Posted on 04/07/2003 7:30:59 AM PDT by Valin
War may indeed be a continuation of politics by other means. But as cataclysms, shocks and surprises accumulate, wars may often be most comfortably understood as continuations of other wars. Wars make most sense when they resemble wars already known.
So generals always fight the last war, protesters object to the last war and debates rage over which last war is being resurrected. Right now the main contenders are Vietnam — with its heritage of mistrust, protest and murky, futile death — and World War II — with its heritage of virtue, necessity and high heroism. These models offer seemingly incompatible images of the United States, of its enemies and of war itself. And both are flawed. Neither Asian rice paddies nor the Normandy beaches are quite like the Iraqi sands. The Vietnam analogy leaves out the broad cold war context for that human and military failure. And the Second World War analogy can seem too disproportionate: the fearsome Nazi conquests on the eve of America's entry into the war are hardly comparable to the successes of Saddam Hussein.
But step back from both Iraq and these familiar models, as Paul Berman does in "Terror and Liberalism," and another model comes into focus. Mr. Berman, who considers himself a social democrat and is a supporter of what was once called the anti-Communist left, proposes that the war on terror resembles the long 20th-century wars against totalitarianism. The war on terror, like the wars against Communism and Fascism, is being undertaken in defense of liberalism and against movements that disdain it.
But Mr. Berman's most important argument — and one that helps make this compact, focused book one of the most challenging accounts of the post-9/11 world — is that the war on terror doesn't just resemble the war on totalitarianism, it is literally a continuation of it. The intellectual and political roots of Islamic terror, he suggests, lie in the West. In this, Mr. Berman goes a bit too far, perhaps. Notions of martyrdom, jihad and the defense (and expansion) of the territory of Islam are present throughout Islamic religious cultures. But Mr. Berman still shows how that fertile religious soil nurtured European growths.
He traces the literary cults of "murder and suicide" and "acts of Satanic transgression" in 19th-century European Romanticism and nihilism. After World War I came death-haunted utopianism: Lenin's Bolsheviks, Stalinists and Spanish, Italian and German Fascists; later there came Maoists, the Khmer Rouge and sundry other ensembles. A totalitarian pattern developed: a lost past or a utopian future is sought, internal enemies are hunted (in many cases, Jews), an absolutist body of law is established and external enemies are fiercely attacked.
Similar patterns developed in the Middle East. The founder of Saddam Hussein's fascist Baath Party studied German Romanticism, including, Mr. Berman notes, "the philosophers of national destiny, of race and of the integrity of national cultures." . One of the most influential Islamist philosophers, Sayyid Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb), who was executed by Nasser in 1966, studied in the West and then, like many other Islamic radicals, rebelled against modernity and secularism (his brother taught Osama bin Laden). The Ayatollah Khomeini, who lived in Paris before the 1979 Iranian revolution, combined phrases of Fanon and Sartre with his totalitarian Islamicism.
These Arab and Islamic movements have had nightmarish results, "fully as horrible," in Mr. Berman's words, "as the Fascism and Stalinism of Europe." In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, more than a million people were killed, gassed and tortured. In the Sudan, up to two million people were killed. During the 1980's and 90's came the "fleabites," as Mr. Berman calls the initial attacks on American embassies, military installations and civilians that the United States "in its bovine stupidity" failed to see as the beginnings of war. Terrorist attacks and massacres now ring the borders of the Islamic world, from the Kashmir to the Philippines.
By putting the war on terror in this totalitarian context, Mr. Berman shows that while the differences between many of these movements are profound, so are the similarities. The totalitarian model makes it clear, too, that much of the recent discussion about the root causes of terror is as distorted as the arguments of those who once argued that the root causes of German Fascist or Soviet Communist terror were in the aggressive behavior of the democracies or even the subversive presence of the Jews.
Mr. Berman's also suggests that as totalitarianism has taken on liberalism, liberalism has often too-readily succumbed, seeking to treat even its enemies as reasonable when they were not. French socialists so tried to avoid conflict with Hitler that a majority eventually supported the Vichy government. Fellow travelers made the cold war more difficult. And now, Mr. Berman argues, this kind of "wishful thinking" has been evident in the ways in which the left has made excuses for Palestinian terror, treating it as "the measure of Israeli guilt."
The war now being faced, Mr. Berman argues, will take years on many fronts using many styles of confrontation and education — just like the cold war. What is needed, he proposes, is a "war of ideas" like the one that eventually toppled Communism, and one that will be accompanied by reform of Arab societies. He supports the war in Iraq but he believes that after a strong beginning, President Bush has failed to make the best case one could for the larger war on terror.
But old political lines are also breaking down and new ones are forming. Many of Mr. Berman's arguments about the totalitarianism of Islamicist movements and the threat to liberal democracy have been made across the political spectrum. And while Mr. Berman urges greater internationalism and a "new radicalism" it is unclear how sympathetic many segments of the left would be with Mr. Berman's analysis. Liberalism and the left may now be even more split over the nature of the war on terror than they once were over the nature of Communism. At times, in fact, it seems as if politics is about to become a continuation of war by other means.
If this works out anywhere near as good as the President and his team want things are going to be very very different, not just in the mid-east but in the world.
And not just in the world, but in our own country. Shut them democraps up! Heard nary a peep from them lately. How nice it's been!
The "West" is not a monolith. But look to France for the establisment of absolutist state Terror and Napoleonic conquest, Germany and Russia for Naziism/socialism and cult of personality, etc.
How odd it seems that in liberating Iraq we are fighting the ideologies of France, Germany, and Russia.
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