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Entry: Mr. bin Laden, Meet Mr. Kennan--A New Containment Policy Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/mr_bin_laden_meet_mr_kennan_a_new_containment_policy#19516 Post contents: I thank Dan for trying to shed some light. It is Mr. Richert who hasn’t read his own piece. The word “Kosovo” comes up pretty quickly. Richert’s differences from the Neocons are only superficial. <i>”the United States should withdraw as soon as possible from areas of Muslim domination.”</i> A very good idea. But Serbia should NOT withdraw from areas of Muslim domination? (Kosovo and areas with Bosniak majorities) <i>”U.S. foreign policy needs to focus on the American interest, not on the interests of any other nation or group, no matter how passionately attached to it we might be.” </i> Another very good idea. So why is Mr. Richert whooping for Serbia irredentism? And calling for “Containment”? (a euphemism for fighting and killing, as Korea and Viet-Nam were “containment”). What is more, “containment” had at its core the idea that Communism was such a bad economic system that it would self-implode if non-Communists stood firm – hardly the expectation one should have with an inveterate religious system. So I’m left with the suspicion (perhaps hasty) that Richert is the mirror image of Poddy, and that the Kosovo conflict doesn’t seem to be about religion. So the real problem in Mr. Richert’s thesis is its very core: the false and dangerous analogy to the Cold War and “containment” -- another Neocon argument, really, for the Neocons love to compare World war One (against, they say, "Prussian militarism"), World War II (fascism), "World War III" (Communism), and "World War IV" ("islamofascism"). Just as the bad general is fighting the last war, so also the bad scaremonger – and both are offering a clear recipe for defeat. A war of religion – and such a war we haven’t had in the West since the Battle of the Boyne – works on completely different dynamics than ideological war (based on claims of justice), than State power grab wars, than wars of economic interest, and wars for the survival of an ethnos against threatened genocide or enslavement. All these kinds of war work with different motives to fight, different appeals to face machine guns, with different treatment of the enemy, with differing abilities to endure to the end, with different “rules”, and with different goals. (I follow Van Creveld here) And a war of religion works on the dynamics of religion itself, and he who pleads for a 100 Year War against another religion (or the “containment” of a religion) ought to know just what religion is. With reference to Durkheim, Otto, and Eliade, we can say that religion’s dynamics are not just/unjust, power/weakness, wealth/destitution, survival/annihilation but rather holy/profane, clean/polluted, consecrated/common, numinous/mundane, sacred/secular. (I rather like the trichotomy between the holy/the poluted/and the mundane, and I find the following compelling: http://www.friesian.com/newotto.htm ) The paradigmatic model for such a war is the Book of Joshua. So the comparison with the Cold War is a program for defeat. Mr. Richert is alarmed about Islam. Well, maybe I am too. Islam is a religion that’s not known (perhaps unfairly) for toleration. I am, in fact, against any religion that fosters intolerance, many such religions parading under the name "Christian". Mr. Richert wishes to stop the spread of Islam. Well, maybe I do too. Indeed, I have gone beyond Mr. Richert and have provided the reader with the causes for the Islamic surge: Western decadence, low birth rates, and (to be added) secularization and the need for young workers to pay the taxes to support elaborate Social Democratic welfare programs. It is not illogical to suggest that by removing the cause, one removes the effect. And again for the record, I am most definitely not a proponent of Albanian irredentism. Sent at: 2008 09 07