[R-G] What the Afghans need is colonizing

[Macdonald Stainsby]

A few days ago I mentioned that the newspaper "National Post" was owned by
Israel Asper, a pronounced Zionist and that it was a downright scary rag
sometimes. Here is an article from one of the two major dailies- and this
article came out *on the front page*. Yes, this little Nazi Mark Steyn is he one
I mentioned before... he's frightening.

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What the Afghans need is colonizing

Mark Steyn
National Post

There is something inherently ridiculous about a man standing in a cave wearing
fatigues and holding a hand-mike and shaking his fist at the entire civilized
world. Osama bin Laden called on his viewers to choose between "the side of
believers and the side of infidels." But who made his microphone? Who made the
camera? I doubt it was Afghan, given that under the Taleban you're not allowed
to watch TV, never mind host your own jihad-inciting special.

True, Osama disdains much of our decadent materialist culture. I couldn't help
noticing, for example, how the poor guy had aged since his last
live-from-the-cave special. That floor-length beard could use a couple of vats
of Grecian Formula. But, such details aside, Osama has the same complicated
relationship to the West as millions of other Muslims. If it weren't for Western
technology, he'd be just a loser in a cave shouting to himself. But on Sunday,
just for a few minutes, he was the only 11th century guy with his own CNN gig,
and what he had to say was useful and illuminating.

The comparisons were simultaneously chilling, because of what they appeared to
foreshadow (he referred to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and heartening, because they
underscored once and for all that no compromise is possible with such a fanatic.
The cave man warmed up with a remark about "the tragedy of Andalusia" -- a
reference to the end of Moorish rule in Spain in 1492. As he sees it, the roots
of Islam's downfall in Andalusia lie in its accommodation with the Christian
world and a move toward a pluralistic society. That's very helpful. Osama's not
just anti-Jew, or anti-Christian, but objects to the very idea of a society
where believers of all faiths and none rub along together. He's at war with, for
want of a better word, multi-culturalism. The boneheads on the left, missing the
point as always, march around the cities of the West waving placards against
"the racist war." But he's the racist. If Professor Thobani were to drop by his
cave, he'd shoot her dead before she'd have time to bleat, "But I'm on your side
..."

By comparison with this big central grievance, the specific ones are easily
solved. Maybe he's right about the Palestine Mandate of 1922: maybe the League
of Nations should have given the Jews a homeland in Saskatchewan or Nunavut and
saved us a whole bunch of trouble. And, to be honest, he has a point about the
U.S. military presence near Islam's holiest sites in Saudi Arabia: he's right,
it is a humiliation that one of the richest regimes on Earth is too incompetent,
greedy and decadent to provide its own defence. But it's not America's fault
those layabout Saudi princes, faced with Saddam's troops massing on the border,
could think of nothing better to do than turn white as their robes and
frantically dial Washington.

In fact, insofar as the Middle East's the victim of anything other than its own
failures, it's not Western imperialism but Western post-imperialism. Unlike
Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas, Araby has never come under direct
European colonial rule. The Ottoman Empire was famously characterized by Tsar
Nicholas I as "the sick man of Europe," which would seem to concede admission to
the club, but also suggests that its sickness was at least partially due to its
lack of Europeanness. These effects linger long: The difference in progress
between parts of the former Yugoslavia seems to owe as much to whether the
territory was previously Habsburg (Slovenia) or Ottoman (Macedonia) as anything
else. The Turks backed the wrong man in the First World War more by bad luck
than by anything else, and one can sympathize with the more sophisticated
terror-apologists in the West who argue the Ottoman Empire should never have
been broken up. Turkey, for its part, was more European in the 1920s than it
ever was under the Sultans: Indeed, it remains the only Muslim territory to have
successfully embarked upon a redefinition of the relationship between Islam and
the state. Turkey gave women the vote before Britain did, the sort of supporting
evidence Prof. Thobani might find useful, if she troubled herself with
supporting evidence.

But in the Arabian peninsula, the Ottoman vacuum was filled not with colonies
but with "spheres of influence," a system that continues to this day. Rather
than making Arabia a Crown colony within the Empire, sending out the Marquess of
Whatnot as Governor, issuing banknotes bearing the likeness of George V, setting
up courts presided over by judges in full-bottomed wigs and introducing a
professional civil service and a free press, the British instead mulled over
which sheikh was likely to prove more pliable, installed him in the capital and
invited his sons to Eton and Sandhurst. The French did the same, and so, later,
did the Americans. This was cheaper than colonialism and less politically
prickly, but it did a great disservice to the populations of those countries.
The alleged mountain of evidence of Yankee culpability is, in fact, evidence
only of the Great Satan's deplorable faintheartedness: yes, Washington dealt
with Saddam, and helped train the precursors of the Taleban, and fancied Colonel
Gadaffi as a better bet than King Idris, just as in the Fifties they bolstered
the Shah and then in the Seventies took against him, when Jimmy Carter decided
the Peacock Throne wasn't progressive enough and wound up with the Ayatollahs
instead.

This system of cherrypicking from a barrel-load of unsavoury potential clients
was summed up in the old CIA line: "He may be a sonofabitch but he's our
sonofabitch." The inverse is more to the point: He may be our sonofabitch, but
he's a sonofabitch. Some guys go nuts, some are merely devious and unreliable,
some remain charming and pleasant but of little help, but all of them are a
bunch of despots utterly sealed off from their peoples. As we now know, it was
our so-called "moderate" Arab "friends" who provided all the suicide bombers of
September 11th, just as it's in their government-run media -- notably the vile
Egyptian press -- that some of the worst anti-American rhetoric is to be found.
The contemptible regime of President Mubarak permits dissent against the U.S.
government but not against its own, licensing the former as a safety valve to
reduce pressure on the latter. This is a classic example of why the sonofabitch
system is ultimately useless to the West: the U.S. spends billions subsidizing
regimes who have a vested interest in encouraging anti-Americanism as a
substitute for more locally focused grievances. As a result, the West gets
blamed for far more in a part of the world it never colonized than it does in
those regions it directly administered for centuries.

It seems to me Osama bin Laden's real grievance is with his fellow Muslims. In
the Nineties, when he was living in the Sudan, the thug regime in Khartoum
persuaded him to invest heavily in the country, in various enterprises of one
kind or another. Doing business in such an environment involves an awful lot of
palm-greasing. Osama's bookkeepers figured out his business interests in the
Sudan had lost $150-million, at which point the great humanitarian cut his
losses and moved on to the Hindu Kush. If he wasn't so consumed by his own
psychopathology, he could have learned far more about the Arab world from this
experience than from any number of books about who did what in 1492 or 1187.

As for the West, by comparison with the sonofabitch system, colonialism is
progressive and enlightened. Even under its modified, indirect Middle Eastern
variation, the average Egyptian earned more under the British than he does
today -- that's not adjusted for inflation, but in real actual rupees. Even in
Afghanistan, the savagery of whose menfolk has been much exaggerated by the
left's nervous nellies, such progress as was made in the country came when it
fell under the watchful eye of British India. With the fading of British power
in the region in the 1950s, King Zahir let his country fall under the competing
baleful influences of Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.

What will we do this time round? Will we stick Zahir Shah back on his throne to
preside over a ramshackle coalition of mutually hostile Commies, theocrats and
gangsters, and hope the poor old gentleman hangs in there till we've cleared
Afghan airspace? Or will we understand Osama bin Laden's declaration of war on
pluralism for what it is? The most unstable parts of the world today are on the
perimeter between Islam and the infidel -- places such as the Sudan, where vast
numbers of Christians have been slaughtered -- and given the vast illegal
immigration of Muslims into western Europe and elsewhere that perimeter is
expanding. Afghanistan needs not just food parcels, but British courts and
Canadian police and Indian civil servants and U.S. town clerks and Australian
newspapers. So does much of the rest of the region. Given the billions of
dollars of damage done to the world economy by September 11th, massive
engagement in the region will be cheaper than the alternative.

America has prided itself on being the first non-imperial superpower, but the
viability of that strategy was demolished on September 11th. For its own
security, it needs to do what it did to Japan and Germany after the war:
civilize them. It needs to take up (in Kipling's words), "the white man's
burden," a phrase that will have to be modified in the age of Colin Powell and
Condi Rice but whose spirit is generous and admirable.



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Macdonald Stainsby
Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
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In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht