Who Fears Chaos More? Posted by Heather Hurlburt

This morning, my old colleague Rob Malley said something that crystallized thoughts I'd been having around the Middle East fighting:

"The question is, who is going to fear instability more, who is going to fear chaos more, and who can sustain violence longer?"

This is exactly the problem with the neocons' "creative chaos" theory that got us into all of this, because, of course, it turns out that we fear instability and chaos more, even -- or especially -- the chaos we helped create.  We mind if oil prices go up; we mind the deaths of our own soldiers, and we sporadically mind the gratuitous killings of civilians.

He might also have asked:  who is best positioned to benefit from chaos?  The answer, as we have seen clearly in Iraq, is:  not us, and not our secular, moderate, embattled friends.  The forces that benefit in times of chaos are those that have strong networks and reliable ties (kinship or faith or ethnicity) already in place; who know the terrain thoroughly and who are known to the people they are trying to coerce/recruit.

Hezbollah has us, and the Israelis, and Lebanon's forces of moderate authority, thoroughly beat on all of those counts.

Why is this fantasy that we benefit from chaos so persistent?  It reminded me of something, so the other day I went and dug through some college textbooks and pulled out the following set of ideas:

--accentuate the contradictions already existing in corrupt, unjust societies;

--expose the weakness and even hypocrisy of governing "moderates;"

--empower the average individual, or forces representing him/her, in the name of democracy and justice.

Sound familiar? 

I knew there was a good reason not to get rid of my Russian history textbooks... because those ideas which Lenin used to overthrow a moderate government and install Soviet Communism sure sound familiar, don't they?   

Given how many of the older generation of neocons grew up steeped in the ideology of communism, I can't believe this is entirely accidental; more broadly, though, this is good revolutionary theory.  The trouble is that it doesn't work so well -- especially if your goal is Western-style democracy.  If you want real, broadly representative forces to emerge that can govern without repression, you need to give them time and space.

Comments

[Zathras]

There is an aspect to the recent history of the Middle East from the Mediterranean's southern shore to the Iranian border that has been all but ignored in the last few years worth of debate about the region. This is the role the Soviet Union played in Arab politics for just over 30 years.

Those few of us in America for whom history did not begin just over five years ago found it strange indeed that President Bush so easily assigned responsibility for the "freedom deficit" in Arab contries to a past American policy that preferred stability to freedom. In fact most of the Arab states most hostile to freedom, most intent on state control of the economy and everything else, and perhaps not coincidentally most devoted to pursuing the sanquinary quarrel with Israel were Soviet clients during the Cold War, not American ones. The causes and tactics now embraced by Islamist groups were pioneered by Palestinian organizations of a distinctly pink cast; the weapons that flooded the region for terrorists to use were mostly of Soviet and Eastern Bloc manufacture; while American policy generally advertised its disinterest in how Arab states governed themselves the internal security institutions and procedures of Arab government's as Syria's and Iraq's bore striking resemblances to those of their Soviet patron. And of course Soviet policy for decades sought to foment conflict in the Middle East, and often succeeded.

So perhaps the appearance of chaos and violence and their uses in overthrowing the established order -- a staple of both Soviet doctrine and Communist foreign policy -- in the Middle East today should not come as such a surprise. I hold that the direct and indirect influence of the Soviet Union on the Arab world was very considerable, that much of it endures today, and that both the Bush administration and its critics err by thinking about the Middle East as if the Soviet Union had never existed.

[Eric Martin]

Well said Heather (and Rob). Sometimes stability is better than the alternative. That this would need mention is surely a sign of the times.

[Carroll]

How many Americans are willing to go thru being bombed in their OWN homes and towns, made refugees, killed or have their families....in order to "spread democracy" to the world?...NONE

On the other hand how many Americans or Arabs would be willing to fight, be bombed, lost their house, risk dying for their family, property and country?....ABOUT 70%

The neo's are simple minded little pretend intelluctuals, simple minded teenagers really, playing dungeons and dragons.. who haven't the slightest understanding of universal human nature.

Nothing in the ME has anything to with Russia, Soviet doctrine, or any other estoric theories... it is about who will control the land and culture and have the power. Period.