Granted, there are certainly individuals who learn from their mistakes—and, just as importantly, from the mistakes of others—and occasionally organizations that do; but if you take human beings as a whole, if you look at the national level and the world level, the record just isn’t good. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is famous for teaching us that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it; the great British historian Arnold Toynbee is famous for his insight that history is essentially cyclical, the same patterns repeating over and over. What does this tell you? Nothing you didn’t already know, that’s what. To take one example, appeasement worked so well with Hitler in the 1930s that we tried it again with the Soviet Union—for a while—and then we tried it with Iran . . . and we kept trying it with Iran . . . and now we’re trying it even harder with Iran, apparently on the theory that we just haven’t groveled enough to make them play nice. Meanwhile, the government of Iran just keeps getting crazier and crazier, so you do the math on that one. But do we learn anything from this? On the evidence, no.This is not, of course, a new phenomenon—not even close. The disinclination to learn lessons we really don’t want to learn is very, very human, and we can always find some way to rationalize that disinclination, some sort of excuse to justify it. The thing is, though, when rationalizations meet reality, what happens? You ever dropped an egg on a hard floor? If you went up to the top of the courthouse building and threw that egg at the road, do you think the extra momentum would help it break through the pavement? No—you’d just get a bigger explosion. When we refuse to learn from what went wrong the last time—when we convince ourselves that this time, it will be different—that’s what we get. Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Category Archives: International relations
Redefining evil for convenience
Here’s Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on “the normalization of evil”:
Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations. . . .The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.
Faith in action: George W. Bush’s greatest legacy
He doesn’t get much credit for it from the country—it wasn’t in the interest of his political opponents or the media to let that happen, since it would have interfered with the narrative of all the bad things they wanted you to believe about the man—but what George W. Bush did to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other diseases in Africa was an unprecedented good on an amazing scale; and for all the difficulties with the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, that effort on the part of his administration has done a great deal of good as well. Eventually, once the politics are out of the way, he’ll get the credit for these things that he deserves.
Modernity as universal cultural acid
James Hitchcock has a truly remarkable editorial in the latest Touchstone which asks a penetrating question: can traditional societies survive the power of modernity? He writes,
A closed traditional society finds it almost impossible to effect an orderly and controlled transition to modernity. Religion dominates all aspects of life to the extent that no distinction is made between matters of faith and mere custom. . . .Thus, it proves psychologically impossible to discard those things in traditional society that have outlived their legitimacy without thereby setting off global change. The changing culture fosters a half-conscious conviction that truth lies roughly in asserting the opposite of what one previously believed. Changes cannot be evaluated rationally, because people are carried along by a euphoric sense of having liberated themselves from long-standing, narrow oppressiveness.Modern society offers an opportunity to exercise freedom in the fullest sense, an exercise that exposes the facts that what passes for deep conviction may be for many people merely a brittle social conformity, and what passes for morality may be the mere absence of opportunities for sin.Muslims who see the United States as the Great Satan reject the good of political liberty along with the poisonous moral licentiousness that such liberty permits. They perceive the ambiguity of modernity itself, most of which either originated in the United States or has been propagated through American influence.But for that very reason the antibodies to modern cultural viruses also exist most robustly in the United States, which is practically the only society in the Western world where moral traditionalists have an effective voice in public affairs.Religious belief is stronger in America than anywhere else in the West partly because believers have had to find ways of living their faith without the kind of social supports that, historically, were provided in countries with established churches.
This is an interesting explanation for America’s unusual religious culture, and one that makes a great deal of sense; but if he’s right to suggest that “the forces of modernity—political, economic, and cultural—really are irresistible and that sooner or later almost every society in the world will have to face them,” then the implications of his argument must be faced as well, because they are of great significance. As he says,
If that assumption is correct, it is better to experience modernity sooner rather than later, in order to make use of what is good in it and to learn to cope with what is bad. Simple quarantine is no longer possible. . . .Both for societies and for individuals, our cultural situation is tragic in the classical sense, because it requires decisions none of which are free of possible bad consequences. Maintaining a rigorously closed society may protect generations of people from the worst evils of modernity, even as it virtually guarantees that later generations will be infected all the more virulently. But alternatively, allowing people a good measure of freedom inevitably leads to abuse.
While, from a Christian perspective, one may well call the consequences of this situation for the church tragic, there is a silver lining as well: if Hitchcock’s overall thesis is correct, then that applies not only to Christian societies but also to Muslim societies as well. This suggests that while traditionalist Islamic societies will no doubt succeed in resisting modernity for some time—which is, I believe, the driving concern behind the rise of Islamism in its various forms, including its most virulent strain, jihadism—they cannot resist forever; eventually, the Islamic world will see its own version of Quebec’s “Silent Revolution,” and the collapse of radical Islam, leaving much of the Islamic world looking much like the once-Christian nations of western Europe. This offers hope that, in our conflict with militant Islam as with the Cold War against global communism, if we will stand strong and not surrender, we will see a Berlin Wall moment.
Channeling Dubya, Part III
Match the speech to the president:
[T]he world has watched with growing concern the horror of bombings and burials and the stark picture of tanks in the street. Across the world, people are grieving for Israelis and Palestinians who have lost their lives.When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the future, itself, is dying—the future of the Palestinian people and the future of the Israeli people. We mourn the dead, and we mourn the damage done to the hope of peace, the hope of Israel’s and the Israelis’ desire for a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors; the hope of the Palestinian people to build their own independent state.America is committed to Israel’s security. And we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against legitimate threats. For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror. To be a genuine party to peace . . . Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements.The Palestinian people are blessed with many gifts and talents. They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a better future for their children. They want the dignity that comes with sovereignty and independence. They want justice and equality under the rule of law. They want freedom from violence and fear.The people of Israel have just aspirations, as well. They want their children to be able to ride a bus or to go to school without fear of suicide bombers. They want an end to rocket attacks and constant threats of assault. They want their nation to be recognized and welcomed in the region where they live.Now, just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians. . . . Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water, and basic medical care, and who’ve faced suffocating poverty for far too long. Now we must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace.Today, Palestinians and Israelis each understand that helping the other to realize their aspirations is key to realizing their own aspirations—and both require an independent, democratic, viable Palestinian state. Such a state will provide Palestinians with the chance to lead lives of freedom and purpose and dignity. Such a state will help provide the Israelis with something they have been seeking for generations: to live in peace with their neighbors.Lasting peace requires more than a long cease-fire, and that’s why I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security.We meet to lay the foundation for the establishment of a new nation—a democratic Palestinian state that will live side by side with Israel in peace and security. We meet to help bring an end to the violence that has been the true enemy of the aspirations of both the Israelis and Palestinians.
President George W. Bush, or President Barack Obama? The answer will be posted in the comments.
About that honeymoon . . .
One of the things I heard a lot last year was that electing Barack Obama would make us more popular around the world. I expressed my skepticism about that, but it was the received wisdom in many quarters, buoyed by international polls. Now, before he’s even in power, the first returns are in, and I wouldn’t say they’re positive:
The international Left is making it clear: they won’t be happy just because we have a President who’s half Kenyan. If he doesn’t give them what they want (Israel on a platter, in this case), they’ll still hate him.
Military forces as geopolitical antibodies
I deplore aggression and violence as a way of solving problems. They can only lead to worse grievances and problems in the long run. But being prepared to defend yourself if you have to is not the same thing. This monstrosity consuming Europe is a cancer of the tissues of civilization. When the body is infected, it mobilizes its antibodies and destroys that which is alien to it. So, too, must the planetary organism. In other words, I accept, regretfully, that there are some evils that can only be stopped by force. Appealing to their better nature is as futile as attempting to reason with a virus.—”Albert Einstein,” in The Proteus Operation, James P. HoganI don’t offer this quote as an appeal to Einstein’s authority; the book is of course a novel (science-fiction alternate-history, for those not familiar with it), and Hogan put those words in Einstein’s mouth. He evidently considered them representative of the historical Einstein’s beliefs, but I don’t know enough to judge. I simply offer it because I think it states the position well, by way of a vivid image. I would certainly call Hamas, and jihadism more generally, “a cancer of the tissues of civilization” which “can only be stopped by force,” and I think their leaders have quite conclusively proven themselves as remorseless and free of conscience as even the worst virus.
Rooting for Israel
I noted last month that Arab leaders were encouraging Israel to take out Hamas; obviously, the Israelis have decided to accept the invitation, and are now doing their best to do just that. I’m rooting for them, for several reasons.First, Hamas wants to destroy Israel, and won’t stop until they’ve either achieved their goal or been destroyed in turn. The same is not true in reverse of Israel, but at some point, Hamas’ relentless efforts will force the Israelis to adopt the same calculus; they can no more coexist with Hamas than Harry Potter could coexist with Voldemort. To take the point made by Yisrael Medad, “Israel’s stated and practiced intention these past 3.5 years since disengagement was to let Hamas rule as long as no rockets were fired,” and Hamas never stopped firing rockets.Second, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are going to remarkable lengths to avoid killing innocents—an exceedingly difficult thing to do in such an environment, when Hamas has been stockpiling weapons in civilian homes (thus using their own civilians as human shields for weapons intended to be used to kill the other side’s civilians). As Jerusalem-based historian and IT specialist Yaacov Lozowick relates,
the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they’re alive, and it wasn’t Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars.Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls. . . .In my professional life I deal with complex IT systems, and I’ve given a bit of thought to this issue seen from that perspective:First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.
What’s more, they’ve done this despite the fact that
alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they’ll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army would have done.
Lozowick concludes from all this that, contra what our MSM would have you believe,
the IDF is the most moral army in the world. This drives some people bonkers, and they often go ballistic. Alas for them, and fortunately for many Palestinians, it happens to be the simple truth.
This statement might seem ridiculous to many in the West (given, as noted, the picture our media prefer to paint), but the conduct of the IDF makes it a reasonable one—not merely at the tactical level, but at the level of the IDF’s overall goals and approach. To quote Scott Johnson of Power Line (emphasis added),
The care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties complicates the achievements of its military objectives and increases the hazards to its soldiers, and it doesn’t do much to win Israel friends outside the United States. It is nevertheless an essential component of Israel’s strategy in dealing with its terrorist enemies.
Third, Hamas is Iran’s proxy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ayatollahs, Inc., and so the battle against Hamas is a battle against Iran by proxy—which makes it a battle the West needs to win. It also makes it a grand opportunity, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen points out:
Iran could well lose this battle, and defeat is very dangerous to a regime like Tehran’s, which claims divine sanction for its actions and proclaims the imminent arrival of its messiah and of the triumph of global jihad. If Allah is responsible for victory, what can be said about humiliating defeat? The mullahs are well aware of the stakes, as we can see in their recent behavior.
This is an opportunity we can’t afford to lose. As I’ve written before, we can afford neither to let the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world go about its work, nor to attack them by any traditional military means; our approach to Iran must of necessity be indirect. I’ve argued for economic attacks, such as doing everything we can to bring down and hold down the price of oil, and the economic situation is indeed doing the Iranian government significant harm; to quote Ledeen,
the dramatic drop in oil prices is devastating to the mullahs, who had planned to be able to fund terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Suddenly their bottom line is tinged with red, and this carries over onto their domestic balance sheets, which were already demonstrably shaky (they were forced to cancel proposed new taxes when the merchant class staged nation-wide protests). No wonder they seize on any international event to call for petroleum export reductions.
However, the current Israeli counteroffensive against Hamas opens up new opportunities at a time when the Iranian government is facing growing, and increasingly brazen, internal opposition. Ledeen quotes an Iranian expat who told him that when university students in Iran launched significant demonstrations against their government, “they were surprised that the regime was unable to stop the protests, even though everyone knew they were planned.” Iran has taken a heavy beating among its terrorist proxies since we launched the surge, and that kind of thing is “bad for operations, bad for recruiting, and weakens the Iranians’ efforts to bully their neighbors into appeasement or more active cooperation.”Ledeen is right, I believe, to say that
the Iranian regime is fundamentally hollow, that much of its apparent strength is bluster and deception rather than real power and resolve. At a minimum, it is a regime that must constantly fear for its own survival, not because of any willful resolve from its external enemies but because of the simmering hatred from its own people.
As such, I think we must take his application of this point very seriously:
This is a moment when those people are, as so often in the recent past, looking for at least a few supportive actions. If the West is now convinced that Iran is the proximate cause and chief sponsor of Hamas’ assault against Israel, it should demonstrate once and for all that we are prepared to fight back.
We cannot afford to do so directly, but Israel has given the West the opportunity to do so in a way which is indirect but unmistakable. Robert D. Kaplan is both typically dramatic and typically spot-on to say that
Israel has, in effect, launched the war on the Iranian empire that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, can only have contemplated.
As Kaplan says, this is a war which we badly need them to win, because the stakes are very, very high. If they lose, the results could be war on a very large scale indeed, and a veritable explosion in what he calls “the ideologizing of hatred,” as the mullahs are emboldened; but a decisive defeat for the mullahs, removing the appearance of divine sanction which (as Ledeen points out) is so critical for such a regime, at a time of major economic stress could very well bring them down altogether—and that would produce a very different Iran indeed, because the government is not representative of the Iranian people. To quote Kaplan,
the one place where Moslems are cynical about Iran is in Iran itself, where the regime relies on a narrow base of support amid a state that (despite its vast oil reserves) is in economic shambles. Thus, the supreme irony of the Middle East is that the place where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are least potent is in the Iranian heartland. Public opinion-wise, Egypt and Saudi Arabia constitute more dangerous territory for us than Iran. Iran’s benign relationship with the Jews, in particular, stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah.
Iran as an American ally, no longer working to undermine the new pro-American government in Iraq, and jihadist terror movements around the world suddenly out of money; it could happen. It can happen, if Israel can win a decisive enough victory in Gaza to “leave Hamas sufficiently reeling to scare even the pro-Iranian Syrians from coming to its aid.”I’m rooting for Israel.Update: Charles Krauthammer and Peter Wehner have done a good job as well in furthering the argument that “the only acceptable outcome of this war, both for Israel and for the civilized world, is Endgame B: the disintegration of Hamas rule.” As Krauthammer says,
The one-step-from-madness gangster theocracy in Gaza—just four days before the fighting, the Hamas parliament passed a Sharia criminal code, legalizing, among other niceties, crucifixion—is teetering on the brink. It can be brought down, but only if Israel is prepared—and allowed—to complete the real mission of this war. For the Bush State Department, in its last significant act, to prevent that with the premature imposition of a cease-fire would be not just self-defeating but shameful.
Another model for fighting terrorists
Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent. Iraq. Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The Philippines.The Philippines? Yes, the Philippines are also a significant theater in the GWOT, and the other place besides Iraq where we and our allies have had noteworthy success against the jihadist movement led by al’Qaeda and its allies. The conflict there is a very different sort, with a different set of restrictions (many of them political, since we’re operating within the territory of a sovereign ally against its own domestic enemies); but as Max Boot and Richard Bennet point out, it offers us a model for how a “soft and light” approach—”a ‘soft’ counterinsurgency strategy, a light American footprint”—can work against terrorist groups.Perhaps the chief benefit of such an approach, where possible, is illustrated by the fact that you probably didn’t even know we’re fighting in the Philippines. As Boot and Bennet note,
One of the beauties of this low-intensity approach is that it can be continued indefinitely without much public opposition or even notice. The reason why Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines gets so much less attention than the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not hard to see. In Iraq there are 140,000 troops. In Afghanistan 35,000. In the Philippines 600. The Iraq war costs over $100 billion a year, Afghanistan over $30 billion. The Philippines costs $52 million a year.Even more important is the human cost. While thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the Philippines only one American soldier has died as a result of enemy action—Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Jackson, who was killed in 2002 by a bomb in Zamboanga City. Three soldiers have been wounded in action, the most serious injuries being sustained by Captain Mike Hummel in the same bombing. Ten more soldiers died in 2002 in an accident when their MH-47 helicopter crashed. Every death is a tragedy, but with the number of tragedies in the Philippines minuscule, there is scant opposition to the mission either in the Philippines or in the United States. That’s important, because when battling an insurgency the degree of success is often closely correlated to the duration of operations.
As the article goes on to concede, this kind of approach won’t work everywhere, because it “requires having capable partners in the local security forces”; we couldn’t have started off on this footing in Iraq or Afghanistan, and there would be real problems in trying to handle Afghanistan this way (or, just as much to the point, Pakistan) even now, though it seems to me that there would be real benefit to implementing as much of it as we can as part of our operations there. In Iraq, however, our success in the Philippines offers a worthy roadmap for the way forward. This is ironic, since our conflict in the Philippines at the turn of the last century offered the best model for the initial situation in Iraq; but as the new government in Baghdad and its security forces continue to grow stronger with our assistance, there’s a real opportunity to transition to a model for American involvement along the lines of our work in the Philippines; the surge has won us that opportunity. Perhaps in another few years our work in Iraq will get as little attention, and be as successful, as our work in Mindanao. That, it seems to me, is the goal, so that when the House of Sa’ud finally falls, Iraq will be a strong and stable ally in the region as we try to deal with whatever comes next on the Arabian Peninsula.
Samuel Huntington, RIP
I’m working with a fairly limited connection here at the moment, but I wanted to note the death of Harvard political scientist and author Samuel P. Huntington. Over the last decade, Dr. Huntington took a pounding from his fellow members of the liberal Western intelligentsia; when they wanted to join Francis Fukuyama in celebrating The End of History, he had the guts in his article “The Clash of Civilizations?” (and the resulting book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order), to point out how foolish that triumphalism was. As Mark Steyn put it, Dr. Huntington’s key point was that
the conventional western elite view of man as homo economicus is reductive—that cultural identity is a more profound indicator that western-style economic liberty cannot easily trump.
As a consequence, he argued that the post-Cold War era would not see the end of major conflict, but rather would see a shift from wars of ideology to wars driven by conflicts between cultures—and particularly by the conflict along “Islam’s bloody borders.” He was pilloried for his argument, but it seems to me that history has validated his analysis, where Dr. Fukuyama’s position has fallen by the wayside. For those interested in reading more, Power Line has a good short roundup of pieces on Dr. Huntington, including Robert Kaplan’s excellent profile of him in The Atlantic. For his insight, his capacity for independent thought, and his willingness to follow out his analysis in the face of the conventional wisdom, Dr. Huntington will be greatly missed.