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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: Neocon who wrote (83436)	3/18/2003 4:22:22 PM
From: paul_philp	Read Replies (2) of 281500

Neocon, I have been struggling for a while to find a better metaphor than imperialism and hegemony for the Project for a New American Century ideals. I tried missionaries for a while but we are not trying convert anyone to a new belief system. The project is both less offensive and more aggressive than the missionary metaphor implies. My current favorite, although surely controversial, is the Borg. We want to assimilate them into the Capitalist/Democratic/Technological system. This will seem to some as Americanization (JohnM makes this point) but I think this is an error. The C/D/T system has an American flavor today only because America was the first to be fully assimilated. Canada, Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan are examples of countries assimilated after America where the local flavor of the C/D/T system is quite different in many ways from the American flavor. I think the Arab world is being offered the choice of competing Borg assimilators - the C/D/T system and the pan-Arab theocracy system. George Bush is 'Queen of the Hive' for team C/D/T and Osama Bin Laden is 'Queen of the Hive' for team pan-Arabia. I think Bin Laden correctly viewed this competition as a winner-takes-all fight which is why he is willing to use such harsh tactics. The neocons are correct that we must actively promote the C/D/T system in the Islamic world. People talk about the Irish peace process as finally paying dividends. I see it differently. In the early '90's Ireland was assimilated into the C/D/T system and once that happened the vitality of the Irish terrorists was gone. The young generation doesn't subscribe to 'the troubles' and they largely ignore the figureheads. The old generation is started to die off. Peace in Ireland is happening one funeral at a time now. The limiting factor for a society to be fully assimilated is trust. The reason Russia went to mafia after the Soviet Union was the lack of trust. There were no institutions, practices or remedies to support fair exchanges between people, business and governments. The russian mob provided the first round of this structure. In the films Gangs of New York it very much seemed that something like mob-like institutions were providing the trust required for social order. It will take time for trust to emerge in Iraq and the first implementation of the C/D/T system may be uniquely Arabic and difficult for us to recognize. The biggest challenge will be withdrawing at that point and allowing the Iraqi people to evolve their own flavor of the C/D/T system. This is exactly how America got from 'The Gangs of New York' to Silicon Valley - evolution of the system. Our goals in Iraq and other countries is to stop things from getting worse, make enough progress so that the people of that country begin to imagine new possibilities for their futures and then get the hell out of the way and let them mature, innovate and evolve. Paul

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