The Role of Justice in a World of Tragedy

    The lengthy cover article in the current issue of The American Conservative is entitled, “Splitting Islam: A Shi’ite-Sunni Strategy for Surviving the War on Terror.”  Its author, James Kurth, who holds a chair in political science at Swarthmore, proposes a diabolical solution to the current NeoCon dilemma.  His solution is to render radical Islamists irrelevant by promoting an internal war between Sunnis and Shi’a worldwide that would focus all Muslim energies on attacking each other rather than on attacking America and America’s allies.

    He goes to great length to show that the Neo-Con dilemma is insoluable.  The Neo-Cons and their allies in the White House cannot win in Iraq and yet they cannot afford to lose.  They have launched a “universalist project” to “drain the swamp that sustained Islamist terrorists by bringing liberal democracy, free markets, open societies, and human rights to Muslim countries.”  The attack on Iraq was to be a quick-fix, but it failed because it was superficial and based on gross ignorance of political realities.  Kurth writes, “With Islamist terrorism a quick fix can always be outwaited by the terrorists, and a superficial one can always be outflanked by them.”  He concludes that, “Neither the liberal, the traditional conservative, nor the neo-conservative solutions offer much hope for a way out of our dangerous condition vis-a-vis the global Islamist insurgency.”

    The only realistic solution is to use the Cold War strategy of divide and diminish (as distinct from divide and conquor) which pitted the Russians and Chinese against each other so their focus shifted to their own geo-political rivalries and thereby undermined what once was a united front by two potential superpowers against America’s vital interests.  In the war on terror this strategy must be pursued by promoting the major divisions in the Muslim world, which are: 1) moderate Muslims versus extremist Islamists, and 2) Sunni Muslims versus Shi’ite Muslims.

    Kurth shows some sophistication in how to drive the Sunnis and Shi’ite into wars that would decimate both of them, including an alliance between Iran, which soon will possess nuclear weapons and delivery capablities, with a nuclear India, to destroy the other Muslim nuclear power, Pakistan.  The reverberations that would produce such a catastrophy are well thought out.  His premise is that Sunnis and Shi’a have irreconcilable pretensions to global power.  “Extremists among the Sunnis,” he writes, “dream of the restoration of the Islamic caliphate” in order to eliminate the “apostate or heretical regimes” that were established after the breakup of the caliphate in 1922.  “Since the Sunnis regard the Shi’ites as heretics, ... the closer the caliphate dream comes to being reality, the more the Shi’ites will have to resist, ... so that an Islamist identity might well become less salient than the warring Sunni and Shi’ite identitries ... and the global Islamist movement might have almost no meaning or attraction at all.  In the Muslim world there might be Sunni Islamists and Shi’ite Islamists, but each might consider their greatest enemy to be not the United States but each other.”

    In Iraq the real Sunni goal, he says, despite protestations of hand-picked “democratic moderates,” is to govern as a minority as they have for centuries through ruthless oppression.  “Since the Sunni Arab minority is in fact a rather small one, any regime composed by the Sunnis was especially authoritarian.”  Of course, the same could be said for the Saudis and, in fact,for almost any government by a minority community in a multi-national state anywhere in the world, as I have been pointing out in numerous articles, including award-winning ones, for many decades.

    My contention all along has been that the Sunnis in Iraq fully intend to destroy all Shi’a and Kurdish resistance, and that we should not dismiss reports of this past June about a meeting in Qatar where the Israelis reportedly made an alliance with the Sunni insurgents to provide the wherewithal to make this possible.  As the Saudi foreign minister made clear yesterday, the Saudi government will do anything to prevent Shi’a dominance and Iranian influence in Iraq, because the Saudis’ traditional fear of an Iraqi attack or an Iranian attack on the oil fields in the Shi’a portion of Arabia could be exceeded only by their recent fear of an Iraqi-Iranian alliance to impose Shi’a hegemony over all Middle Eastern oil. 

    The Iraqi Sunnis may welcome Israeli assistance and American indifference, but the Western strategy would not be to impose the status quo ante, this time with a tamer dictator, but rather to set the stage for a civil war in a country that was created by the British in order to assure that ethnic and religious conflict would undermine any opposition to foreign influence.  “In the end,” writes Kurth, “Iraq, like Yugoslavia, is likely to split into several hostile ethnic states.  But the Islamist insurgency in the Shi’ite and Kurdish regions would have been eliminated. ... The current insurgency against the U.S. military forces in Iraq is doing much to increase the appeal and strength of Islamism and indeed of transnational networks of Islamic terrorists.  In contrast, a war between the states in Iraq might do much to render Islamism irrevelant, at least in Iraq if not other countries of the Middle East.  What meaning will Islamism have if Sunni Arab Muslims are killing Shi’ite Arab Muslims (along with Sunni Kurdish Muslims), and vice-versa?”

    Kurth runs through the various possible scenarios after such a war is underway in what used to be the country of Iraq.  For example, if a radical Wahhabist or Salafist regime should take power in Saudi Arabia, “the Shi’ites of Iran ... could become co-belligerants with the United States against this or that extremist Sunni movement or state that is the enemy of them both.”

    His most ambitious scenario for weakening what he calls “global Islamist terrorism” is a conflict between Iran and Pakistan.  “There will be three new and unseasoned nuclear powers spaced out on a line in one of the most volatile and violent regions on the planet.  As with most three body problems, the dynamics of the three bomb problem cannot now be predicted.”  But, Kurth suggests that the result, whatever it may be, could promote long-range American goals in the world.  He is clear that U.S. troops must withdraw from Iraq, if only for domestic political reasons, and he is equally clear that the result could have great strategic benefits.  “If the United States gets out of Iraq,” states Kurth, “the central conflict within the Muslim world will be between the Sunnis and Shi’ites.  It will be the fate of the Sunnis of Iraq, and in the longer run perhaps the fate of the Sunnis of Pakistan, that will wonderfully concentrate the Sunni mind.  In that context, the current focus of Islamists upon the United States will become misplaced and indeed mindless.”

    The conclusion of Kurth’s brilliant and evil essay, worthy of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and of their brilliant students, Henry Kissinger and Richard Cheney, is this:  “The wise strategy of any truly great power in extending its influence to other countries is not to try to erect utterly new and bizarre constructions that have no foundation in the local realities.  It is rather to try to turn to its advantage those local realities and the inherent tensions within and between them.”

    The above position paper is worthy of the best foreign policy think-tanks, even though its premises and logic are flawed.  Its importance consists in the fact that it offers a new paradigm for the Neo-Cons to replace on an interim basis the bankrupt Neo-Con policy of imposing Western influence through American military might and talk of freedom and democracy.

    My interest in this new paradigm is its use of perverted logic to justify genocidal war and to eliminate any considerations about morality and justice.  Since President Bush has never shown even the barest awareness of morality in any of his foreign policy statements, this new paradigm could exert considerable leverage as the new pragmatism. 

    Such immorality, which always results from amorality, i.e., the lack of any positive moral guidelines, has challenged philosophers for millennia and psychologists ever since the Nazi holocaust.  Today, I was reading a good article in the most recent available issue of Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, published by the American Jewish Congress.  This article, entitled “Why Some Ask Why” by Earl Schwartz, explores the rise of moral concerns in professiomal psychology, which has challenged the relativistic basis of all modern psychology evcr since Freud located all human behavior in motivations that depend on primal instincts and on meaningless differences among societies. 

    My particular interest in this article concerns Schwartz’s discussion of why some people are interested in justice but most are not, and why most people are motivated to action by injustices to themselves but not by the pursuit of truth and justice for others.  He cites the essay, “Moral Development and the Theory of Tragedy,” by Lawrence Kohlberg, who suggests that moral awareness grows out of tragedy.  One could extrapolate from this that justice in both concept and motivation grows out of the challenges of injustice.  This theory of challenge and response, indeed, seem to reflect Toynbee’s theory on the rise and fall of entire civilizations.  Such civilizational dynamics have always been my central interest in life ever since I was the first American student in a German university after World War II and spent a year studyng the spiritual dynamics of resistance against the totalitarian state, including a stint in a Communist concentration camp as a result of my “field work” on organizing underground movements.

    According to Schwartz, “Kohlberg maintains that the study of tragic literature, especially ‘ultimate tragedies’ of classical construction, provides a particularly effective medium for moral education. This is the case because at the heart of every tragedy is a moral dilemma that challenges those involved to reach toward a higher form of moral judgment in search of resolution.  Near the end of this article he comments that, “My own interest in tragedy is part of my interest in literature’s role in education, in literature as stimlating human devcelopment.  For education, the ultimate literature is tragedy, because it, alone, can help individuals with life’s central problems - not merely help them to cope with suffering but also to develop through suffering.  In that sense, tragic vision is one that every human being needs to feel and understand.”

    The role model for Kohlberg was Janusz Korczak, the physician who preferred to remain with the children in the orphanage that he directed in Warsaw and die with them rather than to escape abroad when the Nazis started rounding up Jews for extermination.  Kohlberg writes, “The example of Janusz Korczak illuminates the limits of justice in a world of tragedy and the strength of a sense of justice for living in such a world.”

    The evil machinations and eminations coming out of the American think-tank community and foisted off on the largely innocent American people, resemble those of the Nazi theoreticians, who gained the sometimes naive and sometimes malicious support of the German people to support and commit unspeakable crimes.  Perhaps the victimization of Muslims, and especially of the most victimized of all peoples during the past millennium, the Shi’a, will produce an awareness of justice worldwide.  Only the pursuit of truth and justice can transform the currently advanced disintegration of Westernized global civilization and lead to the rebirth of a truly universal civilization based on the wisdom of all the world religions, so that enlightened religion can fulfill its potential as the cure rather than the cause of chaos.