Quote Originally Posted by JD View Post
At the start of this year, the UK Prime Minister opened a speech with the following:

"Our response to the September 11 attacks has proved even more momentous than it seemed at the time. That is because we could have chosen security as the battleground. But we did not. We chose values. We said that we did not want another Taliban or a different Saddam Hussein. We knew that you cannot defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas". http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200701...al-values.html

My question is this: Is it possible to fight ideas with ideas in the current environment and has it been done successfully before, not just in the recent past, but back to even biblical times. Blair goes on in his speech to suggest the spread of the Moslem Empire was itself a triumph of ideas rather than military might. The same could be said of the Roman and Macedonian Empires. Has the study of history concentrated too much on the military maneuvers rather than the moral and intellectual issues underpinning them?

JD
I'm not sure that you could say that the Roman Empire expanded based on ideas. The legions certainly had a fair amount to do with it, although the basis of the expansion was certainly based on ideas (as are most expansions....look at Manifest Destiny for one example). Hitler also tried to fight an idea (Bolshevism) with an idea (Nazism), although his was also certainly framed and underpinned by racial ideas as well (which could also be seen in a way as an idea fighting an idea).

As for the study of history...you'll find so many shifts in this that it's hard to track them all. Military history has certainly gone through periods where it focused on maneuvers at a higher level instead of ideas, although that does also shift over time (look at some of the recent scholarship regarding the ideals of the men who fought the Civil War for some good examples of this).

I think for your best examples of ideas fighting ideas you need to turn to politics. That is, after all, what they do on a day-to-day basis. The Green movement might also repay study, as their struggles are often in the realm of ideas (as are the anti-globalists...and I feel both groups have contributed much in terms of organization ideas and methods to the network-centric terrorist organizations we see with AQ and others).