Samizdata

I was about to just add a comment, but I found myself with things to say that are better said up here on the front page.

Brian indicated my attitudes correctly. I certainly don’t wish things to go down the hell road… but they could. Many seem not to take into account the intensity of feelings amongst American citizens and the ways in which Americans as a people tend to react.

The first WTC bombing, the occasional blown up airliner, even the attack on the USS Cole were just the events of another Evening News. The USA is a huge country. Events of that size are unusual but not enought to impact the average person on a gut level.

The events of 9/11 were quite another matter. It got everyone’s attention. Everyone has friends, relatives, coworkers in New York City. The USA is a very mobile culture. Large parts of the population have worked or studied there at one time or another in their lives. The reaction, if you knew America and Americans was rather predictable: “We’ll find the bastards responsible and make them pay.” I know my business partner could vouch one of the first coherent things out of my mouth after the “OH MY GOD. ALL THOSE PEOPLE!!!” was about what we were going to do to bin Laden/Afghanistan and/or Saddam/Iraq. Others may not have been as familiar with the “intel” as I, but the gut reaction was repeated from one side of the planet to the other, wherever an American stood watching the live events.

The results after a little over one year is bin Laden/Afghanistan are down. He’s most likely roasting over a slow spit in some special deep hellpit along with his pilot friends and Saddam will be joining him shortly. It has been all very controlled and measured. Very careful to not cause too much harm to anyone’s sensibilities in Europe or elsewhere. Very controlled, very directed and undeflectable fury.

It should be quite noticeable the fury hasn’t cooled down very much in 12 months. Why? Because this is not a television media event, as much as media would like to move on to the Next Big Story. It’s real, and people do know the difference.

If someone were to be so foolish as to set off any “Weapon of Mass Destruction” (the weapons formerly known as NBC) the results will be different. If a nuke were to go off in San Franciso, or LA, or Detroit or where ever… the reaction would be extreme. Perhaps the government could restrain the populace and perhaps not. It would certainly risk not being re-elected if it didn’t do something very harsh. And if it happened more than once or if the death toll was in the millions as predicted for a worst-case Smallpox attack on an uninoculated populace… the reaction would be that of a berserker.

It would not be too extreme to say the results of such attack would be the use of methods similar to those of early Islam. Instead of “Convert or Die!” at sword point, it might well be the choice of “Change or die!” for the whole Arab world, guilty or not. And change they would. You don’t argue when 300 million heavily armed crazies are out for blood vengeance.

The lesson that must be drilled into any potential attacker out there is: the more of us you kill, the crazier and more violent we’ll get. If an attack passes some threshold of destruction on the continental USA the results will be exceedingly bad for children and other living things in the Middle East.

Look at pictures of Tokyo in 1945. That is the result of something done on American soil of similar scale (but not to civilians) to the WTC. You really don’t want to scale that up by a factor of a thousand. You really, really don’t.

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.

The proprietors and staff of the Arab News express their condolences

Some of the more perceptive anti-war bloggers like Jim Henley must despair when certain opponents of possible U.S. action against Iraq turn out to be little better than odious apologists for Saddam’s regime. An example of this breed is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has been touring Iraq warning that a strike against Iraq would constitute a huge violation of international law.

Watching Britain’s Channel Four television news show last night, we were treated to an interview with this gentleman, and it had the effect of hardening my conviction that Saddam’s regime has to go. How come? Well, when asked about the reported use of chemical weapons against Kurdish villagers in the 1980s, Clark dismissed it out of hand. When asked if he thought weapons inspectors should be let into Iraq to verify whether weapons of mass destruction were being stockpiled and manufactured, he dismissed the notion, saying such inspections could never work. He claimed – without citing hard evidence – that WMDs hardly exist in Iraq and that Saddam has no desire to build them. And of course he repeated the line that economic sanctions against Iraq have led to the deaths of millions, though he declined to cite clear evidence or reflect on the fact that if Iraq is so poor, it is odd that it can afford to offer financial rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

There are perfectly honorable reasons for opposing war with Iraq, such as concerns about the aftermath of such a war, the possibility of igniting further trouble down the line, and the fact that Iraq, may not be the prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks. But when supposedly eminent folk seek to portray Saddam as some kind of misunderstood old gent who simply is the victim of hostile forces and events, then one has to smell a rat. With friends like Ramsey Clark, Saddam hardly needs enemies.