Thursday, June 14, 2007

Pushback. The commonality of the current civil wars in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq

Daniel Levy (bio) writes a really interesting analysis over at TPM Cafe of why Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq are all undergoing major internal sectarian warfare. He starts thus:
Gaza seems to be descending towards a civil war, Lebanon lurched closer to conflict with the killing today of MP Walid Eido and ongoing clashes at the Nahr El-Bared camp, and the Iraqi civil war, already long underway, took another desperate turn with the re-bombing of the Shia mosque at Samarra.

Each of these situations has its own complex circumstances and particular set of actors, causes, and dynamics. They cannot be neatly filed under one common rubric -- say extremists vs. moderates, or Iran vs. the US. Yet it is possible, perhaps, to discern at least one unifying theme: each of these conflicts is, in part, the pushback against the neocon transformationalist agenda for the Middle East. I am not suggesting that the US is solely responsible for the woeful state of the region, but the contribution of a mistaken and rigid ideological dogma applied to the region has been dramatic and devastating.
[Highlighting is mine - Editor PPS]
I strongly recommend reading this. The comments are nearly as informative as the article itself.

The article essentially documents how a large number of people in the Middle East have reacted to the Bush/Cheney attitude which can be briefly characterized as: "You are doing it all wrong, and we have the right way. You will do it the way we demand or we will invade your countries militarily and force you to do what we demand. Oh, and no back-talk. We don't care what you have to say or why you are resisting."

What does pushback really mean? Let me offer a personal example. I have exactly the same reaction when some religious cultist demands that I mouth their creed of "I will accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior." I can guarantee that if anyone ever hears me saying that, then they need to call the cops fast. I have been kidnapped and someone crazy is holding a gun to my head. My religion is my business, most religious evangelists are bigots and fools, and no one is going to force me to adopt their idiocy under any circumstances short of torture or threat of death - in which case I will say it all with my fingers crossed while I determine how to screw the evangelists over as soon as I get a chance. And no, I am not an Atheist. Atheism is another false faith-based religion evangelized by mentally ill people. It depends on knowing as a certainty things that cannot be known, and acting as though that certainty is true, is worth forcing on other people, and is valid reason to ignore what others want for themselves.

The real relevance of my example above is not that I am right and the evangelistic idiots are wrong, or vice versa. The key is that I am primed to react negatively to any form of evangelism that tries to force me to do or to believe something without considering my knowledge, experience or goals. Try pushing me, and anyone who knows me even just a little will know to expect a pushback, perhaps even a disproportionate pushback.

People who know the Middle East understood that Cheney's NeoCon fantasy of imposing a western style society on the Islamic Middle East was going to result in a pushback. Can anyone doubt that there has been such a reaction?

I suspect that western globalization is causing much the same reaction. The winners from expanded international free trade can be expected to be bought off. But what about the losers? They are forced to change by an uncaring outsider - generally a foreigner or group of foreigners, who do not know their culture, is working to destroy that culture, and doesn't care what the losers want. Again, pushback is to be expected.

Reacting to (the easily anticipated) pushback with increased force will be more likely to increase the pushback than to resolve it.

But don't bother telling that to the NeoCons. They have their perfect conservative ideology, and all pushback is, by definition, wrong. So is listening to any objection to the prescriptions of the perfect conservative ideology. Those who object to the perfect conservative ideology are are just haters, and according to the perfect conservative ideology, haters are to be ignored and forced into compliance using any power tools (military, police, authoritarianism, etc.) available.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You need to check out the accuracy of the May 15th Prophecy in regards to what is happing in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and the return of the Hidden Imam

lastdaywatchers.blogspot.com

Richard said...

As one who used to drive through east Texas at strange hours of the morning, I became familiar with the radio propecies of Herbert W. Armstrong of the Worldwide Church of God. When that is all there is to listen to other than reruns of radio reports of (Gag!) baseball games, it can be entertaining.

I think that there were prophecies of the return of the God, born of the Virgin and known as Mithra, as well as the prophesies of the return of the Messiah and those of the Return of Christ. I am less familiar with the prophesied return of either the Hidden Iman or the Mahdi, but such prophesies have been used politically for centuries. "Chinese" Gordon and his troops died in Khartoum because of the prophesied return of the Mahdi in the late 19th century.

I am much more familiar with the prophesies of the modern great tellers-of-tales, Economists. They usually come with a statistical margin of error, but I have seen little evidence that any of those prophesies have any connection to reality, either.

You know, I have on occasion lamented that I can't write short, punchy articles. I had to write all the above in this comment before saying,

"Thanks. I don't buy it. Good luck to you."