Mideast: Lessons from classical warfare
By Spengler
Ancient armies with edged weapons first gave meaning to the term "asymmetrical
warfare", much misused by armchair fanciers of anti-colonial warfare. Alexander
killed 230,000 Persians at Gaugamela in 331 BC against 4,000 Greek and allied
dead. In ancient warfare the pursuers slaughtered the pursued, and the side
that ran took all the casualties. Whole civilizations melted away before the
onslaught of superior forces. The great error in Western policy is to imagine
that anything fundamental has
changed. We throw around the term "cutting edge" lightly, too often forgetting
that the edge always lands on someone's back.
For three years I have excoriated George W Bush as a tragic character who
always wishes to do good, but always ends up doing ill. Promoting democracy in
the Middle East instead will lead to perpetual warfare. Nonetheless I
sympathize with Bush, and reject as nonsensical all the conspiracy theories
concerning the supposed motives for US intervention in Iraq. What you see is
what you get: the United States wishes to promote its own interest by making
the Muslims more like Americans. That the effort is doomed to catastrophic
failure is a different matter.
Much as I have ridiculed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I also sympathize
with her point of view. Like Jimmy Carter, she can only interpret events in the
Middle East within the frame of her own experience, which is the bitter
experience of racism in the US south. She stated on October 11 in her speech to
the American Project on Palestine:
I know that sometimes a Palestinian
state living side by side in peace with Israel must seem like a very distant
dream. But I know too, as a student of international history, that there are so
many things that once seemed impossible that, after they happened, simply
seemed inevitable. I've read over the last summer the biographies of America's
Founding Fathers. By all rights, America, the United States of America, should
never have come into being. We should never have survived our civil war. I
should never have grown up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to become the
secretary of state of the United States of America.
In her
view the Palestinian Arabs are a disadvantaged people struggling for their
rightful place in the world. If the Palestinians fail, Rice cannot help but
know, the West will react with racism, the same sort of racism that white
Americans exude when speaking among themselves about the failure of American
blacks. No matter that as Christians, American blacks relived Israel's journey
to freedom during their bleakest moments, and triumphed by appealing to the
Christian conscience of southern whites.
The Palestinians are not the victims of empire, but rather the remnants of a
defeated empire that cannot admit to its defeat without accepting final and
complete deracination. They cannot help but return to the chant they raised
when Iraqi Scud missiles hit Tel Aviv in 1990: "The Jews are our dogs." No
viable economic basis exists for a state of 5 million Palestinians without
massive subsidies from the West, and the Palestinians have voted emphatically
against becoming the subsidized dogs of the US and the European Union.
Why do whole countries in the modern world show economic results as lopsided as
Gaugamela's casualty list? Little more than a decade ago the former Soviet
Union and its satellites wrote off virtually their entire capital stock, and
the aspirations of most of their population. By mid-century the population of a
political entity that in 1980 seemed destined to rule the world will have
fallen by a half (in the case of Ukraine and Moldova) to a quarter (in the case
of Russia). What remains of Russia stalks the world scene like a man whose
terminal cancer leaves him no motivation save amusement and revenge.
Americans could look on the Soviet Union as an evil empire and communism as an
evil ideology because it claimed to replace tradition with the dictatorship of
reason. "No more tradition's chains shall bind us!" intoned the anthem of the
Paris Communards, adopted by revolutionary Russia.
Appropriately, the communist empire's last military misadventure pitted it
against the most traditional of societies, namely Afghanistan. The Russian
quagmire in Afghanistan had little to do with communism's ultimate failure,
which stemmed from the Russian military's realization that it could not compete
with the United States in high-technology weaponry. Despite its internal rot,
Russia might have triumphed if it had succeeded in turning Western Europe into
an economic tributary, and harnessing European productive power. Nonetheless,
Russia's calamitous encounter with tradition symbolized the collapse of the
arrogance with which communism set out to remake the world on the supposed
foundations of science.
Islam was America's ally in the final struggle against Soviet communism. It is
insufficient to say that Islam is traditional; more precisely, Islam is the
apotheosis of traditional society. Christianity appeared as the gravedigger of
traditional society, calling individuals out from their nations into a new
people of God. Where it compromised too deeply with traditional society,
through syncretic adoption of pagan elements, ultimately Christianity failed,
as in the ex-Christian, neo-pagan continent of Western Europe. Where
Christianity liquidated the languages, culture and memories of its converts, it
flourished, uniquely in the case of immigrants to the United States.
Issues that seem trivial and even grotesque to Westerners, such as the veiling
of women, are life-and-death matters for the survival of Islam, as Muslims in
the West know better than their Western critics. Christianity recruits
individual souls into a new Israel: Islam enlists converts into an army to
defend traditional life against the depredations of encroaching empires. Islam
cannot withstand the final dissolution of traditional society that comes with
the triumph of globalization. Its entire raison d'etre is a stubborn
refusal to adapt, in the fashion that the Chinese have adapted, to a new world
with new ground rules. To intervene in the Islamic world is to hasten the
dissolution of traditional society and with it the world of Islam. For all his
good intentions, Bush appears to Iraqis as the worst thing to visit them since
the Mongols in the 14th century.
Christianity, even in its purest, US form, never has quite come to grips with
its role as the exterminator of paganism. Christ's kingdom is not of this
world, but Christians are. They must live in this world. Except in passing
moments of inspiration they must make accommodations to it. Europe's solution
was to make Christianity into mere Christendom, in which Christian observance
settled into a supporting role within the ambient culture. Less by design than
by circumstance, US Christianity has not done this, but only because the US
lacks an ambient culture to begin with.
By and large American Christians do not understand what it is that makes them
Christians, and why their religion has flourished while European Christianity
has perished. Once having abandoned their own culture by becoming American,
Americans cease to understand why others will die rather than let their culture
be stripped from them. Because American Christians do not quite understand what
they are, they cannot understand what makes Muslims so different. Bush, Rice
and other well-meaning American Christians will operate on the presumption that
Muslims can be persuaded to act like them, with tragic consequences.
It is not what the United States does that threatens Islam, but rather what the
United States is: a global avalanche of creative destruction that rips apart
the bindings of traditional life. The US has offered a world in which
traditional society has no place. The portions of the world that have turned
their back to the sword's edge face chaos. An endearing quality of the
Americans is that they find the truth too horrible to contemplate.
