A great deal of the criticism of our current approach to the War in Iraq and the greater war on global Islamic fascism, hinges on the uncomfortable fact that no one seems to have any very good strategic ideas for how we might proceed in ways that would be likely to enhance our future security and make the world a safer place. It seems to me that all the current suggestions have extremely problematic flaws and ultimately resolve down to unanswerable questions.
It seems to me that the current options would include:
• The current approach is to imagine our war against both Shia and Sunni versions of the Islamist virus as primarily a military venture. Since we have no ready answer for Islamic terror, our best approach is to go directly into the heart of the Middle East and attempt to "drain the swamp" and establish a working Muslim democracy in the area.
• An alternative approach, most famously espoused by the Iraq Study Group, would involve opening diplomatic discussions with the Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, and other interested parties, in order to enlist their assistance in stabilizing Iraq. This is based on the hope that the people who have been most assiduous in fomenting unrest would then develop an interest in Iraqi stability; usually this is coupled with the idea that Iran should agree to stop supporting terrorist groups, like Hizbollah and Hamas, followed by a somewhat more reluctant admission that this is unlikely in the extreme.
• The third approach, suggested by some of the "bright lights" in the Congress appears to primarily consist of getting American troops out of Iraq and hoping that peace will then break out.
As noted, all of these approaches have serious flaws which suggest they cannot work.
All the criticism of our military efforts, even taking into account the political calculations of the anti-war proponents who already imagine we have lost and now want to cut our losses, have some merit. The current surge is quite uncertain, as General Petraeus has admitted. Success is not at all guaranteed and if we do not see clear signs of progress within the next 6-8 months, it is hard to imagine that we will have the will to do whatever is necessary to win at that point. Furthermore, it is certainly possible that no amount of American effort will be enough to allow the nascent Iraqi government to create a functioning Muslim democracy in such a difficult environment. If that is the case, we will have compounded the error of trying to establish a democracy by tragically throwing more good lives away.
Unfortunately, there is no reason anyone has offered to believe that engaging Iran and the Saudis will be helpful to America or the world. The Iranians would happily negotiate our surrender which would enhance their stature and survivability while they go about the work of obtaining a bomb. Once Iran has a bomb, its use is almost certain; however, even for those who believe it is unlikely to be used, consider that the Israelis are convinced that an Iranian bomb presents an existential risk and they are not likely to go down quietly. Further, the Saudis and other Sunnis also regard an Iranian bomb as unacceptable, and the risk of a nuclear arms race in a particularly bad neighborhood should be unthinkable and unacceptable. Believing that Iran, a nation led by Shia millennialists, will completely reverse their fundamental policies of the last 25 years and behave in a civilized manner is not a policy; it is a hope.
Finally, even minimal attention to the arguments of those politicians scrambling to cover themselves, reveals its essential emptiness. The mot seems to be that since our presence has caused a civil war in Iraq, our absence will be enough to stop it. The idea of a near term announcement of our impending withdrawal doing anything but ushering in chaos is illogical at best.
All of these formulations dance around the question: Can Muslim culture tolerate true pluralistic democracy which includes respect to the rights of minorities?
Thus far, the answer seems to be a resounding "No!" Turkey has been traditionally held up as the model of a democratic Muslim state. Yet Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Modern Turkey, essentially achieved democracy by eliminating the influence of Islam in political life. His legacy is now failing and Turkey is sliding toward the abyss of Islamism.
All cultures must balance their drive toward the future against the regressive pull to the past and the powerful tendency toward stasis (status quo). In America, arguably the most dynamic culture on the planet, we offer a great deal of lip service to the future, but often have to be pulled kicking and screaming into a future that is being created by a disproportionally small number of visionaries and tinkerers. A society fully invested in the future would spend exponentially more money on the education of the top 20% of our children than the bottom 20%; after all, these are the children from whom the bulk of our progress will emerge. Instead, there are myriad court and legislatively mandated programs for children with all manner of learning difficulties, yet in most areas there is minimal interest or money spent on bringing enriched programs to the top 20%. Fairness mandates we offer help to those who need it, but our neglect of those who would benefit from enrichment, often in the name of equality, seems poorly conceptualized. In another arena, we have a huge cohort who yearn for the regressive pull of an ephemeral welfare state which will assure neither them nor their grandchildren a comfortable retirement, yet they resist with all their might changes which might be of more benefit to their children than themselves. (AARP spent a small fortune defeating any "threat" of offering private accounts to the younger workers.) Despite our imperfect efforts to mediate the generational aspects of culture, we have manged to establish a system, a culture, that allows the young to make their own way in the world with minimal impediments. As a great bonus, which has enhanced our stability immensely, even the least congenitally endowed of our citizens, by dint of hard work, can achieve a level of comfort and ease that remains the envy of most of the rest of the world.
Contrast our admittedly very mixed view with the overwhelmingly present and past focus of a very large segment of the Arab and Muslim world. I have written elsewhere about the dilemma of the young Arab man who has no cultural expectation of the necessity of hard work in order to achieve material success and status. Further, he has often been taught by both his early experience, his religious teachers, and his educational system (which typically reinforces the religious precepts) that he should be accorded status and respect solely by virtue of his identification as a male member of the only "true" and immutable religion. Dhimmitude for his inferiors is natural to him and the belief in equality for dhimmis and women is considered apostasy. This is certainly not the belief of all Muslims but there are enough who do accept such beliefs, including in the West, that serious questions must be raised as to whether those who believe in such repressive aspects of Sharia can ever be reconciled with pluralistic democracy.
The most instructive comparable cultural comparison would be with the various cultures of the Far East. China, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam all were, if anything, much more materially impoverished than the Middle East after the second World War. Those nations which fell under the sway of Communism progressed relatively slowly until they were able to escape the trap of the Communist Utopian Stasis. They were able to take advantage of the loosening of ideological strictures because the cultures in much of the Far East were primarily past and future oriented. Parents were thus expected to work hard, not for their own immediate benefits, but to show reverence for their ancestors and in order for their children to have a better life. A Chinese parent would much sooner sacrifice his own life for the life of his child. Communism could not destroy such forward looking cultural tendencies (if anything, with their emphasis on creating a "new man", Communism always had its focus on the future; unfortunately, the future Communism hearkens to is a disguised rendition of a fantasied Utopian past, but that is a discussion beyond the bounds of this post.)
In much of the Islamist world, the direction of gratification is reversed. The sacrifice of children for their parents is the norm.
[Please note, this does not mean every Arab or Muslim parent would use his children in such away, but enough do, and enough aggrandize the sacrifices of such "martyrs" that the society becomes defined by such regressive tendencies.]
Despite those who insist that this question has already been answered, I prefer to believe that there remains a chance for the Muslim world to enter the world of Modernity, although their window of opportunity is closing.
In the past, dysfunctional cultures were only changed by the effective elimination of that cohort of young men who had enough of a stake in the culture to channel their aggression toward protecting that culture. For good or bad, we have eschewed such brutality in our current war with the hope that merely by offering a new cultural model, the people of Iraq would seize the opportunity offered and deal with their "growing pains" in ways least disruptive to then and dangerous for us. In this we have clearly fallen short. Now the question is put to us. Do we have the wherewithal to find ways (the political will) to allow the majority of Iraqis who desire a future to move forward? Our efforts may well fail in the end; perhaps Iraq and indeed the entire Middle East will forever be depicted and seen as a hopeless cauldron of primitive rage and hate, but such a future is grim indeed, and coming to such a conclusion should be a very last resort.
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