WatchBlog: The Enemy Bush Fails To Understand
It is human nature to change and adapt and even overcome and reshape adverse situations and conditions. The peoples of the East and Middle East are not opposed to change that comes from their own determination of how to adapt, how to overcome, and how to reshape the inadequacies of their own cultures and societies to survive in the modern world. But, many will fight to the death and with a sense of martyrdom and pride, attempts by the West to force changes upon them motivated by needs of those in the West. The greatest mistake President Bush made was to turn a deaf ear and rein in the decision making ability of our own State Department. Our State Department employs people who are trained and educated in cultural values, paradigms, and fundamental structures of foreign nations. Our State Department was very likely capable of designing a strategy for pursuing terrorists against us which would not increase their armies, entrench anti-American hostility, and protract indefinitely our pursuit of growing numbers opposing us.
This opinion piece is insightful. America does not face an evil, irrational, hate-filled, monolithic "enemy" in fundamentalist Islam. We have misunderstood our "enemies" from the beginning - or, rather, we have never bothered to understand them in the first place.
Understanding one's "enemies" needn't be merely some mushy call for love, sympathy, and brotherhood (although each of those may indeed be a wise, enlightened, and faithful response); a crucial part of winning any conflict is knowing one's enemy better than he knows himself. Know what motivates him. Know what scares him. Know what he can accept, and what he will fight to the death for.
And then understand that even as you exploit this knowledge militarily, the ultimate goal is peace with the enemy, not military victory. Let your military strategy be guided by your knowledge, driving your enemy toward a resolution you know he will be able to accept. Recognize that as long as he is scared and defiant, he will continue to fight to the last man; even as you work to defeat him with military strength, mobilize your diplomatic corps, using all your knowledge of the enemy to address those fears and that defiance.
Above all, recognize that your enemy is different from you, and quite likely does not want to be similar to you. In a cultural war as we are in now, there is no insight more instructive than this. As long as we continue to assume that Iraqis and other middle-easterners have always wanted to be secular American capitalist consumers, if they only had the chance, we're going to accomplish little more than stoking the fires of terrorism.
The piece wisely notes:
President Bush would have us believe it is hatred and terrorism that we are fighting. These are the weapons of our enemy, not their cause. It is an adamant defense of tradition, culture, religion, and law honored for thousands of years as set down in the Koran and generational history in song, story, and folklore, that is their cause, and that cause is what we in the West face as our enemy. Failure to recognize our enemy and why it exists and what motivates it, is begging for a multi-generational war based on the domination of some cultures by others.
posted by Bob at
1:54 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Bob.
This is a very thoughtful piece. I agree that we need to understand the Middle East from a perspective that few in Washington fail to comprehend- it is, in my estimation, the most flawed part of our foriegn policy by far.
The idea that American style democracy and capitalism is just what "these people need" is arrogant and extremely self centric. It doesn't take much understanding of the culture of Islam to realize that their faith in their culture and beliefs are hugely more important than where they can get their hands on the next Britney Spears album.
In fact, I would compare the Islamic faith (the mainstream faith and NOT the radical fundamentalists that Bush has convinced us to hate and fear) to the Amish movement in Middle America. The Amish ashew modern conveniences and life to keep distractions from getting in the way of their relationship with God. Many Muslims believe that the problem with the West is that Western Culture focuses too much attention on things and money, distracting from God's divine will. Democracy is deemed less than important because Democracy implies "Will of the People", which is unimportant with the "Will of God".
Furthermore, more repressive forms of government, such as theocracies (especially theocracies) enforce the strong teachings of Islam, which is why they tend to always swirl under the political surface, even thrive in places like Iran.
Of course we have made an enemy of Muslims. We are trying to bring an unwelcome ideology into their countries- in many cases right to the doorsteps of their most sacred lands- against the true will of the people.
The only thing I would say in opposition to your post, however, is that I would consider thinking long and hard about the people in the middle east that are NOT bombing us or flying planes into our buildings. There are a billion Muslims in the world... that means that the ones you hear about are a truly tiny minority.
I would ask you to consider the word "enemy" very closely. Are they truly an enemy? Would they really be enemies if we stopped trying to make them into a spitting image of ourselves?
PS. I expected to completely disagree with everything you said based on what I saw in your blog. I'm pleasantly surprised.
By
CJR, at 12:32 AM
Strong Bad -
Thanks for your comment! I don't think there's a single point I'd want to take up with you... you hit the nail on the head. I'm skeptical, too, about the designation "enemy", and I put it in quotes the first few times I used it. I felt it was becoming cumbersome to read if the quotes appeared every time I used the word, so I decided to drop them once I had hopefully established that I felt the word "enemy" as used against Muslims clearly needed quotes. Maybe that could have been clearer.
I especially appreciated your insight about democracy holding up "the will of the people" when Muslim countries consider "the will of God" to be the highest goal toward which individuals and society can strive. You're exactly right - the Muslim world isn't sitting around wishing for the United States to charge in and bring western-style democracy to their benighted countries! We arrogantly assume everyone in the world "wants to be us," when, in fact, while many people envy certain aspects of our lifestyle, exactly no one wants to become a "little America," buying into the whole shebang.
Heck, I don't buy into the whole shebang, as you have probably guessed. ;)
Again, thanks for your very helpful thoughts. I'm glad that we found something to agree on, and that you're a reader even when you think I'm nuts. =)
Blessings,
-B.
By
Bob, at 10:15 AM
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