This is the second in a five-article series on the radical shift in US foreign policy toward the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world --- an explicit commitment, vented twice by President Bush in two major speeches last November, then followed by several concrete criticisms of nominally Arab allies like Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia, to push for liberalization and democratic reforms of the existing Arab dictatorships. The final touches on the policy, after some initial consultation with NATO allies and almost all Arab governments, are being worked out by the State Department. When they are through, the new detailed policy statement is scheduled to be made public at the next G-8 meeting in the state of Georgia early this June.



INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Good-Bye Dictators

Recall the key points from the first article in the series, all summarized essentially in President Bush's policy declaration last November:

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe --- and in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty . . . As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish," the President added, "it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.

"And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

The President then went on to criticize, you'll remember, traditional US allies in the region, starting with the dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. His criticisms have continued, right through last week, when another traditional US ally in the region, Tunsia, came in for similar reproaches. See AP

 

A Series of Key Questions Rears Up

In particular, four related questions vie for our concerns here and in the next article:

1. Can such a bold policy promote effective change in the Arab world?

2. Why is a US initiative even needed?

3. Why not let the Arab countries continue with their notoriously flawed political and economic status quo --- the 300 million Arab peoples exporting less than tiny Finland with 4 million people, leaving aside oil --- as almost all the EU governments would prefer?

4. Why not await domestic changes to occur within the Arab world, as some Middle East specialists hope for ---- the same ones, by the way, who were totally inept in foreseeing anything like Al Qaeda and the 9/11 massacres, while assuring us that Islamist militant movements were essentially benign . . harbingers of a new civil society in the 22 Arab dicatorships?  

The Answers to the Latter 3 Questions Are Simple and Straightforward.

2. The status quo in the Middle East is cram-full of danger, a breeding ground for militant fundamentalist Muslim movements and terrorism, with bin Ladenism and his magnetic appeal a direct outgrowth of the existing political and economic failures of the Arab dictators and their henchmen. President Bush put the danger crisply in his State of the Union address this January:

"As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends, so America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East"

3. The EU preference for managerial realism --- working with Arab dictators, including lots of lucrative industrial and financial contracts, while issuing now and then an empty declaration about the need for respecting human rights --- adds up to a formula for disaster, a head-in-the-sands form of appeasement. Most of all, it ignores the pervasive social and ideological breeding ground throughout North Africa and the Middle East, including Shiite Iran, that has spawned swarms of conspiratorial, racist, militantly anti-Western fundamentalisms and the support for their terrorist offshoots. [To clarify quickly: in EU governmental circles, only Joschka Fischer --- the German Foreign Secretary --- has so far spoken with any enthusiasm about promoting political and social change in the Middle East. ]

4. At the same time, there are almost no indigenous democratic forces at work in the Arab world that have a chance of bringing about major political or economic change of a liberalizing, democratic sort --- at any rate, not on their own. The progressive middle classes have either been co-opted or defeated by the dictators and their tribal-clan and clientele networks --- or just driven into passivity, more fearful of the Islamist surge than of the repressive secret-police rule that many had once hoped they could beat back by political activity.

Not for nothing did the recent Pew Survey of Global Attitudes find that a large majority or plurality in the Muslim countries surveyed except in democratic and secular Turkey admired bin Laden..



Keep in mind that a secret Saudi poll, administered shortly after 9/11 and leaked to the western media, found that 95% of Saudi men between 25 and 41 years of age admired bin Laden. That was the fall of 2001. A few months later, a Gallup Poll taken in 9 Arab countries showed that 60% of those queried denied that Muslims had even been involved in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C.

 

PART TWO: DEMOCRACY VIEWED COMPARATIVELY

The Crux Query

All of which leaves us with the first question --- the biggest challenge of all: can democracy be promoted in the Middle East, especially from the outside . . . given 1400 years of Arab despotism, interrupted by a long 4 century period of Ottoman imperial despotism and a much briefer one of European imperialism, along with all the related traditions that grew up around such an unbroken line of autocratic rule: above all, winner-take-all politics, conspiratorial opposition, rife corruption and nepotism, a fully controlled media, and the total lack of a rule of law in the western sense of the term? Not to mention the systematic discrimination of women, which does vary across the Arab dictatorships: much the worse in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, better in Tunisia at the other end of the spectrum. Even in Tunisia, though, the commitment to improve women's rights --- legal, civil, educational, professional --- remains largely left floating in lofty discourse and proclamations.

So yes, we're back to the first question.

There's no easy answer to it. We can, however, speculate with some comparative insights, gleaned from the spread of democratic politics in the world beyond West Europe and North America in the last several decades --- including, you'll note, in secular Turkey . . . a country of 60 million people who have managed after three or four generations of political and economic modernization, with off-and-on ethnic strife with the Kurdish minority, to develop what looks like a promising system of parliamentary rule, fairly accountable government, secular politics, and the beginning of what we can hope is a clear rule of law. It's not perfect, Turkish democracy. The rule of law is still uncertain, really only in its early stages.

 

All of Which Brings Us to Today's Main Concern:

We need an analytical framework for defining democracy and its rival forms of government. Once we have such a comparative touchstone, we can make better sense of Turkey's democratic evolution --- no, it's not the same as Australia's or even Italy's, despite a narrowing of the gap recently --- and more important, we'll be better situated to generalize about the prospects of democratic reform in the Arab world. Even if those prospects were to reduce the gap with secular Turkey, a revolution would have started in the Arab world . . . the one part of the globe, remember, where democratic changes are totally absent. Even in much poorer Tropical Africa, there is a handful of promising electoral democracies; in Asia --- think of India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Thailand --- there are several impressively institutionalized democracies. Come to that, Indonesia --- a Muslim country of 230 million people --- will be holding free elections this fall.

Not least, conceivably --- over a long period of domestic change --- Arab public opinion might similarly draw closer to the contempt in which the Turks hold a megalomaniacal terrorist like bin Laden. Remember here: the war on terrorism is a multi-faceted challenge: diplomatic, military, a question of shared intelligence and police work, a sustained effort to stop the proliferation of WMD pursued by dangerous regimes --- but also in large part a clash of ideas and ideologies: democracy and the rule of law vs. regressive, racist Islamist fundamentalisms of various sorts, all infused with jihad-zeal.

 

The Core Problem

The latter challenge --- the root causes behind bin Ladenism and other fervent, conspiratorial Islamist movements --- requires ideological warfare, a sustained campaign to find and support modernizing groups within Muslim countries and progressive political change. Military force in the war on terrorism, by contrast, is of secondary importance, beyond attacking terrorist camps and destroying the most ruthless and anti-Western regimes like those that flourished for years in Taliban Afghanistan and Baathist Iraq.

Is prodding progressive and liberalizing changes within, say, the Arab world impossible for outside countries like the US? Again, no easy answer. That said, as we'll see, the changes that have been set loose in Iraq --- even if we don't yet know the outcome --- have already uncoiled a widening array of domestic repercussions elsewhere in the Arab world, not to mention neighboring Shiite Iran . . . most of them in the right direction, if only in their initial, baby-step stages of development.

And so, right off . . .



Consider The Following Scheme, A Classificatory Device for Generalizing About These Matters

DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT		NON-DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT
Solid Tested Democracy	Transitional Democracy	Soft Authoritarianism	Hard Authoritarianism	Quasi- or Post- Totalitarianism	Totalitarianism
Old, Established     US, West Europe, Japan , Israel Australia have been democracies for decades. Costa Rica too.   New Democracies, India Spanning the two groups (old or new), given its authoritarian rule in the mid-1970s Chile , Argentina , Brazil , Uruguay , Philippines , South Korea , Taiwan are newer, fairly solid democracies that have had several elections, changes of opposition, and have weathered big economic or security challenges.	Electoral Democracies:     Varying Liberal Constitutional Prospects Russia , East Europe, most of Latin America, Thailand , A tiny group of African states Earlier: Weimar Republic and Japan im the 1920s.  Mexico Many in Latin America and some in Asia , eg. Thailand , may become solid democracies.  Others like Russia are more a question-mark.	Gulf States , Much of SE Asia , African States   Indonesia moves into the transitional column after its forthcoming election this year.	Syria , Some former USSR republics, Some African states, Sudan , Saudi Arabia   Syria's Baathist regime , though brutal, lacked the total hold over society and the economy that Saddamite Iraq had. And its brutality compared to Saddam's was limited. Secret police pervasive.   Most Arab states probably span the soft-hard authoritarian grouping.	Post-Stalin Russia , Post-Mao China :     Probably Shiite Iran (hard to classify: official Shia ideology and administration of the Sharia, but an elected wing that contests the power and secret police rule of the hard-line Mullahs. Probably it could overlap with soft-authoritarianism) China actually looks more like a mix of Post-Totalitarianism and Soft Authoritarianism: its dilemma is how to maintain a CP power monopoly and become fully modern and advanced.	Maoism, Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot, Taliban Afghanistan , Saddamite Iraq
Traits Systems have been tested; and at least two or more times, opposition has taken power peacefully. A rule of law has emerged or is emerging.   Note : There may be higher quality and lower quality democracies here  (eg, Italy with its extensive corruption and clientelism vs. Scandinavia). In Latin America, only Chile does well in limiting corruption.	Traits These are systems in transition from authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes. Several dozen countries have emerged into this category the last 25 years or so, not least after the cold war. Some will become solid democracies; others not; yet others will revert to authoritarianism. In many of these countries --- not all, mind you --- there are dominant coalitions, usually a ruling party, that limit the scope of electoral opposition and power-sharing. In many others, power oscillates between competing but fairly corrupt and ineffectual elites, and changes in office-holders don't lead to more effective governmental policies.	Traits Though these sys-stems restrict democratic competition for office and restrict or repress basic civic and political liberties, they may enjoy different degrees of legitimacy. Coercion is then limited for the most part. Still, most rule depends on the secret police and various forms of bribing or crushing potential opponents. A rule of law is absent or barely exists. No legal political opposition is recognized in any real sense either.	Traits Lacking legitimacy, these systems use a high degree of threat and coercion to maintain power (though efforts may be made, not least in foreign policy, to gain legitimacy: e.g. standing up to America or the West or for true Islam). Civil society is largely barren. Any claims to a rule of law are a cruel joke.	Traits Single party dictatorship and an official ideology prevail, but widespread use of terror is limited; and ideology is itself gradually diluted and ritualistic. Little or no social mobilization of the masses for big ideological causes. State-controlled capitalism usually prevails, though as in China today limited free markets can emerge.	Traits Single party monopoly, official ideology, constant social mobilization, extensive terror, usually a charismatic leader Totally administered societies, with no free markets or civil society (no autonomous groups, voluntary associations or professional groups or trade unions or free churches permitted) A widespread use of terror and scapegoated internal and external enemies are pervasive.

 

As buggy visitors might recall, this article made its full-dress appearance for the first time a good month ago . . . part of a new mini-series on the US initiative, adopted explicitly last fall, to promote liberalizing changes of a democratic nature in the Arab world and elsewhere in Muslim countries. Unfortunately, several other themes intruded before the mini-series could progress beyond the initial article: an article on Pakistan and its new, more pro-Western policies under Musharraf; the Madrid bombings, and what they portended for US-EU relations; and a lengthy series on the media and public opinion trends in West Europea nd the US. The series on the radical shift in US policies toward the Middle East now resumes. To refresh your memory, the original article is reprinted here in full again.

Four other articles will complete the series.

The title of this mini-series, four articles in all, will no doubt surprise most of you. Many will guffaw; others rub their eyes in disbelief. The US supporting democratic changes in the 22 Arab dictatorships, vigorously and in concrete ways easy to trace even now? Come on, is it possible?

Yes, quite possible; and what's more, it happens to be the current reality. Not that skepticism here is unwarranted. Until recently, American foreign policy in the Middle East --- like that of all the industrial democratic countries --- courted all but the most brutal of Arab dictatorships (the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq); was primarily concerned with their stability and friendliness irrespective of their systematic human rights violations; and was equally concerned, at times with edgy intensity, to continue tapping the vast oil resources of the Arab countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf arena. The motive forces here mixed diplomacy, security concerns, and economics. Democratic reform was never mentioned, whether by a Republican or Democratic administration . . . any more than it was by the EU countries, Japan, or the other English-speaking countries.



I. ALL THAT HAS NOW CHANGED

Yes, to repeat, changed . . . explicitly and probably once-and-for-all. The previous policy was wrong and proved harmful to US interests, as 9/11's murderous attacks by alienated and fanatical Arab terrorists showed, and no on less than President Bush himself has acknowledged this. In a pathbreaking speech at the National Endowment for Freedom last November, he said clearly, with no reservations, that . . .

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe --- and in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty . . . As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish," the President added, "it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.

"And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

The President then went on to criticize, as we'll see, traditional US allies in the region, starting with the dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. His criticisms have continued, right through last week, when another traditional US ally in the region, Tunsia, came in for similar reproaches. See AP



 

II THE REVOLUTION IN US FOREIGN POLICY SOON TO BE SET OUT IN DETAIL AND WITH THE ALLIES URGED TO SIGN ON

Skepticism Justified?

Given past US policies in the Middle East --- in line with all diplomacy practiced by all the democratic countries there --- yes, some skepticism seems justified. Is the buggy prof repeating himself? Yep, you bet. All the same, purposefully; with a wait-and-see attitude as the best counsel here despite the clear changes currently at work. The changes are real, not electoral tricks; they can be pinned down concretely in easy ways; and they promise to be boldly sweeping. Even so, it's what happens in the future that counts --- the concrete follow-through.

In particular, even if unlike the EU countries (or Japan or Canada) the US never cozied up to the most brutal and mass-murdering of the Middle East Muslim countries --- Baathist Syria, the clerical-fascist regime in Iran, or Saddamite Iraq in the late 1990s (Saddam lavishly signing big-bucks industrial contracts with the Europeans and Russians) --- the diplomacy of the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations still pulsated with the same motive-forces that had marked all US policies toward the Middle East in the cold war period: the desire for stable, friendly Arab allies no matter how dictatorial their politics, and edgy, worried concerns about continued access to Middle East oil and its price levels.

Did the initial Bush Jr. policies toward the region break with this bipartisan diplomatic line?

No; not in the first 8 months of the new administration's life.

To John --- a US professional who spent years in German-speaking countries, studying and serving a long stint as an intern in the German parliament, the Bundestag --- we owe these first-hand observations about German anti-Americanism that he gathered after a recent visit to that country.

Prof Bug:

I just returned from a brief trip to Germany last week. Regarding journalism, I couldn't believe what I was reading in the mainstream (less high-brow) German press about the US and Bush in particular. It was pure anti-US propaganda (not to mention shabby reporting), making outrageous assertions about the Bush Administration's motivations without any factual support and, even more disturbingly, hinting in at least two journalistic reports at a Jewish cabal directing US foreign policy.

One article in the weekly magazine Stern, for example, reported that a dissenter to US policy in Iraq inside the State Department was visited by some shady-sounding government agents and pointedly told that there would be consequences to her if she were to make any criticism of Israel. It was completely off the subject of the article. Simply outrageous.

Those kind of suggestions can only be to try to corroborate the dangerous and false anti-Semitic beliefs held by too many people in Europe.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the mainstream German media I read through, there's much fretting going on about Schroeder's pension and labor reforms and the stagnant German economy which, as a regular visitor to Germany, I can say was palpable this time. I've generally sensed an enormous amount of uncertainty and anxiety in Germany (in the press and talking to people) each time I've visited there in the past few years. On this visit, it seemed even more intense.

There are other causes of their general anxiety. Arguably, Germans are lashing out at the Americans for two overlapping reasons: we're blamed for pressuring them to spend money in the war on terrorism they don't have --- or more precisely think they don't have --- and by the same token, we're resented for pressuring them to take risks that would leave them even more anxious and insecure than they now feel. There's a related point too. On both counts, German nationalist ambitions --- which you refer to in your article --- have taken a series of bruising blow to the body and head. The more assertive and demanding American foreign policy seems to be, the more German impotence is held up to view.

THE BUGGY REPLY:

John:

Thank you for your comments, full of first-hand observations. As with Joel's comments posted in the recent mini-series on the EU media, public opinion, and attitudes toward the United States, it's always helpful to get solid, hard-headed information . . . in your case, knowledgeable impressions. Your references to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and the rattled-nerved intensity of scapegoating Jews, Israel, and America --- or globalizing forces controlled by them --- in the German media seem accurate and fully in line with Eurobarometer surveys of public opinion and all the buggy articles on the subject, not to mention Josef Joffe's . . . discussed in the previous buggy article and linked to again in just a moment.

So too is your conjecture about the nature of the sour, anxiety-blasted mood of the German people, something even Der Spiegel --- that fount of silly shallow pc-pieties about the world, not to mention rancorous, sky-high prejudices against the US: a kind of weekly bible for the half-tutored, unenlightened intellectual classes in that country --- admitted in a recent cover story, Germany the Laughing Stock, where nothing seems done these days except in a largely mediocre manner.

Small wonder. For decades, the German work-ethos has been eroded by an overblown welfare state, declining educational standards --- German reading scores were among the very worst in the industrial world, way below the US average (itself in need of improvement) --- and endless increases in vacation and sick-leave (with the latter slightly pruned back recently). Then too, aggravating all these trends --- maybe a prime cause --- there's the squandered sense of taking personal responsibility and initiative for yourself, replaced by a high-throbbing dependence on an overwrought Nanny-State. Small wonder, too, given this plunge in initiative, what a British-US academic study in 1999 found out: whereas 1 out of 11 Americans created a small business each year, the equivalent figure in Germany was 1 out of 50 (Italy and Britain came in around 1 out of 30). Nor is that all. Technological innovation seems almost totally absent in the country; or come to that, innovation in the arts, science, cinema, philosophy, music, or literature in ways that matter.

As Spiegel's "Laughing Stock" article noted, it's hard if not impossible to find any area of life --- save perhaps vacation-time --- where the Germans are pace-setters. Mediocrity and a soaring sense of entitlements seem to be the norm almost everywhere.

 

But Note Quickly:

The Spiegel article is itself also a symptom of the problems. In particular, it said nothing about how this anxiety and the related collapse of German self-illusions, years and decades in the making, have been redirected toward even more sour-puss anger and constant scapegoating of the US, not to mention the the continued hints in the German media at a Jewish cabal in charge of American policies . . . both deplorable gutter-trash trends, recall, that were set out and discussed at length in The Demons of Europe, by Joffe, the Harvard Ph.D. who is the editor of the far sounder Die Zeit out of Hamburg. For a recent New York Times story about the Spiegel article and the related German mood of churning disillusion and gloom, see this link, "Oh What A Sorry State We're In". As the Times report noted,

"Germans are gloomy because there is a general realization that the formulas that have worked so well for this country in the decades after World War II are not working anymore, and nobody knows exactly what to do."

So again, John, thank you. And keep in mind, by way of buggy replies, that . . .  

 



1. Things Will Very Likely Get Worse in both Germany and the EU

Yes, in the years to come --- worse, not better. The multiple causes?

• Slow or stagnant economic growth, a worrying trend the last several years, will very likely continue the next decade or so, the US having registered higher GDP growth now than the EU for 9 of the last 10 years, and with EU per capita income in purchasing power terms about 70% of the US's . . . about where it was in the mid-1960s.

Germany's economic record is the worst: hardly better than Japan's 10-year long stagnation. France and Italy have barely done better. Spain did improve noticeably under Aznar, thanks to his reforms of that over-regulated economy; and so have a small handful of tiny Scandinavian countries and Ireland, which have made impressive progress in overhauling and modernizing their economies. Britain too --- like the rest of the English-speaking world save Canada, freeing itself of excessive regulation, high taxes, and runaway welfare-spending for years now --- has compiled a noticeably better-than-average EU performance.

That said, the EU Commission itself granted in January 2004 --- when it issued its review of the EU Commitment made in 2000 to transform the EU economies into the most productive and innovative economy of the world --- that instead of closing the gap with the US in the four year interval, the gap was growing.

Here, by the way, are some concrete stats: EU and US per capita income in 2001, including a breakdown for individual EU countries. Note that in 2002 and 2003 US GDP growth was much faster than the EU average, in which case the gap would be about three or four cent higher today. [See the OECD's breakdown of growth since then.] The table is taken from the EU Competitiveness Report 2002, p. 20.

Just in passing, here are a few worrying stats by way of illustration. Last fall, the EU Commission predicted that number of active workers in the current 15 member-countries will fall by some 40 million between 2000 and 2050 --- or from 243 million to 203 million. Oppositely, the number of people aged over will likely increase by 60 per cent: a total of 103 million. Since only in Britain are there many private pensions, it follows that either taxes will have to increase sharply on an ever smaller working population to support the surging number of retirees or benefits will have to be reduced considerably in the years to come.

• Swift, unsettling flux in European identities --- national and EU --- is causing various kinds of worry and anxiety on a large scale . The main source of this flux? The endless, high-pulsating challenge to European secularism and traditional national cultures posed by large, rapidly growing Islamic communities: increasingly alienated, and more and more inclined toward Islamist fundamentalism.

It's largely for this reason that large-scale immigration --- which would help augment the shrinking EU working population in the decades to come --- will not likely occur. Most of it would come from North Africa or the Middle East. Already, though, some EU countries have moved vigorously to stop such immigration --- Denmark, Holland, and Germany among them --- and even send illegals back home.

An alternative source of immigration might be the new EU members in East Europe; but it's more likely that European, Japanese, and American companies in the EU --- instead of encouraging immigrant workers to move westward --- will redirect their investment capital and production toward those new member-countries, where wages are much lower, regulations and other red-tape much less intrusive, and education levels are generally good already or noticeably improving. A strong work-ethos appears to exist in East Europe too, unlike in Germany or much of the rest of the EU. For all these reasons, as the EU expands eastward, it's likely that existing jobs in West Europe will be moved in that direction too, rather than East Europeans being invited to move westward and --- at least for the time being --- compete with West Europeans for the very slow-growing stock of existing jobs.

The latter observation, by the way, isn't just speculative. Even though the cultural gulf between West and East Europe isn't as great as it is with the Middle East and North Africa, the existing EU peoples or governments are far from being enthusiastic about immigration from the new eastern member-states on whatever ground. Just the opposite. Germany's government in particular has tried to find ways to limit the free movement of labor from those countries when they join the EU, many this year, some in the years to come.

This is the second of a two-article mini-series on the EU public opinion toward the US as a country, not just American foreign policy, let alone such policy in the Bush era. The first article tried to bring out the systematic distortions that dominate the EU Continental media's reportage on the US and American life and politics, owing to a mix of

• Ideological traditions in journalism, with newspapers historically identified clearly with specific political ideologies: communism, socialism, moderate liberalism, Christian Democracy, conservatism, or (in the past and to an extent again) reactionary conservatism, and fascism;

• Intellectual habits in German-speaking and Latin Europe that encourage fanciful flights of obscurantist speculation unanchored in any hard evidence: the more abstract and opinionated, the better, it seems . . . particularly if contorted rhetoric, neologisms run-rampant, and constant hints at arcane guru-status knowledge of a Gnostic sort mark the intellectual sky-hootings.

-- Note that post-modernist relativisms, crammed with endless citations of Nietzsche or Heidegger or Derrida or Foucault or any other French-Thinker-of-the-Month, are an inevitable upshot of these giddy fly-away traditions of wild rumination. Reviewing the leading French purveyors of this pretentious pishposh --- in the context of the famous Alan Sokal hoax of the late 1990s --- a distinguished analytical philosopher, Thomas Nagel of Harvard, didn't hesitate to brand them either frauds, or idiots, or a mixture of both. [See gordon-newspost for Nagel's long review article.]

-- In particular, according to Nagel, "the [French] writers arraigned by Sokal and Bricmont use technical terms without knowing what they mean, refer to theories and formulas that they do not understand in the slightest, and invoke modern physics and mathematics in support of psychological, sociological, political, and philosophical claims to which they have no relevance. It is not always easy to tell how much is due to invincible stupidity and how much to the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication. Lacan and Baudrillard come across as complete charlatans, Irigaray as an idiot, Kristeva and Deleuze as a mixture of the two. But these are delicate judgments."

• The dominance in the media, universities, and left-wing parties all over the EU on the Continent of the 1960s student radicals, now in their late forties, fifties, and early sixties;

• The inevitable high-pulsating mishmash of envy and resentments that flourishes on the Continent, not just in intellectual circles, toward the US . . . aggravated, it needs to be underscored, by the huge gap in wealth, power, and influence between the two sides of the Atlantic that especially emerged --- contrary to left-wing and other EU hype about American decline, rife throughout West Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s --- after the end of the cold war.

It will have helped, needless to say, if you've read the previous article. Among other things, it examined these theses in greater detail and looked specifically at the media in Spain, Germany, and France. Using the same organizational scheme, we continue the overall analysis --- which forms a coherent argument --- with Part Four.

 



PART FOUR:
JOSEF JOFFE, AN INFLUENTIAL GERMAN EDITOR,
ON SYSTEMATIC
ANTI-AMERICANISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE EU

The previous article in this mini-series referred to Joffe, a Harvard Ph.D. in political science, a good two or three times: in particular, to his recent argument in The Demons of Europe --- which appeared in the December, 2004, issue of Commentary . For that matter, several earlier buggy articles analyzed the strengths (and weaknesses) of his argument, which we're about to uncoil again here --- only at greater length . . . mainly because it reflects an astute series of observations by an European observer, who's also properly trained academically speaking. [The main weakness, some of you might recall, was a failure by Joffe to tap several good opinion surveys of European attitudes toward Jews, Israel, and the US; these surveys would have reinforced Joffe's analysis, anchoring it in more hardheaded evidence.]

Specifically, to get down to business, Joffe's article set out and probed the roots of the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism --- the first of the demons --- in European life, a scourge well over a thousand years old that had briefly gone into eclipse in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its horrors in WWII, only to burst through the barriers of taboo the last few years. [The two ADL surveys on European anti-Semistim in 2002 found that about a third of West Europeans showed strong degrees of anti-Semitic prejudice. This varied across countries: much higher in France, Spain, and Germany than in Britain or Italy, and practically non-existent in Holland. A subsequent study sponsored by the Italian government found the exact same degee of anti-Semitism in that country: 22%. See the buggy analysis here.] And the second demon, systematic anti-Americanism? Joffe uses the same analytical framework to explain it. Usually, though not always, the two sets of stereotyped prejudice, envy, and resentments go hand-in-hand in European circles. Both add up to moral and intellectual deformity of a worrying sort in European life.

What, then, underlies the pervasive nature of Europe's second Demon?

Essentially, according to Joffe, five mental pillars of emotionally charged hostility to the US as a country, national culture, and powerful polity, starting with the reliance in the dominant EU media and intellectual circles, as well as on the political left and now extreme right, of . . .



1. Stereotyping and Obsession

" First, America is morally flawed. It executes its own people, and it likes to bomb other people. It is the land of intolerant fundamentalist religion. Selfish and self-absorbed, it refuses to ratify the International Criminal Court or agreements to protect the environment. It is "Dirty Harry" and "Globocop" rolled into one — an irresponsible and arrogant citizen of the world.

Second, America is socially retrograde: it is the fountainhead of a "predatory capitalism" (according to a former German chancellor) that denies social services to those who need them most. Instead of bettering the lot of its darker-skinned minorities, it shunts millions of them into prison. America accepts, nay, admires gross income inequalities and defies the claims of social justice.

Finally, America is culturally inferior. It gorges itself on fast food, wallows in tawdry mass entertainment, starves the arts, and prays only to one god, which is Mammon. It sacrifices the best of culture to pap and pop. In matters sexual, America is both prurient and prudish. It is a society where Europe's finest values — solidarity and community, taste and manners — are ground down by rampant individualism."

From Joel, a knowledgeable visitor to the buggy site, the following comments have arrived. They seemed worth posting as a stand-apart article, along with the buggy replies.

1) I should add that polls sometimes should be treated with utmost caution when gauging actual public opinion somewhere. The way pollsters asked survey questions and how they were phrased determine the results of the poll. Also polls of this kind (on social science field rather than hard sciences or engineering) are subject to interpretations that are highly subjective.

For instance, I have seen polls taken in Germany cicra 1994 (Reader's Digest) that says 80% of Germans regarded the US as their most trustworthy and important ally (both East and West Germans, if counted separately, yield the same results, curiously - meaning that interpretation "fmr East Germans are more anti-American" is false). Hardly confirming your "German opinion is generally hostile toward the US and has been so since survey data showed this from the early 1980s on --- to repeat, hostile to the US as a country, whoever governs it" thesis. It is easy to produce a result of pre-determined finding among people surveyed by asking these for instance:

2) Do you believe the US has done incorrectly in the War on Terrorism?

Now 80% of Germans polled could answer yes, and we come up with answers like "80% of Germans polled are hostile to the US". But we could also divide this into several camps: some could think outright all kinds of anti-terrorist work is wrong - "the US should apologize and accede to the demands", some could think the US should readopt the Clinton combat-terrorism-by-policing-and-aid posturing, some think the US should be even more hardline. We simply have no way of determining anti-Americanism by asking these questions. (Granted, I admit Germany is truly more anti-US than Britain, which even it is wobble on this issue, but the extent is less bad - maybe 53% versus 47% kind of thing)

3) I think Steven den Beste best sums up on the best way to gauge true pictures of public opinions - observe how they actually vote. Spain is truly anti-US but once again it is a 60% vs 40% matter. (which, coincidentally, Spain has some of the most hardcore socialist and stand-by-Arafat people in the whole EU, even more so than France)

 



PART ONE: PUBLIC OPINION, THE EU, THE US, AND IRAQ

Joel: Thank you for the informative replies, doubly so because it's unusual for those who leave long comments to cite new data or other facts. In serial fashion, with some detailed analysis, here are some replies tossed off the top of the buggy head. You'll note that because of their length, the overall commentary has been divided into a two-article mini-series.

1. Survey Data.

Yes, public opinion data have to be treated with caution, a warning that the buggy prof has repeatedly made in several articles here that deal with poll surveys: they tap attitudes usually, not deep beliefs; beliefs themselves may not guide specific action at times; attitudes can change in response to dramatic events; and yeah, different questions can elicit different responses.

Still, there are ways to deal with these problems, such as longitudinal studies of attitudes over long periods of time, taking into account shifting opinions; sub-dividing the national responses into various categories, such as age (generations) or ethnic minorities or urban-rural or in terms of income or class. And random surveys carried out over time this way can be deepened to probe more fundamental beliefs --- which don't change dramatically --- by picking out certain sub-groups within a random survey and study the same respondents' attitudes in more thorough ways as a rough gauge of what might be happening in the larger population in question.

 

2. German Views of the USA.

The German outlook on the US was probed in depth in several surveys during the 1980s. Repeatedly, they showed that there was a marked decline in pro-American sympathies by age in that country --- note, pro-American, the questions assessing attitudes toward the US as a country, not specific policies. Essentially, what was found that Germans over the age of 50 were heavily pro-American; those between 40-50 far less so; between 30-40 years of age and 20-30 marked dislike or animosity emerged. It is out of the 30-40 year cohorts that the current generation of German politicians like Schroeder emerged in the late 1990s to govern the country. They hark back to the student radical days of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The shifting opinions in Germany toward the US, by the way, also seemed to reflect a half-concealed new nationalism . . . albeit of a semi-neutralist, semi-pacifist kind, the sort that Robert Kagan, generalizing too much about West Europeans --- British opinion is much different --- describes in the short-hand motto that Europeans are from Venus and Americans from Mars.

A student in an undergrad UCSB course of the buggy's, just getting ready for the final exam, sent a query that touches on a key issue: which NATO governments in the EU supported the US position over Saddamite Iraq, and --- more to the point --- two related matters:

• What explains their support --- and what, oppositely, would explain the behavior of those West European allied government that opposed the war?

• And why didn't all of the supporting countries, notably Spain, send troops into battle when the war erupted almost a year ago to the day?

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

A good set of questions, York, which several buggy articles on US-European relations and NATO have referred to over the last year. Keep in mind, for starters, that there were 19 members of NATO in March last year: the US and Canada in North America, Turkey in the Middle East, and Iceland and Norway in Europe (but not members of the EU). Three others were new East European countries and not in the EU at the time (they're joining this May): Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary.

Of the 15 EU member-countries, four are neutrals: Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and Austria, all in the 4-9 million range. That left 11 EU members of NATO in West Europe. They aligned this way:

For the war: Britain and Italy (60 million in population each); Spain (40 million); Holland (15 million); Portugal (10 million); Denmark (4 million)

Against the war: Germany (80 million), France (60 million), Belgium (10 million), and Luxembourg (250,000). Greece (10 million) did not join either camp, but its government at the time was left-wing, something that only just changed in recent election.

Part One: THE COALITION OF THE WILLING

(1) Which West European NATO Allied Governments Supported the War To Destroy Saddamite Iraq's Brutal Regime, and why?

Governments calculate their interests and specific foreign policies in concrete terms. They really have no choice, especially when major security threats, or controversies anyway, are at stake. Those governments in the EU who were NATO allies --- Britain, Holland, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, and Spain --- were all governed by conservative moderate governments.

Their leaders all saw Iraq as a dangerous state, exactly like the US and UK, and were tired of being yo-yoed around by Saddam's threats, evasions, and prevarications. Even Hans Blix has said, in his new book, that he thought on the eve of the war that Iraq had WMD in place. He did want more time. The US and the UK and the members of the Coalition of the Willing thought he had had 12 years to comply effectively.

 

(2)The British Labour Party's Historical Legacy Clarified

By Continental standards, remember, the British Labour Party is conservative: it hews to Mrs. Thatcher's big reductions of statist regulations and welfare policies.

This is the 2nd of a two-part mini-series on the Madrid bombings and the Spanish electorate's decision to cave in to terrorism and elect a new government whose Prime Minister not only criticized the Aznar government's diplomatic support of the US-UK led war against Saddamite Iraq, but has openly pledged to withdraw Spain's 1300 peacekeeping force from Iraq as soon as its' feasible. True, he's already waffling now that the election is over. He has said that he will withdraw them unless the UN returns to Iraq this summer, assuming sovereignty has been handed over to some transitional Iranian political authority --- which is likely to happen --- but the damage has been done: out of fear and picque, appeasement has gripped the Spanish electorate, and it appears to have rewarded a huge terrorist attack launched by Al-Qaeda extremists on the Madrid citizenry.

Yes, done --- the damage. Whatever the Spanish government decides to do utlimately about its peacekeepers in Iraq, Al Qaeda's heads --- and for that matter probably home-grown European terrorists --- will have already absorbed the lesson: it's possible to cow and bully an entire European country into a political somersault that rewards vicious terrorism. "What won yesterday was the pitiful option of surrendering to an adversary … a thousand times worse than Nazism," wrote columnist Gabriel Albiac in El Mundo newspaper. "This is what was elected yesterday: renouncing the fight; accepting death. Al Qaeda won."



Will Spain itself be spared further terrorist attacks? Not likely, and for reasons set out in the first article in this series. If you haven't read it, you should at least run your eye over its argument.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

More generally, that initial article asked whether any countries that seek to appease rancorous, hate-filled Islamo-fascist terrorists --- whose conspiratorial minds crackle with a sense of self-pitying victimization and cosmic grievances against fantasized enemies, secretive and diabolical and allegedly responsible for all the ills and failures of Arab and other Islamic countries --- will ever succeed. The general answer was clearly no. The conditions, historical and theoretical, that enabled European states operating a classical balance-of-power form of diplomacy and limited warfare --- which included at times appeasement --- were specific to Europe life between roughly the mid-17th century and the mid-19th, save for the 25 year period of total warfare between Napoleonic France and the rest of the European powers. For that matter, even in that long two century period, those conditions didn't pertain to European adversaries in the New World or Africa.

[A sidebar observation: not that the African slave trade was confined to Europeans or later North Americans. If no middle-men African tribal societies had served as eager and greedy slave-traders, no Atlantic slave-trade would ever have flourished. Until the latter half of the 19th century and medical advances, Europeans couldn't penetrate the interior of Africa; diseases there would have rapidly wiped them out. Come to that, the Arab and later Ottoman slave trade preceded the European trade by almost a thousand years, and then continued long after the British and later the US declared war on slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Only advanced western powers were responsible for slavery's destruction --- most of it anyway. It still flourishes in certain Arab countries.]

Appeasement in the Modern Era: A Disaster

Since then, roughly the middle of the 19th century, appeasement as a diplomatic tactic has generally been a failed and dangerous policy --- above all for democratic countries. Quite simply, the conditions that had prevailed in the European balance of power system between 1650 and 1850 or so no longer prevailed. Virulent nationalism as a mass movement repeatedly shook the European state system from the 1850s on and spread rapidly around the world. Worse, after WWI, all the major security threats to the democracies have been radically ideologized and emanate from heavily militarized, totalitarian regimes, led by mass-murdering paranoids right down to Saddamite Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan . . . plus, nowadays, the threats of rippling global terrorism that mark the manically kill-crazy Al-Qaeda sort.

If anything, any appeasement by democratic countries of such enemies has always backfired. In the 1930s, it was worse; it proved disastrous.

 

US Appeasement of Islamo-Fascist Extremists 1979 - September 11th, 2001

The failure of American policy to respond to Islamist terrorism and extremism after the Shiite revolution in Iran in 1979 has been costly too --- as our citizenry learned on September 11th, 2001: Carter failed to deal effectively with the clerical-fascist regime's seizure of our embassy hostages; Reagan sent Marines to Beirut for an unclear purpose, then withdrew them pell-mell when Hezbollah terrorists killed hundreds in a suicide-bombing; George Bush let Saddam Hussein's regime intact after the first Gulf War, armed with helicopter gun ships that the armistice team allowed it --- he immediately slew thousands of Kurds with them. Clinton's policies were equally bad, maybe worse. He emulated a Reagan turnabout and withdrew our Rangers pell-mell from Somalia after the ill-fated Mogadishu incident in 1993. When Saddam Hussein's agents tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993, he did nothing either. As if that weren't bad enough, he repeatedly failed later on to deal effectively with Al Qaeda despite new terrorist attacks on our embassies in Africa and on a naval ship in Yemen.

Reflecting on this long sad story of ineffectual American responses to militant Islamist terrorism, James Woolsey --- our outspoken former CIA head in the Clinton era --- said last year that

I would submit that if at the end of the 20th century you were sitting in the counsels of Mr. Khamenei in Tehran or of Saddam Hussein or of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and you were making a judgment about the Americans, your judgment would probably have been that this rich, spoiled feckless country would not fight. This is the same judgment the Japanese made about us at the beginning of the 1940s because of a parallel history of our behavior in the 1920s and 1930s.

We did the same thing in the 1990s. For some reason, this wonderful country, once it wins a big war, like World War I or the Cold War, feels that it is its God-given right to go on a national beach party. And that's more or less what we did in the 1920s, and it's more or less what we did in the 1990s; and we, in a sense, have paid the price. t's fine to have a good time. It's fine to have the stock market go up, but while you're doing it, you should not be cutting the Army from 12 to 10 divisions

What Follows

That initial article in this series was divided into three parts. The current article continues that organizational tactic, starting with the fourth part.

 

Part 4: WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE ABOUT APPEASEMENT? IT WON'T WORK
AGAINST MILITANT OR FANATICAL ENEMIES

No, It Will Likely Backfire

In particular, armed conflict that pits mass-murdering totalitarian states against us, or fanatical terrorist groups like Al Qaeda as new enemies --- both of which adversaries challenge us with fervor in core moral and political ways and hate democracy and free-market capitalism for crackling ideological or inflamed religious reasons --- are especially difficult, if not impossible, to solve by negotiations of any sort, let alone by use of appeasement. If anything, appeasement is almost always calculated in such circumstances to backfire . . . dangerously so.

To explain briefly: terrorists like manic Al Qaeda jihadists --- or dictators like Hitler or Stalin or the Japanese militarists in the interwar and WWII era, or Saddam Hussein or the Taliban in recent times --- will tend to see appeasement as a sign of weakness, reinforcing their high-coiled belief, full of contempt, that their adversaries are cowardly and weak-willed and can be further coerced into further concessions . . . including, please note, standing by idly as the snarled, hyped-up jihadists or earlier in the 20th century Fascists or Communists attacked smaller states or even now and then big allies. Many democratic countries did this, or tried. If the Spanish vote today is a guide, they're still trying.

 

Something Else Too

And it gets worse. Democratic governments, among all countries, are especially prone to be seen by their terrorist or ideological enemies in this contemptuous light: we're said to lack a martial spirit and firm commitment to defend our ideals --- inclined, instead, toward a quiet life and material comfort and to hold onto these comforts as long as we can. On top of that, democratic leaders going back to Chamberlain and the French appeasers of the 1930s --- who believe that their adversaries are like democratic partisan opponents at home, inclined toward compromise --- almost invariably find that their gestures of good-will and concessions will very likely add to the contempt of militarists, terrorists, or totalitarian enemies.

Essentially, terrorists of the global sort like Al Qaeda and totalitarian rulers right down through the ages like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban in Afghanistan understand only one thing: life is a ruthless struggle, politics is no different, only force counts, and he who dominates is the most cunning and most brutal . . . able to triumph over enemies at home or abroad. Besides, don't these enemies deserve to be tortured, killed, or exterminated?



 

The Long-Term Result of Appeasement?

When, finally, democratic governments and peoples do rally, they turn out to be formidable military opponents, with a fierce determination, if need be, to destroy their ideological enemies in warfare. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the little fascist allies of them were shattered and left destroyed by 1945; ditto the Japanese militarists who turned Pacific Asia into a charnel house. Later, true to the underlying logic of containment policy --- formulated in 1947 by George Kennan, who looked forward to a constant resistant to Soviet and Communist expansion as a way to force their irrational contradictions within their mass-murdering society to destroy them from inside --- the Soviet empire collapsed too, then Communist Russia itself disappeared a year later in 1991, replaced by an electoral democratic system whose democratic and constitutional future is still hard to pin down with any certainty. The collapse of the Taliban --- who together with other Islamic forces and CIA help had stymied the Soviet military for 10 years in Afghanistan --- occurred within two months of the US attack on its women-massacring system. Saddam Hussein's monstrous system collapsed even quicker.

Unfortunately, the recent historical record in compensating for appeasement isn't always this encouraging.

After a brief interlude with no articles published here --- the buggy prof taking off a few days to roam around Santa Barbara and its matchless beauty, natural and man-made --- here's a buggy commentary on the horrors of the Madrid bombings last week, the Spanish reactions, and the likely terrorist-perps: Al-Qaeda fanatics, full of frenzy to strike out at helpless civilians. Since the bombings, the Spanish population has voted; it has exercised its right to punish the Aznar conservatives, heavily favored before the bombings, and bring to power the socialists whose head has promised to do what Al Qaeda apparently wanted it to: to acknowledge that Aznar's government and the Spaniards, including apparently little children and babies, should be killed or punished, and to promise that it will withdraw Spanish peace-keepers from Iraq this summer.

A trio of question prompt themselves here: 1) Will such appeasement work its magical promise and buy Spain freedom from future Islamist-fascist terrorism? 2) More generally, what are the historical and theoretical conditions that might justify appeasement, and 3) do those conditions apply to Al-Qaeda fanatics and other militant Islamist radicals?

Part 1: WILL APPEASEMENT WORK ITS PROMISE FOR THE SPANISH OR OTHERS?

Start With An Astute Journalist's Views

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist living in New Hampshire --- a libertarian, who spent years in the EU, then found Canada was beginning to look like it after almost 4 decades of uninterrupted Liberal Party rule dominated by French-Canadian Prime Ministers (Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, the latter just retired) --- is one of the most trenchant, knowledgeable observers of the international scene, whose writings are all the more impressive and readable because of an uncommonly lively style . . . complete with some humorous jibes.



He publishes in several US, Australian, Canadian, and British newspapers and weeklies. In an Australian newspaper, he deals with the Madrid massacre-bombings and the predicable left-wing cant in the EU --- a sign, regrettably, of lost moral-fiber, few of EU left-wing politicians, intellectuals, and media types willing to fight for their ideals and instead seeing themselves victims of a bullying and arrogant USA -- that if Aznar hadn't backed Bush and Blair over Iraq, Spain would have been spared the attack. As Steyn notes, it's nonsense. Not only has bin Laden or whoever still commands Al-Qaeda never set out a concrete list of demands, let alone negotiable ones, he adds (with a couple of buggy examples tossed in) that the appeasing countries in the war against Saddamite Iraq last year haven't in any case been spared terrorist attacks. In particular,

• Turkey stayed out of the war on terrorism, yet it suffered two bombings recently by Al-Qaeda or other Islamist fanatics.

• France, which stayed out of the war --- the lead critic of it --- was recently singled out by bin Laden (or whoever mouths his alleged tapes) as a target for its new ban on headscarves and other religious symbols. The French have also been grappling the last two months with terrorist threats, explicitly made, plus planted bombs, on their railway system. And since the French have 300 special forces working with American, British, and Australian forces chasing bin Laden or his associates around the Afghan-Pakistani border, the Al Qaeda heads aren't likely to think French opposition to the war on Saddamite Iraq should buy them shelter from Islamo-fascist terrorism.

• Morocco didn't support the war, but it was attacked earlier by Islamist fanatics; as of course was Saudi Arabia twice this last year. Morocco's ruling king, note, has a close tie to Spain's pro-democratic king.

• Steyn's own country, whose government didn't back the war last year --- Canada --- was also singled out as a potential target.

• Muslim Indonesia (200 million) was targeted in late 2002 by fanatical home-grown Islamists, who bombed Bali, killing 200 Australian and other vacationers there.

• Democratic India has suffered several terrorist attacks carried out by Muslim fanatics, including a large-scale shooting of Indian parliamentarians. India's government, like Indonesia's, was not part of the Coalition of the Willing.

• More generally, most of the EU countries have been confronted with home-grown terrorism and assassination attempts for years now that have nothing to do with Islamist terrorism: in Corsica, in Spain, in Northern Ireland (where the terrorism is winding down, the terrorists essentially defeated), and back in the 1970s and 1980s in Germany and Italy. In the mid-1990s, several murderous attacks by Algerian terrorists rattled the French for years. Two years ago, an Italian law professor was assassinated for working on a new labor law --- political correctness in murderous activity. About the same time, the most prominent politician was killed in Holland (Pim Fortuyn). More recently still, several attempts at assassinating the most prominent heads of the EU took place.

 

And Spain Itself: Will Appeasing Terrorism Work There?

Not likely. Steyn goes on to note that one of the lengthy self-pitying Islamist grievances against the West --- crackling with a sense of paranoid-splattered victimization, and spelled out by bin Laden or his sound-alike recently --- was that the Spanish Catholics had driven out the Arabs over 500 years ago. As a British journalist just noted here:

A group close to bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, sent a message to a London-based Arabic newspaper explaining the reasons for attacking Spain. "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader and America's ally in its war against Islam," the statement said.

 

Part 2: CAN ISLAMIST TERRORIST PARANOID GRIEVANCES AND RANCOR EVER BE APPEASED EFFECTIVELY?

Not likely, just the opposite. Cosmic conspiratorial grievances of the Islamist sort --- full of a hate-charged form of self-pitying victimization, whether in the social movements that flourish in the Arab world or in terrorist offshoots --- are motivated by a raging fury for revenge against fantasized enemies. It takes a head-in-the-sands attitude to believe that appeasement will work in dealing with them. It won't. All the troubles of the Arab countries, just to stay with them --- state despotism and failure, rife corruption and nepotism, economic and technological backwardness among demographic explosions, high unemployment, huge gaps between the rich and poor, and the worst illiteracy in the world --- are blamed on diabolical foreign-devils: in particular, globalizing forces incarnated in world Jewry, Israel, the US, and the West, plus Hindu India.

Note something quickly: since most Muslims, not just Islamist extremists, have been taught to regard Islam as a divine providence, God's gift to the members of the faith, large numbers of them in the Arab world and elsewhere are themselves vulnerable tto crackpot conspiratorial theories, however extravagantly fantastic, as a way of explaining their steady and almost uninterrupted decline in power, wealth, and prestige for hundreds of years now. In the Arab world, it's worse. With the highest levels of illiteracy around the globe --- and state-controlled media used by the dictators for their own demagogic self-serving purposes --- conspiratorial paranoia, as several recent buggy articles have tried to show, is widespread and continuing to make headway. Sixty per cent of Arabs surveyed by the Gallup Poll months after 9/11's massacres even denied Muslims had been involved. For an updated view, see the third of a three-part buggy series on conspiratorial racism and paranoia afoot in way too many parts of Islam, especially in the 21 Arab dictatorships.



  The Moral?

Whatever West European electorates may do in the future --- and national politicians catering to their decisions for dealing with terrorism --- almost all the EU member-countries will continue to face repeated terrorist attacks in the future, whether home-grown or from Islamist fanatics. Slow economic growth or outright stagnation, plus constant pressures to cut back on welfare services and social spending, will likely continue to polarize European domestic politics, in the process adding to social conflicts and outright strife and leading almost inevitably to new violence and terrorism.. That is the history of most of Europe for two centuries now. The interlude between the late 1940s and the late 1990s --- a cold war era when West Europe was protected by US military power, in NATO and elsewhere, and its economies grew steadily amid a stabilizing welfare-state and stable democratic development everywhere --- now looks exactly like that: something of a pleasant but unusual period in European life.

Add in surging violent crime all over the EU --- much worse on an average than in the US, whose population in UN surveys of crime-victims shows the most confidence in the police and going out into public spaces --- has recently coincided and been causally connected with surging Islamic immigrant communities, increasingly alienated and swept up in fundamentalist tendencies. Remember, bin Laden or his mouthpiece have already singled out appeasing France and its government and people for future terrorism because they dared pass a law banning headscarves in their school system.

Will appeasing Germany be spared? Not likely, says a British specialist on terrorism this last weekend, after the Madrid bombings:

He said Germans should not feel exempt from terrorism because their government opposed the war in Iraq; the Germans do station troops in Afghanistan, for instance. "If Al Qaeda had the opportunity to blow up a train in Berlin," he asked, "why would they hesitate



 

Part 3: WHEN WILL APPEASEMENT WORK AS A DIPLOMATIC TACTIC?

Appeasers, of course, always hope that they can find ways to fend off security threats with concessions and showing that they're full of understanding when it comes to the hostile adversary's grievances and the logic behind its awesome threats.

The following article is prompted by a very good survey of Pakistani developments in the period since 9/11 under President Musharraf --- who came to power in a military coup in the late 1990s, just about when Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb, and who since then has reoriented his country's policies in ways that are generally commendable, especially in foreign policy. The article appeared in today's Los Angeles Times (March 5, 2004).

That the journalist isn't trained in foreign policy analysis or IR theory isn't surprising: hence the need for some contextual background and analytical commentary here. Read it, and by the end you should have a much better appreciation of Pakistan's pivotal importance to the US in the war on terrorism . . . as well as what Musharraf has accomplished in 30 months even if, in domestic politics --- full of ethnic and religious conflicts, with the clash of civilizations graphically being played out between regressive, racist fundamentalist and kill-crazy terrorist forces on one side and modernizers and liberals on the other --- his record has been more checkered. No doubt, to be frank, inevitably so . . . and for reasons set out later.

Part I: INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS: THEORETICAL IN NATURE

Trade-Offs

Something else you should come away with from the article: a much better sense of the inescapable trade-offs in American foreign policy between security, economic, and human rights concerns.

Only ideologues think all good things go together, whether at home of abroad. That's not the way a complex world works. Far from it, there are always trade-offs in pursuing policies to deal with problems or challenges --- some very acute and a source of agonizing; at most, we can hope that the tensions between them are eased at times. Then, too, the fact that Presidents or Prime Ministers in democratic countries also have to be attentive to a host of domestic concerns --- voters, public opinion, legislatures, the media, and pressure groups --- reinforces the problems of trade-offs, adding further complications and at times outright dilemmas. Winston Churchill was right here. Democracy is a bad form of government for carrying out effective policies, except that all other political systems tried so far are worse. Come to that, what else would explain that the two most successful and influential countries in the last two centuries since the industrial revolution --- and democratic and nationalist revolutions as well as the ideological backlashes --- have been democratic, Great Britain and the USA?

Nor is that all. Very frequently there are also . . .

 

Unintended Consequences To Consider

Very frequently, what we hope are solutions to existing problems and challenges --- some urgent in foreign policy, in the form of unexpected crises that surge up all at once --- turn out over time, years or decades, to create new problems and challenges as a direct consequence.

This happens all the time in foreign policy. Consider the record. We helped the monstrous mass-murdering Soviet regime defeat the even more monstrous genocidal Hitlerian system in WWII, out of self-interest in a total war against fascism, Nazism, and Japanese raging militarism; and after the war ended and the cold war took its place, it turned out that US support helped create a new massive challenge that took decades to defeat. In the 1970s, the Nixon and Carter administrations recognized Maoist China, another mass-murdering totalitarian regime, and developed an unofficial alliance with it aimed at the greater threat of the communist Soviet Union. President Carter even exempted that monstrous regime from his human rights campaign, again for security reasons. Similarly, in Afghanistan after the Soviet military intervention in the late 1970s, the CIA helped train anti-Soviet forces . . . including Islamist volunteers from around the world. Out of these volunteers and anti-Soviet local forces would emerge Al Qaeda and the monstrous Taliban regime. The record runs on. Enough has been said to make the point.

Will things work out better with Pakistan this time? Most likely, just as they are in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and --- we hope --- in post-Saddamite Iraq. One thing for sure, the ultimate tests to determine the results will take years before anyone can be certain. Only slightly less sure, so far things have worked out better in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Pakistani-Indian relations --- never mind each country's relationship with the US --- than almost anyone would have predicted the day after September 11th, 2001. Not that President Bush's political opponents here in the US --- never mind those abroad --- want to hear such news. As they see it, American policies since January 22nd, 2001, have been a disaster.

 

Part II: MORE INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS. THE BUSH REVOLUTION IN FOREIGN POLICY RESTATED IN RESULT-ORIENTED WAYS

Really, A Disaster?

If someone thinks that, he or she must have something else in mind other than the concrete record. Consider the important countries or organizations we need to have influence and work with, not least in the war on terrorism.

• Relations with China have never been better --- ever.

• And Russia? The renunciation of the ABM treaty, never mind the movement of NATO to Russia's borders --- both denounced by Bush's critics as disastrous --- haven't alienated Putin's regime, relations with which remain generally solidy as well, including a good working relationship between Bush and Putin himself (see this link, especially the very end). Both governments prefer to put the conflict over Iraq last year behind them.

• Elsewhere, in the war on terrorism? The Taliban totalitarians have been swept from arrogant, women-whipping power; Al Qaeda has been routed there; Pakistan --- as we'll see --- is dealing with its extremist Islamist terrorism; its relations with nuclear-armed India are better than ever too; further afield, the monstrous Saddamite totalitarian regime has been destroyed, and a new constitution will soon be signed; Quadaffi's Libya has come clean on its WMD programs, as has clerical-fascist Iran.

• As for all the loose misleading talk about unilateralism and strained relations with Europe still being voiced, in fact 6 West European countries were in the Coalition-of-the-Willing last year --- the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Holland --- and all the new East European NATO members also vigorously supported the US-UK position. They still do.

• More to the point, both the German and French governments are striving vigorously to improve relations with the US. Among other things, Paris and Washington are not only cooperating over Haiti, but have troops on the ground, both of them.

To follow the argument unfolded here --- the 3rd and final installment in a three-part mini-series on the rapid spread of both radical Islamist fundamentalism and the use of a conspiratorial paranoid style in the Arab world --- you need to have read the previous two installments or at least to have run your eye over them. At a minimum, glance over the 2nd article in the series. It sets out a lengthy introductory section that simultaneously summarized the initial article in the series and foreshadowed in broad outline the argument and analysis that were then uncoiled at length.

The current article picks up the various threads of the argument left hanging loose at the end of the 2nd installment and ties them together to complete the lengthy mini-series discussion. By the time you finish it, you should have a good working idea of two related and pivotal developments in Arab life the last three decades or so: the multiple shaping causes behind . . .

• The bursting appeals of radical Islamist extremism in the 22 Arab countries, with some variation across them (though not much) to psychically unhinged people, some 300 million in number living in failed states and backward economies who are full of bewilderment, rage, and resentments and simultaneously --- as an added source of distress ---are swept up in a demographic explosion, the worst in the world . . . half of the 300 million Arabs less than 15 years of age;

• And the pervasive use of a mental style full of extravagantly fantasized paranoid projections onto scapegoated foreign devils --- Jews, the US, Israel, and now and then the West or Hindu India --- to make sense of the swarming host of the Arab dictators' home-grown failures and fiascoes on one side and, on the other side, an almost uninterrupted stream of Arab setbacks, military defeats, and declining influence and prestige abroad for generations now; or longer.

The analysis here resumes the organizational scheme that began with the initial two article-installments, a series of major parts --- six of them completed up to now --- starts off with Part VII.

 

Part VII: The Crucial Role of the Arab Media and the Arab Dictators

The Double-Dealing Game of Demagogues

If Islamist fundamentalism has spread in the Arab world for the various reasons just mentioned, the contrived double-dealing game played by dictators and their secret police has been indispensable. In particular, for their own cunning purposes with some variation across the 22 Arab regimes, they have encouraged the rapidly growing fundamentalist movements to reorient their rage and hot-wire urges away from any home-grown failures and toward outward conspiratorial causes: the diabolical enemies abroad, Jews and Israel and the US and the Christian West and Hindus, that in its core cabal, world Jewry, control and manipulate the world for power-grabbing reasons. Its this nefarious set of conspiracies, fundamentalists argue not just in mosques or on the Arab street but in Arab TV, newspapers, and radio, that explains Islam's humiliation, its backwardness, its declining military and political power, and all other ills. The enemies are there; you only have to look and see them.

 

The Demagogic Use of Fundamentalist Rage

To repeat: all these regimes have allowed fundamentalists to have lavish access to their secret-police controlled media for that purpose, the Saudis the worst --- while they use their big oil revenue to push extremist Wahhabi Islam everywhere in the world, including in Australia (see the link below) --- but all the regimes elsewhere included. The same is true of clerical-fascist Iran, with its Shia versions and outright haven and energetic support for Islamo-fascist terrorisms. And in the last few years of his reign, Saddam Hussein began letting fundamentalist rants be vented in his media too.

This, the 2nd installment of a 3-article series on murderous Islamist fundamentalism --- the argument in both prompted by the kill-crazy rant of the Mufti of Australia, the spiritual head of that country's 300,000 Muslim citizens, who recently dubbed 9/11's massacres "God's work" and called on all Arabs to emulate the 9/11 terrorists' wondrous sacrifice --- should be read only after you've at least run your eye over the first installment.

At one point, recall, the Mufti bemoaned 'the lack of "real men" in the Arab world.' He urged them all to harden, adopt murderous jihad terrorism as their chief weapon in the war against the diabolical infidels and enemies of Islam --- almost everybody in the world, other than true-believing Islamist fundamentalists it appears --- and emulate the "true boy" in Arab life who urged his mother not to cry if he went sky-kabooming to Paradise in a suicidal assault. "Oh mother," the boy in a Mufti parable is led to say, "jihad has been imposed on me and I want to become a martyr . . . ."

If you've read the argument in the first installment here more thoroughly, not just run your eye over its argument, all the better.



INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

The Argument Summarized, With Lots Of Foreshadowing

That argument, recall, documented 1) the Sheik's homicidal lunacy; 2) noted that it isn't out of line with most extremist Islamist fundamentalisms, full of rippling hatred and urges for revenge against fantasized enemies --- the paranoid projections of dislocated minds; and 3) then --- more ambitiously, a major point of the two-article series --- sought to gauge how extensive the support for such Islamist movements seems to be, especially in the Arab world. No less ambitiously, the other major point of this series that is fleshed out here, the argument also 4) tried to make sense and document the various causes of the surging appeal of radical Islam in the Arab world.

That spread and appeal exploit an age-old cultural style in Arab life. No, not new; anything but that, and for reasons set out in a few moments.

A set of emotionally charged beliefs about politics and power, plus a related intellectual manner for using them in interpretive manner, this age-old paranoid style in Arab life --- conspiratorial to the core --- has been widely tapped by both fundamentalist spokesmen and members of the so-called Arab street to make sense of a world gone badly askew and full of setbacks and disasters in Arab life, power, and prestige.

 

That Paranoid Style Can Be Easily Explained

In brisk shorthand --- a more elaborate explanation follows in Part VI later on here --- the style and a set of related beliefs and symbols about power and political life are partly a reaction to 14 centuries of unbroken despotic rule . . . with power in the Arab world, at any rate above the tribal level, involving a non-stop form of winner-take-all politics. Near and far, throughout those centuries, the rule of the autocratic despots --- most of them not even Arabs after the Ottoman conquests in the 16th century, followed by European imperialism after the 1830s almost everywhere in the Arab world --- was neither transparent nor accountable to anyone. In the upshot, almost all key decisions that influenced the lives of ordinary people seemed arbitrary and unchallengeable . . . something imposed strictly top-down by superior power, with no participation by average people or for that matter any one, rich or poor, not part of the ruling family clan. Political succession, when it occurred, seemed no less accountable; often it was opaque and inscrutable. Either the despot monopolizing power died peacefully and passed on all power to one of his sons --- frequently after palace intrigues and murders among them --- or he was killed off in a coup or intrigue by a challenger group. If that happened, then the leader of the victorious group grabbed all power for himself.

Nothing else really changed when new despots emerged, except now and then, especially after the Ottoman and European conquests, their nationality.

The outcome?

In such circumstances, conspiratorial interpretations to make sense of power and political life that seems remote and arbitrary, shrouded in palace secrecy and often ruthlessness --- with swords and bullets the ultimate arbiter --- are probably inevitable . . . not that this is the only cause of the paranoid style rife in the Arab world these days.