Posted tagged ‘Neoconservative’

Religion or Civilization: Why Democrats should support the war in the Middle East.

October 6, 2009

islam1In 2003, when US marines first invaded Iraq,   I looked on with familiar sadness as death and destruction were brought to me live via CNN, Fox Noise, MSNBC and others. At the time I thought the old PBS line  “This program is made possible with support from viewers like you,” should be shown as  fitting reminder to the American people that each  of us were morally responsible for suffering caused by the actions of our military, and that by being apathetic or voting for a hawkish pro-war Republican we were saying that the cause of wrenching Iraq from the hands of a brutal , rogue dictator was worth the price it would be paid in human tragedy; that above  the scars of war ten, fifteen, or thirty years from now a beautiful civilization would spring forth once again between the Tigris and Euphrates and that this would be worth the fatherless children, amputated lives, and bitter hatred toward the sources of that  anguish. Feeling that such a radical social transformation was not possible I opposed the war with a deep indignance, considering it to be the Vietnam of my generation.

Five and 1/2 years later with extremist violence in Iraq still on-going and U.S. withdrawal sure to leave an explosive power vacuum we must ask ourselves that same moral question that we did in Vietnam. Now that we have come to set the stage for Iraqi westernization, how are we to act if our leaving will eventually mean that over 700,000 people, and a handful of American soldiers in comparison  have died as a direct result of our invasion. As Sen. John Kerry so wisely put in his youth ” how do we ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam.”  Are we to let so many Iraqis die by our hands in vain? How will history judge us if we do not continue fight this fight, more importantly, what will be our history?

Let us make no mistake, the gauntlet is off and there is no going back. It is not unreasonable to say that the scourge of Islamic extremism is now an ever present danger in every nation on Earth. At the heart of this campaign is dark form of cultural and religious extremism equivalent to the Catholics during the crusades and the National Socialism of the early 20th century. Radical Islam yearns for world domination and the imposition of wacky religious laws that are based on twisted distortions of the Quran. They feed of of the economic stagnation of many Middle Eastern countries to breed hatred toward Israel and the West. We must push forward with all we have or not push at all. The Islamic extremists are right about one thing, there is a conspiracy to secularize the Middle East and to subvert Islamic theocracies, and I think it’s about time all Democrats got on board. Barack Obama and his army of lets-all-just-respect-each other-and-talkocrats need to buck up and defend the fort.  If sending in 40000 more US troops into Pakistan and Afghanistan means that we make headway against the rising tide of Islamic Extremism, then I say that this is a moral cause not unlike fighting Hitler during WWII, or with  much irony, Catholics during the crusades. While we are there, perhaps we can pass out copies of  The Origin of Species.

A friend and fellow Democrat told me something promising today over lunch, he said that when he goes home to visit his cousins in Pakistan, he finds that more and more of the people around him are Atheists.  Rejection of religion is the only rational insight to have when you see hoards  of barbarians blowing themselves up in the name of some socially reproduced  delusion called “god,”  or in Arabic “Allah.”

The question one must ask him or herself  when considering  whether the U.S. involvement is warranted must go beyond pretensions of pacifism, or blind faith in the milk of human kindness. The question is one of a combination of ethical judgment in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, and practical wisdom of Winston Churchill. Bentham argued that “that which is ethical  minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure for the largest number of people.”  Churchill continuously warned British prime minister Neville Chamberlain of the danger the rise of National Socialism posed to Europe and the world many years before  the ruthless Hitler violated the Warsaw pact by annexing Czechoslovakia. If Chamberlain and the isolationist United States had heeded his call for action the world could very well have avoided a long and brutal war which caused human suffering on a truly unimaginable level. Alas, this is the argument for the neoconservative doctrine of  pre-emption, a dangerous ideology which must measure the need for intervention with the imagined need for intervention, or the call for war in the name of military-industrial, or other economic reasons.

As this doctrine is dangerous to our democracy, and yet still the threat that militant Islam poses to the world is very real and very frightening, we must point to  the larger philosophical driver for the reproduction of militant Islam in the first place- religion. It is without hesitation that all of us, in good conscience and clear thought , cannot deny that at the heart of this conflict is human religiosity and that it should be fitting that  the place where the three major world religions were born is also the place that they should die.  Now this sounds harsh to the cultural and moral relativist ear of the average Democrat,  but we must remain objective and realistic about what drives , and has been the driving factor behind the scourge of war throughout human history.  Behind nearly every dark story of the suffering of war is a leader or movement which claims to be divinely ordained. Hitler claimed to have been acting under the authority of an Aryan Jesus, and even visited the head of the Palestinian army before embarking on a brutal campaign of ethnic genocide.  Mahmood Amadinejad and his theocratic overlords have repeatedly claimed divine authority in their campaign to engage in a proxy war using the Palestinian  PLO and Hamas as fronts. In WW II we had emperor Hirohito of Japan, who claimed divinity by inheritance. In Ireland we have Protestants and Catholics, in the Middle east we have Shia and Sunni. When confronted with proof of evil in tangible human suffering throughout modern history, religion answers back with nothing but dangerous superstition. It is time to wrestle our world from the hands of myths wrought in human fear. Religion is the poison which allows otherwise moral and decent people to be manipulated into purveyors of the inhumane.  And if we oppose the war in the Middle East because we are disgusted by the  endless parade of human suffering we must also oppose the core ideology which  begot  its existence.  Thus as a Democrats , We should support  the war because occupying the middle east, and installing leaders who support our interests will help facilitate the spread of  western secularism to the Middle East, which will serve as an antidote to the emergence of dangerous Islamic Theocrats, and Caliphate ideology in the future. In short, the less religion is accepted in the  Middle East, the more stable, prosperous, and peaceful it will be.

Democrats have too long  straddled the fence on this all-too-important issue, we have walked softly and now it is time to show those lunatics just how big our stick really is. Barack Obama should follow the advice of his Pentagon advisors and send in more ground support. And you, as a Democrat, and especially as an Athiest or Agnostic Democrat should stand in full support, sad that while we are temporarily increasing human misery,  in the end it will serve as a great first step toward a New World Order in which religion will be considered as quaint as burning witches. Over and Out.

Dialogue With a Neocon

September 19, 2008

What follows is the unedited transcript of an online dialogue between an Orthodox Catholic Neoconservative and myself. The conversation began with the following post and subsequent quip. What unraveled in the process is a revealing glimpse into the ideology behind the US involvement in the Middle East, and especially our policies toward Iranian nuclear technology.

 
“Iranian Majlis Ratifies Bill Requiring Death Penalty For Muslims Who Convert To Another Religion”
“The bill was approved by a majority of 196 to 7, with two abstentions.”

Neocon:  Sure, they murder Muslim apostates, depict the U.S. as “The Great Satan” and have the explicit foreign policy goals of completely dsetroying the US and Israel.

But let’s TALK to them! I’m sure they’re reasonable people!

 
 
Me:
Alright. So the Iranian Government is intolerant, and does pose a threat to Israel the United States, and Muslim apostates. But to equate the threat posed by Iran to that of Hitler as many in your camp have, and then to use the lesson from England’s experience during World War II that negotiating with aggressive rogue nations will only embolden them is a stretch. A good reason why diplomacy between the Israeli-US bloc and Iran has failed is that, as Amadinejad has continuously expressed,the conditions for compromise are overwhlemingly in favor of IAEA nations, and thus fail to be a basis for reasonable exchange. The underlying presumption is that the IAEA and its Western allied administrators should have the authority to determine global nuclear policy. Iran rejects this position in favor of the Nationalistic view that sovereign nations are by virtue of being sovereign free to determine their own energy policy. SO, despite the regrettable religious supression there does exist a framework for peaceful compromise between these competing interests. The United States and Israel both need to first adknowledge that the hatred toward the west has roots in the aggressive foreign policies of the last fifty years, and even deeper roots in the English occupation and “Holy” wars. The alternative to this is unspeakable bloodshed. The first and only lesson of diplomacy is that if the strategy doesn’t work, change the strategy. Yes, Iran’s religious intolerance makes this a difficult and nauseating task, but we must first remove the speck in our eye before we will be able remove that in our Persian brothers’. Diplomacy requires that both sides make concessions until an agreement is reached. As it currently stands what we have is not as much a diplomatic process but an authoritarian process; Submit or be sanctioned; Comply or be conquered. Iran is a willfull nation with a willfull President to say the least, and we in the Western world would be foolish to take her warnings lighty, but we would be far more foolish to escalate the rhetoric of conflict until our nightmarish depiction of the Iranian threat becomes an all too lucid reality.
 
Neocon:
My camp? Anyway, the threat of Iran is arguably greater than that of Nazi Germany, because of its satellite powers.Speaking of Nazi Germany, it will be “peace in our time.” (See Neville Chamberlain) That is, not peace at all, but a greater conflict and millions of lives lost because we desperately wanted to believe the fascists could be appeased. They couldn’t, and they won’t.

 
Wrong, wrong, wrong:But the fact is, hatred toward the west is simply rooted in the radical Islam concept of “jihad,” which holds that it is holy to kill unbelievers. Of course, they use many true and not true things to psyche themselves up to hate us. But if it weren’t for jihad, there would be no holy war on the West.

but just because it is prevalent does not make that position right.
 
ME:  
The Heritage Foundation made a mistake.( He applied for an internship at this Neoconservative think tank but did not receive the position) This is something that really requires a great deal of research to understand. I’m not saying that at some point diplomacy does not become naive. You make good points and make Cicero blush and all, but I think you cannot be a christian and take up the sword.
 
Neocon:
 
Don’t do a Sophist Jesus. You’re doing so well here, and I don’t want to see Sophist Jesus broken out.Make no mistake– it is jihad, not Western aggression, that is the cause of terrorism and state sponsors of terrorism like Iran.

 
ME:   even assuming all of what you are saying is true… even the waspy William F. Buckleyesqe 1945 drawing room at Yale speak about “we being a superior civilization”– what about the good people of Iran. What about that college student who was arrested for protesting.
 
Neocon:
  ANY THOUGHTs?

 

We are not talking about “the good people of Iran” but the authoritarian fascists that run the country.
 
 

 

Quite simply, they are barbarians, and we are a superior civilization. I know such “ethnocentrism” is against what is being taught to college students and good progressives these days

 

This is not a Christian nation. It is however a nation based on Christian morality as enforced through political rationalism, and the freedoms we have are seen as necessary because of a Christian understanding of human dignity.

Islam, or at least

its radical wing, does not share that understanding of human dignity. Even at its lowest point, when Christianity mistakenly thought that fighting and killing Arabs (and other Christians) had a good purpose, never did it reach the level of thinking that The Other was less-than-human and not worth love and respect. This is what radical Islam believes and this is how they justify jihad.

 

 

We in the West respect human rights, freedom of speech and religion, the equality of women and all racial groups.

Iran will never respect us in negotiations until they stop believing what they believe, that is, radical Islam. To them we are demons. There is no negotiation in the face of that.

Of course, we can avoid war. But to do that we must not talk to them (a sign of weakness) but sanction and pressure them, always with the threat of military force. If we presume to have obtained peace, through some concession, it will only embolden them to greater misdeeds and increase the likelihood
of a much greater conflict.

“The United States and Israel both need to first adknowledge that the hatred toward the west has roots in the aggressive foreign policies of the last fifty years…”

This is just not true. It is comforting for us Westerners to believe, because it means all we have to do is change ourselves and the mean men won’t hurt as anymore.

 

The other alternative, that they are bent on our destruction no matter what, means we must fight them, and we don’t want to have to do that.

 

I can’t believe you’re actually citing Ahmenijad’s complaints. Of course the conditions for compromise don’t favor his nation. His nation is bent on genocidal destruction. The reasonable exchange is, “cease all nuclear activities, or

we will use force against you.” That is the only possible debate with a homicidal regime like this one. Any other “negotiations” that do not have force behind their words are empty and pointless.