Posted on 10/08/2006 7:11:46 AM PDT by Axhandle
September 11, 2006— In the five years since 9/11, much looking-back has been done. The problem is we haven't looked back far enough. To understand the nature of the enemy in the Middle East and to evaluate the prospects for democracy and peace, we need to extend our gaze not five years into the past, but five hundred and even five thousand.
I've spent the last four years writing two books about Alexander the Great's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, 331-327 B.C. What has struck me in the research is the dead-ringer parallels between that ancient East-West clash and the modern ones the U.S. is fighting today — despite the fact that Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic.
What history seems to be telling us is that the quality that most defines our Eastern adversaries, then and now, is neither religion nor extremism nor "Islamo-fascism," but something much older and more fundamental.
Tribalism
Extremist Islam is merely an overlay (and a recent one at that) atop the primal, unchanging mind-set of the East, which is tribalism, and its constituent individual, the tribesman.
Tribalism and the tribal mind-set are what the West is up against in Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, the Sunni and Shiite militias, and the Taliban.
What exactly is the tribal mind-set? It derives from that most ancient of social organizations, whose virtues are obedience, fidelity, warrior pride, respect for ancestors, hostility to outsiders and willingness to lay down one's life for the cause/faith/group. The tribe's ideal leader is closer to Tony Soprano than to FDR and its social mores are more like those of Geronimo's Apaches than the city council of Scarsdale or Shepherd's Bush.
Can the tribal mind embrace democracy? Consider the contrast between the tribesman and the citizen:
A citizen is an autonomous individual. A citizen is free. A citizen possesses the capacity to evaluate the facts and prospects of his world and to make decisions guided by his own conscience, uncoerced by authority. A congress of citizens acting in free elections determines the political course of a democratic community.
A citizen prizes his freedom; therefore he grants it to others. He is willing to respect the rights of minorities within the community, so that his own rights will be shielded when he finds himself in the minority.
The tribesman doesn't see it that way. Within the fixed hierarchy of the tribe, disagreement is not dissent (and thus to be tolerated) but treachery, even heresy, which must be ruthlessly expunged. The tribe exists for itself alone. It is perpetually at war with all other tribes, even of its own race and religion.
The tribesman deals in absolutes. One is either "of blood" or not. The enemy spy can infiltrate the tribal network no more than a prison guard can worm his way into the Aryan Brotherhood. The tribe recognizes its own. It expels (or beheads) the alien. The tribe cannot be negotiated with. "Good faith" applies only within the pale, never beyond.
The tribesman does not operate by a body of civil law but by a code of honor. If he receives a wrong, he does not seek redress. He wants revenge. The taking of revenge is a virtue in tribal eyes, called badal in the Pathan code of nangwali. A man who does not take revenge is not a man. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the sectarian militias of Iraq are not in the war business, they are in the revenge business. The revenge-seeker cannot be negotiated with because his intent is bound up with honor. It is an absolute.
Perhaps the most telling difference between the citizen and the tribesman lies in their views of the Other. The citizen embraces multiplicity; to him, the melting pot produces richness and cultural diversity. To the tribesman, the alien is not even given the dignity of being a human being; he is a gentile, an infidel, a demon.
The tribesman grants justice within the tribe. In his internal councils, empathy, humor and compassion may prevail. Outside the tribe? Forget it. Can Shiites really sit down with Sunnis? Will the pledges of Hezbollah or Hamas to Israel prove true?
The democratic virtues of the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the American Constitution are not virtues to the tribesman. They are effeminate. They lack warrior honor. "Freedom" to the tribesman means the extinction of all he and his ancestors hold dear; "democracy" and Western values are a mortal threat to the ancient and proud way of life that the tribal mind has embraced (whether Scythian nomads, Amazon warriors, or American Indians) for tens of thousands of years.
The tribesman isn't "wrong" or "evil." He just doesn't want what we're selling. We will not convert him with free elections or with SAW machine guns. To him, 9/11 is only the most recent act of badal in a clash that has been raging for more than two thousand years. We will not find the way to contest him, let alone defeat him, until we see the struggle against him within the greater context of this millenia-old, unaltering, East-West war.
Historian Steven Pressfield is the author of the just-release novel The Afghan Campaign. He has written four other historical novels including "Gates of Fire," "The War of Art," and "The Legend of Bagger Vance."
True, Christianity had it's crusades and inquisitions as well. Islam though is unique in teaching not to have Others as friends, but rather only to invite the Others to submit, and if not, to make them slaves or dead. At least in this modern world, Islam is alone in such intolerance.
Never say "never." But the problem is that you can't reliably produce democracy in countries that don't want it.
bump read later.
It's just that Islam stomps out freedom and democracy wherever it flares up. The will of the people is not allowed.
Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us
Real Clear Politics ^ | September 20, 2006 | Bernard Lewis
(snip)
General Bonaparte--he wasn't yet Emperor--proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to them on behalf of a French Republic built on the principles of liberty and equality. We know something about the reactions to this proclamation from the extensive literature of the Middle Eastern Arab world. The idea of equality posed no great problem. Equality is very basic in Islamic belief: All true believers are equal. Of course, that still leaves three "inferior" categories of people--slaves, unbelievers and women. But in general, the concept of equality was understood. Islam never developed anything like the caste system of India to the east or the privileged aristocracies of Christian Europe to the west. Equality was something they knew, respected, and in large measure practiced. But liberty was something else.
As used in Arabic at that time, liberty was not a political but a legal term: You were free if you were not a slave. The word liberty was not used as we use it in the Western world, as a metaphor for good government. So the idea of a republic founded on principles of freedom caused some puzzlement. Some years later an Egyptian sheikh--Sheikh Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, who went to Paris as chaplain to the first group of Egyptian students sent to Europe--wrote a book about his adventures and explained his discovery of the meaning of freedom. He wrote that when the French talk about freedom they mean what Muslims mean when they talk about justice. By equating freedom with justice, he opened a whole new phase in the political and public discourse of the Arab world, and then, more broadly, the Islamic world......
See reply #9 Click on link for more.
OMG! It's a good thing I'm sitting.
"Nonsense as usual. All ready have it in Iraq and Afgainistan."
Don't agree with the article but I wouldn't hardly call what these two countries have Democracy. Long way to go on that account.
Things have actually changed a lot in the last couple of years. I got here in January '04 and have watched the Iraqis grow in learing how to do business on a global scale. Of course, after years of isloation due to the sanctions, we've had to teach them, but they're eager learners. In my capcity of managing subcontracts and purchases, I deal with local merchants and contracting companies every day. They have really come a long way.
I haven't met an Iraqi yet who disdains capitalism. In fact, I have to tone them down sometimes and cheerfully remind them that we are the world's capitalists and don't try to pull any funny stuff on us. ;-)
A journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step and they've taken many steps in the nearly three years I've been here.
I see progress.
The media and the liberals see quagmire.
P.S. Thank you for your service. I appreciate each and every one of you.
I think when you get at least 66% of an eligible voting population out to the polls under mortar fire and threats of death, they want it.
(LOTS of air activity in Bahgdad at 1 a.m. I wonder what's up?)
Ultimately, its the compulsion part of Islam that is its greatest evil. This is why the Pope challenged it directly. But its not only compulsion to accept Islam but more important, compulsion to remain that is antithetical to Western concepts of individual freedom of conscience.
First, I do not think Steven Pressfield is a "anti-west leftwinger" or even sounds like one. True he is dealing with broad, sweeping impressions born of his research in this area.
The pattern in the mid-east is for a King or Tyrant to overwhelm the tribalism of the peoples which constitute his domain. When that king is gone, the feuding factions reemerge. And I think we see that now in Iraq.
The tribe, it seems, is alway at war. And its sense of justice seems unlike that of the Hebrew or Christian eye-for-eye varity (a good thing--it introduced equity into law).
I'm not convinced that efforts to democratize will necessarily fail. Can the tap roots which feed tribalism be cut? Real Islam will continue to keep these people in this bondage, in my estimation. Western cultural influence might produce another Turkey. However, the greatest threat to tribalsm is Christianity.
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