<Our World-Historical Gamble>
<excerpts>, comments
<the whole point of a world-historical gamble is that it offers the only possible escape from the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which the human race presently finds itself. It emerges out of a situation where mankind cannot simply stay put, where the counsels of caution and conservatism are no longer of any value, and where to do nothing at all is in fact to take an even greater risk than that contemplated by the world-historical gamble.>
Both the NeoCons and the pacifists think the world is at this point after 9/11. The Realists don't realize it yet; their response is continuing crisis management. The NeoCon response is a variation on the old, old idea of Empire. They want one tribe in the Global Village to gather up all power (especially military power, especially WMD) in their own MostCivilized hands, unilaterally decide the Village laws, and impose Order on everyone else. The pacifists begin with the Belief "All Men Are Brothers", and go from there.
<All of these positions are fatally undercut by the fact that they appeal to the outmoded conceptual categories of an earlier epoch - an epoch in which all the relevant actors in an international conflict were playing by the same basic rules. They were all nation states>
Not true. For decades, the list of "relevant actors" has included guerrilla armies; Al Queda is using classic guerrilla tactics and organization, following Mao's play-book.
<But what happens when you a playing chess with someone who refuses to accept the rules of the game?>
Better analogy: Two people playing, but one thinks the game is Chess, and the other knows the game really is Go.
<How do you respond if your opponent begins to jump his knight in all sorts of bizarre zigzag patterns, so that you cannot predict where he will land or what piece he will seize?>
It will all make sense, and we might have a chance of winning the game, when we learn to play Go. Of course it looks chaotic, to those who don't know what game is being played.
<This collapse of the well-ordered liberal system has come about exclusively from the side of the Islamic world. No other party has contributed to it. >
The collapse in sub-Saharan Africa has been worse than among Muslim nations. And the poorest parts of Latin America have produced, since WWII, a series of Shining Paths. The threat is mainly, but not exclusively, Muslim. The threat is external, coming from masses of people who have never seen any benefit of Globalization, who have never had any reason to support the status quo, who have never been Included. And the solution is obvious: include them.
<If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.>
This is something that development theorists have come to understand. It is a paradox, but true, that great natural resources often retards economic (and especially social) development. Japan made the first and most successful response to the West, because it was a small cold crowded rocky island lucky enough to have no oil.
<the contradiction between principle of national self-determination and the reality of weapons of mass destruction (WMD's)-for if the consistent application of this principle permits each and every nation to develop WMD's, then, sooner or later, the liberal world order will literally go up in smoke>
He assumes that Contain/Deter won't work. But it worked well for decades, in the Cold War. Why is Kim less Containable than Stalin and Mao?
<The principle of self-determination in a world of perpetual peace may not in fact be the panacea for mankind's ills, but rather a means for prolonging these ills unnecessarily, by sanctioning a status quo of despotism and tyranny>
He's setting up a dichotomy between freedom and sovereignity. This is starting to sound like a rationalization for wars of aggression, in the name of freedom. What is actually guaranteed, by respecting "national sovereignity"? This just means everyone promises to keep their army on their own side of the frontier. But, in the Global Village, no nation, not even ones as big as the U.S., China, or India, are viable economic units. Autarchy is now a failed meme, it has been tried and it doesn't work, and everyone knows it. So there are levers, effective non-violent levers, other than massed tanks crossing borders under a barrage of cruise missiles, to deal with despotism and "loose cannons". He says it himself, that the Muslim Middle East can do nothing, if we don't choose to sell the means to them.
<the bitter truth is that if the Palestinian people were indeed a genuine state fighting a genuine war, they would have long since been annihilated root and branch - or else they would have been forced to make a realistic accommodation with the state of Israel, based on a just assessment of the latter's immense superiority of resources, both military and political.>
No, there is a third choice. If a people's conventional armies are defeated, yet they refuse to give up the goal of having their own State, then they can wage guerrilla war, and see whose willingness to suffer is greater. Which is exactly where the Isreli-Palestinian war is. By "genuine" he means "conventional", but guerrilla wars are very real, and very genuine.
And yet a fourth choice: to create your State and defend it, the way the Baltic States did in 1991.
<dialectic of hubris and nemesis>
Good description of the NeoCon world-view. He's way off-base, about where the global center of hubris is.
<Nothing but force can break them from their illusion>
That's what they said about Communism. And that's what the Cold Warriors tried, Force and the Threat Of Force, for 70 years. The results, the real-world results? They failed to bring down the Berlin Wall, or defeat Communism. In the event, what it took to end Communism, from E. Berlin to Vladivostok, was millions of unarmed people in the streets saying, "We will not obey."
<a state so marginal...... could still make a devastating use of a nuclear weapon that literally chanced to come into its hands.>
Chanced??? Iraq (or N. Korea, or Iran, or.....) could not make nuclear weapons, without the machinery, technology, materials, education, tools, sold to them by the U.S., France, Germany, Russia, China (the non-Islamic non-Communist status-quo powers). We've sold guns to Hitlers, then, when they point their guns at us, we threaten to kill them. Who is really mad?
<Like 9/11, this kind of (nuclear) attack would have no Clausewitzian justification - indeed, from a realistic point of view it can serve no purpose.>
Bin Laden has told us clearly what the "justification" and "purpose" is: end Israel, remove non-Muslim soldiers from all Muslim nations, unify the Islamic world under the discipline of Sharia. Ambitious, but quite rational, and quite similar to the national goals of many peoples. How is that different from, say, Ireland's goal of unifying their island, with only soldiers of the Irish Republic on Irish soil, and promoting Irish culture (including a special place of honor for the Catholic Church)?
<The motivations of those who want to murder us are not complicated: To watch an American city go up into a fireball is its own reward.>
You could equally say (and many of our former allies are saying) that American national culture is uncomplicated, we just love bullying small nations. My stance is: this reciprocal demonization solves nothing.
<The first "rogue" nuclear strike.....>
....will be motivated and caused, as a response to America's near-total reliance on Force to achieve our national goals, and the limitless NeoCon nature of those goals. Who is the Rogue?
<...if any social order is to achieve stability there must be, at the heart of it, a double standard governing the use of violence and force. There must be one agent who is permitted to use force against other agents who are not permitted to use force.>
Any???? He sees Heirarchy, sustained by violence, as the only viable, the only imaginable, method of social organization. Unlike him, I believe in the ideals stated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, and I believe societies can be organized around those (non-heirarchical, consensual) methods. He is UnAmerican; I am a patriot.
<it is equally critical that we are not misled into trying to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic fantasists.>
We're not going to talk to them. We're just going to kill them. And keep killing, till they submit. The body-count will be the measure of our success.
<.....the policy of the pre-emptive strike.....cancel the existence of any state........be prepared to dismantle and reconstruct the other state.....neo-sovereignty....double standard imposed by the U.S. on the rest of the world.....no means should be ruled out....use force "unstintingly,"......>
endless wars of aggression....colonization......I wonder if he has any idea how ugly all this sounds to the 95% of the planet that is not American.
There is a better way:
Message 18677444 |
