What I Cannot Imagine Is Why Anyone Still Listens To Neocons
When the neo-cons (like me) said that we would be greeted with garlands of roses in Iraq, we meant it. [italics added] We couldn’t imagine anyone preferring an 8th century theocracy to freedom and liberty. But subsequent events in Iraq and Palestine have had to give any thinking person pause. The people of Palestine democratically opted for a government that promises non-stop war with a much more powerful enemy. Where the people of Iraq stand remains opaque. ~Dean Barnett
Actually, I think they prefer mid-tenth century theocracy the best. It is smoother, with only a hint of Hanafite jurisprudence. I’m sorry, am I not taking Mr. Barnett’s article seriously? Where are my manners? This is very serious commentary. Okay, right, I’m listening now.
Of course, the people in Iraq in March 2003 weren’t living in an 8th century or even 21st century theocracy–but we took care of that problem, did we not, Mr. Barnett? One might look at the Shia revival in Iraq in terms of the greater meaning that their religious identity provides them relative to vacuous abstractions like freedom–perhaps then the choice becomes more intelligible. In a way, it is like the burst of nationalism in Yugoslavia: after decades of being told that you could think in these terms, you could not take pride in your national identity, there was a natural pushback that attached even more significance to these things because they had been denied you for so long. Likewise, after decades of having to keep their religion more subdued, when the opportunity for the Shi’ites to express it in all its frenzy and fanaticism came they took it.
But, really, why should we listen to anyone who literally cannot imagine why other human beings would prefer another way of life besides his own? Why heed the recommendations of someone so abominably wrong about Iraq and, through his support for the invasion, about the broader conflict of which the Iraq war is not really a part?
What sort of illiberal (in the sense of uncultivated and narrow), parochial sort of person is literally incapable of entering, figuratively speaking, into the mind of another view of the world, if only superficially, to perceive things differently in order to understand? As usual the people who put the greatest store by their cosmopolitanism and universal values have the most limited horizons, the least knowledge and often have the most profound bigotry towards every other way of life that is not cosmopolitan and in harmony with universal values. People who don’t know where they belong, where they’re from or who they are, because they are equally at home (or rather equally alienated) from every place and define themselves by their values and not their folks and their place, are apparently incapable of understanding people different from themselves. “Flyover country” must be as much a mystery to neocons as it is to the coastal liberals.
Most of human history is filled with people who didn’t prefer “freedom”–the question in many cases never really came up or, when it did, was sternly rejected as a route to license and immorality (well, now that you mention it…) or a prideful rebellion against God (well, you know, they may have had a point there…). Quite a lot of people, including more than a few of all our ancestors, preferred what we today disdainfully call theocracy of one sort or another, but which they saw simply as fulfilling their obligations to God and man. I have no truck with Islam and find its vision of order repugnant, but I can grasp why someone would prefer that to the sort of life offered him by Freedom. In the war between a life of meaning and a life full of empty choices, the former will always prevail among sane people.
Since we think we have no obligations to God–and can go around willy-nilly firebombing cities if we must (of all the bombings to invoke, why do they always cite one of the most heinous atrocities, the bombing of Dresden, as an example of a legitimate precedent?)–we call these people ignorant and declare it irrational theocracy and pat ourselves on the back for being sufficiently godless. When they fail to become as sufficiently alienated and openly irreligious as our culture has become, we consider this to be their failure rather than proof of the undesirability of what we’re “selling.” Neoconservatism, in short, is nothing other than the complete failure of imagination. Lacking imagination, its only solution is the solution of every tyrant and thug in history: kill them, kill them all until they admit that it is over. But if someone views the world through the lenses of an “8th century theocracy,” and they view the war as a sacred obligation, it will never be over. To follow Mr. Barnett’s madness to its logical conclusion, America will be obliged to annihilate whole nations. And Mr. Barnett will shrug and say something about fighting Nazis. That is the face of neoconservatism today.
