A Different Point of View [WAR] NOT Left vs Right
David C Kifer
A lot of food for thought, and very difficult to pull "quotable" excerpts
from it, as shown below. The thoughts are good, but not pithy, thoughts on
what may have brought us to this point and where it may take us. I will be
reading it again, which is more than I can say for a lot of stuff.
As examples, the beginning of the article, and a few paragraphs from
deeper inside...
I quote:
Of the many words written for and against the coming war with Iraq, none has
been more perceptive than Paul Johnson's observation in his essay "Leviathan
to the Rescue" that such a war "has no precedent in history" and that "in
terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into
unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990's was a
straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's
invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor."
The implications of this remark - like the implications of the war with Iraq -
are profound. The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning
points of history in which one nation under the guidance of a strong-willed,
self-confident leader undertakes to alter the fundamental state of the world. It
is, to use the language of Hegel, an event that is world-historical in its
significance and scope. And it will be world-historical, no matter what the
outcome may be.
Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis
- they break the mold and shatter tradition.
But this is precisely the problem with trying to grasp such events - they are
utterly without precedent, and this means that it is impossible to evaluate
them prior to their actual accomplishment in historical actuality. Or, more
precisely, it is impossible to evaluate them adequately, because the proper
concepts for even describing the new situation have yet to be constructed.
Such world-historical innovations transcend the conceptual categories of the
old world, call into existence an entirely novel set of categories.
To see the truth of this remark, one need only reflect back to any previous
world-historical transformation. How could one hope to explain nineteenth
century nationalism to Voltaire? Or the French Revolution to St. Thomas Aquinas?
You could try explaining by analogy, but any analogy would be apt to mislead
as much, if not more, than to illuminate. But this is no less true in dealing
with the world-historical changes that have not yet given birth to the new
order of possibilities.
[...]
What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became
rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could
simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if
the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes
of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they
have pledged themselves to destroy. Their power derives entirely from the fact
that the West had committed itself, in the aftermath of World War II, to a
policy of not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because
it possessed the military might to do so - nor does it matter whether the West
followed this policy out of charitable instinct, or out of prudence, or out of
a cynical awareness that it was more cost effective to do so. All that really
matters is the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct: the
prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their
demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or
costs of their action.
[...]
If we are to understand the measure of the present threat ... we must
realize that we are not fighting a Clausewitzian war, and there are immense
dangers ahead of us if we do not squarely face the implications of this fact:
they are not playing by the same rules of realism that we are. And it is
this that renders so much public debate so historically dated.
The motivations of those who want to murder us are not complicated: To watch
an American city go up into a fireball is its own reward.
This is the lesson that 9/11 should teach us in dealing with the fantasists
of the Islamic world. A fantasy does not need to make any sense -
that is the whole point of having one.
In dealing with the Japanese or with the Soviet Union, we were never forced
to wonder whether they might delegate their actions to such utterly informal
and irresponsible entities as Al Qaeda. The threat they posed they posed in
their own right, and hence they were accountable for their actions, and knew
that we would hold them accountable. But this is no longer the case. For
example, even today, over a year later, there is still debate about the
possible connection between Iraq and the events of 9/11 - a debate that may
well never be resolved. And this means that if a nuclear device were to be
detonated in downtown Chicago tomorrow, from an unknown source, could we
really count on being able to find its "return address" if in fact it was the
work of a "rogue" state? We know that, in fact, the answer is no; and we know
that "they" know this as well; and they know we know - all of which only begins
to suggest the surrealism that is characteristic of the crisis with which we
are faced. For it means that if they chose to delegate such a horrendous act to
an entity like Al Qaeda, they would force us into an impossible choice: Either
we accept such an attack without retaliating, or else we are forced to lash out
blindly - and in the same spirit of blood feud and vendetta with which the
attack was made. And either choice transcends our present categories of
comprehension.
The first "rogue" nuclear strike - a strike from an unknown and even unknowable
source - is a genie that once out of the bottle can never be put back in. It
would cause an overnight catastrophic transformation of the world. In many ways
we must be grateful that Al Qaeda's fingerprints were over all 9-11. For what
if we had had no clue - even today - who had perpetrated such an act?
[...]
What the critics of this policy fail to see is the simple and obvious fact
that if any social order is to achieve stability there must be, at the heart
of it, a double standard governing the use of violence and force. There must
be one agent who is permitted to use force against other agents who are not
permitted to use force. The implementation of the fashionable myth that all
violence is equally immoral and reprehensible would inevitably result, in a
typical dialectical reversal, in the Hobbesian state of universal war.
Every civilized order, precisely in so far as it is a civilized order, relies
on such a double standard. The only alternative to this is the frank and
candid acceptance of anarchy, the state in which all recourse to violence is
equally legitimate. But what Mr. Butler and others fail to realize is that
anarchy with clubs and sticks is a much preferable to anarchy with nuclear
weapons.
[...]
This is where we must move beyond Clausewitz. For how do you fight an enemy
whose goal is simply to create a world-historical disaster that will annihilate
the current world order in its entirety? This is not the traditional politics
of the classical nation state, but the apocalyptic politics of fantasists. And
as such it constitutes a threat that cannot be contained simply because it
acknowledges no borders within which it could be contained. And in precisely
the same way, it too recognizes no limits to the kind of acts that it will
undertake: anything will do that promotes the breakdown of the West.
--Our World-Historical Gamble
By Lee Harris
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-031103A
You can also find it on RealClearPolitics, where I found it,
under Wednesday 12 Mar.
under the same title.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
--
Dave
"Tam multi libri, tam breve tempus!"
(Et brevis pecunia.) [Et breve spatium.]
Frank Lynch
resembling Cicero, David C Kifer <dki...@sky-access.com> wrote:
>The article excerpted here is MUCH longer than given here,
Didn't even read past what I left here
Frank Lynch
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page is at:
http://www.samueljohnson.com/
David C Kifer
>
> On Thu, 13 Mar 2003 02:48:14 -0500, in a clarity of expression
> resembling Cicero, David C Kifer <dki...@sky-access.com> wrote:
>
> >The article excerpted here is MUCH longer than given here,
>
> Didn't even read past what I left here
Your right, your loss. It really is worth reading, not the usual
back and forth we've seen so much of for the last year or so...
[p&e]