The Global War on Terrorism has produced its share of domestic political battles. But these little battles never get to the heart of the GWOT. Its existential "big ideas" are still unquestioned after four years.
I have been exchanging emails with a friend high up in the administration. He defends GWOT big ideas as well as any in the inner circle.
In a recent message he writes:
Likewise it was delightful to see you and engage in a spirited discussion.
I don't think you were overly critical at all, particularly compared to many commentators out there. I think our only disagreement is on the level of sensitivity of the US culture and larger intellectual structure to the evolving world; while far from perfect, I'd say we are far better than any other superpower in history and vastly better than we were fifty years ago.
The US government lags society as a whole, but is not entirely ineffective and again is far better than in the past.
I agree fully that we cannot expect other civilizations / societies to evolve along perfectly similar lines to our own. But I do believe the great sweep of history is firmly on the side of increasing democratization / popular election / liberty / freedom and less on the side of totalitarianism / dictatorships / arbitrary use of force. It is a slow sweep but seems clear to me. In other words, the Chinese and the Arabs won't look exactly like us, but they will look more like us than they do like the Ming Dynasty or the Caliphate. It's a rheostat, not an on / off switch and the trends are in our direction.
To which I responded:
Dear ___, I appreciate your thoughtful note, and especially the care with which you treated my notions and ideas. It seems to me that the substance of debate turns on how we (as Americans) frame two essential things. One is our relationship with the world. The other is our place in what we call history.
Our conception of history determines to a large extent how we relate to the world, so that issue should come first. Americans -- not so unlike Muslims, by the way -- see history as a predestined story. Since its founding Americans have felt to their very bones that they were put on this earth to redeem the world: to liberate, raise-up, and remake humanity. Thus history is certainly on "the side of increasing democratization" because this is part of the good news: the vision of human life that we bring to the world.
But we also face a difficulty bringing this to humanity. However crystal clear democracy is as a concept to us, others see it differently. Others -- like many Muslims -- see "democracy" in a distinctly religious light. They see our protestations of bringing democracy to them as a form of targeted religious conversion. They believe that we are intent on making them like us. Moreover, Islam means "submission" -- so it is not surprising that Muslims see what we want from them in the same light: submission to democracy. We of course do not see it that way, but they do. For them democracy is not simply a matter of pluralistic politics and the ritual of elections. To Muslims -- and others as well -- democracy means an entirely religious submission to the American cultural package. The fact that we see it differently in no way changes their conviction on this score.
"The Chinese and Arabs" in this sense are not concerned at all about whether they "look exactly like us" or not. What worries them is the religious package. We -- like any great religion -- see our democracy package as so obviously superior and destined to prevail that anyone resisting must be simply ornery or stupid. But again, they are not resisting the idea of pluralistic politics and electoral institutions. They are resisting what they see as all-inclusive cultural conversion -- that they must accept on our terms.
Moreover, when we mischaracterize their opposition as being either primitive -- like Bernard Lewis' judgment that Islam is a failed civilization and thus at the mercy of inner barbarians -- or childlike -- that failure has furthermore nurtured a sort of helplessly naïf passivity among "moderate Muslim" masses -- we signal, unwittingly, that we have missed who they are entirely. We clearly signal this through our simplistic rhetoric: we signal that we simply do not "get it." We are telling them further that unless they submit to our rhetorical constructs that we will brand resistors as terrorists or even worse, "Islamofascists." We have shown in the four years of this "war" that Muslims who do not collaborate with our narrative are to be punished. Just look at embattled Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan -- now teaching at Oxford after being denied entry to the United States.
So being "far better that any other superpower in history" is like saying that we are better than Stalin or Hitler or Napoleon or Suleiman or Caesar or Alexander or even the much more culturally sensitive Lord Clive for that matter. We are indeed far better. But as you implicitly suggest, we are not ultimately so very different. We share this overriding similarity with the great empires of History: like all of them, the essential Big Story is all about us. History after all smiles on us. It is we who bring freedom's bounty to poor, benighted primitives. It is we who take up the Burden. It is we who must succeed.
The truth is that we have all but thrown away the opportunity to relate to troubled, suffering Others on their terms, in ways that might actually help them. For example, what we have done in Iraq is not to effectuate their cultural conversion to the American vision, but rather to create a chaos space where tyranny had once held sway. It has been in that chaos space that new things have incubated on their own: an independent Kurdish state, a Shi'a Islamic Republic, and a broken but coalescing new Sunni principality. What we rhetorically hail as the new democratic Iraq is the client state overlay that is itself no more than the sweet icing of our occupation. It will melt the instant we depart, revealing for those who cannot yet see the actual successor reality: the true "New Iraq" that our invasion in fact created.
And in fact this is not bad. What I am saying is not "pessimistic" or "defeatist." It simply, is. What we might have accomplished -- if we had done our research in advance; if we had been ready and able to listen at the start instead of at the end; if we had helped them actualize what they wanted rather than compelling them to take it on their own against our wishes -- who knows?
But even our failure in Iraq has this upside: each new mini-nation believes that its destiny is in its own hands. Thus Kurds fight for their final claims, like Kirkuk. Shi'a honestly believe that they faced up to the US occupation and forced America to give them elections. Only the Sunni are fighting for something still unresolved: their inheritance. But they will inherit something. Better to have unwittingly made three believing nations than have only this to say: We propped up the discredited façade of a unified state for yet another year!
Even the three-state solution is not so bad -- it is the unwitting part that is bad. We need to learn from a bitter experience in Iraq that if we want to succeed that it must never be about us but about them. The next time -- and there will be many next times for us in the Muslim world -- we need to be ready to support 'good' Islamist revolutionaries in their struggle against tyranny. This means we must be able to stop supporting vile rentier regimes like Egypt and Saudi and Pakistan. And when the time comes -- which it must -- we must do what we could not bring ourselves to do, in Iran in 1979, or even in Iraq in 2003. We must let the tyrants go down. We must back the forces of change, even if it is revolutionary change.
My simple message is this: US strategy in the Muslim world can never be successful if we continue to worship strategy in the form of a sacred literary narrative that is all about us. Our strategy should have nothing to do with holy words like "Democracy" or deities like "History." Success will come from helping give Muslims what they want: justice, and freedom from the tyrannies that survive because of us -- all our noble rhetoric to the contrary. This is the overarching and yet still unaddressed conundrum of our own making. If we find a way to face it, we will surely win this "war."