By Burak Bekdil
TDN- Once again, pax Americana invites all to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan
Britain's Daily Mirror was probably inaccurate when it asked, in reply to U.S. election results, how could 59,054,087 people be so dumb. First and first, it is statistically insignificant to assume the other 55 million or so who voted for John Kerry were not dumb. More importantly, the editors of the Daily Mirror should sit down and question their own intelligence if they assume the world would have been a much safer place had Mr. Kerry been elected. It is going to be pax Americana - revisited, regardless of which American candidate had won.
From 1947, the CIA started to build a "consortium" whose double task it was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism, and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the agency to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called The American Century. It was.
The CIA, for a while, toyed with an idea: Who better to fight the Communists than former Communists. The idea later gave birth to the thesis which animated the mobilization of what cultural Cold Warriors called the Non-Communist Left (NCL), America's main policy instrument in its psychological warfare against Soviet Communism. The American spying establishment felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism.
Although some American post-war policy makers felt that "they were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan," America's embrace of the NCL worked smoothly as the superpower supported leftist groups to provide them with a mouthpiece so they could blow off steam; and, in extremis, to exercise a final veto on their actions if they ever got too radical -- freedom houses like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the National Committee for a Free Europe were not there to defend freedom only (people like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell did not know his freedom comrades in arms were mere CIA sub-contractors).
More than half a century after, the old enemy is no longer an enemy, but a new one is just emerging from the world's "greener" parts; America's doctrinal paper on Islam and democracy is exactly the same model as that used by the CIA to justify its embrace of the NCL.
Fifty years ago America needed leftist intellectuals to boost the NCL against Soviet Communism. Today it is boosting what it sees as mild Islamists against not-so-mild ones. Replace former Communists with former Islamic militants, and the NCL with, well, why not call it the Non-Radical Islam, there you'll get the picture. Different enemy, same policy tool...
Hence, the Daily Mirror's automatic assumption that a Democrat president would make the world a more decent one is a blend of fallacy and naivety in the extreme.
As for Ankara, George W. Bush's re-election may mean a few things. Firstly, it's good news for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and not-so-bad news for the military establishment. Notwithstanding bitter dates like March 1 and July 4 -- both now already too remote a memory -- it will be "business as usual."
After all there must be some truth in the argument "the devil I know is better than the devil I don't."
Once again, pax Americana invites all to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan.