A few days ago I wrote about how difficult it was for a young woman to learn some uncomfortable things about herself. (When Will They Ever Learn?) She had a powerful need to not-know that part of her character, her habitual way of interacting with important people in her world, consistently led to behavior that was self-defeating. She could not begin to alter her behavior until she recognized her own contribution to her dysfunctional life. Once her own unconscious tendencies were made more available to her she could start the arduous process of change.
There is a corollary to this idea that only by becoming aware of your unconscious tendencies can you begin to change them. That is that as long as you remain unaware of how your basic assumptions, your world view, affects how you interpret information, you will tend to force all new data to fit your pre-conceived notions of how the world works (or should work) and will continue to pursue dysfunctional behavior until catastrophic failure. As an example, on an individual level, a man who is unaware that he treats his wife as an object will not be able to develop increasing emotional intimacy as their relationship progresses (or, fails to progress) until one day he is surprised that she has hired a lawyer and changed the locks.
The same maxim can hold true for a society, a culture, a country, a political party. Failed policies that gratify deep-seated longings among the population and the elites, will be adhered to tenaciously until catastrophic failure even in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence.
The Bush administration has had many failures in the last few years. They failed to recognize that winning the peace was, if anything, more important than winning the initial stages of the war. They failed to recognize that their model of how Iraq worked was incorrect and were 2 years too late in changing course in Iraq. Perhaps most crucially, they failed to understand that the world had changed and that the information warfare component of our trans-global battle with the forces supportive of Islamo Fascism was the key to the long term outcome of this trans-generational war. It has taken electoral disaster for the Bush administration to change course in Iraq and the outcome will remain in doubt for quite some time to come.
The Democrats have been so wedded to the anti-war position as an avenue to power that they been willing to risk long term disaster in the Middle East and the war on Islamo fascism in service of their hunger for power. To say this is irresponsible is a tautology but it is also potentially suicidal for the Democrats. In the short term, if the surge works, they will have damaged their prospects in 2008 and beyond, yet if they win it all in 2008 on the back of defeat (surrender) in Iraq, the threat of Islamic terror will be far worse. Not only will the Islamo fascists be empowered and emboldened but due to the Democrat's act of ham-stringing our operations in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East, the area from which the threat emerges, we will have severe opportunity costs (in terms of lost intel and lost forward basing) which will make successful operations against us more likely.
The Left, especially in Europe, have failed to recognize that their precious Welfare state arrangements, which presumed to offer guaranteed security to their people in exchange for some of their freedoms, was based on a failed model of human behavior and economic man. Further, the means why which they chose to maintain the illusion of equality and sufficiency for all, on the backs of immigrant aliens who were unwilling and/or unable to accommodate to their hosts' desires long term, was always an unstable construct doomed to fail. The resumption of rioting by French "youths", British fecklessness with the Iranian act of war, Italian (left wing) attempts to assign responsibility and blame for the War on Terror to Americans, all have their roots in an unwillingness to address fundamental shifts taking place within European society and in the world.
Israel has consistently failed to recognize that their fight against overwhelming Arab hatred, aided and abetted by Europe's barely conscious desire to erase the stain of their complicity in the Holocaust by transferring ti to Israel (the new Nazis), is made immeasurably worse by their own guilt-derived responses to any and all charges by the Demopaths in the Arab world and their enablers in the West. Israel should long ago have learned that when given a chance for a decisive victory, a "parsed" victory is a failure.
The Muslim World has not, apparently, recognized that their paradigm has been a catastrophic failure, but that is precisely because in their terms it hasn't yet failed. The behavior of Muslim Despots has been consistent and consistently rewarded by their people and by the rest of the world, despite the abject failure of the Muslim World to progress beyond a parasitic relationship to the rest of the world. No Muslim leader has failed by being too extreme. Muslim leaders, from the level of the local Mosque to heads of state, have always established their bona fides by projecting all their cultural defects onto others, preferably Jews and Americans, but not sparing Europeans (seen as effete and weak, easy prey.) The leader who masters the ability to speak in dulcet tones in English while telling his people in Arabic/Farsi/Pashtun that their enemies are the offspring of pigs and dogs, has a ready reservoir of support at home; those who have the "courage" to speak undisguised words of contempt are lauded as heroes. At the same time, the Muslim who has the temerity to suggest a more peaceful approach to the West, to Israel, is usually the subject of a death threat and Fatwas. Thus far, the world has failed, in their thirst for Middle Eastern oil, to demand responsibility or accountability from the Muslim world and until that happens, there is no incentive for the Muslim world to learn to coexist with their neighbors in peace and mutual respect.
The trend lines do not look positive. The Muslims typically act as if they believe their own bombast and have repeatedly started fights they couldn't win. The West, by its combined incompetence and venality have presented a weak and submissive face to the Muslim World, encouraging them to believe they will win if only they maintain their ardor. These trends exist independently of the actual facts on the ground and suggest that further clashes between the Muslim World and the West are inevitable.
Peace will not come anytime soon to the Bloody Borders of Islam and in our increasingly interconnected world, those borders can be as close as the neighborhood Mosque.
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