The third way

After all these years, the entire American liberal/conservative mainstream is still divided into two mindless camps on Iraq. The liberals say we must withdraw in defeat; the conservatives say we have to support at all costs the Maliki government and make Iraq the model for the democratization of the Islamic world. There is, as VFR readers know, an entirely different strategy to which the mindless mainstream has been blind, a strategy that neither recoils from necessary confrontation with our enemies, as the left does, nor defines this confrontation as the spreading of democracy, as the so-called right does. Rather, this strategy recognizes that our adversary is Islam itself, that Islam is antithetical to democracy, that any spreading of democracy in the Islamic world will only empower Islamic extremists, that we cannot arrive at a correct policy for Iraq without understanding this larger confrontation with Islam, and that our real aim is not to change the Muslim world, but to prevent the Muslims from changing our world. This is the approach that VFR has long promoted.

Now for the first time that I’m aware of, this approach, or large elements of it, has been laid out at National Review Online. Without embracing it himself, Andrew McCarthy at the Corner articulates the Islam policy of an unnamed group he describes as “a lot of patriotic people,” which happens to include yours truly.

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Randall Parker writes;

It is so unfortunate that the ranks of the rational thinkers on Iraq are so small. To come up with really optimal choices requires more minds to think clearly. I’m just a software developer on the Left Coast thinking about Iraq in my spare time. That I can be more right on Iraq than huge numbers of experts and power brokers does not speak to a special genius on my part unfortunately. I just don’t embrace the ideological faiths that fog up so many minds.

Should we pull out of Iraq entirely or just put troops in Kurdistan or move out into the deserts and only intervene if Al Qaeda comes to power? The more fundamental question we should ask is whether we can accomplish the creation of liberal democracy in Iraq. I think the answer is no. So then should we set up a dictator or just let the factions duke it out? I favor letting them fight it out. Just intervene if a particularly bad faction looks like it’ll come to power.

We need some of the people who are thinking nutty thoughts about Iraq and human nature to stop doing that and to wake up and lift themselves out of the intellectual smog they are breathing. Both Iraq and immigration demographics crisis are making the liberal myths about human nature into very high costs for the nation. We need more thinking about reality and less belief in falsehoods.

Shrewsbury writes:

Randall Parker writes, “That I can be more right on Iraq than huge numbers of experts and power brokers does not speak to a special genius on my part unfortunately.”

This points to what Shrewsbury has come to perceive as the chief problem of governance in Washington (or anywhere): that policy is made by people who have no interest in policy, or much of anything else, only in scrabbling over as many other people as they can to get as much power and influence as they can. To oppose the current wisdom in whatever area they are would be to harm their prospects, so they don’t even bother thinking about it; they don’t even attempt to acquaint themselves with any facts or realities, since those are irrelevant to aligning themselves with the CW and might even prove stumbling blocks. As you know, a reporter at Congressional Quarterly has lately been exposing the astonishing ignorance of bureaucrats and politicians charged with Middle East policy; but this is only to be expected. If one such as Randall Parker sees farther and better than they do, it’s because he actually takes the trouble to look, whereas they are focused on their squalid little careers and couldn’t care less about the realities of Iraq, or immigration, or anything. This is why empires crumble.

An interesting question is, How is Current Wisdom formed? This were an exceeding complex algorithm.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 17, 2006 08:47 PM | Send