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Bin Laden's victory
« on: 2003-03-22 15:20:36 » |
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Bin Laden's victory
A political system that delivers this disastrous mistake needs reform
Source: The Guardian
Author: Richard Dawkins
Dated: 2003-03-22
Osama bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, could hardly have hoped for this. A mere 18 months after he boosted the US to a peak of worldwide sympathy unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that international goodwill has been squandered to near zero. Bin Laden must be beside himself with glee. And the infidels are now walking right into the Iraq trap.
There was always a risk for Bin Laden that worldwide sympathy for the US might thwart his long-term aim of holy war against the Great Satan. He needn't have worried. With the Bush junta at the helm, a camel could have foreseen the outcome. And the beauty is that it doesn't matter what happens in the war.
Imagine how it looks from Bin Laden's warped point of view...
If the American victory is swift, Bush will have done our work for us, removing the hated Saddam and opening the way for a decent Islamist government. Even better, in 2004 Bush may actually win an election. Who can guess what that swaggering, strutting little pouter-pigeon will then get up to, and what resentments he will arouse, when he finally has something to swagger about? We shall have so many martyrs volunteering, we shall run out of targets. And a slow and bloody American victory would be better still.
The claim that this war is about weapons of mass destruction is either dishonest or betrays a lack of foresight verging on negligence. If war is so vitally necessary now, was it not at least worth mentioning in the election campaigns of 2000 and 2001? Why didn't Bush and Blair mention the war to their respective electorates? The only major leader who has an electoral mandate for his war policy is Gerhard Schröder - and he is against it. Why did Bush, with Blair trotting faithfully to heel, suddenly start threatening to invade Iraq when he did, and not before? The answer is embarrassingly simple, and they don't even seem ashamed of it. Illogical, even childish, though it is, everything changed on September 11 2001.
Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam's savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including, apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let's go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We're gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet.
Bush seems sincerely to see the world as a battleground between Good and Evil, St Michael's angels against the forces of Lucifer. We're gonna smoke out the Amalekites, send a posse after the Midianites, smite them all and let God deal with their souls. Minds doped up on this kind of cod theology have a hard time distinguishing between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Some of Bush's faithful supporters even welcome war as the necessary prelude to the final showdown between Good and Evil: Armageddon followed by the Rapture. We must presume, or at least hope, that Bush himself is not quite of that bonkers persuasion. But he really does seem to believe he is wrestling, on God's behalf, against some sort of spirit of Evil. Tony Blair is, of course, far more intelligent and able than Bush. But his unshakable conviction that he is right and almost everybody else wrong does have a certain theological feel. He was indignant at Paxman's wickedly funny suggestion that he and Dubya pray together, but does he also believe in Evil?
Like sin and like terror (Bush's favourite target before the Iraq distraction) Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. There are nasty people in every country, stupid people, insane people, people who should never be allowed to get anywhere near power. Just killing nasty people doesn't help: they will be replaced. We must try to tailor our institutions, our constitutions, our electoral systems, so as to minimise the chance that such people will rise to the top. In the case of Saddam Hussein, we in the west must bear some guilt. The US, Britain and France have all, from time to time, done our bit to shore up Saddam, and even arm him. And we democracies might look to our own vaunted institutions. Are they well designed to ensure that we don't make disastrous mistakes when we choose our own leaders? Isn't it, indeed, just such a mistake that has led us to this terrible pass?
The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.
My American friends, you know I love your country, how have we come to this? Yes, yes, Bush isn't quite as stupid as he sounds, and heaven knows he can't be as stupid as he looks. I know most of you didn't vote for him anyway, but that is my point. Forgive my presumption, but could it just be that there is something a teeny bit wrong with that famous constitution of yours? Of course this particular election was unusual in being a dead heat. Elections don't usually need a tie-breaker, something equivalent to the toss of a coin. Al Gore's majority in the country, reinforcing his majority in the electoral college but for dead-heated Florida, would have led a just and unbiased supreme court to award him the tie-breaker. [Hermit: I suggest that this might be better characterised as the Supreme Court determined that the Republicans had indeed stolen the election, but that there was no available remedy]. So yes, Bush came to power by a kind of coup d'état. But it was a constitutional coup d'état. The system has been asking for trouble for years.
Is it really a good idea that a single person's vote, buried deep within the margin of error for a whole state, can by itself swing a full 25 votes in the electoral college, one way or the other? And is it really sensible that money should translate itself so directly and proportionately into electoral success, so that a winning candidate must either be very rich or prepared to sell favours to those who are?
When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person. Professional headhunting firms are engaged, written references are taken up, exhaustive rounds of interviews are conducted, psychological aptitude tests are administered, confidential positive vetting undertaken. Mistakes are still made, but it is not for want of strenuous efforts to avoid them. Maybe such methods would be undemocratic for choosing the most powerful person on earth, but just think about it. Would you do business with a company that devoted an entire year to little else than the process of choosing its new CEO, from the strongest field in the world, and ended up with Bush?
Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.
Richard Dawkins FRS is the Charles Simonyi Professor at Oxford University. His latest book is A Devil's Chaplain (Weidenfeld & Nicholson).
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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JD
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Re:Bin Laden's victory
« Reply #1 on: 2003-03-24 09:14:48 » |
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Richard Dawkins wrote a polemical rant in last Saturday's Guardian newspaper. It is an attack on George Bush and the American political system itself. I hoped when I started reading the piece that Dawkins - a brilliant man - might have some useful insights and guidance on these important matters. I was dissapointed. Dawkins' piece is a rant and a crude one at that. Here is a hasty analysis.
Dawkins asserts that the international goodwill that had arising from 9/11 has been squandered. I challenge that. There was some sentimental outpourings, the citizens of allied countries expressed some sorrow. There was a brief hiatus in the relentless criticism and denigration of America. That wore off. The normality of anti-Americanism returned. There was one crucial difference: Americans had woken up to the situation. It is this awakening that is changing the world not the minor fluctuations in the force of anti-American animus that have been pretty much constant for 40 years.
Dawkins further claims that not only has this putative "goodwill" been squandered but Bin Laden must be pleased with the current events in Iraq (the invasion by the coallition).
This suggests two highly unlikely things:
1. That Bin laden is alive.
2. That Bin Ladenists have switched from their primary motive of isolating Israel and forcing American disengagement in the Middle East to one of gleefully rejoicing US armoured units pouring into the region and blank cheques being written to Israel to compensate for possible damage.
Dawkins then hints that worldwide sympathy (such as that offered after 9/11) could be some sort of antidote to Bin Laden's toxic memes. I think he is deluded.
I doubt he really believes that the short lived sympathy shown by people across the world checked the efforts of Al Qaeda (and that the street dancing and rejoicing in the Arab world had no effect on their motivations).
I believe the only thing to have prevented an repeat of 9/11 in both the UK and the USA has been the annihilation of the Al Qaeda homebase in Afghanistan and the relentless campaign against it by the Intelligence Services. There is every indication that Al Qaeda's efforts to inflict terror and death are as strenuous as ever and have never heeded anything but the diktats of their twisted Islamism. The belief that western tears may dissaude them mocks reality.
I was troubled by Dawkins' '"tone" in his piece. To me it read as a rant. He stoops to using the crudest of loaded words and propaganda techniques.
At the very least I expected subtlety from Dawkins, but his article is crude; his arguments blunt and unoriginal.
He described the Bush administration as "the Bush junta" , Bush himself is "swaggering, strutting little pouter-pigeon", Tony Blair is lampooned as a poodle "trotting faithfully to heel". This material would be embarrassing enough coming from a sub-editor at the Iraqi Ministry of Propaganda, but one of the world's finest scholars it is shameful.
As his anger gets the better of him later in the piece, it deteriorates in the grossest snidery as he lampoons and peddles stereotypes. He ironically invokes the demon of racism just as he reaches his own racist crescendo: "It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let's go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We're gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet."
His lampooned stereotypical US straw man is carrying a backpack stuffed with now familiar red herrings [I lifted this imagry from an excellent article on the tactics used by Pinker's detractors1 ]:
1. Removing the hated Saddam will open the way for a "decent Islamist government" - it may or may not, but so be it. This is a post cold- war quandry that is forcing us to rethink the widom of exporting democracy. Is it best to give democracy a chance or do we simply leave matters where they lay in 1991?
Clearly democracy alone is insuffient. It must be accompanied by a proper effort to establish the institutions and cultural norms that support democracy. This is ambitious, but not foolheardy. To give up without trying is cowardice.
The regime change was only one of several objectives or desirable outcomes from this war. No one can tell whether in the long term it was the best thing to do, but one thing is certain - leaving Saddam in place would be wrong and complicitous with mass murder.
Future generations would rightly accuse us of appeasement and securing our own peace at the expense of millions of Iraqis and Kurds. We would bear the burden of their scorn asking why we continued to trade and normalise realtions with a mass murderer simply because it suited our economy and we did not want to risk our soldiers.
In short, dawkins cannot levy outrage at our doing deals with dictators in the past whilst suggesting that we ought to do precisely that now in case "a decent Islamist governmetn" takes power. Bullet biting time Richard.
2. The action in Iraq will arouse (Arab?) resentment. It may, but so what? What was the US reward for saving Muslim lives in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo? 911. What about the ghost of Bin laden claiming that there will be "so many martyrs volunteering, we shall run out of targets"? Heard it all before, prior to Afghanistan, and it came to nought. The arab street is a problem for thug rulers across the region, not us.
Bin Laden's successors are trying as hard as they can to hurt us. Appeasement will never placate them. As Joe Dees wrote on this matter:
"If your enemy believes you to be either the devil or in thrall to him and that conversation itself possibly endangers their immortal soul by osmosis, it is rather difficult to palaver, for all they wanna hear is your conversion, and when they don't hear it, all they wanna see is you dying."
Mid way through the piece Dawkins makes a claim about a claim, namely "that this war is about weapons of mass destruction". His misses the point that this war is partly about WMD. It is also about regime change, middle eastern engagement and Pax Americana. Dawkins cannot grasp the fact that the world has changed completely. The old order of legitimacy is gone. Iraq is partly an experiment - the result of which will help the US decide how to reposition itself in a hostile world.
Thus far in the piece Dawkins just poured expressed his anti-American bigotry and animus whilst repeated, unchallenged, the canards and hopes of the Iraq/Islamist propagandists. He then makes a staggering claim: Bush and Americans see the Iraqi was as revenge for 9/11.
He then goes on to apparently comment on his own claim: "This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice."
He is right. It is pure racism and prejudice. It is a lie, a canard, designed to undermine the just cause of this war. It succeeds in doing nothing but exposing Dawkins radicalism and bigotry.
He then goes further into the realms of the preposterous, like a deranged Virgil touring hell and confusing it with heaven, he saves his main sermon for this passage:
"Bush seems sincerely to see the world as a battleground between Good and Evil, St Michael's angels against the forces of Lucifer. We're gonna smoke out the Amalekites, send a posse after the Midianites, smite them all and let God deal with their souls. Minds doped up on this kind of cod theology have a hard time distinguishing between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Some of Bush's faithful supporters even welcome war as the necessary prelude to the final showdown between Good and Evil: Armageddon followed by the Rapture. We must presume, or at least hope, that Bush himself is not quite of that bonkers persuasion. But he really does seem to believe he is wrestling, on God's behalf, against some sort of spirit of Evil. Tony Blair is, of course, far more intelligent and able than Bush. But his unshakable conviction that he is right and almost everybody else wrong does have a certain theological feel. He was indignant at Paxman's wickedly funny suggestion that he and Dubya pray together, but does he also believe in Evil? "
Dawkins reveals what this is all about. His obvious fury and venom have nothing to do with Iraq or war or presidential systems. He is taking aim against his old enemy: religion. This piece is stuffed with delicious irony because Dawkins appears to schizophrenically describe what he is doing precisely as he makes those claims about his alter ego: George Bush.
It is Dawkins who is an evangelist in this piece. It is Dawkins who divides the world into deluded believers and enlightened non-believers. It is Dawkins who is the fiery pulpit bashing ranter, half raging with indignant fury, half beatified by humane rationalism.
"Like sin [and] terror...Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. There are nasty people in every country, stupid people, insane people, people who should never be allowed to get anywhere near power. Just killing nasty people doesn't help: they will be replaced. "
Wrong Richard. They will be replaced by whomever the people of Iraq choose. The counter will be reset, they will have another go. If they botch it - then leave them to their chosen fate. History will tell us who was right about whether or not the Iraqis embraced democracy or not.
He goes on to make misdirected appeal: "We must try to tailor our institutions, our constitutions, our electoral systems, so as to minimise the chance that such people will rise to the top."
We? Is he speaking as an Iraqi? Our institutions - whilst flawed - are compared to most others, near perfect. Compared to an ideal every system is flawed. People like Chomsky have made a career out of pointing out America's shortcomings against its own exacting standards. No one bothers with genuine benchmarking. The results are already known and would humiliate the West's detractors (like Chomsky) within and without.
Dawkins then states the obvious: "In the case of Saddam Hussein, we in the west must bear some guilt." Ok guilt borne, Next! We are fixing our mistakes with the blood of our soldiers. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out that during the Cold War the west - much to its own discomfort - supported people like Saddam Hussein because they saw them as a lesser evil compared with the Soviet threat. It was a rational and ultimately correct assessment. With the passing of the Soviet threat, foreign policy has adapted and tried to put right problems caused by that 50 year war. That is the era we are living in now.
Two challenges have arise up to face us now (one of which Dawkins has identified). What do we do about democracies that turn out anti-Western governments? What constitutes legitimacy in the modern era? Both questions are vexatious and extremely difficult to answer. Dawkins simple accusations neither help, hinder nor inform. They are filed under "Sanctimonious Guff" and ignored.
Dawkins uses his description of the guiltfest he wants to us to feed at to introduce his main theme: The rot at the core of Western institutions.
Dawkins is puzzled. The US with a population of "300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet...who...emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush."
But George Bush IS a leader of the highest quality. Dawkins is blinded to this by raw bigotry and hatred. He is stuck in a cognitive trap because he would rather bite bullets than admit the possibility that Bush is a superb president for America and doing a superb job, for America.
Because he cannot face the obvious, that Bush is a very popular and successful president of some of the "best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth[ who] almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, lead[] the world by miles." he grasps at straws and blames the US constitution itself.
He counts the dead heat of the election as a fault. Instead of a sign of healthy democracy he claims "Elections don't usually need a tie-breaker", what he characterises as "something equivalent to the toss of a coin." He is both right and wrong. Votes frequently end in dead heats with casting required to carry one side or another. It is unusual, but as we now know, not impossible for this to happen with even massive presidential elections.
Furthermore, what happened with Bush/Gore was not a tie-break. No coins were tossed (however figuratively). The Supreme legal authority in the US took a decision - based on the constitution and laws of the land that the election was valid. Gore conceded. There was no Coup De Grace, just a winner, fair and square, and now a popular one.
So what of the charges that the system is flawed and Dawkins recommend to remedy them?
The summary of his objection to the American system of governance and the legitimacy of the Bush administration is:
1. It is wrong that a single person's vote can by itself swing a full 25 votes in the electoral college (but concedes this can favour either candidate)
2. It is wrong that money translates itself so directly and proportionately into electoral success (and claims that this compromises candidates integrity).
Whilst the complicated presidential electoral system does appear a bit clunky - as all elderly systems are. It may well do with some modernisation and simplification. The beauty of American democracy is that if this is necessary, it will be done. The system can and will adapt as necessary. The election of 2000 may be a spur to reform, and that reform will enhance the system not be a signal of its illegitimacy.
Point number two is a problem for every political system in the world. Money buys influence, advertising space, propagandists and campaigners. There have been major reforms over over the last few years regulating campaign finance and establishing transparency in US fisco-political affairs. US citizens has easily see exactly who has supported what financially. That also have enormous resources to track the voting records and interests of their elected representatives.
At the end of his piece Dawkins adrenaline rush seems to have worn off and he is a bit calmer. He appeals for some sort of Platonic system of governance epitomised by what he imagines is the rational and fair methods used to elect Chief Executives and University Chancellors. Rule by the philosopher kings, franchise by examination, psychological fitness tests for all potential rulers, "positive vetting". This is the stuff of dreams, Soviet Dreams.
Setting aside the impracticalities of Dawkins' half thought out wishful thinking, his examples are spurious. The back stabbing, open prostitution, treachery and rank bribery that characterise CEO selection is worse and often more psychological brutal then even the worst political regimes.
I am sure (but I have no direct experience of this) that university politics are similarly rancorous and brutal.
Dawkins ends with a question and a claim:
"Would you do business with a company that devoted an entire year to little else than the process of choosing its new CEO, from the strongest field in the world, and ended up with Bush?"
The answer is yes. Millions of us will continue to do profitable business with USA Inc. We will also respect them for the resolute president they have who is not afraid to fight for their interests. No one was better suited to reverse the calamity of the Clinton Era ( see the fruits of N Korean appeasement coming to a headline near you soon) than George Bush. Long may he prosper and his people with him.
The claim at the end of the article is I suppose the saddest. It reveals the depths of Dawkins confusions and the scale of naivety. "Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood."
There are no Maginot lines in the age of the ICBM, neither are their neighbourhoods. What Saddam does over there might as well be done over here for its effects, risk and dangerousness. American has woken up to that crucial fact. There is no longer a simple "over there" and the Americans know it.
Luckily for us, every tin pot dictator from knows it too. This is something to rejoice at.
George Bush is a boon for the world. And a nightmare for the ghost for Bin Laden. Victory.
Jonathan Davis is the Churchill Professor of International Macropolitical Understanding at Mossad University. His latest book is Saddam via Bagram (Davis & Dees).
Notes:
1. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/su-eog012303.php
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