someone said it right,, "this sure is a hornets nest this weekend",,,, the following is from an email i received with a different point of view,,,,
and i do hope we get back to our "reguarly scheduled program" mon a.m.,,,,
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Subject: Viewpoint on Cultures
A Case for War. A CASE FOR WAR will not attempt to explain the reasons
for attacking Iraq because Iraq is part of a bigger picture, and the attack
there will be one battle in a much longer war. Trying to understand one
particular battle without the context of the larger war is an exercise in futility.
(By analogy: what excuse is there in 1942 for the US to attack Vichy France in
Morocco? Vichy France wasn't our enemy; Germany and Italy were. Taken out
of the context of the larger war, the Torch landings in Africa make little
sense. It's only when you look at the bigger picture of the whole war that you can
understand them.)
We must attack Iraq. We must totally conquer the nation. Saddam must be
removed from power, and killed if possible, and the Baath party must be
shattered.
But Saddam isn't our enemy. bin Laden (may he burn in hell) is not our
enemy. Iraq isn't our enemy. al Qaeda isn't our enemy. The Taliban weren't our
enemies. They are merely symptoms of decay.
In most wars, there's a government or core organization which you can
identify as the enemy. It isn't always a single person; in World War II it was
Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, but it wasn't Tojo in Japan. Tojo was deposed in
1944, but the war went on. It also wasn't Hirohito; he mostly kept his
hands off of policy. Still, it was the Japanese government, and that could still
be understood. But in this war there is no single government or small group of
them, no man, no organization. Our enemy is a culture which is deeply
diseased.
It's really difficult to exactly delineate who our enemies are, but they number in
millions. They're Arab and Muslim, but not every Arab is among them, and
most Muslims are not. But even to discuss it in these terms is to cross the
boundaries of political correctness. Not that I care, but it isn't politically
possible for our leaders to say things like these, which makes the political
wrangling all the more difficult. I think that they know what I'm about to
say, and I at least am free to say what I believe whether others find it
offensive or racist.
Islam is larger than greater Arabia, and the majority of Muslims are not
Arab.
But in the beginning, Islam was both a religion and a political movement.
The Qur'an is a source of moral teachings for everyday life, telling people
how to live and how to act towards one another. But it's also a manual for
conquest, describing how to face enemies, how to fight, how to treat those
who have been conquered, how to treat prisoners, how to treat enemy soldiers.
It lays a dual obligation on Muslims: to live a good life and to spread Islam
to the entire world, by any means necessary. All successful widespread
religions are evangelistic to a greater or lesser extent (with Judaism being
the notable exception), but I know of no other major religion whose holy
teachings include instructions for how to go to war to spread the faith.
Until Mohammed, the Arab tribes were divided and spent most of their time
fighting one another. The great achievement of Mohammed was to unite the
Arabs and face them outwards, strengthened and given will by his new religion.
And for two hundred years, nothing could stand in their way; they created one of
the great empires in the history of the world which was bounded on the south
by the Sahara, on the west by the Atlantic ocean, on the north by Christendom,
and on the east by the Hindu nations. Extending from Spain to Iran, from Turkey
to Egypt it was much larger and more powerful than was the Roman Empire before
it, and it lasted longer. Within its borders art and science and poetry and
architecture flourished.
But like all empires, it eventually fell. Unlike other empires, this was
against the word of God, for the Qur'an says that Islam will eventually
dominate the entire world. In reality, it's been in retreat for more than
three hundred years, and its decline became far more precipitous with the
collapse of the Ottomans. Once-great Arab nations became little more than
colonies for heathen Europeans, or economic dependents of America.
Our enemy is those who inherit the culture and heritage of that empire. Not
everyone within the empire's physical realm now partakes of that culture,
but many do.
I am having a difficult time coming up with a pithy term for our enemy.
It's hard. It isn't really greater Arabia. It certainly isn't Islam. Islamic
fundamentalism is a symptom of it, not the core. Arab nationalism and
imperialism is also a symptom of it, not the core. Each of those can and
does exist without the other, but they're both expressions of the real enemy we
face, something deeper than that.
To refer to it as Arab nostalgia is wrong, for many of those within the body of
our enemy inherit the beliefs and dogma which make them our enemies without
knowing where they came from. They aren't necessarily traditionalists, for the
same reason, though that's perhaps closer. I'm afraid I'm going to have to use
the partly-fallacious term "Arab culture", accepting that not all Arab culture is
our enemy and not all Arabs are among our enemies.
Our enemy holds to a traditional belief, a traditional culture. Islam is a
core piece of that, but it isn't the whole thing, and not everyone who
believes in Islam is part of the enemy. Our enemy is the majority of the people
who live in what we think of as the large Arab nations, plus certain other
groups.
Our enemy is concentrated in Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and
Syria, plus the Palestinians are part of it. There are lesser concentrations
of our enemy in Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Oman and (non-Arab) Pakistan.
And Iran is, as usual, a complicated aspect of it. While not being Arab, it is
closer culturally to the Arabs, and to a great extent our enemy also holds
sway there. The traditionalists and theocrats in Iran are part of our enemy,
even though not being Arab, because Persian Iran was a key part of the original
Arab/Islamic empire, and still retains much of that culture.
The problem with our enemy's culture is that in the 20th century it was
revealed as being an abject failure. By any rational calculation, it could
not compete, and not simply because the deck was stacked against it. The
problem was more fundamental; the culture itself contained the elements of its
own failure.
The only Arab nations which have prospered have done so entirely because of
the accident of mineral wealth. Using money from export of oil, they imported a
high tech infrastructure. They drive western cars. They use western cell phones.
They built western high-rise steel frame buildings. They created superhighways
and in every way implemented the trappings of western prosperity.
Or rather, they paid westerners to create all those things for them. They
didn't build or create any of it themselves. It's all parasitic. And they
also buy the technical skill to keep it running. The technological
infrastructure of Saudi Arabia (to take an example) is run by a small army of
western engineers and technicians and managers who are paid well, and who
live in isolation, and who keep it all working. If they all leave, the
infrastructure will collapse. Saudi Arabia does not have the technical
skill to run it, or the ability to produce the replacement parts which would be
needed. It's all a sham, and they know it. Everything they have which looks
like modern culture was purchased. They themselves do not have the ability
to produce, or even to operate, any of it.
The diseased culture of our enemy suffers from all seven of the deep flaws
Ralph Peters identifies as condemning nations to failure in the modern
world. Peters makes a convincing case that there is a correlation approaching
unity between the extent to which a nation or culture suffers from these flaws
and its inability to succeed in the 21st century. He lists them as follows:
Restrictions on the free flow of information. The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion. A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.
And carrying all seven of these, our enemy is trying to compete in the 21st
century footrace with both feet cast into buckets of concrete. They are
profoundly handicapped by the very values that they hold most dear and that
they believe make them what they are.
The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy's culture are
complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution
to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art or
culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected.
Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with
resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie. They hate us.
They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not. Our culture is vibrant
and fecund; our economies are successful. Our achievements are magnificent.
Our engineering and science are advancing at breathtaking speed. Our people are
fat and happy (relatively speaking). We are influential, we are powerful, we are
wealthy. "We" are the western democracies, but in particular "we" are the
United States, which is the most successful of the western democracies by a
long margin. America is the most successful nation in the history of the
world, economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally.
Our culture as exported is condemned as being lowbrow in many places, but
it's hard to deny how pervasive and influential it is. Baywatch was total dreck,
but it was also the most successful syndicated television program around the
world in history, racking up truly massive audiences each week.
Our culture is seductive on every level; those elsewhere who are exposed to
it find it attractive. It isn't always "high culture"; but some of it is, and with the
world revolution in telecommunications it's impossible for anyone in the world
to avoid seeing it and being exposed to it.
Nor can anyone ignore our technology, which is definitely not lowbrow, nor
our scientific achievements. We're everything that they think they should be,
everything they once were, and by our power and success we throw their
modern failure into stark contrast, especially because we've gotten to where we
are by doing everything their religion says is wrong. We've deeply sinned, and yet
we've won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours
because we are the standard of success, and in every important way they come
up badly short. In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher,
it's that their score is zero. They have nothing whatever they can point to
that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way
we are better than they are, and they know it.
And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is
intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress. The oft-proposed idea
of increasing aid and attempting to eliminate poverty may well help in South
America and sub-Saharan Africa, but it will not defuse the hatred of our
Arab/Islamic enemies, for it is our success that they hate, not the fruits of
that success.
It isn't that they also want to be rich. Indeed, the majority of the most
militant members of al Qaeda came from Saudi Arabia, out of comfortable
existence. What they want is to stay with their traditional culture and for
it to be successful, and that isn't possible. We can make them rich through
aid, but we can't make them successful because their failure is not caused by
us, but by the deep flaws in their culture. Their culture cannot succeed.
It is too deeply and fundamentally crippled.
Everything they think they know says that they should be successful. They
once were successful, creating and ruling a great empire, with a rich culture.
God says they will be successful; it's right there in the Qur'an.
God lays on them the duty to dominate the world, but they can't even
dominate their own lands any longer. They face a profound crisis of faith, and
it can only resolve one of three ways.
First, the status quo can continue. They can continue to fail, sit in their nations,
and accept their plight. By clinging to their culture and their religion they may
be ideologically pure, but they will have to continue to live with the shame of
being totally unable to compete. Solution one: they can stagnate.
The second thing they can do is to accept that their culture and their religion
are actually the problem. They can recognize that they will have to liberalize
their culture in order to begin to achieve. They can embrace the modern
world, and embrace western ways at least in part. They can break the hold of
Islamic teachings; discard Sharia; liberate their women; start to teach science
and engineering in their schools instead of the study of the Qur'an; and
secularize their societies. Solution two: they can reform.
Some Arab nations have begun to do this, and to the extent that they have they
have also started to succeed. But this is unacceptable to the majority; it is
literally sinful. It is heresy. What good does it do to succeed in the world
if, by so doing, you condemn your soul to hell?
Which leaves only one other way: become relatively competitive by destroying
all other cultures which are more capable. You level the playing field by
tearing down all the mountains rather than filling in the valleys; you make
yourself the tallest by shooting everyone taller than you are. Solution three:
they can lash out, fight back.
It's vitally important to understand that this is the reason they're fighting
back. It's not to gain revenge for some specific action in the past on our
part. It isn't an attempt to influence our foreign policy. Their goal is our
destruction, because they can't keep hold on what they have and still think
of themselves as being successful as long as we exist and continue to
outperform them. al Qaeda grew out of this deepening resentment and
frustration within the failed Arab culture. It is the first manifestation of solution
three, but as long as the deep disease continues in the culture of our enemy,
it won't be the last. Its initial demands to the US were a bit surprising, and not
very well known. (And obscured by the fact that as their struggle continued
recently, they kept changing their stated demands in hopes of attracting allies
from elsewhere in the Arab sphere.) The original demand was for a complete
cessation of contact between America and Arabia.
Not just a pullout of our soldiers from holy Arab soil, but total isolation so
that the people of greater Arabia would no longer be exposed in any way to
us or our culture or our values. No television, no radio, no music, no
magazines and books, no movies. No internet. And that isn't possible;
you can't go backward that way. But it's interesting that this shows their
real concern. If they're no longer exposed to us, they are no longer shamed
by comparing their failure to our success, and no longer seduced by it and
tempted to discard their own culture and adopt ours.
Solution three manifests, and will continue to manifest, in many ways.
Another way it manifests is in a new Arab imperialism, an ambition in some
quarters to recreate the Arab empire and by so doing to regain political
greatness. Arab nationalism doesn't directly spring from Islam, but it does
spring from this deep frustration and resentment caused by the abject failure
of the enemy culture, and it's most prominent practitioner is Saddam
Hussein.
Both al Qaeda's terrorist attacks, and Saddam's attempts to incorporate other
Arab nations into Iraq, spring from the same deep cause. But when I say that
al Qaeda and Saddam are not the real enemy, it's because they both arise due
to a deeper cause which is the true enemy. If we were to stamp out al Qaeda as
a viable organization and reduce it to an occasional annoyance, and remove
Saddam's WMDs no matter how, by conquest or inspections, someone else
somewhere else would spring up and we would again be in peril. We cannot end
this war by only treating the symptoms of al Qaeda and Saddam, though they
must be dealt with as part of that process. This war is actually a war between
the modern age and traditional Arab culture, and as long as they stagnated and
felt resentment quietly, it wasn't our war.
It became our war when al Qaeda started bringing it to our nation. With a
series of successively more deadly attacks culminating in the attacks in NYC
and Washington last year, it became clear that we in the United States could
no longer ignore it, and had to start working actively to remove the danger to
us. We didn't pick this war, it picked us, but we can't turn away from it. If
we ignore it, it will keep happening.
But the danger isn't al Qaeda as such, though that's the short term
manifestation of the danger. This war will continue until the traditional
crippled Arab culture is shattered. It won't end until they embrace reform
or have it forced on them. Until a year ago, we were willing to be patient and
let them embrace it slowly. Now we have no choice: we have to force them to
reform because we cannot be safe until they do.
And by reform I mean culturally and not politically. The reform isn't just
abjuration of weapons of mass destruction. It isn't just promising not to
attack any longer. What they're going to have to do is to fix all seven of
Ralph Peters' problems, and once they've done so, their nations won't be
recognizable.
First, they will seem much more western. Second, they'll start to succeed,
for as Peters notes, nations which fix these problems do become competitive.
What he's describing isn't symptoms, its deep causes. We're facing a 14th
century culture engaged in a 14th century war against us. The problem is
that they are armed with 20th century weapons, which may eventually include
nuclear weapons. And they embrace a culture which honors dying in a good
cause, which means that deterrence can't be relied on if they get nuclear weapons.
Why is it that the US is concerned about Iraq getting nukes when we don't seem
to be as concerned about Pakistan or India or Israel? Why are we willing to
invade Iraq to prevent it from getting nukes, but not Pakistan to seize the ones it
developed? It's because those nations don't embrace a warrior culture where
suicide in a good cause, even mass death in a good cause, is considered
acceptable. (Those kinds of things are present in Pakistan but don't rule
there as yet.)
It's certainly not the case that the majority of those in the culture which is our
enemy would gladly die. But many of those who make the decisions would be
willing to sacrifice millions of their own in exchange for millions of ours,
especially the religious zealots. If such people get their hands on nuclear
weapons, then our threat of retaliation won't prevent them from using them
against us, or threatening to do so. Which is why we can't let it happen. The
chance of Israeli or Pakistani or Indian nukes being used against us is
acceptably small. If Arabs get them, then eventually one will be used against
us. It's impossible to predict who will do it, or when, or where, or what the
proximate reason will be, but it's inevitable that it will happen. The only
way to prevent it is to keep Arabs from getting nukes, and that is why Iraq
is now critically important and why time is running out.
It's wrong to say that this would be "irrational" on their part. It is a
reasoned decision based on an entirely different set of axioms, leading to a
result totally unacceptable to us. But they're not insane or irrational.
Even though they're totally rational, deterrence ultimately can't stop them
from using nuclear weapons against us. All major wars started by someone
else that you eventually come to win start with a phase where you try to
consolidate the situation, to stop the enemy's advance. Then you go onto the
offensive, take the war to him, and finish it.
Afghanistan and Iraq are the two parts of the consolidation phase of this
war. al Qaeda had to be crippled and Saddam has to be destroyed in order to gain
us time and adequate safety to go onto the offensive, and to begin the process
which will truly end this war: to destroy Wahhabism, to shatter Islamic
fundamentalism, to completely break the will of the Arabs and to totally shame
them. Because they are a shame/pride culture, that latter may seem
paradoxical. But the reality is that we cannot win this by making them proud,
for they are not a stupid people and they actually have nothing to be proud
of. We can't make them proud because we can't give them anything to be
proud of; they need accomplishments of their own for pride, and their culture
prevents that. The only hope here is to make them so ashamed that they
finally face and accept the thing they are trying to hide from in choosing to fight
back: their culture is a failure, and the only way they can succeed is to
discard it and change.
It may sound strange to say, but what we have to do is to take the 14th
century culture of our enemies and bring it into the 17th century. Once we've
done that, then we can work on bringing them into the 21st century, but that will
be much easier.
But they've got to accept their own failure, personally and nationally and
culturally. That is the essential first step. They've got to accept that the
cause of their failure is their own culture, and that we're not. And they've
got to accept that the only way to succeed is to change. That will be a
difficult fight, and it's going to take decades. Along the way it's going to
be necessary to remove many governments which come to power and yet
again try to embrace the past and become militant, nationalistic,
fundamentalist, or again attempt to try to develop nuclear weapons.
Saddam has to go not merely because of his programs for development of
WMDs.
He also has to go because he manifests Arab nationalism and imperialism.
Even if he actually consents to disarm, he and the Baathist party must be
destroyed. The reason that Iraq's nuclear weapon program is critical is that
it means we have to do so immediately; it makes it urgent. But removing
their program to develop nuclear weapons doesn't remove the deeper reason
to destroy Saddam and the Baathists, for they are part of the deeper pathology
which must be excised.
After the consolidation phase of this war is complete, with the destruction of
the Taliban and occupation and reform of Iraq, then we will go onto the
offensive and begin to strike at the deeper core of the problem. Part of that
will be to force reform on Saudi Arabia, through a combination of diplomacy,
persuasion, subversion, propaganda and possibly even military force.
What this shows is just how deeply I disagree with many who oppose this war.
I am forthrightly proposing what some might call cultural genocide. The
existing Arab culture which is the source of this war is a total loss. It must
be shattered, annihilated, leaving behind no more traces in the Arab lands
than the Samurai left in Japan or the mounted knights left in Europe.
I am forthrightly stating that it will be necessary to destabilize the entire
middle east, which puts me exactly counter to European foreign policy. No
band-aid will do. It isn't possible to patch things up with diplomacy because
the rot runs too deep. Diplomacy now would be treating the symptoms and
not the true disease. I am forthrightly stating that no amount of aid to the poor
will stop the aggression against us, which will anger liberals everywhere. It
isn't our wealth they hate, it's our accomplishments. The only way we can
appease them is to ourselves become failures, and that is a price I'm not willing
to pay.
And I claim that the US bears essentially no blame for the fundamental source
of their anger towards us. They don't hate us because of our foreign policy.
They don't ultimately hate us because of past mistakes. They don't hate
what we do or what we have done. They hate what we are, and what we show
them that they are not. They hate our accomplishments and our capabilities
because we force them to see their own lack of accomplishments and their
incompetence and impotence. And I'm saying that the US must do this, with
help or without, because the US will be the continuing target of Arab solution
number 3 as long as this resentment continues to boil, which it will do as long
as Arab culture is not shattered and reformed. We will accept help from others
if it's truly helpful, but we'll do it alone if we have to. (Or we will try and fail.)
We will be the primary target because we're the most successful. It's as
simple as that. And that means that this ultimately will be a unilateral war
by us; we're the ones with the most on the line. If the Arabs eventually do
get nukes, the first one they use will either be against Israel or against us.
It won't be against Europe, and if more conventional terrorist attacks continue,
the most damaging ones will be directed against us. We will pay most
of the price for this war, in staggering amounts of money, in losses on the
field of battle, and in death and destruction at home, and therefore any talk
of unified multilateral international action by a coalition of equals is nonsense.
The other nations won't risk as much and won't pay as much and won't
contribute as much and therefore deserve less say in what will happen.
In the mean time, now that al Qaeda has broken the ice, there will be
further terrorist attacks against us as long as this war continues. They may
be made by al Qaeda itself, or they may be made by other groups who will
spring up. We can't totally prevent that until we've removed the true cause of
those attacks:
Arab cultural failure. Nothing short of that will stop the attacks. They're
part of the setbacks which always accompany any major war.
We'll do our best to foil such attacks, but inevitably some will succeed.
And those who don't understand the true issues will inevitably point to such
attacks as proof that our campaign is a failure, that by our aggressiveness
we raised further terrorist groups against us, that we should abandon the war
and try appeasement, concession, aid, humanistic solutions.
And they'll be wrong, because they don't understand the real reason why
we're being attacked and therefore why such approaches won't truly remove
the source of the grievance.. They won't stop hating us until they become
successful and begin to achieve on their own. We can't make them successful
with material gifts, including aid to their poor. We can only make them
successful with cultural changes, and they will resist that. Now that we've been
attacked, we are ourselves compelled to force them to accept those cultural
changes, because that is the only way short of actual genocide to remove the
danger to ourselves. This war will end when they change, but not before. |
