Kieran Healy

Stand Down vs Gear Up

Stand Down is an important new blog from Max Sawicky and Julian Sanchez, bringing together writers from the left and right who think that under the present circumstances, invading Iraq is a bad idea. Read their mission statement here.

Here’s an example of why I think this blog is a good idea. The Lincoln Plawg recently took a few well-aimed swipes at an article by John Lewis Gaddis in Foreign Policy called “A Grand Strategy”, where Gaddis gets excited about the new National Security Strategy document. The Plawg has most of the bases covered, but one thing he doesn’t discuss jumped out at me. Gaddis argues:

The final innovation in the Bush strategy deals with the longer-term issue of removing the causes of terrorism and tyranny. Here, again, the president’s thinking parallels an emerging consensus within the academic community. For it’s becoming clear now that poverty wasn’t what caused a group of middle-class and reasonably well-educated Middle Easterners to fly three airplanes into buildings and another into the ground. It was, rather, resentments growing out of the absence of representative institutions in their own societies, so that the only outlet for political dissidence was religious fanaticism.

Really? Some counterexamples spring to mind. Take many of the countries in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and ‘80s, for instance. Their people lacked representative institutions and were pretty resentful about it, but they didn’t channel their dissent into religious fanaticism, and they didn’t need a U.S. invasion to have their revolution. And closer to the region of interest, from what I understand, Iran is slowly managing to grow a civil society under the noses of the Mullahs.

If you are on the left, you can argue that this shows there are long-term routes to “regime change” that don’t involve massive, direct military commitments. If you are on the right, you can argue that fanaticism obviously isn’t caused simply by a lack of representative institutions, so invading and trying to impose democracy from above is unlikely to deal with the fanatics. Either way, the better policy choice is not to invade. This strikes me as just the kind of point that Stand Down is good for making, especially seeing as the alternative, badly reasoned view is getting play in the likes of Foreign Policy magazine.

Yes, in other contexts, there have been other spaces for dissent, but it is true that in Muslim countries, the mosque is one of the few safe® sites for dissent. Partially for reasons of cultural legitimacy, and partially bc left-wing groups were suppressed more virulently.

Iran is actually a good example. Resentment did grow in the absence of representative institutions, and mosques were one of the few outlets for dissident speech. All kinds of dissidents threw in their lot with Islamicists against the Shah for that reason. (And lived to regret it, but that’s another story.)

I don’t think it’s a very contraversial comment to make, or that citing Eastern Europe is very relevant. You don’t have to be pro-war-with-Iraq to believe that political frustrations have motivated the popularity of Islamicism.

I’m also not sure if growing a civil society “under the noses of the mullahs” is the right way to understand what’s happening in Iran. I mean, in many cases, the mullahs themselves (Montazeri, Sanei, Taheri, Soroosh isn’t a mullah but is an ulema and worked for the Revolution) are contributing to the regeneration of civil society. The impressive thing to me about the Iranian case is how the responsibilities of power have transformed Islamicist thought.