What Next?

Unsurprisingly, Iran has rejected the U.N.'s August 22nd ultimatum. Unsurprisingly, the Security Council looks helpless to take decisive action due to China's and Russia's intransigence. What next? How effective will American/European sanctions be while China remains dependent on Iranian oil?

Here are my thoughts on the situation:

First, it seems as though diplomacy is not going to work. Iran is emboldened by Hezbollah's "success" in Israel, the disintegration of U.S. influence in Iraq, and its ability to trick/manipulate the U.N.. I would not be surprised if the U.S. carries out limited airstrikes on selected Iranian targets before 2008. If not the U.S., then Israel by 2010.

Second, Iran's army is notoriously weak. While the addition of nuclear weapons to their arsenal will make them, essentially, untouchable, their current conventional forces are limited and outdated. This makes U.S. intervention a greater possibility.

Third, while U.S. intervention does remain a possibility, the threat to American interests posed by attacking Iran are quite high. Oil prices will inevitably shoot out the roof and terrorist attacks on American sites throughout the world will increase significantly. In particular, U.S. forces in Iraq will become prime targets (although it seems unlikely that Iran will want to push the Iraq situation into total chaos.) Hezbollah will strike Israel again, hard, and I wouldn't be surprised if a task-force of Iranian Republican Guards are dispatched to organize small scale terrorist strikes against American interests around the world.

Fourth, while striking Iran's nuclear sites before they become fully operational is a possibility, I am not convinced this will permanently disrupt their nuclear ambitions. The democratization of nuclear technology makes it nearly inevitable that capable and dedicated regimes, who have already achieved a fair degree of regional influence and power, will eventually acquire nuclear weapons. It simply depends on a) how strongly Iran sees its success and survival as dependent on their acquisition and b) how they view their chances of getting away with it. The more the U.S. touts regime change and pre-emption the more likely a) becomes. The more the U.N. falters, the more likely b) becomes. Unfortunately, it seems the only real solution to the crisis would be regime change, although this is clearly a pratical impossibility. And while the remaining solution lies with the U.N, their incapacity to force Iran bodes poorly for a diplomatic solution.

Thus, our response to Iran needs to be framed within a serious consideration of which would be worse: the possibility of a nuclear armed, belligerent Iran and the threat of a new regional arms race this poses or an inevitably destabilizing military strike and the international economic disruption and terrorist threats to U.S. interests around the globe it would create.

Journalists and strategists have been weighing these two sides of the coin for the past few years (see particularly the Atlantic's December 2004 coverage of Iran war-games). What I have not yet seen, however, is a serious Plan-B. That is, how to contain, weaken, and isolate a nuclear armed Iran such that its weapons pose little threat to the region, Israel, or the West. I am convinced Iran will have the bomb within a few years (perhaps decades if the U.S. does strike) and that American policy should be equally concerned with this inevitably as with preventing/postponing its realization. Indeed, it seems that U.S. policy throughout the coming century should be more concerned with containment, isolation, and balancing of nuclear powers than with pre-emptive elimination of their nuclear projects. The spread of nuclear weapons will become easier and easier throughout the 21st century and, as the U.S.'s hegemonic reach diminishes and the center of world gravity continues to shift towards the East, pre-emptive war will increasingly become an impossibility.

It is time to envision a world, and the possibility of a peaceful world, with a nuclear armed theocracy.

It's a scary thought and will require courage, humility, and patience to address its possibility.

Iraqi Reality TV

Hope?

Che & Nasrallah

I wonder if Urban Outfitters will start selling this t-shirt next...

Images from a great Egyptian blog The Arabist.

Rejected!

Ooops. No, I mean the package offered Iran by the Security Council. Are we surprised?

The West and the "Other"

My recent posts have clearly centered on the problem of imagining a just and responsible response to the growth of the truly dark and frightening force of militant Islamic extremism in its myriad of Sunni/Shiite, state-based/terrorist group, Arab/Asian/European forms throughout the world. I have tried to articulate a post-Bush vision which, while without failing to critique the current Administration's horribly planned and executed vision for an unnecessary and illegitimate war, keeps in mind the threat posed by anti-Semitic, totalitarian, misogynistic, and violent extremism to the democracies of the West--Europe and Israel in particular, the United States, and--to a far lesser extent--Canada and Australia. Europe--Britain in particular--is slowly awakening to this threat, as the proliferation of extremist groups continues to grow relatively unchecked throughout the countries of the Continent. I have also tried to articulate a common ground between the United States and Europe; that, despite the current and tragic trans-Atlantic rift, the strength of democratic institutions and a shared tradition of freedom and secularism will ultimately land the United States and Europe firmly in the same boat as the threat of mass-based, violent, racist totalitarianism continues to grow unabated. My position certainly relies on some cognitive simplicity, as "the West" is certainly not an ideologically-free, neutral, or politically harmless concept. It relies, necessarily, on an "Other" against which it can be defined. According to the tenor of my posts, this "Other" appears more and more to be a certain brand of Islamic extremism. I have tried to emphasize that the values of the West--as imperfectly as they have been applied throughout history--imply an openness to the "Other", to Islam and to all other religions, races, etc. However, I believe that the failure to distinguish between healthy and just multi-cultural pluralism and the toleration and protection of those groups whose ideology and violent practice call for its overturning is a real threat. Unfortunately, Europe--particularly guilt-ridden Germany--has been poor at making this distinction and has done little to stymie the growth of an extremely virulent brand of Islamic extremism in its midst. I believe, however, Europe may be reaching a turning point, and is coming to realize that the vitality of an open society depends both on its ability to protect the marginalized and the capacity to see clearly from what sectors of society the threat to free institutions come. Democracy cannot be so polite that it allows its own murder.

I invite a thouroughly post-modern, cultural relativist critique. I acknowledge the simplicity of my position and its potential for ultimately destructive "Othering."

I am convinced, however, that the very potential for a debate of this sort relies upon exactly the freedom that Islamic extremism wishes to do away with.

Anti-Semitism, Islamofascism, and Nazism

Timely. The world's most powerful Holocaust-denier/anti-Semitic has just won a war against Israel.

Too bad this has to come from a conservative, American magazine and not a liberal, European one.

Just Words?

Maybe. But like I've said before, words mean a great deal, particularly in the massive propaganda war that is being waged right now in the post-ceasefire Levant. Check out the difference in rhetoric between Israel and Syria/Iran. Supports the theory that Olmert's war was intended primarily to convince Israelis he was hard on security/serious about Hezbollah before proposing a disengagement from the West Bank? Or the theory that Iran started this war as dress rehearsal for a greater future conflict with Israel?

Remember when I said that Hezbollah was a military organization and "not a legitimate political organization"? Well.... Here and here.

"Wer schweigt, wird schuldig..."

First coverage I've seen in U.S. media. I guess the whole Ramsey ordeal is better celebrity gossip...

More on Islamofascism

Good article about the "Islamofascism" debate. Would be nicer if it were a little longer and more developed, but it makes good points anyway. The term "Islamofascism" has always made me a little uncomfortable as well--it always seemed somewhat anachronistic, inappropriate and propagandistic. On the other hand, its relative conceptual simplicity appealed to me--at the very least it reminded people that what we are up against is more than freedom fighters. Let's hope this debate continues--language is perhaps the most important weapon in this war of ideas, and it will be very important how we decide to understand it and sell it as a war worth fighting.

My Predictions

These were my predictions at the beginning of the war:

1. Hostilities ending the first week of August.
2. Big losses for Hezbollah in arms, manpower, and territory but not total defeat.
3. A more confident, brazen, and angry Iran emerging out of all of this.
4. An Arab world (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) awakened to the threat Iran poses to their regional interests.
5. Increasing cooperation between the Arab world and the U.S. to deal with Iran.
6. Increasing impatience on Israel's part with Iran's nuclear program and belligerence.

Some of my predictions were off: the cease-fire came a little later than I expected, and Hezbollah did not lose any territory (we'll see what the Lebanese/UN force is going to do).

Some are not clear yet: who knows how the Sunni Arab world will react and how Israel will respond to Iran's belligerence.

Some were right on: Hezbollah was beaten up, but not beaten. And Iran, more than anyone else, is claiming victory in this war.

But regardless of my predictions, I had not imagined things winding up (just beginning?) this way at all. A major shift has just occured in the Middle East and each day since the cease-fire we are learning more exactly what this shift will mean... More later...

The Best News I've Heard in a While

Finally. Finally. Europe gets it. How long did it have to wait to remember the long shadow of its totalitarian past and acknowledge this threat for what it is? Perhaps the U.S.'s greatest failure since 9/11 has been its inability to convince the world that this threat is truly international, truly a threat directed at the Western way of life. Europe has couched its new approach in inspiring terms:

"At the moment, there are two fundamentally different sets of values in play in Europe, Mr. Reid said: Those of the European Union, including 'democracy, freedom and justice to all' and those of 'totalitarianism,' which hopes to 'subvert a religion whose very name stands for peace.'"

Right on.

Peace At Last

But before we get too excited... let's remember who won this war and what Israel's supposed "defeat" now means...

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan (he tends to get a lot of thanks on my blog...) for pointing out the backwardness of so much of the Western Left's opposition to the war in Israel. Check out this picture from a rally in San Francisco: supporting Nasrallah?! Do people know who he is? The man who shoots unguided, shrapnel-filled missiles into pouplated Israeli cities in order to tear apart as many Israeli civilians as possible? Who bragged about the inevitable weak response of Israel to his provocations? Who is supported by a theocracy in Iran and a Baathist dictatorship in Syria? It's exciting to support freedom fighters (why everyone wears Che Guevara t-shirts and listens to Rage Against the Machine), but let's please discriminate between freedom fighters who care about freedom and radical, murderous terrorists. This is a group who wouldn't shrink from committing atrocities of the likes of 9/11, Bojinka, etc. The fact that the West allows popular resistance to war, public demonstrations, etc. is what makes it such a wonderful place to live in. It's what gives it its moral and political legitimacy. But when I see people touting such crap as this it makes me wonder what would happen if they were taken seriously... C'mon people. Anti-war demonstrations are the bread and butter of America. But if we're going to have them give us something serious, not this self-contradictory, anti-Semitic, ignorant bullshit.

(Photo from here. Click on it to see some truly terrifying anti-Semitism from our Lefty friends in San Francisco. Isn't it a hate-crime to say some of these words?)

Top-notch article from Janet Daley that confirms my general beliefs about this war.

I am an unabashed liberal, but there is a grave danger in being too friendly with your enemy. If we liberals are committed to freedom (remember where the word comes from and what it really means) then we cannot forget Daley's excellent points.

Remember that the original World Trade Center bombing and the planning of both the Bojinka plot and 9/11 occured before we even really knew who G.W. was. Add to this the fact that 9/11 occurred relatively early into his tenure--when he was still just pissing off liberals, environmentalists, and Democrats--and it becomes obvious that we cannot reduce this war to retaliation against a corrupt and immoral Administration. This is a war of ideas where far more is at stake than well-meaning liberals are willing to admit.

Daley writes:

"...many of those same sceptical sophisticates who wished to distinguish so carefully between the various Islamic discontents would also claim that the answer to all our problems was to solve the Palestinian problem (and thus withdraw our support for Israel), which is certainly of little relevance to the anger of Kashmiri separatists with whom most British Muslim suspects identify.

Al-Qa'eda began talking about the Palestinian question after 9/11, only when it found itself having to give a plausible public account of its motives. Until then, it was frank about its actual goal, which is to re-establish the Caliphate over the historic Islamic empire. So maybe those who wish to conciliate this movement, who believe that it can be negotiated with in some rational way, would like to tell us where they would begin making concessions. Would they like to explain to the citizens of Turkey that they may have to sacrifice their secular democracy and be ruled again by the theocracy from which they had broken free? Or perhaps they could persuade the residents of Spain that, since Islam would like to rule the Alhambra once again, they must, in the interests of meeting al-Qa'eda halfway, consider sacrificing this region. Next, perhaps, would be the recognition of sharia law in Muslim-dominated regions of Britain and France.

No wonder the liberals are in disarray. What we are up against is quite outside the limits of our rational political discourse. This enemy does not even bother to offer explanations for its actions that fall within the acceptable bounds of Western debate: it is overtly racist, explicitly imperialistic and unapologetically inhumane...

This is a critical moment. What we must call the "free world" will either decide that it must unite unequivocally against a force so dark that it is almost incomprehensible to democratic peoples, or else succumb to a daydream of denial that is nothing more than appeasement."

Our Plans for this War

The New Yorker has been excellent about breaking news on the Administration's war plans for Iran. Chilling. But will we resist such a war? What are the stakes?

Also, look at what Nasrallah said about Olmert and Peretz. Hezbollah was expecting a "weak" response from Israel, for a short retaliation which would not hurt their operational capacities in any way. Nasrallah himself thus admits that his organization--backed by Iran and Syria--is not one to be negotiated with. Critics in the West often forget that Islamic militant organizations (Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc.) have always relied upon a perception of American and Western unwillingness to respond in force--Western "weakness" or "softness"--to allow them space within which to conduct terror operations. This, of course, does not give the West free hand to shatter this preception by brutal and violent campaigns. However, it should be recognized that Hezbollah is a military organization, not a legitimate political organization or nation-state with which straight-forward negotiation makes any sense. When your enemy, whose explicit goal is to destroy you completely, relies on your weakness to hit you, how can you respond? We cannot forget the ethos of violence that motivates such groups. Israel's withdrawl from Lebanon in 2000 has given Hezbollah time to rearm in frightening proportions while the UN stood-by and watched. I will never cease to believe that war and violence are perversions of humanity, but what good does talk of peace do to one committed to your destruction, whose religious convictions hold that you must die? Remember, this is not the PLO anymore. Secular resistance to Israel is turning into militant Islamic resistance--whether by Sunni Hamas or Shiite Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, Israel's response is turning into a strategic failure with high civilian cauasalties. Is this inevitably the outcome of this Administration's military fiascos (as the article points out, Cheney's war-horse played a large role in planning and supporting the Israeli initiative)? How can we formulate a new set of guidelines by which unnecessary and excessively bloody, albeit limited, warfare appears less like a strategic necessity? How can we ween ourselves from our addiction to air power, which inevitably has bloody consequences? On the other hand, how can we convince the world that sometimes military action against violent, dogmatically motivated and explicitly anti-Western and anti-Israeli groups is necessary?

I do not know how to proceed forward.

Günter Grass

I'm surprised and shocked not to find any American media coverage of one of the biggest stories in Germany right now: Günter Grass's admission after sixty years that he was a member of the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the Nazi organization. See the interview here.

Clarification

My last post was misleading: Mann himself did not live through the Nazi's reign of terror and the Second World War since he, a non-Jew, was in exile in the United States between 1939 and 1952. Hence the title of Brecht's 1943 poem "Als der Nobelpreisträger Thomas Mann den Amerikanern und Engländern das Recht zusprach, das deutsche Volk für die Verbrechen des Hitlerregimes zehn Jahre lang zu züchtigen," a title that acknowledges Mann's distance from the events in Germany that he criticized. See also Brecht's later poem Ich, der Überlebende--one of my favorites--for Brecht's own feelings of guilt at being in exile during this period.

Ich weiß natürlich: einzig durch Glück
Habe ich so viele Freunde überlebt. Aber heute nacht
im Traum
Hörte ich diese Freunde von mir sagen: »Die Stärkeren
überleben«
Und ich haßte mich.

But I think Mann's entire oeuvre speaks to my previous point clearly: the abandonment, relativization, or over-intellectualization of simple humanism and democratic freedom leads inevitably to a barbarism that forgets the value of the human and human culture. We cannot forget what freedom means: we are fighting against a foe that has no respect for Western freedom. Unfortunately, however, our own government seems to forget its value as well.

In the midst of this terrifying, dangerous new world, where conflict rages without forseeable end in all direction, don`t forget the simple wisdom of a man who lived through far worse. We are in the midst of a war that must be won through the strength of ideas and values:

"...the democracy of the West--however outdated its institutions may prove over time, however obstinately its notion of freedom resists what is new and necessary--is nonetheless essentially on the side of human progress, of the goodwill to perfect society, and is by its very nature capable of renewal, improvement, rejuvenation, of proceeding toward conditions that provide great justice in life." - Thomas Mann

One Cheer, One Jeer

Kudos to the French for stepping up to solve this new crisis in the Middle East.

But what Douste-Blazy said is inexcusable. A stabilizing force in the region? I had never heard of a foreign minister taking LSD before going to an official meeting until this...

At the very least the U.S. is consistent: we don't deal any more with criminal regimes that hang homosexuals and girls that have sex out of wedlock.

Look at how disgusting our culture is. How do bigots get the opportunity to run their mouths on every news media service while legitimate anti-war critics are labeled traiters and turncoats?

... History is wise. All will someday become clear...

Here's an excellent collection of international analysis on the war.

This War

I don't fall on either side. I can't make up my mind. With routine questions of war and public policy ethical positions are easy to stake out. With emergencies, with situations of conflict where the stakes are as high as this one, it is much more difficult to do so. Here are the two deciding factors which make it so hard for me to decide where to fall:

1. The Shiite alliance of Hezbullah and Iran openly calls for the eradication of Israel. And their anti-Semitic rhetoric is frighteningly similiar to that of pre-war Hitler's (Andrew Sullivan has had some real nice coverage of this point). Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. And why else? “We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame". Iran now openly admits that they are waging proxy-war on Israel and that they are controlling the decision-making of Hizbullah's leaders (i.e., where is bombed, when, how). Essentially, Israel is being openly attacked by a state that is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and that is bent on nothing short of its eradication. There is no appropriate response for Israel except full use of military force.

2. Look at this terrifying media feature from the New York times. Anyone who was been to Berlin will instantly recognize the similiarities between these before and after pictures and those taken of Berlin before and after the war. A completely bombed-out, ghost of a city. Lebanon is being destroyed and the Lebanese people are dying in droves for the sake of the future of the region and whether it will be decided by an American/Israel axis or a Shiite/Iranian one. This conflict ultimately depends heavily on how strongly Arabs/Sunnis will be won over to Iranian/Shiite cause, respectively. Unfortunately, the longer this war continues, the easier that will be.

Ich benötige keinen Grabstein, aber
Wenn ihr einen für mich benötigt
Wünschte ich, es stünde darauf:
Er hat Vorschläge gemacht.
Wir Haben sie angenommen.
Durch solche Inschrift wären
Wir alle geehrt.

-B.B.

(Photo mine.)

Very, Very Bad News

1. Iran admits to supplying Hizbullah with weapons.

2. Iran pledges to continue to do so.

Good thing Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons yet. If they did, this would only end in their use.