Originally Posted by
Dayuhan
How do you know what the goals of these individuals are? It’s best to remember that AQ was able to recruit foreign fighters just as easily, maybe more easily, for his jihad against the Soviets, which had nothing at all to do with the home front. A charismatic recruiter with a good pitch and an audience of testosterone-addled young males can pull a few hundred to fight for practically anything, there’s no basis there to deduce an insurgency. I think you're imposing assumptions here.
If we want to solve the foreign fighter problem, we might want to think less about changing the governments in their home countries, which we can't change anyway, and more about the basic conditions enabling them: the existence of a jihad. They can't travel to join the fight if there's no fight to join. Foreign fighters aren't created by bad governance in Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Libya or Germany, they're created by the opportunity to go fight a foreign invader in Muslim lands. If we want fewer foreign fighters, fewer large scale extended military occupations in Muslim space will achieve that goal... and unlike change to foreign governments, this is at least within our control. We cannot change the way the governments of these countries treat their people. We can change our own habit of providing foreign fighters with a standing target. We can "address the conditions that give rise to these guys" simply by reducing direct, extended, large scale military intervention and by eschewing regime changes that require us to provide extended military sustenance to the regimes we install.
An excellent summary of those Western assumptions that were discussed earlier, but does nothing at all to measure local sentiment, local attitudes toward governance, or local conditions… and therefore a completely inadequate way of measuring the proposed condition of insurgency. How do you measure the attitudes of a populace except through their actions?
Why start at 1945? And why assume that US foreign policy is the cause of what we’re seeing? Maybe this is simply the local habit of governance… has it altered significantly since 1945? What basis have we to assume that US foreign policy has shaped local patterns of governance?
I think you drastically overestimate that supposed enabling factor, and I can’t see any evidence that it’s there at all. What government do you think is so enabled, and why exactly do you think it is so enabled?
Might also look at the perspective of the 40 year olds, and reflect that few nations anywhere allow 20 year olds to set policy… for good reasons.
Here’s another example of an externally imposed assumption, from a prior post…
I doubt that many people in the region under discussion, or even in the West, share that definition. For most, “hope” lies in the belief that next year will be better than this year, that our children’s lives will be better than ours, and that we will have security and a little more prosperity than we do now.
I think you look too much for what you want, and thus assume others want, and not enough at what people fear. After many years around the Arabian Gulf area, I think people there fear chaos far more than they fear tyranny: they know very well that they are sitting on top of something the whole world wants, and many believe – with good reason – that if they show any internal dissension or inconsistency the outsiders will come in and take it. Two comments that reappear with almost metronomic regularity in conversation in that part of the world, with only minor variation…
Osama is good, he is brave and pious and we support his jihad… but if he takes power here we will go to war and we will lose everything.
America wants us to have democracy so we will fight each other and the CIA can manipulate our elections and take our oil for nothing.
I actually think that if the bulk of that region’s populace had a choice between AQ-style Isalmism, American-sponsored democracy, and the status quo, they would take the status quo… not because they like it best but because they fear it least.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in the Gulf in the last 6-7 years, but the difference, relative to the very grim 1990s, is really striking to me. The oil price surge provided a lot of latitude and the rulers have been fairly canny in plowing back in domestically, most unlike the late 70s-early 80s oil boom. Lots of money around, lots of jobs, incomes way up. Averages don’t tell you much in the land of skewed distribution, but consumption of middle-class goods has skyrocketed, and that tells you something. I suspect that as with China, significant popular impetus for political change in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf may have to wait for a significant economic dislocation.
Again I have to ask... even if your analysis is accurate, which you clearly believe it is... what do you propose that we do about it? Do you really believe that the US has the right, the responsibility, or the capacity to adjust the way other governments relate to their populaces... or that anyone, populace, government, or insurgent, wants us meddling in their domestic affairs?
Bookmarks