Thursday, April 15, 2004
An emailer asked for my impressions of the following article from the American Spectator. It's basically the pessimist's view - that efforts to bring democracy to Iraq, or frankly any Muslim nation, are doomed to failure despite our best efforts and intentions. The points it brings up are interesting and troubling. While the questions it raises are nothing new, it may be time to revisit them again.
The American Spectator: Call It a Democracy and the Hell With It By William Tucker
First the author uses an illustration culled from the history of the Peloponnesian War to warn us against imperial adventure and overstretch. This is the quagmire argument without use of the word. Then, on into the real meat of the thing. This author is no Bush hater, or even paleo-con on the lookout for "Likudnik influence." No, he supported the invasion to remove Saddam and find the WMD. It's just that now that that's done, he wants to warn against fantasy hopes of utopian democratic futures.
This is an illusion. But that shouldn't surprise us. All wars begin with such illusions.
During the entire era of the Crusades, Western Europe lived with the illusion that it was seeking Prester John, a mythical Christian emperor on the other side of Araby who was waiting to link up with the Crusading armies. When we started the Spanish-American War, it was in part to rescue Evangelina Cisneros, a young woman who -- according to the Hearst newspapers, at least -- was being raped and tortured in a Havana jail. Napoleon thought he was liberating Russia when he arrived in Moscow. Some wars are worth pursuing, some not. We obviously shouldn't have quit in the middle of World War II or the American Civil War, but that doesn't mean every war is worth expanding. If we are really involved in a 100-year War on Terror -- which we probably are -- the question becomes: Do we want to expend everything we have right here and now?
The notion that we should get rid of Saddam Hussein was not a romantic illusion. Everyone except a few die-hard Baathists are happy to see him gone and the world is safer as a result.
The question now is whether we can seriously hope to create a democratic society in Iraq? Everything -- absolutely everything -- tells us that this is a romantic illusion...
Then follows a highly negative recap of "where we stand now" with a dismissive flick of the hand to the idea that if we just stick it out, that if we just continue to exercise our will, we can't help but achieve our goals.
What I really found interesting was Tucker's analysis on one of the main sources of Islam's dysfunction: polygamy. Quoted at length:
What is "reproductive equality"? It revolves around that core value of Western culture -- monogamy -- as opposed to that old "heathen" custom, polygamy.
Islam is the only major world religion that sanctions polygamy. Mohammad allowed his followers to have four wives (the same number he had). About 12 percent of marriages in Moslem countries are polygamous. This is not as bad as East and West Africa, where successful men often take more than a hundred wives and where almost 30 percent of marriages can be polygamous. But the solid core of polygamy at the heart of Islamic culture is enough to produce its menacing social effects.
What are those effects? Do the math. Into every society is born approximately the same number of boys and girls. If they pair off in monogamous fashion, then each one will have a mate -- "a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl." In polygamous societies this does not occur. When successful men can accumulate more than one wife, that means some other man gets none. As a result, the unavoidable outcome is a hard-core residue of unattached men who have little or no prospect of achieving a family life.
The inevitable outcome is that competition among males becomes much more fierce and intense. Mating is an all-or-nothing proposition. Women become a scarce resource that must be hoarded and veiled and banned from public places so they cannot drift away through spontaneous romances. Men who are denied access to these hoarded women have only one option -- they can band together and try to fight their way into the seats of power.
AND THAT IS WHAT happens, endlessly. The entire history of Islam is a story of superfluous males going off into the desert (literally or figuratively) and deciding that the religion being practiced by the well-furnished elites of the cities is "not the true Islam." They then burst back upon the cities, violently attempting to overthrow the established authority. The Shi'ites, the Wahabis, the Assassins (yes, that's the origin of the word), the Muslim Brotherhood -- all are the fruit of this eternal warfare in Moslem societies between the "ins" and the "outs."
The only defense Islam has been able to construct for itself is to recruit these unattached males, inculcate them into the religion, and convince them that if they turn their violence and sexual frustrations outward¸ they will be rewarded with "70 virgins in heaven." This is how the ranks of martyrs and suicide bombers are created.
Martyrs and suicide bombers are men who have internalized the fundamental axiom of polygamous society -- that some men are expendable. When Muslim warriors proclaim, "We love death," they are not kidding. Golda Meir said famously that the Palestinian conflict would end when Arabs loved their own children more than they hated Israelis. That moment is not likely to arrive any time soon. In a polygamous Islamic society, some men's lives have very little intrinsic value. They are literally better off seeking death.
Monogamy, on the other hand, fulfills the proclamation that "All Men Are Created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Monogamy is the social contract -- albeit poorly understood and little appreciated -- that lies at the heart of the relatively peaceful societies of Europe and the Orient.
It is no accident that Islam has "bloody borders" with both these civilizations. We practice different social customs that give human life very different values. If the UN wanted to something really useful, it would declare reproductive equality a "human right" and ban polygamy throughout the world. Don't hold your breath.
In the meantime, do we really want to get in a spitting fight with these people? The military used to warn about "land war in Asia" -- getting into a war of attrition with overpopulated countries that didn't mind sacrificing millions and "had no respect for human life." Well Islamic societies are worse. They are constantly throwing up "suicide brigades" of young martyrs and fanatics who literally welcome death...
I find that a very intriguing theory.
What is Tucker's prescription? Declare victory and depart the field. We got what we needed, now let's get out. Leave the Muslims to do what they want. If they want us to stay, or to help them in any way...sure, no problem. We'll do it, but they - through the exercise of some sort of plebiscite - have to ask us for it. Until then...well, just don't make us come back.
What do I think of all this? My crystal ball is on the blink right now, so I really don't know how this all turns out. Is Tucker right? That Islam is incompatible with democracy and the Middle East is doomed to backwardness for a long time to come, or do we come down more on the Bernard Lewis side of things - that democracy can happen, that there is enough of a secular middle class in Iraq to balance out the totalitarians.
Here's what I know. For the time being, we're committed. This debate has been had already, and the isolationists and the pessimists who believe the Arab World is of a piece and can't change have lost in favor of those who believe that change is necessary if we're to avoid that 100 Years War on Terror the author mentions (hereafter referred to as the "positivists"). Tucker warns that Athens overreached and fatally weakened itself in its war with Sparta, but here's what else I know: At our future path's worst, a few hundred billion dollars, and even a few thousand combat deaths (God forbid) aren't going to bring this country down. It's simply not. We're too big for that.
Let me counter one Peloponnesian War example with another. Athens had an impregnable wall to protect it, while the Spartans built no walls at all, thinking they represented paving on the path to weakness. The Spartans understood that victory meant more than just not losing - that in order to remain strong, and in order to triumph, their society and each individual in it needed to remain strong and responsible, and that the keys to victory lay outside the city walls, not within them.
That's what we're doing in Iraq right now. We've been sitting back and imagining that our walls will protect us. Some of us are so deluded that we haven't even been willing to acknowledge that a war has been ongoing. Look, if it doesn't work, we can always declare victory and depart the field. America is not going to die of overexertion and heat prostration trying to bring secular civil society to Iraq and Afghanistan. If true reconstruction can't happen there, it's best to find that out now, while it's still early in the game. Because if reconstruction and the birth of secular consensual civil society can't happen in a predominantly Muslim/Arab country, then we truly are looking down the barrel of a very long, and likely very bloody Clash of Civilizations. This will all end up as part of an early learning experience of what works in fighting that war. Better to get it on the table now, rather than later, after we really have been worn down.
By taking a high-stakes, high-cost (but not bankruptcy risking) gamble, we may be able to shorten the war. Either way, there is little to be lost in the long run.
Islam takes the long view of war by dividing the world into the House of Islam (the Islamic nations - Dar al Islam) and the House of War (everyone else - a free-fire zone for Islam - Dar al Harb). So, slowly they expand the borders of Dar al Islam. George Bush seeks to take the fight to the enemy by going on the offense, not just through the gun, but by increasing the borders of the House of Freedom, and setting it right down in the middle of the enemy's house. That is the only way to achieve long term victory - by going on the attack - not just with guns and bombs, but with our way of life as the instrument. That is, after all, the strongest weapon we have.
Let me take a moment aside for another example. Not long ago I read a collection of Science Fiction stories from the 1950's. One of the tales was one of those typical post-apocalyptic visions of a society completely broken by War. Every man for himself. Society back to the Iron Age. Rifle ammunition a scarce and valuable commodity. The protagonist was an American airman who found himself living in a small Russian farming community. One day, that community was attacked, like in days of old, by a horde of horsemen - nomadic bandits of the steppes. Short story even shorter - in Magnificent Seven fashion, or hero won the day, protecting the village from the marauders.
But that wasn't the end of the story. You see, he knew that the horsemen would be back. The nomads could go out, rebuild their strength at leisure, find guns, ammunition, allies and resources. All the while, our hero's community would be sitting in place. A known position, a known quantity. Expanding their capacities at a pitiful rate compared to their opponents. In the end the decision was made, the only decision possible, to pack up the community and make a run for the mountains.
They had to quit. They had to take the gamble on running because they may have won the battle, but the war was far from over and they knew it would return to them at a time not of their choosing. They didn't have the resources to take the fight to their enemy and finish it.
We do.
9/11 taught us that oceans don't protect us as well as they used to. Even primitive cultures are capable of hijacking the technology of the modern age and using it against us. Just as gunpowder made the city wall a relic of the past, so too have modern weapons rendered the wide-waters, the great navies and air forces into modern Maginot Lines waiting to be circumvented and scoffed at. In these days when chemical weapons can be cooked up in a cave by people who are anxious to die, and substances capable of killing millions can be created in secret facilities by governments who pretend to be our friends (or worse, don't pretend to be our friends but know we won't do anything about it anyway), we will not be able to simply sit behind our walls and send some bombers or missiles out to destroy our enemies. We will need boots on the ground to literally dig through the dirt and uproot the supply and support system.
That means bases in the area of need to react with, and bases require the political support of their host countries, and that means the political reality on the ground has both long-term (political-reality changes) and short-term (projection of hard power) impact.
One way or another, we must engage the enemy, and we must do so in an active manner. If reconstruction doesn't work, if Islam and Arab Tribalism mean that the Middle East is too primitive to ever morph into something resembling Western Liberalism no matter what steps we take, then we can always move on to Plan B. But before we do that, we must give Plan A our all, for if it fails, it will have failed for a long, long time to come. The American People will have little patience or charity left for that part of the world. I tell you even now that if we feel sufficiently threatened by Syria or Iran to use overt force against them, we will feel little obligation to expend billions re-building them when we're done. How much worse then, if, after all we have done and are going to do, we fail in Iraq, how much worse the future will be. We will be far more likely to simply sit back from afar and hammer our enemies until we no longer feel any threat from them. We will be less careful and more brutal. We will come in with maximum force, search for and neutralize threats as we wish and then leave in a manner that pleases us and opens our troops to the minimum of danger.
No one I have ever met possesses a crystal ball of any reliability, and there are plenty of people will very big brains who disagree on the future's potential. We cannot know the results of Plan A until we have given it our maximum effort. We owe it to ourselves, and the world, to do so. The alternative is dark.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mccarthy200404151450.asp
The entirety of that post is just excellent. All the points made are reasonable points, both from the referenced article that was quoted and your the additions. It may be a conflict measured in years, decades or even a century or more. We simply don't know the future, but that certainly doesn't mean we should passively wait for some fate to overcome us, to the contrary. And given that we will need to attempt some offensive measures (diplomatically, militarily, etc.), we also need to acknowledge none of them will be executed with utter perfection and they certainly won't be executed without costs.
Also, each situation is sui generis. So we cannot simply assume, pace Turkey, that because it occured there we can institute it in Iraq without paying the price and measuring the costs, without applying both wisdom and the will to see it through to the end. Similarly though, it also means we cannot simply assume it will fail, e.g. Britain in Iraq, early 1920s.
Each situation requires its own measure. This generation will fail or succeed depending upon both the wisdom and vision it applies and the strength it invests in support of that vision. We'll have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off a few times, because perfection is rarely achieved, but the point is to carry through with some responsible, this-worldly faith to a fruitful end.
At any rate, my own grandiloquence aside, it's a good post that reflects many of the considerations that all need to be taken into account, there is no one size fits all solution and there is no solution without costs and risk/reward balancing acts whose outcomes can be known in advance.