Mark Steyn, one of Canada's few "outrageous" columnists, has been kicking the anthill again. This piece appeared in the National Post yesterday

www.nationalpost.com (then do a search for Steyn)

Mark Steyn
National Post

There is something inherently ridiculous about a man standing in a cave wearing fatigues and holding a hand-mike and shaking his fist at the entire civilized world. Osama bin Laden called on his viewers to choose between "the side of believers and the side of infidels." But who made his microphone? Who made the camera? I doubt it was Afghan, given that under the Taleban you're not allowed to watch TV, never mind host your own jihad-inciting special.

True, Osama disdains much of our decadent materialist culture. I couldn't help noticing, for example, how the poor guy had aged since his last live-from-the-cave special. That floor-length beard could use a couple of vats of Grecian Formula. But, such details aside, Osama has the same complicated relationship to the West as millions of other Muslims. If it weren't for Western technology, he'd be just a loser in a cave shouting to himself. But on Sunday, just for a few minutes, he was the only 11th century guy with his own CNN gig, and what he had to say was useful and illuminating.

The comparisons were simultaneously chilling, because of what they appeared to foreshadow (he referred to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and heartening, because they underscored once and for all that no compromise is possible with such a fanatic. The cave man warmed up with a remark about "the tragedy of Andalusia" -- a reference to the end of Moorish rule in Spain in 1492. As he sees it, the roots of Islam's downfall in Andalusia lie in its accommodation with the Christian world and a move toward a pluralistic society. That's very helpful. Osama's not just anti-Jew, or anti-Christian, but objects to the very idea of a society where believers of all faiths and none rub along together. He's at war with, for want of a better word, multi-culturalism. The boneheads on the left, missing the point as always, march around the cities of the West waving placards against "the racist war." But he's the racist. If Professor Thobani were to drop by his cave, he'd shoot her dead before she'd have time to bleat, "But I'm on your side ..."

By comparison with this big central grievance, the specific ones are easily solved. Maybe he's right about the Palestine Mandate of 1922: maybe the League of Nations should have given the Jews a homeland in Saskatchewan or Nunavut and saved us a whole bunch of trouble. And, to be honest, he has a point about the U.S. military presence near Islam's holiest sites in Saudi Arabia: he's right, it is a humiliation that one of the richest regimes on Earth is too incompetent, greedy and decadent to provide its own defence. But it's not America's fault those layabout Saudi princes, faced with Saddam's troops massing on the border, could think of nothing better to do than turn white as their robes and frantically dial Washington.

In fact, insofar as the Middle East's the victim of anything other than its own failures, it's not Western imperialism but Western post-imperialism. Unlike Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas, Araby has never come under direct European colonial rule. The Ottoman Empire was famously characterized by Tsar Nicholas I as "the sick man of Europe," which would seem to concede admission to the club, but also suggests that its sickness was at least partially due to its lack of Europeanness. These effects linger long: The difference in progress between parts of the former Yugoslavia seems to owe as much to whether the territory was previously Habsburg (Slovenia) or Ottoman (Macedonia) as anything else. The Turks backed the wrong man in the First World War more by bad luck than by anything else, and one can sympathize with the more sophisticated terror-apologists in the West who argue the Ottoman Empire should never have been broken up. Turkey, for its part, was more European in the 1920s than it ever was under the Sultans: Indeed, it remains the only Muslim territory to have successfully embarked upon a redefinition of the relationship between Islam and the state. Turkey gave women the vote before Britain did, the sort of supporting evidence Prof. Thobani might find useful, if she troubled herself with supporting evidence.

But in the Arabian peninsula, the Ottoman vacuum was filled not with colonies but with "spheres of influence," a system that continues to this day. Rather than making Arabia a Crown colony within the Empire, sending out the Marquess of Whatnot as Governor, issuing banknotes bearing the likeness of George V, setting up courts presided over by judges in full-bottomed wigs and introducing a professional civil service and a free press, the British instead mulled over which sheikh was likely to prove more pliable, installed him in the capital and invited his sons to Eton and Sandhurst. The French did the same, and so, later, did the Americans. This was cheaper than colonialism and less politically prickly, but it did a great disservice to the populations of those countries. The alleged mountain of evidence of Yankee culpability is, in fact, evidence only of the Great Satan's deplorable faintheartedness: yes, Washington dealt with Saddam, and helped train the precursors of the Taleban, and fancied Colonel Gadaffi as a better bet than King Idris, just as in the Fifties they bolstered the Shah and then in the Seventies took against him, when Jimmy Carter decided the Peacock Throne wasn't progressive enough and wound up with the Ayatollahs instead.

This system of cherrypicking from a barrel-load of unsavoury potential clients was summed up in the old CIA line: "He may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch." The inverse is more to the point: He may be our sonofabitch, but he's a sonofabitch. Some guys go nuts, some are merely devious and unreliable, some remain charming and pleasant but of little help, but all of them are a bunch of despots utterly sealed off from their peoples. As we now know, it was our so-called "moderate" Arab "friends" who provided all the suicide bombers of September 11th, just as it's in their government-run media -- notably the vile Egyptian press -- that some of the worst anti-American rhetoric is to be found. The contemptible regime of President Mubarak permits dissent against the U.S. government but not against its own, licensing the former as a safety valve to reduce pressure on the latter. This is a classic example of why the sonofabitch system is ultimately useless to the West: the U.S. spends billions subsidizing regimes who have a vested interest in encouraging anti-Americanism as a substitute for more locally focused grievances. As a result, the West gets blamed for far more in a part of the world it never colonized than it does in those regions it directly administered for centuries.

It seems to me Osama bin Laden's real grievance is with his fellow Muslims. In the Nineties, when he was living in the Sudan, the thug regime in Khartoum persuaded him to invest heavily in the country, in various enterprises of one kind or another. Doing business in such an environment involves an awful lot of palm-greasing. Osama's bookkeepers figured out his business interests in the Sudan had lost $150-million, at which point the great humanitarian cut his losses and moved on to the Hindu Kush. If he wasn't so consumed by his own psychopathology, he could have learned far more about the Arab world from this experience than from any number of books about who did what in 1492 or 1187.

As for the West, by comparison with the sonofabitch system, colonialism is progressive and enlightened. Even under its modified, indirect Middle Eastern variation, the average Egyptian earned more under the British than he does today -- that's not adjusted for inflation, but in real actual rupees. Even in Afghanistan, the savagery of whose menfolk has been much exaggerated by the left's nervous nellies, such progress as was made in the country came when it fell under the watchful eye of British India. With the fading of British power in the region in the 1950s, King Zahir let his country fall under the competing baleful influences of Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.

What will we do this time round? Will we stick Zahir Shah back on his throne to preside over a ramshackle coalition of mutually hostile Commies, theocrats and gangsters, and hope the poor old gentleman hangs in there till we've cleared Afghan airspace? Or will we understand Osama bin Laden's declaration of war on pluralism for what it is? The most unstable parts of the world today are on the perimeter between Islam and the infidel -- places such as the Sudan, where vast numbers of Christians have been slaughtered -- and given the vast illegal immigration of Muslims into western Europe and elsewhere that perimeter is expanding. Afghanistan needs not just food parcels, but British courts and Canadian police and Indian civil servants and U.S. town clerks and Australian newspapers. So does much of the rest of the region. Given the billions of dollars of damage done to the world economy by September 11th, massive engagement in the region will be cheaper than the alternative.

America has prided itself on being the first non-imperial superpower, but the viability of that strategy was demolished on September 11th. For its own security, it needs to do what it did to Japan and Germany after the war: civilize them. It needs to take up (in Kipling's words), "the white man's burden," a phrase that will have to be modified in the age of Colin Powell and Condi Rice but whose spirit is generous and admirable.

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), October 11, 2001

Answers

A.S.N. (another shameless nudge)

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), October 11, 2001.

I enjoyed that one. Thanks. :)

-- Stephen M. Poole (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), October 11, 2001.

OK, so none of the subjects are allowed to do TVs, but the masters may use them at their leisure. But what about the drug money allegedly flowing into Afghanistan. Does this mean that Benny the L is just another seedy drug lord, at the same time touting religion and wholesome goodness? What a fartsucker.

-- UpUpAnd (SlipSliding@Away.yyy), October 11, 2001.

Take up the White Man's burden--

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride

--R Kipling

-- E.H.Porter (just.wondering@about.it), October 11, 2001.

White men are earth's eqivalant of boils on people's butts. It is good and just they will be the ones to die protecting the rest of us.

-- (thinning@them.out), October 11, 2001.

Johnny--

Steyn is a wiity, insightful writer. I hope for Canada's sake that he stays in Canada but I predict he will be sucked to the states by big American bucks.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 11, 2001.

I enjoyed that one also, Johnny. Thanks. Even outside of the microphone, etc., I couldn't help but notice the watch on the guy's wrist. It wasn't just Alexander's rag time band, by any means.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 11, 2001.