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Author Topic:   The Fantasy World of Bush, Blair and Harper
DayDreamer
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posted August 25, 2006 04:39 PM           Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
It's not our freedoms that fuel Arab anger
Bush, Blair, Harper push dubious claim

Aug. 19, 2006. 12:31 PM
JAMES TRAVERS

It is this new century's first great conceit that extremists are motivated not by what history and mighty powers have done to Arabs but by what the West has done for itself.

To listen to George W. Bush, Tony Blair and, now, Stephen Harper is to be led to believe that the industrial democracies are hunkered down behind the barricades at an intersection between civilizations or at least between good and evil. That's politically useful and not very helpful.

Yes, there is a fundamentalist element on Islam's fringe willing to die making its point in the most shocking and painful ways. Their ultimate commitment was evident in the horrors of New York, London and Madrid.

But political leaders badly distort reality when they magnify the threat. Worse still, they inflate support for solutions that aren't working now and hold little hope of future success.

What Washington and its few close allies are trying to achieve is theoretically constructive. Spreading democracy, confronting fanatics and keeping unpredictable states from building nuclear weapons is, indisputably, in the common interest.

But the difficult transition from theory to practical application suggests that good intentions are not nearly enough. To be effective agents of meaningful local change, even powers as muscular as the U.S. must be credible.

It isn't now, and that makes it heavy lifting to advance democracy, fight terrorism or control Iran.

Democracy will always be a hard sell in a region that still remembers how colonial oil interests crushed Mohammed Mossadeq and the beginnings of political freedom in Iran before the ayatollahs. It's even harder now that Washington has assigned higher priority to Israel's struggle with Hezbollah than to protecting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution.

Rooting out fanatics would be easy if they were only the one-dimensional creatures of Western caricature. But as the world is witnessing in south Lebanon, modern militias are as adept at construction as destruction and, more important, fill the void left by government impotence and international indifference.

And what lessons has the West taught the East about building weapons of mass destruction? America's friends are allowed to break the non-proliferation rules while its enemies, fearing an unwanted visit from the Marines or Cruise missiles, rush to build or buy the bomb.

That might be so much doom and gloom if it were not for an underlying dynamic that is even more disturbing: Rational, stable states are losing ground to more radical neighbours and to extreme, amorphous organizations that are as difficult to cope with politically as they are to defeat militarily.

Along with an appalling list of civilian casualties, emerging from an unnecessary summer war is a new Middle East. But it's not the one the U.S. promised to create.

On the defensive only weeks ago, Iran and Syria are using aggressive and startlingly innovative proxies to exercise their offensive strength. Hezbollah with its network tactics is the new asymmetrical warfare model.

Their gains come with equal and opposite losses. Israel, despite its celebrated military and secretive nuclear capacity, suddenly seems vulnerable, as do moderate neighbours who put too much faith in an equilibrium largely sustained at Palestinian expense.

It's particularly troubling that the Middle East may have moved past the tipping point. Land for peace is quickly becoming a better deal for Israel than its enemies, and for that reason could easily slip beyond reach.

If that's the future, then post-9/11 rhetoric will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Driven to extremes by failures to resolve real and inflated grievances, enough of the majority could join the minority to make today's political fantasy tomorrow's inescapable reality.

Two options beckon. One is to do more of the same; the other is to accept and work with the connection between actions and consequences, anger and violence, prosperity and peace.

That doesn't require accepting blame for being victims of irrational hate. It does demand thoughtful reconsideration of the proposition that Western societies are targets simply because they are democratic, open and free.

Simple and comforting, that notion might still survive as the collective explanation. But the exercise has the potential to expose the extraordinary conceit that millions of Muslim as well as Christian Arabs, not just those on the far side of extremism, are more consumed with destroying our lives than improving their own.

If that twisted logic seems reasonable, then so, too, will policies now reducing the Middle East to rubble and chaos.


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