Self-Determination:  A Faint Light Emerging at the End of the NeoCon Tunnel  

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Tony Cordesman’s op-ed position paper of March 30 in the Sunday New York Times from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, entitled “A Civil War Iraq Can’t Win” shows that acute failure may have a bright side if it triggers a paradigmatic shift from utopian ideologies to the recognition of pragmatic realities.  In the current presidential debate there may be faint signs now, at last and even in Washington, of an awakening to the fundamental laws of human nature, which have been denied for so long in the secular think-tanks.  Even Tony Cordesman has it only half right, because a “civil war in Iraq” assumes that there is an Iraq to begin with, whereas in fact there three autonomous nations struggling for national liberation from decades of centralized oppression.

  It took five years to figure out that the very concept of Iraq is a loser and has been ever since the Brits created it 80 years ago.  Why has it taken five years and a million Iraqi casualties to get even a savvy analyst like Tony Cordesman to acknowledge not only that one can’t put humpty dumpty back together again but that there never was a real egg to begin with?  The Ottomans knew this, which was why their bogus empire lasted so long.

  The same is true for Afghanistan, and for Russia, and eventually also for China and India, and perhaps even Indonesia, as well as for the artificial states of Sudan and Burma, and perhaps even Pakistan and Iran, as well as a couple dozen others that never deserved to exist as modern states with a monopoly of power in a political corporation.  In Vietnam we tried to split an organic nation and were destined to fail, whereas in Iraq we tried to do the opposite by creating a bogus central government, copying the British and Saddam Hussein, which was designed from the very beginning to force independent nations into an artificial state.  This also had to fail. 

  It is ironic that the NeoCons are afraid of failed states, but they are creating exactly what they are afraid of by failing to recognize that global reality cannot be invented in Washington.  All the great empires in history have failed for the same reason.  They failed to appreciate the fact that the natural self-identity of human beings is sought in families and communities or ummas, not in foreign-based substitutes.  None of the imperial tyrannies throughout history, and especially none of the totalitarian states of the modern world, ever dared to admit that they were committing suicide by denying the universal human right of self-determination, known in the maqasid al shari’ah of Islamic law as haqq al hurriyah.  Perhaps the Muslims will be the first to recognize the wisdom in their own classical code of human rights, which first introduced the concept of political federalism but has been essentially dead for six hundred years.  And perhaps they will be the first to recognize the concept of economic democracy, contained in the universal principle of Islamic law known as haqq al mal, which recognized that the devolution of political power is possible only through the broadening of capital ownership, based on the principle that whoever owns the tools of production will own both the money supply and both political and military power.

  These facts of life could be tested best by demonopolizing ownership of oil in the Fertile Crescent from centralized Iraqi state power, through equal voting and inalienable shares of stock, to every person in a Fertile Crescent federation, so that every Shi’a, Kurd, and Sunni would have equal incentives to support a system of cooperation from the bottom up.  Right now, the various peoples there have only two choices, which are to kill each other in trying to control the central government or to kill each other in the attempt to destroy it.  Without an economic strategy designed to devolve economic power by empowering people, rather than to widen the wealth gap within and among nations, there is no future for any civilization.

See also these articles on the same topic by Robert D. Crane in The American Muslim at http://www.theamericanmuslim.org

“Federalism: the Missing Arrow in the American Quiver,” February 13, 2006

“The Vision of Communitarian Pluralism: The Conflict Between State and Nation,” March 4, 2006

“New Directions for American Foreign Policy: Can Communitarian Pluralism Bring Peace through Justice,” August 18, 2006

“Natural Nations and Natural Money: Two Keys to Progress through Political and Economic Justice,” October 14, 2006

“Economic Justice: A Cure for Terrorism?, September 29, 2002

“Taproot to Terrorism,” June 19, 2005

“New Frontiers in Conflict Management: A Grand Strategy to Wage Jihad against Terrorism,” September 24, 2004

“Hudna: A Long-Range Islamic Strategy for Conflict Resolution,” July 12, 2006

“Grow, Grow, Grow: Religion is the Permanent Pluralism,” July 23, 2006