I’m of the opinion that our Iraq intervention is more less neutral in terms of how most Muslims view us compared to antibellum opinion: in their eyes, we suck already, this makes us suck somewhat more but not much more to matter beyond getting a few excitable would-be jihadi to cross to border into Iraq to get killed. In the medium to long term, what will matter is how Iraq turns out, and I’m cautiously optimistic about this. We’re at the beginning of a long road, and liberalization is a process, but the process is now proceeding.

The problem with Islamists getting control of countries is that they then acquire unmolested safe areas from which to plan strikes against the “far enemy”, i.e., make war on us. That was what happened in Afghanistan. One reason (among many) why there hasn’t been another 9/11 is that we got inside Al Qaeda’s decision loop and disrupted them: we struck faster, harder and more persistently than they planned for and had the capability to adapt to. The lack of safe havens with relatively easy contact to the outside world — what they had in Afghanistan — has hampered their operational capabilities. Yes, there have been strikes against near and easy targets, but a big blow against the far enemy has been made much less likely, though not impossible.

In the West, yes, Al Qaeda resembles a police matter, but that only applies where law and police forces are at hand. Beyond the West, police strategies have failed. If Islamists control a state, then Al Qaeda activities within that state will be beyond the reach of police strategies.

Agreed, America and Europe have to think about Muslims living in the West, but this seems to be more an issue with Europeans who have segregated Muslim immigrants in ghettos outside the bounds of the prevailing society. I’m sure you saw the Economist article a week or two ago about the Dutch rethink on these matters. I think American society puts more pressure on immigrants to adopt American ways and attitudes, even if there’s no deliberate policy to that effect.

I think that letting Islamists take control over parts of the Middle East may not be such a bad thing in the long run. In Iran, Khomenei’s revolution is not as strong ideologically as it was 25 years ago. Letting Islamists rule a country means that they get blamed for anything that goes wrong. Iranians may ultimately reject the mullahs. But I think that the Iranians are more likely to if the U.S. stops threatening Iran than if we keep up what we are doing. Iranians are very nationalistsic and our meddling will make people rally around the government.

In much of the West, I think that Al Qaeda and their ilk should be treated like a police matter. With better informers, surveillance, and border control, we could reduce their ability to strike significantly.

America (and Europe) also needs to reconsider how we should handle the Muslims living in the West. These people are often the biggest threat. The 9-11 hijackers were living in Hamburg, not Kabul. This is the issue that most politicians do not want to deal with for politically correct reasons. It is easier for Western politicians to send troops to Iraq than to deal with enemies in our midsts. For Westerners to be safe, more needs to be done about the enemies closer to home.

Note that the Vietnamese are primarily nationalists: yes, once we left them along, they didn’t bother us. But Al Qaeda and the like are neither nationalists nor geographically restricted.

The war was chosen for us. The ideological roots of this war were drafted by Qutb in the late 1950s/early 1960s when he looked at Western liberalism and secularism and found that it would destroy the Islam that he and his followers were trying to pursue. This doesn’t really have to do with US policies — for that matter, America had just slapped down the UK, France and Israel in the Suez Crisis — but with the liberal ideas emanating from the United States through the marketplace, pop culture and so on, not through US policies. Canada and Switzerland are not seen at the forefront of liberalism and their cultural power is more or less irrelevant. China, similarly, doesn’t project cultural ideas very far beyond East Asia. The United States, however, does project its liberal culture and is seen as the epitome of liberal culture, in the eyes of Qutb and all that followed him. How do you stop that? How do you keep America from interacting in the world — through the marketplace, symbolism, culture — in a way that would not offend them in some fundamental way? Isolationism isn’t possible, and probably hasn’t been possible since before WW2.

And we come back to Shubik’s technological curve again. We have a span of a few decades before Al Qaeda’s successors can ride this curve to launch repeated apocalyptic attacks on their “far enemy”. The liberalization project that we’re undertaking will take decades before the number of people who would give shelter to Al Qaeda, or aid, or sheild by silence — instead of turning them in or laughing them out of the room — dwindle to the point when Al Qaeda becomes a police matter. This is a race. It’ll take decades to run. But ignoring the problem, or “leaving their part of the world” (which is an impossibility as it’s not all about foreign policy specifics), won’t make this race not happen.

I think America has chosen to be in this war. America has chosen to be interventionist in the Middle East. A consequence of intervention is that we have enemies there. Canada and Switzerland do not. Neither does China and they are a big power, too. The Vietnamese no longer bother us since we left their part of the world. I believe the Muslims will be a lot less bothersome if we leave their part of the world.

My point is that if Iraq fails, then we’ll have to fight another Middle Eastern war a decade or so afterwards, as an Iraqi failure will embolden Al Qaeda and its sympathisizers to strike cataclysmic blows against the “far enemy”, as we’ve been shown to be “ineffectual” in some measure. And if we fail in that war, the cycle will be repeated. I don’t believe any change in American foreign policy will appease the Islamists, and this cycle of apocalyptic terrorism will continue until the Islamists are extinguished, either with great collateral damage to everyone or because the society around the Islamists has changed so much that Islamist ideas are laughed out of the room when brought up.

Yes, wars create problems different from the ones before the war and should only be fought as a last resort, but I believe we’d been at war for a decade before we realized that we’re at war. We haven’t chosen to be at war — far better for us to get fat playing PS2 games — but you can have a war if only one side wants one.

Given that the original reasons for going into Iraq proved false, if things get worse in Iraq, people will start questioning why we are still there.

From what I have read from Max Boot, I do not think there is a war he didn’t want (someone else) to fight. My view is that wars tend to create more problems than they solve and only should be fought if absolutely necessary.

It’s also far from clear that America cannot sustain its Middle Eastern commitments. Remember that America was attacked, by assailants that most Americans consider to be batshit crazy. Note also that Americans will recall the litany of attacks prior to 9/11, and how not dealing with Al Qaeda and the mindset it sprung from merely led to worse acts. When roused, the America’s Jacksonian instincts aren’t easily put away. Remember that we were willing to invade the Japanese main islands and suffer a million casualties doing so. In terms of long-term military commitments, take a look at Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace.

The other thing is that if America really isn’t willing to spend blood and treasure to accomplish it now, then it will be willing to spend blood and treasure to do it after the next act of apocalyptic terrorism. Al Qaeda and its successors won’t go away, and America will always be regarded as the “far enemy”, now shown to be weak and impatient. The problem with any sort of “next time” scenario is that America may take its gloves off for that fight.

I do believe that the American foreign policy is driven to a large extent by special interests. You may think my last paragraph was shibboleths, but that is what I believe the evidence supports. I think that the neoconservative arguments are used by special interests to justify what they would like to do. I am not saying that no one believes in these arguments (I know you and many others do). I just find that it is too convenient that many of the supporters of the Bush foreign policy are getting what they want out of these policies.

I suspect that the American presense in Iraq will prove to be too expensive for the American public to maintain. Whether or not America could really democratize the Middle East is an open question. But, I do not think Americans will be willing to spend the lives or money to accomplish it.

You are right thoug that in the next decade or so, history will prove one or neither of us right.

Anyway, yes, credibility is a dangerous concept to toy with, but the pendulum had swung too far the other way. Going simply by Al Qaeda’s own statements, we see that one reason they attacked the United States was because they did not believe American use of force in way that would substantially affect them was not credible. This was after Beirut 1980, Somalia, the Cole, the embassy bombings, Anbar Towers, etc. Really, American retreat or waffling during those instances invited further, mroe devestating attacks. Yes, we should heed the warnings of Cold War credibility logic, but these are warnings and not religious cant.

Look at Pollack’s book. This was written well before the invasion was on the horizon. That was the thinking of the time. Yes, intelligence reports were used by people wanting to invade Iraq, but there are a constellation of reasons for wanting to invade Iraq post-9/11, when the mere possibility of WMDs getting into the wrong hands invites great attention (For something that would minor pre-9/11, an old Boeing 707 freighter was stolen off the runway in Africa and no one could find it. Most likely, this was a dispute between creditors and their client, but this still drew US intelligence services to look for it as the 707 could be used in a 9/11 style attack. In the end, it was an unusually large repo, but before 9/11, something like this would have simply been ignored.)

Again, take a look at Qutb’s writings, which were written in the 1950s and 1960s. The US presence in Arabia was just one more thing in the end. The USS Clueless piece was concentrating on the center of gravity for the conflict, which is the Islam and modernism problem.

Actually, I think at this point, we’re at an impasse that we’ll probably be at for the next decade or so, as only time will give enough evidence on our different points of view: whether the US can’t help resolve the contradictions of modernity and Islam, and whether it should (and not out of some sense of moral obligation, btw, but from enlightened self-interest or self-defense). We can throw paragraphs around, but I don’t think we’re going to get around this difference for the time being.

Your last paragraph is straight from the antiwar protests, invoking all the shibboleths.