Every War Is Civil / Jehovallah Versus The Lord

I

There are many ways to classify the over-arching continuum of history: the story of the migration of tribes, the story of the spread of technology, the story of organized religion, the story of economic forces, and so forth. The best choice among the various over-simplifications, however, is this: history is the story of civil war.

We know by virute of science and intuition that humans are far more similar to each other than we can even quantify and even the most insular among us recognize that humanity is one family. This family fights, as do all families. But there is a indissoluble bond nonetheless. With this is mind, we are led to the truism that all war is civil war.

Civil war works on many levels, and they are by no means restricted by artificial and myopic national borders. Today, we see a civil war within the arbitrary borders of a political fiction called "Iraq". When we take a broader view, as we must, we see that most conflicts can be seen as manifestations of larger civil wars.

The 20th century lasted from 1914 to 1989. It was the last century to be dominated by Europe and, fitingly, it can best be described as a 75-civil war. Democratic capitalism, communism, fascism, and national socialism fought over the breadth of the continent over these decades, vacilating between military and political tactics.

When we ascend further, and see the Earth as a whole, I see an Eastern camp and a Middle Eastern camp. The eastern camp consists of everything between the Pakistan/India border and the coast of California. This camp accounts for probably 2/3 of humanity. I don't pretend to be qualified to synthesize the eastern mind but, suffice it to say, they're not monotheists.

The Middle Eastern camp, or the ME camp, is no longer restricted to the Middle East; it has long since taken over Europe and the entire western hemsiphere. The ME camp is the monotheism camp. Jews, Christians, and Muslims fall into this group; we need to take a deep breath and understand that monotheism is the exception throughout human history and even today. China and India see to that.

But we must understand that we, from Los Angeles to Baghdad, are defined by what, from the proper vantage point, is a very distinguishable camp in humanity's endless civil war: the Monotheists. Ah, the monotheists, who have been so busy killing each other these last 2,000 years that they have managed to convince themselves that they don't all sprout from the same seed.

The desert does something to people. It makes them more fatalistic, more absolutist, more judgemental. It is no accident that the three monotheisms were born in the desert. These men, from Abraham on, came up with the idea that religion should not seek to explain the wonders of the natural world, but rather should seek to dictate individual morality, more often than not at the point of a sword.

The Middle East birthed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the blink of an historical eye. There is a reason they all come from the same patch of place, and there is a reason that they have spent so much of their history fighting each other. When one has a holy book on his side, he can find a way to justify crucifying his cousin. Only a holy book could do that. The Communist Manifesto was another such holy book, with splintered camps of devotees murdering each other for the sin of misinterpreting its pages.

Monotheisms are, by definition, expansionist; they are the capitalism of religious models. Their only logic is expansion, driven by the Promethean certitude that they are doing what's best for people, whether they know it or not. They usually don't know it, by the way.

The "clash between civilizations" label for the current conflict is only slightly more substantial a subtitle than "First Blood: Part II"; as much commie ass as John J. Rambo kicked, the label was a contradiction. This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash within the civilization of monotheism.

II

America is not primarily American, nor is it primarily European; it is primarily a Middle Eastern society. What then accounts for the apparent chasms between the beliefs and conduct of these monotheist tribes? We must consider two factors: the nature of Jehovah versus God versus Allah, and the material condition of each of these tribes today.

Jehovah and Allah would get along well. They are.....assholes. Domineering, jealous, vindictive, pathologically violent figures. The kind of people that would destroy a city to avenge a perceived slight by the residents of said city. The God of the New Testament is qualitatively different from Jehovah and Allah, but this is not simply the function of a temporal shift in human mentality, because this peaceful and loving and forgiving Lord was born in between the sociopaths Jehovah and Allah.

So we can say this, we who do not fear truth: the Jewish and Muslim Gods are agressive, judgmental, and violent, while the Christian God is pacifistic, loving, and forgiving. This surely accounts for at least some of the difference between what Muslims and Christians perceive as acceptable conduct in the name or defense of their faith.

What then, accounts for the fact that the Jews, who have quite a violent God themselves, are not driven to the extreme and nihilistic violence of radical Muslims? Despite its conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories, which borders at times on brutal and criminal, Israelis don't kill as Jews, they kill as citizens of a temporal political state that they rightly perceive to be facing relentless attack.

The reason that the Jews have largely ignored their psychotic God recently is that their material success has rendered unappetizing the prospect of blowing themselves up for Jehovah, or beheading those who would denigrate Jewish law as revealed to Moses. Put simply, it's easy to cling to ideas of a vengeful and absolutist God when your life is nasty, brutish, and short. Unfortunately, Muslims are far more likely to have nasty, brutish, and short lives than are Jews and (especially white) Christians.

While we recognize that many pathologies can be assuaged by indoor plumbing and clean drinking water, others are less vulnerable to these inducements. Radical Islam is one such threat; it will never be totally co-opted by material progress, social dignity, or physical security. How many of the 9/11 hijackers grew up in the fetid alleys of Palestinian refugee camps, vainly clutching the worthless deeds to their homes in Israel? None. How many lived and thrived in the west, enjoying freedoms and opportunities only dreamed of in their homes countires? Most of them.

We do ourselves no good by claiming that Islamist terrorists are not "real Muslims". It's a tendency that many in the west share, up to and including Tony Blair and George Bush. As soon as a Muslim kills a few dozen people along with himself, the leaders of the west assure us that they had simply "hijacked" an otherwise peaceful religion.

To say that terrorists are not real Muslims is to entirely surrender to wishes rather than reality. The terrorists are real Muslims; that's the whole point. These men have read the Koran, and most of them have memorized it. They have read the passage instructing the reader to go out and kill the infidel, and they believe, from the bottoms of their filthy hearts, that this is truly the revealed will of God.

To say that these people are not Muslims is wishful thinking bordering on the suicidal. If a man walks onto a bus and blows himself up, do we need to guess his religion? No; 10 times out of 9, he (or she) is a Muslim. A real Muslim. One who grew up steeped in the Koran and genuinely beholden to its teachings. Here is the truth that the west refuses to acknowledge: the root of Islamist terrorism is.....Islam.

III

So, we must come to a synthesis. When we look at the three major tribes of the monotheist camp, we see that one of them, the Muslims, are far more willing to use agressive violence as a specific manifestation of their faith; they are far more willing than memebers of either of the other tribes to openly engage in holy war.

Two of the tribes have a violent God and one of them has a peaceful God. The two violent Gods, Jehovah and Allah, differ in one important respect, however. Both use massive violence to articulate their displeasure with followers on occasion. But only one God, Allah, specifically tells his followers to use violence themselves against members of the other tribes for the simple crime of not belonging to the right tribe.

We can be sure that an improvement in the temporal physical life of Muslims will put a damper on the allure of Islamist terrorism. We can be just as sure, however, that as long as their are Muslims, their will be Islamist terrorism. Go kill the infidel means go kill the infidel. Period. No amount of political compromise or socio-economic justice can erase those words or obscure a final fact that makes us uncomfortable, but which must be acknowledged.

Here is this uncomfortable truth: when a Christian man intentionally murders people in the name of his faith, he can point to no passage in his holy book that commands him to do so. Considerable, and futile, mental gymnastics are needed to find a license to kill in the name of the Christian God. A man who truly believes in the Bible can not kill in his Lord's name and remain true to the text.

When a Muslim man intentionally murders people in the name of his faith, he can point to a very concise and un-ambiguous passage in his holy text that does not obliquely justify killing, but specifically mandates and orders it. Considerable mental gymnastics must be taken by a devout Muslim to not find justification for murder in his holy book. A man who truly believes in the Koran can kill in his Allah's name and remain true to the text.

Liberation Conservatism

Conservatism, as practiced from above, is a force to be feared and resisted. This is the force that leads to executions for those who dare to assert that the earth revolves around the sun. This is the force that turns the water cannon against citizens demanding their constitutional rights. Conservatism from above is the timeless force that seeks only to conserve its own power. Conservatism from below, however, may be the only hope for America.

Conservatism from below is not aimed at conserving a grip on the levers of power by a few; rather, it is a force of the many, in which they seek to deny powers to the state, with the sober understanding that any power yielded to any government will be jealously conserved and abused by that government. Conservatism from below, in other words, strives to assure that conservatism from above is never possible.

When we speak of liberals and conservatives in our present context, what we are really referring to is where one comes down on the nature versus nurture ratio. Conservatives feel that, wherever this balance may lie, the state has no business in legislating nurture or in manipulating nature. Liberals feel that, nature being cruel and nurture having millions of manifestations, none of which can be "equal", it is the state's job to somehow compensate for the inequalities of both nature and nurture.

Conservatism from the bottom is in fact a liberating ideology because it has the audacity to say, "I Can". It does not pretend that inequalities do not exist, but merely accepts them as inevitable as the wind and the rain. It does not pretend that members of consent-based communities have no responsibility towards each other, but simply says that the state is an illegitimate patron of this process. It recognizes that all state power, however benevolently cloaked, must and will be exercised in perpetuity and for always-expanding reasons and justifications. It understands that the alternative, the only alternative to an omnipotent state, is for the citizen to say to his government, "I Can".

Conservatism has historically been used to maintain a fixed grip on entrenched power. This is conservatism practiced from above. Conservatism from below, liberation conservatism, is used to take power back from the conservatives on high. Power is not returned to the citizen by creating new federal bureaucracies tasked with figuring out how the federal government got so powerful; it is returned to the citizen when the citizen says to the government, "Thanks, but no thanks. I Can".

This is all very simple on paper, of course, and the reason it runs into such legion practical pitfalls is that the hour is getting late. The federal government has created a dependency in the minds, hearts, and wallets of the citizens that may be irreversible. Local governments are starved of revenue and authority. This is no conspiracy theory, of course, but the inevitable result of ceding power, any power, to a centralized and geographically distant bureaucracy.

Here's how it works: the federal government takes most of a citizen's tax monies; the citizen's local and state institutions receive comparably little. Here is the first step in creating dependency; since most of a citizen's taxes go to the federal government rather than more local ones, the citizen relies on the federal government for a corresponding degree of the services provided with tax revenues.

The second step is the ultimate power grab: the federal government can deficit spend and the state governments cannot. So not only does the federal government collect more money than the states, but it isn't even bound to restrict its expenditures to the level of money collected. States have checking accounts; the federal government has a credit card with no spending limit.

The corresponding realization must then be this: American liberals, and all the federal programs and bureaucracies they have authored, are the real on high conservatives. They are the entrenched power. Their power is not manifested by denying citizens their rights, or by excommunicating scientists, or by stationing federal troops in restive cities. Rather their power is entrenched by maintaining the feeling of dependence.

A mentality has been assiduously crafted and promoted, especially among minorities and the working class, that people need the federal government, that without their tax revenues going to Social Security and FEMA, the heartless conservatives would swoop down upon their homes and rob them blind. Then when Hurricane Katrina strikes, and the federal government proves breathtakingly negligent, there is no money or authority at the local level to deal with the needs of the citizens. "You need us, you need us", comes the chant from Washington. "Yes, we do need you", says New Orleans, "we need you to either do your fucking job or get out of the way".

There are two ways that a bloated and voracious federal government can be changed. They are bankruptcy and revolution. We are heading for the former unless we realize the need for the latter. This revolution does not need blood, however, nor does it need hostility between competing segments of civil society. All it needs is a clear and concise belief, an admittedly monumental paradigm shift. All it needs is for citizens to look at what the federal government has provided as opposed to what could have been provided at the same cost by local institutions. When the citizen sees this balance sheet in his mind's eye, he will be left with one conclusion. "I Can".

Who Are We?

My sister is a student at a public university, and her abnormal psychology professor gave her a dose of abnormal psychology recently. When my sister informed her professor that she had made a mistake in sourcing a paper and asked for a chance to correct it, her professor told her, "you white people are all the same...always looking for other people to clean up your messes".

Firstly, I take issue with the logic of this indictment. If white people are always looking for other people to clean up their messes, why was my sister asking for permission to clean up her own mess? She is a disgrace to white people everywhere, apparently. All joking aside, I wonder how it is that a person who felt it acceptable to say this to a student could possibly be employed by a public university.

There is no such thing as reverse racism, just as sure as our society harbors no sympathy for reverse murder or reverse rape. Racism is racism. When it is "reversed", none of its immorality is alleviated. My sister's professor made a blatanly racist and intellectually childish comment, and it got me to thinking how it is that I am far more outraged by this than my sister was.

If a white professor had started a sentence with, "you black people are all the same...", he would have been fired the same day, I imagine. I can also imgaine him on the front page of the local newspapers and as the crucible for a new push for sensitivity training, diversity awareness, and other assorted acts of moral masturbation in which young people congregate to apologize for living in such a rapacious and bigoted society.

I don't mean for one minute to underestimate the weight of the crimes that have been perpetrated by white men in my country against African-Americans. Neither do I intend to endorse the logic of these racist men, which I must do in order to buy into my sister's professor's world view. Racist whites see people as defined by their skin color. So do racist blacks, such as my sister's professor.

I am not proud to be a white man. I am proud to be a good man, and relatively proud to be an American, but I attach precisely no importance to my skin color. I fully understand that the overarching forces of society and economics mean that I will benefit to some degree by being born white, but that is different from defining myself as white, or allowing anyone else to do so. I don't define myself by my skin, my height, my name, or the shape of my ears, because I have no control over these attributes. I define myself by my actions.

If we accept the world view of my sister's professor, not only am I and my sister responsible for the various and well-documented sins of our great-great-great-great-second-step-cousins-twice-removed, but we are also to be credited with representative democracy, walking on the moon, are curing polio. And not only does my sister's professor share victimhood with the nameless millions of her ancestors who were enslaved by my ancestors, but she is just as responsible for those of her ancestors who kidnapped and sold her other ancestors to my ancestors. American armies did not pierce the heart of darkness with soldiers and cotton tycoons to enslave Africans; other Africans gladly sold their cousins to the Americans, with full knowledge of the destination.

I was in a train station in Munich a few years ago with my closest friend, and we were buying a ticket to Florence. "Before leaving Germany", said the man at the counter, "I suggest you visit Dresden. It's really quite beautiful.....or it was, until you destroyed it". Ah yes, the great destroyer of Dresden, born 35 years after the fact.

If I am responsible for destroying Dresden by virtue of my nationality, then I am also to be commended for rebuilding it. And if I am responsible for destroying Dresden, the ticket man is every bit as responsible for the war itself. For every life wasted, for every book burnt. I wondered why he was at work at the train station that day. Didn't he have Jews to kill? And since I'm an American of German descent, which side am I responsible for? Both? Sucks to be me.

The kind of conversation-ending intellectual infantilism cited above, which denies people their very identity as individual human beings and is designed to end conversations before they are allowed to become substantive, has no place in the hearts and minds of rational people. It will continue to exist, of course, but it must be relegated to people who sell train tickets, and exorcised from the ranks of those who teach our children.

Beware the Narrative

We are witnessing now, in real time, the construction of the Narrative that will arise to explain our inevitable defeat and (partial) withdrawal from Iraq. This Narrative, as it must, will shadow the Narrative that has taken hold regarding America's defeat in Vietnam.

Firstly, it must be said that certain types of people, such as the type of people who would read this blog, often delude themselves into thinking that their Narrative of the Vietnam War or the Iraq War is in any way similar to the dominant paradigm throughout the country as a whole. In order to understand how most Americans think about Vietnam, for example, we should not read Howard Zinn. We should watch Rambo.

The dominant Narrative of the Vietnam War boasts two villains. First, we have the natives who, despite the unending selflessness and generosity of the United States, steadfastly refuse to live up to their responsibilities and defend their own country. Second, and more central, are the liberals. Yes, the liberals, along with their elitist allies in the media, forced us to quit just as we were turning a corner and the war was becoming winnable.

The Narrative that has taken hold regarding Vietnam holds that if the Democrats and the media had been more realistic, more patient, more patriotic, more focused on the "good" news from the war zone, the war would have been won. Tet was a smashing military success for the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, yet the elitist pansies at the New York Times and CBS News found a way to portray it as a defeat, hence demoralizing the American people and making the war unwinnable.

When John Rambo is tasked with returning to Vietnam to rescue American POW's, he has one question to ask of his commander. This question sums up the Narrative with a clarity that only a punch-drunk steroid hound could muster. It is beautiful in its simplicity, in its embrace of the Narrative that we all owe it to ourselves to learn. What does John Rambo ask his government before being sent back to the 'Nam? All he wants to know is, "do we get to win this time?"

I don't have much sympathy for this perspective, but it needs to be understood, since it is happening all over again with Iraq. From my perspective, any American war in Vietnam was unwinnable by definition. Losing faith in the war after several years and countless promises of progress was less a sign of treason than of reason.

In the context of Iraq, we have heard for some time now the grumbling from politicians (I hesitate to call them anything as flattering as "leaders") about how the Iraqis need to "step up". Yes, those ingrates are going to have to learn to handle their own war and stop taking our kindness for weakness. We have been good enough to make their land the central front of a global war, and yet they seem to show no gratitude. Fucking Arabs.

So, just as in Vietnam, the natives are not stepping up. In both wars, of course, our local allies have taken far more casualties than the American military and have fought with far inferior weaponry. This does not matter in the construction of the Narrative, however, since any American failure (or crime) must surely be someone else's fault.

Our definition of "stepping up", of course, is "fighting for American interests". Why are there not millions of Iraqis flocking to fight for American interests? Because they're Iraqi, not American. And, since America will not stay in Iraq forever, the locals can perhaps be excused for placing their perceptions of their own local interests over the fulfilment of American interests.

And, just as in Vietnam, we have the liberals. I have no regard for the Democrats in Congress, and I have no illusion that their current "opposition" to the war has any trace of substance deeper than the most myopic political calculations. There is no genuine opposition to the war in the government. Since not even "the liberals" are calling for an end to the war, it is difficult to saddle them with responsibility for the coming train wreck. Indeed, the American people as a whole turned against the premise of the war long before the "liberals" caught up.

Then we have the media, with their incessant trumpeting of bad news and their studious ignorance of good news. There is a lot to be said for this. When NBC Nightly News opens its broadcast with a story about a car bomb, it does border on the surreal. What kind of way is this to report a war? It is so utterly devoid of context and proportion as to be essentially useless as "news".

Can we imagine what World War II would have been like on the home front if the top story of every day focused solely on what blew up and who was blown up with it, with absolutely no metrics of political progress or strategic objectives? For example, Iraqi Kurdistan is a smashing success by any standard. But don't we all know deep down that we won't hear a word about it unless and until shit starts blowing up there?

Despite the media's problems of perspective, they are not inventing the suicide bombers. There have been more suicide bombers in Iraq since America invaded than there were across the globe throughout all history until that point. Way more. The capital city, four years after the invasion, is the most dangerous place on the planet. If I were to walk down a street, any street, in that city, my life would be counted in minutes, if not seconds.

The danger of the Narrative, by virtue of who the Narrative seeks to blame, is clear to see. When America loses a war that it should never have waged and could never have realistically expected to "win", it attacks the very pillars of its system. We go to war to spread liberty, so we delude ourselves, and when we lose, we blame...freedom of speech and multiparty democratic representation. "Oh, if only the government controlled the media...... Oh, if only we had a one-party state..... We had this thing won, but free speech ruined it". The danger in adopting this view is glaringly obvious.

The war in Iraq is lost. The question now is what our Narrative will be. Why did we lose? Did we lose because those ingrate ragheads wouldn't know what to do with freedom if it came with printed instructions? Did we lose because those pussy intellectuals hate George Bush so much that they allied themselves with the terrorists by obligingly putting every car bomb on TV? Did we lose because the traitorous liberals gave up, as they always do, when the going got tough? Or, did we lose because we were aggressors? Did we lose because the war was illegal? Did we lose because we invaded a country we knew nothing about? Did we lose because people tend to resent being told what to do by a country that lies 6,000 miles away? Did we lose because we were.......wrong? Unless we entertain this notion, this will happen again.

Irakornam, Nutshelled

For those who don't care to descend into the minutiae of my argument regarding the Irakornam Syndrome, here is the message in a condensed version: No superpower, no matter how super, no matter how powerful, will ever win a land war in Asia unless said superpower is......Asian.
P.S. Iraq is in Asia. P.P.S. The United States is not in Asia.

Irakornam Syndrome

While it is impolitic to the dominant paradigm to speak of the United States as ever having lost a war, we can surely agree that there are three wars that the United States has not won. These three wars were fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and they all betrayed the same fundamental ignorance of the imperial American president.

In all three wars, the American president deluded himself into thinking that he could wage war in another power's neighborhood and realistically expect that other power to refrain from aiding its anti-American allies, even though this hostile power knew full well that the United States could not attack it directly.

In Korea and Vietnam, this power was China. In Iraq, this power is Iran and, indirectly, China. The United States escalated the wars in Korea and Vietnam until each reached the borders of China. China then inevitably intervened, whether with waves of infantry or with fleets of trucks. American presidents then continued to fight in Korea and Vietnam while acknowledging that they could not attack China directly.

After Americanization of the Korean and Vietnam Wars caused Chinese intervention, American presidents decided to continue these wars, even as they acknowledged that they would never strike at the base of their enemies' support. This is as clear-cut a recipe for an unwinnable war as one can fathom. I am not arguing that the United States should have gone to war with China over Korea or Vietnam; I am arguing that the wars there should never have been Americanized.

With the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has committed a similar error with regards to Iran. While not nearly as powerful as China was, Iran is the preeminent power in the region that America chose to invade. In choosing to invade this region, it seems never to have occured to the Bush Administration that the regional power, an American enemy, might seek to influence postwar Iraq. Thankfully, Iranian influence in Iraq has involved clerics and currency rather than human wave attacks. The hubristic error of Bush is familiar, though; Iran? They won't have the balls to intervene!

Not only did all three American wars completely fail to account for regional powers which had been established for thousands of years (China and Persia), but they insisted on seeing its wars as American wars, which were to be defined, conceived, and executed according to American interests and ideals, and for American interests.

Korea in 1950, Vietnam in 1965, and Iraq in 2003 were all societies in varying stages of profound revolutions. There were several wars raging within each of these countries far before American intervention. Americans consistently fail to understand that there was no more an American solution to these wars than there was a French solution to the American Civil War.

Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were revolutions, civil wars, and proxy wars. They were revolutions because all three societies were emerging from various forms of tyranny, whether Japanese imperialism, French colonialism, or Ba'athist despotism. All three were civil wars because segments of the nations, all of whom had been either divided or grouped against their wills by western powers, disagreed amongst themselves as to what course to take following independence. And they were proxy wars, all between America and China, to varying degrees.

Iraq is now a civil war between those who want Iraq to exist and those who don't, between those who want to modernize Islam and those who want to Islamize modernity, between those who love their children and those who hate their neighbors. This situation knows no American solution, as we must acknowledge before we degrade our military further.

The real question in Iraq is not whether we can defeat the insurgency, which we can't, or stop the civil war, which we can't, or stop the money and weapons from flowing in to all sides, which we can't, or provide electricity, which we can't, or create an atmosphere where a white man can walk down a street in Baghdad, or make it safe for people who live in Baghdad to go shopping, which we can't. It's about whether we can contain Iran. Which we can't.

The specific cauldrons of Korea and Vietnam have faded somewhat back down to their proper dimensions; they are places a westerner may not necessarily want to live, but neither are they the existential threats to civilization that our leaders sternly assured us they were. Iraq, with time, will be no different. The real issue is China.

China is a global power. It will, in time, be the global power. Why? It is the oldest continuous and centralized state on Earth and it has more soldiers and workers than America has people. Chinese power is inevitable. What we, as Americans, need is a fundamental shift in how we feel about America's place in the world.

The National Security Strategy laid out by President Bush in 2002 and 2006 is really rather elegant in its simplicity, which is the rarest of attributes for federal documents. This document, which was renewed three years after invasion of Iraq, soberly informs the reader that the United States controls, and always will control....North America? No. Earth.

China will not be the power of East Asia, because that would threaten the United States. Iran will not be the power of the Middle East, because that would threaten the United States. What of the fact that China and Iran (Persia) have been regional powers for millenia? Isn't is likely that China will be the power in Asia since, as opposed to the United States, it is actually located in Asia? Since Persia has been in the Middle East for thousands of years and the Americans have been there for sixty years, isn't the safe bet on the Persians having more influence? Don't be a pussy; they are threats to the United States.

When you state total control as your policy, two things are inevitable. First, you are threatened by everything. For example, Saddam Hussein in 2002 was threatening only to one whose goal is domination of the globe. Therefore, he was threatening to us, but not to the 191 other, weaker nations, who didn't define their lack of global domination as the end of the world. Second, failure is inevitable. The world is more stable now, in certain ways, than it ever has been, but we are all doom and gloom. Why? Because we are measuring ourselves against a childishly naive set of assumptions.

One thing that Americans aren't told by the liberal media is that the United Nations has been successful beyond expectation at its ultimate task: preventing war between member states. The world has moved on from the paradigm that saw physical force as an acceptable political tool. In fact, there is just one foreign war being waged by a member of the UN right now, and we are that member.

Americans are in for a world of hurt if they don't realize that it is more likely for gravity to fail than it is for the United States to militarily dominate the globe. We need to ease away from the self-importance that tells us that anything short of Global American Empire would be medieval savagery. For example, I've been to Europe. It's nice.

In the relatively near future, America will not be the most powerful country on Earth. Our terminal descent began with shock and awe. We will not, however, become just another nation. America is, say it with me, the most important nation of modernity. It is modernity. American ideals, if not practices, are accepted by an unbelievably broad cross section of humanity. America will always be powerful. Our task as patriots is to guarantee that, as our total military and economic dominace gradually erode, we do not allow our ideals to do the same.

American ideals are not different from Islamist or Communists ideals; they are better. Respect for individual dignity, contempt for authoritarian governments, legal equality for women and all minorities. These beliefs are superior to the alternatives offered by our rivals. We must have faith that, after our bases in the desert are abandoned, our ideals will remain to be self-evidently just by most the the world. That is power.

Mission Accomplished

"Democracy perishes by two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of the people for the authority it has itself established, a contempt in which each faction or individual reaches out for the public power, and reduces the people, through the resulting chaos, to nullity, or the power of a single man" --Robespierre

"Terrorism and tyranny lie in the eye of the beholder; and under democracy each beholder will not only perceive for themselves, but is explicitly entitled to do so" --John Dunn

Despite the gloom of the media and much of the public, one American success in Iraq has been studiously ignored: Iraq today is a democracy. This uncomfortable and perhaps counter intuitive truth is far more indicative of the dangers of democracy than it is of anything positive about Iraq. What we are seeing in Iraq is democracy. What we want in Iraq, and what we have in the United States, is not democracy.

For all the messianic talk about America's timeless and selfless mission to spread democracy, America would never dare impose actual democracy on itself, never mind other nations. Democracy in its purest form is better known as anarchy, and democracy clearly thrives in Baghdad.

Direct democracy is the cataclysm that is brutalizing Iraqi society. Far from something to be strived for, direct democracy holds that every person has an equal right to exercise his or her own power and prerogative. This system is very difficult to maintain in small groups. In groups of over 200 or so, it is essentially impossible. In groups of 25 million it is nihilistic insanity.

Representative democracy is what we have, to some degree, in the United States and what we implicitly envisioned for Iraq. Compared to direct democracy, this brand is less vulnerable to mob rule and populist suppression of minorities. Each member of the community does not have a say in every decision, but their representatives do.

The Iraqi government exists only on television because Iraqis have largely rejected representative democracy, hence their elected representatives have little or no actual power. Rather, many Iraqis have opted for direct democracy, manifested at personal levels by neighborhood militias and institutionalized vigilantism.

Many Americans, including myself, would like to see a greater degree of direct democracy in the United States. Look at the architects of the Iraq War, for example. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice. Among these power brokers, only Bush and Cheney were subject to an election, and even they were not held to the most fundamental criteria of a popular vote. We could stand to be a bit more democratic, at least when it comes to selecting our representatives.

Actual democracy is not something to be idealized, or even necessarily tolerated. It is a practice that does not exist in any nation state, and indeed never could. Even Luxembourg has far too many people to allow every citizen to weigh in on every issue. Iraq also has far too many people to attempt this, but too many Iraqis are insisting on exercising their new "rights", usually via acts of violence.

The Iraqi embrace of direct democracy, in retrospect, was clear immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Why would people loot anything that wasn't tied down and a great many things that were? They were simply exercising what they perceived to be they newly-acquired "rights". The ubiquitous anecdote of the Iraqi in the street in 2o03 had him saying, "democracy means we are free to do whatever we want".

The American government, of course, was unable to understand the importance of this mentality. Donald Rumsfeld, an intelligent yet exceedingly stupid man, dismissed the looting as evidence that "freedom is messy". He was right. Freedom, total freedom, is very messy. In fact, society is impossible if people are truly free.

The looting and the dominance of locally-based militias are evidence of Iraqis' embrace of direct democracy. The utter impotence of Iraq's government is evidence of Iraqis' rejection of representative democracy. Keeping this in mind, it is not surprising that Iraq has only become less stable since the representative government took nominal control.

Iraqis' rejection of the representative democracy offered by the Green Zone government reflects their embrace of several manifestations of more direct democracy via neighborhood militias and provincial and sectarian loyalties and identities. Simply put, representative democracy fails when people decided that their representatives don't represent them.

It speaks to the naivete of our prewar mentality that we thought that real democracy was a good idea anywhere, never mind Iraq. How can we hope to impose alien ideologies onto alien cultures when those ideologies are alien even to ourselves?