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Here is a piece from Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, it is reproduced in accordance with the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060822.wsimpson22/BNStory/National/home
Simpson has part of it right, but only a bit.
This new war will be long, at least as long as the liberal West vs. fascist/communist Europe one. It will also be asymmetrical.
The UN report on human development in Arab nations is, indeed, instructive. The Arabs are abysmal failures at nation building and statecraft. There are many reasons for this, almost all cultural: beginning with a distaste for education, beyond religious education. This is the main medieval aspect of parts of the 21st century Islamic world. It is reported (I cannot find the reference at the moment) that religious studies are overwhelmingly dominant in almost all Middle Eastern universities – even in Cairo and Amman; the exception is in Palestine where commerce, engineering and medicine (the ‘trades’ of academe) predominate. One need only to look at Saudi Arabia: it has a largeish modern air force which would be grounded the day after all the foreign, mostly Anglo-American ex pat tech reps left.
But, being a journalist, Simpson is terribly short-sighted; being a Canadian he is required, culturally, to go off the rails and blame George Bush for almost everything. Ditto his views on the Arab/Israeli ‘dilemma’. It is not a dilemma at all: one side or the other must win. Historically, it probably doesn’t matter all that much which one does. I rather hope the Israelis win, I rather expect both to lose in the short term, with an eventual completely (and literally) pyrrhic victory going to the remnants of the Arabs.
The Globe and Mail invites readers to comment. I often do – despite a very user unfriendly system which limits both size (not a bad idea) but does not allow paragraphing. Here is my offering:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060822.wsimpson22/BNStory/National/home
Visiting the way stations of a new 'long war'
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
The “long war,” U.S. scholar Philip Bobbitt's description for the interconnected hot and cold conflicts from 1914 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, was fundamentally about the relationship between individuals and the state.
Liberal democracies ultimately prevailed in that “long war” against their ideological foes, notably communism and fascism. But it was easy to forget in the euphoria of that victory that an offshoot of the “long war” had implanted itself in the heart of Islam, namely Israel.
Of course, Jews wishing a homeland had been in Palestine before the Balfour Declaration, before and during the British mandate, before and after Theodor Herzl's Zionist call for a Jewish state. But the “long war,” with European Jews as leading victims, pushed enough of them to Palestine to force the making of modern Israel and created the political geography and psychological reflexes that plague the area.
The old “long war” between liberal democracies and its foes culminated, if not with the “end of history,” then with the dominance of the countries that upheld those values, notably the United States.
Then began the next “long war,” of the weak against the strong, a war fought by asymmetrical means and once again about different conceptions of the relationship between individuals and the state. Since this struggle, like the last one, is essentially about values and political conception, and since these take a long time to change, this latest “long war” bids fair to be a matter of generations.
The weak were (and are) the Islamists whose states, or so they believe, betrayed the faith by not insisting that all phases of individual and collective life be shaped by it.
Having been made acutely aware of their states' and societies' own weaknesses — economic stagnation, endemic corruption, corrosive politics, military defeat — these individuals and groups rationalized those weaknesses by blaming others, targeting Israel, and devising means to strike at the strong.
The seeding ground for this anger came from Arabs themselves — the economists and others who wrote the devastating portrait of the miserable performance of these countries (the Human Development Reports) for the United Nations.
While many Asian countries, all the former Communist states of Eastern Europe and some Latin American ones have been pulling themselves up economically, the Arab ones — including those with huge quantities of oil — have been going nowhere.
A careful analysis of this sad state of affairs, such as that provided by the UN authors, ought to have sparked serious introspection and radical changes. Instead, these painful truths were either ignored or interpreted as further evidence of the oppression imposed by “others,” the remedy for which was more stringent adherence to the faith.
Iran is a classic example of oil revenues wasted. A country that should be rich as a Persian king might have imagined is mired in corruption and stagnation, with a bloated bureaucracy and a chaotically bad infrastructure.
The appeal to a certain version of the faith, the rhetoric of being surrounded by enemies, the fixation with Israel, the “death to America” sloganeering and the appeal to Persian nationalism are all symptoms of a country averting its eyes from its own weakness and determined to compensate for such weakness by equipping itself with the mightiest weapon of all: a nuclear bomb.
The weak, of course, are not without tools. Some are psychological: the age-old Shia sense of martyrdom where military setbacks such as that suffered by Hezbollah are parlayed into glorious victories, and where the Arab memory of humiliating defeats inflates rocket attacks against Israel into triumphs. Some of the tools are violent ones, used by terrorists, militias (in Iraq, for example) and governments against their own people (in Afghanistan under the Taliban, for instance, and in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood).
The weak in this new “long war” are lucky, too, in their adversaries, especially the administration in Washington that has become so widely reviled. They also have been fortunate — although there is blame aplenty on all sides — that no solution has been found for the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.
What we have witnessed in recent weeks — another spasm of Israeli-Arab fighting in Lebanon, an aborted terrorist attack in Britain, 3,000 dead in the cauldron of Iraq, violence in southern Afghanistan — are but way stations of this “long war.”
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
Simpson has part of it right, but only a bit.
This new war will be long, at least as long as the liberal West vs. fascist/communist Europe one. It will also be asymmetrical.
The UN report on human development in Arab nations is, indeed, instructive. The Arabs are abysmal failures at nation building and statecraft. There are many reasons for this, almost all cultural: beginning with a distaste for education, beyond religious education. This is the main medieval aspect of parts of the 21st century Islamic world. It is reported (I cannot find the reference at the moment) that religious studies are overwhelmingly dominant in almost all Middle Eastern universities – even in Cairo and Amman; the exception is in Palestine where commerce, engineering and medicine (the ‘trades’ of academe) predominate. One need only to look at Saudi Arabia: it has a largeish modern air force which would be grounded the day after all the foreign, mostly Anglo-American ex pat tech reps left.
But, being a journalist, Simpson is terribly short-sighted; being a Canadian he is required, culturally, to go off the rails and blame George Bush for almost everything. Ditto his views on the Arab/Israeli ‘dilemma’. It is not a dilemma at all: one side or the other must win. Historically, it probably doesn’t matter all that much which one does. I rather hope the Israelis win, I rather expect both to lose in the short term, with an eventual completely (and literally) pyrrhic victory going to the remnants of the Arabs.
The Globe and Mail invites readers to comment. I often do – despite a very user unfriendly system which limits both size (not a bad idea) but does not allow paragraphing. Here is my offering:
Simpson is a typical journalist: short sighted. He recognizes that we are in yet another long war but then, because he cannot resist, he drags in the current, short term, American administration. The group which will lead the West to yet another victory, this one over Islam - militant or not, (see Victor Davis Hanson for some historical, classical perspective on the long, long list of wars and Western victories) is the "Anglosphere" - which has been rising, and continues to rise, for about 400 years. (It replaced the essentially Asian hegemony started by Timor and completed by Babar’s Mogul Empire.) The zenith of the Anglosphere's power is still in the future, but maybe not even 100 years in the future; the nadir of its power is 500+ years away. In the interim it will defeat the Islamist threat and, possibly, hopefully stimulate a necessary reform and enlightenment within Islam and the Middle East. It will also contain and moderate China which will join it, perhaps supplant it, as the leader of an equally powerful "Sinosphere". Long term, strategic and historic thinking is required for a long war: not immediate journalistic navel gazing.