The stark truth is that the radical Middle East is religiously observant, but spiritu
NCfan
Posts: 945
November 21, 2006
Will the West Stumble?
by Victor Davis Hanson
What a stupid question. By any benchmark of economic prosperity, military power, and political stability, Western civilization — in the United States, Europe, and the former British Commonwealth — has never been stronger. Globalization has become a euphemism for Westernization, an apparent unstoppable juggernaut.
So how could the lingua franca of English, uniform international travel, or worldwide commerce ever falter — given that American-style material bounty is spreading among billions the world over?
But the global sale of PlayStation 3 or a world in Levis is only the glitzy veneer of civilization. That shared taste almost unnoticeably hinges on a powerful and liberal United States that keeps the peace and remains the spiritual and intellectual fountainhead of an entire global system — one ultimately dependent on American core ideas like freedom and tolerance. What pressures China to liberalize, protects the creativity of Japan, assures Europeans they can be postmodernists in safety, and guarantees that the world commerce is protected from both old and new piracy is a confident and strong United States.
In contrast, grant a jihadist his 7th-century dream world, and within months even he wouldn't have a cell phone signal to call in an IED explosion.
So just as the central nervous system controls an animal's most powerful muscles, so too capital, politics, and armed forces are all governed by subtle, unseen public opinion, or the people's will to define and defend their civilization. For America soldiers to fight jihadists in Afghanistan or Iraq, Americans back home must grasp whom they are fighting and why. And that's the core problem when we consider the recent news and the West's response to it.
Intelligence sources announce that Iran is seeking to replace al Qaeda as the foremost anti-Western global terrorist organization. Not to be outdone, al Qaeda is said to be desperately seeking a nuclear device. This is precisely at the time President Ahmadinejad announces the next step of uranium enrichment and more promises to end Israel.
International inspectors report that traces of plutonium are found in Iranian nuclear waste sites. The results of a terrorist with a plutonium-laced suicide belt in the New York Stock Exchange, the Mall of America, the Louvre, the Vatican, or the Harvard Library are like a water spill into a computer hard drive — the tiny drop unseen to the naked eye as it shuts down a way of life.
In the Middle East, Israeli intelligence warns that Gaza is to be the next Lebanon. The terrorists of Hamas worry that Hezbollah's Katyushas have upstaged their lesser Kassems. The very idea of Israel has suddenly been turned upside down. The last sanctuary of the world's Jewry that offered immunity from another Holocaust is now to be a one-bomb state that might ensure it. This is not Western paranoia, but Middle Eastern braggadocio. In that way, the Iranians trump Hitler — by not just writing about their plans, but by their president promising both to destroy Israel and to ignore international efforts that might not let him have the means to do so. Could anything be clearer?
A new generation of terrorist killers wishes to erase the stain of past Arab failures of 1947, 1956 1967, and 1973. Perhaps, it at last senses that the students of the 1960s in the West have come of age and into power. Might one day soon they shrug that things would be less of a hassle for all concerned without the "mistake" of Israel — regrettable perhaps, but life goes on?
Suicide bombers intent to destroy democracy in Afghanistan stream across the border from Pakistan with the connivance of the government there. Meanwhile, its President still smiles and hawks his books on Fox News. And why not? Once support for democracy in the Middle East has been demonized as either unrealistic or outright dangerous, a nuclear Islamic state under a sometimes neutral dictator is preferable to hostile theocracy.
In Iraq, the killer Moqtadar Sadr, we are also informed, is now seeking to be the probable power behind the Shiite-led democracy, his militias no longer mere rivals to the state security forces, but may well be infiltrated within them. Apparently he wishes to kill particularly Westerners — for the crime of taking his name off Saddam's hit list and onto a ballot.
The rationalist would find a common Thucydidean denominator in all this madness, one of lost honor and rampant envy. There is wealth aplenty pouring into Iran and Iraq through oil that is sold at a high price in a world market whose sanctity is ultimately protected by the United States. So the poverty there of radical Islam is not material, but one of the soul.
There is a sick ingenuity of a sort that can disguise terrorists as state policemen in Baghdad to kidnap and torture the innocent, and outwit Humvees with land mines. The improvised explosive device, with help from Iran, gets ever more complex. And there is a great deal of mental energy, time, and money that went into making rockets and suicide belts or even the graphics on a bin Laden infomercial.
How odd that Iranians cannot design a car or computer, but can with the proper instruction manual spend millions of hours putting together Western-designed centrifuges, like the stamped lettered-parts of a build-it-your-self intricate model toy.
So again, the problem with the radicals in the Middle East is not the lack of capital or mental energy. Rather under the influence of Islamism and autocracy a deep-seeded cultural malady distorts human effort and creativity solely for destructive purposes. In all of these places, radical leaders such as a Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, or Sadr — the same thug has a thousand faces that come and go as we saw with Zarqawi, Saddam, and Arafat — are, like the Sultan and Grand Vizier of old, as fascinated with the West as they despise it.
They obviously want Western technology — whether the Internet or the plastic munition — but never the decadence of freedom, democracy, and tolerance that creates the very appurtenances they crave. It is like sacking European Constantinople and then moving into it as your new Window-on-the-West capital, with the requisite minarets plopped on Hagia Sophia.
Such parasitism proves no lasting palliative, but only the goad for more envy and frustration. The stark truth is that the radical Middle East is religiously observant, but spiritually poor. Naturally wealthy, it is mostly materially impoverished — and as anti-Western in ideology as addicted in fact to Western attention and consumerism.
Will the West Stumble?
by Victor Davis Hanson
What a stupid question. By any benchmark of economic prosperity, military power, and political stability, Western civilization — in the United States, Europe, and the former British Commonwealth — has never been stronger. Globalization has become a euphemism for Westernization, an apparent unstoppable juggernaut.
So how could the lingua franca of English, uniform international travel, or worldwide commerce ever falter — given that American-style material bounty is spreading among billions the world over?
But the global sale of PlayStation 3 or a world in Levis is only the glitzy veneer of civilization. That shared taste almost unnoticeably hinges on a powerful and liberal United States that keeps the peace and remains the spiritual and intellectual fountainhead of an entire global system — one ultimately dependent on American core ideas like freedom and tolerance. What pressures China to liberalize, protects the creativity of Japan, assures Europeans they can be postmodernists in safety, and guarantees that the world commerce is protected from both old and new piracy is a confident and strong United States.
In contrast, grant a jihadist his 7th-century dream world, and within months even he wouldn't have a cell phone signal to call in an IED explosion.
So just as the central nervous system controls an animal's most powerful muscles, so too capital, politics, and armed forces are all governed by subtle, unseen public opinion, or the people's will to define and defend their civilization. For America soldiers to fight jihadists in Afghanistan or Iraq, Americans back home must grasp whom they are fighting and why. And that's the core problem when we consider the recent news and the West's response to it.
Intelligence sources announce that Iran is seeking to replace al Qaeda as the foremost anti-Western global terrorist organization. Not to be outdone, al Qaeda is said to be desperately seeking a nuclear device. This is precisely at the time President Ahmadinejad announces the next step of uranium enrichment and more promises to end Israel.
International inspectors report that traces of plutonium are found in Iranian nuclear waste sites. The results of a terrorist with a plutonium-laced suicide belt in the New York Stock Exchange, the Mall of America, the Louvre, the Vatican, or the Harvard Library are like a water spill into a computer hard drive — the tiny drop unseen to the naked eye as it shuts down a way of life.
In the Middle East, Israeli intelligence warns that Gaza is to be the next Lebanon. The terrorists of Hamas worry that Hezbollah's Katyushas have upstaged their lesser Kassems. The very idea of Israel has suddenly been turned upside down. The last sanctuary of the world's Jewry that offered immunity from another Holocaust is now to be a one-bomb state that might ensure it. This is not Western paranoia, but Middle Eastern braggadocio. In that way, the Iranians trump Hitler — by not just writing about their plans, but by their president promising both to destroy Israel and to ignore international efforts that might not let him have the means to do so. Could anything be clearer?
A new generation of terrorist killers wishes to erase the stain of past Arab failures of 1947, 1956 1967, and 1973. Perhaps, it at last senses that the students of the 1960s in the West have come of age and into power. Might one day soon they shrug that things would be less of a hassle for all concerned without the "mistake" of Israel — regrettable perhaps, but life goes on?
Suicide bombers intent to destroy democracy in Afghanistan stream across the border from Pakistan with the connivance of the government there. Meanwhile, its President still smiles and hawks his books on Fox News. And why not? Once support for democracy in the Middle East has been demonized as either unrealistic or outright dangerous, a nuclear Islamic state under a sometimes neutral dictator is preferable to hostile theocracy.
In Iraq, the killer Moqtadar Sadr, we are also informed, is now seeking to be the probable power behind the Shiite-led democracy, his militias no longer mere rivals to the state security forces, but may well be infiltrated within them. Apparently he wishes to kill particularly Westerners — for the crime of taking his name off Saddam's hit list and onto a ballot.
The rationalist would find a common Thucydidean denominator in all this madness, one of lost honor and rampant envy. There is wealth aplenty pouring into Iran and Iraq through oil that is sold at a high price in a world market whose sanctity is ultimately protected by the United States. So the poverty there of radical Islam is not material, but one of the soul.
There is a sick ingenuity of a sort that can disguise terrorists as state policemen in Baghdad to kidnap and torture the innocent, and outwit Humvees with land mines. The improvised explosive device, with help from Iran, gets ever more complex. And there is a great deal of mental energy, time, and money that went into making rockets and suicide belts or even the graphics on a bin Laden infomercial.
How odd that Iranians cannot design a car or computer, but can with the proper instruction manual spend millions of hours putting together Western-designed centrifuges, like the stamped lettered-parts of a build-it-your-self intricate model toy.
So again, the problem with the radicals in the Middle East is not the lack of capital or mental energy. Rather under the influence of Islamism and autocracy a deep-seeded cultural malady distorts human effort and creativity solely for destructive purposes. In all of these places, radical leaders such as a Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, or Sadr — the same thug has a thousand faces that come and go as we saw with Zarqawi, Saddam, and Arafat — are, like the Sultan and Grand Vizier of old, as fascinated with the West as they despise it.
They obviously want Western technology — whether the Internet or the plastic munition — but never the decadence of freedom, democracy, and tolerance that creates the very appurtenances they crave. It is like sacking European Constantinople and then moving into it as your new Window-on-the-West capital, with the requisite minarets plopped on Hagia Sophia.
Such parasitism proves no lasting palliative, but only the goad for more envy and frustration. The stark truth is that the radical Middle East is religiously observant, but spiritually poor. Naturally wealthy, it is mostly materially impoverished — and as anti-Western in ideology as addicted in fact to Western attention and consumerism.
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