You see time, time is our friend
Jonathan Pearse responds to my maunderings of the other night:
My main problem with Jim’s argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that’s putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view – if I can presume to call it that – should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again – and Jim and others have to answer this question – does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian “leave-well-alone” foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel’s actions in Lebanon . . .
So my question is, why the long face? Why might the process of inspiring more liberal values in the Muslim world take “thousands of years?” The dual strategy of deterrence and visibly living well took less than a century to bring down militarized socialism. Already, and this is too often forgotten, it is a mere rump of Muslim societies that can bestir themselves to actually wage violent Jihad, folks two standard deviations from the mean of their societies. It’s only at the actual flashpoints of contact with “Western” militaries that any significant portion of the local Ummah involves itself in violence and/or terror – Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza, the Kashmir, Chechnya. Lebanon is in the mix right now because of the aftershocks of a long series of interventions by everyone from France and Israel to Syria.
The history of the nationalist Right since the Cold War shows that a prominent strain of it has surprisingly little faith in its own side. The “long twilight struggle” people during the Cold War believed that the West was too weak, too decadent, that the triumph of the cold hard legions of Communism was, alas, inevitable. Their Bible was Jean-Francois Revel’s How Democracies Perish, but Revel’s book merely crystallized ideas that were commonplace throughout the gloomier quarters of the Right. The West achieved its final victory over the Soviets before How Democracies Perish had time to be remaindered. The gloomy Right was wrong then and they’re wrong now.
Who was right? Ronald Reagan, actually. He was convinced the West was about to win the Cold War because the West had a better product: (what passes for) Liberty. We still (barely) do.
I should note there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in Jonathan’s worry that it could take “thousands of years” for the greater Muslim Middle East to get with the liberal program. A lot of paleocon isolationists have argued that the attempt to impose liberalism on the region by force was doomed to fail because “democracy” was culturally alien to the region. Hawks from the President on down have argued that this attitude is “racist,” that the critics are saying “brown people don’t deserve democracy” or don’t love freedom. I am pretty sure that Samizdata has agreed with this response in the past. That seems at odds with the idea that it could take “thousands of years” for the Ummah to embrace liberalism absent the cleansing fire of military force. You have to have an awful lot of faith in the transformative power of government violence to hold both thoughts in mind.
Osirak is a side issue here. One thing you can say about the Israeli raid on Osirak is that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the US campaign to remake Iraq’s polity through invasion and occupation. I honestly don’t know if Osirak did any real good. By 1991, post-OsirakIraq was quite far along with its nuclear program. Had Saddam Hussein not invited closer inspection with his Glorious Adventure in Kuwait, Iraq may have had nukes a bare decade after Osirak. But supposing it counts as a success, it stands comparatively as a limited use of force for limited objectives. The US doctrine of prophylactic war’s closest analog in Israeli behavior is probably Israel’s early-1980s attempt to bomb Lebanon friendly. That didn’t work out well for anybody, including the US and Israelis. Even there there are important differences. Wrongheaded as I think Sharon’s Lebanon plan was, it was at least in direct response to continuing attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory. It wasn’t “preemptive” or even preventive, but responsive.
The adventurist Right holds two simultaneous attitudes in uneasy conjunction. One is “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” – a boundless belief in the power of military might, will and “resolve” to remake the world. The other is a complete lack of faith in the durability of the social institutions and cultural capital of America and the West. The latter attitude leads to “How Democracies Perish” and stabs in the back and the general conviction that the West – still soft, still decadent – isn’t up to the task of outlasting its enemies.
I don’t believe that. (For that matter, I think the twin ideas above have only a vestigial hold on Jonathan.) I think liberal society is deeply attractive. It doesn’t surprise me that it penetrates different regions of the world at different rates. It expect it will take the tincture of local culture wherever it reaches. I don’t for a moment think that, disentangled from military domination, it will take so long to win over Muslim society that we get destroyed in the meantime. The West is vastly more powerful than militant Islam could even hope to be and will remain so.
Comment by Hesiod —
July 15, 2006 @ 12:40 pm
How about a model of military intervention in other countries that tracks 1st amendment jurisprudence in the US?
For the Gvt to infringe on someone’s 1st amendment rights, its action must be ”narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest.” Usually a ”compelling state interest” is protecting another fundamental right, such as the right to vote. Or, to prevent armed insurrection, life, or limb etc.
So, if we apply this model to foreign interventiins it would be something like this:
”A narrowly tailored military action designed to protect a compellimg national interest.”
And ”compelling national intersts” could be defined as ”protecting our right to exist, and to protect the lives of our citizens.” It may also be extended, perhaps, to protecting ”the right to exist or lives of treaty allies.”
I know it’s not exactly libertarian in outlook. But I’m not a libertarian. I am just trying to come up with some workeable framwork that liberals and libertarians can live with.
Thus, Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor would certainly qualify as ”narrowly tailored military action.” But whether it was designed to ”protect a compelling national interest,” is a seperate question subject to some debate. I say, probably yes it was.
Comment by Elkhart —
July 15, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
Whether bombing Osirak ”counts as a success” is a pretty big supposition, not to mention an ugly barometer, one we’d never allow ”enemies” to use in justifying their actions…
’The little evidence we have – serious evidence – indicates that the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor probably stimulated and may have initiated the Iraqi nuclear weapons development program…If you come out and say, ”Look, we’re going to attack you,” and countries know that they have no means of conventional defense, you’re virtually ordering them to develop weapons of mass destruction and networks of terror. It’s transparent. That’s exactly why the CIA and everyone else predicted it.’
http://www.justresponse.net/Imperial_ambition.html
Comment by Jennifer —
July 15, 2006 @ 6:58 pm
When you portray the battle as one of ”militant Islam” versus ”the West” then our eventual victory seems assured. But sometimes in my gloomier moments I wonder if it isn’t really ”structure” (for lack of a better word) versus ”entropy.”
You’ve got a house, right? And you can prevent that structure from being claimed by entropy, but it takes constant effort on your part. Make those repairs. Replace that missing roof shingle. Kill those termites. Apply new paint. Floodwaters are coming–better fill those sandbags!
For entropy to win it doesn’t have to do anything–all it has to do is wait you out. If you stop making efforts, or if you make the wrong efforts, entropy wins. If you paint your house when you should be filling the sandbags, or fill sandbags when a fire’s headed your way, entropy still wins despite your hard work.
I worry that the West in general has been making a lot of the wrong efforts. The EU isn’t building its economic or military strength as it should because it’s trying to build the perfect state where every citizen is perfectly safe and in optimal health at all times. America’s ignoring its real threats to go after anything from Iraq to gays. Israel’s going after Lebanon as a whole rather than the small fragment of it responsible for its troubles. Why are we all so easily distracted?
I have no idea if this was a worthwhile comment or proof I shouldn’t post when drunk and feeling blue. If the latter I apologize to all.
Comment by BruceR —
July 16, 2006 @ 1:22 am
Actually, Jennifer, all the reporters I’d trust in Beirut are saying the Israeli attacks have been pretty tightly targetted on Shiite neighborhoods and other areas that are strongly pro-Hezbollah. Of course, that’s a pretty big target set, and growing, but there it is.
Jim, not that you’re wrong about the fear of the stab in the back, but it might be a little more rational than you make it sound, because in the mind of your current leadership term limits have already set the date for the stab. If things stay as they are currently, the present Middle East policy has exactly 30 more months to bear fruit, for whatever happens after that can only, at present, be a climbdown by comparison. There is no candidate, at present, who is *more* bellicose than the current office-holder.
Which means, if you’re on the right, you have more or less those 30 months to either straighten the entire Middle East out forever, or fundamentally shift the American political dynamic so that the Bush position becomes the middle road so the next office holder can launch into the next phase. Another domestic mass-casualty terrorist attack might shift public opinion sufficiently, of course, but Bin Laden may not be quite so obliging as that. So far, tarring war critics as being against Western culture is the best idea they’ve come up with, but they’ll think of something else soon enough.
Comment by Barry —
July 16, 2006 @ 4:22 pm
Jennifer, that’s a bit odd, and really just a minor variation on the theme of ’we have no will! we are too soft!’. Just in case you haven’t noticed, *the West* is the militarily dominant group here. As has been pointed out before by Jim, *we* have fleets on *their* coasts, not the other way around. *We* have armies in *their* countries.
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
July 17, 2006 @ 2:59 am
Thanks for the response Jim. I don’t think I was being overly gloomy here, although maybe my timeframe is too long. The parallel with the fall of the Soviet Empire and what might transpire now does not quite fit, as far as I can tell from where I am standing. Whatever else it was, Communism and All That pretended to be a rational creed. (It wasn’t of course, but I take it that we would agree on that). But that is how it was sold. Socialism was ”inevitable”, it was ”scientific”, etc. I doubt that most islamists would argue in the same way. They want to go to heaven. The afterlife is what counts. And it is pretty difficult to defeat such a worldview in the same way that the worldview of a materialist value system like Marxism got defeated.
Maybe I am being too gloomy. I hope you are correct, Jim; I think that we need to do more to show how ”soft power” can effect change, including in the case of the Middle East.
brgds
Comment by Jennifer —
July 17, 2006 @ 1:47 pm
”Jennifer, that’s a bit odd, and really just a minor variation on the theme of ’we have no will! we are too soft!’.”
No; I meant it more as ”we’re too easily distracted by bugaboos that aren’t an actual threat.” Based on what Congress has been concerning itself with, I must conclude that the following are the biggest threats currently facing our country: gay people, flammable flags, bad words on television, and baseball players who use steroids.
Comment by Barry —
July 17, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
Jennifer, that’s what Congress is waving in front of people’s heads, in order to distract them.
Comment by washerdreyer —
July 17, 2006 @ 4:50 pm
But Jonathan, the goal isn’t to make people give up on Islam the way it was to make people give up on Communism. Communism, even ideologically, isn’t consistent with a democratically elected right’s respecting government (this is an arguable, but I think correct, point). Islam is qualitatively different, i think.
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July 20, 2006 @ 10:51 pm
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July 29, 2006 @ 5:21 pm
Green Lantern?
I saw this quote on a friend’s blog: …The adventurist Right holds two simultaneous attitudes in uneasy conjunction. One is “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” – a boundless belief in the power of military might, will and “re…