Posted on 07/22/2003 7:21:19 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
"Since the events of 9/11," observes Lee Harris, America's reigning philosopher of 9/11, "the policy debate in the United States has been primarily focused on a set of problems -- radical Islam and the War on Terrorism, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
We sense that these three problems are related, Harris notes in an article at TechCentralStation.com, but we can't quite figure out how. He proposes a subtle link between these seemingly disparate issues -- and it's not specifically their common Muslim identity. Rather, it has to do with their unearned power.
"All previous threats in the history of mankind have had one element in common. They were posed by historical groups that had created the weapons -- both physical and cultural -- that they used to threaten their enemies." States achieved their military power through their own labor and sacrifice, developing their own economies, organizing their societies, training their own troops, and building their own arsenals.
But the same cannot be said of the threats emanating from the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda destroys airplanes and buildings that it itself could not possibly build. The Palestinian Authority has failed in every field of endeavor except killing Israelis. Saddam Hussein's Iraq grew dangerous thanks to money showered on it by the West to purchase petroleum Iraqis themselves had neither located nor extracted.
How, despite their general incompetence, has this trio managed to guide the course of events as if they were Powers in the traditional sense?
The cause of this anomaly, Harris replies, is that the West plays by a strict set of rules while permitting Al-Qaeda, the Palestinians, and Saddam Hussein to play without rules. We restrain ourselves according to the standards of civilized conduct as refined over the centuries; they engage in maximal ruthlessness.
Had the United States retaliated in kind for 9/11, Harris tells me, the Islamic holy places would have been destroyed. Had Israelis followed the Arafat model of murderousness, the West Bank and Gaza would now be devoid of Palestinians. Had the West done toward Iraq as Iraq did toward Kuwait, the Iraqi polity would long ago have been annexed and its oil resources confiscated.
While morally commendable, Harris argues, the West's not responding to Muslim ruthlessness with like ruthlessness carries a high and rising price. It allows Muslim political extremists of various stripes to fantasize that they earned their power, when in fact that power derives entirely from the West's arch-civilized restraint.
This confusion prompts Muslim extremists to indulge in the error that their successes betoken a superior virtue, or even God's support. Conversely, they perceive the West''s restraint as a sign of its decadence. Such fantasies, Harris contends, feed on themselves, leading to ever-more demented and dangerous behavior.
Westerners worry about the security of electricity grids, computer bugs, and water reservoirs; can a nuclear attack on a Western metropolis be that remote? Western restraint, in other words, insulates its enemies from the deserved consequences of their actions, and so unintentionally encourages their bad behavior.
For the West to reverse this process requires much rougher means than it prefers to use. Harris, author of a big-think book on this general subject coming out from the Free Press in early 2004, contends that Old Europe and most analysts have failed to fathom the imperative for a change. The Bush administration, however, has figured it out and in several ways (all of which surfaced during the Iraq campaign) has begun implementing an unapologetic and momentous break with past restraints:
- Preempt: Knock out fantasist leaders (the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat) before they can do more damage.
- Rehabilitate: Dismantle their polities, then reconstruct these along civilized lines.
- Impose a double standard: Act on the premise that the U.S. government alone "is permitted to use force against other agents who are not permitted to use force."
In brief, until those Harris calls "Islamic fantasists" play by the rules, Washington must be prepared to act like them, without rules.
This appeal for America to act less civilized will offend some; but it does offer a convincing explanation for the inner logic of America''s tough new foreign policy.
Let's name names, shall we?
Anyone can go and check post #3., by John Galt.
And then Einstein (libteeth) accuses me of wanting to stop the exchange of ideas, because I reject any poster whose initial response to an article is name calling and guilt by association... followed eventually by psychobabble.
Go figure.
Sorry to have to tell you this, but your "reductionist" assessment comes off more like buffoonery and sophistry.
Most of us are singularly unimpressed.
As for Mr. Pipes' stature? Fortunately, your opinion of it counts for pretty much zero.
Bernard Lewis or Daniel Pipes are arguably the best and best-read muslim scholars we have.
OK, I'll make an exception this one time.
I usually avoid overschooled (but undereducated) ignoramuses.
"Carthago delanda est".
the very subject of the original post!
D'OH!
Not even gonna try, except to say that to the best of my knowlege, Mr. Pipes is not German.
Have a nice day.
I never said that the Greeks were biologically exterminated when confronted by the military might of the Roman nation state.
I said the Greek city states ended up in the dust bin of History.
After the disorganized Greek city states fell to the Legions of Rome, the ancient Greek city states of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Delos, etc., etc. ceased to exist as independent political entities.
The biological progeny of those once independent Greek city states spent the next 2,000 being ruled as subjects of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Turkish Empire.
What you mean (and your theme is awfully close to the General Sherman lover, Victor David Hanson) is that the ruling elite of a nation state only survive, no?
No. I never mentioned any so-called "ruling elite".
Whether the "ruling elite" of a nation state survives defeat after losing a war to a conqueror has historically depended on whether or not the conquering power has spared them or wiped them out. When Alexander the Great's superior military organization conquered the ancient city of Tyre, he crucified the men of military age and sold the rest of the entire population into slavery. No Tyrian population, let alone the Tyrian "ruling elite", survived it's encouter with the Macedonian nation state.
What I mean is that History has repeatedly shown that a civilization can survive in this cruel World only as long as it's Armed Forces can defend it against all foes or only as long as a more powerful Ally cares to defend it.
What I mean is that History has repeatedly shown that a nation state will have more resources to field an Army with superior military technology, superior manpower and superior logistics that a small city state depending on amateur militias.
As military technolgy advances this becomes even more applicable.
In today's world, when a Chinese nuclear tipped ICBM can cross the Pacific in less than one hour, 250 million Todd Beamers in local militias will not survive as free Americans without the technology and the organized might of the U.S. Armed Forces.......unless they all have a car wash to raise the money to develop, deploy and acquire the technical expertise to man a Trident submarine nuclear detterence system.
I do not "love" bombs and tanks.
On the other hand, I do not bury my head in the sand and pretend that they do not exist and that modern wars are still fought by local militias armed with Brown Bess smoothbore muskets.
Switzerland is "doing O.K." solely because Nazi Germany had use for them as an international banker during World War II and because it was totally surrounded by NATO territory after World War II.
Imagine that World War II is over, that Hitler had won and that Hitler no longer needed his Swiss banker.
How long would Switzerland survive with the Wermacht controlling all road access into Switzerland and with the Luftwaffe having total air superiority over Swiss skies bombing Swiss cities by day and by night and strafing every Swiss motor vehicle on Swiss roads and every Swiss farmer daring to expose himself in his fields?
Hitler could starve out Switzerland in two years without ever having to order a single German paratrooper or infantryman to set foot on Swiss soil.
The belief that ruthlessness is the high road to power is a piece of superstition, not a fact. It is belied by all the evidence of history. The Palis think that, Saddam thought that, Osama thought that - the collosal failures populating the dust bin of history all subscribed to that superstitious equation. It is a kind of psychological delusion.
But every one of them was wrong. They do not generate greater strength for themselves by dispensing with all moral scruple. Moral scruple is not a synonym for weakness. On the contrary, moral evil debilitates, multiplies enemies, weakens support from friends, wrecks the fruits of cooperation. It is not a new thing to notice. It has been more than 2000 years since a writer noticed that even a gang of thieves can only succeed to the extent they practice justice among themselves, not the opposite.
Justice is not a piece of kindergarten philosophy for harmless children that only works in a protective atmosphere. It is the standing policy of the most successful amassers and wielders of political power since the dawn of civilized states. Justice implies discrimination between friends and enemies, holding out benefits to one and harms to the other. It divides opponents. It co-opts the most productive. It focuses resources on the best target set. It has nothing to do with mere meakness, and generates scads more power and success than mere unscrupulousness or self-seeking.
Self seekers are feared, hated, and acted against by vast numbers. Tyrants live like men "condemned by all mankind to die for their injustice". Exceptional ones may die in their beds, but they are exceptional, while prosperous reign and retirement, both, are entirely normal for moral leaders. On the civil side, in economics and the sciences and all that makes for power for a society in the longer term, moral rules completely eclipse the dubious achievements of ruthlessness.
It is pointless to adopt the rules of basket cases to fight against basket cases. They are basket cases because their rules do not remotely work. Iraqi nutjobs charged M-1 tanks in pickup trucks with AK-47s; shall we copy that tactic as well? It is no more stupidly suicidal than their ruthless immoralism. Our enemies are immoral not because immorality is the secret of power and they've figured that out while we haven't. They are immoral because they are dumber than a bag of rocks, because they actually believe that bit of superstitious nonsense while we as a society have long since learned otherwise.
But apparently as individuals not all of us have, at least consciously. Ruthlessness is simply stupid, it is bad tactics.
does it hurt when your knee jerks like that?
so are you denying the US government's past and present practice of propping up corrupt and undemocratic regimes in the middle east (iran, iraq, saudi arabia)
-OR-
are you just saying we should not *blame* the US government for doing that?
btw, it's impossible to "blame america" because america is an abstraction. unlike you, i expect the government of the US to be accountable to me for its actions and i feel free to critize that government whereever and whenever i see fit. that's my right and if you don't like it you can go back to merry old england and kiss the queen's big white a**.
"blame america" - what a joke!
That is the option that has been proposed to us. And it is stupid.
It would make us as dumb as they are. The writer thinks we provide them perverse incentives by operating according to the code of chivalry, and that if instead we operating according to their code of ruthlessness, they would "understand" us better. Perhaps so, because we'd be as idiotic as they are. But it would not benefit us.
Concretely, he means we ought to seize all of the oil in the middle east by military force and exploit it entirely for our own profit, giving nothing to the people of the region in return. Because that is what they'd do. And because it would deprive them of the income our more chivalrous respect for property allows to them, which he thinks they've not really done anything to deserve, and misunderstand.
If we run around seizing whatever our military might allows us to seize, however, we will destroy cooperation and replace it with an arena of organized grab. Which is exactly what they've done, time out of mind, in their own civilization, and why that civilization is still in the dark ages while ours is not.
You can imagine all the intermediary degrees you like, but a supposedly serious person is soberly proposing that we forget everything we learned that got us here, chop off our own heads as it were, and imitate the mindless violent idiocies of our stupidest adversaries.
And any number of people here, where everyone ought to know better, are applauding the sentiment. Largely because they share the bloodthirsty superstition that ruthlessness generates power and that morality is a weakness. Which is a very dangerous error.
Instead of quibbling about possible intermediary positions no one has (yet) proposed, maybe you should pause and look at just how reckless the proposed course of action is and how many otherwise sane people apparently fall for it. And ask yourself why.
And perhaps, just perhaps, correlate the answer to that question of "why" with the real disease blighting those other parts of the world. And thereby catch a glimpse of the actual lesson that needs to be transmitted to them. Which is all about learning how weak and ineffectual the pointless worship of ruthlessness actually is, how superstitious its ultimate grounds are. We will never teach anyone such things by forgetting them ourselves...
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