Fight Terror with Culture

I wrote a column that touched on this topic some time ago ...

Christopher J Falvey expands on that view, namely that the war on terror, as it is presently constituted, will fail. Not because of a lack of military might or strategy, but rather because we're forgetting the one great weapon that has won all previous wars we've been involved in: our culture.

A lot has been said about the Muslim outrage over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and why not? It's a great storyline. It has an us-versus-them quality. It has a "free speech" element, which always fires people up. It even involves a righteous boycott of the Danish dairy industry, collateral damage if ever there was.

Nevertheless, the deeper meaning of the whole situation is really none of the above. Rather, the episode is a window into how we win wars - and how we could lose this one.

The war on terror, as it is presently constituted, will fail. The failure will not be from a lack of military might or strategy - that part of the war is actually going well enough, though you wouldn't know it from watching the television news. (For some, even one American casualty is too many.)

The breakdown of the war will not even be economic or political. Rather, the pending failure lies in the fact that we have not employed the one great weapon that has sealed the success of nearly every war in our past: our culture.

What we're really seeing from the recent Muslim outrage is our own nation being dragged into a religious war. We can pretend to analyze our way out of it, but if the Islamic community feels that we're fighting against each and every one of them, we'll soon find ourselves doing so - like it or not. And that's a bad thing. A really bad thing. Religious wars never end, and no one ever wins them.

Any student of basic world history could easily begin to draw a line- one I believe we are approaching quickly- where this war on terror devolves into the same religious war that has been going on among Christians, Muslims and Jews for millennia. Throughout American history, we've done a good job of not fighting that war. And for good reason: That war generally topples empires. This time around, however, we're foolishly being tempted into it.

Culture as a Weapon

You obviously need two sides to a religious war. America and the Western World are not a religion, right? That technically may be true, but the dilemma lies in the fact that we're beginning to fight the war on terror as a war of principle.

Religion and principle are really the same thing. When the administration speaks of "armies of compassion," "a God-given right to democracy" and the rest of the amorphous rhetoric that seems to be the entirety of the endgame strategy, its base reasoning is no different than fighting a war "because God told you to."

Speeches during World Wars I and II, as well the Cold War, were laden with similar rhetoric, but the rhetoric was merely window dressing on a real plan. These wars were a success because our enemies' nations rebuilt themselves on a framework of our own capitalist, secular culture. Neither Presidents Kennedy nor Reagan inspired the fall of communism among the populace as much as blue jeans and rock music did. The atomic bomb didn't prevent Japan from regrouping and continuing on as our enemy; the allure of corporate capitalism did.

The parallels between 20th century Japan and today's Middle East serve not only as an excellent example but as a model - maybe the only model - for how the war on terrorism can be won.

The nationalist movement of Japan in the 1930s used terrorism internally to eradicate western ideals and cultural structures. The result was a one-party government, complete with a state religion, and a bent on engaging in wars of principle through non-traditional means. Sound familiar?

After the end of the war, the real work began, and it had to do with the culture. Once the people of Japan no longer felt beholden to conform only to their own ancient culture, that, combined with the more easily achieved economic results of capitalism, erased the foundational need for wars of principle.

Certainly there are differences with today's Middle East. Japan carried out its attacks as a unified nation, and modern terrorists generally don't wear the uniforms of the nations whose policies they most espouse. However, the mono-religious, anti-capitalist, closed-market structure of the Middle East is similar enough to believe the results of cultural infusion would be the same.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the opposite of our current strategy in the Middle East, where military action is the only action, and the spread of a more stable culture is rarely discussed. In fact, some even consider it offensive to do so.

Growing Peace Organically

The ugly secret about using culture as a weapon is that it has no respect. This is also why it works. A nation cannot destroy irrational, religious-like fervor simply with "better" principles and bigger bombs. Those things may open the door, but after any initial success, you'll find the same institutions being rebuilt that help sow the same seeds of zealotry. You also cannot simply destroy these institutions or make them illegal. That is an effort doomed to failure and sure to provoke outcries of acts against humanity.

The one thing you can do is plant the seeds of an organic and free socio-economic culture. It'll do the work on its own. Think of Vietnam's doi moi policies of the mid-1980s. Decades of Western military intervention did nothing on its own, other than continue a bloody stalemate of principle in Southeast Asia. However, once the injection of even a little bit of capitalist culture caused an 8 percent annual economic growth, wars with Cambodia and Laos became meaningless. While Vietnam may not be the single shining example of economic progress for the globe, one thing is for certain - it's no longer a threat to anyone.

The reasons are fairly simple: The healthy, organic, internal struggles prescribed by a Western-style socio-economic culture generally force unhealthy, external struggles of principle and religion to cease. You can't spend your energy everywhere.

Organic is the operative term here: Such a culture needs to grow from within. It can succeed - and has succeeded many times, in places previously thought of as completely anti-capitalist and anti-Western.

One of the benefits of such a transformation is that religious zeal is the first thing to fly out the window.

The War on Religion

To best understand the cultural issues involved in the endgame of the war on terror, it helps to take a step back and ask: What exactly is religion?

Throughout human history, religion has been many things. In ancient civilizations, it was science. It explained rain, wind, fire, and everything else. Over time, religion became government - it made controlling the masses a lot easier because people were obeying the word of God, not necessarily the word of a king or queen. Religion in the modern Western World acts as a social glue. This has always been especially true of new immigrant cultures - it provides a base until the culture is assimilated.

The key is that religion provides structure for people until something better comes along. In America, we realized religion's place in society from the very beginning. One of the most unheralded consequences of America's Constitution is that the separation of church and state didn't just guarantee freedom for every individual to worship as he or she chose. The most important part was the converse - it allowed capitalism and government to grow without the interference that uncontrolled religion often produces.

We didn't ban religion, we just made sure it could not take over. We did this by providing a better alternative. When allowed to, people will always flock to free market capitalism over religious-like dogma. There is no reason to believe this cannot be true in the Middle East.

The Cultural Endgame

The Bush administration isn't completely to blame here. The Western World has become so guilty about exporting its own culture to developing nations that it often hinders that task. In America, we have a love/hate relationship with our Wal-Marts, Starbucks and Nikes. Thus, when we see members of a non-Western culture marching violently against Western values, many of us can sympathize with their sentiment.

This love/hate relationship is fine - in fact, probably a healthy and more advanced way of reflecting on life than, say, the mass-consumerism of the 1950s and 1960s. This, however, is irrelevant when it comes to the benefits of exporting that culture. When you look at the roots of terrorism, embedded in poverty and despair, the exporting of prosperity that springs from Western values is easily our best weapon in the war on terror.

What will the culture of the Middle East look like in five, 10, 20 years? It is hard to tell. One thing is for certain, though. No matter how well our military action succeeds in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever else, if we don't insist on harvesting the seeds of a secular, capitalist, Westernized socio-economic culture, the Middle East (and the terrorism that breeds there) will never change. This much we do know - that is a frightening proposition.