Samizdata

I am not a huge fan of Steven Den Beste’s blog USS Clueless, as I dislike the style and content on so many levels. I frankly regard his understanding of history, geopolitics and in particular anything beyond the shore of his home country as generally underpinned by misleading stereotypes and ‘Hollywoodized’ history. In particular I dislike his frequent risible saccharine paeans to the transcendent superiority of an imagined United States of America in which in one would scarcely believe Waco, Ruby Ridge, civil forfeiture and Ted Kennedy would even be conceivable, let alone a reality. Such ‘feelgood’ writing is undoubtedly very good for the hit rate but then the Mirror, Sun and Daily Mail will always outsell the Times, Telegraph and Guardian for much the same reason. In short, I regard USS Clueless as a prime example of American neo-conservative thought at its most blinkered and parochial.

And so it is somewhat of a surprise to me to find myself in fairly robust broad agreement with Steven’s article about the fact the war against Iraq is in reality a manifestation of a cultural war. To me that is such a self evident truth that I am astonished that so many people find Den Beste’s essay so controversial.

Now as a libertarian, I am highly critical of the way western nation states are structured. In fact I would say that Continental European and, to a slightly lesser extent, Anglosphere civil society has a deep rooted sickness brought on by a century of creeping statism. And yes, that includes the United States. The degree to which freedoms taken for granted by our grandparents are regulated and circumscribed grows almost daily. As I have often written, the state is not your friend.

Of course the views I have just expressed would not come as any surprise to anyone who has read Samizdata.net for more than a few days: so far, so ‘typically libertarian’.

However the idea that as the state (meaning for me, the British state, and for many of our readers, the American state (USA or Canada)) and the aspects of civil culture which support it, is something to be resisted and undermined until the state has been cut down to size and the culture put back in touch with the classical liberal roots from which it sprang, does not mean that I think therefore ‘western’ culture is not better than the alternatives. I am constantly threatened by the state which makes me its subject and constantly robbed by it under threat of violence. Yet it is not the British or American states which threatens to set off nuclear weapons in London or spread smallpox through the public transport system in New York.

We are indeed threatened by the Islamic culture that is expressed by Wahhabism and Den Beste is entirely correct that we need to understand that what happened on September 11^th was just a very visible expression of the kulturkampf that has already been going on for a long time. I strongly suspect it is because Islam is so clearly losing this ‘war’ that Al Qaeda was motivated to do the things it did. For much the same reason that this ‘war’ is so evidently real, I find myself grudgingly supportive of Israel on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is (sometimes) my friend, and also that Zionism is an entirely parochial -ism that will pose no threat to me either now or at any time in the future.

So is Den Beste correct that the entire ‘Islamosphere’ needs to be destabilized as part of this kulturkampf? Yes, but that does not need to be done entirely by force of arms, not even primarily so. We do indeed have to make sure that the short/medium term threat of our literal destruction that springs from the ‘Islamosphere’ is dealt with forcefully by the equally literal destruction of Ba’athist Socialism and eventually (let us not kid ourselves) radical Wahhabism. Once that is done, there is no need to turn the Islamic world into an American province, even if that was possible… in the long run the comfortable banalities and sheer material success of the Western secular capitalist way will destroy the cultural underpinnings of the threat that became impossible to ignore on September 11^th 2001.