Fighting Caliphate with Chaos
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.com
Sum up our failed Middle East policy in a
nine-letter word starting with an S. Stability.
Stability
is the heart and soul of nation-building. It’s the
burden that responsible governments bear for the
more irresponsible parts of the world.
First you send experts to figure out what is
destabilizing some hellhole whose prime exports are
malaria, overpriced tourist knickknacks and
beheadings. You teach the locals about democracy,
tolerance and storing severed heads in Tupperware
containers.
Then if that doesn’t work, you send in the military
advisers to teach the local warlords-in-waiting how
to better fight the local guerrillas and how to
overthrow their own government in a military coup.
Finally, you send in the military. But this gets
bloody, messy and expensive very fast.
So most of the time we dispatch sociologists to
write reports to our diplomats explaining why people
are killing each other in a region where they have
been killing each other since time immemorial, and
why it’s all our fault. Then we try to figure out
how we can make them stop by being nicer to them.
The central assumption here is stability. We assume
that stability is achievable and that it is good.
The former is completely unproven and even the
latter remains a somewhat shaky thesis.
The British wanted stability by replicating the
monarchy across a series of Middle Eastern
dependents. The vast majority of these survived for
a shorter period than New Coke or skunk rock. Their
last remnant is the King of Jordan, born to Princess
Muna al-Hussein aka Antoinette Avril Gardiner of
Suffolk, educated at the Royal Military Academy,
Sandhurst, and currently trying to stave off a
Muslim Brotherhood-Palestinian uprising by building
a billion dollar Star Trek theme park.
The British experiment in stabilizing the Middle
East failed miserably. Within a decade the British
government was forced to switch from backing the
Egyptian assault on Israel to allying with the
Jewish State in a failed bid to stop the Egyptian
seizure of the Suez Canal.
The American experiment in trying to export our own
form of government to Muslims didn’t work any
better. The Middle East still has monarchies. It has
only one democracy with free and open elections.
Israel. Even Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring was a
perverted attempted to make stability happen by
replacing the old Socialist dictators and their
cronies with the political Islamists of the Muslim
Brotherhood. They abandoned it once the chaos rolled
in and stability was nowhere to be found among all
the corpses.
It might be time to admit that barring the return of
the Ottoman Empire, stability won’t be coming to the
Middle East any time soon. Exporting democracy
didn’t work. Giving the Saudis a free hand to
control our foreign policy didn’t work. Trying to
force Israel to make concessions to Islamic
terrorists didn’t work. And the old tyrants we
backed are sand castles along a stormy shore.
Even without the Arab Spring, their days were as
numbered as old King Farouk dying in exile in an
Italian restaurant.
If stability isn’t achievable, maybe we should stop
trying to achieve it. And stability may not even be
any good.
Our two most successful bids in the Muslim world,
one intentionally and the other unintentionally,
succeeded by sowing chaos instead of trying to
foster stability. We helped break the Soviet Union
on a cheap budget in Afghanistan by feeding the
chaos. And then we bled Iran and its terrorist
allies in Syria and Iraq for around the price of a
single bombing raid. Both of these actions had messy
consequences.
But we seem to do better at pushing Mohammed Dumpty
off the wall than at putting him back together
again. If we can’t find the center of stability,
maybe it’s time for us to embrace the chaos.
Embracing the chaos forces us to rethink our role in
the world. Stability is an outdated model. It
assumes that the world is moving toward unity. Fix
the trouble spots and humanity will be ready for
world government. Make sure everyone follows
international law and we can all hum Lennon’s
“Imagine”.
Not only is this a horrible dystopian vision of the
future, it’s also a silly fantasy.
The UN is nothing but a clearinghouse for dictators.
International law is meaningless outside of
commercial disputes. The world isn’t moving toward
unity, but to disunity. If even the EU can’t hold
together, the notion of the Middle East becoming the
good citizens of some global government is a fairy
tale told by diplomats while tucking each other into
bed in five-star hotels at international
conferences.
It’s time to deal with the world as it is. And to
ask what our objectives are.
Take stability off the table. Put it in a little box
and bury it in an unmarked grave at Foggy Bottom.
Forget about oil. If we can’t meet our own energy
needs, we’ll be spending ten times as much on
protecting the Saudis from everyone else and
protecting everyone else from the Saudis.
Then we should ask what we really want to achieve in
the Middle East.
We want to stop Islamic terrorists and governments
from harming us. Trying to stabilize failed states
and prop up or appease Islamic governments hasn’t
worked. Maybe we ought to try destabilizing them.
There have been worse ideas. We’re still recovering
from the last bunch.
To embrace chaos, we have to stop thinking
defensively about stability and start thinking
offensively about cultivating instability. A Muslim
government that sponsors terrorism against us ought
to know that it will get its own back in spades.
Every Muslim terror group has its rivals and enemies
waiting to pounce. The leverage is there. We just
need to use it.
When the British and the French tried to shut down
Nasser, Eisenhower protected him by threatening to
collapse the British pound. What if we were willing
to treat our Muslim “allies” who fill the treasuries
of terror groups the way that we treat our
non-Muslim allies who don’t even fly planes into the
Pentagon?
We have spent the past few decades pressuring Israel
to make deals with terrorists. What if we started
pressuring Muslim countries in the same way to deal
with their independence movements?
The counterarguments are obvious. Supply weapons and
they end up in the hands of terror groups. But the
Muslim world is already an open-air weapons market.
If we don’t supply anything too high end, then all
we’re doing is pouring gasoline on a forest fire.
And buying the deaths of terrorists at bargain
prices.
Terrorism does thrive in failed states. But the key
point is that it thrives best when it is backed by
successful ones. Would the chaos in Syria, Nigeria
or Yemen be possible without the wealth and power of
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran? Should we really fear
unstable Muslim states or stable ones?
That is really the fundamental question that we must
answer because it goes to the heart of the moderate
Muslim paradox. Is it really the Jihadist who is
most dangerous or his mainstream ally?
If we believe that the Saudis and Qataris are our
allies and that political Islamists are moderates
who can fuse Islam and democracy together, then the
stability model makes sense. But when we recognize
that there is no such thing as a moderate
civilizational Jihad, then we are confronted with
the fact that the real threat does not come from
failed states or fractured terror groups, but from
Islamic unity.
Once we accept that there is a clash of
civilizations, chaos becomes a useful civilizational
weapon.
Islamists have very effectively divided and
conquered us, exploiting our rivalries and political
quarrels, for their own gain. They have used our own
political chaos, our freedoms and our differences,
against us. It is time that we moved beyond a failed
model of trying to unify the Muslim world under
international law and started trying to divide it
instead.
Chaos is the enemy of civilization. But we cannot
bring our form of order, one based on cooperation
and individual rights, to the Muslim world. And the
only other order that can come is that of the
Caliphate.
And chaos may be our best defense against the
Caliphate.