Sunday, October 14, 2007

The long and the short of it   [Mark Steyn]

My column this weekend took as its starting point Peter Robinson's observations in this space re Norman Podhoretz's book and the need for an equivalent of George Kennan's Long Telegram. Orrin Judd doesn't care for the cut of my jib:

Today we live by the Short Telegram: no terrorist states. 

I wish that were true, but it's not, as the Iranians, Syrians, Sudanese and others well know. However, in the course of working up to that conclusion, Mr Judd notes re the Long Telegram and the Cold War:

Unfortunately for the hundreds of millions of victims of Communism, our willingness to follow the Kennan model meant that the Cold War lasted for decades, during which we stood by as tens of millions were murdered and the rest lived in near slavery. To the extent that Kennan was responsible for our not settling Soviet hash in the late 40s, he (and we) enabled the repression and mass murder of a significant portion of the human population for a disturbingly extended period of time. The cost of his accuracy was catastrophic to them and morally disabling to us. Four decades of compromising with evil led directly to the spiritual malaise that even Jimmy Carter could diagnose and lament  — though, having bought into the Kennanesque status quo, he was incapable of snapping us out of it.

It seems safe to say that Mr. Steyn would not counsel that we just mellow out and recognize that Islamicism is likewise doomed in the long run and, therefore, all we have to do is sit back and wait for it to, likewise, die off. However, this is the course of action that Kennan recommends to us — as witness Mr. Fukuyama's more militarily isolationist stance towards the Islamic world — and it is quite consistent with what Mr. Friedman and others propound.

That's very true. One of the themes of my book is that there's no such thing as "stability". Choosing to "contain" the Soviet Empire over four decades did enormous damage not just in terms of the vassel populations and the millions of ruined lives ("stability" looks a lot better from the western side of the Iron Curtain than if you're stuck on the eastern side) and the difficulties those societies are having in recovering (not least demographically) from half-a-century as a prison state, but also in the enervation of the free world and its decay into relativist mush. That's one reason our "victory" in the Cold War is not felt as a victory by the populations of almost every Nato member state, although technically they "won" it. And it's part of the reason why we're disinclined to rouse ourselves for what the Administration calls another "long war".

You can fight a Cold War launched in the wake of a six-year Hot War. But two long existential ideological Cold struggles back to back? I wonder.

10/14 02:55 PMShare