One Utah

Two connected posts - first Street Prophets We’re All Dhimmis Now which links to Glen Greenwald’s The Islamist’s Are Coming:

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

And their key political beliefs — from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home — are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. . . .

One way to look at the threat posed by Islamic radicalism (let us call it Option A) is to see it as the Epic War of Civilizations, the Existential Threat to Everything, the Gravest and Scariest Danger Ever Faced which is going to take over the U.S. and force us all to bow to Islam.

Another way to look at it (let us call this Option B) is to dismiss it entirely, to believe there is nothing wrong with Islamic radicalism, to think it should just be completely ignored because it poses no dangers of any kind.

There are, however, other options besides A and B. Therefore, to reject Option A is not to embrace Option B. 

I think this comes back to the idea of being overwhelmed by modernity which, it seems to me, is as much about acknowledging a multiplicity of persepctives, ideas and options as it is about any advances in technology.  The tendency to see the world in Manichean terms, as a dualistic battle between good and evil - which is a hallmark of religious fundamentalism no matter its stripe - is also a way of managing complexity.

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets writes “The religious corollary to these secular fears is a contempt for tolerance. Some conservative Christians really believe that they are locked in an existential cultural conflict with “the East”. For them, pluralism is tantamount to surrender“

 There’s a straight-line relationship between fear of a Muslim invasion and a fear and disdain for pluralism. This is an essentially rigid worldview, in which any sort of change or deviation from the master plan ensures disaster. Tolerance undermines Christianity and allows its greatest enemy (Islam) to become implanted within America’s Christian society, spelling its destruction.

Reading through conservative articles and op-ed pieces, it is difficult to miss the paranoia about Islam, the either/or attitude toward Islam - we destroy them or they destroy us.  Notice that coexistence is absent from this construct. 

Which is where the other options come in.  The other options, for instance, are often articulated by folks like Bill Scher:

Barack Obama’s recent foreign policy address was a move in the right direction. As recommended here, Obama challenged the main false premise of conservatism:

The President would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates al Qaeda in Iraq — which didn’t exist before our invasion — and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan. He lumps together groups with very different goals: al Qaeda and Iran, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. He confuses our mission.

In doing so, he is able to reframe the terms of the debate and make the case for a fundamentally different foreign policy:

And worse — he is fighting the war the terrorists want us to fight. Bin Ladin and his allies know they cannot defeat us on the field of battle or in a genuine battle of ideas. But they can provoke the reaction we’ve seen in Iraq: a misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world.By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

It is time to turn the page.

That’s a good start, though it needs to be more than a speech and be the basis of a consistent challenge to current foreign policy. That’s the only way the ideas in the speech will have a meaningful impact in shaping the debate.

Consider George W. Bush’s recent pronouncement that the US should have stayed longer and blown up more shit in Vietnam and that leaving Vietnam was a disaster that caused all sorts of other problems including the Killing Fields of Cambodia.  Of course, the Khmer Rouge could never have taken power had the US not destablished Cambodia’s government by, you know, bombing Cambodia as part of its war in Vietnam and of course it was the Vietnamese Communist government the invaded Cambodia and toppoled the Khmer Rouge regime.

Conservative foreign policy - especially it’s Bushie incarnation - is a one trick pony called “strength” - in which strength is only expressed by using the US Military to invade, conquer, and pacify brown people.  In this world, you’re either a “strong” person who is willing to do those things, or your a weak appeaser, a dirty fucking hippy who would rather let the “terrorists” win that fight for America.

Of course, I’ll take Option C - or D or E or F or  . . . . there a lot of them.  These options include all kinds of alternate actions.  consider what we could have accomplished in the last 4 years if we’d spent the a billion dollars a day investing in R & D to achieve energy independence, to develop alternatives to oil.  What could have happened if in the waning days of 2001 the US had gone to the UN and said “Look, radical Islamists like Al Qaeda are a problem.  The world needs to deal with this problem together - we want to be part of developing a worldwide solution that invites even those groups to the table to stop the violence” - and then actually done so.  Or we’ve we’d gone to our good friends the Saudi royal family and said, “Bin Laden is your creation and he’s your problem.  We expect you to deal with him.  And until you do, we’re buying all our oil exclusively from Russia, Venezuala and Mexico.”  Or we could have done all the above.

“Strategic” thinking in its conservative form is simplistic, driven by fear, and ignores a huge array of options available to us, engages in actions that close of other productive avenues and leave us with progressively fewer and worse choices.  The war in Iraq has actually made things worse by radicalizing larger segments of Arab population, by exhausting the US military and driving it to the breaking point, by trapping the US in a situation in which the options range from bad to disastrous.  Conservative thought continues to insist that we must “win” in Iraq.  But begs the question of what it would mean to actually win and why victory would matter.  By following simpliistic policies, the Bush administration has acted on exaggerated fears and created an environment in which choices really are simple - stay in Iraq or leave.  There’s no middle ground between those choices, unfortunately.  Option C, D, E, F, G and so forth existed before the invasion of Iraq.  Once the invasion occurred, we lost those options forever. 

The great intellectual failure of American conservatism lies not in its blind adherence to the magic of the “market” or its hostility to government, but in its Manichean dualism that sees the world as an ongoing and endless battle between good and evil, absent shades of gray.  Informed by dualism, embracing either/or dichotomies, American conservatives live in a fantasy world in which “Islam” is about to overwhelm the west and only a great struggle of civilizations can prevent it.  I realize it sounds snarky, but such an analysis doesn’t actually consider the real Islamic world of today - which strikes me as a collection of increasingly diverse nations in which Islam is a common religion but not a force of unity - until we western declare war on all Muslims.  A war which Islamic fundamentalists gleefully celebrate.

Ultimately, Karen Armstrong was spot on correct - our fundamentalists have more in common with their fundamentalists than they do with our moderates.

This entry was posted Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under Disaster, Iraq, Religious Fundamentalism, Salt Lake City. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.