The psychological roots of the Iraq involvement

(Further down in this entry, be sure to see Dimitri K.’s thoughts on how our seemingly futile involvement in Iraq is really serving our larger good.)

In the fall of 2002 John Zmirak wrote an article at FrontPage Magazine in which he said that what was driving the push toward a war against Iraq was “testosterone poisoning.” The use of this liberal, anti-male cliche by a paleoconservative writer was, to say the least, an embarrassing sign of an inability to discuss a serious issue seriously.

However, to be fair to Zmirak, there was not a complete absence of evidence for such a charge. I say this on the basis of an article written by Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online in May 2000, which Goldberg linked this week at the Corner. In this piece Goldberg was considering two problems, how to restore America’s “national greatness,” along the lines of William Kristol and Robert Kagan’s widely noted article in the Weekly Standard, and how to help poor suffering Africa. Proposing to kill two birds with one stone, Goldberg said that America should take charge of Africa and put the place back in shape. The idea of a Western re-colonization of that incompetent continent is not in itself wrongheaded or irrational. It’s the way Goldberg writes about it that suggests something out of whack in his thinking:

I think it’s time we revisited the notion of a new kind of Colonialism—though we shouldn’t call it that. I don’t mean ripping off poor countries. I don’t mean setting tribes against one another and paying off corrupt “leaders” to keep down unrest. I mean going in—guns blazing if necessary—for truth and justice. I am quite serious about this. The United States should mount a serious effort to bring civilization (yes, “Civilization”) to those parts of Africa that are in Hobbesian despair. We should enlist any nation, institution or organization—especially multinational corporations and evangelical churches as well as average African citizens—interested in permanently helping Africa join the 21st century. This might mean that Harvard would have to cut back on courses about transgender construction workers. And it might mean that some churches would have to spend more time feeding starving people than pronouncing on American presidential candidates.

We should spend billions upon billions doing it. We should put American troops in harm’s way. We should not be surprised that Americans will die doing the right thing. We should not be squeamish, either, about the fact that (mostly white) Americans will kill some black Africans in the process. Yes, this would be a display of arrogance of historic proportions, even a crusade. But it wouldn’t be a military one. On one hand, this cannot be merely an armed invasion, but on the other hand it must not be some UN initiative which just shuffles poverty around. This would be America and its allies doing right as we see it.

Yes, this would seem imperial, for there would certainly be wars declared against us. French writers would break their pencils in defiance of the American Empire. Kofi Annan would need a pacemaker. Pat Buchanan would move to Canada. But being imperial is not necessarily a bad thing. The British Empire decided unilaterally that the global practice of slavery was a crime against God and man, and they set out to stop it. They didn’t care about the “sovereignty” of other nations when it came to an evil institution. They didn’t care about the “rule of international law,” they made law with the barrel of a cannon.

This article shows how, 16 months before the 9/11 attack, neocons were restlessly looking around for some big project, any big project, that might revive our “National Greatness.” Again, my subject here is not Goldberg’s idea of a Western re-colonization of Africa, an idea that has occurred to many people and on which there are reasonable pros and cons, but rather the overcharged, irresponsible way he talks about it, like a hyperactive kid effusing about a video game. Except that Goldberg is not talking about a video game, is he? He is talking about committing our country to a vast project of war and philanthropic imperialism in which we would take over an entire continent, a project, he crassly acknowledges, that would result in Americans being killed, not for the purpose of national defense, but for the purpose of doing good to others.

Reading his column, I realize that this was the same overcharged mentality that drove many neocons’ thoughtless and hysterical enthusiasm for the Iraq war and especially for the fraud of Iraqi “freedom” and “democracy.” It was also this same exaggerated excitement about the automatic operation and the automatic blessings of “freedom” that was at the root of our government’s refusal to think about what would happen to Iraq after we had destroyed the only existing source of order in that country, a refusal that helped unleash the terror insurgency, the civil war, and the Islamic fundamentalism that have forced four million Iraqis including hundreds of thousands of Christians to leave their homes and become refugees, a disaster that to this day the war supporters have not acknowledged.

Given what everyone thought was true about Saddam Hussein’s possession and development of weapons of mass destruction, there were rational and pressing arguments for the invasion of Iraq. But there was also an unhealthy, hyper-aggressive element at work in many war supporters, and this—though he unfortunately phrased it in the form of a cheap cliche instead of doing the work of thoughtful analysis—is what Zmirak meant by testosterone poisoning.

- end of initial entry -

An Indian living in the West writes:

I don’t think anyone thought that Iraq under U.S. and allied occupation would get this bad. I was opposed to the war from the outset and I thought that the occupation would get messy. But I must admit this, even I never imagined things would get this bad.

What I can hope here (and I think my hopes are perhaps based on too much optimism about the wisdom of men), is that Americans have learnt a few lessons about imposing “democracy.” The point is that Imperial Britain unhindered by anti-racism or “diversity” or “multiculturalism” could not control Iraq in the 1920s. Churchill even ordered the use of poison gas and it didn’t work. Iraq is simply very hostile country and it cannot be ruled by a ruler who is unwilling to be utterly ruthless in imposing order by resort to terror. Saddam Hussein was the ideal ruler for Iraq. He was a product of Iraqi society, he understood Iraq’s tribes and their endless feuding and he knew how to control the country. Now think about this—after 1991 when his army was crushed, he had people constantly trying to assasinate him (an Iraqi specialty in any case), Western sanctions, the entire Western world more than happy to knock him over but there was no chaos in Iraq. Brutal tyranny yes, chaos no.

The lesson of Iraq is that the West has lost its ability to understand other cultures. It’s a funny thing that in this age of multiculturalism in which Westerners are supposed to be able to understand other cultures better, their understanding is poorer than it has ever been.

Lastly, Jonah Goldberg is a loud-mouthed buffoon. Your reproduction of the extract from his National Review article in 2000 about colonising Africa proves it.

LA replies:

But of course the purpose of multiculturalism is not to understand other cultures but to accommodate ourselves to them. The two purposes are in fact mutually incompatible. If we understood other cultures, we would inevitably draw conclusions about them which would get in the way of our accommodating ourselves to them.

ILW replies:

That’s absolutely right.

LA continues:

In any case, the Iraq project was not, at least in its origins, based on the multicultural belief in the equality of all cultures but on the neoconservative belief that culture doesn’t really matter because all human beings have the same transcultural desire for freedom and democracy. So we didn’t need to know anything about Iraq or Islam before we set about reconstructing Iraq, because we already knew everything we needed to know, which was that:

“[T]he world is everywhere full of ordinary people who want exactly what we want, though they may not even dare to dream of it. Whether they are Asians or Africans or Middle Easterners or Latin Americans, what they want is a decent place to live, decent food to eat, to be able to stick around long enough to watch their children grow and prosper, and perhaps above all, not to get pushed around by people with guns in their hands.”

So we could ignore the particularities of Iraq. We didn’t need to know about all those stinking particularities over there, because we knew the one big truth of human sameness. But then, when it turned out that the particularities matterered a great deal and that they were not compatible with our idea of democracy, what did we do? We turned from neoconservatives who ignore other people’s cultures into multiculturalists who accommodate ourselves to other people’s cultures. And now we are even giving up the one supposed absolute constant of our policy: our opposition to terror, as Condoleezza Rice has stopped calling Hamas a terrorist organization and instead is calling it a resistance movement.

From the moment that we refused to acknowledge the fundamental distinctions between ourselves and Muslims, our ultimate surrender to the terrorists was inevitable.

ILW replies:

“In any case, the Iraq project was not, at least in its origins, based on the multicultural belief in the equality of all cultures but on the neoconservative belief that culture doesn’t really matter because all human beings have the same transcultural desire for freedom and democracy.”

This is correct. However, I think multicultural blindness and neoconservative blindness are inseparable allies. Multicultural blindness to the savagery of Iraqi society allows Neoconservative stupidity to gain a foothold in the minds of your country’s establishment (if the Iraqis aren’t savage, then let them vote and Iraq will be transformed into a democracy like Poland after the collapse of Communism).

Therefore, one leads to another. I have always believed that neoconservatism is the only form of “opposition” to multiculturalism that is permitted in liberal society—and this is correct. To oppose multiculturalism appropriately would be not only to say that other cultures are savage or barbaric but to also admit that other peoples are barbaric too and some of them can almost certainly never be civilized without resort to the harshest of methods. To say that, however, would be “racist.” And neoconservatism is of course an ideologically pure “antiracist” ideology. So there you have it.

LA replies:

I would put it this way. I agree that to oppose neoconservatism requires saying that not everyone is assimilable to Western or American or English culture, and this implies that people cannot be entirely separated from their culture, which implies that culture has a racial/ethnic basis and that the source of the unassimilability is racial differerences. However, I’m not sure why opposing multiculturalism, which says all cultures are of equal value, requires saying that the source of the inequality of cultures is an inequality of races.

ILW replies:

“However, I’m not sure why opposing multiculturalism, which says all cultures are of equal value, requires saying that the source of the inequality of cultures is an inequality of races.”

I think you’ve misunderstood my argument. I was not speaking of biological inequality of races but inequality of condition. Modern terminologies are terrible in the sense that they cannot convey the argument quite often. An inequality of condition is a serious matter—if it takes five centuries of Roman influence to turn Germanic barbarians into civilized nations, for example, that is an example of the inequality of condition. Of course, this means that a Comte de Gobineau would argue that this is still a liberal view of man, i.e. even the supposedly “inferior” races can be civilized, his genetics are not a bar to civilization. But this is irrelevant in any case. The Neocons or America don’t have five centuries to spare.

So although Iraq can indeed be completely civilized and even turned into a liberal society hypothetically, these hypotheical arguments are pointless because we are not going to sit there for five centuries to make it happen—nor are we going to do the things necessary to let it happen (such as destroy the destructive influence of Islam among the Arabs).

Dimitri K. writes:

I never was a fan of the idea of spreading democracy and always was realistic about Iraq. However, I must admit that there is some point in conquering Iraq. It did not bring democracy to Iraq, but it brought to America something much more precious—knowledge about Islam. As a foreigner, I can only guess that Americans knew nothing about that, as they probably know nothing about any foreign country (and that is good sometimes). Muslim immigration would have continued quietly as in Europe, and America would have waked up in a much worse situation. It is not that I believe that Bush thought it over, certainly not, but I have a feeling as if someone smarter than Bush thought it over. God likes America and does not want it disappear. For that reason, not a realist but a wishful thinker Bush was elected. He told Moslems that they are good, and continue doing that. And they were abused by such an assumption. Just like bad children—when you tell them that they are good they start behaving even worse, to prove that you are wrong. It is useful to tell people that they are good—either they become better or they become worse, but any way the truth comes out. The same happened with Mexican immigration—it could have continued quietly if not for Bush’s wishful thinking, that provoked the discussion, and discussion revealed the truth. Similar situation occurred with the Palestinians in Israel’s effort to exchange peace for land. Now the vast majority of Israelites quit to believe in peace—the first time during Israel’s history. As you said, people need to see before they understand. And it is much better if they see earlier than later. For that, some naive wishful thinkers are necessary. God blessed America and Israel with wishful thinkers, so these two countries will not disappear quietly, due to the ignorance of their inhabitants. Is it a coincidence, that much more skeptical and practical Europe is in much worse situation? European countries are not shelled like Israeli towns, but European people are misguided and in despair. They are busy hiding truth from themselves, and the best way to do it is to be a “realist.”

LA replies:

Dimitri’s observations are brilliant. The other day I had a thought somewhat like his regarding immigration, that God made Bush into a fanatic for open borders in order to wake America up against immigration, but I hadn’t thought of the same with regard to Iraq, that without Bush’s and the neocons’ fanatical belief that Muslims are “just like us,” we wouldn’t have realized that it’s not true, or it would have taken us much longer to see it. And the same re Israel. As William Blake wrote, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

Dimitri’s approach enables us perhaps to find good in what had seemed the futile waste of our Iraq involvement. Our casualties in Iraq have not lost their lives and limbs in vain, but have been serving a truly great cause, though it was not the cause they thought they were serving. They were not serving the cause of spreading democracy to Muslims. They were serving the cause of waking up America to the nature of Muslims so that America would start protecting itself from Muslims.. Without our men’s sacrifice, America would not have seen these things.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2007 04:20 PM | Send