Alexis de Tocqueville, who a century and a half ago observed that nobles of the ancien régime “possessed annoying privileges, enjoyed rights that people found irksome but they safeguarded the public order, dispensed justice, had the law upheld, came to the help of the weak and directed public business.” But when “the nobility ceased to conduct these affairs, the weight of its privileges seemed more burdensome and its very existence was, in the end, no longer understandable.”
.. It is likely that other forces will intervene to preclude the wholesale transfer of France’s government and elite institutions to the Gulf States. Yet the Gulf State influence in Submission is not some dystopic future to be arrived at absent a course correction; it is very much part of the West’s present reality.
.. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.” The money flowing into extremist groups and human rights violations have been documented copiously, with little change in U.S. policy.
.. Some experts estimate as much as $7 trillion from the U.S. alone to the Middle East in the last four decades.
.. Gulf Arab petro-nobility donate tens of millions to elite American universities and leading think tanks. The think tanks, of course, are well positioned to directly shape U.S. policy. “It is particularly egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an advocate,” Joseph Sandler, an attorney and expert on foreign influence, told the New York Times’ Eric Lipton. “Think tanks have this patina of academic neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”
American Way of Life: a nation without limits: a threat?
In the 20th century, “our” side won because American industry and ingenuity produced not only superior military might but also a superior way of life based on consumption and choice—so at least Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe. A third assumption asserts that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means of ensuring that universal freedom prevails—that the armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination. That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.
..
Not coincidentally, a Pakistani tribal elder talks about the effect that US drone attacks has on his community:
“Children stopped going to school, the women have become mental health patients, in my own house my four children, my daughter has mental problems, because of drones,” he said.
And the strikes are not fulfilling their aim, he argued.
“These drone attacks do not finish terrorists. When in one house two or three children and their mother or father are targeted by drone attacks, the whole household become terrorists against America,” he argued.
.. He said that American policy towards the Middle East is emblematic of a nation that does not believe it has limits.
In this view, America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen.
.. But come on, can we really say with a straight face that the hedonistic culture of the post-Christian West is no threat to their way of life? That they have nothing to fear from us, other than our drones and bombs?
How Islam Created Europe
In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.
Indeed, early in the fifth century a.d., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves
.. Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.
.. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders—borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents—Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration.
..Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.
..Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.
.. “The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”
Does Obama Have This Right?
I was most struck by the moment when Sheikh Abdullah Humedi Ajeel al-Yawar, head of the giant Shammar tribe, centered in what is now ISIS-occupied Mosul, stood up in his elegant robes, looked at Iraq’s oil minister and asked: “What happened to the $700 billion [in oil money] that came to Iraq, and not a single bridge was built? What happened to this $700 billion? We are asking this from the heart.”
.. But tiny Kurdistan today is hosting 1.8 million refugees from other parts of Iraq and from Syria, and with low oil prices, it’s almost bankrupt.
.. Kurdistan and Tunisia are just what we dreamed of: self-generated democracies that could be a model for others in the region to follow. But they need help. Unfortunately, Obama seems so obsessed with not being George W. Bush in the Middle East that he has stopped thinking about how to be Barack Obama here — how to leave a unique legacy and secure a foothold for democracy … without invading.