Matt has responded to my last post. [For those who need to catch up, read 1) Matt's initial post 2) my post below and then 3)Matt's follow-up before you read this.] The follow-up is even more impressive than the original, and I doubt Xanga has hosted anything like it before. It is a must-read.

Now, neither of us wants to drag this debate out for too long, and I promise that this will be my last post directed to Matt on the matter. I will try my best to keep this post short, but I at least have to say something about his ideas, which really are on the far right fringes of neoconservative thought. Take this passage, for example:

As far as intervention in the Middle East goes, Chris's points are well taken. But he is still thinking in terms of the states as they exist now, rather than what I was going for--something of a tabula rasa in the region. For instance, let's imagine that each of the current Middle East countries was broken into ten or more administrative entities ("states"), each with a xerox of the United States constitution where the state's own name has been written in everywhere it says "United States." This is the sort of abstraction I'm interested in using to deal with the problem--forget current personalities and the United States' history with the region. So even if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the places that seem to best approximate the model I have sketched, that doesn't mean that I think Egypt and Saudi Arabia are exemplary. I'm talking about totally new geographic expressions, with new people and new rules. Consider also that I am imagining that the United States does this with a coalition of Western nations, rather than alone--the interest extends beyond the United States. This might go some way in addressing the results of the United States' current occupation of Iraq.

I'm not exactly sure if Matt's tabula rasa is meant as a real objective or just some hypothetical abstraction. In any case it is clear that Matt desires a massive redrawing and restructuring across the Middle East together with the imposition of Western-style and Western-controlled government.

Does he have any idea how much blood will be shed for this? I think it would be unprecedented. Not to sound sensationalist, but what Matt is proposing is nothing less than the initiation of World War III, in a region of 1 billion very pissed off people, many of whom would stop at nothing (including death) to terrorize their occupiers and possibly their neighbors and ethnic rivals.

On paper, the war in Iraq sounded like a cakewalk compared to what Matt is endorsing. In Iraq the original plan was to replace an extremely unpopular tyrant with a democratic government controlled by the Iraqis, with no redrawing of borders. Guess what? They didn't like it, and they're not going to let us hear then end of it. We did not and will not accomplish what we wanted to; the war was simply a failure. What looked good on paper fell apart in the face of reality. Now imagine how much messier it will be to do the same thing across the entire Middle East, and this time with redrawing of borders and the imposition of a government directly controlled by the West. Massive ethnic cleansing would be inevitable, and I mean massive.

Nor do we have the resources to do it. We are already stretched thin between Iraq and Afghanistan, and while a coalition of more Western nations would have been helpful in Iraq, it would still be far too little for a Middle Eastern sweep, even if it were to proceed serially (which it can't). Matt might say that a broad Western coalition would also add to the operation moral legitimacy in the eyes of the Arabs. But this is unlikely. Although it is true that the United States is particularly reviled in the region, the rest of the West is deeply mistrusted as well. Western imperialism of any sort is the worst type of insult for the Arab nations, and they aren't going to take it sitting down. Bottom line: not only is this plan unfeasible, it is also morally reprehensible for the amount of blood that will be shed.

All that being said, Matt has shown in his response that some of the ideas I was leaning towards are also untenable. I'll have to think about them some more. In the meantime, do check out his response, if you haven't already.