Some First Steps For Peace

The New Depression has captured our attention to the extent that we no longer have the time or inclination to spend much effort on the larger picture. Let us try to keep in mind that this all did not come about because of bad luck. It came about because of our unreasoning [i]faith[/i] in our experts ultimately knowing what they are doing, even when it became clear that they did not.

Now we have a new man scheduled to be at the helm in a couple of months. This has caused a burst of some optimism in me which is certainly partly wishful thinking. So in spite of wishing him well, and fervently hoping that he can govern as well as he ran his campaign, I find myself looking for the ways he could easily paint himself into a corner, in the hope of adding my voice to prevention of such a disaster.

A couple of things come immediately to mind. He favors fairly rapid disengagement in Iraq. Disengagement which should have begun years ago. But at the same time we are disengaging, it is suggested that we increase our military involvement and commitment to the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, powder kegs by any definition.

And when we consider the volatility of the rest of the region, we simply do not have the option any more of behaving as the sole superpower on the planet as President-Elect Obama's predecessor has tried to do for these past eight years. To mire ourselves down in Afghanistan and Pakistan militarily is not any better than what has happened in Iraq.

The Soviets did not learn that lesson in Afghanistan, and we did not learn it in Vietnam. If our new President does not learn this lesson very quickly, and revise his campaign enthusiasm about this other theater of war, we could very easily get bogged down in exactly the same unending way again, and neither we nor the rest of the world can afford the consequences. This region is as volatile as it is, not in spite of all the military moves, dating back all the way to the British efforts to hold everything together and keep it all under control, but because of them. It did not work for them either.

The key here all along has not been a military one, but one of persuasion, and in this regard, we are way behind. We are so far behind because we have paid virtually no attention to this part of the problem. Even the Arab nations which are nominally our allies do little or nothing to stop the unending indoctrination and conditioning of boys of all ages in the Madrassa schools. This is an unending source of fanaticism/terrorism and it will not be easy to turn it around.

Our efforts should turn to the minds of the people of the region. For a decade, we were overconfident and turned a blind eye to the dedicated nationalism of the North Vietnamese. The consequences were worse than horrendous for ALL concerned.

And what was our rationale? We were preventing the ultimate fall of Asia to monolithic Communism. Yet when Vietnam fell, nothing horrendous happened.

Here in the west, we tend to think of Islam as monolithic as well. This is a measure of our ignorance. In truth, Islam is as diverse and fractured with schisms as the Christian world. If we start to respect those elements of Islam that produced some of the greatest advances in human history, peace might break out. We could then begin to turn our attention to the politics of cooperation rather than strife.