A Wretchard Choice

Richard Fernandez, né Wretchard, the writer of The Belmont Club, doesn’t need my help publicizing his blog; I’m putting this comment of his up in my own blog more as a reminder to myself of how well he’s put this point. I argued the same in a letter to a friend of my father that I wrote about three years ago, but never sent (he didn’t want his angry friend to turn his guns on me, and I think he thought one of my generation responding to one of his, outside of family, unseemly). I doubt, however, that I put it as well. The crux of the argument, that I was making specifically in regard to the Iraq war, and which Wretchard Fernandez is making more generally, is: “We don’t want to go there,” “going there” being defined as “being forced to destroy with nuclear weapons vast segments of Islamic society.” Here are his words, as they appear in the third comment of this post, Thinking the Unthinkable: (should the link fail to work, he may have moved his archives over to his new home at Pajamas Media, here):

The argument has already been made and widely
accepted that Western society is guilty and deserves
collective punishment. Much of the Left believes this, an[d]
certainly Osama Bin Laden does. Terrorism is all about
collective punishment. That's why terrorists don't meet
armies or enemy forces directly. They strike at civilian
and other targets reasoning that one is as “guilty” as the
other.

The idea of collective retaliation is an old one. What was
the bombing of Dresden about? The Japanese, who
butchered civilians in Nanking and Manila knew all about
collective punishment. And so did the Brits, who used
poison gas and strafing runs against Iraqis in the pre-
World War 2 years. There is no way to prettify collective
punishment. It is so unavoidable that deterrence -- the
thing that kept the world in one piece from 1949 to
1989 -- was based on it.

Consider, that if in 1963 it was US policy to incinerate
every Russian man, woman and child in the event they
had to “duck and cover” -- American schoolkids were
taught to try to survive a nuclear blast -- then why is it
less moral to apply the same morality to terrorist
supporters and places of prestige?

In truth, they are equally immoral. And for myself, I think
it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.
About all you can say is that it may be necessary.
Necessary to make these threats to keep the peace. So
maybe you can argue that we can threaten the immoral to
achieve the moral -- which is the prevention of war -- aka
deterrence.

This used to be called, back in grad school, the art of
“thinking the unthinkable.” At this point some people
mentally short circuit, raise themselves erect, throw back
their heads and announce “I shall not contemplate this.”
But after a while, they sit down and realize that heroic
poses aside, he's still stuck in the same bottle along with
all the rest of the trapped scorpions. Then they go back to
doodling.

For my part, I think the only unambiguously moral action
to take is work toward avoiding this fix to start with. That
means nipping WMD terror threats in the bud. Hitting the
enemy conventionally and precisely now. I don't hold
with the idea, so dear to many pacifists, that we should
just let things slide, because “nothing can be worse than
war” -- meaning limited war, against terrorists. Or holding
back from criticizing noxious ideologies. There is
something far, far worse than this.

And the Hoover piece gives us a glimpse into what that
worse thing is. We don't want to go there. Though we
seem to be doing our damndest to go there anyway.

“‘I shall not contemplate this.’” Turning the other cheek calls for this stance. I wrote a few days ago that it is ok to turn one’s own – ok to let one’s own self be destroyed by a terrorist bomb – but not ok to tell others to turn theirs. I.e., it is ok to fight to prevent injustice being done to others. That said, however, I believe in the professional pacifist. Jesus was not a Zealot, even if they were fighting for freedom from the Romans. Clergy generally refrain from taking up arms. Maxmillian Kolbe did so, but left no doubt as to his bravery. I am not a pacifist, and I’m not even against collective punishment (I am a teacher, after all), but when it comes to nuclear weapons … well, I have thought and written and sometimes spoken in favor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if I had the key to the suitcase, if I were in charge of pushing the little red button, I don’t know if I could do it. Perhaps that makes me a coward, but perhaps deep down I hold to that law of morality, that one not do evil, even with the intention that good may come of it. Ech.

If there’s any certainty in all of this for me, I can say these three things: 1. better we colonize the whole of Islamia than nuke it all (note that I am not necessarily recommending this); 2. like one categorically opposed to the death penalty is an invalid juror, I would be an invalid President of the United States; 3. it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to be sinless while living in this world, which is why the monastery has such appeal at times. As Wre- As Fernandez might say of the world, “it is futile and dishonest to twist it into a moral shape.”

"to weaken the circle of particularism"

For my money, though I love the conviviality of Goldberg, and the literary essays of Derbyshire, the writer at National Review who best combines deep and impressive research with theoretical imagination and clarity of expression is Stanley Kurtz. This is not to say I have understood in toto his every column, but any lack of understanding has been due only to my lack of time or energy to address his writings, some of which require background in the subject he’s addressing in order thoroughly to comprehend them. I don’t quite have the historical knowledge to fully appreciate his latest, so this entry is more aimed at posing questions than giving answers to or opinions on some of the things he says.

Kurtz has written a so-called book review at the Weekly Standard, of Philip Carl Salzman’s Culture and Conflict in the Middle East. I say “so-called” not to denigrate or challenge him, but because it is so much more than a book review (pasted into Microsoft Word, in 12-point Times New Roman, it reaches 13 pages). The review encompasses an obscure (to me) allusion to Native American history, a mini-history of the discipline of anthropology, a summation of the book’s argument, and an analysis of our own time in light of the issues raised in the book (these last three elements apparently come from both Salzman and Kurtz, in which proportion he does not make clear).

At the end of an argument that, in essence, the Arab tribal nature of our enemies is more responsible for our (and their) troubles than is their Islamic nature (though it’s not that simple, so go read the essay, and then, perhaps, the book), Kurtz writes,

It won't be easy to weaken the circle of particularism – the self-reinforcing loyalties of extended family, tribe, and sect that dominate Arab countries at both the state and local levels. The British did something comparable in traditional India by creating a counter-system of liberal education and advancement through merit, rather than kin ties. But that took time, military control, and a favorable political environment. The road to genuine cultural change is long, and there are no easy shortcuts.

This seems profoundly sensible. It’s an admission of the benefits of empire, analogous to Jonah Goldberg’s advice to re-colonize Africa, or Thomas Barnett’s admonition to “shrink the gap.” But it gets me to wondering, in a chicken-egg kind of way: What did Europe do to escape tribalism? Was it the Romans and then the Church that set up meritocracies (army and clergy, respectively) analogous to the political one grown over the years in British India? Or was it faith in gods or God – a thing in which to believe other than earthly power? Do the Greeks get any credit, even though their democracies didn’t outlast their own strife? Why weren’t their democracies inherently tribal – or were they?

This example also brings up the American Indians. There I have fewer questions, though based still on a somewhat thin instruction in the subject. It seems clear that the American approach to “the gap” was both similar to and different from the British approach. The British gave over India to a private company – the British East India Company – to manage. That company essentially provided its own protection, until at some point they got too brutal and were essentially fired by the British government, who then took over the colony, finally releasing it after World War II. (Please don’t rely on this history, though, yourself – look it up if you have any doubts, because I wouldn’t bet my blog income on it being flawless.) The Americans also gave over the business of gap shrinkage to private actors – thousands and thousands of them, individual colonists or pioneers setting out on their own to find freedom and profit. But these individuals were not required to protect themselves, as the American Army was sent out in their behalf (thus becoming complicit in their injustices, as well as committing a few of its own). When enough of these individuals lived in an area pacified by the military, they would petition to become part of the United States, thus transforming the paradigm.

The Subcontinental solution, it seems, was primarily political – a transformation of Indian culture – though there may have been genocidal elements I don’t know of. In the American West, the solution was partly genocidal – though that was partially inadvertent and not truly comparable to the classic genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. It was also partially political, as some Indians became assimilated to the invaders. And it was something in-between – perhaps a form of ethnic cleansing – in which the gap was shrunk into a multitude of gaps we today call reservations. (It seems that the reservations are still somewhat gappish, if the horror stories I hear occur within them are true.) Iraq, finally, is an almost wholly government-run effort, almost entirely political in nature, with its temporarily colonized natives being – as often as they are willing – partners in the efforts of the U. S. military. It is not ethnic cleansing, because they are not being moved to make way for the invaders. It is not genocidal, because they are not being exterminated. (Indeed, one reason I supported the invasion of Iraq was because I preferred the certain travails of nation-building to the potential crime of nuclear genocide of an entire region – ask yourself what might have happened after four to five more 9/11’s, and you’ll perhaps see my point.)

I still have lots of questions, enough that I’m not entirely confident in what tentative analysis I do offer above. If I had to take a guess of where I’d find my answers, my dilettantish historical reading and poor memory suggest Henri Pirenne and Christopher Dawson may make good choices, though I certainly have no particular works in mind – the only one I know by the former is on the rise of the cities, and I’ve only read a few essays by the latter. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror might be useful, though her main examination of lawlessness covers the mercenary companies of the 1300’s, which seemed to grow out of settled agrarian populations – perhaps that is an example of the Khalduno-Gellneric patterns of tribal alignment and causality that Kurtz mentions. Rather than pondering on any more, however, I’ll take my leave. Perhaps Mr. Kurtz can suggest a reading list for those of us who wish to know more – after we get finished with Salzman, that is.

The Echo Chamber

The blogosphere seems to act like a gigantic echo-chamber at times, causing stories that don't make it big at first to get there if enough people mention them. As my modest effort to add to the echo chamber effect on this story of Hussein-Al Qaeda connections, I offer the final three paragraphs to Stephen F. Hayes's article on “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” a study showing the sympathy between the objectives of Saddamite Iraq and Al Qaeda, not to mention monetary connections between the former and individuals working for the latter:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Good Question