We are fighting Islamism from ignorance as we did the cold war
A very interesting article: Is the West on a Quixotian yet dangerous and costly war against windmills???
"We are fighting Islamism from ignoranceas we did the cold war"
Simon Jenkins, Guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 March 2012 20.00 GMT
"Andrew Alexander gazes down from his Daily Mail column like a stern and scholarly heron. No one could possibly call him leftwing, let alone a pacifist appeaser. He has no illusions about the evil of Stalin or Mao, any more than he has about Saddam and al-Qaida. But he combines cussedness towards conventional wisdom with historical scepticism. In a sensational but little-noticed book, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance, he marches to the conclusion that most recent foreign policy has been based on systematic ignorance. We were duped – and still are."
"Alexander agrees with the now accepted thesis that after the second world war, Stalin and his successors never meant to invade western Europe and overthrow American capitalism. As the historian Sir Michael Howard has written, "No serious historian any longer argues that Stalin ever had any intention of moving his forces outside the area he occupied in eastern Europe"."
"Although it is easy, in any arms race, to declare a plague on both houses, Alexander is in no doubt – the fault lay primarily in Washington. A succession of bombastic American leaders, chary even of travelling abroad, denied what their own intelligence was telling them, that Russia posed no threat to the west. This is backed by recent research into Russian archives. (Alexander might have credited others who said so at the time, from CND to Enoch Powell.)"
"The cold war consumed trillions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands died in surrogate wars around the globe. The opportunity cost in poverty and disease, in growth foregone and democracy postponed, was awesome. (snip) The cold war was not a war of good against evil. It was ignorance so pernicious as to question "the integrity and basic intelligence" of those democratic institutions persuaded that they were under existential threat."
"Where Alexander goes for broke is in showing how this ignorance is ongoing. With the end of the cold war – and the west's later inept handling of Russia – the west's craving for a necessary enemy has revived. For a decade after 1990, defence chiefs resorted to genocidal autocrats, drug lords and Balkan separatists to maintain their budgets, which duly dwindled. Then came 9/11 and a "clash of civilisations". Bush and Blair won elections. Bankers lent money to generals, and the military-industrial complex refloated on an ocean of myth and mendacity."
"I believe Alexander is right to seek explanation not in the realpolitik of international relations, but in the motives of democratic leaders. America's belief in itself as the "greatest superpower the world has ever seen" led Lyndon B Johnson to impotent fury at being thrashed by "a raggedy-ass little country" – Vietnam. It led Washington lobbyists to protect defence spending, as Truman was advised, by "scaring the hell out of the American people". Today, a similar self-delusion leads Washington and London to claim the right to drop bombs on anyone they find "unacceptable"."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...rance-cold-war
