I promised, in an older post, that I would continue on disemboweling the logic that is Hitchensian (and as contrived as that, I swear to you, friend and reader.) The "I know the origins of the name of the country (no, you don't) therefore I can make a conclusion (you must have a sound premise to have a sound conclusion.) This is the kind of racist logic that is either so common we ignore it, or so ridiculous it inflames us. I wrote the below as an appendix to a work aged years and years back; it came in response to the allegation that Saudi Arabia was fictive because its name was fictive (whatever that means.) All legitimate criticism aside, the Saudi regime cannot be understood to be wanting only because one sees its name as somehow "wanting" -- this is a cheap trick, appealing to a flagging mind, too tired to try.
... ... ... ... ...
On Bad Journalism
During one
of those periods when the Inner Party instructs its minions at Fox News to
insult some Muslim country, a common criticism of the Kingdom arose.
Namely, "Saudi Arabia is the only country named after a family."
While I
agree with the substance of this criticism, insofar as that substance is an essence critical in and of itself of unchallenged monarchy, I do question the colonial spirit hovering around the criticism, since Saudi Arabia is not
as dreadfully strange as it is generally made out to be, nor should its name be the object of fun (and sensitive as I am to how Obama means foreignness and ergo untrustworthiness, bear with me.) Many
countries are named after persons, if not families, yet these lands are spared such
disparagement.
Let's look deeper
into things, shall we?
The Americas, and thus the United States,
are named after an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. Is it better to be named after a royal
family, or a mostly unknown man whose country is associated with pizza? Surely
the stuff American major media debates are made of. There's a country/continent/another continent not named after a family, but a person.
Colombia, the District of Columbia and British Columbia are all named after Christopher Columbus, who, working off of knowledge borrowed
from early 15th century Chinese, Arab and Indian explorers, literally and inspirationally, opened Europe's
way to new empire. I, for one, would not name anything important in my country
after a man who could not distinguish the Caribbean from India, unless of course the Carribean's proximity to India gave Christopher "Country First!" Columbus exceptional foreign policy cred. There's a country/district/province not named after a family, but a person.
Israel was chosen as the name for the
Zionist state, having surpassed other candidates, including the fascinating Ever which, in my opinion, would be
much, much cooler. But what is Israel?
It is another name for the Prophet Jacob, peace be upon him, which arises from
an Old Testament incident in which Jacob wrestles with God. There's a country not named after a family, but a person.
Algeria, Kuwait, Djibouti and Tunisiaare so devoid of any deeper historical correspondence that they
are named after their capitals. In that case, Saudi
Arabia would be Riyadh, America would be Washington,
and Israel would be Tel Aviv.
Uzbekistan, recently released from Soviet
control, is named after the Uzbeks, who might have been so named after Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Uzbek Khan, leader of a Turkic
tribe who was the first of his people to convert to Islam. In his honor, they
named themselves Uzbek, and then went galloping about, conquering other Muslims
and establishing empires, as nomads are so prone to doing. Of course, it was
all in good fun. There's a country not named after a family, but a person.
Kazakhstanand Kyrgyzstan suffer much confusion, as before the 1920's, the Kazakh were the Kyrgyz, and
the Kyrgyz were the Kara-Kyrgyz. Naturally, Stalin made up a new identity for
the two "peoples" (divide in order to disintegrate), and everybody eventually went
along. Minus the millions of deaths Communism was responsible for, the purges of thousands upon thousands of Muslims, Russians, Jews, dissidents, etc. But substantively: There's a country named after the wrong people. And the other one, too, sort of. Don't be surprised if the two countries go to war over all this one day.
Don’t you just love it when someone who has no expertise and
yet still the pretense to propose, with smug self-satisfaction, that he does? After writing a book in which he criticizes all religion for practically being the source of all human evil, and
simultaneously endorses the Bush administration’s agenda, rooted very much in a
right-wing understanding of Christianity, now Christopher Hitchens has turned
his sights on Pakistan. This can only mean both Pakistan and logic will suffer. Poor Pakistan; poor logic. You are both too often and sometimes unfairly hated on.
I found this
article through the wonderful website Talk Islam (original post), which I only very rarely contribute to,
which you can blame on my laziness or my busyness, depending on how you are
feeling. I really must say Christopher
Hitchens is becoming a bothersome little man. It was bad enough that God is Not Great came with such ugly arguments in such ugly yellow,
a "book" poorly researched, warning of a simplistic mind, incapable of the deeper appreciation of the nuances of human thought,
theology, as well as causality. I happily eviscerated that book in a post
which generated a lot of attention, precisely because so many Muslims were so
sick of hearing that man continue to yap. Where once before he boasted that he knew the definite article in Arabic (congratulations!), now he pridefully claims to understand acronym formation in Urdu (and Persian) and, therefore, understands why Pakistan "failed."
I simply don’t understand how it is that one can endorse the
war, become its biggest cheerleader, watch it fall apart and cause the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of people, as well as the squandering of hundreds of
billions of dollars, and continue to believe somewhere in one’s mind that one
continues to be a competent observer of human affairs. Why do such people still have jobs? How can you be so off, so tremendously, and still be an "authority"? Now Christopher Hitchens has turned his
sights on Pakistan, and he is right insofar as he is pointing to the designs
of the Pakistani government (more properly, the government within the
government) on controlling Afghanistan or at least keeping it out of the
Indian orbit (a point which would, in part, explain unfortunate Pakistani policy decisions which Hitchens entirely is unaware of). Fairly, Pakistan's foreign policy has often been disastrous; in the case of the 1971 war, it was brutal, merciless and vile. Hitchens talks about how
dangerous Pakistan has
become, and how dangerous Pakistani colonial designs on Afghanistan are
for the future fight against terrorism. If this is the case, pray tell, what the hell did Iraq have to do
with the war on terrorism? Forget that: First of all, Mr Hitchens, define terrorism. And then: How possibly can America "handle" Pakistan, which has the arms, the instability and complexity to dwarf Afghanistan or Iraq, plus about three times the population of the two put together? No answer. Just absurd rhetoric, absent context (no mention of the reasons Pakistan fears India, or the genocidal campaigns in Gujurat against Muslim minorities, feeding brutal terrorism in return.)
But the most
galling segment of his piece has to be a paragraph in
which he simultaneously demonstrates his unawareness of subcontinental history and thinks it sufficient to sum up his punchy, snarky argument with this incorrect analysis. You may think this is too harsh. Wait for me to finish.
The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It
is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by
a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan
suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym
means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name
expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory
ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim
but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India.
Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name,
despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part
of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against
genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a
restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level
secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because
Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste
(which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind).
As I once wrote,
the country's name "might as easily be rendered as 'Akpistan' or
'Kapistan,' depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or
Kashmir is to the fore."
First of all, the name “Pakistan” was not the creation of
anyone affiliated with the movement to guarantee Muslim rights within the
subcontinent. It was the creation of a
man, said Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, on the fringes of the Muslim independence movement within the Indian context, doodling dreams of Muslim revivalism while stuffed up at Oxford. So absurd were these that Ali planned for most of India to fall under Muslim rule, and to be renamed the "Pak Confederation" on the Continent of Dinia (get it? get it part two?) Ali considered Pakistan to be
some kind of sovereign or extremely autonomous entity
within the greater
framework of the Indian subcontinent, yet associated with other such entities of Muslim majority or significance. The reason there is no “B” in Pakistan,
for Bengal, is because the author of the scheme anticipated that there would be
a separate sovereign area for Bengal, named Bangistan or Bang-i-Islam(istan). The plan called for ten Muslim territories, whose names would either be an acronym, or evoke something specific to the territory; the name was eventually picked up by the Muslim League some years later, and did not necessarily include or refer to Bengal, which may have been intended to be separate from Pakistan (but tied to it). Not to mention the "stan" was often taken to refer to Baluchistan...
Secondly, the name caught on despite the absurdity of the
original plan behind it. The name caught
on because it was catchy, it was easy to say, and through its Persianate
connotations, evoked the romantic past that all nationalisms are susceptible
to. "Land of the Pure," yes; that is not therefore racist expansionist jingoism. This does not make Pakistan any
different, or any worse, than any other country. Simply because its name has been created does
not imply any sense of artificiality: What exactly does Hitchens mean when he says, "it is not a real country or nation." Was Belgium real? Did it become real? What about Georgia, or Moldova, or England, or France? One could argue the same of so many other countries. One could also point to strong national identities and strong state institutions which were simultaneously colonial or savage, say England or Germany; that a nation is weakly realized does not mean its idea is itself weak. Its institutions, environment, economy or leadership could, jointly or severally, be to blame.
In this respect, Christopher
Hitchens, supposed enemy of religion and metaphysics, has proven himself to
be all the more of a hypocrite. How
can a nation not be “artificial”? Does
Hitchens believe that some nations are natural, organic entities? If so, when did he become a proponent of the logic that gives us Aryan race theory? Doesn't this smack of religion? One can argue that
nations are more contrived, or less realistic (pragmatically speaking), but we must be honest: the
narratives by which nations are created and sustained are of course artificial
in so far as they are firstly often terribly historically inaccurate and
secondly, quite obviously the creation of human beings and do not respond to
any kind of biological or essential fact. This explains why until 1946, perhaps even
until early 1947, the supporters of the Paksitan movement did not seem to
intend an independent Muslim state, but rather one or several very autonomous
territories of Muslim majority within the framework of a loosely confederated
Indian state.
Thirdly, the author of the name “Pakistan” was an astute
observer in one respect: when Jinnah finally agreed to the partition plan as it
was proposed by the British, even though he was very much against its boundaries, Rahmat Ali noted
that the eastern wing of the country should be forthwith granted independence
or a great degree of autonomy in all practical and economic matters. In fact, historical records prove that Jinnah
as well as prominent members of the Muslim League were never opposed to the
creation of two or more independent Muslim states on the Indian subcontinent,
though when we say independent, it is of course unclear whether the Muslim League actually wanted a truly independent state or a confederation of
Muslim and Hindu (and even Sikh) states within some kind of constitutional
framework that allowed for the possibility of secession as well as the
possibility of greater unification. Thus
the “two nation theory” is not in fact an argument that there should be two
nations in place of British India. The point is, that in the view of the Muslim
league, the Muslim population of India was sufficiently homogenous
to merit the status of “nation” and to demand rights, by virtue of its coherence, at both the regional and all-India levels of government. Congress disagreed in some respects; the dispute was never resolved, the British rarely helped and often hurt; hence Partition...
Fourthly, by what measure does Hitchens argue that all the
territories represented by the individual letters of the acronym “Pakistan” were part of India and hence the country is nonsenical? I hate when I hear this; Pakistan did not secede from India. Colonial British India became independent as two states of equal age and international standing. Of course what is Pakistan was Indian in the 1930's, if by Indian you mean India as a British colony! They were, furthermore, part of the United Kingdom at
the time, which further gives proof for the inane comment that there is no
letter “B” for Britain in the name "Pakistan", nor a "UK," either. There
is, in case you haven’t noticed, no such letter in the name "India" either. The Pakistan movement was one
of several movements or trends in the subcontinent which were aimed at freeing
the subcontinent from British rule. The disagreements began as Indians of different backgrounds, classes,
ideals and values, not to mention languages, religions, and regions, debated
what exactly an independent India should look like and how it should work. To say Kashmir and Punjab were part of India in 1933 is to state the obvious (for Hitchens, correspondence with reality can be a victory); to state that not even all of Punjab went to Pakistan is to state the trauma: Jinnah wanted whole provinces under larger groupings for the purposes of autonomy. This didn't work, but it doesn't mean Hitchens is therefore telling us anything.
I will follow this up
shortly with a second post which explains how stupid it is, in every sense of
that word, to say that a country is not real because its name is an acronym. What is real? One could say the very same thing, regarding instability and failed national cohesion, about Afghanistan; is it not real? Or, Iraq! Perhaps it is not a country, but a figment of an anti-religion activist's imagination, a dream in which he urged a religious Christian to invade it, to save it from the tyranny religion causes. Many people died, but the man never woke up.
It does not take an empire to end
an empire. Often it is not even that the empire has been defeated, but that the
empire, swollen on pride, tries to swallow too much and finally, deservedly, helplessly,
predictably – and so on – chokes. (Empires are obese; empires are gluttons.) It
takes an empire to end itself, then.
Shall we begin/end?
By the turn of the 15th
century, it was clear that Usman’s dynasty was not only successfully but fatally
challenging Byzantine rule. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the Ottomans fielded
the most powerful armies on the planet. Even well after the Ottoman went into
decline, they continued to fight off powers with resources considerably greater
than their own. Certainly states cannot and should not be judged on
military performance alone. But considering how crucial conflict is to the latest
imperial narrative, we should compare the progress of the current American drive
to empire to the ghosts of empires past.
Because it takes time for the
propaganda to catch up with the reality of things: From the death of the
Prophet Muhammad to the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople,
821 years intervened. If the same length of time lapsed thence till the present,
the readjusted present would be 2274 and James T. Kirk would have just wound
down his five-year mission exploring the galaxy. (Good for him.) These
numbers are important, because they provide context, perspective and humility
at a time when we most require them. It’s been eleven years since the launch of
the neo-conservative “Project for a New American Century” – and in that time,
the desire to preserve empire has clashed fatally with the inability to sustain
it, let alone project it.
In 1991, the Soviet Union crumbled and
the United States made and
monopolized a massive global coalition against Iraq. How often we study history
and how little we learn from it. In that year, who would have denied America was the
most recent edition of the Western hegemon? While deeper signs pointed to an
exaggeration of American capabilities (especially considering the chosen enemy), neo-conservatives fixated on completely conquering Iraq, pushing and prodding
Clinton and then Bush to go all the way to Baghdad. They became obsessed with
the place, in a strange and stupid way no reasonable person today can explain.
Except the irony. In the idea of an American Iraq was the ascendancy of true
empire. In its execution, the downfall.
Unlike Vietnam’s
potent combination of Communism and nationalism, so far Iraqi resistance to America is more
often overshadowed by internal fragmentation and civil slaughter. At best (or
worst), Iraq’s
resistance consists of a series of militias who have offered no vision for
Iraqi unification or even reconciliation. Their inability to produce more than
violence, instability and incoherence is symptomatic of the broader
intellectual and moral crisis afflicting the Muslim world. Yet what of America, then, sitting atop a country far more
fragmented than Vietnam
and still stuck. We have been revealed economically and politically incapable
of controlling a poor country ravaged by decades of war. And the response? The
Imperialists who whipped us into the conquering frenzy now announce plans for Iran. I am watching
a man choking on a bone while reaching, simultaneously, for another bite. We can't build nations; author Parag Khanna points out the absurdity of America, the world's allegedly wealthiest nation, dozens of miles from Haiti, one of the world's poorest societies -- where we've intervened numerous times -- and we cannot bring order there.
How then in Iraq, never mind Afghanistan or Iran?
This must be some kind of imperial
malaise, a peculiar form of insecurity and overconfidence, frothing at the
mouth and screaming and shuddering and hiding. Iran’s
GDP compares favorably with a wealthy New England state, one of only fifty in
the Union. Our latest quest for empire
continues to pretend it is but a drive to survive – somehow we, the world’s
wealthiest, are the oppressed – exaggerating the enemy’s capacity to exaggerate
our capacity. Even our “greatest generation,” so often invoked and valorized, did
not fight so unaided. Let alone this preemptively. Had we, on the advice of
certain non-minds among us, jumped the gun on Hitler, we may never have allowed
Hitler to betray Stalin and turn the Man of Steel into our ally. The Soviets
would have likely assisted Germany
(and Japan) out of fear that
once America had Germany out of
the way, their turn would doubtless come next, a potentially deadly
shot-in-the-foot eclipsed only by George Bush’s actual axis of evil silliness.Too bad we didn’t think through
that thought experiment before trying to steamroll Iraq in 2003. Eventually history
calls the bluff; it has before.
But empires are not cautious, nor particularly reflective.
In Korea,
we fought for two years. To a stalemate. That war is still not over, and
the fate of North Korea
remains undemocratic and terrible. In Vietnam, despite unloading a
massive tonnage of bombs upon farms and forests, we were defeated. Our more
recent targets have been so globally marginal that to call them wars is in fact
conceptually insulting: who can believe that Panama in 1989 or Iraq
in 1991 were actual adversaries? The answer to Iraq is not Iran,
it is admitting the practical limits of our power in the world and asking the
moral limits of our role in the world. (Something few of our potential future
leaders have done. We have a very big problem, and bigger still that the Republican
candidate for President has little capacity for humility and little
awareness of the scope of the problem. After all this, no less.) Otherwise, at some point, it has to end. Whether at Stalingrad,
Moscow or Vienna;
whether after centuries or decades or a dozen years.
A few days ago, a problematic albeit typical editorial in the NYU student newspaper featured the rantings of a students concerned that the greatest threat to the West was a homogenous menace known as Islamic fundamentalism.
These kinds of articles are a dime a dozen these days, maybe all the more so because we are in an election cycle and such topics unfortunately have a habit of saturating the media while not contributing an iota of enlightenment to our general understanding of the issues involved. An NYU student wrote a rebuttal, but I offer some advice, which I reproduce below, in case one is ever in a situation where one has to respond to these general types of articles and arguments.
Because it seems we must always be prepared to write back to nonsense.
Islam Writes Back
Firstly, be especially chary of any argument that says, "such and such
terrorist group attacked country X, but not Y." While I think this is
a valid argument and an especially illuminating one, it can be
rhetorically dangerous because it invites the suggestion, however
remote, that a certain population deserved what happened to it. The
tone must emphasize our absolute and
total opposition to evil and to murder and to attacks upon the
innocent, no matter the origins of those attacks or the rhetoric used to justify them (modern warfare is terroristic in nature, and promotes terror as a tool for "accelerating" war -- reducing losses on "our" side while indifferent to the harm caused the other's innocents). Putting this first and foremost is especially powerful
and useful: Muslims oppose all violence against innocents.
Secondly, be certain to emphasize the casual and in fact
intellectually lazy if not stupid use of the word "terror". No writer
who rants and raves about how Islam is supposedly on the verge of
conquering the West has ever shown himself or herself capable of
defining terror, let alone Islam or the West. This is their weakest
point. Their inability to use language
coherently, and their obvious incapability for thinking consistently needs to be called out. They throw around
definitions in such a way that should embarrass any NYU faculty
member.
Thirdly, point out how many
Muslims live in democracies. The largest Muslim nation in the world by
population is a democracy. Many Muslims live in democracies or states
that are failed democracies but nonetheless aspire to democratic
status, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India; there are also active
Muslim democracies in Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Mali and Senegal. This is in
fact part of the above point: what defines Islam? What defines the
Muslim world? What defines the West? Simply pointing out that half of
the worlds Muslims live in democracies is sufficient to completely
crush any such argument of a uniform West and a uniform Muslim world.
Fourthly, be sure to throw in some economics and some figures
and facts to really shed light on the silliness of arguments that
pretend the West is under siege from the Islamic world. This is
especially aggravating when smaller minds presume to tell us that we
have not faced a threat so great since Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military and largest economy
arguably of its time, at least the most sophisticated. Nazi Germany
was able to conquer most of Europe and drive deep into Russia in the
span of a few years; the United States could never have defeated Nazi
Germany alone. Neither England nor France nor America could likely
have defeated Germany without the help and sacrifice of the Soviet
Union.
And we are supposed to imagine that somehow countries like
Iran or Pakistan represents similar types of threats to the world. Are
we using drugs? The total annual military budget of Pakistan, which
arguably has the most sophisticated military in the Muslim world -- and
is the only nuclear power in the Muslim world -- is round about the
same as the Harvard University's endowment ($20-30 billion). Put
another way, Harvard could spend its endowment and in one year equal
the military of Pakistan. Now, that is obviously a silly example but
its silliness points to reality. Extremist groups threaten the Muslim
world far more than they do the West, because as they tactically
realize their insignificance and relative backwardness, they will
necessarily turn their anger and rage and violence towards their fellow
citizens -- because it is technologically and strategically impossible
for them to sustain any sort of attack on the West.
In other words,
they are simply too weak to cause serious or long-term harm to the
West.
And regime change, it turns out, is infectious—a militarily
transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any
political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have
had intimate relations with the Bush Administration’s Mesopotamian
misadventure.
A week ago last Saturday, John Howard, the second-longest-serving
Prime Minister of Australia, became the newest casualty of this
political epidemic. Howard’s case is unusual, both for the slavishness
with which he has followed Bush’s lead and for the comprehensiveness of
his defeat. After a decade in office, and at a time of widespread
economic contentment, his center-right coalition was decisively ousted
at every level of government. He even lost his parliamentary seat. His
fealty to Bush, not only on Iraq but also, and at least as important,
on climate change, was, of course, not the only factor. But it colored
everything.
Two episodes helped solidify the public’s fed-upness. As close
observers of our own election campaign may recall, the Australian Prime
Minister greeted Barack Obama’s entry into the Presidential race—and
his proposal, at about the same time, for an American withdrawal from
Iraq by next March—with a sneer. “If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq,”
Howard said, “I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many
times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the
Democrats.”
... the crispest rebuke
came from Obama himself, who, after calling the attack flattering,
said, “I would also note that we have close to a hundred and forty
thousand troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr.
Howard has deployed fourteen hundred. So if he’s ginned up to fight the
good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another twenty
thousand Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a
bunch of empty rhetoric.”
Then, in early September, Bush decided to drop in on the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
group to give his old mate an electoral boost. The event, which
officially described itself as “the most significant international
gathering of an economic kind that Australia has hosted,” was supposed
to be the zenith of Howard’s premiership. It turned out to be the
nadir. He was humiliated when Kevin Rudd chatted with the President of
China in perfect Mandarin. He was humiliated when a popular TV satire
troupe called the Chaser mounted a fake motorcade, flying a Canadian
flag and featuring a rented limo with an actor dressed as Osama bin
Laden in the back seat, and got within ten yards of Bush’s hotel,
making a mockery of an elaborate, war-on-terror-inspired security
lockdown that had encased downtown Sydney in a “ring of steel.” Bush,
for his part, made a fool of himself (and, by extension, of his host)
by calling APEC “OPEC” and Australian troops “Austrian troops.” The Bush boost was a Bush bust.
Many years ago, while attending an ISNA conference in Chicago, I recall being especially intrigued and perhaps worried by an historical comment made by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. He argued that despite all America's influence on the world, this paled before the centuries long impression the Ottoman Empire left not only on its constituent peoples, but on the wider Muslim world. At the time I thought this was some kind of traditionalist hyperbole; allying as it does with a history sympathetic to his understanding of Islam, indeed corroborative of it, I didn't put much stock in it.
My mistake.
Born in the early 14th century, the Ottoman Empire developed almost unknown to the world around it. It was only around the turn of the 15th century that it was clear that a new power had emerged straddling the previous territories of the Byzantine heartland, and that the capacities of this force -- which were based in the nomadic shock warfare that had allowed the Mongols to so overwhelm the heartland of the Muslim world -- were capable of reaching far into Europe and across much of the Middle East. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire was likely the most powerful military force on the planet. Even well after the Ottomans went into decline in the early 18th century, they remained capable of military victories for a further 100 years, and that against powers with resources and military capacities equal to if not greater than their own. Of course, a state cannot be judged by military capacity alone, nor should it be. But considering how crucial military supremacy is to the American narrative, it is fascinating how deceptive that narrative has turned out to be. Not to mention how terribly short in length.
From the death of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.) to the Ottoman capture of Constantinople spanned 821 Christian years. Since then only 550-odd years have passed. If the same length of time were to have lapsed from the passing of the Byzantine Empire till the present day, then the present day would be 2272, and James T. Kirk would have finished his five year mission exploring the galaxy. I like to tell my students facts such as these to keep in mind the tremendous spread of history, and how important it is we not excessively privilege our perspective, in the belief that all important matters have been decided simply because they take a certain shape at the time we live or the time we are studying.
In that light, I would like to talk about the myth of the American superpower. If you remember that the Soviet Union fell at around the same time the United States was able to lead a massive coalition and pummel Iraq into so much uranium coated dust, it seemed to the world that the era of an unparalleled new Roman Colossus had emerged. It was not too much for neoconservative so-called thinkers to project their vision of how to maintain this supremacy well into the next century. Those of us who found this unpalatable and undemocratic, dangerous indeed to the very foundations of the Republic for which we should stand, were more concerned by the damage such a policy would do to America, not the on likelihood of such a policy were it to be seriously pursued. I was, in part, misled by the myth of power, and did not pay sufficient attention to the economic realities far more affective than pure rhetoric or planning.
I have to admit that in 2003, when the invasion of Iraq proceeded, I could not foresee a defeat so total. The United States has not only failed to control Iraq, it has embarrassed itself. This is no Vietnam. We are not facing an ideology such as communism which for decades had tremendous and undeniable attractiveness to peoples of numerous religions and ethnicities throughout the world. We are facing a localized insurgency, which is caught up with a broad civil war; we are not facing even the entirety of the Iraqi people, and yet we have bankrupted ourselves, ruined our reputation, and now our government -- or more specifically the office of the Vice President -- is concerned with attacking Iran. Why? Because, as Seymour Hersh argues in his must-read New Yorker article of this week, it is clear that our bumbling policy has led to an Iranian victory in the Middle East, and the deep moral principle on which such an attack would stand is: we are jealous of your success based on our ill-thought policy. So we will simply smart-bomb you into the ground. After all, the American Century can have no challengers.
Looking back, it has been only 16 years since the first Gulf War, and yet how much has changed! Can we imagine where we will be as a country in a further 16 years? When I criticize neoconservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz, I used to think my criticism would be a moral criticism more than anything else. Now however the criticism must be laced with the inevitable objection that we are simply not capable of handling third-rate third world powers. Never mind the hubris of insulting the Iranian president for his denial of the Holocaust when we have elected a president who, in the words of comedian Lewis Black, believes the Flintstones are a documentary. We are simply economically and technologically incapable of mounting an invasion of a poor country, ravaged by decades of war, and controlling that country. We lack the intellectual expertise, the language skills, the military appropriate to the task, and the depth of commitment -- in no small part because of the remaining strong moral conscience among enough Americans to convey a serious opposition to any such adventure -- to do what the neoconservatives want us to do.
Indeed our military record, of which we are so proud, is not as terrific as our propaganda would like it to be. We would have never won World War II without the assistance of England, France, and Russia, especially Russia. It was Russia the defeated the Nazis. Had we, on the advice of certain non-minds among us, jumped the gun on Hitler, we may never have allowed Hitler to betray Stalin, and would have ended up facing a war against Nazi Germany and Japan without the assistance of the Soviet Union; indeed the Soviet Union may have assisted Nazi Germany out of fear that Western opposition to dictatorship would not spare communism.
In that case it is very likely that we would not have won, but simply exhausted ourselves. After World War II, our military record continues to problematize. In Korea, we fought for two years to a stalemate. In Vietnam, despite massive tonnage of weaponry and bombs, we were defeated. Our other wars have taken place against non-entities so pathetically inferior to us that to call them wars is in fact conceptually insulting: who can believe that Panama in 1989 or Iraq in 1991 were serious adversaries? As compared to the empires of previous generations, which fought wars against powers comparable to themselves, much as England did against Germany, or Russia did against Germany, we have very little to brag about. And yet we continue bragging.
One of the best lessons of history should be a sense of humility. We simply have no idea how quickly how much can change. And considering this was supposed to be our century, the first decade of it is indeed sobering for anyone who advocates further war.
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