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COMMENTARY
September 9, 2006
Brave or smart?
There is something to be said for Fight, something to be said for Flight, but nothing to be said for anything in between -- given a real threat. This, anyway, has been my experience over a long and messy life. There are many battles best avoided, and prudence dictates a fairly careful avoidance of the battle we can’t win. But there are battles that cannot be avoided, and that we must win. And there is nothing edifying, nor even intelligent, in trying to avoid the unavoidable.Opponents of our fights in Afghanistan and Iraq habitually argue that the American-led invasions might have been brave, but were also stupid, and therefore foolhardy. In Canada’s case, with a fairly sincere commitment to the destruction of the Afghan Taliban, we are hearing unprecedented whimpering about the whole task being hopeless, at the very moment our troops in the field are annihilating the Taliban at an unprecedented rate. Naturally, their accomplishments come with casualties. And the scale of the problem may indeed have been underestimated, because Canada, the U.S., and other Western powers, committed to the battles for Afghanistan and Iraq, were too optimistic in assuming those battles could be isolated. (Now we know.) In Washington, I really wish the Bush administration had listened more carefully, and even more exclusively, to the advice they received from “neo-conservatives”. The point made, by these disciples of Bernard Lewis, was that “regime change” in Afghanistan and Iraq would be a good start. It was not a finish, however, and they were alert to the danger of getting bogged down in idealistic projects for “democratization”, in countries without democratic pasts. Contrary to what almost everyone now believes, it was the U.S. State Department, and hardly the “neo-cons” now retired from the Pentagon and White House, that insisted on the elaborate rebuilding projects. Whereas the latter were more inclined to install pro-Western strongmen, with genuine democratic aspirations (say, Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, and Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq), and let them get on with it, while we from the West got on with the purely military task of hunting down and killing our common enemies; plus relief operations to garner goodwill. Mullah Omar’s psychotic regime in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein’s psychotic regime in Iraq, were major impediments to any prospect of peace and order in the Middle East. But so were, and are, the ayatollahs’ psychotic regime in Iran, the psychotic Assad regime in Syria, and other psychotic regimes such as those of Libya and Sudan. Iran has now emerged as the principal threat, not only to the West (especially front-line Israel), but to the establishment of anything resembling tranquillity in the region. The idea that, after liberation, Afghanistan and Iraq might become beacons of motherhood and apple pie, was perhaps the principal contribution from President Bush himself, jumping, I now think, to the wrong conclusion, from the more encouraging things those neo-cons had to say, but also speaking out of a "can-do" American tradition of optimism that should not be despised. The neo-cons’ strength was in their hold on languages, and realities on the ground, through personal connexions; and their disconnexion from failed policies of the past. Their weakness, as mostly secular Jews, was an understandable failure to plumb the specifically religious workings of the Islamic mind, and the degree to which it could be turned against "secularization", per se. (By secularization I here mean only the establishment of civil authority, strictly separated from religious authority; I don't mean the de-legitimization of religious authority.) For strong cultural reasons, the Middle East was not about to have a democratic revolution, as Eastern Europe was after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We have not defended secularization (in the sense given) robustly enough. In the cause of promoting a democracy "that would be compatible with Islamic traditions" -- when there are no Islamic traditions compatible with Western-style democracy -- we have spent too much time negotiating irreconcilables, and not enough creating hard new facts. For any necessary reform of Islam, to make it compatible with the strict separation of “mosque and state”, is a task for Muslims, not for us. Our task, is to defeat a fanatical and determined ideological foe, who uses conflict with the West to build his own power within the Muslim world. We defeat him by destroying him wherever we can find him, and we defeat him in the full sight of the Muslims he's trying to impress, ideally before they've joined his cause. This is not a war we could ever wish to fight, but one that is certainly thrust upon us. Winning this war means changing more regimes, until there is no country left that will harbour our mortal enemies. Winning in Afghanistan and Iraq must involve pushing outwards against the countries supporting the insurgencies in them. We retreat or advance: there is no viable compromise between fight and flight. The message we must convey, through force, is that we will do capital-letter Anything necessary to remove threats to the West. To Muslims everywhere, it must be unambiguous: "Don't join these people or you will share their fate." (We should have said the same thing to the Germans in the 1930s, before Hitler had succeeded in making Nazism and Germany indistinguishable; having failed then, we should not fail again.) And in rendering this message, and conducting this war, “brave” is the necessary foundation for “smart”. We can't fight a war without fighting a war. The smarts should be applied to winning it, not to finding a way to pretend it's not happening. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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