Into the Maelstrom

This George Packer review of Beinart's book, The Good Fight at the New Yorker is troubling on many levels, not the least of which is Packer's "I've been on the front lines of this 'long war' for a long time, and Beinart and his ilk are fancy-pants who couldn't carry my kit bag" machismo. (I'm not exaggerating, folks.) But it's late, so I'll just leave you to ponder these grafs for now:

Francis Fukuyama, the ex-neoconservative who publicly broke with his former comrades and now embraces what he calls “realistic Wilsonianism” (as opposed to Madeleine Albright’s “realistic idealism,” or the “democratic realism” of Fukuyama’s friend turned foe Charles Krauthammer, foreign-policy manifestos being largely a matter of tempering the right ism with the right adjective), has urged a toning down of rhetoric. “We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win,” Fukuyama wrote in his recent book “America at the Crossroads.” “But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom.”

But the maelstrom is always the point of the provocation. Although the Iraq war wasn’t inevitable after September 11th, a global polarization along religious lines probably was. Much of the Muslim world already felt persecuted by the West before the attacks, and Bush’s unfortunate use of the word “crusade” immediately afterward has been remembered, while his and Tony Blair’s many declarations that Islam is a religion of peace have been ignored or forgotten. In spite of Bush’s efforts not to unleash a civilizational war (thus the “war on terror,” rather than the more apt “war on radical Islamism”), the battle lines were already forming well before shock and awe and Abu Ghraib. I was in Somalia during the Afghanistan war, and even Westernoriented Muslims there saw the overthrow of the Taliban as the start of a war against Islam. What Fukuyama calls “the international jihadist movement” might include only a few tens of thousands of militants, but for passive sympathy or active support it can count on tens of millions of Muslims in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Fukuyama, a political philosopher, ignores the political nature of the problem.

"I was in Somalia during the Afghanistan war, beeyatch." If anyone out there can explain "the maelstron is always the point of the provocation" to me, I would appreciate it.