Category Archives: Neoconservatism

The Meta (Perspective) on Mark (Steyn)

Iran, Islam, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Mark Steyn’s essay, “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” appears in the Spring-2006 issue of City Journal. The Journal is billed as “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine… an idea factory” on policy questions.

Let me stipulate for the record that Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. There is, moreover, a great deal that is valuable in this piece—and in his work, in general. However, I don’t think Steyn’s epistolary razzmatazz should be confused with in-depth analysis, or be passed as such in policy-oriented publications.

What do I mean in the context of his Iran run-down?

Just one example: Steyn is courting a confrontation of biblical proportions with Iran. But for me one of the profound questions is this: the West, including the U.S., consists of a bunch of deracinated nations, only relatively free, whose governments are engaged in indoctrinating their respective populations about the twin wonders of Islam and Muslim mass immigration. The Crusaders we are not.

On what philosophical basis, then, does Steyn wish to wage war on a belligerent Muslim country? What are we fighting for if we’ve surrendered already—we’ve welcomed their infiltration of our societies and institutions? (See my expose of this process in the winter issue of The New Individualist)

Surely the real war is at home? Surely the fight for self-determination—individual and national—must be waged against government and its sundering of our sovereignty, individual and national?

Apropos Mark (indirectly, that is), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems, recently wrote in Times Online: “Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI [American Enterprise Institute] are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.”

I think it’s fair to say this is a general trend.

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.

Neoconservatives, Reality, And Religious Relativism

Islam, Neoconservatism, Religion

In Get With The Global Program, Gaul, I mention a book with which a number of prominent neoconservatives seem enthralled. Olivier Roy, the author of Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, draws parallels between radical Islamists and the broader movement of born-again Christians. You heard me. If that makes you shake in your boots (I’m being cynical, of course. Would that the asinine analogy held; we’d be safe), thank your lucky stars. The author believes these Islamic revivalists are doomed to become “a remote, detached community, like the Hasidic Jews and the Exclusive Brethren.” If only the comparison worked. If I were able to wave a magic wand so that born-again Christians and Exclusive Brethren usurped Islamists in the world, I’d do it in a heart beat. Islamism, sadly, is said to have hundreds of millions of active adherents, who do not come in peace. Still. at least two of the neoconservatives I cite in the column dig the book’s religious relativism. Is that significant?
The author, Roy, also sees Islamic radicalism as a revolt against—and a sign of—rapid acculturation, triggered by contact with the West. Islam, apparently, is in the throes of modernization; its atavism is actually advancement in disguise. Neoconservatives don’t care for reality, and they are anything but uncreative when it comes to subverting it. Thus they are in agreement when evidence against a theory is cast as evidence for a theory, as it is in this book. Like magpies to trash, they are also (at least these two) drawn to superficially clever ideas which are not truly insightful because their relationship to reality is at best tangential.

Neocon Tales Of The Arabian Nights

Foreign Policy, Islam, Neoconservatism

Curiously, those who advocate aggressive and futile wars against Muslims are equally devoted to promoting the Religion-of-Peace pie-in-the-sky, and the attendant misconceptions about Islam. Yes, neoconservatives, led by the Bush/Blair pair, have managed to anesthetize their subjects to a faith that defies sanitation. As you know, neoconservatives implicate “Radical Islam” in our woes, by which they mean a splinter of Islam. Indeed, an estimated 100 to 300 million Muslims are active adherents of Islamism: small potatoes, right? Yet to listen to our globalists, you’d think that Jihadists are as alien to Islam as edelweiss is to the Kalahari.
Ad nauseam we hear it chanted that the Religion-of-Peace was doing what it does best–inspire serenity and prosperity–when suddenly, ex nihilo, radicals materialized and derailed it. Of course, this nonsensical incantation is both ahistorical and illiterate–it’s easily corrected with the aid of a good history book and a Quran.
The first will show that the sword has always been integral to Islam, and that conversion has invariably meant conquest and untold carnage. The second will prove that, to be fair to Islam’s alleged hijackers, the’ve done no more than act on the dictates of their faith. Bin Laden is an obedient Muslim. He has obeyed the Quran. The Call to Jihad instructs Muslims that, “When you meet those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them.” Holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not defensive war as the Western students of Islam would like to tell us, warns Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, and author of The Sword of the Prophet.
Islam, moreover, has changed little over 1,400 years. Unlike the Jewish (and no doubt Christian) holy texts which have been reinterpreted by the sages over the centuries, the Quran has not; ”its decrees are not debatable and are to be taken literally.” Bin Laden may not be a perfect Muslim–he prefers bombing to beheading. But the times they have changed. Allowances must be made for technological advances and expediency.
A geopolitical blind spot tops the historical and textual deficiencies characteristic of the administration’s approach to terrorism and Islam. Agree or disagree with it, an aggressive war, launched against a sovereign Muslim nation–Iraq–was bound to serve as a catalyst for Jihadists. But the policy pinheads who extol Islam refuse to factor American foreign policy into the terrorism equation. Supporters of Bush’s foreign policy would do well to remember that, even if they believe, as Bush expects them to, that war in Iraq and terrorism in America are mutually exclusive conditions, they must at least concede that the president’s domestic positions on immigration, border security, and the imperative to be “minimally observant” about America’s enemies (comedian Dennis Miller’s term for racial profiling), amount to a reckless indifference to the sovereignty and safety of Americans.
But as I’ve previously observed, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”