Via The Corner is this analysis of the Moslem world done in 1946 by an American intelligence analyst. His conclusion:
If the Moslem states were strong and stable, their behavior would be more predictable. They are, however, weak and torn by internal stresses; furthermore, their peoples are insufficiently educated to appraise propaganda or to understand the motives of those who promise a new Heaven and a new Earth.
Because of the strategic position of the Moslem world and the relentlessness of its peoples, the Moslem states constitute a potential threat to world peace. There cannot be permanent world stability, when one-seventh of the earth's population exists under the economic and political conditions that are imposed upon the Moslems.
It is a potential threat no more. Sixty years of the same factors undermining the potential of this part of the world and the potential of fanatics from this world to get the bomb that only we possessed in 1946 have made the threat very real and very dangerous.
It is tempting to ask what if we had sought to repair the Moslem world starting in 1946 instead of 2001. But that is pointless. At that time, we were trying to repair the dysfunctional European world still recovering from fascism and Japan still recovering from militarism after the guns of World War II fell silent. We had much to do. And shortly, before we'd made much progress in seeing the former Axis countries and their victims rebuilt, the Iron Curtain would come down. In order to rally forces to stop Soviet and then Soviet and Chinese communism during the Cold War, short-term stability held in place by friendly islamic dictators was more valuable than facing a potential threat from the Moslem world. We had little choice. Would you trade a loss in the Cold War for a repaired Moslem world? A Moslem world that might then have simply succumbed to a new disease from communism triumphant?
And even if you think our Cold War victory was inevitable, could our leaders really have assumed that in 1947 when the Iron Curtain came down even as Europe lay in ruins? Or 1957 during the atom bomb scares and the apparent monolith of China and Russia making the East Red? Or 1967 when Euro-communism was rampant and our fight in Vietnam was raging? Or 1977 when Soviet clients ran rampant in Africa and the Third World, and many assumed we were doomed to lose the Cold War? Or even 1987 on the eve of the Soviet Union's collapse when the Western Europeans seemed to be losing their nerve to resist the Soviets and many Americans thought we were fools to try to outspend Moscow in an arms race? At what stage could our leaders have said, we are safe now, we can afford to discard potential allies to fight the Soviets and focus on the Moslem world's problems?
Sadly, containing the Soviet Union did not lead to their collapse in a decade as was once hoped. And in the long twilight struggle of the Cold War, we forgot about the growing threat of the Moslem world that stood still wallowing in its poverty and backwardness while the West and Asia advanced by leaps and bounds.
We may not have had a choice but to promote the stability of dictatorships as the realistic choice at the time, but have no doubt that it had a terrible impact on the Moslem world.
So now, after 9/11 showed the failure of the realism school 's forced stability from the top down, we are trying to foster strength and stability through democracy and rule of law. We do this not so much out of altruism, although that streak is there (certainly our troops feel they are doing good), but so these will provide economic progress and liberty to reverse the economic and political conditions that have given us our current threat from the Moslem world. Now we must try to provide stability from the bottom up resting on a prosperous, educated, and free Moslem population.
Without that bottom-up stability, we will have Moslems who are still unpredictable, backward, determined to reach Paradise, and possessing atomic weapons. It is a combination too explosive to accept.
We may fail after letting the potential problem foreseen sixty years ago fester for so long, but do we really have a choice but to try?
