bryant

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

r-ness.livejournal.com

The question I always have when people talk about "a war of civilizations" is "What do you mean when you say the word 'civilization'? What is this aggregation you are creating with a figurative wave of the hand? Do hundreds of millions of people all self-identify as being part of a 'civilization' supposedly at war?"

I think most of the people in question may identify themselves as an adherent of a particular religion, or as a citizen of a particular country, but it's a very, very long stretch to go from there to say that they all self-identify as part of a "civilization".

I think calling it a "war of civilizations" is a way for people to avoid framing the issue as a war between America and Islam, which it clearly is not, nor should it be. To its credit, the administration goes out of its way to assert that it is not. There are those, however, who call it a "war of civilizations" who simply can't come out and admit that they mean it to be a war between America and Islam.

To those who claim it is a "war of civilizations" but deny they mean a "war between America and Islam", here's a question: "What 'civilization' do you identify as being 'the enemy'?" "What 'civilization' do you
identify as the 'our side'?"

So many of the people on the board you quote appear to identify the former as Islam, and the latter as America (or America and our allies). It is no surprise that they consider us to be in a "war of civilizations". But reframing the issue makes things much more clear. It exposes the "mouth-breathing" for what it is.

Is the sleight-of-hand deliberate? I suspect there are some who really want to draw America into a war with Islam, and vice versa. But I like to think they're in the minority, and that the others have simply not thought things through.

That many people are anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, or anti-American does not make them extremists who want to crash planes into buildings, or detonate atom bombs in cities. There are a few people who both are, and do. The vast majority of the rest simply dislike Israel, the Jews, and America (among other things) for whatever reason, and are quite willing to see them all go to hell in their own way, but have little inclination to do anything to help the process along.

American policy should probably concern itself with how to prevent the vast majority from joining the few, and stopping the few. If America insists on acting as if the vast majority are with the few, that may be what it ends up with.

From: (Anonymous)

I'm going to repeat my act of extreme bad taste from a few postings back and paste in (slightly edited) what I had to say on PopOne, because it relates to r_ness's comment here.

--------------

I suspect that the Clash of Civilizations line of argument--which strikes me as the kind of grandiose theory beloved by academics, more suited to writing books and getting tenure than answering questions--is taken seriously by some (mainly academics, demagogues and idiots), but masks a more subtle concern.

So-called WMDs have become almost a running joke in debates this year, which I think tends to obscure the way they really do tend to change the rules of the game. The potential exists for small gangs of psychotics to cause damage on a scale previously only available to nation-states. Nobody really has a fucking clue what to do about this, and a lot of people in the government are plain terrified at this.

From the perspective of risk management, what matters is not whether the so-called 'Islamic world' is at war with the 'West', in the sense that there's a coherent 'They' at war with 'Us'; what matters, objectively, is whether threats on a civilizational scale (i.e. megadeaths, trillion-dollar damages) are emerging from the box marked 'Islamic world'. As noted above, such threats can emerge from very small and profoundly aberrant groups.

Such groups can't be seen as representative of the societies from which they emerge in any way, but at the same time they aren't disconnected from those societies, either.

For example: 9/11 was a deliberate attack from al-Qaeda (we assume), a smallish group of somewhere between 10^2 and 10^4 agents. The actual attack was carried out by between 10^1 and 10^2 actors. There doesn't seem to be a direct connection between al-Qaeda and USG; the US government never funded bin Laden directly, and while its intelligence services were aware that the group existed they seem to have had really crappy data on what al-Qaeda was actually doing. It also does not seem likely that al-Qaeda was acting as an extension or agency of any Arab government.

On the other hand, al-Qaeda is hardly disconnected from the contexts of Arab nationalism and politicized fundamentalist Islam; al-Qaeda's funding derives from bin Laden's inheritance, supplemented by (it seems) donations and/or blackmail from Saudi Arabia. (And essentially all of that money comes from petroleum sales, of course. This is ironic, but suggests that 'Western' hegemony is rather less effective than it is usually accused of being.)

How do you detect threats coming from such groups? How do you react?

Nobody has a goddamn clue.

Nobody.

We don't have cognitive frameworks in which to analyze these problems; the vocabulary hasn't been developed and the principles haven't been reality-tested. Any person or faction claiming to understand the causes, to know how to assign the blame, or to have the correct solution, is utterly deluded.

And at the same time, against all these mental constructs, you have a smoking hole in New York. A real attack carried out by actual people did actual damage and killed actual people; on top of the reality, it's clear that with a little bit of optimization (taking flights a few hours later in the day, for instance) could have done an order of magnitude or so more damage. The US government must act in response to such an event.

In this conflict (and I'm not going to play the game of who started it right now), there is a somewhat coherent 'we' in the sense of the US government. You can scale that down and talk about the actions and agendas of different factions and agencies in the government, or scale it up and talk about alliances, coalitions, whatever, but one side exists within the understood framework for war between nation-states. The other side, however, does not.

(next post: what the hell is my point?)

From: (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.