Has the clash of civilizations predicted by Samuel Huntington begun?

[KlatooBNikto]

At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, it was possible for people the world over to think that the bloody century we left behind would not be repeated.That has now been dashed for good;we can now expect endless wars whose ferocity and mercilessness are already on display in Iraq and Afghanistan.In the treatment of prisoners, in the slaughter of innocents and the deployment and use of increasingly lethal weapons we have been given a foretaste of what is yet to come.

As Bush has waded into the religious/resource war, concocting ever more esoteric rationales, he has laid the groundwork for the toppling of American puppet regimes in Saudi Arabia,Egypt, Pakistan and many more.As these happen, and those countries arm themselves to the teeth with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and their delivery systems,Bush would have turned all his dire warnings before Iraq into self fulfilling prophecies.To the explosive mix of religious war, Bush and the American soldiers in Iraq have now added a racial angle reviving all the memories of Western white colonial masters subjugating the darker skinned peoples of the Middle East. These long simmering hatreds threaten to make this century far bloodier than anything the twentieth century dished out.

In the relentless pursuit of their goals through violence and chicanery, the U.S administration has lost any moral authority to counsel restraint against the uses of WMD's or cruel treatment of prisoners. I dread the possibility that mass murders with WMD's will become common and so too will torture and abuse of prisoners and civilians, not to mention gross violations of human rights everywhere.

[Maple]

1. No more

than usual.

It's been the same for thousands of years.

[KlatooBNikto]

2. The difference being that many more countries will come into possession

of WMD's, a situation even William Shirer dreaded. Those weapons and the religious undertones to the next wars plus the racial angle makes it more lethal than anything mankind has faced in thousands of years.

[Maple]

4. Well if you were

a Carthiginian, and Rome attacked, killed all your men, sold your women and children into slavery, knocked down your buildings and put salt in your soil so it wouldn't grow crops again....it would be just like being hit by a nuke.

Just more labor intensive.

[KlatooBNikto]

5. The idea that millions of human beings could be incinerated in an

instant over areas that span whole continents and made uninhabitable for thousands of years looks like a new phenomenon to me.

[Maple]

7. Well I grew up with it

It was called the Cold War.

Drills, duck and cover, air raid sirens, 15 minutes till the missiles hit, and nuclear shelters in the backyard were all part of my youth.

[KlatooBNikto]

8. I too did. But I see a qualitative difference in the threats we face today

There are simply going to be many more countries armed with WMD's in the next two decades. Many of these will be nursing grievances of one sort or another.And many of them, including us, will be true believers.They will have no remorse in using these lethal weapons preemptively.This is why I dread the current climate.

[Maple]

10. Lots of countries have, or can easily get them

But only one country has ever used them, and you're living in it.

Is there a lot of remorse over it in the US?

[KlatooBNikto]

11. To tell youthe truth I have yet to meet anyone who has expressed any

remorse at all over the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.I have also to admit not having met anyone who has expressed any remorse over the use of napalm or Agent Orange in Vietnam. I am sure that the mass execution in Fallujah will also find widespread support.These, I want to emphasize have only laid the foundations for a future adversary to turn the tables and justify similar atrocities.
Blowback, as Chalmers Johnson, says is a bitch.

[Malikshah]

3. Huntington and Bernard Lewis are so full of crap their eyes must

be brown.

You scratch the surface of their stream-of-conciousness blather and you find holes in their arguments big enough to drive a mack truck through.

Alas, their writings are easily digestible and disseminated through sound-bites and thus are lapped up by the masses for whom critical thinking is too much to ask for.

:)

[KlatooBNikto]

6. I was not talking so much about Huntington as the reality of the

War on Iraq causing many countries to arm themselves a la North Korea to protect themselves from that type of invasion. Who knows if the same countries would use our arguments against us and launch a preemptive invasion? Self fulfilling prophecy, no?

[Malikshah]

9. I agree with the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect, but

that still has little if anything to do with the Huntington thesis--

The self-fulfilling aspect of the war has more to do with PNAC and their war-mongering ways at best, and simple Imperialist self-destruction at its finest.

The Romans expanded, in their words, for defensive purposes and to liberate others. We're doing the same-- and are couching it in the same words. Hell, we've even got the "bread and circuses" (Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Michael Jackson, Donald Trump, Reality-shows a go-go) to boot.

[Lexingtonian]

12. more like Clash of Barbarisms

At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, it was possible for people the world over to think that the bloody century we left behind would not be repeated.That has now been dashed for good;we can now expect endless wars whose ferocity and mercilessness are already on display in Iraq and Afghanistan.In the treatment of prisoners, in the slaughter of innocents and the deployment and use of increasingly lethal weapons we have been given a foretaste of what is yet to come.

Oh, c'mon, compared to WW2 era wars the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are small potatos in terms of bloodshed and violence. The distinction lies in the pointlessness of the aggression and the dishonesty in defining the problem involved.

As Bush has waded into the religious/resource war, concocting ever more esoteric rationales, he has laid the groundwork for the toppling of American puppet regimes in Saudi Arabia,Egypt, Pakistan and many more.

Well, they're regimes without a chance at permanence anyway...Bush is only accelerating their downfall and (arguably) increasing the chaos and bloodshed involved.

As these happen, and those countries arm themselves to the teeth with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and their delivery systems,Bush would have turned all his dire warnings before Iraq into self fulfilling prophecies.To the explosive mix of religious war, Bush and the American soldiers in Iraq have now added a racial angle reviving all the memories of Western white colonial masters subjugating the darker skinned peoples of the Middle East. These long simmering hatreds threaten to make this century far bloodier than anything the twentieth century dished out.

That's the way of phrasing it that ignores the role Modernity and reaction to it plays- the reactionaries in two cultures worlds choosing to fight with each other- which is the most truthful historical way of looking at it. The way it is imagined by the 'little people' reactionaries on both sides is essentially as a replaying of medieval events: the Arab invasion of Europe beaten back at Tours and Poitiers, on the one hand, and the Crusades, on the other. (Reactionaries always and everywhere see the present through the lens of the medieval past, and they always insist on the most barbarian way of misunderstanding history.)

In the relentless pursuit of their goals through violence and chicanery, the U.S administration has lost any moral authority to counsel restraint against the uses of WMD's or cruel treatment of prisoners. I dread the possibility that mass murders with WMD's will become common and so too will torture and abuse of prisoners and civilians, not to mention gross violations of human rights everywhere.

You're taking all these rationales proffered way too seriously. For the people running the U.S. and their present supporters, all they're doing is replaying the Past in a way that is a kind of therapy- freeing their resentments suppressed by Cold War necessitations. It amounts to treating any opportune occasion as a do-over of sorts of something long ago and trying to get this second attempt 'right'.

Under Reagan we 'did over' FDR's terms. Under Bush Sr, Truman's. Under Clinton (Gingrich), Eisenhower's and some parts of the Sixties. Under Bush Jr. we've done over the foreign debacles of the Sixties (Cuba-Missile Crisis/AQ-Afghanistan and South Vietnam/Iraq) and are presently in a ~1973 Nixon Presidency place. And if you want to know the amount of care and respect for international law of that era, I recommend Jim Jones's 1953 "From Here To Eternity" as portraiting the kind of people the Bush contingent are and the standards of 'civilization' (read: barbarism) and the paranoia that informs the world they consider the normal.

What the Bush folks have said (if you read between the lines) they'll do is to go after Iran in some way and deal with Chavez in Venezuela by the time they leave office. That would de facto amount to retaliation against the mullah-ocracy for the 1978-80 Iran Hostage Crisis (I think an assisted coup attempt is the game to look for) and replaying (in some form) the mercenary wars against Castro-allied folks of 1978-1985 in El Salvador and Nicaragua. (The deal with North Korea and China is a bit complicated and sorta irrelevant- that's just a pawn in the game of China trying to push back US power in East Asia over the next dozen or two dozen years, and the Bush people are being lazy hacks about it even though they know the stakes.)

For all the big talk, the truth about reactionaries has always been that they want things that are ultimately small compared to their efforts and rhetoric, and they only know their own past- which must be repeated, because they are incompetent at the truly new.

True, the rest of the world is not taking kindly to these games. Nor should it. But moral authority is situational- it can be recovered.

What bothers you is the sense that these people in power have no limits, no internalized sense of civilization. Well, they do know- but can't acknowledge- that they are ultimately dependent on truly civilized people (aka Liberals) to build a better country and better world on the ruins of the old. In fact, people of the kind hate the people who call themselves Liberals but are too cowardly to stand up for Civilization and too lazy to do the work of rebuilding the destroyed obsolete structures and institutions of society properly. As they themselves see it, Reactionaries have done the brutish half of the work of progress- razing the bad structures/institutions, and knocking down all the dysfunctional and obsolete leaders and powers, which is work Liberals are much less efficient at.

So I'm not quite willing to subscribe to your anxieties and the scale of doom you propose, but I am even more convinced than you are of the depravity of things being done in the name of 'America'.

Our job, however, is not simply to be reactive to what is being done. Our side has to provide a solution that far surpasses the individual problems the Bush people create in scope and insight. Let us say the worst case scenario happens, that WMD are used and great massacres are committed- it is foolish and unnecessary to simply fall into psychological victimhood. That's when the true terrorists- the kind in ironed shirts sitting in official positions in Washington, pushing pencils and ordering stuff done on telephones- will have won.

[KlatooBNikto]

14. Thank you for a well reasoned response. I would like to make the following

points, though.

1. Because WWII was fought with what I would call more primitive weapons, its impact on populations like Fallujah would have been far less severe in my opinion. I have heard it said that some of our new eapons, which were used in theaters like Fallujah, could lay waste to an entire city block in a matter of minutes. That is what I was trying to say when I talk about the ferocity of the new weapons. I am sure that the wide area covered by WWI the barbarism of the Nazis compensated for the lack of these modern weaponry with the zeal with which the Untermenschen were treated.

2.When I talked about the puppet regimes coming to an end because of Bush's adventure in Iraq, I wanted to say that they are going to be replaced by fundamentalist Islamic regimes of the Taliban variety.May be I should have been more explicit. That, in turn, would ensure the pursuit of WMD's by those regimes.With Islamic regimes like Pakistan that want to create Islamic Bombs, and countries like North Korea ready to sell missile technology to all comers, the day is not far off for every country to own its own bomb and delivery system much like the old days every country had to have an airline of its own.

3. I do not think that the hatred toward the West in Islamic countries is confined to reactionaries.There is a widespread feeling among Muslims of having been violated and humiliated by the Western nations.And, I do believe that our own feelings of Muslims being terrorists is confined to 'reactionaries'. It is also quite widespread.

Having said all that I hope you, as a person, with obviously a greater grasp of history,are right about this thing being played out to avenge old resentments.I am not sure that an Iranian or an Iraqi or an Afghan is going to see it quite that way.

[Lexingtonian]

16. true, yet...

1. Because WWII was fought with what I would call more primitive weapons, its impact on populations like Fallujah would have been far less severe in my opinion. I have heard it said that some of our new eapons, which were used in theaters like Fallujah, could lay waste to an entire city block in a matter of minutes. That is what I was trying to say when I talk about the ferocity of the new weapons. I am sure that the wide area covered by WWI the barbarism of the Nazis compensated for the lack of these modern weaponry with the zeal with which the Untermenschen were treated.

Well...the idea in Fallujah was to discourage the Iraqi resistance's idea that they could just wage an urban guerrilla war. That's why the place got flattened- to discourage further Fallujah Uprisings. But it has plenty of precedent- Tokyo/Yokohama, Dresden and Hiroshima, the destruction of Hue in Vietnam. Maybe those bombs and shells were weaker than those used now, but they made up for it simply by throwing in more. The point is to demonstrate overkill and the willingness to impose it. That was not a message consistent with being in the country to achieve democracy, in the case of Fallujah, of course. But the Bushies see stuff according to their needs, not the realities, and they imagine Iraqis see the guerillas as "terrorists" or VC as they do.

2.When I talked about the puppet regimes coming to an end because of Bush's adventure in Iraq, I wanted to say that they are going to be replaced by fundamentalist Islamic regimes of the Taliban variety.May be I should have been more explicit. That, in turn, would ensure the pursuit of WMD's by those regimes.With Islamic regimes like Pakistan that want to create Islamic Bombs, and countries like North Korea ready to sell missile technology to all comers, the day is not far off for every country to own its own bomb and delivery system much like the old days every country had to have an airline of its own.

Saudi Arabia has official Wahabiism, most other Islamic countries are far more traditional than the media tends to portray- the Islamic clergy has far greater power than most people think, but it's not as apparent because it's not overt and works only on a local level. The Islamic Bomb concept exists only because Israel has had a regional monopoly and has used it coercive capacity. I don't think fundie theocracy= need WMD. Iran is the only country overtly ruled in such a way, it happens to want/have/desire/need nukes as a matter of coincidence of sorts and historical accident of the U.S. being the Shah's big ally. Pakistan is a military dictatorship and its only serious, too-large-to-defeat, enemy/obsession is India.

3. I do not think that the hatred toward the West in Islamic countries is confined to reactionaries.There is a widespread feeling among Muslims of having been violated and humiliated by the Western nations.And, I do believe that our own feelings of Muslims being terrorists is confined to 'reactionaries'. It is also quite widespread.

There is a great distinction in how far the enlightened go vs. how far the unenlightened go in their views and actions. The unenlightened behave according to what rules they think there really are, and those tend to be the most 'traditional' views, which are the ones that reactionaries spew all the time. The reactionary p.o.v. tends to be the bottom line, and people of your society cannot fully disavow you or fully disagree with you if you behave according to it- which they can with any other p.o.v.

Having said all that I hope you, as a person, with obviously a greater grasp of history,are right about this thing being played out to avenge old resentments.I am not sure that an Iranian or an Iraqi or an Afghan is going to see it quite that way.

Perhaps not, and their concern is not what the patterns of American history and the excuses/explanations of American historians are. But it's not as if Iranians, Iraqis, and Afghanis are blind or insensible to the oppressions and bad rulers and criminal minions in their own society- they know them better than we possibly could, of course. And to the extent that their individual subsocieties are so definitely tribal, there is no need for them to be defensively tribalist. Their problem is not the violence but the inadequate discrimination the American/allied side employs, which ups the amount of violence and its duration.

I think you're fishing a bit too hard for reasons to expect extreme violence against Americans, as some kind of righteous retribution for American arrogance and coerced hegemony. Well, that's a bit too easy. They see it as one thing for Americans to get involved in taking out an obsolete dictator-which they are powerless to do themselves-, another when Americans decide to dictate internal social and (non)prosperity arrangements of an Islamic society.

The problem in the way the Bush Administration has done things lies in the way they don't consider average people as anything but marks or obstacles. They're horrifyingly feudal in their approach, which would nonetheless almost work if they had any nobility whatsoever. But they botch everything and stand for all the wrong things- they've managed to make the U.S. appear to be a retrogressive force in the world, which immensely confuses and annoys people who thought the U.S. was the one reliable progressive political force.

[Minstrel Boy]

13. No, it's the "Resource Wars" predicted by Michael Klare

[KlatooBNikto]

15. Wouldn't it be wiser to get the resources (oil, I assume) we need

through the sort of relationship, good or otherwise, we have with Saudi Arabia? As it stands, our use of violence to achieve this goal, has possibly ruined any chance of getting this vital resource from Iran or Venezuela in the long run. I am also quite confident that Putin will sell his oil to India and China rather than to us. Doesn't this represent a big blow to the policy of coercion and war?