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Last month, Australian LTC David Kilcullen did the honors when eminent war scholar Edward Luttwak said a bunch of inane things about Iraq, Afghanistan and the inevitable failure of any US imperialist efforts at counterinsurgency in Harper’s.
Now Luttwak returns in Prospect with “Why the Middle East Doesn’t Matter.” The West is overreacting to Iran like Britain overreacted to Mussolini. That fearful count of Iran’s obsolete and ineffective warships, aircraft and divisions is alarmism. ”Backward societies must be left alone …. Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.”
I’m not in your class, Kilcullen, but if you don’t mind, I’ll take this one:
Luttwak starts by leading us up a couple of meandering paths across the past century. The first one leads to the conclusion that Arabs haven’t been able to accomplish much against Israel. Not for want of trying, but that’s not really what Luttwak’s getting at. His point is not how much trouble has been attempted and caused in the Middle East, but that it never quite lives up to the Arab hype. Luttwak notes that solving the Arab-Israeli problem would have absolutely zero effect on all other Islamic beefs.
I agree with him on both points. I don’t hold out much hope that Palestinians, with or without broader Muslim support, will stop hating and attacking Israel any time soon. Or if they did, that it would solve the Muslim world’s many problems. But that doesn’t make the destabilizing, terrorism-inciting windmill-tilting of the Arabs against Israel any less abhorrent or counterproductive to their own and other people’s prosperity.
Luttwak’s next ramble, same essay, is about Mussolini, and how seriously everyone took him, not realizing his army wouldn’t fight. Luttwak applies that to several historic Arab conventional armies and to the current Persian one, and sees Muslim Mussolinis. I agree by and large with these assessments.
Here’s where we diverge. I don’t think anyone whose opinion matters is overly concerned about Iran’s warships, aircraft or regular divisions. Those could be dealt with readily enough. Nor, as Luttak suggests, is Iran’s ability to initiate terrorist attacks a sufficient deterrent to removing its nuclear threat, though I think Luttwak may be underestimating that ability.
Luttwak suggests we could take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, with neither Iran’s conventional nor unconventional forces causing much more of a nuisance than they do already. I somewhat disagree with regard to the unconventionals. But if attacks on Iranian nuke facilities were to draw out Iranian proxy forces in Iraq and elsewhere, that could make them easier to kill. And that would make the destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities a win-win.
With his suggestion that Iran unchecked doesn’t really pose a threat to us, however, Luttwak fails to see the nose he has already described. The one on the front of his face.
Last summer, Lebanon was devastated and more than 1,000 people were killed in a few short weeks in a war provoked by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not done causing trouble there. More recently, we’ve heard reports that Iran is training and arming Hamas, which is now more interested in resuming hostilities with Israel than ending them. Then, of course, there is Iraq, where Iranian agents have been arming and training terrorists who kill Americans and Iraqis, keeping that country in a significantly higher state of instability than it would be otherwise. Afghanistan, more evidence of Iranian arms and interference.
So a bunch of Middle Eastern Muslims and Jews, not to mention Americans, have had their lives turned upside down or taken from them by Iran, which is now interested in stepping up its activities. Not our problem, Luttwak says: Iran and the entire region is just a backward place, from which any needed resources can be bought.
Of course, Iran also wants nuclear weapons. Those would enhance its ability to throw its weight around while complicating any conventional containment we might consider. Luttwak notes that a takedown of Iran’s nuclear facilities might be easily achieved, but he drops the subject short of advocating this, which is gutless enough to beg the question of why he raised that subject at all.
Instead, Luttwak bolts toward an argument for the uselessness of action. We should ignore the Middle East and see to Europe and the United States. We are using less and less of its oil, so who cares. He doesn’t address the ongoing settlement of Europe, Britain, Australia and the United States by Middle Eastern Muslims, in whose ranks one finds extremists who abuse western freedoms and attempt with remarkable success to impose their standards on our societies and institutions. While dismissing the importance of Middle Eastern oil, he also ignores the fact that whoever controls Mideast oil stands to make huge amounts of money they can use for whatever ends they choose, and could find themselves influencing the policy and actions of nations like China, whether we are directly burning and buying that oil or not.
Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, with an extremely impressive resume. UC Berkeley, Yale, University of Bath, consultant to various U.S. military branches. I’m fascinated that a scholar of modern military history and strategy could, apparently sober, advocate isolationism. As I try to follow along, I begin to think it could be possible he is idealistically or cynically trying to advance a political agenda independent of his myopic assertions, as so many people are these days. He really doesn’t provide enough information to make a determination. It can’t be that he is upset about several thousand American deaths, given how blithely he writes off 100,000 Arab and Israeli in this essay.
So it’s a mystery. Unless it is just that the complex, compound demands of current events have finally become too much, defiant of easy answers, and he just wants an exit, like so many people are these days. Frustrated, lazy, and seduced by wishful thinking.
But I’m thinking, if Harper’s and Prospect magazines and the Center for Strategic and International Studies really need someone to produce tripe like this, I’m a tabloid newspaperman who went to San Francisco State University. I could give it to them a lot cheaper.
Topics: Iran, middle east, moronocy
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 2:25 am on Friday, May 4, 2007
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May 4th, 2007 at 6:17 am
Wow, I didn’t know Monty lived for so long after WWII. Good for him.
If you agree with so much of what Luttwak wrote, why is it tripe?
May 4th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I’m fascinated that a scholar of modern military history and strategy could, apparently sober, advocate isolationism.
Isolationism was a common attitude prior to WWII, and I think it was a result of denialism by people who didn’t want deal with the problem. We have the same problem today, a whole lot of people who would rather go to the mall, and pretend there are no bad actors in the world. A silly attitude now as it was in early 1939, especially given all of the actions by Islamic terrorists and their supporters (not to mention the enablers).
Luttwhack has been seduced by that attitude, and bases his analysis on the assertion that there are no problems in the world. “Myopic” doesn’t begin to describe his problems.
May 4th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Let me get this straight: Luttwak’s solution to the Middle East is to stick our fingers in our ears, screw our eyes shut, and sing “la la la”. Well, he’s right about one thing. That way, we’ll never see it coming.
May 4th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I’ve thought that the U.S. had lost the “home of the brave” part of the equation, but I see now that, from the top down, it no long has any convictions to have the courage of.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
[...] Crittenden didn’t like the latest Luttwak article. I don’t think Skippy will like this [...]