Globalization is winning, and the Islamist movement is losing
Monday, July 20, 2009 at 12:37AM COMMENTARY: "Something's Dying in the Streets of Tehran: The 30-year-old Islamist movement has been fading for the past two years," by Joshua Muravchik, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 13-19 July 2009.
Provocative start:
Much as the hammers that leveled the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, so might the protests rocking Iran signal the death of radical Islam and the challenges it poses to the West.
Muravchik argues that the real danger after 9/11 wasn't the terrorism, but that radical ideology could dominate much of the Islamic world.
The collapse of legitimacy in Iran comes after a string of similar setbacks to the movement: Morocco 2007, Jordan 2007, Pakistan 2008, Indonesia this year, Kuwait this year, and then Lebanon. In each instance the more radical groups, which had done better previously or were perceived to be on an upswing, have suffered surprisingly bad outcomes--when votes were actually counted.
Why the broad reversal?
The brutality of the radicals.
This is why I've always maintained that Iraq would have its desired effect either way: if we had succeeded from the start, the Big Bang could have been unstoppable (remember all the positive tumult back in 2005 across the region); but done badly, the outcome works just as well and in some ways better. Why?
One, the U.S. military is forced to evolve as it should, making it far more ready for the tougher slog in Af-Pak (which, as I argue, is of far lesser strategic value--thus the need to have our ducks in a row thanks to the far more important battlefield called Iraq).
But two, any temporary al Qaeda "victory" or "cause célèbre" just allows their brutality to emerge, and that works in our favor nicely.
In the end, history will judge Bush-Cheney kindly on the choice to go in, even if the execution sucked.
Reader Comments (5)
President Bush's decisions should be better appreciated because of the flawed execution, not despite it. Upon 9/11, we went to war with the military we had. That military was strong at some things, and we did them well (eg, Taliban and Saddam takedown). Our military was weak at other things (eg, post-major combat OOTW). The bad execution that happened should be blamed on ingrained flaws. Policies like the Powell Doctrine remind me how (UFC fighter) Frank Mir describes initially taking up wrestling: "I was covering up a weakness rather than fixing one." For a long time after the Vietnam War, we made decisions based on covering up our weaknesses. Mir later earned a black belt in jiu-jitsu to turn his weakness into a strength, and he became a champion.
Long before 9/11, we've needed a learning curve to replace our weaknesses with strength. President Bush, in contrast to his predecessors (Republican and Democrat), made decisions that strained our weaknesses, especially the "surge" and COIN in Iraq. Bush forced us onto the learning curve and his determination kept us there even as respected authoritative people were excoriating him and making compelling arguments to fall back onto our weaknesses and quit.
It's been hard and ugly at times, but the learning curve we needed was always going to be hard and ugly at times. We have learned needed lessons, and as importantly, it looks promising that we will continue to learn them rather than fall back onto our old weaknesses. So, I hope history eventually will judge President Bush kindly for his choice to go in, BECAUSE the execution sucked.
Althought his approach comes at this without these words above or a political agenda, Dr. Barnett's "Pentagons New Map" has been an awesome contribution to unleashing the posibilities of a New Age of Enlightment via connectivity and globalization in the areas without it.
Having a release date around the time of a Bush ll 28% approval rating says something too.
Rather than the military learning lessons, they were significantly hampered by our political leaders. The politically driven torture regime started at Gitmo and expanded to Iraq was a major recruiting tool for Qaeda. The decision to go extra light and not have enough troops for follow on was a political one, made by a political appointee. The hyping of WMDs (Barnett's "it was dark" defense) weakened America's position world-wide, especially among the allies we should have recruited. The decision to reserve the rebuilding contracts as political spoils instead of using them to build support was a political one. The decision to disband the Iraqi Army was a political one, as was the de-Baathist program and the abrupt end of the various nationalized industries.
I think that history will look at the MBA/CEO president, his experienced Veep and their political appointees and wonder just how they could make so many bad choices.
Only if "history" begins its look on 9/11/01.
My history began in 1997, when I enlisted in the Army. In my acculturation as a soldier at the end of the 90s, we prepared to fight a conventional war against a Soviet-like force, avoided MOUT, and treated OOTW as lower order and only as needed. Back then, Civil Affairs was barely discussed, if at all, and just an odd unsoldierly concept that dealt with other-than-war and post-war issues that didn't concern us war-fighting soldiers. (Yes, even an MI troop is a war-fighting soldier.) Nowadays, Civil Affairs is part of every soldier's mission.
From my perspective, the "bad choices" actually have been reasonable choices within the context of who we were when we entered this war. We had ingrained weaknesses and the results often painfully reflected them. President Bush was not revolutionary and we didn't skip steps on the learning curve. But his decisions, at times against tremendous political pressure, allowed the necessary iterations of failure and success, reflection, and improvement.