Friday, March 08, 2002

The Longest War by Victor Davis Hanson The fight we’re in didn’t begin on September 11; it started thousands of years ago. It’s the struggle between East and West, and history can both encourage and help us—if we read it properly. " ... many facile comparisons that are being made with the past are fraught with error ... and they misinform us about every element of the situation, from its underlying politics to the nature of the terrorism involved, the proper role of the military in our nation’s survival, the broader cultural context, and the true philosophy of war itself." Politics " ... wars often break out over professed rather than authentic grievances. ... the source of conflict hinges on a state’s perceived sense of 'honor, fear, and self-interest.' ... bin Laden is ... an inherently evil man who hates and envies us for our clout and our influence. ... That simple explanation seems to offer more consistent logic than do all the ... critiques of our foreign policy ... the reasons bin Laden himself has proffered for his hatred of America: our military protection of Saudi oil, Israelis on Palestinian land, the hateful modernism of global democracy and capitalism, Jewish American women walking in the land of Mecca ... " " ... the Muslim world has rejected the twin forces of global capitalism and democracy. ... Failure to emulate Western market economies and constitutional governments is probably the chief reason why living standards in the Middle East, despite extravagant oil and natural gas deposits, lag so far behind those of other continents. Revolutionary Islamic movements, which promise Muslim utopias based on strict adherence to the Koran and the exclusion of foreign ideas, have, in fact, ruined their countries." " ... our policy of not intervening to insist on gradual democratization has been understandable, because of our worry over world oil supplies ... In an irony of history, the promotion of democratic movements in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq may be our best way to oppose Islamic fundamentalism ... Most Americans support Israel because it is the single Middle Eastern state most like us in its commitment to a free society based on the rule of law and the consent of the governed." Terror "We are repeatedly told that we have entered a 'new' age of terror ... Yet neither bin Laden nor terrorism is new, and so the solutions to their threats are not only known but time-honored. Our steep initial losses ... resulted far less from any intrinsic weaknesses than from the laxity and naiveté that characterize free democratic societies during times of peace." "Bin Laden is not a figure of national liberation ... Rather, he is more one of the marginal fanatics of history, the B-team, who, long after their countries were exposed to Western culture, their heritage and future forever altered, have sought to employ terror and mysticism to rally the disaffected around a messianic figure." "Not merely terrorist leaders but terror itself has been met and trumped in the past. ... In short, throughout history, the opponents of Western civilization who have lacked its discipline and firepower have turned to terror and suicide in their struggles to even the odds. ... without exception they have been beaten by the greater terror of discipline, resolve, vigilance, new tactics, and the firepower of industrial weaponry. ... They need bases, banks, transportation, and lodging, and therefore they must have friendly host governments that can be cajoled, threatened, or destroyed if they offer sanctuary." Military " ... unlike prior invaders, Americans have been prepared to strike with no illusions about the ease of their task and with no wish for conquest, lucre, or obeisance. Our generals are neither arrogant nor naive, and we have no interest in occupying the country or in turning its people from medieval Islam to preferring the benefits of popular American culture." "Today, America’s political landscape is hardly beset by civil unrest. Instead, there is unity and recognition that our home soil has been attacked." "The last decade has witnessed a revolution in bombing, as the old banes of airpower —ineffectiveness, collateral damage, and aircraft losses—have been vastly reduced through technological breakthroughs. ... with new generations of complex ordnance and sophisticated technology, bombers can increase their already prominent role to match the importance of conventional ground forces, shorten the war, and thus save lives on both sides." Culture " ... the long tradition of the Western way of war itself. Across some 2,500 years, the real danger for a Western power has always been another Western power. ... Western nations from the Greeks to the present are not weak at war but enormously lethal, far out of proportion to their sometimes relatively small populations and territories." " ... our power ... is founded on our very ideas and values. The underpinnings of Western culture—freedom, civic militarism, capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash—have always brought carnage to adversaries when applied on the battlefield. ... [enemies] all can usually be trumped in the long run by the systematic approach to war that is emblematic of our culture. ... This is a question not of morality per se but of military capacity." " ... civic militarism is a trademark of Western armies, whose soldiers are not serfs or tribesmen but fight as citizens with rights and responsibilities. ... In the months to come, American ground and air forces, with better weapons, better supplies, better discipline, and more imaginative commanders, audited constantly by an elected Congress and President and scrutinized by a free press, will in fact destroy the very foundations of radical Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, virtually the only check on the terrifying power of Western armies, other than other Western armies, is not enemy spears or bullets but the voices of our own internal dissent ... " "America is not only the inheritor of the European military tradition but in many ways its most potent incarnation. Our multiracial and radically egalitarian society has taken the concepts of freedom and market capitalism to their theoretical limits, to the great worry of critics on both the left and the right. While it is easy to ridicule the crassness of our culture and the collective amnesia of our masses, we must not underestimate the lethal military dynamism that such an energetic and restless citizenry accrues. Right now, background means little in comparison with our present ambition, drive, and ingenuity. For all the talk of a cultural mosaic, we are still a nation and a melting pot, as the composition of our military and its resulting effectiveness show." "So our creed is not class, race, breeding, or propriety, but unchecked energy, as so often expressed in our machines, our competitiveness, and our unabashed audacity. These are powerful assets when we turn from the arts of production to those of destruction." Philosophy "If we are so strong, then, why have so many Americans been doubtful about the future and poorly acquainted with their past?" " ... during the International Year of Peace, 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike. Consequently, we now tend to believe that war always results from concrete, rather than professed, injustice, especially poverty brought about by colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and so on. As a result, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of conflict-resolution theory, a sort of divorce counseling on the international level. And such naiveté and relativism have affected the very way we look at our current conflict, when we imagine that bin Laden is either ignorant, insane, or partly justified, rather than purely evil, and that his followers can be counseled, instead of annihilated like the fascists of Germany and Japan." "Our goal is not only to replace the Taliban and dismantle terrorist networks but also, by the annihilation of the Afghanistan government, to teach the misguided and misled in the region that when they let slip the dogs of war against America, it can be a dangerous thing indeed. ... Real morality does not permit hesitating out of fear of injuring the innocent or suffering casualties but rather can require enduring that and more to ensure that thousands now and millions later will not grow up to be murdered under terror and fascism, whose fruits we know so well from the sordid history of the past century. Lincoln called such sacrifices 'the terrible arithmetic.' ... it is hard to learn from war ... 'the harsh schoolmaster.' It shatters our modernist assumption that we can change the nature of man and eliminate the Neanderthal need to resort to arms. America at the beginning of the millennium, awash in wealth, luxury, and learning, was convinced that our enemies were either ignorant, misinformed, or temporarily insane—not evil, and certainly not rationally evil. And so in place of strong military preparation and the swift responses to aggression that had been the wisdom of the ages, we wanted lawyers to handle war as a criminal matter, or we thought we could avoid it through conciliation and mediation, or by buying off our enemies with money, kindness, education, apologies, or, as a last resort, the occasional Tomahawk missile." "Those of the professional elite now between the ages of 40 and 60 have, in the last few years, often been protected through sinecures, tenure, safe suburbs, select schools, and good money from the traditional checks on utopianism: the unemployment, scant disposable income, muscular work, and physical danger that daily confront members of the working class. ... Multiculturalism, conflict-resolution theory, postmodernism, pacifism, and a host of other new isms and ologies all sought to achieve a kinder world where equality of results would be enforced rather than equality of opportunity ensured, where injustice, disagreement, and thus war itself could somehow disappear. History and literature, the age-old instructors of war, were often crowded out as the proper guides to the human condition; facts, knowledge, and even methodical inquiry were replaced in many of our schools by an ideology. The result was that now many of our cultural leaders know little of history, and they mask their ignorance with the arrogance of good intentions, fueled by the bounty of American materialism." "Our salvation will hinge on how many of our leaders read history, learn its lessons, and act out of conviction drawn from classical American wisdom and military strength." ... [more] 1:48:37 PM    comment  []

National Review Online "America's Premier Conservative Website" Left Plays Survivor by Stanley Kurtz Why the anti-war Left must be. "The anti-war Left is back ... The problem for the Left is that Sept. 11 really may have changed everything — that a near-constant state of mobilization against terror may permanently cripple the politics of multiculturalism at home and anti-globalization abroad." "If you want to understand what's really going on in the mind of the anti-war Left, pick up the March issue of Harper's. There you will find an extraordinary article by novelist and University of Massachusetts English Professor John Edgar Wideman called, 'Whose War: The Color of Terror' ... His point is that Bush has cooked up a fraudulent war abroad 'to  upstage and camouflage the real war at home' (i.e. the "war" of a racist white American society against blacks). Wideman has next to nothing to say about Islamic terrorism. He's preoccupied instead with the cultural and political effects on America of a war with 'alarmingly open-ended goals.' Bush's 'phony war,' says Wideman is being waged not 'to defend America from an external foe but to homogenize and coerce its citizens under a flag of rabid nationalism.' ... Wideman's calumny is built upon a genuine fear. The president is in fact defending us from an external foe, but that urgently necessary defense really does have the effect of cutting off the cultural and political oxygen of the Left." "Wideman's calumny is built upon a genuine fear. ... he tries to conjure away the terrorist threat with standard-issue techniques of deconstruction.  We use the word 'terrorist' ... to deny the possibility of 'reasoned exchange' with our foes, to project the evil in ourselves onto a despised 'Other.'" "Lewis Lapham's own assault on the war in the latest issue of Harper's ... We have been inventing phony wars for nigh on 60 years ... all because of our need  to prove to ourselves that we're the good guys. ... all a ridiculous and self-fulfilling fantasy of national endangerment in the service of America's utopian quest for omnipotence. ... our seemingly ineradicable capacity to warmonger, even as we convince ourselves of our peace-loving intentions." "Pity (and fear) those so ashamed of their capacity for rage that they can no longer turn even a righteous anger against some foreign foe, but must vent their rage instead in an attack on their own country." "The cultural politics of the Left is essentially  an attempt to 'one up' democracy by being 'more egalitarian than thou.' The sense of superiority; the demand for control; anger against a hated foe — all of these forms of human irrationality are abundantly present in leftist politics. Yet a right-thinking, well-brought-up, hyper- egalitarian fellow can only enjoy these guilty pleasures if they're buried inside of an attack against America itself for some imagined sin against democracy. To feel angry at, or superior to, some benighted foreign foe is just too obvious — too embarrassing — a way for a sophisticated modern leftist to gratify all of those nasty but ineradicable human longings for supremacy. So how to run a leftist political crusade when America really is under threat from a foreign and undemocratic foe? It cannot be done." "That's why left-leaning intellectuals have retreated into a stance of tortured isolation and superiority, while still suggesting to anyone who will listen that the threat of terrorism and the war itself are nothing but mass delusions. ... But the timing is off. The Democrats and the Left are panicking — speaking out against the war too sharply, too soon, and with too little justification — all because they cannot control their fear that an 'open-ended' war against terrorism will permanently shift the cultural politics of the country to the right. Their fears are well taken. This war will not have a definitive ending. Because of that, the Left now has a very serious long-term problem on its hands. That definitely does not mean that the culture war is over. The sources of America's post-sixties cultural revolution are far too broad and deep for the culture war to fade. But in ways that may last for a very long time to come, our political and cultural center of gravity has shifted several degrees to the right." ... [more] 1:42:13 PM    comment  []