War dividends

I know it is going to sound cynical, because there is a lot of human tragedy underneath all this, but the war in Iraq and the mess in the Middle East have produced a number of benefits for the United States (and for the rest of the world, to some extent). To name just the big ones:

1. Re-igniting the ancient feud between the Shia and the Sunni. As long as they keep duking it out amongst themselves, they will have less energy and resources left to dish it out to the Great Satan. Similarly with the other various factions: Hamas vs. Fatah in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebabon. The rest of the world is much better off when the murderous attention of muslims is focused inward.


2. With Iran now scaring its Sunni neighbors shiiteless (or should it be "shiiteful"?), they are looking to the US as the only stabilizing force capable of keeping the deranged Iranian leadership in check. The Europeans have proved (yet again) completely helpless, and Bush is sending signal after signal that he's not going to lift a finger against Iran - one can only imagine the sense of vulnerability of countries like Saudi Arabia.


3. The fairly dramatic rise in oil prices apparently had negligible effect on the US economy, which is remarkably strong. While the higher prices were a huge windfall to the oil-producing countries, they also - and more importantly - demonstrated that the global economy is not as vulnerable to disruption coming from the Middle East as it appeared to be in the seventies. If the interest in alternative energy sources is sustained and leads to technological innovation and consumer adoption, this vulnerability will be reduced even further, to the point when (as Spengler points out in his piece), sudden disappearance of the entire Middle East may well go unnoticed.


4. If Abu Ghraib was such a public relations nightmare for the United States, imagine what the relentless carnage unleashed on innocent civilians by assorted islamic fanatics must be doing to their image in the world, including the so-called "Arab street". One would have to be completely brain dead not to feel a profound cognitive and emotional distress upon being relentlessly bombarded by news of muslims slaughtering other muslims by busload, while the "infidels" are emerging relatively unscathed from the bloodbath.


5. The power that the United States now solely wields on the global stage only increased, with many countries - including the enemies of the US - now realizing what mayhem would be unleashed if the only superpower were to disengage from the world. If we withdrew from Iraq next week, the brutal slaughter that would engulf that country would be on par with the Rwandan genocide.

The End of Faith

I have just finished reading Sam Harris' phenomenal book, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason". Without hesitation, I would call it the most important book of the decade. Reading it was both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting, because it is a wonderful feeling to have someone much smarter than I express with such clarity and force ideas that I could very well call my own. The only thing better than that would be if I were able to write so well myself, and be read by so many (this book was a bestseller in the US). Depressing, because there seems to be no viable alternative to the path of apocalyptic destruction we appear to be on. That is, Sam Harris does offer such an alternative - abandoning irrational beliefs in exchange for spirituality and ethics anchored in reason and honest inquiry - but I just can't imagine enough people taking up his challenge for it to make any difference. At least not during my lifetime, which, incidentally, may be cut short by maniacs smart enough to make and use nuclear weapons, but dumb enough to believe that for mass murder they will be rewarded in the afterlife with their own personalized bordellos, each with 72 horny virgins.

Part of the problem, paradoxically, are the very people whom one would naturally expect to provide a counterbalance to religious lunatics, namely the secular liberals. As Sam Harris points out in his book, and in the excellent essay in The Los Angeles Times, "The End of Liberalism", Western liberals have been so blindsided by self-hatred and its monstrous children: moral relativism and dogmatic multiculturalism, that they actually play into the hands of those, who want to destroy Western civilization. To know that this is true one needs only to look at the treatment the erstwhile icon of the European Left, Oriana Fallaci, received from liberals for daring to criticize... islam, and for speaking about the cultural values of the West as if they were (oh, what blasphemy!) superior to the cult of death and destruction emanating from the "islamic world". Sadly, it appears that only the religious lunatics of the West are willing to take a stand against the lunatics of the Middle East - if that's the case, I'm with the former. I can coexist with Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush, but not with Bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. There are people far scarrier than Dick Cheney. The Left, in the grips of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), disagrees. To hell with them.

Here are the major points from Sam Harris' book (as I recall them):

• The human species is on the brink of annihilation because of a clash between worldviews that spring from irrational beliefs


• We live in the Age of Unreason


• This really is a war with islam, and not with terrorism


• Islam is not, and never was, a "religion of peace"


• The role that religion plays in the current conflict has been taken out of discourse


• Islam as a religion is not unique in its aggresive stance against non-believers; the Old and New Testament also contain unambiguous calls to exterminate the non-believers. The only difference is that the adherents of Judaism and Christianity either don't read their holy texts, or don't take them seriously any more.


• Religions have been a tremendous burden on human societies, causing untold suffering and destruction, and hampering progress throughout centuries


• The current predicament of humanity is different from past ones in that now people who disdain life and crave death can get their hands on weapons with the ability to annihilate the human race


• There must be a way to have ethics and spirituality without religion. In fact, we better find it fast, otherwise we may not survive next 50 years


• Happiness and suffering could well form the basis on which to build a rational, non-religious system of ethics

Winning by losing and vice versa

I admit: I'm one of those people, who lost faith in the "Freedom and Democracy in Iraq" project. Not that I had a lot of faith in it to begin with. Initially I was convinced that the war in Iraq was a mistake, primarily because I did not consider Saddam Hussein - even with the weapons of mass destruction - to be a threat to the United States, at least not as grave as Iran or North Korea. Later, I allowed myself to be swayed by the argument that having a prosperous democracy in the Arab world would change the dynamics in the Middle East, and perhaps have a domino effect in the surrounding medieval satrapies. Yes, it would have been a brilliant stroke - had it had any chance of succeeding. And so I'm back to what I have always believed, which is that democracy and individual freedom are incompatible with the Arab mindset, or even Islam for that matter - the quasi-democratic, deeply corrupt regimes in Muslim countries like Indonesia notwithstanding.

It does not mean, by the way, that I do not believe we can "win" in Iraq, if by "winning" one means suppressing the insurgency and stabilizing the country to the point where we could get out without losing face. The problem is that, unless we stay in Iraq for decades and impose - by any means necessary - our own secularized political and cultural system, Iraq will eventually slide back into bloody chaos soon after our departure. There is just no way around that. Japan and Germany after World War II are often evoked by the proponents of this project as examples of countries that the United States successfully transformed from murderous, aggressive, nationalistic dictatorships into prosperous, docile democracies. However, aside from cultural differences that made Germany and Japan more susceptible to such transformation than Iraq, neither of these two countries was surrounded by neighbors who very much remained in the pre-transformation mold, and who feared the changes taking place accross the border. In order to change Iraq we would have to change the entire Middle East at the same time - an idea as crazy and impossible as it sounds.

The only way a country like Iraq can be "stabilized" is by one of the factions being strong and cruel enough to finish off the others. That's why we can't do it - we are not capable (institutionally more that psychologically, perhaps) of being sufficiently cruel; and by "cruelty" I do not mean faking electrocutions or photographing oneself next to a pile of naked prisoners (none of them dead or being killed). I mean wiping out entire families or clans in reprisal for terrorist acts committed by one of their members; I mean throwing live people into wood choppers; leveling, Hama-like, entire villages and tows, with their inhabitants still inside; mutilating bound prisoners before cutting off their heads and videotaping all this to be shown on TV. I have no doubt that many, if not all, of the insurgent groups currently fighting in Iraq are itching to be the one committing these and other atrocities on a scale sufficient to destroy or scare the others. Mass murder in Iraq is inevitable - the only question is: how quickly will it burn itself out and who will emerge on top after blood stops flowing in the streets?

To be brutally honest, if we play our cards right, the answer to this question should be of no consequence to us. Aside from oil and helping Israel stay alive, we have no interest in this region. The two are huge ones, of course, but the issue of oil could, and should, be resolved by the combination of energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and increased domestic production of oil; this, by the way, would also help diminish the risk of a second Jewish holocaust. How? Without revenues from oil, the countries in the Middle East have no economies to speak of, so they would be forced to go back to nomadic tribalism from before the oil boom, which seems to be their dream anyway.

Whether we get out of Iraq next week or next year, the country will deteriorate into a bloody mess, so we may as well do it sooner rather than later. Yes, the jihadists will declare a victory, but so what? More such victories, and the Arab world will stop being a problem. It's kind of like the "victory" of the Vietnamese, isn't it? However, suicidal idiots that they are, they are not as stupid as to not recognize that while we may not be able to help a defeated country stand back on its feet, we can easily destroy any Muslim country, if it pushes the right buttons. (How long did it take the US military to defeat the Taliban and the Iraqi army, with negligible casualties on its side?) Having a prosperous, strong Middle East at peace with itself might actually be more dangerous to us than having a bloody mess there. Unless they change their culture and abandon their religion, a substantial percentage of Muslims will always want to conquer the world and convert everybody to Islam, so a democratic state would at some point either have to revert to authoritarian rule (like Algeria), or succumb to an Islamic takeover and theocracy. Imagine a country like Japan, with its industrial and technological power, and vast financial resources, becoming hostile and aggressive again?

Tiny points of light

Writing in today's LA Times with clarity and force, Sam Harris chastises fellow liberals for ignoring the grave threat posed to our civilization by islamic fanaticism. He has put into precise sentences something I've been thinking about for a long time but never wrote down: having ranted for so long about the ills and evils of the Western civilization, the liberals internalized their loathing to the point, where they will not defend this civilization against annihilation. How can a reasonable person respond to this death wish, except by saying, "Fuck you! And may you die a prolonged and horrible death, having your head sawed off with a dull knife by a masked islamic fanatic. On video. You can go to hell, if you so wish, but you're not taking me along."

For the biggest part of my life I considered myself a liberal, albeit in the "classical sense", that is a person who would like to see more freedoms given to individuals to make their own decisions, and fewer restrictions placed by government bureaucrats on the lives of private citizens. I abhorred religious fanatics of any kind and didn't like religions to begin with. But if Christian conservatists are the only people capable of recognizing the threat and willing to fight it, then sign me up. I will become a born-again Jesus freak, if that's necessary to defeat islamic fascism, because I know that our civilization will have a chance to emerge from the temporary darkness imposed on it by Christian fundamentalism - it has done so in the past, it will do it again. But if we lose this battle, if murderous islam turns up victorius, there is no chance for us. Christianity did go through very dark, cruel episodes, but it eventually reformed, adjusted, "civilized" itself. Islam never changed. If anything, it seems to be going backwards, toward barbarism, intolerance, fanaticism, madness.
It is so extremely rare these days to hear a liberal speak up againt the gravest threat our civilization has faced since Nazism, that it is impossible not run toward these tiny points of light, like a child chasing fireflies in a swamp.

Acting crazy

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway quotes an Autralian newspaper's report that "Israel threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.", and calls it "stupid beyond belief".

I’m afraid that this (the report) is a canard, but boy, do I wish it were true! It is high time for Israel (and for the US for that matter), to start behaving a bit more irresponsibly, if not outright crazy in this war. World’s sympathy? Screw it! It ended for us soon after it became clear after 9/11 that the US would not roll over and die, but intends to punch back. Oh, the outrage! The condemnations! Israel should borrow a page from the playbook by that nutcase, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and start talking about wiping Palestine off the map, or nuking Tehran. Apparently, he gets results, with the Europeans offering a “package of incentives” so that Iran does not build The Bomb. How about a nice package of incentives from the Arab countries for not hanging a big mushroom cloud over Mecca?
You can’t get the attention of fanatical killers by playing nice. They’ve been chopping people’s heads in front of video cameras, and the world gets upset because American soldiers - the savages! - photographed naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and play-acted electrocution. If the world is going to hate the Jews and the Americans anyway, why not at least give them good reasons?

Gone to live on a farm

A very funny and poignant piece by David Zincavage at Never Yet Melted illustrating how American "intelligentsia today are like children. They have no first hand experience commonly of the harsh and difficult choices adults have to make. And, like children, they are naive, sentimental, and do not understand evil."

By all means, go and read the whole thing.

They hate us? Great!

A couple of days ago I caught the last few minutes of a radio interview with Francis Fukuyama bemoaning the fact that, “the United States have never been so unpopular and even hated around the world.” (Quoting from memory.) Of course, I’ve heard it before, many times – after all, it is one of the favorite mantras of the American Left, almost as popular as “Bush lied!” – but it never fails to bring a nasty expletive to my lips. It is such a meaningless statement and yet most of the time accepted at face value, as if it were, indeed, an undeniable and very unfortunate fact.

Even assuming that this is true, that the unpopularity of the United States has never been greater, why is this necessarily a bad thing? It might be a bad thing if everybody in the whole world liked the US less (or disliked it more) than before. I’m certain that this is not the case – that there are plenty of people whose admiration and respect for this country increased in recent years. Of course, I’m also certain that there are plenty of those, who hate us more than before. But before we start wringing our hands and pondering how to make ourselves more lovable, let’s consider for a moment who is hating us and why. I’ll take a stab:

The radical Left worldwide is not about to forget and forgive the fact that the wrong side won the Cold War. There is no way we can placate these people unless the US adopts socialism. I hope this will never happen, even if these people end up stewing in their hatred till the day they expire.

The Islamists want us all to die slow and painful deaths, but even if we were to do that in order to please them, I really doubt that this would diminish their hatred of us – only add contempt to the mix. Even scoundrels like Michael More, whose disdain for his own country receives such applause from the enemies of America, would probably have his head sawed off, too.

There are those, who are envious of our success and prosperity. Especially in countries that used to play the first fiddle on the international scene but now are finding out that their voice matters as much (or as little) as that of any other country. Russia and France immediately come to mind. These countries’ elites – and a significant portion of their citizenry – feel that the United States somehow “stole” their power and influence, basking in the spotlight that belongs to them. As Sylvain Galineau so eloquently put it:

“In a way, the U.S. position today is that of a geopolitical Microsoft : hugely successful, rich, powerful, sucking up the best talent, fast and nimble despite its massive size, ruthlessly efficient in crushing its opponents. Hated, insulted and derided more for it successes than its failures, the favorite subject of conspiracy theories, urban legends and other lunacies. Surrounded by lesser powers and interest groups all vying for its attention and a piece of the action. Harrassed, stalked and sued by a constellation of once great dwarflings who will never admit their diminished position has at least as much to do with their own stupidity and mistakes as it has with the giant's deft cunning. Feeling entitled to greatness and influence on the sole basis of their past, they claim what should be theirs has been stolen from them. The U.N. is their Department Of Justice. Chirac fancies himself as their David Boies. With more expensive suits. And he loves the attention.”

The Palestinians. Ah, but then they hate almost everybody. Apparently they hate the Europeans, who for many years have been pouring money and support for their cause, even more than us. Go figure.

Authoritarian regimes, especially those in the Middle East, have good reasons to fear and hate us. They used to be courted by both of the great adversaries in the Cold War, but now, with only one of those adversaries still standing, their usefulness has diminished to zero. In fact, their continued existence is against the interests of the United States. Their resentment is hardly surprising.

Now, let’s ask ourselves: would we really want these people to like us? Would Francis Fukuyama feel better about America, if newspapers abroad carried news items like these:

“Representatives of Hamas expressed their gratitude to the United States for providing them with much needed cash and weapons.”

“French president Jacques Chirac acknowledged today that since the US had started seeking France’s approval for all its international initiatives, the relationship between the two allies has never been better.”

“Mullah Omar and his Taliban supporters praised their former enemy for restoring them to power in Afghanistan and for providing tens of thousands of burkhas for the Afghan women.”

“Socialist parties around the world applauded the United States for abolishing private land ownership and promoting farm collectives in all 50 states.”

We ought to be proud and happy that people like that hate us – the alternative would be unbearable.