There is evidence that our involvement in the Middle East has made some people living in the region angry enough to want to kill Americans. That fact doesn’t automatically dictate what our foreign policy should be, nor does it follow that if we were to leave the region tomorrow that Islamist terrorism would cease to be a problem. But it shouldn’t be beyond the pale to bring up. ~Jim Antle

Jim’s post makes many important points.  I have to agree that Ron Paul failed as a matter of debating tactics when he did not try to finesse the answer to play to the emotions of the crowd, but then Ron Paul never finesses his answers to play to the emotions of the crowd.  This is why he is frequently right and doesn’t get swept up in mass hysteria.  When his colleagues were foolishly plunging ahead on Iraq–which most of Paul’s current critics still believe to have been the right thing to do, which ought to obliterate their credibility at once–he was virtually alone on his side of the aisle in opposing the war.  The mindless Republican near-unanimity that took us into Iraq persists and causes most Republicans to fail to think critically about the nature and purpose of our foreign policy.  If Giuliani appears to have “won” the debate yesterday, he and the other candidates have made it clear in their Paul-bashing that the GOP is a party that favours myth and visceral emotionalism over serious thought.  Such is the deplorable nature of mass democracy that this sort of party might still do well in an electoral contest, but I think most of the country has grown sick of this stuff after all these years and the majority has been trying to purge its system of this toxic irrationalism.  Little noted in all of the post-debate commentary were Paul’s remarks that 2006 was lost because of the war and the majority of the country is against the standard GOP view: political realism, to say nothing of sane policy, dictates that the candidates offer some evidence of adjustment and reflection that actually amounts to more than mentioning “Islamic fascism” or “extremism” every three sentences.

As much as I and others who support Paul are thrilled that he is out there challenging these other candidates, it does make you ask the question: what would make anyone believe that a party that is 70% or more behind the Iraq war is going to be receptive to a lesson in how fundamentally they have departed from their own foreign policy traditions?  If the calamity of Iraq has not sobered them up, what good will history lessons do?  Even if they will acknowledge that this departure from tradition is true, they won’t want to hear that they have fallen into the ditch of hegemonism.  Denial in action is an awesome thing to behold.  Besides, many of these are people so far gone that they think that criticising policy as flawed and dangerous and “blaming America first” are the same thing.  (Incidentally, accusing someone of “blaming America first” is simply the code that these people use when their adversary engages in cultural or political criticism that they cannot answer with argument and feel compelled to resort to flag-waving and sloganeering–it is an ideological reflex totally divorced from thinking.)  Many can’t even manage the most elementary distinction between government and country, regime and people, and so cannot begin to grasp that opposition to ongoing policy implemened by the state is almost always motivated by devotion to the country’s welfare. 

Of course, it’s possible that departing from the Near and Middle East entirely would not bring an end to jihadi attacks on American targets.  Not likely, but possible.  Lessons from past insurgencies suggest that the attacks cease when the policies or actions that have been met with violent responses have been stopped.  It seems to me that you could make an argument that, say, having friendly ports in the Gulf is significant enough for our national interests that our government would be irresponsible as a matter of national interest to yield to demands that we never use those ports or base anyone in those countries.  I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that argument, but that is the kind of argument that someone would need to make to even begin to sound credible in defending an interventionism that provokes terrorist responses.  The benefits of intervention would have to clearly outweigh the costs that it brings with it.  The point normally made by non-interventionists is, of course, that the costs are almost always much higher and there are almost never any meaningful benefits for America.  In response interventionists say, “The sacrifice is worth it.”  They don’t elaborate, because I imagine they’re not even sure what they mean when they say this.  Anyway, there would need to be an argument that could credibly say that remaining in Iraq for the foreseeable future is so vital to the American interest that it is worth the risk of Iraqis (or some other jihadi motivated by anger over our presence there) one day possibly launching terrorist strikes on American soil.  Obviously, it’s nowhere near that important to America.  Continuing the Iraq war creates additional unacceptable and unnecessary risks for American security that can be eliminated by ending the war. 

This is the real question of any policy debate: every approach entails risk of one kind or another, and the wise and prudent man tries to find the policy that involves the least risk while securing essential national goods.  Part of the debate then involves determining what those national goods are.  Some people think voting Arabs belong in this category, while most do not.  Some think that propping up an openly sectarian government friendly to Iran is worth the lives of American soldiers, while opponents of the war do not.  Some believe that ruining our military in the sands of Iraq is essential to winning the “war on terror,” while others disagree.  Who seems to be more in the right? 

The Vice President was a great one for talking about risk before the invasion–the risk of inaction was too great!  Well, as it turns out, the risk of inaction was substantially less than he claimed and much more in line with what opponents of the invasion said it was.  It doesn’t require someone to be a dedicated America Firster to know that the current policy advocated and defended by the majority of the Republican candidates, most Republican voters and this administration is failing to secure American interests and is exposing this country to increased, unnecessary risks.  Our presence in Saudi Arabia, which did directly contribute to the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, has now been replaced by a presence in Iraq that seems to have no logical or obvious conclusion and which also seems to be serving no obvious American interest.  Ron Paul proposes trying to shield America from these unnecessary risks, and for this he is routinely denounced and belittled by this supposed “big tent” party that is brimming with ideological diversity.

It is amusing to watch the gaggle of these other Republican candidates hold forth about the threat of Islam (Giuliani now claims to be some sort of expert), when they seem to have absolutely no historical perspective on any of this.  Tancredo expressed this view most absolutely when he cut to the heart of the issue: “…whether Israel existed or didn’t, whether or not we were in the Iraq war or not, they would be trying to kill us because it’s a dictate of their religion, at least a part of it, and we have to defend ourselves.”  Tancredo is sort of right, and yet also so horribly wrong that I cringed when I heard this. 

Is jihad an integral part of Islam?  Yes.  Will there always be those who pursue jihad and try to subject non-Muslims to Islamic rule?  Yes.  Of course, where and under what circumstances jihadis will be doing this are all determined by any number of other factors.  There are jihadis in Kashmir, but not terribly many in Gujarat–perhaps that has something to do with the political disputes over Kashmir?  There are or have been jihadis in the Caucasus, Kosovo and Bosnia, but not terribly many in Indonesia, which may have something to do with violent contestation for power in the former.  It seems plain that jihad comes to the fore when Muslims are caught up in conflict with non-Muslims, but otherwise the “dictate of their religion” remains more or less dormant.  So, I put it to the majority of Republicans, why would you pursue policies that seem intent on provoking more conflicts with Muslims if you are interested in quelling jihadism and undermining its appeal?  Either you have no idea what you are doing, in which case the rest of us should not heed your advice, or you are going about seeking the right goal in entirely the wrong way.   

Jihad has existed in its fully formalised and elaborated form for approximately one thousand years, and yet jihadis (very broadly defined) took an interest in attacking Americans only in 1979.  For some reason, Maghrebi Muslims were not gathering themselves into boats to raid the Jamestown settlement in a trans-Atlantic razzia.  For some reason, the ruler of Morocco was among the first to recognise the independence of the United States; one of our earliest treaties was with the Moroccan monarchy.  There was a war against Tripoli to secure our shipping in the Mediterranean, which was a war against piracy.  From 1805 until 1979, it is exceedingly difficult to think of many episodes when the “dictate of their religion” so motivated zealous Muslims to attack Americans.  As ties with Israel have deepened and our military profile in the region has increased, jihadi attacks have also increased.  Now, as the old saying goes, correlation is not causation, but it is awfully curious that Muslims studiously overlooked a “dictate of their religion” for most of our national history in our dealings with them and only happened to rediscover them at the moment that we embarked on policies that were not all together friendly to at least certain Muslim groups and states.  Of course, we have enjoyed geographical distance from the Islamic world, and as inhabitants of this continent we have a certain luxury of distance that our cousins in Europe do not have, which is why it is so perplexing why anyone would actively promote a narrowing of this distance to bring us into ever-greater contact with people who are, in Mr. Tancredo’s estimation, out to kill us.  The point is, surely, even if Tancredo were right (and he largely is not right), we would be far better advised to limit our points of contact with the Islamic world in every imaginable way than to expand them through ever-wider rounds of intervention, democratisation efforts and the like.  Even by the standards of the wild Republican vision of the conflict with jihadis, the Republicans have been going about things in almost entirely the wrong way. 

The history of Islam from the beginning has been one involving much strife, bloodshed and the invasions of non-Muslim lands, and anyone talking about this should harbour no illusions on this score (I certainly don’t), but as a result of political fragmentation of the Ottoman territories after WWI there has been no Islamic polity capable of projecting power or significantly threatening Europe or any of the countries bordering the Islamic world.  The pathetic political and economic weakness and general geopolitical irrelevance of the Islamic world (Luttawak is right on this) has contributed to the eruption of mujahideen on the borders of that world where there are relatively small-scale conflicts.  Terrorism and even the pursuit of an “Islamic bomb” are the responses of a world desperately outclassed and outmatched in almost every measurable way by its neighbouring civilisations.  Those who have been on the losing end of global cultural and economic transformations almost always grasp for the sword and try to redeem their losses through power–the American conservative movement can understand this response a little too well, I think–and thereby confirm their own lack of deeper reserves of strength.

Of another excessively hyped and misunderstood, albeit real, threat, George Kennan said 54 years ago:

They [anti-communists] distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal.  They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat.  They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago.  They insist on ascribing to the workings of domestic communism evils and frustrations which, in so far as they were not part of the normal and unavoidable burden of complexity in our life, were the product of our behaviour generally as a nation, and should today be the subject of humble and contrite soul-searching on the part of all of us, in a spirit of brotherhood and community, rather than of frantic and bitter recrimination.  And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.  (from George Kennan: A Study of Character by John Lukacs, p. 193-194)

Though not entirely applicable to the present situation, this quote points to many of the flaws in what passes for a lot of anti-Islamist or anti-jihadi thought today.  If Kennan was the anticommunist anti-anticommunist (where he was opposed to communism, but also strongly critical of populist, ideological anti-communism), perhaps the time has come for an anti-jihadi anti-anti-jihadist.