Is the West Too Civilized?

"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.

Killing to protect one's property, family or friends is not much different than killing an enemy soldier in a firefight. Both examples require a temporary suspension of our rules of civilized behavior in order to 'get the job done'. Sometimes our instinct for violence must get the better of our civilized selves; paradoxically in order to preserve our civlized selves. I'm not trying to draw a connection to troop tactics, although it appears that D. Pipes might be.

This observation stems from a personal experience. During the course of a community search for a missing girl I overheard a 'joke' made by an individual to his friends. The remark was offensive and entirely out of place given the circumstances, but everyone seemed to treat it as nothing more that a distasteful joke. However, I was nearly overwhelmed with an instinctual urge to kill the man who made the offending remark. It was quite a powerful urge but my civilized sensibilities reasoned me out of acting on instinct.

About 6 months later I saw the same individual on the evening news as he was being arrested for the murders of two teenaged girls. At some instinctual level I had recognized the danger posed by this person yet my civliized self had come to his rescue. Had I acted on the impulse the action might have prevented the death of the second girl by drawing attention to this individual (he had provided a DNA sample several years before in connection with a series of rapes, but the sample had inexplicably never been examined). Of course all of this speculative hindsight, but the fact remains that my instinct was correct where my reasoning was wrong.

BTW, I found nothing offensive in either of your responses.

Obviously, you can neither write clear and coherent English and don't know what a " POTEMPKIN VILLAGE " is. You can't compare his ideas and logic to a false fronted, nonexistant village.

Pipes is an expert on Islam/Islamonazi fantasists fanatics/and the Middle East. No one is claiming that he is a " Conservative " or a " Liberal "; his politics are not the point.Unlike YOU, he knows what he's talking about. It should; however, give you great pause, that CAIR, Edward Said, etc. hate this man and gripe about what he says & writes.

Your preoccupation with " worry over what future presidents will do ( Dem implied " is factuous at best. Clinton, long ago, pulled what can easily be called any number of things; from " WAG THE DOG ", to yes a " premptive strike " ! He never followed through, though and THAT is precisely WHY we have been viewed , by many others, as a " PAPER TIGER ", decayed, toothless, and easy prey. From Carter and the hostages, to Reagan and the Lebbanon strikes against the Marines , to Clinton and the African embasies, the USS Cole,Somalia, first WTC bombings, our retaliatory actions have been zip, nada, turn tail and run.

" Christian culture " ? Might I remind you of the CRUSADES ?

That you neither know, nor care enough to educate yourself about the ARAB STREET and what the French/German/Belgium group is saying, is proof that you shouldn't even attempt to post your " thoughts " on FR. YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING, YET, IMAGINE THAT YOUR VIEWS, BASED ON NOTHING, MATTER. Of course, you're wrong !

Your comments are OFFENSIVE to anyone who is even somewhat intelligent.

Another very clear article on this subject, I searched but did not find it posted. As a side note, it's amazing how some groups on the Right are indistinguishable from the Left in their opposition to the decisive actions on the "Muslim front".

http://www.toogoodreports.com/column/general/stover/20030722.htm

Was Iraq About WMD; Or Was
It About The Risks And "The Message"?
By
Allan C. Stover

War is not the answer, the protesters say? It depends on the question. What if the question had been: "How can we protect the American people given the violent world in which we live, where diplomacy and appeasement have failed to prevent attacks on Americans abroad and on America itself?"
War was the answer because we were already in a de facto state of war. Weapons of mass destruction, oil, and freedom for the Iraqi people weren't the major reasons for taking out Iraq, although they played a part. America had two major reasons for going into Iraq.
First was The Message: In a previous column, I wrote: "On September 6, 1970, Islamic terrorists hijacked Swissair, TWA, and Pan Am airliners and blew them up. The next day, they attacked a British airliner and destroyed it. That date, September 6, 1970, marked an Islamist declaration of war against Western nations. Sadly, we've been either too oblivious or too much in denial to realize that we've been in a state of war since then."
Bill Clinton seemed oblivious to the ongoing state of war. He assumed that launching a few cruise missiles at some desert tents and an aspirin factory would persuade Islamists to call off their jihad against America. His miscalculations led to the slaughter on September 11, 2001.
President Bush understands that we've been in a state of war that will continue until we annihilate or neutralize all Islamists, an unlikely possibility, at least in the short term. He can, however, neutralize those terrorists who are the most dangerous because they are the best financed. He can't stop renegade attacks by independent terrorist cells, but he can stop the terrorist groups that other nations support.
That's why we needed The Message: "This is to remind you that America has taken out one nation, Afghanistan, because it was complicit in the attacks that killed 3,000 innocent Americans. We took out another nation, Iraq, because there was a risk that it was a threat to America. If you continue to support those who kill Americans, you will be next."
The second reason for removing Iraq as a threat was the risks, specifically the risks of doing nothing in the face of the ongoing war. Successful entrepreneurs, military strategists, and others who deal with an uncertain future analyze risks and rewards to make the best decision given the options. The entrepreneur isn't sure whether his new business will fail within a year, but he has analyzed the risks and potential rewards, and calculated that the rewards of going forward outweigh the risks. Tommy Franks was never a hundred percent sure that our casualties would be as low as they were. He analyzed the risks and potential for victory and decided on the best strategy. He had no way of knowing whether the Republican Guard would launch a massive chemical attack or suck our fast-moving troops into a trap outside Baghdad, but he had to take risks to win.
Since the smoke cleared on 9/11, President Bush has faced the most challenging decisions of any presidency in recent times. His first decision: What actions should he take to minimize Islamist attacks on America? That's when the risk of doing nothing became obvious.
Suppose your neighbor is a known criminal who has had family members and friends murdered. Now he's threatening your family. Would you feel safe if a police detective told you, "There's only a small risk that he's crazy enough to have someone in your family killed like he did his"? Wouldn't you take some action?
President Bush faced the risk that Saddam either directly or through an Islamist terror group would attack America again. How much of a risk should we be willing to accept before we take action? Should Bush have done nothing if the CIA told him there was a small risk that Saddam-a known criminal who has killed family members, friends, and underlings, and slaughtered his own people-would be crazy enough to load cargos of high explosives and chemical weapons on ships and explode them in U. S. harbors, killing tens of thousands and destroying the U. S. economy? Saddam had the ships and the weapons.
President Bush had to assess the risks of invading and not invading Iraq. The Pentagon may have told him that combat deaths could be high, perhaps as many as a thousand. "If I do nothing," Bush could have replied, "there is a risk that we could lose tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans in the next attacks. I can't take that risk."
He can't reveal that he invaded Iraq to send a message to other hostile governments (Iran, Syria, North Korea, and others) to call back their terrorist gangs, and block any others that might have a link back to them, or risk being the next target. He's hamstrung with international diplomacy constraints. Revealing the real message behind Operation Iraqi Freedom would dilute its effectiveness and provide ammunition to the leftist media and American-haters worldwide.
Democrats have been grasping for an issue to undermine our president, and they think they've found one in sixteen words in his State of the Union speech. He stated that British intelligence had learned that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium in Africa. It was a true statement, but was the intelligence a hundred percent accurate? No, just as business and war carries risks and uncertainties, so does intelligence, but the Democrats and their leftist friends in the media are using the issue to undermine our efforts in Iraq. It's more important to them that Hillary or another leftist gets elected than that we prevail in Iraq.
Americans must understand at least this: We can't wimp out in Iraq and withdraw before we've clearly sent The Message. Otherwise, the Islamist war on America will never end.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Allan at acstover@comcast.net .
RECENT COLUMNS: Archives are shown, going back nine months, from the date of this article. To see articles older than that, consult the archive listings accompanying earlier articles.

07/15/03: Will All Perversions Soon Become "Normal"?
07/08/03: The World Knows America Is Different, But Do They Know Why?
07/01/03: Will International Agreements Lead To America's Self-Destructing?

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