THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VI, Issue # 106, May 24, 2004
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE WORLD, THE MIDDLE EAST, & MILITANT ISLAM
By Alan Caruba
FULL STORY:
Sometimes I have to remind myself that I did not wake up and go to sleep every day hearing, seeing, and reading about the Middle
East. For much of my life, it was little more than a setting for the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” and, earlier, movies about Sinbad. I
vaguely understood it to be a very backward place consisting mostly of sand.
There isn’t much good to be said of the Middle East. After World War I, Great Britain and France divided it between each other.
World War II made it necessary for the U.S.A. to ally with Saudi Arabia to insure a steady supply of oil. Mostly though, it has been
lurking around our consciousness since the founding of Israel in 1948. That initiated what would turn out to be more than fifty years
of unrelenting Islamic hostility to a nation about the size of New Jersey.
Israel’s only real ally would be America. Israel is the only real constitutional democracy in the Middle East. It has been through an
endless series of wars and other events that have required some of our attention, but not much while the Cold War continued.
When the Soviet Union came to an end, every nation was thrust into a new world and one very much in need of a new set of rules
with which to relate to one another.
A book by Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map ($24.95, G.P. Putnam’s Sons) looks at “War and Peace in the
Twenty-First Century.” Barnett, a futurist and analyst for the Pentagon, spells out a new set of “rules” which the world is now
fashioning.
At the heart of those rules is “globalization,” the way one part of the world is “connected” by economic and other treaties, the
magic of modern communications, and how another part, the Middle East, is seeking to remain “unconnected” from the West,
presumably to protect Islam and the sources of power that permit despots to continue ruling over the lives of billions of its people.
The Middle East is in the grip of a first class lunatic called Osama bin Laden, who, on 9-11, got the world’s attention. His goal is to
disconnect the Middle East from the rest of the world and, if that means killing a lot of infidels and a lot of Muslims, so be it. Israel,
always the background music to everything else in the Middle East, has a problem called Yasser Arafat. Until he dies, there isn’t a
hope of peace with the socalled Palestinians.
“The grand historical arc of our relationship with Islam is clearly peaking with the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam
Hussein’s regime and rehabilitate Baathist Iraq, much as we did with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan following WW II,” writes
Barnett. “Over the long run, the real danger we face in this era is more than just the attempts by terrorists to drive the U.S.A. out of
the Middle East; rather, it is their increasingly desperate attempts to drive the Middle East out of the world.”
Barnett’s book is devoted to the concept of how many nations, mostly in the West, but some in the East as well, have become
“connected” through the modes of modern communications and transportation, which have facilitated greater trade and prosperity,
while Islamic nations in the Middle East deliberately have not become connected with the rest of the world. “To be disconnected in
this world,” Barnett writes, “is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated, “adding, “For young men, it means being
kept ignorant and bored and malleable.”
What seems perfectly normal to us here in the U.S.A. is perceived by the peoples of the Middle East to be alien as well as extremely
evil and abnormal. The benefits and advantages of constitutional democratic governance, the rule of law, individual liberty under law,
and the free enterprise economic system enjoyed by Americans have never really been known or comprehended by the peoples
dwelling in Middle Eastern nation-states. America's pursuit of peaceful realtions among sovereign states, international trade, and a
global free market are alien to the minds of Middle Easterners and completely misunderstood by those peoples.
“We {Americans} are the only country in the world,” writes Barnett, “purposefully built around the ideas that animate globalization’s
advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, [and] freedom of expression. We are connectivity personified.”
“If, in waging war against the forces of disconnectiveness, the United States ends up dividing the West, or the heart of the Core
(group of nations who subscribe to globalization), then our cure ends up being worse than the disease.” This is the problem we are
encountering with Europe. While there are European nation-states that are still supporting our war in Iraq, others, e.g., France,
Germany, and the Russian Federation, have shown a reluctance to support our effort. Moreover, there are still others that fear or
hate us so much that they would not mind seeing us fail.
Barnett correctly identifies the biggest problem facing us. “As America is learning in this global war on terrorism, it is one thing to
topple the Taliban or Saddam Hussein with our highly-lethal, highly-maneuverable military force, but quite another to actually
transform those battered societies into something bigger — to reconnect them to the larger, globalizing world outside.”
A longtime, highly respected Pentagon analyst, Barnett has been arguing inside that vast institution that we need to transform it
to deal with a new era. “In the post-Cold War era the U.S.A. tends to send its military to where the wild things are, to the places
and situations where the normal rules about not resorting to violence and warfare simply do not seem to hold.” This explains why
we have lost more military personnel since the capture of Baghdad than in the campaign to take the city and the nation. We don’t
fight wars like our enemy.
We don’t send airplanes loaded with innocent passengers into buildings filled with more innocent people. Having liberated the
Iraqis, we don’t understand why they won’t or can’t embrace it. The simple answer is that they have no real experience with
freedom and will have to learn how to support, operate, and maintain a constitutional democracy, i.e., if they,.in fact, really want
this type of governmental system. It is, however, vitally necessary to our future and the future of the world that they develop
a viable and stable constitutional democracy. That will take time and patience.
Right now, one of the problems Americans face is the failure of the Bush administration to effectively explain why we are in Iraq
and Afghanistan. “In short,” says Barnett, “the Bush administration needs to level with the American public as to where this
whole thing — this global war on terrorism and the preemption strategy — is really going. And if U.S. foreign, military, and
national-security policy makers themselves are unclear as to what is the ultimate course of these strategies, where they are heading,
then the policy makers had better let the rest of the citizenry in on the inside debates that apparently continue to rage between
Colin Powell’s State Department and Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.”
To me, that is the most chilling aspect of the war on terrorism to which the President has committed the United States of America.
He is not much of an orator. He has been talking about freedom and its spread around the world, but offering little more by way of
explaining why this is so important. Barnett says, “We will need many presidents — Democrat and Republican — over the coming
decades who will keep our political system, our public, and the rest of the Core focused on the prize we seek — making globalization
truly global, and shrinking the Gap....” [meaning, the gaps -- the division among the Core Western nations and the gap between the
nations of the West and the nations now controlled by Islamic and other oppressive regimes.]
In the last great, worldwide conventional shooting war, i.e., World War II, we fought nation-states that threatened to conquer and
enslave the entire world. We defeated and transformed those nations. In this new asymmetrical war, we are faced by Islamists who
fear that globalization will undermine their religion and their way of life. They are determined to keep the Islamic Middle East
disconnected from the rest of the world and safe for Islamic fanaticism, abysmal ignorance, backwardness, barbarism, tyranny, and
oppression. The Islamists are prepared to destroy the United States as the world’s beacon of freedom. The question is, are we
prepared to take the time, utilize the resources, and the wield power necessary to defeat them? The answer is that we must.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Arabs
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, Communications Director of the American Policy Center,
and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly
column, "Warning Signs," posted on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center
(www.anxietycenter.com). A compilation of his past col- umns, entitled Warning Signs, is published by Merril Press. In addition
to Warning Signs, Caruba is the author of A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam and The United Nations vs. the United States,
both of which are available from the National Anxiety Center, 9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, New Jersey, 07040.
Copyright 2004 Alan Caruba
Published with Permission of Alan Caruba
ACaruba@AOL.Com
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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