Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change

Real Ray · Apr 16, 2003

http://www.policyreview.org/apr03/jowitt.html
Read this today-something I think people here might find interesting.

In stark contrast, look at Iraq. It completely lacks what pre-Nazi Germany had in the way of values, institutions, and practices congruent or even proximate with liberal capitalist democracy. And unlike both Germany and Japan, Iraqi social organization, far from being hierarchical, is basically segmental, much like a ringworm. In Japan, MacArthur could manipulate and dictate to a hierarchically obedient society. In Germany, it’s difficult to find even one jaywalker in the entire country. It is impossible to see how a liberal capitalist democracy can discipline a segmented Iraqi society with none of the social, cultural, or psychological qualities required for even an unstable democracy.

World War ii severely dislocated, traumatized, and mobilized Japan and Germany, thereby providing the United States substantial room for political maneuvering and institutional-cultural innovation. With the onset of the Cold War, Japan and Germany became integral parts of a Western Castle: the Western side of the moat (or “Iron Curtain”) separating the West from the Soviet Empire. In contrast, an American-occupied Iraq, far from being an integral part of a Western Castle, will resemble an exposed American fort, surrounded by intimidated, frustrated, and enraged enemies.
Click to expand...

Also

What can be said about the magic bullet scenario? For one thing, it demonstrates the near-genetic quality of the missionary impulse in American political culture, an impulse that partially informed our origins and manifests itself regularly throughout our history as an ideological belief that America’s way of life in particular and the Western way of life in general constitute the natural, and potentially the universal, way of life. From this perspective — one that either denies or is simply ignorant of the decisive role cultural and social institutions play in mediating the practical organization of universal desires for security, affluence, and status — any suggestion that “freedom” as understood in the West requires a “calamitously improbable set of circumstances” is seen as ethnocentric. The reality is that, as a way of life, individualism is a uniquely Western and particularly American phenomenon, one that provides the most consistent internal base for liberal capitalist democracy.

The magic bullet scenario also strikingly expresses America’s heroic disposition and character, our willingness to identify and undertake great world-shaping endeavors. The scenario effectively transforms and elevates a local, dangerous-but-mundane effort to remove a pathological killer, Saddam Hussein, into a successful democratic crusade that transforms the “last” anti-modern, anti-democratic capitalist region of the world: the Muslim Middle East. One might at least consider the fate of earlier Western crusades.
Click to expand...

Also this piece today by Phil Weiss in the NY Observer.

http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage6.asp

It sums up a lot of what I dislike about Thomas Freidman and ties into the the first piece

There is always the sense about Mr. Friedman that he is playing "Gotcha!" with the Arabs, and there is never any subtlety. This is best demonstrated by an incident in his latest book. His plane from London is about to arrive in Riyadh, and an "attractive raven-haired" Saudi woman in the seat beside him begins to fret. She has left her veil at home. She is calling home madly on her cell phone to make sure someone has come to the plane with her veil.

To Mr. Friedman, this is a great sadness. What a waste of time—she is so attractive. Think of all the useless energy she and other Saudi women who seem to actually like the veil are expending, putting on the chains of servitude ….

But Mr. Friedman never really talked to the woman, and the resulting observations are facile and self-serving. A subtle mind, a truly inquiring mind, would be forced to different observations. Like: She is from a very different culture from my own, and she sees a value in this thing that seems hateful and pointless to me. But then, think of all the energy that women in our culture spend to deal with the same essential condition—men stare at them—by prettifying themselves with expensive makeup. Is that a waste of time and resources? Is a free-speech culture inevitably one of public pornography, as these Arabs often say? And what does that do to civilization?
Click to expand...