Lieven on neo-cons

I think you pointed this very thing in an earlier post on Glenn Reynolds: the way he zooms between ‘Oh oh oh ….so you’re saying that Iraqis aren’t ready for democracy, is that what you’re saying? You’re a racist, is what you are!!!’ to ‘well it seems that the Iraqis weren’t ready for democracy after all. Perhaps Arabs just aren’t capable of democracy at the moment’. The two statements within a few months of each other, as I recall.

Currently, the neo-cons in America alternate between arguing that all Arab societies are capable of making rapid progress towards democracy (and that anyone who denies this is racist) and asserting that ‘Arabs understand only force.

I have to say I think this tendency is much more pronounced among the erstwhile neocon cheerleaders, whether it’s Glenn Reynolds or Donald Rumsfeld, than the neocons proper. Basically if a person is now likely to denounce neocons as insufficiently conservative or too idealistic, they are also likely to revert to “Arabs can’t handle democracy” or “Let them kill each other and God will sort it out” rhetoric. I haven’t heard that from many people who still keep the neocon faith.

Abb1, my guess would be that Afghanistan is what they are most clearly thinking about in the Soviet case. The general mindset is still widely common in the ruling class in Russia, most of whome were the lower level of the ruling class in the Soviet union. The darkies down in the caucusas, for example, I was regularly told, only understand force and can’t be dealt with in any other way since, despite the best efforts of the soviet union, they just refused to be civilized.

I understand this is out of context, but the premise of the paragraph is obviously false. When did the Soviet Union believe their values to be self-evident and their programs beneficial? They proclaimed that, but very few actual people believed it, and certainly nobody at the top. On the other hand, people, as opposed to governments, in the third world quite obviously accepted the superiority and benefits of the American values and programs, as witnessed by the rates of migration to the US and to the USSR.

As for the people in the Soviet Union and what is left of it needing a reason to “swing to racism” – well, that’s just ridiculous.

While I agree with Lieven, what strikes me about the neocon project in the Middle East is the lack of ruthlessness. As Matt Taibi put it, if Stalin were running the Iraq invasion, the US would have cut the population of Baghdad from five million to four million, put a NFL team in the city, and relocated most of the Sunni triangle. But Stalin didn’t have any illusions about being greeted with rose petels.

‘Democracy is no in their blood. Is it racist to say that?’

Well it’s certainly ungrammatical.

What really galls is that the same people who are now “more in sadness than in anger” despairing of the Iraqi people making a success of democracy are for the most part exactly the same people who think the “flypaper strategy” is the greatest thing since Sun Tzu. I’ve never seen any prominent exponent of the idea asked by a journalist how they reconcile encouraging democracy abroad with turning abroad into a bloodbath so that it doesn’t happen on American soil.

#4 has now become #5.

It took the West centuries to develop and understand democracy and here it is believed by some that the Islamic world can pick it up just like that. Democracy is no in their blood. Is it racist to say that?

Yes very much indeed, for a plethora of reasons, including:

a) democracy is not in any group of people’s “blood”;

b) there is no such thing as a monolithic “Islamic world”;

c) one could argue that starting with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt the weight of Western influence has been a bigger common denominator for the countries of the “Islamic world” than…well, their “islamicness”. Hence the ludicrousness of the idea that all those amazing centuries of heroic western struggle towards democracy have somehow gone unnoticed in the “Islamic world”;

d) the implicit assumption I guess you’re making that the politization of Islam — that leapt to the front pages of the newspapers with the toppling of the Shah in Iran — has always existed, will go on forever and is a uniform phenomenon all across that “Islamic world”;

The neocons and the Derbyshire mini-mes speak the same language, after all. Both have a grotesquely exaggerated view of American power in the region and in the world. Whether that power is seen as transformative or punitive is not that important, as we’re seeing.

The success of democracy depends on a series of factors, like e.g. the moderating influence of a middle class, the catch-all notion of “institution-building”, or in the case of countries as diverse as Iraq, whether the logic of the ballot box empowers those truly willing to attain consensus between communities. In some countries of the Middle East the conditions for democracy are better than in others. In some countries the influence of what could be called “political Islam” is or will be stronger than in others. Point is, it’s none of our business or shouldn’t be. This is not a moral statement, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the limits of American and western power. After the debacle in Iraq runs its course and Iran acquires nukes or in all likelihood “just” the means to make them, this will become starkly clear.

“The West” should develop a sensible, realistic working relationship with the countries of the region. Something along the lines of what is done (or used to be done before Bush) in such unimportant, forgotten backwaters as the “Far East” would be imperfect, but would still represent a remarkable progress.

By the way, shit and fuck. Just because.

Thank you for the filtering. I’ll leave the rest behind the paywall. That paragraph is a gem and applies with little stretching to the arrogant evangelizing of any number of formal political groups.

“The idea that you can democratize and defang the little brown Arabs by allowing them to bask in the glorious example of America is only slightly less racist than the whole “rubble vs. rabble” thing, and just as oblivious or dismissive of uncomfortable Arab voices.”

What do you mean by “uncomfortable Arab voices” in this context?

To be fair to Hitchens, he shouldn’t be classed with the likes of the Weekly Standard when it comes to the domestic side of the war on terror. He has consistently argued against the warrantless wiretapping programme and torture. In fact he is a plaintiff in one of the anti-illegal-wiretapping lawsuits.

Democracy is not in their blood. Is it racist to say that?

I don’t know about racist (since I believe we’re probably all racist by most definitions) but it certainly is stupid (ignorant, ahistorical?) to say that.

Democracy is no[t] in their blood. The Islamic world has not been cultured in democracy like the West has.

Islamic culture is not conducive to modernity like Western culture is, a prerequisite for democracy. It will take more time for the Islamic world to modernize in thought and expression so as to except the premiss of democracy.

That comment, as I hope is clear, was a follow-on to Godfrey’s.

When was it decided that being rude about someone’s culture was “racist”? And by whom?

It took the West centuries to develop and understand democracy and here it is believed by some that the Islamic world can pick it up just like that. Democracy is no in their blood. Is it racist to say that?

Well some Asian countries have picked up on democracy – Taiwan, India spring to mind. Japan – though perhaps you could argue about how democratic it is. And then there’s lots of countries that seem to be moving in a more democratic direction over time, eg Thailand, Indonesia, though I will not venture a definite prediction for those countries and instead am crossing my fingers.

And friends who have travelled through South America tell me that all the politicans boast of how they stood up to dictatorship, which if the friends have got the right take on it (and a couple of them speak fluent South-American Spanish) indicates a fair chunk of local support for democracy.

So there is some reason for hoping that, if Arab leaders are willing to make some brave choices and sacrifices (such as stepping down from power if they lose an election), then democracy could take place in Arab countries.

“before we shoot off our mouths”

Unfortunate choice of words in a post complaining about Dick “Deadeye” Cheney’s influence . . .

One notices that whenever democracy does happen in the Middle East – say, the election of Hamas – the elected government immediately goes from democratic to terrorist in the American media, which pretty accurately reflects the real definition of Middle Eastern democracy by the D.C. elite: a freely elected government of an Islamic majority country that cheerfully carries out the will of the American people. That is how Pakistan, for instance, gets to be democratic, and Iran doesn’t. All other applicants for “democracy” will be put in the reject pile.

“There’s lots that I don’t agree with in Anatol Lieven’s reformulation of realism[…]” Any chance of a post elaborating on your differences?

Political scientists specializing in the study of democracies are bound to act as historians, examining the circumstances that have led to the establishment of successful democracies and providing useful general guidelines for the reproduction of these conditions.

But it’s all history, and it’s predictive power is limited. A certain culture, region or country will be regarded as averse to democracy for this reason or the other, until democracy actually comes about.

Take Spain, for instance. Although home to the third modern democratic constitution of the West (1812), throughout the 19th century and up until the Civil War it was racked by military uprisings or “alzamientos” and only achieved a measure of long-term stability under the strictly-regimented system instituted by Antonio Cánovas . And under Franco, of course. Well after his death shit was still being written about how divisive Spain, with its repressive Catholic legacy etc. was intrinsically undemocratic. Fast forward. Today a left-wing government is giving the Church the stinky one on a number of sensitive “moral” issues and the Iberian Peninsula has to be swallowed by the sea yet.

airth10’s hit-and-run posts have spawned all these responses. I’m consumed by searing envy. He only needs to slop on the trollish charm a bit (something about “PC drama whores”, say) and I’ll ask him to impregnate me.

so, to add kerosene to glorious godfrey’s drama pyre, I have to add…

re: 27 (airth10)
please define the following terms in your argument:

The Islamic world
democracy
modernity (as a prerequisite for democracy).

being a charitable soul, I’m guessing that you’re not arguing that half of Asia and a significant proportion of the populations of Western countries are incapable of holding elections because they somehow don’t get the motor car, or the internet or what have you… I’m sure you must have a good, applicable definition of democracy that isn’t in fact a pseudo-religious ecstatic vision of men in powdered wigs liberating the struggling puritans of America, and a well thought out thesis for modernity that isn’t reduced to simply pointing at a cartoon image of muck-splattered, pustulent medievals straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie and describing itself as “not that.”

“I am currently keeping a close eye on Turkey as a test case”.

Well I’m sure the Turks will be relieved to hear it.

Incidentally has no one seen fit to respond that the major reason there is no democracy (with the exception of Lebanon…so far) in the Middle East is because the US does not want there to be any, and has always moved (hard) to prevent any indigenous democratic movements from being successful?

What is the opposite of racism in this case? Is it delusion and misplaced hope that the Arab world will pick up democracy just like that? No, the opposite is realism. a realism that the Islamic world is not ready for democracy. Nevertheless, we should keep plugging away at it.

It took the West centuries to develop and understand democracy and here it is believed by some that the Islamic world can pick it up just like that. Democracy is no in their blood. Is it racist to say that?

Probably, because it sounds like you’re replying on the common myth that “Islamic” = “Arab”. Which is false if you look at Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Man Formerly Known As Cassius Clay.

“America will always act to prevent democracy.”
Isn’t that a little bit racist in of itself?

I know the Russians can’t have a democracy, it’s not in their blood. All they ever do is stealing and getting drunk.
Also the Germans: all they are good at is following orders.
And don’t even mention guilt-ridden Catholics blindly obeying their priests in funny hats. Or sheepish Asians with nonexistent personality. Or the blacks who only sing, dance and fuck around.

Come to think of it, democracy is strictly for the Jews and Anglos. Really.

I know the Russians can’t have a democracy, it’s not in their blood. All they ever do is stealing and getting drunk.

Actually, the thing Russians are BEST at is …….. killing other Russians.

e could argue that starting with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt the weight of Western influence has been a bigger common denominator for the countries of the “Islamic world” than…well, their “islamicness”.
RTalk about racism. Or maybe just navel gazing?
1300 years of tradition don’t go away just because some white people show up. Not everything revolves around what WP do.

Nice try (namely, to use racism as an all-purpose escutcheon), but no cigar.

“White people”, from Boney onwards, didn’t just “show up”. In different stages, they assumed political control of the Middle East. As in, you know, conquer it. Manu militari. The word “colonialism” might ring a bell here. I think that qualifies as a pretty heavy political influence, heavy with consequences.

You’ll notice that I’m talking about “the countries”, not about the daily lives of every Bedouin and every single marsh Arab*.

On the other hand, the politization of Islam in the Middle East, with its many complexities, can be deemed to be a later phenomenon (the Muslim Brotherhood, say, was founded in 1928). It certainly couldn’t really have attracted the attention of the democracy-ain’t-in-their-blood crew until 1979. Before it was all about Nasser, the commies gaining a foothold in the region, etc.

But really, the point of that “racist” sentence is very simple: the world has already got an earful from “the West” in general and America in particular. This should prompt “us” to put in proper perspective the transformative power of “our” ideas. Or, more properly, “our” blather.

The democracy-ain’t-in-their-blood crew will say that the fact that the earful hasn’t proved too effective is an indication that, well, it ain’t in their blood. I think that the more parsimonious thought is that the success of democracy depends less on earfuls than on a host of other things.

*: BTW, who the fuck has implied that Western influence erased “1300 years of tradition”? I know that straw men are supposed to be all straw and no brains, but still…

Crap. Replace “escutcheon” with “bludgeon”.

To a certain extent I would agree with you Steve, since the rise of the religious right and the evangelical movement in the US are indeed worrisome developments, that have a negative influence on the democracy there. But most people would also agree that currently the problems created by religion in middle eastern and other countries struggling with modernization are of a much larger scale. Its not that they are insurmountable, but it’ll certainly take a good while until these battles have been fought to the end and, hopefully if everything turns out well, some sort of laicist model can be adopted there.

Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not assuming that everybody in the Middle East used to be a Bedouin (let alone a marsh Arab). And actually their nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life has changed quite a great deal (often after decolonization).

There is a difference between the religious ways in the United States and most Islamic countries. There is freedom of religion in the U.S. Even Muslims. of all strips, are free to worship as they wish in the U.S. That freedom is what many Muslims find attractive about America, including economic freedom, which they don’t have where they come from. Those rights are what makes the U.S. a more sophisticated place even though it has its measure of fundamentalists.

The United States also has the judicial system that keeps religion at bay. Keeping religion and government separate in the Arab/Islamic world is generally done by force.

This is something of an aside, but please read as I think it is quite clever!

The neoconservatives strike me as just another iteration of “Utopia NOW!” baby boomers. Faced with the awful guilt of living up to their parents, they have been trolling about the world for 60+ years now looking for sundry crusades and causes to justify their existence. It isn’t enough for them to just live out their lives; they need to live out their dreams. And reality be damned, full theory ahead!

Iraq is of course the apotheosis of this behavior. Why can’t we have our own Good War? Hell, why not? And meanwhile, the professional activists are salivating and furiously printing placards…

And if Theda Skocpol is to be believed, they are also stealing our idealism.

When will these losers just fade away?

* Notice that James Baker is a member of the Silent Generation. The boomers have fucked up again; send in the adults!

@jack, post 56,
never heard of the donut hole crowd, but in the real world, the creation of a modern nation called Finland c. 1895-1944 involved the following crises and responses to them: Czarist Russification policies, the Russian revolution of 1905, the WWI, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik revolution, the Finnish civil war 1918, the Russian Civil war and Allied intervention, the Great Depression and the WWII. With the possible exception of our civil war, these were all unavoidable (by us). I don’t know what were supposed to be an example of, really.
Modernization is always painful, but I do object to the idea that killing lots of people is the best way to modernize rapidly. Controlled terror has its uses, but easy resort to mass violence is more often the tool of a weak and ineffective government. Or a delusional one.

abb1, I remember you describing the Soviet Union under Kruschev as some sort of liberal wonderland on this blog and now you’re praising Saddam Hussein as the great modernizer – do you actually ever think about what life was like for the ordinary people living under the rule of such enlightened leaders?

r4d20: Dude, you’re OK. Infodumping and trolling are two great tastes that taste great together.

First of all, your condescension is just delicious: yes, thanks for telling me that organized religion often has an overt political dimension. Ali and his assassination; how could I have ignored that all along?

Thanks to you, I’ve done some research and I’ve realized that my prior assumptions about the strict separation between the public and the religious sphere according to Islamic tradition were just wrong! Before, I used to think that Shari’a was some Pakistani dish.

At any rate, you appear to assume that I’m some embodiment of the mythic figure of the “self-loathing liberal”, who blames all the woes of the “good savages” on the evil (but formidable) imperialistic white man, and who therefore is in his way a narcissistic, condescending racist. If that’s what you assume, I assume that you are full of shit.

I happen to be in favour of a somewhat detached, “analytic” approach to history. You however appear to make the common mistake of turning that detachment into a frankly laughable form of determinism/automatism after the fact.

” Even if there had been no colonialism, the radical changes in science, engineering, and political philosphy that the West has seen in the last 100 years would STILL have spilled over into the middle east and destabalized their societies (just like the destabalized European societies at first).”

Yeah, yeah, sure, but do you think that there were no choices involved in the actual process that took place in the real world? That, say, the French expedition against Algiers in 1830 was just “spill-over”? Or that the “conservative backlash” would have looked exactly the same irrespective of how the West had exercised its influence? Muslim rulers (like, say, the famous Shah Abbas) were often keen to establish commercial links with the West and to hire European engineers. The fact that the cannons built by those engineers’ colleagues ended up being aimed at those rulers possibly made a difference.

But I’m just following you along that awesome tangent which you and your army of straw men are going off on. This is a thread about neocons and those like John Derbyshire who say that the Mahometan rabble only understands the use of force. My point, a pretty pedestrian one, addresses a (mis)conception that is popular in both camps (which shows in turn that the ideas of those camps are not at all that dissimilar).

The neocons and the Derbyshire mini-mes are saying: the backward peoples of the Middle East haven’t been exposed to the ways of the West to a sufficient degree. According to the neocons, they are just longing for said exposure, purple fingers and everything, which justifies America’s regime-changing antics. According to the Derbyshire mini-mes, the Mahometan rabble is just impervious to the influence of “our” superior western civilization, so “we” should just bomb ’em when “they” get out of line.

I say: the peoples of the Middle East have been exposed to plenty of western influence (you say just that yourself) and, frankly, it’s quite implausible that “they” are intrinsically any more “backward” than “we” are. At any rate, America and the West have not the moral authority to interfere in the affairs of the region, certainly not to the egregious extent that is still the norm. More importantly, America and the West lack the power to achieve the goals of said interference. “We” should take a more hands-off approach.

Pretty straightforward, ain’t it?

And, just to be perfectly unambiguous: I DON’T THINK THAT “THE WEST” HAS ANY MONOPOLY ON MODERNITY. The 21st century will in all likelihood be dominated by China and India, and I’m not getting my panties in a bunch over that.

Now, will you answer to this, and not to the musings of some crash-test dummies you have in your living room? Will you drop what is shaping up to become a tiresome exchange? Or will you proceed to enlighten me about the fact that Hulagu Khan’s sacking of Baghdad was a bigger blow to the Arab self-consciousness than the Crusaders could have ever hoped to deliver?

Do not impute that I supported the Iraq invasion in any way. We have set back Iraq many decades.

However, the claims regarding Kuwait are preposterous. If anything, modernity is an absence of ideology and a presence of pragmatism. Hussein has more in common with Stalin than Pinochet, because Hussein was paranoid and conflated military glory with national glory. The invasion of Kuwait was stupid and unnecessary. I imagine you’ll bring up slant-drilling next, and any number of apologies for the insanity of Hussein. Pinochet was brutal, but the military was used to serve the economic project, and the policies were fundamentally rational in spirit if not always in execution.

Regarding Finland: modernity is primarily an economic process. Although this may not sit well with poli sci majors, politics really is the junior partner in world affairs. The economy matters most. And modern Finland as an economic creature is fairly recent and post-industrial.

And to those who question the wisdom of modernity in general: had the romantics had their way, there would not be a computer screen in front of you right now. I don’t know how many times I have heard the “technology and prosperity without dislocation and social decay” argument, but I remain unconvinced. Quite frankly, most people prefer material comfort to social belonging. Sorry.

And is it really so difficult to say anything without laying all of the blame at the feet of inhuman Westerners? The way you ascribe power to us, we might as well be able to do a double-somersault across the Arabian peninsula and chuck Mecca into space. The fact is that if you want to blame colonialism in the Middle East, blame the Turks. The Europeans were only there for like twenty years, and I would not be so daft as to say the current Middle Eastern countries are imperial vassals of the USA. Have some perspective.

boy, apart from your moral compass being seriously off kilter, you display an amazing ability for talking out of your hat

amazing ability for talking out of your hat

Novakant, care to elaborate?

Btw, if the Berlin situation was indeed as horrible (“causing untold grief to millions”) as you say, it could’ve been most easily and naturally resolved by Americans and Brits getting out, taking their troops out of West Berlin. Poof – solved, no wall, no problem, no more untold grief to millions. What do you think about this idea, Novakant? Never thought of it this way, huh, doesn’t make sense, right?

At any rate, you appear to assume that I’m some embodiment of the mythic figure of the “self-loathing liberal”, who blames all the woes of the “good savages” on the evil (but formidable) imperialistic white man, and who therefore is in his way a narcissistic, condescending racist.

I dont assume anything, but I’ll take the blame for starting off with the snide remarks.

Well, since you were talking about cryptoracism, navel-gazing, utter ignorance of anything about the world that does not revolve around “the West” or “white people”, and so on, I thought that some amount of inferential reasoning was in order, yes.

All in good fun, though.

‘Now, the Kuwait society is heavily based on Islamic Law. That’s not rational and therefore not modern. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just a fact.’

Actually I would say there is a lot wrong with that, in this day and age. I might also point out that the main reason that it is in that state is that after it was ‘liberated’ by the ‘West’ in ’91, ‘we’ immediately handed power back to the freedom loving Kuwaiti junta…no nonsense about democracy there! Isn’t it funny, incidentally, how according to the Keyboard Kommandos the purpose of the ’91 war was to liberate Iraq I distinctly remember being told at the time it was to liberate Kuwait…this justifies the ‘we should have marched on to Baghdad’ rhetoric, forgetting that, if we had been interested in democracy, democratising Kuwait would have been at the forefront of our agenda, and would (unlike in Iraq) have been relatively easy to do. And yet we didn’t. How strange.

Fukuyama’s paradise is not just democracy, it’s a combination of liberal economics and liberal democracy. I haven’t read it, but it’s seems weird, because contradictions in this model seem fairly obvious: the demos typically doesn’t like liberal economics too much.

Capitalism and democracy do not contradict each other. Both are Darwinian. Both mine natural variability, punish the unfit, and reward the fit.

Unless of course, you believe that democracy is synonymous with equity. Democracy is a process, just like capitalism. The results of this process have nothing to with capitalism and democracy.

I have always thought that socialism smacked of “intelligent design”. And just like the ID salesmen would be quite shocked to learn that the human genome is highly functional yet rife with useless sequences and redundancy, and quite obviously not intelligently designed, so the central planners were shocked to learn that anarchical capitalist economies were more efficient than their own. It was joked in the 80s that the Soviet economy had three industries: defense, oil, and vodka. That makes sense, because three industries is about all a central planning committee can handle.

Liberal states use minimal resources to transform the survival of the fittest from a violent, warlike game to a peaceful, economic game. This does not mean that the unfit are not selected against. It simply means that they are marginalized and left either to reform or die off. Call it “soft culling”. Any goals beyond this transformation – however politically popular – posit a desired result rather than a desired process.

Desired results are exactly ideology. Infusing your life with grand ideas and metaphysical implications is the bane of human history. Infusing the world with metaphysics is intelligent design. Just do what you need to survive, and accept the results as is. Just like a capitalist economy, I believe this will produce better results than conscious attempts to construct utopia.

I agree with you: without ideology, there cannot be society. But why must there be society?

Qualifier: conscious control can be used in reasonable amounts to catch up to leaders, once the way forward is known. Hence my assent to capitalist dictatorships as modernization vehicles.

Qualifier: intelligent design is possible when the problem is highly constrained, such as microprocessor design. The number of design parameters is tightly bounded, and performance can be measured and compared to the theoretical optimum. Even so, current research into design focuses heavily on automatic or evolutionary design tools as problem complexity grows. I have no way of placing a number on this, but at some point complexity is too great for designers and you must simply through a lot of mutants at the market and see what happens.

I’m an engineer if you haven’t guessed so already :)

Liberal states use minimal resources to transform the survival of the fittest from a violent, warlike game to a peaceful, economic game.

Well, obviously no one ever wants to participate in any “survival of the fittest” game. Everyone wants to have a safe, guaranteed, easy life without any fighting (even the economic kind), without taking chances. And these are people who – in a democracy – control these ‘liberal states’ you’re talking about.

If the people really have the power to design the game – the game they themselves will have to play – how can do you expect them to create anything even close to any sort of “survival of the fittest” game? That’s totally unrealistic.

No, it’s quite the opposite. Like I said, any place where democracy is introduced – capitalism there declines until it doesn’t look like capitalism anymore. In Chile, for example, the current president represents the Socialist party – the same party that was represented by Salvador Allende in the 1970s.

The father of the current Chilean president was a cabinet member of Allende’s government. He and his family were arrested and tortured by Pinochet’s junta, he died in jail and his daughter (the current president) was exiled. She lived and studied in East Germany. Enough said.

airth10:

What the hell is a “democratic economy”? This term has no meaning whatsoever. You have repeatedly exercised your freedom to be unencumbered by facts. Maybe for once you can exercise the opposite freedom.