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2 In defense of genocide,
redux By Spengler
One
kind word should to be said for the foundering US
president: George W Bush seems to be the last
person in public life to think that genocide is an
unacceptable outcome (except, of course, for Pope
Benedict XVI, who sadly has no divisions).
Time was that the g-word was
unpronounceable by critics on the right or left.
It is a measure of how much the world has changed
since September 11, 2001, that the prospect of
genocide shocks neither. For example, prominent
journalist and humanitarian
activist David Rieff believes
that if genocide is inevitable in Iraq, we should
stand back and watch. He asks (in Rod Dreher's
must-read Crunchy Con weblog) why the US should
remain in Iraq at all: [1]
The usual answer is that because if
we leave [Iraq] there will be a genocide ... The
deeper questions are (a) whether short of
open-ended colonization, the US has the power to
prevent the genocide whose preconditions we
ourselves created through our hubris, (b)
whether the future of the Iraqi polity should be
one of the main foci of our concerns, and (c)
whether the cost of preventing genocide is one
we as a polity can afford to pay. My answer to
all three questions is no.
Rieff
penned the above words to defend Democratic
Senator Barack Obama's statement that the danger
of genocide is not sufficient cause to keep US
troops in Iraq. On the conservative side, Father
Richard Neuhaus in the September issue of First
Things takes President Bush to task for having
"pledged America to the ultimate goal of ending
tyranny in the world", as Bush said in Prague on
September 6. Father Neuhaus writes:
The claim that we are imposing our
values, says the president, is refuted by the
fact that every time people are given a choice,
they choose freedom. It is by no means evident
that the people of Iraq, for instance, who
bravely turned out in the millions to
participate in elections, were choosing freedom.
It is more likely they were voting for the
dominance of their tribes determined to dominate
them. It would seem that freedom, as the
liberal-democratic tradition construes freedom,
is, in fact, un-Islamic.
He asks
whether the United States can "present its
purposes to the world in a manner friendly to
Muslims seeking to institute governments that, in
a believably Muslim way, derive their powers from
the consent of the governed", and concludes, "It
is possible that the answer to that question is in
the negative. If so, it would seem that there is
no alternative to bracing ourselves for the
escalation of an open-ended clash of
civilizations."
Before September 11, 2001,
I published a brief essay titled "In defense of
genocide", with intent to shock. [2] Now, as the
surrealist enfant terrible Andre Breton
repined at the end of his life, it is no longer
possible to outrage anyone. The single-mindedness
with which Shi'ites and Sunnis slaughter each
other makes us take civilizational conflict for
granted. The few score of deaths each day in an
Iraq occupied by US forces, where sectarian
killers remain underground, has inured the public
to the millions of deaths that will ensue after
the Americans leave and the death squads can
emerge in the open, drawing support from Iran and
Saudi Arabia respectively. What this might imply
for Pakistan and Lebanon is not hard to imagine.
A million deaths, more or less, ensued
from Sunni-Shi'ite warfare during the 1980s after
Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. A rematch fought out
not only between armies but between neighborhoods
might add a zero to the score, in part because the
United States would not permit Iran in effect to
annex the oilfields of the Iraqi south, and almost
certainly would try to restore a military balance
by reinforcing the Sunni side, and supporting
unrest among the non-Persian half of the Iranian
population. Wars in which antagonists are equally
balanced but equally determined turn out to be by
far the bloodiest - the Catholic-Protestant civil
wars of the 17th century and World War I stand out
as examples.
Only naivety verging on
simple-mindedness could envisage a genocide in
Iraq to which the world's powers would stand
indifferent. It is not merely that oil is at
stake, but that the ambitions of the Shi'ite world
could not be contained at the Saudi border. Rather
than attempting to "colonize" Iraq, to which David
Rieff objects, the United States and its friends
would intervene in a score of smaller ways. In
fact, even Bush's most embittered opponents do not
object to such interventions. In a television
interview on January 22, Senator Harry Reid, the
Democratic leader of America's upper house,
intoned that Washington should "take nothing off
the table" regarding prospective intervention
against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, currently America's
most diligent ally.
The desire to instill
a rational order into a violent world persuades
historians and political scientists to suppress
the most obvious fact about the modern era, namely
that genocide is the norm, rather than the
exception. The French state, universally hailed as
first exemplar of the modern era, was born from a
sea of German blood. Roughly half of Europe's
German speakers and a great
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