Follow-up to my post about George Kennan (which, I am proud to say, has set off the first spirited debate here in Laboville). I thought it might be interesting to migrate that discussion from the "Comments" section to the main page. Here's what has transpired (the last post is my latest response).
The Brother-in-Law: While "strategically-placed support for budding pluralism" may have been a factor in Eastern Europe, an equally significant factor was that the USSR simply couldn't afford both guns and butter - the domestic expenditures needed to pacify a stifled populace were made impossible by the demands of matching the 80s buildup in Western (primarily US, but don't disregard Lady Maggie as the intellectual half of the right-wing western leadership) arms and armaments.
We can bombard the Muslim world with Voice of America, etc., but I'm not sure we have a second "weapon" in our arsenal. Too much of the Western thinking starts with the premise that, when exposed to western values and given the ability to make independent decisions, all people will choose these Western values. But, what if they don't? What if that stretch of world from Algeria to Indonesia just wants that old-time religion?
Me: It may be true that the Middle East just wants that old-time religion. But signs seem to indicate otherwise. After all, Iran had a hard-line Islamist revolution, but it didn't stick; the thing that replaced the iron rule of the Ayatollahs was a democratically elected and reformist minded congress. Admittedly, Khatami is no Washington, but it's a start.
Perhaps we'll never remake Bagdad in our image, but it can't hurt to try. To quote Kennan, "wherever, in this modern age, one has to choose between war and no war, such is the fearfulness of modern armaments that one should give every conceivable preference to the possibilities and arguments for peace before resorting to the sword."
The Brother-in-Law: But that would still leave Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Iraq and Pakistan, for starters.
(Assuming, arguendo, that in the context of the region, that countries such as Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the various smaller Gulf states & emirates come under the category of "good enough for now".)
Then, of course, we can jump over the Indian subcontinent and deal with issues of the Asian Muslim population centers (first and foremost, of course, Indonesia, as we were so tragically reminded 10 days ago in Bali).
And, when all that is done, there are more than 100 MILLION Muslims in India, plus tens of million Muslims in China and the various "stans" of the FSU.
In the early part of the previous millenium, Christianity went through what could kindly be called "growing pains", during which it took several hundred years - and uncountable crusades, deaths, rapes, etc. - to develop a working model for interaction between "the Church" and "the State" - almost as if Christianity, having "come of age", was now being a rebellious teenager. While that was going on, however, European society had the "Dark Ages". I lack the historical knowledge and training to do an in-depth comparison between the issues and themes that Christianity faced +/- 1,000 years ago with those facing Islam today, however I throw the idea out for consideration.
Unfortunately, modern warfare doesn't consist of thousands of large, loud, sweaty & smelly warriors who trek hundreds of miles on foot or ship to use clubs, lances, rocks and spears. How the rest of the world will survive a comparable period of "adolesence" by Islam is still to be determined - but so far, the teenagers are winning...
Me: I'll grant you that the task is daunting. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is one fundamental difference between the last millenium and this one: in the history of the world, there has rarely, if ever, been such a concentration of destructive power under one nation's control as exists in the U.S. military today. In contrast to the Crusades, which were privately financed and loosely organized battles between roughly equivalent fighting forces, this time around, the sides aren't exactly equal. Rogue nuclear states might indeed inflict horrific damage on the U.S. with their handful of nuclear weapons, but without ICBMs and multiple independently-targetable warheads that magnify the impact of each ICBM, none have the ability to eliminate U.S. retaliatory capability. Even a rogue state that merely supports a stateless terrorist network would have to think twice before condoning aggression that would likely result in the elimination of the host regime, whether by conventional or nuclear means.
And therein may lie the key to our salvation (if you can call it that): say what you will about any radical regime in the Middle East, none of them is so irrational as to invite its own total destruction. Call it the "Yamamoto principle" -- no one really wants to wake up the slumbering giant, since that would be "bad for business", so to speak. This is not to say that we should rest on our nuclear laurels, just that things may not be as dire as some would have us believe.
Of course, there is another explanation, namely that you can't believe everything you see on CNN -- as Barry Rubin postulates in the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs [article], anti-Americanism may just be stoked by the Arab power elites to keep the Arab street preoccupied and unfocused on the failings of those same power elites. The fact is, as Rubin recounts, that American involvement in the Middle East is actually more sympathetic to Arab and Islamist interests than those regimes would have you believe, but that the story has been twisted around in a sort of through-the-looking-glass kind of way. Rubin's conclusion is that if the power elites can somehow be discredited -- by standing up to them as we did in Afghanistan, and by demanding that our more moderate beneficiaries take actions to justify our support as a way of sending a message that we're not playing around any longer -- we would find that the rampant anti-American sentiment on the street might not turn out to be so rampant after all.
The Brother-in-Law: While "strategically-placed support for budding pluralism" may have been a factor in Eastern Europe, an equally significant factor was that the USSR simply couldn't afford both guns and butter - the domestic expenditures needed to pacify a stifled populace were made impossible by the demands of matching the 80s buildup in Western (primarily US, but don't disregard Lady Maggie as the intellectual half of the right-wing western leadership) arms and armaments.
We can bombard the Muslim world with Voice of America, etc., but I'm not sure we have a second "weapon" in our arsenal. Too much of the Western thinking starts with the premise that, when exposed to western values and given the ability to make independent decisions, all people will choose these Western values. But, what if they don't? What if that stretch of world from Algeria to Indonesia just wants that old-time religion?
Me: It may be true that the Middle East just wants that old-time religion. But signs seem to indicate otherwise. After all, Iran had a hard-line Islamist revolution, but it didn't stick; the thing that replaced the iron rule of the Ayatollahs was a democratically elected and reformist minded congress. Admittedly, Khatami is no Washington, but it's a start.
Perhaps we'll never remake Bagdad in our image, but it can't hurt to try. To quote Kennan, "wherever, in this modern age, one has to choose between war and no war, such is the fearfulness of modern armaments that one should give every conceivable preference to the possibilities and arguments for peace before resorting to the sword."
The Brother-in-Law: But that would still leave Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Iraq and Pakistan, for starters.
(Assuming, arguendo, that in the context of the region, that countries such as Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the various smaller Gulf states & emirates come under the category of "good enough for now".)
Then, of course, we can jump over the Indian subcontinent and deal with issues of the Asian Muslim population centers (first and foremost, of course, Indonesia, as we were so tragically reminded 10 days ago in Bali).
And, when all that is done, there are more than 100 MILLION Muslims in India, plus tens of million Muslims in China and the various "stans" of the FSU.
In the early part of the previous millenium, Christianity went through what could kindly be called "growing pains", during which it took several hundred years - and uncountable crusades, deaths, rapes, etc. - to develop a working model for interaction between "the Church" and "the State" - almost as if Christianity, having "come of age", was now being a rebellious teenager. While that was going on, however, European society had the "Dark Ages". I lack the historical knowledge and training to do an in-depth comparison between the issues and themes that Christianity faced +/- 1,000 years ago with those facing Islam today, however I throw the idea out for consideration.
Unfortunately, modern warfare doesn't consist of thousands of large, loud, sweaty & smelly warriors who trek hundreds of miles on foot or ship to use clubs, lances, rocks and spears. How the rest of the world will survive a comparable period of "adolesence" by Islam is still to be determined - but so far, the teenagers are winning...
Me: I'll grant you that the task is daunting. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is one fundamental difference between the last millenium and this one: in the history of the world, there has rarely, if ever, been such a concentration of destructive power under one nation's control as exists in the U.S. military today. In contrast to the Crusades, which were privately financed and loosely organized battles between roughly equivalent fighting forces, this time around, the sides aren't exactly equal. Rogue nuclear states might indeed inflict horrific damage on the U.S. with their handful of nuclear weapons, but without ICBMs and multiple independently-targetable warheads that magnify the impact of each ICBM, none have the ability to eliminate U.S. retaliatory capability. Even a rogue state that merely supports a stateless terrorist network would have to think twice before condoning aggression that would likely result in the elimination of the host regime, whether by conventional or nuclear means.
And therein may lie the key to our salvation (if you can call it that): say what you will about any radical regime in the Middle East, none of them is so irrational as to invite its own total destruction. Call it the "Yamamoto principle" -- no one really wants to wake up the slumbering giant, since that would be "bad for business", so to speak. This is not to say that we should rest on our nuclear laurels, just that things may not be as dire as some would have us believe.
Of course, there is another explanation, namely that you can't believe everything you see on CNN -- as Barry Rubin postulates in the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs [article], anti-Americanism may just be stoked by the Arab power elites to keep the Arab street preoccupied and unfocused on the failings of those same power elites. The fact is, as Rubin recounts, that American involvement in the Middle East is actually more sympathetic to Arab and Islamist interests than those regimes would have you believe, but that the story has been twisted around in a sort of through-the-looking-glass kind of way. Rubin's conclusion is that if the power elites can somehow be discredited -- by standing up to them as we did in Afghanistan, and by demanding that our more moderate beneficiaries take actions to justify our support as a way of sending a message that we're not playing around any longer -- we would find that the rampant anti-American sentiment on the street might not turn out to be so rampant after all.
posted by Daniel at 4:38 PM
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