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Egads, A Defeatist In Our Midst!

Iraq doesn’t have a government. It has a collection of warlords, demagogues and thieves with official titles. It’s time to put our own politics aside and face reality: If Iraq’s elected leaders won’t stop looting their country long enough to pull together and defeat the foreign terrorists, internal insurgents and militias killing Iraqis, we should […]

Iraq doesn’t have a government. It has a collection of warlords, demagogues and thieves with official titles. It’s time to put our own politics aside and face reality: If Iraq’s elected leaders won’t stop looting their country long enough to pull together and defeat the foreign terrorists, internal insurgents and militias killing Iraqis, we should not ask our troops to defend them. ~Ralph “I’m Not A Racist!” Peters

Of course Mr. Peters isn’t a racist.  Just as everyone who said before the elections that the whole democratisation plan was a terrible idea wasn’t a racist.  At the time, they were something far worse in the eyes of the administration (and Mr. Peters): realists.

Now, all of a sudden, neocons and their hangers-on have rediscovered the importance of culture.  Here is Peters, sounding more like your average contributor to TAC c. 2002 than the lunatic neo-imperialist (and author of such masterpieces as New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy) that he really is:

Arab states are another story: Their social, political, economic and cultural structures leave them catastrophically uncompetitive with the developed world. Societies divided down the middle by religion, inhibited by tribal loyalties and conditioned to accept corruption can’t build healthy democracies.

I’m shocked, simply shocked by the defeatism and lack of resolve!  Mr. Peters probably just wants us all to roll over and die, doesn’t he?  Well, no, but to listen to Mr. Peters a year or two years or three years ago, you’d know that that was exactly what he and his allies thought of people with more foresight than they had.

But if we look closer, the same contempt for normal, more traditional societies that seems to motivate everything the neocons do also fills Mr. Peters’ throat with bile when he contemplates the Near East:

Even the seeming bright spots, such as Lebanon, aren’t true democracies. The Lebanese voted for clans, tribes and faiths, not for policies and programs.

In other words, “true democracies” can only have people who are alienated, deracinated, atomised and stripped of real religious loyalties–you know, members of the “ideological nation,” the “proposition nation.”  Of course, even in modern democracies ethnic and religious loyalties have considerable significance in shaping political values and political affiliations; we pretend that we all vote based on “policies and programs” when far more of us vote according to the same natural, human attachments that people everywhere use to define their political interests, together with our irrational enthusiasms for individual candidates.  For Mr. Peters, things should organised according to a certain kind of merit, “rationality” and the idols of this world.  All of what he says might well be true of mass democracy–perhaps loyalty to clan, tribe and religion are real impediments to its success.  This is why it, as a system of organising political life, will probably fail to endure in most parts of the world that still place high value on “clans, tribes and faiths” or, as Charles Krauthammer put, “tribe or religion or whatever.”  It will thrive among those who put no stock in loyalty to kin, place and religion, but why would any people want to become the kind of miserable people for whom these attachments were not powerful and essential?  Why does any people in the world want to remain in such a miserable state?

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