A Tale of Two Worldviews
Posted by Mark Noonan
Blogs for Bush
R. J. Rummel over at Democratic Peace has an interesting compare and contrast between two articles - one written by a foreign policy estalishmentarian, the other by our Ambassador to Iraq who represents the new foreign policy thinking in the United States. I very highly recommend reading the whole thing (linked below), but to boil it down the establishment view is that it is our presence in Iraq which is causing the problem and the solution is to shower gifts and privileges upon the Sunni minority who lorded it over Iraq during the Saddamite era and make up the bulk of the terrorist problem in Iraq today. In contrast to this, our Ambassador to Iraq recognises that Saddam bred enmity among his people and this dark legacy has made it difficult for Iraqis to come together - and thus there is a multi-faceted approach to dealing with this problem which includes such things as increased democratisation, increased economic opportunity and improved Iraqi security services.
Pretty much, there you have it - the siren song of surrender and cutting deals with the bad guys juxtaposed with the hard-headed realist who recognises that no problem is ever solved by surrendering to evil.
Right after the 9/11 attacks, I remembered a quote from Napoleon; it went something like "gunpowder killed the fuedal system; ink will kill the modern". It is sometimes hard for us in 2005 to recognise Napoleon as being part of the modern world, but he certainly was - indeed, he ushered in the modern world (albeit unintentionally) with his world-shaking conquests. What was meant is that the modern world could not survive the rapid diffusion of knowledge among the masses - these days, with electronic communications, transmission is vastly faster than it was...and the modern world, as it turned out, could not sustain itself under the new dispensation. 200 years ago, a massive terrorist bombing attack would have had only minimal effect - it would have been days or weeks before most people were even aware of it...and thus such things just weren't done. It is the ease of communications which allows terrorism to be the force that it is - they are really insignificant insects, these terrorists...but because of the instant transmission of information, they have a power all out of proportion to their strength.
In a sense, the "modern" world died in 9/11 - it was the fulfillment of Napoleon's long-ago prediction. Ink, transformed into electronic media, has made it impossible for peoples and nations to act as they did even a few decades ago. Governments cannot enter into agreements with other governments secure in the knowledge that each side will generally keep its word - we are a very close-fitted, person-to-person world now. Governments carry immense power - but the people also have immense power...as 19 people showed on 9/11. What this means is that governments must become ever more attuned to providing for the desires of the people - it isn't good enough for us to strike a deal with some foreign strong-man figuring he'll keep a lid on his people and allow us to go forward undisturbed. No, in 2005 our only assurance against attack is to make it so that the people around the world are getting what they desire - which, in almost all cases, is to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit. As long as some people are denied their right to live their own lives, they will be prey and tools for those who have a violent, hate-inspired agenda.
Our leftwing friends are living in a fantasy world - living in the past, as it were. To the left, it is just a matter of getting our government to go to the UN (a successor, in the long view, to the Congress of Vienna and the "concert of Europe" designed post-Napoleon to regulate the affairs of the world) and work with other governments to solve the problems of the world. It just doesn't work that way anymore. First off, of course, some governments don't want the problems solved. Tyrants, especially, thrive on strife and division...a divided, strife-ridden world is the perfect hot-house where Iranian mullocracies and North Korean insane-ocracies live and grow. Secondly, by dealing merely government to government we are leaving out of the picture the flesh and blood people of the world. All the well-tailored and well-mannered diplomats in the world can reach every agreement they wish...but if the peoples of the world are not consulted upon the result, then the problems will persist.
In Iraq (as well as Afghanistan) we are seeing the new paradigm (hate the word, but it is best for this) at work - the American government and the American people working with the Afghan and Iraqi people and government to secure a better mutual future for the peoples and governments of the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan. We could have, if we wished, found a strong-man in Iraq and Afghanistan to be installed by brute American military power...a man who would sternly control his own people and ensure that, at least for now, they made no trouble for us. That, however, would have been at best a band-aid, and it would not have attacked the fundamental problem we deal with - that in a small, inter-connected world only a few have to be off the ranch for all government agreements to be worthless.
The establishment wishes us to create a government in Iraq which will get us off the hook - viewing the continuing fighting as being the bad thing, rather than understanding that the bad thing is the poverty and repression which bred the fighting in the first place. It is a hard, but highly idealistic, battle which President Bush has set us to fight - he didn't have to, but he swiftly grasped after 9/11 that the world really had changed...and as any wise man knows, you can't recapture the past - it is gone, forever, and we can only live in the present and work for the future. The really hard part of this battle is the fact that we are fighting a domestic political battle with the desperate rear-guards of a dead world - we have not only to overcome the terrorists and the societal millieu which created them, but the defenders of a defunct status quo who view the end of their world as the end of themselves, personally.
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