NYT -- David Brooks -- After the Fall: "Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave "responsibly" - as defined by Western nationalist categories - were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal."
Charles Dickens
cutting and running and killing off a bunch more other folks kids is
the proper course. The fact is there's no solution. Every "solution"
will bring defeat, unless of course pinning the blame on Bill Clinton
wins the GOP the next election.
The New York Times
December 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
After the Fall
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/opinion/10brooks.html?pagewanted=print
By DAVID BROOKS
In fall 2007, the United States began to withdraw troops from Iraq, and
so began the Second Thirty Years' War. This war was a bewildering
array of small and vast conflicts, which flared and receded and flared
again across the entire Middle East, but which were joined by a common
theme.
The essence of all this disorder was that the Arab nation-states lost
control. Subnational groups - like Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army -
and supranational groups - like loosely connected terror networks,
the new Sunni and Shiite Leagues and the satellite television networks
- went from strength to strength while central national governments
toppled and fell. The collapse of national governments led to a power
vacuum that the more authentic and deeply rooted social groups sought
to fill.
This war had several stages. The first was the disintegration of Iraq.
No national institutions could survive the onslaught: there was no
impartial justice, no effective law enforcement, no political
organization that put loyalty to nation above loyalty to sect or tribe.
Absent a government of laws, government by death squads emerged.
Militias - with their own hospitals, schools and indoctrination
systems - sought to impose order through assassination and revenge.
The Muslim world watched the Sunni-Shiite bloodletting on satellite
television and became enraged. Militias, seminaries and terror
organizations developed transnational alliances. Shiite uprisings
occurred in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Pakistan. Furious Sunnis rallied
in places like Egypt, demanding that their leaders preserve Sunni
supremacy.
The environment was ripe for new sorts of radical leaders, influenced
by Moktada al-Sadr and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. These leaders were hot,
charismatic and divisive. They had no intellectual ties to the old
20th-century Arab nationalism, which was scorned as the model that
failed.
Chaos spread as governments in Lebanon and Jordan collapsed. The
Palestinian Authority fell into complete dysfunction as Hamas and Fatah
waged a low-boiling civil war. Al Qaeda reveled in the bloodshed and
spread it with rapturous fury. The spreading disorder vindicated an
observation that the historian Michael Oren had once made: that there
are really only three nations in the Muslim Middle East: Iran, Turkey
and Egypt. The other nations are make-believe. The borders are
arbitrary and the governments are artificial.
The surviving governments scrambled to stay in front of their
radicalized populations and meddled ceaselessly in the wars around
them. Turkey meddled in Kurdistan. Iran meddled everywhere through
Hezbollah and a legion of mini-Hezbollahs. The Saudis tried to buy
their enemies off, but only ended up financing them. Egyptians spread
out everywhere as foot soldiers and assassins, especially after the end
of the Mubarak era.
Westerners had a great deal of trouble understanding the ever-shifting
conflicts among sects they didn't understand and tribes they'd
never heard of. Early in the war, Americans engaged in a moronic debate
about whether Iraq was in civil war, which illustrated that American
vocabularies were trapped in the nation-state paradigm, and how
unprepared Americans were to understand the non-nation-state world.
Parallels were made, some apt, some inapt, to the first Thirty Years'
War, which decimated Europe in the 17th century. That, too, was a
spasmodic constellation of conflicts not among nation-states, but among
faiths, tribes and local groupings.
This second version of that war produced a Middle East that looked
medieval and postmodern at the same time. The core weakness of Middle
Eastern nations was that over centuries Arab society had developed
intricate social organizations based on family, tribe and faith.
Loyalty to these superseded national bonds. Notions of federalism,
subsidiarity and impersonal administration - the underpinnings of the
nation-state - had trouble flourishing in these sands.
The Middle East's weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising
forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism,
economic globalization and transnational communications networks.
Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave "responsibly"
- as defined by Western nationalist categories - were doomed to
failure. The American defeat sealed the deal.
It was a terrible era for those brave patriots fighting for national
unity. There was horrific turmoil, and the emergence of sociopolitical
organizations whose likes the world had never seen.