Stardate 20030226.1410

(Captain's log): The battle lines are drawn. The war is on. There are two sides in this war and there is no common ground between them.

For me as an American, the danger we face is Arab failure. The Arabs as a cultural group, and the Arab nations collectively, produce little, create less, and are not respected either by themselves or by anyone else. Their culture is strongly based on pride and shame, and their shame at their failure has boiled over into violence. For a number of reasons, much of that violence is now aimed at the US, and thus it has become a danger to my nation, and that means we can no longer tolerate it.

What they want and do not have is accomplishment. Poverty isn't the problem, and giving them charity will only exacerbate their shame and their anger. What they want is pride and respect, and to feel as if the respect has been earned.

But their failure is due to the fact that their culture itself is deeply diseased and predisposes them to act in ways which perpetuate their failure. The only way they can become successes is for their culture to change, and it has now become necessary for us to promote that change. The essential first step in doing so is the conquest of Iraq.

Thus I feel that this battle is an essential step in the overall war "on terrorism", because Arab/Islamic terrorism is rooted in shame, and shame comes from failure, and their failure comes from the roots of their culture. They don't have to become American; they don't have to discard their past or throw away everything they have, but certain things which do hold them back will have to be eliminated. They have to join the 21st century.

We must conquer Iraq. It will as a practical matter be necessary for us to directly control the nation for an extended period, but it's impossible to say how long that would be. It could be as little as one year or as long as five. Just as we did in Japan, we'll use that period to reinforce new ideas and establish new power structures, and then to slowly turn temporal power over to Iraqi control, while maintaining a gradually less intrusive degree of interference in Iraqi society. But on some level military occupation of Iraq will continue for decades, just as it has in Japan.

The success of this will be and must be evaluated by the Iraqi people themselves. We succeed or fail as a function of how the Iraqi people themselves, collectively, view their lives and consider their lives improved. And perhaps even more important, it must evaluated by the people of the nations bordering Iraq, who will see what happens and see how the lives of the people of Iraq will improve, and become encouraged to try to implement similiar improvements in their own nations.

Iraq is the pilot project of New Arabia. This war will be fought, ultimately, in the hearts and minds of the "Arab Street" and we must convince them that our way is better than the one they currently have for them.

The problem in Japan in the late 1940's was different in detail but the same in gross: there were parts of the previous Japanese culture which were dangerous but much that was valuable; the new system was definitely Japanese but not the same as before.

Old Japan became new-and-better Japan; it did not become new America. Japan didn't become a clone of America as the result of American occupation and the American imposition of reform, but it did change quite radically. And it ceased to be a danger to us, and the lives of individual Japanese improved. We won, and so did they. They adopted (by coercion and persuasion) some American ideas and policies and integrated them into Japanese culture, and the new system was born.

That's what will be needed in Iraq: we must make them feel as if they've won because their lives have improved. We will force on them certain things which will replace the most diseased aspects of what they have now, and that will be integrated into their culture and create a new-and-better Iraq. They must begin to achieve, for once they do their pride will be satisfied and their resentment will subside, and they will cease to be a danger to us. Nation building in Iraq is a strategic requirement for the US for purely selfish reasons. But we cannot get what we need by placing a new friendly dictator in charge to replace the old unfriendly dictator. Iraq itself must be reformed.

This means that we are fighting this war to free the Iraqi people. We're not doing so out of altruism, but the effect for the Iraqi people will be the same as if we were. (We didn't free Eastern Europe from Soviet rule out of altruism, but they don't seem to mind.) And we need Iraq to keep being a success, because it will induce reform in the rest of the Arab world, leading to further and broader Arab success, rising pride, decreasing shame, lessening resentment and less violence aimed at us.

Arab shame at Arab failure is the "root cause" of this war. Arab reform leading to Arab success is the solution. Arab culture must liberalise, and we no longer have the luxury of waiting for that to happen on its own.

We have to embark on this effort because the only alternative is to kill them all. If we don't work to institute deep cultural reform, there will be more and more attacks against us which are progressively more and more damaging, and our reprisals will become more and more catastrophic. We have to fight now to prevent unconscionable slaughter later.

If we interfere now, we can help both the Arabs and ourselves. If we wait, both they and us will bleed and die.

This is, of course, a very high level view presented in summary form; it deliberately simplifies the issues and therefore it necessarily leaves out many nuances.

But our enemies view the war in entirely different terms. For the other side in this war, the danger is American power and influence. No nation in history has ever had the kind of unbalanced power that the US has. Analogies to the Romans, or the Chinese are unsatisfactory; they may have dominated their local areas but they did not dominate the world. But in a real sense, the United States already does dominate the world, and a lot of people are afraid of this.

I've spoken before about the difference between capabilities and intentions. One of the reasons why Saddam is dangerous is because he has the intention to create and dominate a new pan-Arab/Islamic federation which would be ruled from Baghdad. Initially he tried to do this through conventional arms, and created the most powerful conventional army in the mid-East (largely on credit). Twice it was used to expand Baathist power and both attempts failed. The attack on non-Arab Iran became a stalemated war of attrition which eventually burned out when both sides exhausted themselves. The conquest of Kuwait succeeded, but was then reversed by the US, which rolled over the Iraqi military in what is generally viewed as the most lopsided major military victory of the last hundred years.

To really accomplish his goals, Saddam needs nuclear weapons; he needs a threat so large that it will cause the US to back off and to cause other Arab nations to surrender without conventional military invasion, and Saddam's government has spent the last 20 years trying to create nuclear weapons. Without them, he cannot achieve his goal of creating a new Arabian empire.

He has the intention of conquest but not the capability of doing so. Capabilities are harder to come by than intentions; and part of why Saddam is a manifest danger now is that he has actually been close to getting nukes for a long time. Once he does, a lot will change.

But as long as he doesn't get that capability, his intentions are relatively unimportant and many actually think that ongoing inspections are good enough for that purpose. Leaving him in power doesn't matter; all that's truly important is making sure he doesn't actually get nukes. As long as that's prevented, his threat is contained.

But when you turn that around and apply that idea of intentions and capabilities to the US, you can begin to see why a lot of people are nervous about us. The US has the largest economy on the planet; our GDP now is greater than the sum of the next five most prosperous nations combined, and our per-capita GDP is nearly 40% higher than the average for the rest of the G7. We have the highest productivity on the planet. Our work force is immense and unemployment is low. We have the best technology in the world. We do most of the best science.

And we have the most powerful military. We have more naval power than the rest of the world combined, and we can project more military force. Our military is not only large, well organized and well motivated but also armed with wizard weapons no one else can match.

The US has the capability but apparently not the intention of launching a war of world conquest. Almost any other nation in the world which had the power we have would have started such a war long since.

And intentions can change far more easily than capabilities. Which is why much of the world's leadership sits with white knuckles every four years, wondering who the Americans will pick as President. Americans choose him, but everyone has to live with him, and they never know what's coming. Every four years the world is just one election away from disaster.

The great nightmare for much of the world has been an activist America, one which rouses itself from its self-indulgent and decadent stupor and begins to flex its muscles around the world. That nightmare seemed to finally come about in the aftermath of the September 11 attack. Would this rouse the sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve? Would this begin the War of American Global Conquest?

There was a futile hope in the beginning by some that the attack could be used to make us begin to doubt ourselves and possibly cause us to pull back and reduce our power. That was part of why we so often heard "Ask yourselves why they hate you."

But it soon became clear that this had failed, and that the attack would not cause us to destroy ourselves through critical self-doubt. We didn't come to the desired conclusion that we were hated because we were too powerful, and that our proper solution was self-castration. An even more futile hope was that perhaps we could be put back to sleep, thus advice that we should "get over 9/11".

But for our enemies in the war, even a quiescent America is a danger. Even if we are not embarked on military conquest, we seem to be taking over the world by "peaceful" means. Our culture is sneered at by sophisticates everywhere, but it is also present everywhere. Our books and magazines and our TV cable channels can be accessed in most of the world. Our music and our fashions are everywhere. Our movies dominate the world's theaters. Our products sell well. And our Internet is carrying our culture and attitudes to the world. Without even trying to, we seem to be infecting the world with our ideas and many of the world's cultures can't compete. And they feel threatened.

And since power and dominance tend to reinforce themselves, there's little hope that this will change. If anything, relative American power would be expected to increase. It's true that all powerful nations eventually decline but there's no sign of this happening anytime soon.

With the rise of direct American activism, their worst fears are realized and they now feel as if they must actively oppose us.

The participants in this war are therefore divided between those who think that American influence in the world is on balance positive or on balance negative. Most on the negative side would agree that America has done good; most on the positive side would agree that America has created evil. And no one who is realistic expects that American power will radically decline in the near future. Will American action in the future cause harm? For most out there, this question looms much larger than the relatively minor question of Arab activism and hostility or Saddam's quest for nuclear weapons.

These things cross national boundaries. There are Americans who align with America's opponents; there are French who support the US. But the real issue for most of them is the United States. It isn't Saddam; it isn't his nukes. It isn't the plight of the Iraqi people. It isn't terrorism. It isn't Islamic extremism. Those things are not necessarily good, but the danger of American military conquest is seen as being much worse. And that's what comes out once you really push the issues; when you encounter activists who seem to oppose the war in Iraq, you'll find them surprisingly uninterested in questions about the fate of Iraqis themselves, or the danger posed by Saddam's quest to develop nuclear weapons. At an antiwar demonstration in London, an expatriate Iraqi woman tried to speak about the plight of the Iraqi people and this caused Jesse Jackson to say the following:

Today is not about Saddam Hussein. Today is about Bush and Blair and the massacre they plan in Iraq.

Warnings about vast numbers of casualties amongst the Iraqi people are common among those opposing the war; the numbers they claim are limited only by their imaginations. As war becomes ever more imminent, the casualties anticipated (almost eagerly) by those opposing the war have climbed ever skyward in hopes of raising the deterrence.

But for all their pontification about vast numbers of casualties, that's not what they really fear. What they are most afraid of is that the war will succeed rapidly and seem easy. They fear a rapid and nearly bloodless conquest. They fear that we'll move in, that the Iraqi military will mostly surrender without fighting, and that the war will end in days with almost no one dying. They'd rather see hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians be slaughtered than to see a fast and easy conquest, for their greatest fear is that if conquest of Iraq is too easy then the US will decide to do more of it. If war cannot be prevented, they want a huge body count, and if possible they want as many of those bodies as possible to be American. If there must be war they need it to be seen as a failure, just as Viet Nam was. This is not because they are bloodthirsty, but because they fear the alternative even more. An American war of global conquest would ultimately cause even more death and destruction, or so they fear.

So they warn of another Viet Nam and speak in grave tones about quagmire because they're afraid it won't be one. They protest this war because they fear the US. American power is the true issue. It doesn't matter where it might be flexed or what the local issues are.

In fact, you occasionally see comments from some to the effect that they'd actually support a military conquest of Iraq, as long as it wasn't America doing it. They bear no love for Saddam, but they fear him much less than they fear American power and American will to use that power. Saddam might create an Arabian empire but it would only directly affect the Arabs. If America creates an empire it will cover the world.

American predominance in capability cannot be removed for the forseeable future, so it is American intentions on which they work. Their only hope of restraining the giant is to bind him with strands of obligation. Demands for "multilateralism" and "UN approval" and "consultation with allies" are all intended to cause the US to accept chains to bind it and make it so it cannot actually apply its real capabilities. And as those efforts also fail, the rhetoric becomes increasingly strident and the opposing plans become ever more desperate.

Our opponents want America weakened and defeated and for America to no longer have the ability to dominate the world, whether it uses that capability or not. The majority of the voters in the US refuse to accept such limits. There's no common ground between those two positions.

This struggle has been developing for a long time and now it's out in the open. For us as Americans, we cannot expect to convince the opponents of our good intentions. We don't want an empire because empires are boring – but they'll never believe that. So our opponents must be defeated.

That doesn't mean they must all die. But they must be defeated. And since most of their best weapons are words, our best defense against them is to ignore them and get on with the job.

Let's roll.