The Gertrude Bell Jar

Civilized People Would Never Tolerate Genocide!

See now, this is the kind of thing that baffles me:

You don't need to be a master geo-strategist or have a doctorate in comparative anthropology to figure out that a culture and religion indifferent or worse to murder on a large scale is going to be a problem for the civilized countries. Egyptian, Saudi, and other Arab Muslims who object to this characterization of them have it within their power to prove me wrong, or not, by what they finally do about Darfur.

See the entire history of world-wide indifference to instances of genocide when the national interests of no outside nation are at stake for the easiest refutation of this statement (Kosovo was an exception, and even then only just barely, as you may recall—his use of the example here is disingenuous, since obviously European intervention followed American intervention, which is highly unlikely ever to be forthcoming with regard to Sudan), which I’m sure everyone can work out for themselves. The question for me is, has always been, why does a person who believes this support the Bush Doctrine on any level? Do they really believe that we can actually change the basic culture and religious beliefs of that many people at will? If you really, truly believe that Islam and Arab culture is inherently savage, then it seems to me that you must also think that there is no hope whatsoever for democratization, and that those who want to return to the "realpolitik" model, of conducting foreign policy in the Middle East through repressive dictators and monarchs whose rule we help to maintain, are right, always have been, always will be.

And beyond that, how can anyone who understands the relationship between ruler and press in the kinds of manifestly unfree countries we’re talking about here possibly mistake press silence about Darfur as an expression of the will of the people in general, rather than of rulers who have no intention of acting and therefore see no reason to get anyone to get all riled up about it? Or to complicate their narrative of blaming all their failures on the International Jewish Conspiracy and its puppet the U.S, or vice-versa, by acknowledging any shortcomings in other Arab-ruled nations? The pattern here is political, not cultural or religious, and has been the default since long before Darfur. I don’t get how you can beat your chest about lack of freedom in Middle Eastern countries in one breath and then treat their state-run media as some kind of deep expression of the popular will and character in another. A good Cold Warrior would never have been caught dead making this error about Pravda back in the day.

The irony is, 100 years ago, people like the guest blogger here were always going on about how passive and sensualist and downright effeminate Arab and Islamic culture were. No, really.

P. said: The interesting thing is that the "liberal" argument for 9-11 invokes all kinds of examples of economic duplicity with regimes as nasty as Sudan's.

To think of the Arab world as a collaborate and culpable monolith is as naive as saying that America could intervene forcefully on the part of the Basques, or the Kossacks.

Furthermore, Kosovo was a belated exception to a rule of sovereignity that also came out in Turkey, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia, Rwanda, Uganda, Australia, China/Korea under Japan, and the Congo, to name a few examples from the 20th century. Stopping genocide is never as easy as it looks, and can be politically and fiscally disastrous. The problem from Hell is not yet solved, because the UN is not an effective or trusted force in these matters, and no other body has the scope and resources to put out all these fires. In most cases, genocide gets stopped by neighboring countries when the refugee burden gets too hot to handle. This is certainly not the quickest way to avert tragedy, but its probably the only realistic way to bring an end to genocide wwithin.

I replied: The interesting thing is that the "liberal" argument for 9-11 invokes all kinds of examples of economic duplicity with regimes as nasty as Sudan's.

I find that mindbending, myself. If you can recognize how destructive economic, military, and political duplicity with repressive regimes in the Middle East has been to our long-term interests so far, particularly in terms of the ideoligical development of Islamism, how can your answer be: Keep doing the same, except while rewarding Islamist terrorists with partial fulfillment of their demands? I couldn't think of a more effeciently self-destructive course if I tried.

M. said: The question for me is, has always been, why does a person who believes this support the Bush Doctrine on any level? Do they really believe that we can actually change the basic culture and religious beliefs of that many people at will? If you really, truly believe that Islam and Arab culture is inherently savage, then it seems to me that you must also think that there is no hope whatsoever for democratization, and that those who want to return to the "realpolitik" model, of conducting foreign policy in the Middle East through repressive dictators and monarchs whose rule we help to maintain, are right, always have been, always will be.

I suspect that they support the use of force to take out some enemies and concentrate the minds of others, but are suspicious of the democratization project and consider it either a smokescreen or wrongheaded. (Up through the elections, I was always afraid that we'd lose our nerve and go back to the more traditional strategy of installing a strongman we can control, which much of the foreign policy establishment seems genuinely more comfortable with.) It's certainly possible to support taking out Saddam and putting troops in the Mideast as a matter of asserting power and pressure his neighbors, as well providing an opportunity to take on the enemy under military conditions far away rather than law-enforcement conditions in the US, without seriously expecting or caring that democracy take root in Iraq or anywhere else in the region. From a realpolitik perspective, repressive dictators and monarchs who are more afraid of their violent Islamists than they are of us is a lose-lose, as are repressive dictators who derive a large part of their authority from being our enemy-- it's just that there's no distinction between repressive dictators and an elective governments that do likewise, and-- I think-- no inherent presumption that one governing style is more or less likely to be a problem for us than another. (Though since you live with someone who did graduate work on this sort of thing, he presumably can do better than my muddling.)

Conversely, we have pursued policies to change what we at least thought were a culture's basic cultural and political beliefs before-- postwar Japan being the clearest example, but there was certainly a sense that German culture was inherently militaristic, violent, and expansionist (hence the support for the Morgenthau plan of essentially destroying Germany as an industrial country-- and if you'd asked me in 1945, I might well have gone for that). I think rooting out Islam would be on a completely different scale (and would be impossible short of genocide on a scale to make the 20th century blanch), but others may see it as a bigger version of the remaking of the Axis powers.

G. replied: I think rooting out Islam would be on a completely different scale (and would be impossible short of genocide on a scale to make the 20th century blanch), but others may see it as a bigger version of the remaking of the Axis powers.

I don't think there is any political objective to displace Islam (though some evangelists surely hope one day to convert all Muslims and everyone else too in a spiritual sense), but rather to tone it down to the tolerant religion of peace which respects women etc. which some adherents (and quite a few spinmeisters) maintain it is. In short, to foster a pre-1975-Beirut-style, Western-looking Islam by shutting down the Taliban, the ayatollahs and (one would hope sooner rather than later) the Saudi royal family.

The shorthand critique of the democratization initiative is that Americans (or W. anyway) believe that, given a chance, everyone else in the world would choose to be just like us. I think, however, that this is pretty much the case. Or at least they would be as much like as as, say, France: not necessarily best of friends, but not blood enemies and happy to vacation in the other's country. The lure of western individual freedom is just too intoxicating.

The problem is what constitutes "given a chance." A democratic ballot is no guarantee of democracy, let alone a (classical) liberal democracy, unless there is also all the accordant social and economic institutions and some degree of religious pluralism or other check on clerical power.

From that perspective, I think Iraq's ethnic and religious factionalism may actually be conducive to democratization since it would encourage coalition-building. Unless they kill each other first, of course.

I replied: it's just that there's no distinction between repressive dictators and an elective governments that do likewise, and-- I think-- no inherent presumption that one governing style is more or less likely to be a problem for us than another.

Ah, I think this is the part I was really not getting, I think because it seems so self-evidently false to me. Most of the pragmatic problems with attempting to realize foreign policy goals through "repressive dictators and monarchs who are more afraid of their violent Islamists than they are of us" is the total lack of tranparency; we never really know that they're doing what we think they're doing, and what else they might be doing that isn't even on our radar, and we don't seem capable of producing an intelligence community that can effectively keep an eye on them. The transparency in government that accompanies democracy as a matter of course would solve this problem. Or am I missing something?

In the Shadow of the Prophet/Milton Viorst

In the Shadow of the Prophet: the Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Milton Viorst.

Viorst is a journalist who has managed to gain access to many important figures in Middle Eastern and Islamic politics over the years, and perhaps therein lies the rub. Shortly after beginning this book I read apostablog taking Viorst to task for a laudatory profile of Muammar Qaddafi, and it's easy to see how a journalist might be dazzled by such a colorful and charismatic figure ("A James Bond villain trapped in our world," as Mr. Bell Jar likes to describe him). I found this bit of transcript from an interview with the late King Hussein of Jordan interesting in this respect:

MV: Leaving aside insults to the Prophet, do you feel there is a line that can be drawn in politicalspeech?
KH: No, as witnessed by what you hear and see in Jordan.
MV: Well, a Jordanian went to prison recently for what he said, though you pardoned him soon afterward. There is also a press law which, I am told, is designed to limit free speech.
KH: I don't know that it's designed to limit free speech but it is certainly designed for the judiciary to address distortions of truth and morality. I believe this would happen anywhere in the world. We opened up here in Jordan without having the time to develop codes for preserving our coherence and our unity and our dialogue as they should be. So we had to look at certain--not restraints, people can write whatever they feel like writing--but if they infringe on certain areas in a blatant way …
MV: What areas?
KH: For example, attacking people in a manner that is incompatible with the truth, false accusations. There is no restraint. But undermining the very roots of society is not what freedom is about. Freedom is your freedom to do whatever you like without infringing on the freedoms of others. That is precisely the line we are trying to draw. Are people in Jordan telling you there is no freedom? There is freedom. Too much at times.
MV: Shifting the subject ….

One is left to wonder whether there isn't always a little shifting of the subject in Viorst's interviews with political figures (no other interviews are presented in transcript form), and if being willing to do so when the interviewee becomes uncomfortable isn't a condition of being allowed to talk to them at all, and whether adoption of the view, which permeates this book, that Arabs--alone, of all the peoples of the earth--need to be ruled with a firm hand, isn't a consequence of making such accommodations over and over again. The most reprehensible example of this tendency is his acceptance of the Saudi self-characterization as the "most Islamic" Arab nation (which is a lot like calling Pat Robertson the "most Christian" religious leader in the West). However, this bias tends to be a matter of spin rather than actual accuracy with Viorst, and in any event his viewpoint is common enough in the West to be worth understanding on its own terms. Moreover, the book contains some interesting chapters on often-neglected subjects, like the Islamist (but Sufi!) government of the Sudan, the civil war over Islamism in Algeria, the surprising story of what actually happened to the Mu'tazilites, and a welcome history of the methodology of Islamic interpretation during the Abbasid period. Overall, well worth the read.