Iraq, 9/11 and the state of the West

At the risk of beating the same drum as the formidable Matt Nuenke, I publish my first post here on a subject which I believe reveals more about the state of the post-modern West than any other: 9-11 and Iraq.

Much ink has been spilled on this, the most remarkable of follies in American history. Some of that ink speaks for folly, issuing a call to arms for further action against Iran, Syria and a few other Neocon favourites in the Middle East. Traditional conservatives and Paleos have, in contrast, attempted to demonstrate the nature of this folly and how the “project” has little to do with conservatism properly understood.

With President Bush running for re-election on essentially one slogan: “9-11 changed America”, it is perhaps a good time to take stock of where America - and where the West - stands after that event.

It is now three years on and much water has flowed down the Potomac and the Rhine. America and Europe, it is said, now stand in greater animosity and opposition to each other than at any other time since the second world war.  Americans, it is said, are infused with a renewed sense of pride in and love of country. All their simple, stubborn, admirable belief in right and wrong, justice and moral clarity has been in plain sight. We Europeans, meanwhile, remain the great practitioners of moral equivalence.

The truth, however, is that 9-11 did not so much change Europe or America as reveal something about our respective peoples and politics.  Actually it probably did that to a greater extent than any other event in recent memory. The sense of confusion stemming from the American reaction to 9-11 revealed much about the state of the American mind: muddle headed, screeching for blood one moment while wallowing in guilt the next. Europeans first engaged in the ritualistic sobbing and throwing of flowers after the cataclysm and then went back to advocating the same old liberal conceits as before: multiculturalism, diversity, cultural relativism and the rest of that rotten package. The event came and it passed, we gestured and wept like the effeminate people that we have become, and things went back to the way they were before.

One thing which has changed of course, is the new push by the US to try and change the state of the Middle East which, we were reassured, hung on success in Iraq. The Middle East is the greatest threat to the West … must be democratised … cannot be allowed to fester … or stew … or keep producing despots, tyrants, religious nuts and all manner of undesirables because, as 9-11 taught us, we cannot ignore it for it won’t ignore us.

In consequence, Neoconservatism, rising to this challenge, went mainstream with their theorising of all the wonders that might happen if … well, if.  You know: peoples eager for democracy all across the crescent … a seeding process achieved with miraculous efficiency … the transformation of Iraq into a vibrant example of western freedom and democracy before the eyes of all the Arab world … a great “tidal” effect across the region as peoples awake to the fundamental ideas of liberty and equality and demand said democracy from their humbled rulers … it all looked so damned easy. And if, for some reason, events do not occur as prescribed U.S. forces would embark upon an ambitious project, so lucidly described by the hand of the indefatigable Norman Podhoretz in his essay, “World War IV”. For sheer ambition and sheer lunacy, Podhoretz remains the benchmark.

One almost has to pinch oneself to remember that this is a people who have witnessed the worst of multiculturalism, diversity, the destruction of the nation-sustaining myths that were with them until only yesterday, and the unchecked invasion of tens of millions of aliens who care nothing for the European founders, European traditions and European principles of the Republic.  Why, when it has a conservative President and a conservative majority in both houses, does it ignore all this and look for a purpose in the sands of Araby? Why does it throw itself, at such cost in treasure, lives and materials, into a project to turn alien lands into replicas of American suburbs?

A necessary concomitant of this (as absurd as it is) is that American patriots be willing to devote their blood and toil and, if necessary, sacrifice their lives to this project for many, many years to come - not because of the attachments of race, family, God or country but because of “principles”.

One quite expects, when the last missile has been fired into the sand and the last reveille has died away, some old general from the U.S. military circa 1961 to prod at a lifeless Neocon form and pronounce, “It’s conservativism. But it’s not conservativism as we know it.”  For what kind of conservativism is it that directs America into such a venture when so many more real threats obtain at home?  The answer is that Neoconservativism is predicated upon two things: (1) the fundamental conservative understanding of a what constitutes a nation is dead, and America is a now the great Proposition Nation and the ideal that all nations and peoples must aspire to; and (2) that Americans will be willing to fight,  kill and be killed in alien lands in the name of “Propositions”. 

Well, the new conservativism has spoken.  Its project shall succeed, its Empire shall triumph because both (1) and (2) are correct. There can be no dissent here. It is the Gospel truth, and heresy is not tolerated these days in those United States.

So don’t mention that if an empire is to be built and sustained it must at its core be driven by a nation united by the ties of blood and family.  Don’t mention that all of the great empire-building peoples of yesteryear have been nations in the true sense, with a staunch and unswerving belief in their own superiority and a haughty contempt for the conquered.

Since Neoconservatism stands in complete opposition to Nation and Country there’s nothing left for it but to respond to this or that new threat by inaugurating a new, bizarre, insane project. Americans, after all, are not one people. So the only conservatism that fits is one that makes Americans focus completely on abstractions. Since being an “American” now has no meaningful physical connotation (Christian? European?), America remains and survives in the abstract and its enemies are also abstractions. The enemies of the United States and the enemies of the West are not really physical. They are abstract enemies; abstract principles which must be supplanted by abstract principles of our own. The peoples involved are irrelevant because underneath the diverse appearances we all have lungs and like having sex.

The fact that the proponents of such ideas now constitute the mainstream of the American Right says much about the state of that country.  We Europeans can only look upon America in sadness and with a watchful eye for the same developments here.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sunday, October 31, 2004 at 07:28 AM in War on Terror
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