The Wisdom of Gaffer Gamgee

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

One of the most compelling evidences that interventionist foreign policies fail is that they almost always end up resembling an asylum run by lunatics.  The outcomes and results are most often hard to credit.  One can do little more than document the twists and gyrations, the irrational stupidities, and the incredible contradictions that inevitably transpire.  It all seems much, much stranger than fiction.  An example?  Peter Hitchens asks us to consider the recent track record of the West in Afghanistan. 

. . . Afghanistan, where the nominally Christian West, having once mobilized warrior Islam against the Soviet Union (which was the ally of the Arabs in their war against Israel), now fights a furious war against warrior Islam.  Islam in its turn has repaid past American help with terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC.  Amusingly, it was the USSR that once claimed to be liberating the women of Afghanistan from the tyranny of Islam, a task it has successfully achieved in its own Central Asian empire.  Now it is the "West" which tried so hard to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan, that says its troops must remain there . . . to protect Afghan women from the tyranny of Islam.  Is this a war caused by religion, or by human folly?  (Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 132.]

Yet what is it about modern Western nations that drives them to become involved in the affairs of other nations yet, when disaster results, makes them purblind to the consequences for which they are largely responsible.
  It would seem that hope springs eternal in the dumb secularist's breast.  Maybe the fault lies with  evolutionary electrons having been randomly configures to hard-wire Westerners to act like donkeys.  On the other hand, maybe our Lord is mocking the foolishness of the wicked, even as He repeatedly lampooned and mocked idolaters in Israel.  After all, dumb rebellious Israelites thought that cutting down a tree, sawing a branch, taking it home, cutting it in half, feeding the household fire with one half, and carving an image of a deity with the remaining half, then falling down and worshipping the (half) branch was all so sophisticated and clever--despite the overwhelming revelation of the power, goodness, majesty and lovingkindness of the only wise God.  Westerners demonstrate that for their part they are little changed.  So much for evolutionary progress.

We believe that it is the following deadly sins, amongst others, which lead the West into such reckless folly when it comes to intervening in the affairs of other nations:

1.  Pride.  The peoples of the West believe they are the smartest thing since sliced bread.  Because they can build aeroplanes they can solve all the problems of other nations.  Did not President Obama declare that the United States would engage in a vast and glorious task of nation building in Afghanistan?  Did he not speak lightly of the twenty or thirty years of national effort and sacrifice that would be undertaken to transform Afghanistan into a modern Western-style democracy?  The policies were a demonstrated failure within four years.  This is not a failure of the Democrats.  It is not a failure of an effete, incompetent president.  It is a failure resulting from overweening hubris shared by the elites and the Chattering Classes.

2.  Ignorance.  Whilst the West believes it is both  clever and sophisticated, in actuality it has become profoundly ignorant of humanity and human culture.  Its grasp of the complexities of life and human interaction is to all intents and purposes non-existent.  It believes that by dropping a few bombs or unloading a bit of rice it can change human nature.  It believes it can successfully restructure centuries old cultures by tweaking a few superficial externalities. Impose democratic forms of government in Iraq, and within the length of a Hollywood movie, peace and light will break out cancelling fifteen hundred years of hatred between Sunni and Shia. 

We believe this ignorance is but another application arising from interventionist domestic Western governments, which, similarly believe they  can change things for the better (however conceived) by tweaking externals.  Western governments are continually outfoxed and surprised by the citizens whom they are constantly attempting to condition and shape through endless government initiatives and programmes.  If domestic policies are riven with unexpected and opposite consequences, what hope is there for interventionist policies abroad, where local cultures and beliefs are far more exotic?

3.   Hypocrisy.  The West can lament all it likes over the slaughter of the innocents by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but its own slaughter of (in-utero) innocents is a thousand times worse.  But sometimes it salves guilt if we can jump up and down about the speck in another's eye, whilst we ignore the log in our own.  Yet, the West tells itself, the slaughter of innocent human beings in our abortion chambers is justified because it is done to respect human "rights"--such as the mother's right to control her own body trumping the right of an unborn child to live.  We attempt to portray our most evil acts as righteous, whilst shouting bloody murder over the depredations of ISIS.

Western interventionist foreign policy will continue to resemble the shrieks of bedlam unless it repents of its sin and turns back to the God it has spurned.  Until then, fiasco will be the headdress of  folly.