Denial Part 3,935

Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in an OpEd in the New York Times titled Prisoner of Her Desires, provides for us exhibit #3,935 of the delusion that infects a large number of people who are otherwise intelligent, normal, thoughtful human beings. This is not a case of the appearance of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) but rather something that maybe we can call "End of History Derangement Syndrome (EHDS)" or the desire to believe that war, and all the rest of the general distastefulness of humanity, of human wickedness, has been banished forever because Europeans and other Westerners have said it is so. It is signaled by the deployment of that strange, unhistorical German/French "hope" (I mean policy) that could only have been dreamt up by a European living in the post-peace paradise of the EU called "constructive engagement."

Gerecht discusses the story of "Haleh Esfandiari, an American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, [who] has been jailed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since May 8."

He goes on:

The clerical regime doesn’t play fair: A 67-year-old woman who has over the years shown Iran’s representatives in the United States and other visiting Iranians, including esteemed clerics, the utmost kindness and respect is a perfect target to show the regime’s distaste for Iranians who want to build bridges.

[...]

Mrs. Esfandiari’s arrest is what you could call “clerical engagement”: Iranians and Americans are meant to (re)learn that the ruling clergy exclusively defines the terms of engagement. “Mutual interest,” something Mr. Hamilton repeatedly insists the United States and clerical Iran share, isn’t a phrase I’ve seen used by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic ultimate leader. Messrs. Hamilton and Baker raised the fearful (to the clerical regime) specter of an America eager to embrace the Islamic Republic. The mullahs, in a very personal, Iranian way, have replied.

Gerecht concludes by advising the Western powers that

...they should recall that Ronald Reagan’s finest moments came when he saw that the struggles of Soviet dissidents should be at the forefront of American-Soviet relations. The liberation of one individual should sometimes define a nation’s foreign policy.

It would be nice to believe that the Western Powers will do so, and recall that Reagan's policies helped end the USSR. Or, will the policy also know as appeasement continue to drive large numbers of otherwise intelligent, normal, thoughtful human beings to deny what is plainly before their eyes in the hope of avoiding today what they can confront tomorrow?

Sadly, we've been here before. Andrew Roberts, writing a chapter called "Hitler's England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?" in Niall Ferguson's conterfactual history "Virtual History," writes about the all-to-real mood and history of the later 1930s in Britain that existed at the time (before he lays out his counterfactual history of a Britain defeated by Germany):

The Majority of voters had had enough of war.... Nor was it just the Labour Party which adopted a pacifist position summed up by its leader George Lansbury's pledge 'to close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the Air Force' - short to 'abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war.' Liberals like John Maynard Keynes and even former wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George now regarded the Great War as having been a waste of young lives: the result of diplomatic blundering in 1914 which had done nothing to diminish Germany's claim to European predominance and everything to aggrieve the German people. A great many Conservatives shared that sneaking sympathy with postwar Germany which was in many ways the foundation of appeasement.

To a great extent, the desire to avoid war was understandable. The apparently futile slaughter in the trenches had provoked a deep-rooted reaction against the whole idea that it was noble to die for one's country - once the motto of a generation of brave (and short-lived) public-school-educated officers. In addition, there was a fear that technological advances would make any new war far more costly in terms of civilian lives than the First World War had been.

Are we in the 1930s again? I don't know, but the similarities are far too many to ignore. As Glenn Reynolds says, "read the whole thing"

Lebanon: Worth Saving

Michael Young, who is both the Opinion Editor of the Beirut Daily Star and a Contributing Editor to REASON, has a piece on Reasononline titled Liberal Lebanon: Worth Saving, or the hell with it? Young describes a former U.S. National Security Council operative named Flynt Leverett who wants to be "middleman" in a collaboration with Syria, which he thinks we should cozy up with.

Most of the article then goes on to look at the interference of Syria in Lebanon and the fact that the "dead hand" of the Syrian drives much that seems inexplicable in Lebanon, or which is blamed on other players.

In any case, Young concludes with a comment that gets to the heart of the State of Denial that exists in much of the West (particularly that in Europe and in the U.S. Democratic Party), that desperately wants to escape back to September 10, 2001:

What Flynt Leverett wouldn't admit was that while the so-called Cedar Revolution may have been romanticized, there was good reason to see it as something novel in the Middle East. For the first time, for example, several intelligence and security chiefs were forced out of office because of popular discontent. Place that against the grim order the Syrians and their Lebanese allies, notably the theocratic, authoritarian Hezbollah, seek to resurrect. Many in the West want to close the door on an Arab world that seems permanently overcome by its pathologies. Fine, but in abandoning a weak but genuine liberal system they are also abandoning a part of themselves.

A New MAD?

A number of bloggers have written about the (Russian) cyber Denial of Service attack on Estonian computers in response to Estonian plans to remove a Soviet-era memorial to the Russian "liberation" of Estonia from the Nazis.

John Robb, writing at Global Guerrillas, proposes a countermeasure:

The key is to develop an offensive capability that draws on the lessons of the cold war.... We may shortly see a reprise of this concept for warfare between states in an interdependent world, where disruption replaces destruction in a new MAD.... The option for Estonia is clear, will it establish a similar capability alone (or in conjunction with other states to form an umbrella of protection) to make the new MAD a reality? The best approach for this is to develop an open source network of hackers/black marketeers that can match the Russians. That shouldn't be hard.

Maybe, one day in the future, we will be reading newspaper reports of the progress of "cyber-battles" the way our ancestors read about the progress of battles in World War 1 or 2. But seriously, the implications of open source network of hackers raises the issue of non-state actors working, in this example, on behalf of states, that is specific states versus other specific states. It is an interesting exercise to think about that in relation to discussions going on in the blogosphere about third gen gangs and their growing influence and the threat they pose in Iraq and in the U.S. as well as Central America.

Open source hackers fighting off a cyber attack on the state in which they in represent the mobilization of a gang-like group of people to defend a state. If 3rd gen gangs can pose a threat to nation states, it also seems that they can be used by nation states.

Richard at Belmont Club posts an email from a Marine heading back to Iraq:

...we may have found part of the answer to your query as to how to handle 3rd Gen gangs/irregular warfare/the problem with no name (as in your post: "Total Blurring of Crime and War"): the answer is not to eradicate an insurgency, it is to create or find one's own group that offers a reasonable alternative. This is really what has happened in Anbar: the tribes were colluding with Al Qaeda and other criminal and terror groups, but now we have turned them and empowered them.

Just as the Estonians could recruit their own hackers to fight off a Russian cyber attack, maybe what we're seeing in Iraq is that the tip of the spear of U.S. policy in the GWOT, which is the military, has begun to figure out the solution to the problem of how to counter the tribal, decentralized nature of the enemy we face. We started down this path in Afghanistan in 2001 with our support of certain warlords. It appears to be happening again in Anbar.

The unnamed Marine adds another point, which is that:

Here's the real takeaway though: this never would have happened without some sort of American presence in Iraq. It was not diplomats that turned the tribes, it was military officers.

He then adds to this, and this is the Money Quote:

That is the secret that will be hard to swallow: we are in an age wherein the opposite of the 'exit strategy' will have to be the lynchpin of strategy: presence, not early exit, is what is required in these broad swaths of the world that where instability threatens US interests. The key will be not to figure out whether to be there or not, which is the current debate. The key will be to figure out how much to be there and in what form: soldier, diplomat, spy, or some other category that has yet to be determined: perhaps a combo of all three, or perhaps some privatized version of any one of them.

Maybe we will see the rebirth of MAD.

The Calm at Home

President Bush gave a quite lengthy press conference today on a number of issues: trade with China, Gonzales, the war in Iraq, Iran.

One of the great criticisms of Bush that has been repeated ad nauseam over the years is that he has never made the case for why we're still in Iraq, he's never made the case for overall war strategy, that he's never admitted his errors, that he doesn't talk about the burdens we face enough, etc, etc.

Plainly, that is nonsense, as anyone who has actually paid attention to what Bush has had to say in many speeches over the years. This is one part of the alienation disease that so many feel. Here's an example from today's press conference (note all the implied negatives and implied assumptions - which could be the subject of whole separate post - embedded in the question), where Bush actually deploys the "naive" warning, still to no avail:

Q Mr. President, after the mistakes that have been made in this war, when you do as you did yesterday, where you raised two-year-old intelligence, talking about the threat posed by al Qaeda, it's met with increasing skepticism. The majority in the public, a growing number of Republicans, appear not to trust you any longer to be able to carry out this policy successfully. Can you explain why you believe you're still a credible messenger on the war?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm credible because I read the intelligence, David, and make it abundantly clear in plain terms that if we let up, we'll be attacked. And I firmly believe that.

Look, this has been a long, difficult experience for the American people. I can assure you al Qaeda, who would like to attack us again, have got plenty of patience and persistence. And the question is, will we?

Yes, I talked about intelligence yesterday. I wanted to make sure the intelligence I laid out was credible, so we took our time. Somebody said, well, he's trying to politicize the thing. If I was trying to politicize it, I'd have dropped it out before the 2006 elections. I believe I have an obligation to tell the truth to the American people as to the nature of the enemy. And it's unpleasant for some. I fully recognize that after 9/11, in the calm here at home, relatively speaking, caused some to say, well, maybe we're not at war. I know that's a comfortable position to be in, but that's not the truth.

Failure in Iraq will cause generations to suffer, in my judgment. Al Qaeda will be emboldened. They will say, yes, once again, we've driven the great soft America out of a part of the region. It will cause them to be able to recruit more. It will give them safe haven. They are a direct threat to the United States.

And I'm going to keep talking about it. That's my job as the President, is to tell people the threats we face and what we're doing about it. And what we've done about it is we've strengthened our homeland defenses, we've got new techniques that we use that enable us to better determine their motives and their plans and plots. We're working with nations around the world to deal with these radicals and extremists. But they're dangerous, and I can't put it any more plainly they're dangerous. And I can't put it any more plainly to the American people and to them, we will stay on the offense.

It's better to fight them there than here. And this concept about, well, maybe let's just kind of just leave them alone and maybe they'll be all right is naive. These people attacked us before we were in Iraq.
They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq, and they've been attacking ever since. They are a threat to your children, David, and whoever is in that Oval Office better understand it and take measures necessary to protect the American people.

Another part is the obsession (what Charles Johnson calls "Bush Derangement Syndrome") with getting Bush to admit he was wrong (based on what we know now compared to what we knew then). This type of approach, which trys to retroactively prove a past argument made from all available information know in that past, wrong with new information known now, is the question heard endlessly at press conferences.

Unfortunately, it is also the one, along with its response, that is most picked up in the news and in the soundbites broadcast on the filter. That this is illogical is of no concern. There was a perfect example today:

Q Mr. President, a new Senate report this morning contends that your administration was warned before the war that by invading Iraq you would actually give Iran and al Qaeda a golden opportunity to expand their influence, the kind of influence you were talking about with al Qaeda yesterday, and with Iran this morning. Why did you ignore those warnings, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: Ed, going into Iraq we were warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn't happen. And, obviously, as I made a decision as consequential as that, I weighed the risks and rewards of any decision. I firmly believe the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. I know the Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein in power. I think America is safer without Saddam Hussein in power. As to al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda is going to fight us wherever we are. That's their strategy. Their strategy is to drive us out of the Middle East. They have made it abundantly clear what they want. They want to establish a caliphate. They want to spread their ideology. They want safe haven from which to launch attacks. They're willing to kill the innocent to achieve their bjectives, and they will fight us. And the fundamental question is, will we fight them? I have made the decision to do so. I believe that the best way to protect us in this war on terror is to fight them.

The thing that boggles the mind is that Bush has been asked - and has answered - this question hundreds of time; each time being asked to rejustfiy his foreign policy of the last six years; and each time, to the sadness of the questioner, he provides the same answer.

Alienation and its costs

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Bill Bennett last week on his radio show in an interview focused on Bennett's new book, "America: The Last Best Hope." Towards the end of the interview, Bennett and Hewitt get into a discussion of appeasement where they Hewitt asks about similarities to the 1930s in which people today are ignoring the threats from Jihadism plainly visible. Bennett responds by pointing out another similarity which I will call that of the "Useful Idiots." Bennett compares Jimmy Carter to Charles Lindbergh, Joe Kennedy, etc. Excerpt:

BB: ...I think there’s another parallel to the Vietnam situation, withdrawal from Vietnam, and the temptation to withdraw from Iraq, I think is one parallel. The other is the 30’s in Europe. And you know, it’s quite the extraordinary story, and a lot of people don’t know about Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, a great American hero who flirted with the Nazis. I spend more time than I probably should have on the ’36 Olympics. I could have spent fifty pages on it. It’s a fascinating period, and the opposition by some to the Olympics, based on what Hitler was doing, you know, there were concentration camps that had started. They were forty miles, fifty miles away from the Olympics site. But people didn’t want to hear it. They just didn’t believe it. What does he mean, they said, the Cliveden Set said over there, you know, over tea in England with Lindbergh and Joe Kennedy. If there’s a bad dude in this book…

HH: Yeah, you give him his due, and I’m glad.

BB: Yeah, well he is just…he deserves it. I mean, he and Jimmy Carter, I’ll tell you, I mean, over there, just trying to just...selling…not selling out, but underselling and undervaluing the Brits, and just saying the Germans will just whip their butts, and who’s side here was he on, in terms of the Allies? It was a very bad time for…again, people, very smart people being blind to very clear and obvious things, just like today. When Zawahiri says we want to reestablish the caliphate from Spain to Iran, people say what does he mean?

HH: Right.

BB: What does he mean? Well, I think he means exactly that. When Hitler says we will exterminate the Jews, we’ll rid the world of the Jews, what does he mean? That’s exactly what he meant.

HH: There’s an uncomfortable parallel as well for Republicans in your chapter on the Great War.

BB: Yeah.

HH: At home, Wilson alienated the Republicans utterly. He could not cooperate with the bitter enders. Now I’m not sure that Bush intentionally set out to do this, in fact, I’m sure he didn’t. But that’s where we are now, a completely alienated partisan divide.

This "alienated partisan divide" has now become, as I noted in an early post, a threat larger than any Weapon of Mass Destruction. Part of the problem this generates can be seen in the questions that are asked as part of polls. Bennett get to the impact of poll questions after Hewitt's comments above:

HH: [...] How does the country get around that [partisan divide], Bill Bennett? Or is it impossible to do so until the next presidential election?

BB: I don’t know. I mean, I think everybody has to pull the oar here. We all have to do what we can. I think lots of small things, for the people who are not presidents, so there’s…everyone has a job to do. Radio talk show hosts have a job to do. Columnists have a job to do. Citizens and teachers have a job to do. Pollsters have a job to do. I want a question, Hugh, I want a poll question. Would you be in favor of withdrawal from Iraq if you knew the following things: that instead of hundreds of people a month dying, there will be thousands a week, that Zawahiri and bin Laden, and whoever’s in charge of al Qaeda at the moment will be dancing, saying we defeated them, we said they were not a strong horse, we said the U.S. was a paper tiger, we said they would run, and we were right, that the world’s second largest, now it turns out, reserve of oil is in Iraq, and that will be controlled by who? Al Qaeda? Iran? Both of them? All of them? If you know all of that is going to happen, and the rest of the world draws the same conclusions that people started to draw after Vietnam, that the U.S. cannot be trusted, when it says it will be there, its word is not good, would you still be in favor? You
know, these ridiculous interviews that these Democrats are doing, thank God, goodness that people are at least asking these questions. Are you prepared for genocide? Are you prepared for massive slaughter?

HH: Right.

BB: A couple of the ones with intellectual honesty have said yes, we are, but that’s why we’ve got to keep the troops close, so we can send them back in. Well, what the heck does that mean? What kind of a policy is that? Some have said well, that’s what we’ve got now is genocide. No, you don’t. That’s not what you have. You have something a good deal short of that. What you have is ugly and it’s brutal, but it’s not genocide. You know, Shakespeare’s Lear says it’s not the worst as long as we can say this is the worst. This is not the worst. Things can get worse than this, and they did in Vietnam, and they did in Cambodia.

HH: And it could very quickly do so.

So, in 2007, here we are in a place where winning the political argument is more important than either the national interest or the national defense.

Writing in the WSJ, in his fittingly-titled column called "Wonderland," Daniel Henninger writes, after an analysis of Spain's current political impasse created by The Socialist Premier Zapateros' desire to pin the entire blame for the Spanish Civil War on supporters of General Franco, in an article titled "Dancing With Ghosts" that:

I want to suggest that American politics today is talking and fighting its way toward a similar impasse. How did it come to this?

It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.

From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization races to the 1998 House impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).

Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now.

Exhibit A through Z is the Iraq war, a major military undertaking by the United States fought, after the 2002 resolution, with little or no support by one of the nation's two political parties. When one Democratic Senator persisted in support, his dissent was not allowed, as normal in our politics, but punished with ostracism. Feel free to call this take-no-prisoners opposition "principle," but it's also
uncharacteristic for our politics.

As we head to the summer, with all of Iran's machinations in play in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, the Gulf, God help us...

Types of Denial

Wikipedia describes 6 types of denial:

1. Denial of fact: This form of denial is where someone avoids a fact by lying.
2. Denial of responsibility: This form of denial involves avoiding personal responsibility by blaming, minimizing or justifying.
3. Denial of impact: Denial of impact involves a person avoiding thinking about or nderstanding the harms their behavior have caused to themselves or others.
4. Denial of awareness: People using this type of denial will avoid pain and harm by stating they were in a different state of awareness.
5. Denial of cycle: Many who use this type of denial will say things such as, "it just happened."
6. Denial of denial: This can be a difficult concept for many people to identify in themselves, but is a major barrier to changing hurtful behaviors.

Commentary Magazine has an article up as a preview from it’s June issue by Norman Podhoretz called “The Case for Bombing Iran” and in it he addresses the denial involved in the threat represented by Iran:

But here we come upon an interesting difference between then and now. Whereas in the late 1930’s almost everyone believed, or talked himself into believing, that Hitler was telling the truth when he said he had no further demands to make after Munich, no one believes that Ahmadinejad is telling the truth when he says that Iran has no wish to develop a nuclear arsenal. In addition, virtually everyone agrees that it would be best if he were stopped, only not, God forbid, with military force—not now, and not ever.

Here we are faced with a threat that is tangible, that is imminent, that people recognize as a grave danger, yet no one wants to do what might be ultimately necessary: attack Iran.

Amir Taheri writes in the NY Post that:

Strategists in Tehran appear convinced that an American retreat will take place within the next two years at most. They are also determined not to allow the United States to shape a regional alliance capable of protecting a new balance of power…..

Early signs show that a long, hot summer of conflict, perhaps even full-scale war, is ahead of us in the Middle East. The perception that the United States is divided and weak has encouraged the most radical elements throughout the region, including Tehran and Damascus.

With what was left of the so-called realists and pragmatists on the defensive everywhere, the radical agenda is unchallenged. As Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme Guide" of the Khomeinist movement, said last week, Tehran can deploy suicide-martyrdom groups, a weapon "many times stronger than the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima."

The Guardian, in a cover story by Simon Tisdall on Monday titled Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq, wrote that:

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

Later, Tisdall writes, quoting U.S. sources:

"Iran is perpetuating the cycle of sectarian violence through support for extra-judicial killing and murder cells. They bring Iraqi militia members and insurgent groups into Iran for training and then help infiltrate them back into the country. We have plenty of evidence from a variety of sources. There's no argument about that. That's just a fact," the senior official in Baghdad said.”…

In trying to force an American retreat, Iran's hardline leadership also hoped to bring about a humiliating political and diplomatic defeat for the US that would reduce Washington's regional influence while increasing Tehran's own.

But if Iran succeeded in "prematurely" driving US and British forces out of Iraq, the likely result would be a "colossal humanitarian disaster" and possible regional war drawing in the Sunni Arab Gulf states, Syria and Turkey, he said.

Denial is a powerful human function and the string of recent news, and the overall meme that has driven debate on the Iraq war, is clearly pointing to denial of a fully transparent reality. If Americans already feel that Iraq is lost, and that we can simply leave and it will all go away, the chances that we will deal with Iran before they deal with us appear slim.

As I type, the NYT just posted the results of a poll titled "Poll Shows Opposition to Iraq War at All Time High."

Americans now view the war in Iraq more negatively than at any time since the war began, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Six in 10 Americans say the United States should have stayed out of Iraq and more than three in four say things are going badly there – including nearly half who say
things are going very badly, the poll found.

The article does note that Americans still support funding the war - as long as the Iraqi government meets certain benchmarks. Oh - and then we can leave.

In any case, the chances that this generation will approach the challenges it faces in the manner of past generations appears depressingly low, not when Iraq, let alone the War are a political football in Washington. It now appear that domestic politics in Washington are in themselves the bigger Weapon of Mass Destruction that threatens our security.

Dead End

Rory Stewart, writer of The Places in Between, had an answer to a question on Iraq that he gave at a talk in New York in April reprinted in the New York Review of Books:

Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, "What has the coalition ever done for us?" And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

Richard Fernandez, writing in his blog Belmont Club, in a post called “Realism” asks at the end if:

Can America work effectively through the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan to fight terror? Can it work through the Palestinian Liberation Authority to achieve peace? Working through counterparts has its own set of challenges. Nothing is easy.

Later, in the comments section of the same post, Richard asks:

The same long war tactics that al-Qaeda have successfully used to persuade the liberals of defeat in Iraq are going to be used in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is a landlocked country that is completely enclosed by the 'stans, Iran and Pakistan. And if the fighting ups in intensity, the logistical problems could be very challenging. Right across the border from Afghanistan is the nuclear-armed country of Pakistan. And on the other side is Iran. This the liberal idea of a favorable battlefield, though for what reason I can't say.

Maybe we're giving AQ too much credit and hoping for too much from our "allies" in the region. Maybe it's not AQ's "long war tactics" that are defeating us but rather the deep-seated Arab/Muslim cultural failure that is behind what Stewart describes. Rory Stewart's comment is no different from hundreds of other observations, by numerous authors over the years; of the Palestinian cult of death (vs. the Israeli cult of life), of the general fatalism of the Arab, wherever he lives. Of the love of conspiracy theories and their embrace by seemingly well-educated people, against all signs of fact and reason, to the obsession over Israel.

As observers, we are facing a world-historical moment where a great human culture has been exposed as failed. It is the Ralph Peters analysis - The Arabs - they're done, failed, Kaput.

Many of the world's cultures have confronted modernity in the last 100 years and it has not been easy. Come to think of it, it wasn't even easy for the half of Europe east of the Rhine! The Indians have adapted, the Confucian Asians (China, SE Asia, Japan) have adapted well, South American Latin culture seems happy in stagnation and not belligerence, Africa is really failed and inward looking, but the Arabs are failed and outward looking; they still believe they are at the top of the heap. Years of despotism has destroyed all individual sense of responsibility but oil has allowed them to escape from reality. Without oil, the Arab world would be just like Africa, if not worse.

So, maybe, all these calls to withdraw and to leave the Iraqis to success or failure, completely miss the point, as many of them assume the Iraqis have some capacity at self-agency, some care for success or failure. It seems, rather, that Iraqi society does not, and functions no better than the mall group or tribal level, which is why the US is having so much success in the field and with small Iraqi army units but not the larger civil society government entities in the Green Zone.

When cultures fail, they return to the oldest organizing principle: the tribe. If there is any reason for why we stay in Iraq, it is to prevent the brutality that occurs in tribal societies: death, death, and death, opening the door to the rule of the strongest...