The Long View

The Mahdi Comes to Westphalia

President Obama gave a speech yesterday evening on the international intervention in Libya and on America's role in the operation. The text is here. The reasons he gave for this ecumenical project of humanitarian intervention are plausible. However, the address was regrettably unilluminating about how the actions being taken by the intervening coalition in general and by the United States in particular are supposed to promote those purposes. Like many viewers, I was struck by how closely President Obama's views mirror those of President George W. Bush, but without the Kantian lucidity.

Be that as it may, there is something to be said for the proposition that this intervention is an even greater departure from classic modern statecraft than the Iraq wars were. Martin Hutchinson had these observations in a piece entitled Back to Westphalia:

Westphalianism proved a vital organizing principle for the next 300 years [after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648], allowing significant periods of peace to appear between all the wars - and thus mankind's greatest boon, the Industrial Revolution, to become established. We now appear to be abandoning that principle - and the economic and political implications of doing so are dire...

The ultimate goal of the anti-Westphalians is of course a world government, dominated by unaccountable supranational bureaucrats even if it includes some electoral fig leaf (which will be entirely unrepresentative, because the global population of 7 billion is far too great to be adequately represented by 1,000 or so delegates, the maximum that can usefully participate in a world congress). Unlike the various alarums and excursions in the Middle East, that fate genuinely is worth fighting against militarily - but one must wonder whether the free peoples of the world's sovereign states will wake up to the danger before it is too late...

In retrospect, it will become clear that the guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1918 has been to prevent the formation of a world government. Governments tend to form across any region containing polities that have the capacity to do each other unacceptable injury; following that dynamic, a global government has been trying to form since the last third of the 19th century. The United States has prevented this from happening by doing many of the things that a world would be expected to do. This policy has resulted in a remarkably demilitarized world. Paradoxically, it has also resulted in lower defense costs for the United States than would have been incurred in a world of peer powers, and much lower than in a world with a global polity that excluded the United States.

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The rhetoric of the president and his advisors is not in fact completely inconsistent with these views, but expressed in an unusually dispiriting form. Be that was it may, I would like to point out that Mr. Hutchinson's nostalgia for Westphalia is anachronistic for several reasons. One reason is that, as no less an authority than Carl Schmitt has pointed out, the traditional public international law of Europe was a somewhat exotic system that was designed to function for one or two dozen states with broadly similar political cultures. It would be a little odd to expect it to work in a world where the count of "sovereigns" now approaches 200, many of which have political systems that barely qualify as states. The bulk of them are hothouse entities that will not survive, at least with the same pretensions, beyond the transitional era in which they appeared.

Another reason is exemplified by the Muqawama Doctrine, here explained by Ehud Yaari:

I suggest calling [the rationale for the fact that the enemies of Israel now again believe the country can be destroyed soon] the Muqawama Doctrine. The literal translation of the Arabic word muqawama is "resistance," but that does not reflect the full meaning of the term. A more correct translation would be "the doctrine of constant combat," or "persistent warfare," which is how Hizballah's Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas's Khaled Mashal define it.

In terms of the merits of this doctrine, we might note that the Mannheim Paradox tends to glitch any strategy that extends across more than two generations; it is remarkably difficult for fanatics to communicate their fanaticism to their grandchildren. Be that as it may, one of the premises of Muqawama would make Westphalia less relevant to the Middle East:

The Arab state is not a suitable vehicle: The Muqawama is not merely a military system, but a comprehensive, alternative regime. The Arab states constitute a flawed and inefficient apparatus, unfit to conduct a historic battle. The task must be shouldered instead by the Islamic movements that, alongside their military activity, engage in societal reform through educational, health and business institutions. Hamas and Hizballah are headed by shura (consultation) councils composed of senior clerics. The "Shurocracy" is key to rehabilitating the community as well as defeating the enemy, offering an alternative hierarchical structure to dictatorships, monarchies and democracies.

Meanwhile, attentive readers of the right hemisphere of the blogosphere have surely encountered references to the documentary, The Coming, which evangelizes the doctrine that the 12th Shia, the Mahdi in this tradition, is about to manifest. I have been unable to satisfy myself about the provenance of the video, or to learn just why it is being released now by Drudge and such people. (Where and Oh where is Tim Furnish when we need him?) For what it is worth, here is what the CBN site had to say:

"This video has been produced by a group called the Conductors of the Coming, in connection with the Basiji -- the Iranian paramilitary force, and in collaboration with the Iranian president's office," said Reza Kahlil, a former member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards who shared the video with CBN News . . . Kahlili [sic], author of the book, A Time to Betray, worked as a double agent for the CIA inside the Iranian regime.

"Just a few weeks ago, Ahmadenijad's office screened this movie with much excitement for the clerics," Kahlili told CBN News. "The target audience is Muslims in the Middle East and around the world."

And here is the video itself. The presentation and even the graphics will not be so strange to viewers familiar with documentaries on eschatological subjects prepared by Western millenarians. This is not a coincidence: in the last two decades, there has been a great deal of direct borrowing by Islamists from the late 20th-century popular apocalyptic literature, particularly of books and videos of American origin.

Viewers of the video will note how closely it ties a version of Shia messianism to current personalities and events, and how imminent it suggests an endtime war has become. (For a sympathetic and perhaps less tendentious account of Muslim eschatology, you could do worse than Charles Upton's summary.) It is entirely supportive of the existing Iranian government. (Western millennialism took a similar attitude in the early Middle Ages toward the institutions of Christendom, but thereafter Western speculation of this class has tended to be more subversive than otherwise.) The film suggests that one of the reasons for the American invasion of Iraq was to find the child-Mahdi before he could begin his mission. In Muslim endtime scenarios, there is an Antichrist-like figure called "ad-Dajjal". In this one, the figure is plural: the video seems to refer to Osama bin Laden, President Obama, and Colonel Gaddafi in this connection; the list is longer, though.

I saw the video just once, but it seemed to me that it strongly implied that the trigger for the endtime events would be the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The video is very insistent that the current president of Iran will capture Jerusalem. The future universal Caliphate will have its capital in southern Iraq. This prediction may be less interesting for its universal implications than for what it reveals about the views of the video's producers about where the southwestern Iranian border should be.

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Moving on to nuclear power and its future after the Fukushima incident, I am inclined to Joseph Hertzlinger's view:

I went from someone who was mildly pro-nuke to someone who is fervently pro-nuke as a result of the reactions to an article on solar-power satellites in the CoEvolution Quarterly. Some of the commenters cited the supposed failure of nuclear energy as a reason to oppose SPS as well. In other words, if we let them get away with suppressing nukes for no good reason the'yll move on to other technologies.

They have already started that.

Of course, Dilbert's take on the green-energy issue cannot be improved.

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Speaking of Carl Schmitt and eschatology, diligent readers may have noticed my new review of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. The book clarified many things for me, though probably not of the sort that author intended.

When I was in high school, I had some sort of theology course every year (it was a Jesuit school, after all). One year was particularly interesting. The priest who taught it was one of the people who got me interested in Carl Jung. That was part of the odd thing about the course, though. Henry Kissinger once observed that the foreign minister of Italy was a very intelligent man, but that to discuss foreign affairs with him was to risk boring him. It was the same with this teacher and theology. Instead, we discussed the great issues of the day, to which we were asked to offer a "calibrated gut-reaction."

From those days until last week I was puzzled to know what the man was talking about.

He meant authenticity.

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