Islam's Long Twilight Struggle and Us

During the war in Vietnam, alternative papers connected to the antiwar movement occasionally dipped into conspiratorial mode by printing a map of the South China Sea showing how Mobil, Esso (in those days) and the other oil giants wanted to carve up South Vietnam’s coastal waters.

The war wasn’t about oil, of course. Vietnam evolved into America’s greatest foreign policy blunder of the 20th century for ideological reasons. Americans were misled by leaders whose rigid anti-communism blinded them to the true nature of the Vietnamese people’s nationalist yearnings. Peasant nationalism, to use Chalmers Johnson’s formulation, had united under the banner of Communism, just as it had two decades earlier in China.

What we should have learned from that debacle is simple. People do yearn for democracy, but it can’t be imposed from outside. It certainly can’t be imposed by force of arms. Under those circumstances, democracy has about as much chance of putting down roots as an alien religion spread by the same means.

I couldn’t help but think about Vietnam last night while listening to President George Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The first half of his speech, devoted to his domestic agenda, sounded flat. Even the delegates seemed uninterested.

But when he turned to his war in Iraq, the speech and Madison Square Garden came alive. “Our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is clear: We will help new leaders to train their armies and move toward elections and get on the path of stability and democracy as quickly as possible. And then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned.”

He then made the obligatory (and false) link to the war on terror by offering an emotional quote from a soldier. This valiant if misled young man said that his opponents in Iraq were terrorists, and if he were not fighting them there, he (and the American people) would be fighting them here at home.

A few minutes later, John Kerry gave a rambling speech in Springfield, Ohio. I stayed up to listen. Lord, the man is a poor public speaker. But he hit on the two themes that in starkest terms best illustrate the choice confronting the American people this fall.

First, he said that Bush and the neo-conservatives around him have “misled” us into Iraq. This is objectively true (note that Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most notorious outlaw still at large, did not get mentioned by the president even once last night).

The other significant theme was his tying the Bush administration’s Middle East policy to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Kerry attacked the Saudi royal family while pledging to put this country on track to the environmentally necessary shift to a non-oil based energy system.

Unlike Vietnam, this war really is about oil. In the past week, several Republican leaders have admitted they foresee a permanent and very large military garrison in that part of the world. They point to our military presence in Japan and Germany after World War II. Do they not recall Osama’s stated reasons for attacking the U.S.? The number one reason on his list was the 5,000 U.S. soldiers based in Saudi Arabia – the home of Islam’s most holy shrines.

Over the next several decades, the Middle East’s oil reserves will become more crucial to those parts of the world economy still dependent on oil. At the same time, the corrupt regimes that now control those reserves will be engaged in a long, twilight struggle to hold onto power. What has happened over the past few years (really going back to the Ayotollah Khomeini’s ousting of the Shah of Iran) are nothing but battles in the long civil war raging throughout the Islamic world.

The American people have a clear choice this fall. Do we want to permanently intervene in this civil war? Do we want to garrison several hundred thousand troops smack in the middle of that conflict? Do we want to perpetuate our dependence on their resources that makes such unwinnable military folly inevitable?

Or do we want a world where our children and grandchildren at least have a chance of growing up under something that you or I might recognize as peace?

If we reelect Bush, the American people will in essence be throwing our support behind the most reactionary elements of our society – religious fanatics in league with oil barrons fighting against the environmental imperative – who have forged an alliance with some of the most reactionary elements of their societies – oil-soaked sheikhs, CIA collaborators and faction fighters in religious garb.

In the long run, I can’t believe that’s the winning side.

Posted by gooznews at September 3, 2004 11:43 AM