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[bryant]

First, read this post.

OK. So, yeah, blogfight. I don’t really want to get into the question of who’s a Democrat and who’s not, since I’m not a Democrat — y’all can have your own arguments. I will say, tangentially, that I do not think Kevin’s comment regarding liberal qualifications is any more divisive or damaging than the belief that criticizing Bush is traitorous. And that’s all I wanna say about that.

What I really wanna talk about is the whole “war of civilizations” thing. Bluntly, it’s hyperaggressive mouthbreathing. There is a relatively small Muslim population that would like to see the West wiped out. This does not constitute a war of civilizations any more than the existence of the Patriot movement constitutes a war of civilizations. It’s terrorism driven by ideological motivations. That’s all.

By calling this a war of civilizations, you imply that the entire Islamic civilization is at war with us. That’s not true. It is, in fact, a lie.

The flip side of that question — whether or not we’re at war with Islamic civilization — is murkier. To rephrase: who’s the aggressor? More on this later.

Comments

t.rev

[(Anonymous)]

My first point is that we don't have much in the way of tools for thinking about conflicts like this, individually or collectively. (There have been attempts to work out the consequences of increasingly damaging weapons in the hands of increasingly small groups, down to such disreputable texts as 'Basement Nukes: the Consequences of Cheap Weapons of Mass Destruction' by Erwin S. Strauss, published by Loompanics in 1984, but very, very little reality-checking and less consensus.)

My second point is a consequence of the first: that it is very easy to make semantic category errors by applying existing models. Put crudely, 'we' are a nation-state, 'we' are fighting Islamist groups, nation-states only fight other nation-states, thus the Islamist groups must really be nation-states. I don't claim that this fallacy is anything like the reasoning supporting the Clash of Nations hypothesis, but I suspect that it is part of why people are inclined to accept the hypothesis.

My third point is that this puts decision-makers in an impossible bind. They must act. If they are sane, they are aware that they have no idea what they're doing. Nobody else has a workable framework for understanding and acting within the conflict, either, so their most enthusiastic supporters are almost certainly supporting them for wrong and idiotic reasons. The same holds true for their detractors, of course.