LONDON, 19 February — President George Bush has bequeathed the world a great sense of insecurity. Since he delivered his dose of inflated hyperbole at his State of the Union address, we are left to wonder if the rest of his presidency is going to be a constant reminder of that state when “every road toward a better society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, threats of war, preparations for war,” as Aldous Huxley warned us it would be 70 years ago.
“If you want peace, prepare for war” advised Clausewitz, and today’s inhabitants of the White House, convinced self-righteously that the mailed fist will cow the infidel and the wicked, take Clausewitz all too literally, convinced that their bombs will persuade those underneath to bow to superior force.
It can happen. Nazi Germany was blitzed into oblivion. Japan was nuclear bombed into capitulation. More recently, Iraq was dissuaded from taking over Kuwait and Milosevic sued for peace in Kosovo.
Yet apart from the argument, a powerful if underused one, that in most situations of conflict there is an alternative way — as most successfully Bill Clinton showed with the effective defanging of the would-be nuclear teeth of North Korea — there is the real danger that Bush is walking us into the trap of “The Clash of Civilizations”.
While the bombs were dropping on Afghanistan, I decided to re-read Samuel Huntington’s political masterpiece. Often misrepresented as a call to arms in defense of the vulnerability of Western civilization, it is, toward its end, a cautionary tale with Huntington arguing how a world war between the West and the Islamic World backed by China can be avoided.
But along the book’s way, Huntington does remind us how close to the surface lies the enmity of the Islamic world toward the West. And he underscores, throughout much of its history, how militant on the battlefield has been the Islamic cause. Once Islam regains the prowess it wielded until the 12th century, when its decline relative to the West began, it will seek to confront the West at every point. We see only the beginnings of this now as oil wealth in particular builds up the strength of many Islamic societies. But it is nothing to what we may see over the next 30 years as economies strengthen, educational achievement spreads and as military hardware is acquired. Whether dictatorial or democratically led, argues Huntington, the feelings of the masses are so strongly anti-Western the leadership can only head in one direction — confrontation with the supposedly Christian West. Yet, there is a process in American political discourse that tends to overstate dangers. The most egregious example was Vietnam with its theology of falling dominoes. Similarly, in retrospect, it is quite clear that the menace of Soviet military strength was overstated almost to the point of ludicrousness.
Huntington’s grave error is to see the appeal of the West — which he fears is being rejected in the Islamic world — in terms of modern culture and contemporary financial priorities. What he misses is the impact that the spreading notions of human rights are having, deep inside the Islamic world, as they are everywhere.
While it is true that in its present form, the human rights cause is primarily a Western construct, it is not true, as Huntington argues, that the Islamic world has for the most part shunned it. He passes over the influence played by many Islamic nations when the path-breaking UN documents on human rights were written. As Professor Susan Waltz of Michigan University has uncovered, it was not Eleanor Roosevelt who authored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rather, it was a group of small countries and non-governmental organizations that pushed it through the UN labyrinth with delegates from many Muslim countries making many substantive contributions. Moreover, the Muslim delegations clearly understood all the human rights documents to be universally applicable and they made compelling arguments and applied concerted effort to that end.
If the Islamic world is as potentially dangerous as Huntington suggests, then, the best long-term counterweapon is not arms but the pursuit of human rights. This is what will impress the oppressed rank and file and, as we know from watching democratic Hindu-Muslim India or democratic Muslim Bangladesh or democratic Confucian Taiwan rings very deep bells inside society. Democratic societies that practice human rights do not go to war with each other. But to be effective, the West itself has to be credible on the human rights front, which means among other things in the news right now, honoring the Geneva Conventions, abolishing capital punishment, supporting financial reform of electioneering and, not least, supporting the International Criminal Court.
