Beldaran
03-01-2003, 04:24 PM
If you are at all interested in why we should or shouldn't attack Iraq, then READ this now. It's long but it's totally worth it. If you refuse to read it because you are too lazy, then you have no right to argue your position any further since you won't hear out the other side.
The article:
A CASE FOR WAR
I will not attempt to explain the reasons for attacking Iraq because Iraq is
part of a bigger picture, and the attack there will be one battle in a much
longer war. Trying to understand one particular battle without the context
of the larger war is an exercise in futility. (By analogy: what excuse is
there in 1942 for the US to attack Vichy France in Morocco? Vichy France
wasn't our enemy; Germany and Italy were. Taken out of the context of the
larger war, the Torch landings in Africa make little sense. It's only when
you look at the bigger picture of the whole war that you can understand
them.)
We must attack Iraq. We must totally conquer the nation. Saddam must be
removed from power, and killed if possible, and the Baath party must be
shattered.
But Saddam isn't our enemy. bin Laden (may he burn in hell) is not our
enemy. Iraq isn't our enemy. al Qaeda isn't our enemy. The Taliban weren't
our enemies. They are merely symptoms of decay.
In most wars, there's a government or core organization which you can
identify as the enemy. It isn't always a single person; in World War II it
was Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, but it wasn't Tojo in Japan. Tojo was
deposed in 1944, but the war went on. It also wasn't Hirohito; he mostly
kept his hands off of policy. Still, it was the Japanese government, and
that could still be understood.
But in this war there is no single government or small group of them, no
man, no organization. Our enemy is a culture which is deeply diseased.
It's really difficult to exactly delineate who our enemies are, but they
number in millions. They're Arab and Muslim, but not every Arab is among
them, and most Muslims are not.
But even to discuss it in these terms is to cross the boundaries of
political correctness. Not that I care, but it isn't politically possible
for our leaders to say things like these, which makes the political
wrangling all the more difficult. I think that they know what I'm about to
say, and I at least am free to say what I believe whether others find it
offensive or racist.
Islam is larger than greater Arabia, and the majority of Muslims are not
Arab. But in the beginning, Islam was both a religion and a political
movement. The Qur'an is a source of moral teachings for everyday life,
telling people how to live and how to act towards one another. But it's also
a manual for conquest, describing how to face enemies, how to fight, how to
treat those who have been conquered, how to treat prisoners, how to treat
enemy soldiers.
It lays a dual obligation on Muslims: to live a good life and to spread
Islam to the entire world, by any means necessary. All successful widespread
religions are evangelistic to a greater or lesser extent (with Judaism being
the notable exception), but I know of no other major religion whose holy
teachings include instructions for how to go to war to spread the faith.
Until Mohammed, the Arab tribes were divided and spent most of their time
fighting one another. The great achievement of Mohammed was to unite the
Arabs and face them outwards, strengthened and given will by his new
religion. And for two hundred years, nothing could stand in their way; they
created one of the great empires in the history of the world which was
bounded on the south by the Sahara, on the west by the Atlantic ocean, on
the north by Christendom, and on the east by the Hindu nations. Extending
from Spain to Iran, from Turkey to Egypt it was much larger and more
powerful than was the Roman Empire before it, and it lasted longer. Within
its borders art and science and poetry and architecture flourished.
But like all empires, it eventually fell. Unlike other empires, this was
against the word of God, for the Qur'an says that Islam will eventually
dominate the entire world. In reality, it's been in retreat for more than
three hundred years, and its decline became far more precipitous with the
collapse of the Ottomans. Once-great Arab nations became little more than
colonies for heathen Europeans, or economic dependents of America.
Our enemy is those who inherit the culture and heritage of that empire. Not
everyone within the empire's physical realm now partakes of that culture,
but many do.
I am having a difficult time coming up with a pithy term for our enemy. It's
hard. It isn't really greater Arabia. It certainly isn't Islam. Islamic
fundamentalism is a symptom of it, not the core. Arab nationalism and
imperialism is also a symptom of it, not the core. Each of those can and
does exist without the other, but they're both expressions of the real enemy
we face, something deeper than that.
To refer to it as Arab nostalgia is wrong, for many of those within the body
of our enemy inherit the beliefs and dogma which make them our enemies
without knowing where they came from. They aren't necessarily
traditionalists, for the same reason, though that's perhaps closer.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to use the partly-fallacious term "Arab
culture", accepting that not all Arab culture is our enemy and not all Arabs
are among our enemies.
Our enemy holds to a traditional belief, a traditional culture. Islam is a
core piece of that, but it isn't the whole thing, and not everyone who
believes in Islam is part of the enemy. Our enemy is the majority of the
people who live in what we think of as the large Arab nations, plus certain
other groups. Our enemy is concentrated in Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and Syria, plus the Palestinians are part of it. There are lesser
concentrations of our enemy in Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Oman and (non-Arab)
Pakistan.
And Iran is, as usual, a complicated aspect of it. While not being Arab, it
is closer culturally to the Arabs, and to a great extent our enemy also
holds sway there. The traditionalists and theocrats in Iran are part of our
enemy, even though not being Arab, because Persian Iran was a key part of
the original Arab/Islamic empire, and still retains much of that culture.
The problem with our enemy's culture is that in the 20th century it was
revealed as being an abject failure. By any rational calculation, it could
not compete, and not simply because the deck was stacked against it. The
problem was more fundamental; the culture itself contained the elements of
its own failure.
The only Arab nations which have prospered have done so entirely because of
the accident of mineral wealth. Using money from export of oil, they
imported a high tech infrastructure. They drive western cars. They use
western cell phones. They built western high-rise steel frame buildings.
They created superhighways and in every way implemented the trappings of
western prosperity.
Or rather, they paid westerners to create all those things for them. They
didn't build or create any of it themselves. It's all parasitic. And they
also buy the technical skill to keep it running. The technological
infrastructure of Saudi Arabia (to take an example) is run by a small army
of western engineers and technicians and managers who are paid well, and who
live in isolation, and who keep it all working. If they all leave, the
infrastructure will collapse. Saudi Arabia does not have the technical skill
to run it, or the ability to produce the replacement parts which would be
needed. It's all a sham, and they know it. Everything they have which looks
like modern culture was purchased. They themselves do not have the ability
to produce, or even to operate, any of it.
The diseased culture of our enemy suffers from all seven of the deep flaws
Ralph Peters identifies as condemning nations to failure in the modern
world. Peters makes a convincing case that there is a correlation
approaching unity between the extent to which a nation or culture suffers
from these flaws and its inability to succeed in the 21st century.
He lists them as follows:
Restrictions on the free flow of information.
The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion.
A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.
And carrying all seven of these, our enemy is trying to compete in the 21st
century footrace with both feet cast into buckets of concrete. They are
profoundly handicapped by the very values that they hold most dear and that
they believe make them what they are.
The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy's culture are
complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution
to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art
or culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected.
Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with
resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie.
They hate us. They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not.
Our culture is vibrant and fecund; our economies are successful. Our
achievements are magnificent. Our engineering and science are advancing at
breathtaking speed. Our people are fat and happy (relatively speaking). We
are influential, we are powerful, we are wealthy. "We" are the western
democracies, but in particular "we" are the United States, which is the most
successful of the western democracies by a long margin. America is the most
successful nation in the history of the world, economically and
technologically and militarily and even culturally.
Our culture as exported is condemned as being lowbrow in many places, but
it's hard to deny how pervasive and influential it is. Baywatch was total
dreck, but it was also the most successful syndicated television program
around the world in history, racking up truly massive audiences each week.
Our culture is seductive on every level; those elsewhere who are exposed to
it find it attractive. It isn't always "high culture"; but some of it is,
and with the world revolution in telecommunications it's impossible for
anyone in the world to avoid seeing it and being exposed to it.
Nor can anyone ignore our technology, which is definitely not lowbrow, nor
our scientific achievements.
We're everything that they think they should be, everything they once were,
and by our power and success we throw their modern failure into stark
contrast, especially because we've gotten to where we are by doing
everything their religion says is wrong. We've deeply sinned, and yet we've
won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours because we
are the standard of success, and in every important way they come up badly
short. In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's
that their score is zero.
They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve
their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are,
and they know it.
And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is
intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress. The oft-proposed
idea of increasing aid and attempting to eliminate poverty may well help in
South America and sub-Saharan Africa, but it will not defuse the hatred of
our Arab/Islamic enemies, for it is our success that they hate, not the
fruits of that success.
It isn't that they also want to be rich. Indeed, the majority of the most
militant members of al Qaeda came from Saudi Arabia, out of comfortable
existence. What they want is to stay with their traditional culture and for
it to be successful, and that isn't possible. We can make them rich through
aid, but we can't make them successful because their failure is not caused
by us, but by the deep flaws in their culture. Their culture cannot succeed.
It is too deeply and fundamentally crippled.
Everything they think they know says that they should be successful. They
once were successful, creating and ruling a great empire, with a rich
culture. God says they will be successful; it's right there in the Qur'an.
God lays on them the duty to dominate the world, but they can't even
dominate their own lands any longer. They face a profound crisis of faith,
and it can only resolve one of three ways.
First, the status quo can continue. They can continue to fail, sit in their
nations, and accept their plight. By clinging to their culture and their
religion they may be ideologically pure, but they will have to continue to
live with the shame of being totally unable to compete. Solution one: they
can stagnate.
The second thing they can do is to accept that their culture and their
religion are actually the problem. They can recognize that they will have to
liberalize their culture in order to begin to achieve. They can embrace the
modern world, and embrace western ways at least in part. They can break the
hold of Islamic teachings; discard Sharia; liberate their women; start to
teach science and engineering in their schools instead of the study of the
Qur'an; and secularize their societies. Solution two: they can reform.
Some Arab nations have begun to do this, and to the extent that they have
they have also started to succeed. But this is unacceptable to the majority;
it is literally sinful. It is heresy. What good does it do to succeed in the
world if, by so doing, you condemn your soul to hell?
Which leaves only one other way: become relatively competitive by destroying
all other cultures which are more capable. You level the playing field by
tearing down all the mountains rather than filling in the valleys; you make
yourself the tallest by shooting everyone taller than you are. Solution
three: they can lash out, fight back.
It's vitally important to understand that this is the reason they're
fighting back. It's not to gain revenge for some specific action in the past
on our part. It isn't an attempt to influence our foreign policy. Their goal
is our destruction, because they can't keep hold on what they have and still
think of themselves as being successful as long as we exist and continue to
outperform them.
al Qaeda grew out of this deepening resentment and frustration within the
failed Arab culture. It is the first manifestation of solution three, but as
long as the deep disease continues in the culture of our enemy, it won't be
the last. Its initial demands to the US were a bit surprising, and not very
well known. (And obscured by the fact that as their struggle continued
recently, they kept changing their stated demands in hopes of attracting
allies from elsewhere in the Arab sphere.)
The original demand was for a complete cessation of contact between America
and Arabia. Not just a pullout of our soldiers from holy Arab soil, but
total isolation so that the people of greater Arabia would no longer be
exposed in any way to us or our culture or our values. No television, no
radio, no music, no magazines and books, no movies. No internet. And that
isn't possible; you can't go backward that way.
But it's interesting that this shows their real concern. If they're no
longer exposed to us, they are no longer shamed by comparing their failure
to our success, and no longer seduced by it and tempted to discard their own
culture and adopt ours.
Solution three manifests, and will continue to manifest, in many ways.
Another way it manifests is in a new Arab imperialism, an ambition in some
quarters to recreate the Arab empire and by so doing to regain political
greatness. Arab nationalism doesn't directly spring from Islam, but it does
spring from this deep frustration and resentment caused by the abject
failure of the enemy culture, and it's most prominent practitioner is Saddam
Hussein.
Both al Qaeda's terrorist attacks, and Saddam's attempts to incorporate
other Arab nations into Iraq, spring from the same deep cause. But when I
say that al Qaeda and Saddam are not the real enemy, it's because they both
arise due to a deeper cause which is the true enemy. If we were to stamp out
al Qaeda as a viable organization and reduce it to an occasional annoyance,
and remove Saddam's WMDs no matter how, by conquest or inspections, someone
else somewhere else would spring up and we would again be in peril. We
cannot end this war by only treating the symptoms of al Qaeda and Saddam,
though they must be dealt with as part of that process. This war is actually
a war between the modern age and traditional Arab culture, and as long as
they stagnated and felt resentment quietly, it wasn't our war.
It became our war when al Qaeda started bringing it to our nation. With a
series of successively more deadly attacks culminating in the attacks in NYC
and Washington last year, it became clear that we in the United States could
no longer ignore it, and had to start working actively to remove the danger
to us. We didn't pick this war, it picked us, but we can't turn away from
it. If we ignore it, it will keep happening.
But the danger isn't al Qaeda as such, though that's the short term
manifestation of the danger. This war will continue until the traditional
crippled Arab culture is shattered. It won't end until they embrace reform
or have it forced on them. Until a year ago, we were willing to be patient
and let them embrace it slowly. Now we have no choice: we have to force them
to reform because we cannot be safe until they do.
And by reform I mean culturally and not politically. The reform isn't just
abjuration of weapons of mass destruction. It isn't just promising not to
attack any longer. What they're going to have to do is to fix all seven of
Ralph Peters' problems, and once they've done so, their nations won't be
recognizable.
First, they will seem much more western. Second, they'll start to succeed,
for as Peters notes, nations which fix these problems do become competitive.
What he's describing isn't symptoms, its deep causes.
We're facing a 14th century culture engaged in a 14th century war against
us. The problem is that they are armed with 20th century weapons, which may
eventually include nuclear weapons. And they embrace a culture which honors
dying in a good cause, which means that deterrence can't be relied on if
they get nuclear weapons.
Why is it that the US is concerned about Iraq getting nukes when we don't
seem to be as concerned about Pakistan or India or Israel? Why are we
willing to invade Iraq to prevent it from getting nukes, but not Pakistan to
seize the ones it developed? It's because those nations don't embrace a
warrior culture where suicide in a good cause, even mass death in a good
cause, is considered acceptable. (Those kinds of things are present in
Pakistan but don't rule there as yet.)
It's certainly not the case that the majority of those in the culture which
is our enemy would gladly die. But many of those who make the decisions
would be willing to sacrifice millions of their own in exchange for millions
of ours, especially the religious zealots. If such people get their hands on
nuclear weapons, then our threat of retaliation won't prevent them from
using them against us, or threatening to do so. Which is why we can't let it
happen. The chance of Israeli or Pakistani or Indian nukes being used
against us is acceptably small. If Arabs get them, then eventually one will
be used against us. It's impossible to predict who will do it, or when, or
where, or what the proximate reason will be, but it's inevitable that it
will happen. The only way to prevent it is to keep Arabs from getting nukes,
and that is why Iraq is now critically important and why time is running
out.
It's wrong to say that this would be "irrational" on their part. It is a
reasoned decision based on an entirely different set of axioms, leading to a
result totally unacceptable to us. But they're not insane or irrational.
Even though they're totally rational, deterrence ultimately can't stop them
from using nuclear weapons against us.
All major wars started by someone else that you eventually come to win start
with a phase where you try to consolidate the situation, to stop the enemy's
advance. Then you go onto the offensive, take the war to him, and finish it.
Afghanistan and Iraq are the two parts of the consolidation phase of this
war. al Qaeda had to be crippled and Saddam has to be destroyed in order to
gain us time and adequate safety to go onto the offensive, and to begin the
process which will truly end this war: to destroy Wahhabism, to shatter
The article:
A CASE FOR WAR
I will not attempt to explain the reasons for attacking Iraq because Iraq is
part of a bigger picture, and the attack there will be one battle in a much
longer war. Trying to understand one particular battle without the context
of the larger war is an exercise in futility. (By analogy: what excuse is
there in 1942 for the US to attack Vichy France in Morocco? Vichy France
wasn't our enemy; Germany and Italy were. Taken out of the context of the
larger war, the Torch landings in Africa make little sense. It's only when
you look at the bigger picture of the whole war that you can understand
them.)
We must attack Iraq. We must totally conquer the nation. Saddam must be
removed from power, and killed if possible, and the Baath party must be
shattered.
But Saddam isn't our enemy. bin Laden (may he burn in hell) is not our
enemy. Iraq isn't our enemy. al Qaeda isn't our enemy. The Taliban weren't
our enemies. They are merely symptoms of decay.
In most wars, there's a government or core organization which you can
identify as the enemy. It isn't always a single person; in World War II it
was Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, but it wasn't Tojo in Japan. Tojo was
deposed in 1944, but the war went on. It also wasn't Hirohito; he mostly
kept his hands off of policy. Still, it was the Japanese government, and
that could still be understood.
But in this war there is no single government or small group of them, no
man, no organization. Our enemy is a culture which is deeply diseased.
It's really difficult to exactly delineate who our enemies are, but they
number in millions. They're Arab and Muslim, but not every Arab is among
them, and most Muslims are not.
But even to discuss it in these terms is to cross the boundaries of
political correctness. Not that I care, but it isn't politically possible
for our leaders to say things like these, which makes the political
wrangling all the more difficult. I think that they know what I'm about to
say, and I at least am free to say what I believe whether others find it
offensive or racist.
Islam is larger than greater Arabia, and the majority of Muslims are not
Arab. But in the beginning, Islam was both a religion and a political
movement. The Qur'an is a source of moral teachings for everyday life,
telling people how to live and how to act towards one another. But it's also
a manual for conquest, describing how to face enemies, how to fight, how to
treat those who have been conquered, how to treat prisoners, how to treat
enemy soldiers.
It lays a dual obligation on Muslims: to live a good life and to spread
Islam to the entire world, by any means necessary. All successful widespread
religions are evangelistic to a greater or lesser extent (with Judaism being
the notable exception), but I know of no other major religion whose holy
teachings include instructions for how to go to war to spread the faith.
Until Mohammed, the Arab tribes were divided and spent most of their time
fighting one another. The great achievement of Mohammed was to unite the
Arabs and face them outwards, strengthened and given will by his new
religion. And for two hundred years, nothing could stand in their way; they
created one of the great empires in the history of the world which was
bounded on the south by the Sahara, on the west by the Atlantic ocean, on
the north by Christendom, and on the east by the Hindu nations. Extending
from Spain to Iran, from Turkey to Egypt it was much larger and more
powerful than was the Roman Empire before it, and it lasted longer. Within
its borders art and science and poetry and architecture flourished.
But like all empires, it eventually fell. Unlike other empires, this was
against the word of God, for the Qur'an says that Islam will eventually
dominate the entire world. In reality, it's been in retreat for more than
three hundred years, and its decline became far more precipitous with the
collapse of the Ottomans. Once-great Arab nations became little more than
colonies for heathen Europeans, or economic dependents of America.
Our enemy is those who inherit the culture and heritage of that empire. Not
everyone within the empire's physical realm now partakes of that culture,
but many do.
I am having a difficult time coming up with a pithy term for our enemy. It's
hard. It isn't really greater Arabia. It certainly isn't Islam. Islamic
fundamentalism is a symptom of it, not the core. Arab nationalism and
imperialism is also a symptom of it, not the core. Each of those can and
does exist without the other, but they're both expressions of the real enemy
we face, something deeper than that.
To refer to it as Arab nostalgia is wrong, for many of those within the body
of our enemy inherit the beliefs and dogma which make them our enemies
without knowing where they came from. They aren't necessarily
traditionalists, for the same reason, though that's perhaps closer.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to use the partly-fallacious term "Arab
culture", accepting that not all Arab culture is our enemy and not all Arabs
are among our enemies.
Our enemy holds to a traditional belief, a traditional culture. Islam is a
core piece of that, but it isn't the whole thing, and not everyone who
believes in Islam is part of the enemy. Our enemy is the majority of the
people who live in what we think of as the large Arab nations, plus certain
other groups. Our enemy is concentrated in Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and Syria, plus the Palestinians are part of it. There are lesser
concentrations of our enemy in Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Oman and (non-Arab)
Pakistan.
And Iran is, as usual, a complicated aspect of it. While not being Arab, it
is closer culturally to the Arabs, and to a great extent our enemy also
holds sway there. The traditionalists and theocrats in Iran are part of our
enemy, even though not being Arab, because Persian Iran was a key part of
the original Arab/Islamic empire, and still retains much of that culture.
The problem with our enemy's culture is that in the 20th century it was
revealed as being an abject failure. By any rational calculation, it could
not compete, and not simply because the deck was stacked against it. The
problem was more fundamental; the culture itself contained the elements of
its own failure.
The only Arab nations which have prospered have done so entirely because of
the accident of mineral wealth. Using money from export of oil, they
imported a high tech infrastructure. They drive western cars. They use
western cell phones. They built western high-rise steel frame buildings.
They created superhighways and in every way implemented the trappings of
western prosperity.
Or rather, they paid westerners to create all those things for them. They
didn't build or create any of it themselves. It's all parasitic. And they
also buy the technical skill to keep it running. The technological
infrastructure of Saudi Arabia (to take an example) is run by a small army
of western engineers and technicians and managers who are paid well, and who
live in isolation, and who keep it all working. If they all leave, the
infrastructure will collapse. Saudi Arabia does not have the technical skill
to run it, or the ability to produce the replacement parts which would be
needed. It's all a sham, and they know it. Everything they have which looks
like modern culture was purchased. They themselves do not have the ability
to produce, or even to operate, any of it.
The diseased culture of our enemy suffers from all seven of the deep flaws
Ralph Peters identifies as condemning nations to failure in the modern
world. Peters makes a convincing case that there is a correlation
approaching unity between the extent to which a nation or culture suffers
from these flaws and its inability to succeed in the 21st century.
He lists them as follows:
Restrictions on the free flow of information.
The subjugation of women.
Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
Domination by a restrictive religion.
A low valuation of education.
Low prestige assigned to work.
And carrying all seven of these, our enemy is trying to compete in the 21st
century footrace with both feet cast into buckets of concrete. They are
profoundly handicapped by the very values that they hold most dear and that
they believe make them what they are.
The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy's culture are
complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution
to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art
or culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected.
Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with
resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie.
They hate us. They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not.
Our culture is vibrant and fecund; our economies are successful. Our
achievements are magnificent. Our engineering and science are advancing at
breathtaking speed. Our people are fat and happy (relatively speaking). We
are influential, we are powerful, we are wealthy. "We" are the western
democracies, but in particular "we" are the United States, which is the most
successful of the western democracies by a long margin. America is the most
successful nation in the history of the world, economically and
technologically and militarily and even culturally.
Our culture as exported is condemned as being lowbrow in many places, but
it's hard to deny how pervasive and influential it is. Baywatch was total
dreck, but it was also the most successful syndicated television program
around the world in history, racking up truly massive audiences each week.
Our culture is seductive on every level; those elsewhere who are exposed to
it find it attractive. It isn't always "high culture"; but some of it is,
and with the world revolution in telecommunications it's impossible for
anyone in the world to avoid seeing it and being exposed to it.
Nor can anyone ignore our technology, which is definitely not lowbrow, nor
our scientific achievements.
We're everything that they think they should be, everything they once were,
and by our power and success we throw their modern failure into stark
contrast, especially because we've gotten to where we are by doing
everything their religion says is wrong. We've deeply sinned, and yet we've
won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours because we
are the standard of success, and in every important way they come up badly
short. In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's
that their score is zero.
They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve
their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are,
and they know it.
And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is
intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress. The oft-proposed
idea of increasing aid and attempting to eliminate poverty may well help in
South America and sub-Saharan Africa, but it will not defuse the hatred of
our Arab/Islamic enemies, for it is our success that they hate, not the
fruits of that success.
It isn't that they also want to be rich. Indeed, the majority of the most
militant members of al Qaeda came from Saudi Arabia, out of comfortable
existence. What they want is to stay with their traditional culture and for
it to be successful, and that isn't possible. We can make them rich through
aid, but we can't make them successful because their failure is not caused
by us, but by the deep flaws in their culture. Their culture cannot succeed.
It is too deeply and fundamentally crippled.
Everything they think they know says that they should be successful. They
once were successful, creating and ruling a great empire, with a rich
culture. God says they will be successful; it's right there in the Qur'an.
God lays on them the duty to dominate the world, but they can't even
dominate their own lands any longer. They face a profound crisis of faith,
and it can only resolve one of three ways.
First, the status quo can continue. They can continue to fail, sit in their
nations, and accept their plight. By clinging to their culture and their
religion they may be ideologically pure, but they will have to continue to
live with the shame of being totally unable to compete. Solution one: they
can stagnate.
The second thing they can do is to accept that their culture and their
religion are actually the problem. They can recognize that they will have to
liberalize their culture in order to begin to achieve. They can embrace the
modern world, and embrace western ways at least in part. They can break the
hold of Islamic teachings; discard Sharia; liberate their women; start to
teach science and engineering in their schools instead of the study of the
Qur'an; and secularize their societies. Solution two: they can reform.
Some Arab nations have begun to do this, and to the extent that they have
they have also started to succeed. But this is unacceptable to the majority;
it is literally sinful. It is heresy. What good does it do to succeed in the
world if, by so doing, you condemn your soul to hell?
Which leaves only one other way: become relatively competitive by destroying
all other cultures which are more capable. You level the playing field by
tearing down all the mountains rather than filling in the valleys; you make
yourself the tallest by shooting everyone taller than you are. Solution
three: they can lash out, fight back.
It's vitally important to understand that this is the reason they're
fighting back. It's not to gain revenge for some specific action in the past
on our part. It isn't an attempt to influence our foreign policy. Their goal
is our destruction, because they can't keep hold on what they have and still
think of themselves as being successful as long as we exist and continue to
outperform them.
al Qaeda grew out of this deepening resentment and frustration within the
failed Arab culture. It is the first manifestation of solution three, but as
long as the deep disease continues in the culture of our enemy, it won't be
the last. Its initial demands to the US were a bit surprising, and not very
well known. (And obscured by the fact that as their struggle continued
recently, they kept changing their stated demands in hopes of attracting
allies from elsewhere in the Arab sphere.)
The original demand was for a complete cessation of contact between America
and Arabia. Not just a pullout of our soldiers from holy Arab soil, but
total isolation so that the people of greater Arabia would no longer be
exposed in any way to us or our culture or our values. No television, no
radio, no music, no magazines and books, no movies. No internet. And that
isn't possible; you can't go backward that way.
But it's interesting that this shows their real concern. If they're no
longer exposed to us, they are no longer shamed by comparing their failure
to our success, and no longer seduced by it and tempted to discard their own
culture and adopt ours.
Solution three manifests, and will continue to manifest, in many ways.
Another way it manifests is in a new Arab imperialism, an ambition in some
quarters to recreate the Arab empire and by so doing to regain political
greatness. Arab nationalism doesn't directly spring from Islam, but it does
spring from this deep frustration and resentment caused by the abject
failure of the enemy culture, and it's most prominent practitioner is Saddam
Hussein.
Both al Qaeda's terrorist attacks, and Saddam's attempts to incorporate
other Arab nations into Iraq, spring from the same deep cause. But when I
say that al Qaeda and Saddam are not the real enemy, it's because they both
arise due to a deeper cause which is the true enemy. If we were to stamp out
al Qaeda as a viable organization and reduce it to an occasional annoyance,
and remove Saddam's WMDs no matter how, by conquest or inspections, someone
else somewhere else would spring up and we would again be in peril. We
cannot end this war by only treating the symptoms of al Qaeda and Saddam,
though they must be dealt with as part of that process. This war is actually
a war between the modern age and traditional Arab culture, and as long as
they stagnated and felt resentment quietly, it wasn't our war.
It became our war when al Qaeda started bringing it to our nation. With a
series of successively more deadly attacks culminating in the attacks in NYC
and Washington last year, it became clear that we in the United States could
no longer ignore it, and had to start working actively to remove the danger
to us. We didn't pick this war, it picked us, but we can't turn away from
it. If we ignore it, it will keep happening.
But the danger isn't al Qaeda as such, though that's the short term
manifestation of the danger. This war will continue until the traditional
crippled Arab culture is shattered. It won't end until they embrace reform
or have it forced on them. Until a year ago, we were willing to be patient
and let them embrace it slowly. Now we have no choice: we have to force them
to reform because we cannot be safe until they do.
And by reform I mean culturally and not politically. The reform isn't just
abjuration of weapons of mass destruction. It isn't just promising not to
attack any longer. What they're going to have to do is to fix all seven of
Ralph Peters' problems, and once they've done so, their nations won't be
recognizable.
First, they will seem much more western. Second, they'll start to succeed,
for as Peters notes, nations which fix these problems do become competitive.
What he's describing isn't symptoms, its deep causes.
We're facing a 14th century culture engaged in a 14th century war against
us. The problem is that they are armed with 20th century weapons, which may
eventually include nuclear weapons. And they embrace a culture which honors
dying in a good cause, which means that deterrence can't be relied on if
they get nuclear weapons.
Why is it that the US is concerned about Iraq getting nukes when we don't
seem to be as concerned about Pakistan or India or Israel? Why are we
willing to invade Iraq to prevent it from getting nukes, but not Pakistan to
seize the ones it developed? It's because those nations don't embrace a
warrior culture where suicide in a good cause, even mass death in a good
cause, is considered acceptable. (Those kinds of things are present in
Pakistan but don't rule there as yet.)
It's certainly not the case that the majority of those in the culture which
is our enemy would gladly die. But many of those who make the decisions
would be willing to sacrifice millions of their own in exchange for millions
of ours, especially the religious zealots. If such people get their hands on
nuclear weapons, then our threat of retaliation won't prevent them from
using them against us, or threatening to do so. Which is why we can't let it
happen. The chance of Israeli or Pakistani or Indian nukes being used
against us is acceptably small. If Arabs get them, then eventually one will
be used against us. It's impossible to predict who will do it, or when, or
where, or what the proximate reason will be, but it's inevitable that it
will happen. The only way to prevent it is to keep Arabs from getting nukes,
and that is why Iraq is now critically important and why time is running
out.
It's wrong to say that this would be "irrational" on their part. It is a
reasoned decision based on an entirely different set of axioms, leading to a
result totally unacceptable to us. But they're not insane or irrational.
Even though they're totally rational, deterrence ultimately can't stop them
from using nuclear weapons against us.
All major wars started by someone else that you eventually come to win start
with a phase where you try to consolidate the situation, to stop the enemy's
advance. Then you go onto the offensive, take the war to him, and finish it.
Afghanistan and Iraq are the two parts of the consolidation phase of this
war. al Qaeda had to be crippled and Saddam has to be destroyed in order to
gain us time and adequate safety to go onto the offensive, and to begin the
process which will truly end this war: to destroy Wahhabism, to shatter