War Against the Boogey Men

After watching the Sunday newsies with clips of Bush, Cheney on camera and Hadley the functionary, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that we, Americans are chasing phantoms in the world, phantoms carefully cultivated in a surfeit of seminars and an excess of Jungian memory.

The president says that we are locked in an ideological struggle -----  OK, So what are the ideologies involved?

!- Freedom?  On our side?  That includes the Pakistanis, Saudis, Israelis, The Siniora government in Lebanon, Abu Mazen in Palestine, the Shia government of Iraq?  The Iraqi Kurds?  Turkey? Libya? Egypt? Yemen?

2- "Islamic Fascism" On the other side? Hamas, Syria, Iran, The Sunni insurgents (various), the jihadis?

This is tricky stuff.  The Saudis?  The administration's "pet" Lebanese? The "freedom" list looks more like a list of our client states than anything else.  Saudi Arabia has no consitution other that the Quran, no law except for Sharia and that of the Hanbali variety.  Pakistan is one man's life away from being a Shariah state.  Yemen?  Libya?  My God! The Israelis?  Sorry folks, but Carter is right.   From the point of view of the the Palestinians Israel/Palestine is not a free place. 

"Freedom" and "Islamic Fascism" clearly have "special" meanings here.  I say that "freedom" as the bushies use the term is code and really means westernization and "globalization" in the sense that we want to see the world "ironed out" flat so the it meets the egregious Friedman's dream of a homogeneous world.  "Islamic Fascism" means, I think, simply "Islam."  That is, Islam as it has been understod by millennia of Muslims.  That is, as an all encompassing view of the world and man's relationship to God.  "Ah, but these are not real Muslims," I can hear the outcry now.  Rubbish.  We non-Muslims can not dictate to any particular group of Muslms what Islam means to them.  We want an Islam similar in its role in life to the emasculated role that Christianity plays for most Americans in their lives?  Sorry!  We do not get to choose for them.  There wil be a reaction to what I have written here.  It will be similar to the outrage vented on me by a former congressman from the Midwest who went on and and on about the nice ladies who come to his office to tell him that Muslims are a peaceful lot.   Peaceful? Yes? Within limits.

My analysis leads me to the belief that in reality we are fighting against traditional Islam. What do I mean by that? I mean that the US government claims that it is opposing only the extreme jihadis whether Sunni or Shia, but, in fact is opposing the whole structuire of traditional Islamic life and law in the name of "universal values" which are, in fact, Western in origin. In this context "democracy," "globalization" are mere code for the goal of acculturating the Muslims in the direction of the West.

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Iran and the international jihadi movement are existential threats to Israel.  They are not existential threats to the the USA.   Fight over that one.  Just think about what it would take to kill the USA.  It would take a lot, a hell of a lot.  Think about potential jihadi or Iranian capabilities.  Think about ranges, throw weights.  Think about "the unthinkable."  Undertand that the death of a city will not kill the United States. We are Israel's ally.  We are prepared to go to war for Israel.  I do not question that as policy, but if we go to war with Iran at root it will be because of the Israelis reasonable fear them as an existential threat.  pl

Comments

[The Lounsbury]

This silly anti-globalisation screed, however, is pure fantasy:
The globalist project will also destroy local mores, cultures, religions and habits of trade (e.g. the souk replaced by the Mega-Mall filled with transnational retailers like The Gap), but to its proponents like Friedman, it's a small price to pay for world peace and prosperity.

Local choices make local cultural changes (I leave aside the nitwit Friedman, you will not find more effective critiques of his simple minded cheerleading than from informed 'pro globalisation' writers such as Martin Wolfe.), and to the extent that a shopping mall is favoured over the traditional souq, well that will be the choice of the local consumer.

Fetishisation of "local" shops over the fiction of "trans-national retailers" (rarely of any import outside their home markets in terms of sales) is merely illiterate fear-mongering.

[soar]

Is it not deterrence that kept the cold war in check? I do not think that MAD is the stuff of war games alone. If Israel and our own government cannot show more respect for the legitimate aspirations of other peoples and adhere to the cold logic of deterrence then we are indeed doomed.

[The Lounsbury]

A final item, to my friend Dave Schuler supra.

While the global economic system is indeed a thing that can be disrupted, I do not see in my knowledge of logistics chains and economies, a real existential threat from al-Qaeda, nor most any Islamist movement.

A nuclear exchange - well not even there unless the protagonists hit the Gulf oil fields.

[W. Patrick Lang]

soar

You think that Iran is the equivalent of the USSR? pl

[anon]

The US did live with an existential threat during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. These are now Russian missles not Soviet, but they are still there, so if the retrogression of Russian leaders continues, the existential threat could return.

Your post brings two question to mind:
1) What would the world look like today if during the Cold War, the US had followed methods similar to Bush and Cheney's in order to deal with the Cold War existential threat from the Soviet Union?
2) I was a very small child when the US was targeted by Soviet missles, but I do remember the tension. If the US lived with it, and solved it by a patient policy of diplomacy and deterrence, why should Israel not do likewise? Do you think the real long-term leadership of Iran are less rational than those of the old Soviet Union. The crazy Iranian President's party already took a drubbing in recent elections, and his opponents are trying to move up the next presidential election to finish him off politically.
Iran will not become a nuclear power for five to ten years, and even after that, if it occurs, why should Israel get a special dispensation from having to live with an existential threat? Who was around to give the US a special dispensation from its existential threat? Israel is a very important ally, and I agree that that the US should guarantee that it will respond if Israel is attacked, to make the policy of deterrence as strong and convincing as possible. If that sounds like I am anti-Israel, I would respond that I am firmly convinced that I am very firmly convinced that the policy I favor is much more likely to work in the long run.

Also, what do you mean by 'traditional Islam'? Do you believe that Islam as practiced in, say Malaysia or Indonesia is the same kind of threat as that practiced in Saudi Arabia or by Pakistani fundamentalists?

Also I can't help responding to one commenter's statement that any threat to our economis way of life is a threat to our freedom. And my response is that if you look at a map of how Middle Eastern Oil gets to to the US and Europe, it seems to me that the Bush/Cheney approach is an equally grave threat to our economic way of life, and therefore an equal threat to our freedom.

[Altoid]

Overall I think you're right on both counts. As to the first, it's become clear that that bush and his people never use the important words the way everybody else understands them. They have secret meanings that have to be decoded.

A question or addendum, though. One of the bushies' core convictions has always been that terrorism and terrorist networks-- the famous "non-state actors"-- never count for much; only when supported by states are they anything to pay attention to. That's why Condi didn't care about the famous AQ warning, for example, and why even now they're attempting to move against Hezbullah by threatening Syria and Iran.

This is an amazing theory. (See, eg, the history of Israel 1947-9, of the US 1776 as portrayed in _Washington's Crossing_, the "NJ rising" in particular. See also 9/11.)

But it points to where I think Brzezinski is essentially right about this being a colonial war. Iran is the very symbol of autonomous Islam these days, as Iraq was for a long time the symbol of an autonomous secularist but largely Islamic state. Egypt, also somewhat autonomous, doesn't have any oil to speak of, is desperately poor and internally riven, so who cares? Etc.

Ultimately then I'd say that bush is really making war on the possibility of autonomous points of view in areas of the world whose resources we care about. That's pretty colonial.

On the other issue, I agree with the poster who points to the centrality of Palestine for everyone else. I'd add that one of the big dangers for us is the way we've completely taken over the Israeli view of non-Israelis in that region-- where does anyone think we learned the interrogation techniques we've been using there? But of course that only reinforces the colonialist nature of what's going on.

One other question, somewhat off-topic: I've always understood Mesopotamia to be very tribally-based in the way that Chinese society is family and clan-based, and I'm wondering about the overlap of tribalism and sectarianism now that we've destroyed the Iraqi state.

Calling what's going on there "tribalism" would say that the society's loyalties are much more fractured than does calling it "sectarianism." Conversely, speaking of "sectarian" strife implies that the two (or three) main groups are pretty cohesive. Is there any value in thinking of it as a tribal place rather than, or in addition to, a sectarian place?

[Leigh]

Am having trouble with my keyboard as previous gobbledygook shows. Forgive me.

This is by far the most intellectually stimulating blog on the Net. Thinkers are posting here.

I have but one comment to add to all the statements that have gone before. George Bush has spoken the truth about what is going down, and he did so right after 9/11: he called it a "crusade."

Depending on how one counts them, there have been 20 such...and the West has won none of them!

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:

Nuclear weapons have not and will not bring security to Israel.

If they really truly wish to be secure in the Near East for centuries (or at least decades) they will fly to Tehran and kiss Ayatollah Khamenei's robe and ask him to be their godfather.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Altoid:

There are some Arab tribes that have both Shia and Sunni branches.

On the other hand, in Somalia, the civil war has been among clans of the same tribe.

Kurds are also tribal (Barzani and Talabani in Iraq). But there are also Shia Kurds and Kurds that are no longer tribal at all.

You have to look at it from the point of view power.

While I could agree that the Israel-Palestine War is a central concern of the Arabs (and Muslim) people its resolution (which is now impossible) cannot usher in a solution to all issues.

There is fear in Saudi Arabia, for example, that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan might some day la claim to Saudi Arabia. There is general fear of Iran in the Persian Gulf. There is the animosity between Jordan and Syria. There is the issues between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, between Yemen and Saudi Arabia etc.

[4 billion]

Why can't the mad idea work with Iran, you have said (I think) that they would be up and running again quickly after an airstrike.

Of course this then leads to the neo-crumb wet dream of regime change.

[DCExile]

Sir: You state Israel is our ally, and we are obligated to defend her...Please share with me information on the treaty we have with Israel? I cannot find any information on a treaty that says we have this obligation. Wouldn't such an obligation have to be codified in a treaty negotiated by the president and ratified by the Senate?

[JT Davis]

pl... Sorry folks, but Carter is right.

Michele Malkin will never read your blog again, Col.

[swerv21]

col. Lang:

very provocative post.

i wonder if it doesn't beg the question "is traditional islam at war with us?"

after all, it takes two to tango.

I've been wondering whether somewhere, lurking in the shadows of all of this are two question both sides seem to be wrestling with. the first might be something like

"whatever are we to do with modernity?"

and the second might sound something like

"what on earth are we to do with capitalism?"

and somehow, the two are conflated by both sides to the great dismay of those who do not see the two as inseparable.

i think there is a substantial number of muslims who do not see themselves as outside of modernity- indeed they are insulted, even humiliated, by the idea that they are somehow seen as pre-modern.

it is this posture within the islamic body politic that is simultaneously threatened and threatening to the salafist/ jihadi strain.

meanwhile the 'dominant regime', our side, has wasted no time in dictating the post war rules of the game to the troublesome arab hinterland: the price of modernity will henceforth be the subjugation to capitalism (globalization, flatness, whatever.) resistance to these terms, be it in the name of nationalism, arabism, islamism, leftism, whatever, is lumped into the only officially recognized -ism left: terrorism.

the stakes are exceptionally high indeed, because if this effort fails, or if we, here, somehow are able to dissolve the link between modernity and capitalism once and for all, then the consequences for this regime and all how benefit from it are indeed catastrophic.

[MarcLord]

I do question going to war for Israel as a policy. What utility does that have anymore? The primary potential value Israel brings to the US table right now is as a diplomatic sacrifice.

[soar]

Well said anon.
I do believe that we and the Israelis should show Iranians proper respect, as they are very shrewd operators, adept at playing us like the chumps we have become. This business of treating the Iranians like children, somehow incapable of rational conduct & deep strategic thinking has got to stop. If any can be thus accused it would be our own pitiful leadership whose actions are rooted in conceit, prejudice, ignorance and impulsive hostility.

[Frank Durkee]

There has been a rising tide in all of the major religious faiths, except possibily The Buddhist one, of increasing reistance to the impact of the modern world and its scientific, economic, social and cultrual disruptions of traditional mores and beliefs. If you want to understand it look at the rise of the religious right in the US. when one is objectified and rendered essentially valueless, reistance is one option and traditional religious structures and beliefs can be very active in that pursuit. Note the impact of the Roman Church in Poland in recent past. In the complex of variables that arise in any confrontation like this all sorts of allies will be looked for. Fundamentalism of any type is hard to confront and root out unless you can create a different and more attractive culture. And that will be reisted ferociously and frequently with armed might. Review the 17th Centur's Wars of religion to get a small flavor of the kind of intensity that can develope. It was only in the neext century, when the rise of modern science and its methodologies had sufficiently undercut the forces of both religion and autcracy that the thinking that led to our revelotion and Republic. it was Diederot, I think, who said "...that human kind would not be free until the last lawyer was hung with the guts of the last priest". The Col. is correct, Islam and the Islamic World have not gone through an analogic process and consequently we are slowly stumbling into a confrontation wiith it and them. Our own religious fundamentalist aupport that confrontation so it begins to look like a war of faiths as well as a traditionalist. With this President the 'religion' card has been crucial to his rise and support and for his party. Faiths are not finally available to "reason" in the final analysis, in diasagrement they are only available to conflict. Part of the 'war against Islam' is fuled by Christian belief and rhetoric. Since we are at war within ourselves on these issues [modernity and religion ] we cannot 'think coherently as a society about what we're up to. The more our elites pander to religious extremists in our own society the less able we are of act coherently. We need to solve our own internal religious wars and not export them to some enemy.

[share]

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=10012&sid=9a35221b16b9bd8a9791c2ca756834ce-
The ‘Salvador Option’

At this point, legendary Iraqi blogger ‘Riverbend’ reported that many of the supposed suicide bombings were in fact remotely detonated car bombs or time bombs. She related how a man was arrested for allegedly having shot at a National Guardsman after huge blasts struck in west Baghdad. But according the man’s neighbours, far from having shot anyone, he had seen “an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away.”

[cynic librarian]

I'd like to know what treaty obligations have been signed which state that the US will attack anyone that attacks Israel. Since--I imagine--there is no such treaty, the assumption that this is the US position should be submitted to Congress and debated.

Perhaps there is a rationale for asserting this desire on the part of America, although I personally see nothing but some nostalgic religious sentiments that are exploited by politicians in the US and Israel to bolster the view.

Having said this, I wonder what the founding fathers would have said about the idea that the US is defending on religious principles one state over another. As some have noted, John Adams and the US Senate signed a treaty with Islamic Tripoli (now known as Libya). In this treaty, it is explicitly stated that the US does not discriminate in pursuing its interests based on religion.

Juan Cole quotes the treaty:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This quote shows that it has been US policy not to decide its political interests with reference to religious affiliations.

This is not to deny that there are various interests that the Israelis support vis a vis the US in the Mideast. I would argue, however, that the founding of the state of Israel and its continuing destabilization of the Mideast has formed the basis of more threats to US interests than not.

On the other hand, there seems to be little ground for the idea that various Islamic governments such as Iran and Syria are not amenable to diplomatic relations with the US. This was borne out recently with Iranian help in Afghanistan, approaches by Iran to normalizing political relations between the two countries, and Iran's attempts to negotiate its nuclear/energy programs well before the time this issue went into crisis mode.

To say that the US is in a war against Islam seems, by historical standards at least, deeply unAmerican. If the President wishes to change that history and that ideology, then those intentions should come under scrutiny and be debated in those terms. To have this type of activity go unnoticed and unquestioned lays a dangerous precedent whose future ramifications bode ill for US diplomatic efforts.

[Silver Warrior]

Great post Colonel. Thank you very much.
It would be great to sit at a late night cafe with you and some of your friends and listen and maybe add a bit of my own. Mostly to learn though.
Yes, let us reclaim the reigns of power from those equivocators who are promoting ideological struggle. It is a large task though: Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Cheney are only the surface of the melting iceberg. Is it a hopeless dream, and thus endlessly frustrating? Or are we powerless and thus open to a grace that is embodied in any true spiritual path? Yes, all religion, all spiritual paths appear challenged by corporate power and person.
However, any spiritually true way cannot be blocked by that sort of force. There is, in Christian language, the Annunciation - a willingness to accept birth of a new way, the betrayal - of the earth, of indigenous cultures, the Crucifixion, global warming, endless killing of innocents, a threat of nuclear holocaust. However,the Resurrection and then the Ascension are promised. The True Light cannot be extinguished by those who seek or hold worldly power.
And yes, I agree, liguistics is vital today. What are the code words, what are the daily shifting meanings and rationalizations? And when will rational, truly kind and centered people begin to use our language and marketing skills?
Freedom from, Freedom to, Freedom of - speechwriters put forth words very quickly for consumption. Define ideology please. And please don't pull a Leo Strauss on me saying I'm not capable of understanding, or it needs to be withheld from me for my own good.
Again, however, expecting those sorts of questions to be answered by Madame Secretary Rice or Gen. Powell or Douglas Feith or any on that level, until they reach an epiphany similar to Robert McNamara's, is well almost a guaranteed resentment and heartache.
Maybe Chuck Hegal will answer some of those things and talk straight talk. I'd love to see you, Col Lang, speak with him. Again thank you.

[parvati_roma]

Just wanted to pay my compliments to Col. Lang for his clear-ended, honest and knowlegeable opening post, and for this forum in general. This blog helps to counter the floods of cant from Washington, reminding non-Americans that honesty, decency and intelligence are not yet dead in the USA.

[share]

This war can not be won militarily; which is what the Democrats & Liberals have been saying all along. The Republicans & the Conservatives have totally abandoned their Judah-Christian teaching which state "That the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds."

If we are truly fighting a war on terrorism, which is an intangible enemy then any Christian worth his salt should know that the war will not be won with guns and bombs

[Chris Marlowe]

After watching the interview of President Bush on 60 Minutes tonight, I can sleep better tonight.

When Scott Pelley asked the president if he was a stubborn person, he answered that he considered himself to be an "open-minded, flexible person."

That is so reassuring. I have been worrying that we had a president who had run amok, who would ignore a newly assertive Congress and is hellbent on war with Iran and Syria, in addition to fighting a 40-year war (Cheney's words) with Islam, I mean "terrorism" (as defined by him).

Now that would have been scary, wouldn't it?

[ked]

"when you don't like the facts, enforce rules". we've observed this in the Bushitburo's domestic politics, and the GWOT policies at home & abroad. coercion by force is the only means of control with which they are truly comfortable.

it surprises me that old-school Conservatives are not organizing marches on the WH - they always claimed to be willing to fight for their beliefs.

on modernity; who owns it - the inventors or the best practitioners? if China does to modernity what Japan did to the US auto industry, we may get flat after all, just not "our" kinda flat.

[brenda]

Your post gives me the impression there has been a change in your thinking, Colonel. Are you still alarmed by the prospect of a war with Iran? Or have you resigned yourself to it, thinking maybe it won't kill us to do one more war for Israel after all?

Please let me know before I dig up any more of the back yard for my Victory Garden.

[W. Patrick Lang]

Brenda

Resignation is not the same thing as acceptance. pl