath scenarios only get worse.

Posted by: Tokyo Taro at August 30, 2002 01:02 AM

The go slow advocates don't seem to realize that over 40% of the population in Iraq is under the age of 15. Most of the other middle eastern countries have similar demographics. These facts would indicate that time is not on our side.

Posted by: tom at August 30, 2002 09:51 AM

Heisbourg's comments epitomize why France is no longer a great power. At a fundamental level, they no longer understand the very tenets of war and conflict.

Sun-Tze points out: A protracted war serves no one, least of all the sovereign.

His point is that protracted conflicts not only exhaust a nation's treasury and saps morale, but since war is filled w/ uncertainties and unintended consequences, it is ALWAYS risky. Protracted war just exacerbates the risk.

As Tokyo points out, the Cold War was protracted in no small part because it had to be. But it wrought massive changes world-wide. Michael Lonie's point about STAYING a long-time is very different from choosing to wage the war for a long-time.

It is always amusing to me how academics will claim that Generals fight the last war, while failing to recognize that their own recommendations are based on the last war as well....

Posted by: Dean at August 30, 2002 10:19 AM

I would point out too that the soviets didn't just, y'know, clobber Solzhenitsyn over the head and get rid of him because they cared about the opinion of our liberal class; they believed, correctly, that as long as they refrained from total brutality towards dissidents, the liberals would to a large extent side with them, sowing dissension in our own ranks and benefitting their geopolitical ambitions.

But what similar pressure is there upon the middle eastern fiefdoms? They already behead, gas, or stone their dissidents, not to mention many of their more ordinary outcasts. And the liberals side with them anyway. So what's the point of bringing up their human rights abuses? They not only have no shame -- after all, these abuses are ordained by God, or so they convince themselves -- but they gain no benefit by doing so.

Posted by: Jane Galt at August 30, 2002 01:32 PM

I have to say, that this is the first time in over 15 years I have heard the Commodore 64 called "modern", and not broken out in laughter.

Posted by: John Bono at August 30, 2002 05:14 PM

Stephen is right about the Arab leaders not being hypocrites. They are barbarians. When a civilization is faced with barbarians, it has three choices: surrender (not acceptable), try to civilize them (good luck with this bunch), or kill enough of them that the survivors say "I will fight no more forever." I fear our model must be, not the Cold War, but the Indian Wars.

Riyadh delenda est!

Posted by: Cato the Youngest at August 30, 2002 08:45 PM

I think the model should be the aftermath of WWII. We went in, kicked butt and made them Democracies. Whether they wanted it or not. That's the deal, you win the war you dictate the terms. That was the problem with WWI, the Allies, particularly the French, wanted to humiliate Germany. After WWII we, the US, decided the treaty and fixed the problem. Of course now they don't like us, but they're not shooting at us.
Faster Please.

Posted by: veeshir at September 4, 2002 08:47 AM