An Uncertain Hour
With the Assad regime in Damascus slowly but surely deflating James Linville asks what happens next, citing an article by Telegraph journalist Con Coughlin. Coughlin refers to “western intelligence officials” who claim that the Ayatollah Khamenei now accepts that Assad’s fall may be inevitable and has ordered a retaliatory plan drawn up. “The report, which was personally commissioned by Mr Khamenei, concluded … Iran ‘cannot be passive’ to the new threats posed to its national security, and warns that Western support for Syrian opposition groups was placing Iran’s “resistance alliance” in jeopardy, and could seriously disrupt Iran’s access to Hizbollah in Lebanon.”
But Khamenei’s threat seems hollow on the face of things. Iran’s unconventional warfare reach is limited. It’s conventional miltary power, while dangerous, is nowhere close America’s. What Iran might be able to export — but which the Syrian civil war is manufacturing faster than the Revolutionary Guard — is chaos. Spengler, writing in the Asia Times, thinks chaos is the leading ideology in the Arab Spring. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that all leaders want security and stability Spengler thinks that Morsi sees an opportunity in trouble. And why not? With Egypt throwing away every chance to pull itself out of an economic hole it may be rational to believe that Mori thinks chaos is an opportunity.
American analysts had assumed that Egypt’s massive need for external aid would keep Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood on Washington’s leash. On the contrary, the Brotherhood indicated its intent to benefit from economic chaos months ago, as I wrote in this space last April (see Muslim Brotherhood chooses chaos, Asia Times Online, April 11, 2012). Now the gravity of the situation is beginning to sink in.
“Just two months after coming to power, Morsi is pursuing a rapprochement with Tehran and articulating a newfound ambition to jettison billions in US foreign assistance dollars and financing from Western financial institutions,” wrote David Schenker and Christina Lin in the April 24 Los Angeles Times.
The State Department may have forgotten the famous words of Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s butler. “Some people just want to watch the world burn.”
But do they have enough matches? Hanin Ghadar, writing in the New York Times, says that Asad and Iran have been trying to set fire to the region for some time. The malice is there, but the means are lacking. “The Syrian government has tried many times to transfer its crisis to Lebanon, but it has failed to cause a real explosion that would lead to another Lebanese civil war.”
Hezbollah’s growing impotence was demonstrated when the Lebanese government arrested a man widely known as the Mouth of Assad in Lebanon: “Bashar al-Assad’s friend and adviser, the former Lebanese information minister Michel Samaha.” Instead of exerting pressure for his release Hezbollah remained sulkily quiescent. Why? Because while “Mr. Assad may not yet realize that he is a dead man walking, but Hezbollah does”. They didn’t want to be part of Samaha’s pyre just then. But as James Linville notes, it’s a matter of time. The fall of a Middle Eastern dictator doesn’t necessarily mean the end of dictatorship, it often just signifies the mere replacement of one thug by another. “The thug is dead, long live the thug.”
If the good news is that Assad is doomed; the bad news is this in no wise implies that liberty is alive. An Egypt now freed from the clutches of Mubarak can look forward to the depredations of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s on the way, in Spengler’s words, to being “North Korea on the Nile” where nothing is for sale except trouble.
Nobody can see a way to write a happy ending to this story. Lee Smith writes that the principal difference between the Romney and Obama foreign policies is that Romney isn’t obstinately obstructive. The former Governor sees no downside to letting Israel try to save itself while the Obama administration sees no downside to doing nothing.
During Romney’s trip to Israel last month, campaign adviser Dan Senor said: “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision.” …
The Obama Administration says its policy is not to deter and contain an Iranian nuclear weapons program but to prevent it. But that’s just what they’re saying. What they believe surely must be something else. If the United States was able to contain and deter the Soviets, we can certainly do the same with a crummy little third-world regime like Iran’s. Or perhaps American policymakers just see it like this: If we take military action against Iran, the likeliest scenario is a region-wide war and an Iranian terror campaign against the United States and its allies, especially Israel. If we do nothing, the worst-case scenario is that emboldened Iranian action leads to a region-wide war and global terror. Common sense tells you that if someone believes he will get the same results by doing nothing and doing something, then he will choose the path of least resistance, by doing nothing.
In revolutionary times there is no stable condition into which failing states can collapse. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the obvious place to fall was toward Western liberal democracy. That was the ‘natural state’. It was tendency so pronounced that some writers declared that the End of History had come. The ‘natural’ resting place is signally lacking in the Middle East. Thus there are no color revolutions in the region, just turmoil with the trappings of it. The reason there are no waypoints is that the international framework which formerly provided the navigation is itself in crisis.
The topology of history is going through one its periodic renewals. James V. DeLong points out there is actually an upheaval at the very center of the world system: a crisis of legitimacy in the United States. Apart from its particulars it is no different from the storms now buffeting Europe and the international financial system. DeLong writes:
Across many decades, my mind’s eye sees Professor Samuel Beer pacing the lecture hall stage at Harvard, talking about the accession of Henry II to the throne of England in 1154 and the end of 20 years of anarchy …
Throughout the year, the class time travels to societies in crisis over legitimacy: From the England of Henry II to its long revolution of 1640 to 1688 to the American Revolution in 1776, the French and Russian Revolutions of 1789 and 1917, and Weimar Germany as Hitler comes to power in 1933.
In each instance, a government has forfeited its claim to obedience and loyalty—at least in the view of a significant portion of its subjects—and has broken down. The questions are: Why? And what comes next?
The ‘why’ is easier to answer than ‘what comes next’. In DeLong’s analysis America — and by extension the West — has been destabilized by the ‘breakout’ of government. The original grand bargain underlying America was that government should never become so big that one faction could use it to impose its will upon the others. Like Lebanon or Syria, no sect should become so powerful that it could threaten the others. Once that balance had been upset there was no easy way back.
It has taken some time, but the result has been predictable. Once the overall principle was broken, the system turned into a chaotic war in which interests fight for pieces of power and control. … The political culture has evolved to the point where anyone who declines to push for special favors is regarded as a fool, and systemic corruption is accepted as the normal and inevitable way of doing political business …
All the talk of the government needing power to solve national problems or to fix the healthcare system, the housing market, the financial world, or anything else is only blather to obscure the determination of the special interests to gain and defend their turf. Yet still they come, fighting their way to the trough, arguing that more than 60 percent of GDP is not enough and that the “welfare state” requires still more if it is to achieve cosmic justice.
Gallup and Rasmussen are telling us that the Founders were right to posit that a breakdown of the limits of government would cause a breakdown of consent. In response to the question of whether the current government has the consent of the governed, only 22 percent of likely voters say “yes.” The partisan divide is marked; Democrats split evenly, but only 8 percent of Republicans say yes. These are scary numbers, particularly when one considers that many of the “no consent” Democrats are probably on the left, denying the legitimacy of a government that does not do more for them. Also scary is that the political establishments of both parties seem oblivious.
So Beer’s time-traveling students would have little trouble deciding that the United States has a legitimacy crisis. They could produce competent term papers on how it arose. The big question, of course, is what happens next. That is indeterminable. Unstable political arrangements often continue for a long time, until some crisis pushes them over the edge. France faced severe fiscal problems in 1789, and Russia’s tsars might still be with us if they had avoided the strains of World War I. So the United States might be pushed into full-blown chaos only by serious fiscal dysfunction or some national security disaster. Unfortunately, neither of these possibilities appears remote.
In time a new equilibrium will be found. A new Grand Bargain will be reached. But in the meantime the direct consequence of the crisis in the West is that it has made it impossible for it to reimpose order in the East. Whereas in 1989 nearly every former Soviet bloc country wanted to become like the West, today not even the West wants to be like the West. The EU is probably done for. Paul Ryan at the Republican national convention pledged to work toward limiting the expenditures of Federal Government to 20% of the economic output.
It will be as easy to contain government as to contain Iran. DeLong writes that he can’t see a clear path out of the woods. All history teaches that there are likely to be a lot of brambles along the way.
The urgent question is how to find a road back to stability and consent without going through a crisis and consequent upheaval. This is a mystery, since the set of societies that have faced and surmounted legitimacy crises without turmoil is a limited one. In later years, Beer added to his syllabus the topic of the great reform acts in England during the 19th century, but that example seems almost unique. Most societies must endure considerable pain.
That sad observation applies especially to the drama in the Middle East. There’s no resting place, no consensus model for societies in aftermath of upheaval unless one counts the theocratic prescriptions of the Saudis or the Ayatollahs. But the sad prospect also applies to the West which has been betrayed by the pat answers of the last twenty years. The only way to find a new stability is to start by realizing we are at the beginning of a period of discontents.
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DeLong has it wrong.
It isn’t about legitimacy, it’s about what works. The basics for a society in dynamic equilibrium are easily demonstrable, but push certain parameters too far in the wrong direction and the equilibrium is gone and the dynamics accerate – sometimes fatally for the society involved.
At the core of the disruptions is the notion that technology and government fiat can somehow change the basic nature of human beings and their needs and behavior. This was wrong in 1789 and it is wrong now. Those parameters cannot compensate for the ones that have always existed in man, merely tweak at the edge. VDH, in Carnage and Culture, and the Founders in the Constitution, and others, have noted what works and their observations are correct factually. Forces like the descendant philosophies of the French revolution and radical Islam and postmodernism have tried to do other things and failed. Hence the Middle East and the breakdowns in the West.
We’ll see if we have to get to Mad Max societies before people give up on the notion of changing human nature by fiat. Both here and in MENA.
Blowback will be bloody but deeply satisfying too. The Islamists and Socialists have sawed off the limbs of the tree on which they sit. Hopefully we will be able to scramble back to other still secure branches. Hopefully the new Romney administration will pursue a few focused programs.
1. Double and then double again the US military.
2. Support revolution in Iran.
3. Deregulate and defund.
4. Drill frack and nuke.
We may need to declare the Egyptian Antiquities the common heritage of mankind and prepare to rescue them. While the people of Egypt may choose to walk into the abyss we should try to prevent another scrubbing of our legacy like the Taliban did at Bamiyan.
It is 1917 all over again. Enough motivated academicians, politicians, and people want to implement sharia in Egypt as guided by the Moslem Brotherhood. Like the socialist struggle against the Czar in Russia, the struggle against the corrupt autocracy of Egypt has lasted for generations. Those who have waged the fight—the Brotherhood—have by their passion, dedication, and victory earned the right to rule.
Like socialism, Islam, when given its chance to govern unhindered, will fail bloodily. A hard lesson to be sure, but one that can be learned no other way, and, judging by the current rulers of EUrope, must be taught again and again until it is learned.
Instapundit has a link to an article that goes into what I sometime call The Clerical Aristocracy — the Clerktocracy — rule by clerks. The Unseen Class War. Gee, I can see it.
http://tinyurl.com/9dz24pz
Let’s go out and seize the money hoards from those selfish bastards so we can buy organically grown arugula!
“Spengler thinks that Morsi sees an opportunity in trouble.”
That was the Soviet approach. They were willing to hand out guns, fighter jets, and ballistic missiles to any old body on the basis that chaos promoted their interests. In a way, they were right; in reality the USSR was in constant chaos as well. They did not really thrive on chaos but just did not know any other way.
“The original grand bargain underlying America was that government should never become so big that one faction could use it to impose its will upon the others.”
And then the factions got together and decided that they would all work towards a stronger Feral Government that could give them all what they desired. That was what The Big Tent was all about. But instead they got Springtime For Hitler; the play was oversold so that they all owned 75% of it. The Alinskist response to this problem is to blow up the theater. The fact that they are underneath it, lighting a fuse that is far too short to let them escape, has not occurred to them. And it never will. The issue is whether we try to put out the fuse or just make very sure that they never get out of the theater. There are more than a few who think that bringing the place down would be worth it because it would ensure that the Left never gets out of that place. When the cops are on strike every man is his own cop, judge, jury, and executioner.
“the direct consequence of the crisis in the West is that it has made it impossible for it to reimpose order in the East.”
All too true, I just question the need for the West to restore order in the East in the first place.
The age of colonies is over. Colonization was the result of Europe’s dominant military position. It wasn’t a superior culture or more advanced morals that created European dominance over the world but gunpowder. Firearms allowed 200 Spanish to conquer over a million Aztecs. Wooden ships armed with cannon controlled the seas and allowed soldiers armed with gunpowder weapons to go were they wanted.
While the military advantage of the West has increased in the last few centuries, the would be colonies now have firearms also. Give the natives modern firearms and colonization losses it’s cost effectiveness.
Why not let the natives sort it out on their own?
The Arab Spring has become a launch pad for the Muslim Brotherhood. So what? While inimical to the West, that isn’t the point. Any government produced by the Arab Spring MUST make the citizens happy. If they don’t the citizens will replace the new government just like they replaced the old.
It doesn’t matter what the intent of the MB is. It matters what they are capable of. Right now they are not capable of much. The main threat to America by the Islamic Crescent over the last few decades has been the control of OIL. With new technology, that threat will be ended in a few more years. Find somebody in State with more then two brain cells to explain to the MB that the USA can feed their hungry masses. Without a sweat, out of our surplus. That if they want to maintain power by feeding their masses, they need to make nice.
The MB will understand. They will NOT be grateful, but gratitude is a disease of Dogs according to Stalin.
As far as ‘order’, that word has different meanings in east then west.
Most analysts get Islam wrong in my opinion. As smart as Spengler is, he writes constantly about engaging “moderate muslims” in the fight against “extremists”, and asserts that the chaos we see across the swath of Islam (and Islam’s inability to provide what the West provides), are “Why Islam will Fail”.
Not true. Spengler, along with most others doesn’t seem to comprehend how alien Islamic “thought” is. Such analysts glibly equate Islam with other ideologies they know more about – Western ideologies- they apply the same metrics to guage and measure, and make the same inferences and predictions as if they are analyzing just another system of the West.
Here is one example of how western analysts bungle their understanding of Islam: Analysts say: Since Muslims weren’t nearly as murderous a century ago as they are today, it proves that Islam can moderate itself.
Islam appeared moderate because it had simply run out of plunder and opportunity. Sure, there may have been one or two oddball sultans over Islam’s 1400 year history who took their Islam less seriously, but as long as there is loot and opportunity, Islam’s steady state is terror, genocide, plundering and conquest. When loot and opportunity run out and Muslims lay in squalor and backwardness, Islam hasn’t failed – it’s more akin to a black hole awaiting the the next unwary victims – get too close and watch out! We are seeing that today in spades. Islam has been feeding on the loot from the accident of oil, and has used that loot (including our Western medicines and technoligies) to breed 1.2 billion foot soldiers.
Chaos during revolutionary times is a feature of Islam, not a bug, and not a sign that Islam is failing. Islam doesn’t let go, unlike all the other systems described above. Challenge capitalism with communist totalitarianism, (or vise versa), and one system will cave to the other and vice versa. Communism and its counterparts, in short, most of the ideologies of the west DO “let go. Western systems can fall, be re-imposed, and can fall again. Not so with Islam.
Chaos is a weapon Islam utilizes to destroy the sinews of any civilization it aims to replace. Islam is a civilizational re-boot. The historic systems Beer is talking about above are not civilizational re-boots, but different software programs operating under the same basic OS. Islam is not only a completely separate OS by design, once installed, it places permanent cookies, malware, etc onto the disk itself which make it virtually impossible to install rival OS after the fact.
Islam IS the end of history if we aren’t careful. This is just one reason Islam appeals to Marxist-influenced thinkers. They imagine they can ride piggy back on a robust and merciless totalitarian sytem which controls the individual down to where and how he shits. But secular communism comes and goes and hasn’t yet shown it has any real staying power… Compare that to the sewer of Islam which has persisted for 1400 years – Islam, unlike all the other things it is compared to, never lets go. And now, Islam is back with a vengeance and taking the world by storm. This is in no small measure due to our horrible and clueless Western analysts who have fooled us with their arrogant West-centric analysis.
We. Are. In. Deep. Trouble.
The “Breakout” was more of a trickle, stream and then flood, it is when America became a major player on the international stage was the start of the trickle, Our “Christian” foundations started to crumble with the Demoncrat Congress of the 60’s and 70’s, Newt was more of a deceiver than a Conservative Freedom Fighter, it was the 90’s when the Christian Foundations were fully thrown down by Bill Clinton, this was the “Flood” (Breakout), Total disregard for Truth, Law and Freedom happened with the Clinton Administration, Obama is just the child birthed in the “Village” Bill Clinton and the Demoncrat’s built…
In later years, Beer added to his syllabus the topic of the great reform acts in England during the 19th century, but that example seems almost unique.
England seems to be the home for this, you might also add the Glorious Revolution and even the Magna Carta. Perhaps that bodes well for the US now (and perhaps it boded well for the US in 1776, though yes there was some fighting …).
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Meanwhile, Morsi this morning apparently went to this big Islamic conference in Tehran and said rude things about Assad. That doesn’t change the overall picture, but is a bit surprising. Saw Karzai marching around the conference too, fwiw.
md @ 7: Islam appeared moderate because it had simply run out of plunder and opportunity.
Agreed. I only started looking seriously at Islam after 9/11, and the triple-net on the deal is it’s a total loser from top to bottom, until and unless it has a *major* reformation and expurgates their literature to produce iSlam2. Meanwhile, the Pope still wears a funny hat, so I’m not holding my breath on major religious innovations anywhere on the planet.
s @ 6: Firearms allowed 200 Spanish to conquer over a million Aztecs.
No no no, I’m sure you know better than that. OTOH, 200 B-52s could wipe out dar al-Islam from end to end, or at least the nasty parts. I like technology (whether horses and armor, or Hellfire missiles) as well as the next guy but sometimes what it takes is tonnage, even mega-tonnage, and then boots on the ground to take the territory and stabilize it. That’s what happened to the Aztecs, too, their neighbors the, um, Totonacs and the Tlaxcaltecas, yeah them guys or whoever, supplied the troops. Cortes mostly supplied the surprise, also of course, measles, tuberculosis, and whiskey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_Empire
200 guys with blunderbusses weren’t going to conquer anything by themselves.
The Saudis must be seen as the biggest roadblock to peace in the Middle East. Not to mention Obambus having missed a crucial opportunity to support the uprisings in Iran in 2009. Not to mention the idiot Putin and the constipated Chinese are supporting the status quo, even though culturally they have nothing in common with it and nothing to gain from it. And of course Europe slumbers on, plenty of problems for them right at home should they be stirred to awakening. The problem in the Middle East remains as it was with the Aztecs, who will move in? Who provides the new model? I agree with MD, there is just no good reason to believe they will wake to Western representative government (especially with bad examples like Obambus currently occupying the white house). Should we “encourage” it? I dunno, seems a bit like trying to teach a camel to talk, might be a good way to kill time, but what are the odds.
md @ 7: Islam is a civilizational re-boot.
Islam is a no-boot, Islam is a BSOD.
Morton – “Islam, unlike all the other things it is compared to, never lets go.”
Islam really is a self referential monkey trap that eschews individual reflection. The Islamic state persists in ways that a Castro, Chavez, or even a Khadaffi could never. Even the Assad regime failed to make the transition from papa dictator to son dictator and you can probably fault that with Assad’s apparent exposure to Western liberal democracy and a Western wife. Nothing pisses off the true believers than a king who does not follow his own royal protocols.
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are like the Blues Brothers – they are on a mission from God. This approach is both chaotic and effective.
The search of a new Grand Bargain is something that seems badly needed. Historically, our country has had generations when the correct path was broadly agreed upon; Not without distinction but consensus on the core assumptions. At this point, there is no broad consensus on much of anything. Normally, as Wretchard points out, the genius of the American system was the ability to regenerate and form an new consensus when the old failed to work well.
What is peculiar is that it appears that the Blue State Model or the Liberal Consensus has no ability to self correct. The solution to more failure is more government, on and on ad infinitum. The design never fails, it is always just poorly implemented. Detroit and California being two examples. No one wakes up and says, “This does not seem to be working. Maybe the other guys should have a turn at the tiller.” The orthodoxy has no room for re-examnation.
Without such, the system is doomed to crisis. A crisis being the only thing with enough power to undermine the perceived security that anchors the supports of the Blue State Model. I sincerely hope that I am wrong and the feed back loop is not utterly broken.
Mr. Fernandez:
Spot on!
…But every single player of modern 4D chess seems to consistently fail to realize (or recognize) that there is an invisible hand that busts moves in inaccessible other dimensions.
While I make no pretensions to possess any ability to play anything beyond mediocre 2D chess, my current thread of thought on the great game that is unraveling before us brings to mind the question; What would the Wielder of invisible hands (call him God – universal justice – Shiva, or Murphy’s razor-wielding spaghetti monster…etc) do to muck up the plans of aspiring god-kings with hardened hearts and giant brain trusts?
Likely it would be a [morally] perceptible train of little somethings -powered by free will- which results in some-big-thing that is both unexpected and obvious…The obviousness of the thing will of course depend upon the view from where one stands, and what he stands upon.
As it appears that the MB and Mullahs are busily sowing chaos in the service of consolidating and expanding the powers of their respective super-factions. Why wouldn’t the power that is give them what they think they want? …Allow them to reap the fruits of their very own Caliphate/s.
Now relate the prospect of a couple big old juicy caliphates to The Conjectures and various proposals we’ve seen discussed earlier this year for ideal trans-formative target packages. Therein is why I believe we must do everything in our moral and material power to remove their atomic fangs. Perforce we must also de-fang the marx-spawn and their yapping pyromaniac lapdogs, ’cause if we fail in these endeavor, the big dogs of post-modern war will be unleashed. Our very own fire and brimstone may yet rain down upon “the cities of the plain” and shining hilltop cities alike. To paraphrase a host of old guys: We’ll have salted the earth to immanetize a peace.
Remember, God can be terrible in his justice, and last time I checked, Karma was still a vindictive b__ch…And the devil always cheats in his details.
Josh @ 9: “England seems to be the home for this, you might also add the Glorious Revolution and even the Magna Carta.
The so-called Glorious Revolution would be better characterized as the successful invasion of England by a foreign power. It ties into the theme of loss of legitimacy, because religious differences (among other things) resulted in the subjects of the Brit King not being willing to mount a successful defence of the kingdom.
The foreign winner, William of Orange, is remembered today as King Billy, whose name was often on the lips of “Loyalists” (to the British cause in Ireland) during the recent Irish troubles. The evil that men do lives long, long after them. Considering the history of Christian Europe, let’s not expect an end to the troubles of the Middle East any time in the next several hundred years.
History documents Islam is Chaos, Winston Churchill wrote about it prior to WWII… Only way to get rid of Islam is the same way that cannibalism was nearly driven out of practice and that is Wipe it out, Kill every Man, Woman and Child! Old hardened Christians had no problem stamping out abominations such as Cannibalism and it’s the only way to get rid of a Death Cult like Islam, there is no “Moderate” Muslim, it’s an illusion, it’s a Muslim simply practicing wala wa bara (Koran 5:51 and 58:22), and taqiyya (Koran 3:28) Islam is “Submission” no other can be equal or superior to it AND the example of the “Perfect” Muslim was a Murdering, Thug, Child rapist at best so how you could get any better than your “Perfect” example is suppose to be is absurd! It’s Time for the West, The World to demand Islam followers renounce their false belief and live in a Civilized World or the World should Severely punish Islam’s followers where ever they are and turn their backs on any type of accommodation until they do! That is the Truth, Yes this would cause a massive blood spilling but that is the only one way to remove a cancer such as Islam! Or Islam will eventually lay waste to the World.
Sunni Islam, represented by the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, is not anti-Western, it is anti-human. During the era that Thomas Aquinas was reconciling natural law with Catholic theology, the Sunni were completing the total isolation of Islam from natural law, human reason, free-will, and even the experience of human history.
By the end of the 13th Century the Sunni jurists had successfully enforced the belief that the only possible source of knowledge regarding the mysteries of human existence, the manner of pursuit of the good life, the dimensions of human relationships, and the organization of human society were the Koran and the biographies of Mohammed. “I have given you (the Muslims) a complete religion, and have forgotten nothing.”
While it is true that an individual who identifies as Muslim may in fact actually believe anything at all, Muslim organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are tied brain and tail to the Islamic-centric rulings (fatwas) that come out of Al-Azhar or a few other jurisprudential centers of Islam. If you are expecting a meeting of Islam and the Western mind – forget it – there is no there, there.
There is not going to be any “reformation” of Islam. The Koran has always existed in heaven and was revealed only to Mohammed. Averroes, Avicenna and a couple other Medieval scholars tried and were twisted into knots. What authority can trump heaven and Mohammed?
As an aside, I think that swipes at the Pope and the Catholic Church are well deserved, for the most part, but you’re dumbing yourself down if you ignore the rich intellectual tradition of the Church. I too studied Islam after 911 which led naturally to a serious study of the Jewish Tradition and the Orthodox/Catholic Tradition. Even though it gets a little weird from time to time, nothing explains the totality of human existence as well as the Orthodox/Catholic Tradition.
I am thinking that Israel is going to strike Iran’s oil facilities, and maybe a few easy nuke site targets. Without oil money, Iran can’t fund its terrorism goals.
K @ 14: Considering the history of Christian Europe, let’s not expect an end to the troubles of the Middle East any time in the next several hundred years.
Well, America was the end to the religious troubles in Christian Europe, secular and representative government. Not that it went smoothly, it didn’t. Maybe it hasn’t completely finished even yet with an unelected bureaucracy still claiming to run the continent.
And oh yeah, *after* the Revolutionary War, and within only (!) 180 years, Britain gave up the rest of the empire more or less peacefully. One can optimistically count that as progress and not collapse. Ireland and Northern Ireland? Shrug.
cjm @ 17: I am thinking that Israel is going to strike Iran’s oil facilities, and maybe a few easy nuke site targets. Without oil money, Iran can’t fund its terrorism goals.
Doubling the world price of oil, probably including the US, causing shortages in Europe, Japan, and China? Consider the optics of that. And probably triggering at least a short battle to close the Straits of Hormuz. Overall causing a worldwide recession, and everyone gets to blame Israel?
Just explaining why it wasn’t done a year ago.
Firearms allowed 200 Spanish to conquer over a million Aztecs
Not exactly, although that helped. The Aztecs were ripe for a downfall, and the Spaniards had willing allies among the Aztec’s subject tribes who hated their overlords for their cruelty.
Also, Europeans demonstrated greater curiosity about the world around them than other civilizations at the time, and had a genius for applied knowledge that was not so strong among other advanced people of the time.
#7 – Morton – I just don’t believe that Islam is the unconquerable Borg religion, despite current appearances. You’re right to say that “Islam appeals to Marxist-influenced thinkers”, but that’s only because their first, preferred magical weapon – Communism – failed. I’m in my 50s, but I remember the 70s, when Communism was thought to be the infallible system of world conquest. The Red Army was regarded almost with superstition – They never lost a war! was the popular belief. The best democracy could hope to do was to slow down the inexorable advance of Communism, and even that was seen as a doomed struggle. Maybe the Soviets wouldn’t actually conquer America, but America would have to “come to terms” with communism, and it was assumed that this would mean we’d end up living under some sort of hybrid system, some time in the future when we finally tired ourselves out struggling vainly against the inevitable. The Afghan war was a genuine shock, because it showed that Soviet Communism WASN’T fated to triumph everywhere; the Red Army WASN’T infallible. None of that had ever been seriously disputed, except by lunatics like Ronald Reagan, and we were all assured that nobody agreed with that crazy old fool. So these Marxists have been wrong before.
I think the West lost interest in fighting Islam once it ceased to be martial and expansionist. We don’t send our armies and generals to fight starving goatherds and bearded beggars, and so Islam was left alone to marinate in its own pathologies, until a lucky turn of the wheel made it rich and dangerous again. I don’t believe that Islam is immune to religious or philosophical attack – their hysterical laws against proselytizing seem to demonstrate that they sense that their idiotic belief system is too brittle and jerry-rigged to hold up to any serious attack, and must be kept protected and insulated against outside disturbances. I think a campaign of exposure and ridicule, coupled with determine Christian proselytizing, would undermine Islam very rapidly. But of course, not even the Pope is recommending a push to convert the Muslim world, so I have no hope that the crumbling secular governments of the West will do anything of the kind.
Count on America to save or create peace in the Middle East. If they won’t, then Israel will.
If not Israel, then Europe or China.
dm @ 20: I don’t believe that Islam is immune to religious or philosophical attack – their hysterical laws against proselytizing seem to demonstrate that they sense that their idiotic belief system is too brittle and jerry-rigged to hold up to any serious attack, and must be kept protected and insulated against outside disturbances.
And yet it has proved very effective for 1500 years. It’s classic totalitarianism. It has worked in Cuba and North Korea for 50 years, it worked in Russia for 80 years – and apparently is still working in Putin’s head. Islam grew up geographically adjacent to and temporarally *after* Greece and Rome had shown how various forms of democracy and republicanism could work. They want none of it. Maybe they eagerly would prefer to return to the 7th century, hey so would a lot of Americans, mostly the greens.
But here’s the point I actually wanted to raise when wretchard raised the DeLong ideas. In anything like a liberal (really liberal, not modern leftist) society, we should expect to find a spreading spectrum of ideas. Even if you like progress, you might view it as more of a random walk, a messy evolutionary process, and not a straight-line teleological and/or Hegelian dialectic straight up to heaven. And, well, this gets harder as society gets more complex. Some bright boy gets the idea out of the blue, “let’s assume that carbon dioxide warms up the Earth and is a horrible danger”. Now, there is NO truth to this physically, chemically, biologically, but it’s a random idea and the process allows for that. Or some economist (cough Krugman) gets the meme stuck in his head, “Debt, massive debt, HUGE debt, that’s the ticket!” It’s nutz, but it is An Idea, so you have to guess that someone, somewhere is going to advance it.
Well, it’s a sandpile. You pour on even valid ideas, and then – it slumps. The underlying mechanism just can’t support any more. Science, politics, morals, ethics, …
We talk a lot here about gatekeepers and how they are failing these days. Well, I’m just offering a few more metaphors about why that sort of thing happens. It’s not insurmountable or we’d still be banging rocks together to make sharp tools, but it can be slow and the “fix” may be remote from specific problems, fixing the gatekeeper function is remote from replacing one dufus of a POTUS who sleazed into office.
The original grand bargain underlying America was that government should never become so big that one faction could use it to impose its will upon the others.
IMO the poll showing that 22% thought that government had the consent of the governed should have been the news story of the year, probably even ahead of who wins in November. The election will only determine which faction feels that government doesn’t have their consent.
What had been for a few decades a “culture war” seems to be sliding into a low-grade civil war: the recent politically-motivated killings and violence, widespread vandalism and arson of churches, demonizing of dissent, political intolerance in many workplaces, the balance of political powers being replaced by executive decrees, while the MSM still works feverishly to convince us that violence and extremism are right wing phenomena and airbrush out evidence to the contrary. To a large extent the left no longer feels that those “extremists” who disagree with them should enjoy the same rights as others. I am routinely appalled as friends and acquaintances on the left don’t even try to hide or downplay such sentiments any more. They are unabashedly post-liberal. This is a qualitative change. Many of these people won’t be forming militias in the near future, probably because they know that the way to win all the marbles is not with Communist vs. Nazi rioting in the streets but with seizing the reins of Leviathan.
What is the solution? Until the public begins to care more about a Grand Bargain than about Jersey Shore, there won’t be any. As Leviathan grows our collective intellect becomes nasty, brutish and short: just where the corporatist-political-media complex wants it.
I think that the world has come to resemble a giant restaurant that serves up narratives instead of facts. The world is muddled up largely because it has chosen from a menu of narratives that don’t work.
The West chose from the narrative menu a tale that says wealth creation and wealth creators are nasty and not required. Our narrative insists there is so much wealth around that all we have to do is distribute it. Moreover each one of us deserves much more wealth than we can earn. To right that perceived wrong all we have to do is borrow wealth from the future. After all we deserve it more than unborn generations do.
Use tomorrow’s wealth today!
Future generations don’t exist
Therefore they have no say!
Places like the Middle East seem to have chosen different narratives from the menu. Their narrative appears to be based on TV shows from the 1980’s. They want to live in 1980 American TV land. They deserve to live in 1980 American TV land. Never no mind that they don’t have a clue how to get there and that it’s a fantasy from the past that did not exist then and does not exist now. They have chosen various narratives that promise to lead them there. One narrative is kill all the Jews. Another is to conquer 1980 American TV land by converting all the infidels to Islam.
Other parts of the world choose more narratives from the menu. The problem is that none of the narratives on the world menu work. None of them are self sustaining and all of them are failing. We have achieved a global fustercluck. Narratives don’t have to be true in order to work. They just have to be practical. The idea of Empire isn’t nice but it’s practical. The Romans, Mongols and British followed Empire narratives that worked for some time. Of course Empire narratives, like all narratives, only worked until they didn’t.
So we need a new menu of practical narratives. Who will supply this new menu? I think it will be the Great God of Arithmetic. His/her menu will be a practical one but the Arithmetical menu of narratives will probably be a mix of nasty and nice. There’s no guarantee that people in different parts of the world will choose narratives that are Arithmetically correct and benign. Liberty and generosity are not necessary conditions for Arithmetical correctness
Any way you look at it, without a (mostly) benevolent head waiter, the narratives being chosen around the world, or that reality will force upon the world look likely to usher in a period of grief and strife. I guess it will be like the old days.
If I wasn’t an optimist I’d be downright pessimistic.
In a similar vein to DeLong and Codevilla , Joel Kotkin writes of the class warfare battle between what he calls the “clerisy”and the “yeomanry” taking place in America where “there’s justifiable anger at the impoverishment of much of the middle and working classes.”
The “clerisy” are “a 21st century version of France’s pre-revolution First Estate. This includes an ever-expanding class of minders — lawyers, teachers, university professors, the media and, most particularly, the relatively well paid legions of public sector workers — who inhabit Washington, academia, large non-profits and government centers across the country.”
The “yeomanry” are those that ” represent the contemporary version of Jeffersonian farmers or the beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act. They are primarily small property owners who lack the girth and connections of the clerisy but resist joining the government-dependent poor. Particularly critical are small business owners, who Gallup identifies as “the least approving” of Obama among all the major occupation groups”
Kotkin in the end writes:
“Romney’s imperative will be to rouse the yeomanry by suggesting the clerisy, both by their sheer costliness and increasingly intrusive agenda, are crippling their family’s prospects for a better life. In these times of weak economic growth and growing income disparity, the Republicans delude themselves by claiming to ignore class warfare. They need to learn how instead to make it politically profitable for themselves.”
http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00615-pmuch-said-about-class-warfare-contemporary-america-and-therersquos-justifiable-anger-
I am a member of this new “clerisy” by accident rather than design, but am a member nevertheless. I do not share the typical views of “my kind,” and am distressed at their blindness.
The election may turn on both which group has the greater turnout, and also which group still outnumbers the other overall. If the “clerisy” is not yet more numerous than the “yeomanry,” it soon will be if the trend continues. For this reason this may be the last election where things can be rolled back.
@26 Don Rodrigo said this may be the last election where things can be rolled back. Math, demographics, and the erosion of agreement about what America is or should be point in that direction. Not that a Romney/Ryan victory will necessarily succeed in rolling things back.
The next election will create precisely the crisis in legitimacy described, and the only thing that might — might — change that is success. Romney/Ryan will be opposed and blocked at every turn. Every initiative will be painted as depriving half of the country of “good” things they need. Only if R&R are successful and only if an expanding swath of the country feels things being better will legitimacy flow to them. And if they don’t succeed, or if they achieve only the partial success of slowing the decline, then 2016 will surely be dreadful.
Are matters like the end of the Euro, the breakup of the EU, war in the middle east, Chinese moves against Taiwan, nuclear Iran, overthrow of KSA, a new plague-like virus, a Muslim uprising within Europe, a series of earthquakes of 8.0 magnitude, or a dirty bomb in Times Square black swans or white swans? Even if none of these things happen, the next four years will be difficult at best.
The problem for most ‘enlightened’ individuals, IMHO, is they only see the religious aspect of Islam, choosing to not-see the warring, totalitarian governmental side. Global religious rules should read, ” All religions, including anti-religions, which respect, tolerate and live in harmony with all others are legitimately protected. All others will be considered antithetical to the standards of religion.
If you want to force a reformation of Islam, Post-WWII Germany is your solution. You have to show how the concept that Allah is All-Powerful is as flawed as was the ‘Master Race.’ You tell them, “Stop pursuing Nuclear Weapons and allow unfettered, surprise inspections to prove it or Tehran disappears.” Inevitably, they will not agree, so make Tehran disappear in a mushroom cloud. Then tell them, If Allah was all-powerful, he would not have allowed this to happen. Now, behave or another city will disappear.” And mean it. Eventually, they will start to question what they had been told since birth and it might take a few generations, but it will have to disprove the infallibility of the religion. Or else they just cease to exist, either way works for me as they, by their own admission, are the soldiers of their God and therefor legitimate military targets.
23. Spudnik: Jersey Shore was just cancelled so perhaps there is hope…..
1. The “natural state” is warlords ruling over peasants.
“The overwhelming majority of civilized polities for the last 5000 years, from the ancient empires of the iron age to the early modern period in Europe, are structured along a fundamental fissure — a prime divider — between elites and commoners that structures most of the features of political and social life in basic ways. These societies are based on the political axiom “rule or be ruled” and permit even require the use of violence to defend one’s honor. …
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/reflections-from-second-draft/civil-society-vs-prime-divider-society/
“The basic rule of human interaction in such cultures is … the “dominating imperative” [libido dominandi], that is “rule or be ruled.” If I don’t rule over you, you will rule over me. I must therefore try to dominate you lest you dominate me. If you win, I lose; in order for me to win, you must lose. … The classic expression of this attitude comes in two forms, the more basic “honor-shame” culture of the tribal warrior, where honor comes from dominion … and the “civilized empires” in which a certain degree of restraint in the exercise of immediate dominion has opened up both a space for an expanding “middle class”, largely urban, and for a much wider range of conquest and dominion. … They illustrate the accuracy of the [Athenian] remark to the Melians that it had been a law long before their time and would be long after, “that those who can do what they will and those who can’t suffer what they must.”
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2012/08/08/demotic-religiosity-and-economic-growth/
2. The American Clerisy:
I think they want to be the Mandarins of the new order. Here are two recent excellent articles about China. They explain the Mandarins excellently. I think they capture modern American liberals very well too.
http://cowenjohnson.blogspot.com/2011/01/thoughts-on-china.html
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/
What ties 1 and 2 together is the fact discussed by cowenjohnson, that in China, “the Emperor who, while revered under Confucianism and expected to publicly conduct himself by Confucian norms, was not bound by them. Martial violence was seen as the exclusive province of the Emperor, who had a monopoly on its use. Confucians accepted this because the Emperor’s capacity for violence, unpredictability, and disorderliness was the necessary complement to Confucianism’s emphasis on order, prescribed ritual, and non-violence.”
29. Walter Sobchak:re:“rule or be ruled.”
I agree there are those in this nation that identify with the European mindset of ‘rule or be ruled,’ but would argue the true American mindset is different. We began as colonies of people who had had enough of being ruled indiscriminantly and were willing to risk life and limb to be in the absence of overbearing rule. Sure there were rules but mostly for survival. Self-determination was a deeper driving force.
From frontiersmen and trappers we moved away from clusters of rule in the cities eventually moving farther away to the West. Wagon trains and pioneers moved us to the extreme ends of the continent. Self-determination.
What do I want from my government? To be left alone to determine my own future. Screw the European mindset.
The fact that we move away from ‘rule’ whenever possible tells you everything you need to know about ‘governance.’ The only people who embrace centralized government are those who want to govern others.
Wretchard quoted Spengler:
“[Egypt is] on the way, in Spengler’s words, to being “North Korea on the Nile” where nothing is for sale except trouble.
This represents an unimaginable tragedy. The Copts will surely be genocided. They are the true Egyptians who were descended from the builders of the pyramids. To allow these people to be slaughtered during our time is a terrible disgrace. Likewise, Islamic fascists tend to be cultural vandals. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban is the classic example. Imagine the same sort of mindless hate that will take place over all of Egypt. Five thousand years of human history and culture are about to be erased by savage barbarians. This is a horrible outcome. Our generation will be scorned by scholars thousands of years in the future because we allowed this to happen.
I am part of the American public that did not think about Islam before 9/11. Since then, I have come to some sad conclusions.
One scholar of Islam (Daniel Pipes?) wrote that one measure of Islam’s greatness was the ease with which it converted barbarians. But scholars have an affection for their subjects; I believe that barbarians found conversion to Islam easy because it is very close in its assumptions.
The philosophical problem of good and evil and human nature is basic in the thought of every group (Anthropologists would talk of cultures.) from groups of children to nations. If a group believes human nature is good, it finds the source of evil in outsiders and is less likely to put up barriers to ward off evil from within the group. It is also less able to correct its own faults. Both communism and Islam have this view; evil comes from outside and corrupts. This makes disagreements violent and vicious; the death tolls mount up very fast. Stalin, Mao, the rulers of North Korea all exhibit this pattern; Moslem countries show this also; consider how east and west Pakistan split up.
Whither goest the West? Well, whither goest the rest of the globe? It is Newton’s 2nd law about action and reaction that will out, not the history ending series of dialectics of Hegel or Marx or their descendants. Hence, as one noted commentator is said to have recently surmised regarding 2012, it will be like either 1976 or 1980: a harbinger of change or the change itself. Here are three commentators that offer pause and hope, in my estimation:
1. “The Death of Science?” by Nobel Prize Winner Sheldon Lee Glashow, in The End of Science? Attack and Defense, Nobel Conference XXV, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, October 3-4, 1989, University Press of America, Inc., 1992.
“Science is culture dependent because Technology fuels the progress of Science, and Technology is hostage to social perversion. Arabic astronomy, chemistry and mathematics once were unrivalled. Early in the millennium, TAQLID, the doctrine that no truth exists beyond that revealed in the Koran, was instituted in the Islamic world. Scholars were banished. The only remaining trace of their Science is in our language, in words from Alkali to Zenith. The Chinese too had their fling with science. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and were the greatest navigators on earth until they decided, in the 15th century, that nothing beyond their Celestial Empire was worth of discovery. They burnt their great ships just before Columbus set forth with his tiny flotilla to discover a New World.
“In science…we believe the world is knowable…that there are…eternal, objective, extra-historical, socially-neutral, external, and universal truths. …the same everywhere and everywhen…universal, invariant, inviolate, genderless, and verifiable. While our faith [in science] may be irrational, its success is undeniable. Boyle’s law and Newton’s laws [etc.] that survive experimental scrutiny… are true after all…eternal, objective, true…with certainty [regardless of] the social scientist, ideologist, or pseudo-philosopher.” [my emphasis]
2. W.R. Inge (1860-1954): he who would marry the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower. And, as one commentator has stated, “the span between nuptial bliss and bereavement has shrunk disconcertingly. ALSO from Inge: “It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
3. Peter L. Berger offers several clue concepts: “reality is of course….until further notice” (the ellipses are his). In two books he write of his analysis of socialism and capitalism: “Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change” ((1975), and “Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions About Prosperity, Equality & Liberty” (1986), the first offering the pros and cons in an even handed way, asking what will happen with each, the second indicating the that as capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system (as China and Russia have now concluded and Cuba and North Korea are about to), capitalism “wins”, at least for now. The real question or debate moves on to the question capitalism enables: democracy or dictatorship (or centralized governmental economic control if you prefer that term).
Hence, according to Berger, “It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term.” And: “…we don’t have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy – which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.” And: “In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state. And: “So I think one can say on empirical grounds – not because of some philosophical principle – that you can’t have democracy unless you have a market economy.” One can propose, therefore, that with market economies being what even China and Russia have concluded they need to survive, both may well move toward democracy, or at least their form of it, to enable continue economic growth.
All of these explain for me why listing to the works of Oriana Fallaci on Islam make more sense than do those enamored with ideas like “last stage of capitalism,” as it is really the last stages of socialism.
The human spirit continues to confound those who would harness it or destroy it. I recall grad school bull sessions (is that term still used?) in the 70s, when I was on the short end of the discussion, holding out that the USSR would collapse internally and, to rub it in more, that China would go capitalist first. They held out for “last stages of capitalism” transforming into a socialist USA and, oh by the way, I’d be the first one shot when that occurs. Stated with grace and diplomacy, but no regret, as that’s “just the way it is.” And so 2012 will be a significant election, one way or the other, which will be followed by the significance of 2016.