Peace will come to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East when ______.
I define peace as a situation in which at least 99 percent of the people do not have to consider abandoning their homes for fear of violence.
Off the top of my head, I do not have an answer. But I find myself drawn more to the conservative civilization-barbarism axis than to the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis or to the libertarian freedom-coercion axis. Along those lines, you may wish to re-read Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick’s classic Dictatorships and Double Standards. Among many possible excerpts I might choose, there is this:
Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.
She argued against this brand of wishful thinking. If you think that you have a reliable answer to my question, then ask yourself whether you are engaged in wishful thinking.
For example, I would give a low grade to anyone who thinks that the solution is to focus on empowering communities. In other words, community organizers are the solution to terrorism. When I read that, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I am afraid that I could not come up with anything charitable to say.
If anything, libertarians tend to think more wishfully than progressives. My own wishful thought has been that violence would wane at some point because so many people would become fed up with it. [UPDATE: I am not entirely wrong about that.] I think that in fact more people are getting fed up with it, but they are not being provided with a reason to hope that the militants will be defeated.
I am not saying that the solution is to bomb the heck out of the Middle East. It may very well be that the most prudent thing to do is nothing. But the policy articulated by our leaders sounds like it came out of a class discussion in freshman sociology. I find it demoralizing. And I imagine that anyone who is on the front lines against the Islamic militants has to feel totally bereft.
Peace will come to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East when … Jesus returns. Apparently a belief held by both conservative Christians and ISIS.
“… the policy articulated by our leaders sounds like it came out of a class discussion in freshman sociology.”
Perhaps that is the median voter’s level of understanding?
In imperial England, and further back in imperial Rome, it was important that the *important, powerful stakeholders* had something like a democratic system among each other. Nobody who had the power to raise an army was completely squashed out of using a political solution.
So, yes, I think some form of democracy is key, but the details matter. People who might turn to violence, need to instead have a political option. If you think this is naive, why not try to elaborate on the topic? The people waging war in the middle east are consistently complaining that they are unfairly excluded from some kind of resource or power source that they feel they should be a part of.
Assuming it’s an accurate end goal, what does it imply for Washington? To a large degree, Washington has limited power to fix these things around the world. However, it would help to support those power centers that will comply with a democracy in their region. Supporting Sadam Hussein was a blunder, from this perspective: he was nice enough to the U.S., for a while, but he was an unpopular minority in his own country.
Yes the civilisation-barbarism axis is the most useful mental too, but “I prefer civilisation” is a too vague a policy.
One path to civilisation is to have a mechanism where contending magnates agree to share power peacefully: a democratic constitution with ugly, corrupt politics is a good framework for that. It works well for India and Brazil and helps in worse places, like Lebanon (when foreign dictators don’t interfere) and Pakistan (when the miltary stays away).
Western powers have minimal influence over all this, but what they little the can do is help nuture this kind of solution. The point is to support democracy not because you think it will work well, but because it’s naive to imagine “realists” can pick some winning strong-man. Nowadays it is even naive to imagine that self-made strong-man will stay in charge for long.
Libya, Syria, Yemen and even Egypt are all long-standing dictatorships that fell more or less without outside help (western involvement, where it happened at all, came only after a war or revlotion was underway). That happened partly because dictaorships collapse all the time, but also because they were unable to survive under modern conditions.
Those conditions include the fact that Arab peoples are not totally immune to ideas from outside, and many of them want to try democracy. Even if they are going to make a hash of it for a few decades, it is no use for foreign do-gooders to try and impose dictatorship from the outside.
The C-B axis does seem to be the best way to understand this. The problem with the C-B tribe is that they believe that they can impose order on barbarians through the use of an orderly military.
The barbarians are likely to remain barbarians regardless of the inputs we make into their systems.
But that’s not the scenario outlined by Arnold.
The US Marine Corps did not make Iraq into a democracy, and when they left they fell back into barbarism.
But while they were there, after the surge, the violence subsided.
So, to answer Arnold’s question, “if we sent in the Marines”.
You don’t bring order to barbarians, you kill them. Death is within the normal scope of the military.
“Rubble makes no trouble” is this group’s motto.
Modern democracies (i.e.with news cameras) are unable to prosecute total war. The best they can do is render the enemy fighting force ineffective and demoralized. Winning the subsequent peace is critically necessary yet likewise impossible if your view is correct.
Peace will come to England, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, the Baltic Nations, Spain, Portugal when ____
The attempted answers over the Age of Conflict of the 20th Century (and before) have been: “When “universality is achieved.”
In terms of “re-reads,” open Carroll Quigley’s “The Evolution of Civilizations.”
(1961; Liberty Fund 1979). There is also his “Tragedy and Hope,” to find leads to the trends toward seeking universality following periods of extended conflicts and violence.
Something often missed in the understanding of “Islam” is the function of universality in the Muslim faith. We are witnessing another of those “drives” for universality through violence – that must be understood as such if it is to be successfully confronted; at least to eliminate the aspects of violence.
“Peace will come to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East when … ”
… they believe the same things Europeans believed after WWII (maybe Western Europeans, or maybe after the fall of the Soviet Union), and have some entity play the same role as the U.S. did.
That probably means a collapse in religiosity as well as ‘conversion’ of a larger portion of the population and especially the elites to mainstream progressivism.
Until then, it’s going to be a rough few decades.
Attempt 1: when they view capitalism as compatible with their cultural values.
I would like to see a discussion of, if the president made a believable announced that if the people in the middle est wish to continue killing each other off it is no skin off our nose. Go ahead, we will not intervene in any way . Included in this discussion has to be what support the US owes Israel.
If anyone knew how to fill in that blank, it probably would have been filled by now and we’d be talking about how well the new Transformers movie did in the Middle East this year.
I think Michael Bay is why they mad.
What answers do the prediction markets give?
Isn’t the most libertarian answer that we just don’t know how to get a society from A to B? There is so much we don’t even know about how the rich western democracies got that way(Iraq really exposed our naivete about institutions), and obviously so much missing local knowledge about societies we’d like to remake, that the very idea of advancing these societies by our hand seems anti libertarian.
Peace will come when they embrace individual liberties, the often called English liberties, and start to create the traditions and institutions to keep them alive. In essence, when they enter the modern world with the separation of the economic, religious/ideological, political and social spheres. This is unlikely to happen at this time when not only is Continental Europe reverting to it absolutist/ruling elite traditions, but even Britain, Canada and the US (the bastion with the strongest formal protections of individual liberties) are subverting the time immemorial traditions of liberty first enumerated 800 years ago in Magna Carta.
Democracy is a horrible export and a red herring. We quickly see this observation by a late 19th century commenter bears true.
“We will therefore conclude with the perhaps unforeseen result, that democracy, when crowned with power, seeks rather what it considers the well-being of the community than the liberty of the individual.”
In any case, democracy without the traditions of individual liberty that put individual liberty beyond the plebiscite as well as the Parliament soon become a tyranny. A tyranny the above commenter insightfully lamented:
“It was a great advantage when tyranny had one head and one neck; but what axe will relieve us from the tyranny of the majority? Foreign conquest was an evil; but it commonly took only our flocks and herds and left ourselves in liberty.”
The British Empire was somewhat successful in exporting “English” Liberty in a manner. While other Europeans held all the offices of powers in their colonies, the British developed and trained a local “elite” in traditions of government and individual liberties. Not perfect, but as we see with India, the seed can germinate after a time when removed from the shadow of the British Empire.
Much more than India supports the English program. Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, the Caribbean, Hong Kong and more. Non of these places have fully made the transition but they have traversed great distances and are running a good marathon pace to make it.