Russia is, incidentally, not typically considered to be “the West” for the purposes of most such discussion.

a) One puts too much stock in the allegedly intrinsic political or philosophical characteristics of “the West”, thereby downplaying the importance of cosmetic considerations in defining one´s sense of cultural identity. It´s not like Democracy™ has proved a failure in places like India, South Korea or Japan, where it has a lot of local flavour. And last time I checked, Greek thought (mainly Aristotle) was still a fundamental source of authority in classical Islamic philosophy.

b) One forgets that things can become somewhat muddled if one tries to describe ancient history in terms of neat East/West dichotomies. Europe, Asia, Africa, were far less important economical and historical categories at the time than “the Mediterranian”. Sure, Herodotus makes much of the alleged contention of the Persians that their enmity with the Greeks went back all the way to the Trojan War, but weren´t those Trojans reported to have founded Rome, of all places? Didn´t Christianity start out as an “oriental” cult? Weren´t most of those heavily influenced by Greek thought, anyway? If the Greeks are stand-ins for the West and the Persians for the East, what are the Egyptians? Other, different Easterners? Pre/proto-Westerners? Does it make any sense whatsoever to ask such questions?

My main gripe is that using Marathon or the Thermopylae to justify The War on Terra is just boring. The warmongers should start trying to sound funny. After all, not all is lost if future generations are able to say: “their grand schemes surely sucked bad, but at least they were wacky”

Victor Davis Hanson pointed the way when he compared the Yoorpeans to Tolkien´s ents . What the fuck, if the Greater Middle East goes down the drain, at least you can still save Middle Earth.

Just imagine how much more entertaining reading the NRO would become. Victor Davis Hanson on Chalabi: Every Ring Quest needs a Sméagol.

But I should have qualified my statement. “After Alexander, for over two millenia the West was not able to advance far into Asia.

(chuckle) An interesting hypothesis, but one that fails to explain, for example, the existence of Vladivostok.

I do see the existence of a “west”. The fact that so many nations in Europe, as well as their colonial offspring, were so greatly influenced by Greek thought and Roman institutions (the Republic, the Empire and the Church) led to a great many commonalities that set those countries down quite similar paths.

But, I don’t see nearly so much the existence of a single “east.” Lumping such dissimilar societies as China, India and Arabia into one entity is unedifying, except perhaps for the purpose of discussing the civilized “non-west.”

This is not actually true, although believers on the West’s mystical destiny to spread ‘democracy’ and ‘civilisation’ to lesser breeds without the law are terribly keen to believe it was true. The very first democracies (in any sense) were the Indian republics.

http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/histdem/indiadem.htm

There were also, of course, many semi or quasi democratic systems in the ancient world (not least, of course, the Roman Republic, and others). Also (I am quoting from memory: I don’t actually have Persian Fire in front of me, which is why I made the bloopers about Xerxes etc.) my understanding is not so much that Athens and Sparta etc. were ‘objectively’ terrorist states, as that Persia considered them to be terrorist states, which is surely true. Any state which resists the dominant hegemon is invariably considered to be ‘rogue’ or ‘terrorist’: a fact which obviously has no relevance for our own situation.

Also I wasn’t arguing that Thermopylae was insignificant. Au contraire: in many ways it still shapes our the dominant ideology of our own day. My point is much simpler: I just think that the idea that there are two distinct entities ‘east’ and ‘west’ is a nonsense in itself: still less that the ‘west’ is duty bound to introduce ‘democracy’ and ‘civilisation’ to a backwards and degenerate ‘east’. This is one mythic viewpoint that has long since outlived its usefulness.

and here’s the picture (same guy as the battle above):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chrzest_Litwy_1387_Matejko.JPG

The Roman penetration of the Middle East seems to have been quite transient, hardly more than raids. They also sacked Ctesiphon a number of times, but never conrolled the area. The Levant was often Roman or Frankish, but that’s not deep penetration.

After Alexander, the West was never able to move very far into Asia.

Trajan expanded the Roman Empire all the way to the ancient Persian capital of Susa. That’s quite far considering that the Empire at the time encompassed all of Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia.