-Cicero, In Catilinam
In the past three days both Barack Obama and John Kerry have published op/eds about their foreign policy in the Middle East under the guise of writing about violent extremism, as if it’s the violent extremism of, say, Green parties that’s the problem . As can be expected from op/eds from people in their positions, they said little and meant even less.
If I were an optimist, I would praise the international division of labor as being a civilizing force that unites all of mankind into peaceful cooperation, but I’m not and so I won’t. Doing so, anyways would be, as Arnold Kling points out at AskBlog, giving into wishful libertarian thinking.
When I think of peace in the middle east Edmund Burke’s line from Letters on a Regicide Peace that "men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites" quickly comes to mind. Like Mr. Kling, I tend to favor the conservative civilization versus barbarism lens when it comes to the institutions of the Middle East. I don’t know how valid institutional analysis will be to regions like Syria in prescribing good institutions because I don’t know if those institutions would even have legitimacy.
Herein lie the problem about Mssrs. Kerry and Obama singing the praise of communities organizing around peace in their op/eds: Communities in Syria and Iraq aren’t necessarily going to be pulling together towards peace. Many will be pulling together to help support the Islamic State assert its territorial claims in the region. It really all comes down to culture and whether local cultures can even support civilly liberal societies. Those who put faith in Arab Spring underestimated how much good institutions are contingent on culture if they are to emerge.
A passage from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is well worth quoting on this point: "Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."
If I were to give advice to a Middle Easterner wanting prosperity, I would recommend that he, but especially she, look elsewhere. Maybe Europe, but most likely the United States. In a sense, I write off the entire region as a failed state. ISIL has grown to the point where peace-loving Middle Easterners have to take up arms against it. Patriotic duty summons Kurds and the Shia population in Iraq to arms.
That’s not to say that Middle Easterners are evil and vicious people. I think that they may be just as virtuous as Westerners. Plus, I think that a century of horrendous foreign policy from Paris, London, Washington DC and Moscow have all ensured that at least this generation of Middle Eastern states will be eventually sorted into the ‘having failed category.’ That Iraq, for instance, would eventually collapse to sectarian violence was a matter of time. Nevertheless, I think that their culture lacks the regard for liberalism and bourgeois dignity necessary to really give
The country I’d be most optimistic about (not counting Israel, since it really isn’t culturally apart of the Middle East) would probably be Iran. Persia has had a thriving secular culture for centuries before the 1979 revolution, evidenced by the fact that wine continued to have been produced until the Ayatollahs put a stop to it. Wine continues to be sold in volume on the black market there today. Even women's hairstyles of the last one hundred years reflected a growth of Western culture in Iran that was suddenly put to a halt with the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the same could be said of the same thing throughout the Muslim world at the period. Unfortunately, the foreign policy of Western countries are doing their best to isolate the nation. In doing so, however much Western nations may be talking the fight against Islamic terrorism, they push opinion there ever more behind the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Republic.