A great deal has been written in the last week concerning what meaning can be derived from our five year effort in Iraq. There is much made of the 4000 deaths we have suffered as of today. Much of the commentary concerns reasonable questions of whether or not the war has made us safer, whether or not we are winning, and whether or not Iraq can yet be stabilized as a democracy or proto-democracy. Many commentators concern themselves with the war's impact on our domestic politics or our standing in the world and/or our ability to shape events. Many speculate on the war's presumed negative effect on our ability to confront or contain Iran. Yet there are subterranean currents that will likely drive events and which have not been well articulated in the articles and posts I have read. These currents have to do with the ongoing conflict between modernity and the Muslim world and various, poorly discerned potential outcomes of the current clash between the West and radical Islam.
Several commentators have tried to put the Iraq War into a greater context and all, to a greater or lesser extent, note how complex and poorly defined our current situation remains. I would suggest three lines of inquiry that may help illuminate the underlying issues at stake.
First, five years into the Iraq War and going on seven years post-9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while clearly not central to the clash, does present a(n admittedly imperfect) microcosm of the conflict between the West and the Arab/Muslim world. Aspects of the current low level conflict with Gaza and the larger struggle with Iran and its proxies can be instructive and predictive.
Second, the pace of technological change and its impact on the conflict have been poorly explicated by most commentators on the conflict, and is likely to eventually be definitive.
And, third, the conflict between the West and radical Islam has consistently been mischaracterized in terms of its crucial long term dimensions. In other words, most commentary understandably focuses on Western concerns about the negative impact of the GWOT on the West. Democrats want to "stop the war" in order to save our economy or defeat the "arrogant mindset" that sees military might as the only way to resolve disputes. Republicans want to "win the war" in order to minimize the risk of an attack exponentially greater than 9/11. Few commentators seem to recognize that the outcome of American involvement in Iraq is no longer primarily about us. At this point the theater in Iraq and its short to medium term outcome is of exponentially greater significance to the Arab world than to the West.
Some historical perspective can be useful. Coincidentally, while working my way through Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold, I picked up a copy of Barry Rubin's The Long War for Freedom. The thesis of both books is remarkably complimentary. Mead sets out to explore how the history of the Anglosphere led to a specific facility and comfort with the revolutionary creative destruction of capitalism, ie systematized change:
(pp. 14-15) The book finds the roots of this aptitude for capitalism in the way the British Reformation created a pluralistic society that was at once unusually tolerant, unusually open to new ideas, and unusually pious. In most of the world the traditional values of religion are seen as deeply opposed to the utilitarian goals of capitalism. The English-speaking world - contrary to the intentions of almost all of the leading actors of the period - reached a new kind of religious equilibrium in which capitalism and social change came to be accepted as good things. In much of the world even today, people believe that they remain most true to their religious and cultural roots by rejecting change. Since the seventeenth century, the English-speaking world or at least significant chunks of it have believed that embracing and even furthering and accelerating change - economic change, social change, cultural change, political change - fulfills their religious destiny.
Mead does an excellent job supporting his thesis and his descriptions of the long, bloody battles involving the Anglosphere that eventually lead to a stable, though dynamic, modus operandi between various absolutes, whether religious, ideological, or even the absolute primacy of reason, are well structured and sourced.
Barry Rubin, on the other hand, illuminates the struggle of a small, intrepid, and extremely brave cohort of Arab liberals, to help usher the Middle East into a modern world that accepts change and questions orthodoxy:
(pp. 7-8) There is a battle raging within the Arab world whose outcome is of the utmost importance for the entire globe. This struggle between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism, modernity and stagnation, is not different in kind from the titanic conflicts that have shaped the lives of many other lands. But the specific Middle Eastern version of such events is also quite distinct from what happened elsewhere.
What is going on in the Middle East today is part of the great, centuries-long transition wrought by secularism, industrialization, democratization, urbanization, globalization, and all the other historic changes that have shaped the modern world everywhere on the planet. Indeed the struggle over the Middle East may be the last of these great battles over alternative futures. Within each country, the issue has been what kind of society and polity would prevail there. On every continent, the regional question to be resolved was whether a single country, leader, or ideology could dominate that vast landmass or even, using it as a base, the entire world.
For example, Europe's political, social, and ideological throes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to international tidal waves that carried violence to every corner of the planet. Three world wars, including the Cold War, as well as fascism and communism, arose in the strife of that great debate over how people should and would live their lives.
Compared to Europe's upheavals, such catastrophic events as September 11 and the three wars emanating from Iraq are mere ripples. But the great battle over what system and worldview will dominate the Middle East is happening now, and this struggle will probably be our era's central drama.
One way to frame the current war between radical Islam and the modern world, as well as the civil war within Islam, is to place it in context and acknowledge the similarities between the historical struggle toward liberalism in the Anglosphere and the current struggle for (and against) liberalism in the Arab world.
[My series on The Arab Mind is an attempt to understand those forces within the Arab world which influence character development and support those forces working against modernity within the Arab world.]
The most significant difference, beyond cultural impediments, and the combination of religious and political totalitarianism, is the different time frames involved. The Arab world is facing the daunting prospect of doing what took untold amounts of blood and treasure spent over three hundred years for the Anglosphere, in the space of a mere generation or two. The reason they have so little time in which to evolve and join the modern world is suggested by the concatenation of the three lines of inquiry I mentioned above.
Consider this news item from Israel:
Defense Officials: Forget lasers, we're sticking with Iron Dome
The Defense Ministry stands behind its decision to develop the Iron Dome missile defense system and appears to not plan to purchase the Skyguard laser system under development by Northrop Grumman in the United States, senior defense officials said Thursday.
The Iron Dome system uses projectiles (ie, bullets) to destroy short range rockets and mortar rounds as opposed to the high tech laser system that is still under development and not yet close to deployment. Yet Iron Dome is itself an example of the triumph of high tech. The salient point is that the networked complex of computerized radar and computer directed firing that makes up Iron Dome and operates with minimal human intervention, will in short order provide increased protection for Israeli population centers from Gazan rockets. Once the technology is "good enough", it is a trivial matter to extend the protection to the north of Israel. It only requires incremental improvements to increase the effectiveness, range, and stopping ability of the system.
Israel has found ways, both high tech and low tech, to stop the once highly effective technique of suicide bombing that was used to such tragic effect during the intifada. Iron Dome promises to further disarm Hamas and in conjunction with targeted slaying of Hamas leaders, who despite their avowed desire to die as martyrs would prefer to delay their glorious martyrdom as long as possible while hastening the martyrdom of their more expendable followers, may effectively end the resistance from Gaza within a matter of months to years.
(I do not pretend to be able to forecast the immediate future. I do not know if Israel will yet need to re-occupy Gaza, but if Iron Dome works as it appears to, a defensive perimeter would be far preferable to sacrificing untold numbers of young Israelis in the service of fighting a war and resuming an occupation that the international community will certainly find inadequately humane and proportional.)
Iron Dome is just one more sign that for the Arab world, the technological singularity is already destroying their chances for victory against their hated enemies. In the last part of my five part series on The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part V, I discussed this in some detail:
On another level, the increasing rate of change in systems means that a society that is behind the curve will have almost no chance of ever catching up. In military terms, this means that a nation whose technology is ahead will be able to disarm or destroy an adversary with decreasing cost as time goes by. While those who are anti-War tout the figures for American deaths and injuries in Iraq, the fact is that our Military forces are much more lethal and targeted than in past wars and our casualties have been extremely low in historical terms. This has everything to do with the increasing integration of high tech into our military, a process that accelerates during war time. Our current forces fight with smart bombs and missiles, with UAVs supplying real time surveillance, and increasingly networked units in the field. Within a few years, our surveillance nets will be composed of flights of mechanical "sparrows", "snakes" and "ferrets" on the ground, and "eels" patrolling the seas, all connected to make a seamless map of the battle space, and our troops will fight with smart bullets. A generation or two later, the "sparrows" will be "mosquitoes", the "snakes" centipedes, and the "eels" minnows; yet another generation or three and our surveillance nets will be complete, composed of smart dust, some of which could easily be designed to be lethal to our enemies, covering every square inch of the battle space. Insurgencies, as currently composed in Iraq, will be even more futile than this one and will be destroyed almost as soon as they show their effects. The smart dust may be 20-30 years down the road, but it is coming; the smart "sparrows" and smart bullets are much closer.
From both a military and economic point of view, Islamic fascism is doomed in the long run. Whether they are conscious of these developments or not, they cannot escape the knowledge that the tide of history is against them. They also know that only by bringing the rest of the world down to their level can they hope to remain relevant. The race is now between the Iranians obtaining nuclear weapons and the West obtaining the technological means to disarm the Iranians. This is why any air assault on Iran must be sure of putting their program back enough years to allow us to reach the next stages of technological development without a catastrophic counter-attack from Iran and its agents.
During the brief period of optimism following the Oslo accords, Israel welcomed the Palestinians into the modern world. Business ventures between Israelis and Palestinians sprung up overnight. The Palestinians, while well behind the Israelis, were offered access to a modern economy, the possibility of enriching themselves and their nation, and ultimately, a nation of their own. The first intifada destroyed those possibilities. However, it was only with the second intifada that the Israelis made the painful decision to finally separate from the Palestinians. The fence and wall between Israel and Gaza and the analogous fence and wall between Israel and the West Bank is more than anything else a psychic separation. If the Palestinians cannot agree to play by minimally acceptable rules of civilized behavior, they cannot become part of the modern world. Israel, far ahead technologically and with their technological lead expanding by the day, is becoming more and more effective at quarantining themselves from the infection of Palestinian hate. The Palestinians direct their ingenuity at finding novel ways to kill innocent Israelis, but when their greatest triumph is the murder of 8 unarmed students, most of whom are children, their ability to actually "win" is laughable.
And that is the message for the rest of the Arab world conveyed by our presence in Iraq. Perhaps we invaded for many of the wrong reasons, and certainly our implementation was poor at times; yet despite all our missteps, the Iraqi people, in the heartland of the Arab Middle East, still have been given what will probably be their last opportunity to join the modern world. Iraq may yet descend back into the morass of Arab totalitarianisms, whether religious or ideological; even if it successfully transitions to a more open, tolerant, liberal society, the rest of the Arab and Muslim world may not take advantage of the opening offered. Yet the alternative is that the Arab world becomes Gaza writ large, a Nation of several hundred million, walled off like a deadly infection from the civilized modern world. They will still, for the foreseeable future, have enough money from their oil to buy whatever toys and goodies the West can offer, but they will continue to be parasites on the global economy, shunned by civilized peoples, and left to stew in their own hatreds. It is not the West that depends on Iraq succeeding, it is the Arab world.
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