Travel Sidebar

When we look back on the menace of communism, it doesn’t seem so menacing anymore. Not long ago, I had an encounter with a drunk frat boy at the Draught House in Austin. He was clearly looking for a fight, so I deferred to his tirading. He inveighed with pointed but wobbly finger that my generation had lost its will in Vietnam, implying, I guess, that he supported an indefinite stay in Iraq.

I didn’t tell him that I had recently been to Vietnam and that it is a stable government with a steadily improving standard of living. The US is Vietnam’s #1 trading partner. Vietnam has emerged as a reliable ally in an otherwise unstable part of the world. In retrospect, it seems silly that we would have been fighting against this eventuality.

I think there were two important lessons that came out of the Cold War:

1.) We confused communism with repressive dictatorship. All of the propaganda against communism portrayed dictatorial and repressive regimes. That’s what we were fighting, not communism.
2.) Also, we learned that setting a good example is the best way to influence world events. The Cold War wasn’t won by the west; the Soviet Bloc imploded on its own. The example set by 1st world democracies influenced the outcome, but it was passive. The people in the Soviet block finally got tired of chronic grayness. They saw an alternative, so they took action.

How do those lessons apply to today’s crises in the Middle East?:

1.) We must be careful not to confuse criminal acts with nationalist or religious warfare. 911 was a criminal act, and should have been prosecuted as such. Our administration framed it as an act of war, and responded accordingly. In doing so they alienated many people who would have otherwise supported a police response.
2.) The only way to neutralize Muslim extremism is to lead by example and allow it to implode on its own. Any attempt by an infidel, especially the US, to win an ideological battle in the Middle East is doomed. The only hope for success is to address episodic eruptions as police actions, and let the court of world opinion take care of the rest. The weapons that these extremists rely upon are inherently self-defeating: restrictions on education and media; repression of women; promotion of an us-against-them credo. It is a concern that 1/6th of the world’s population increasingly condones this closed-mindedness, except that 5/6 think they are a bunch of kooks.

The opinions described above are intolerable to many Americans. They are unaware or unconcerned that during the Bush administration, world opinion has swayed heavily against the US. They seem oblivious to the loss of US hegemony in everything except military power. Much of the rest of the world would love to see US influence diminish; indeed it already has, due to declining clout in the world economy. Our enemies know that they can bankrupt us because the current administration can’t recognize a tar baby when it sees one.