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A SENSE OF ASIA

Imaginary games of what if and the very real war on terror


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

Thursday, September 14, 2006

We in the U.S. are in the midst of a highly charged political season. In a polity very closely divided, debate is even more vehement and acrimonious than usual.

And so, it is quite natural — if detrimental to public discourse and policymaking — we should also be frequently invoking what the historiographers, those who philosophize about how history should be recorded, call “the fallacy of Cleopatra’s nose”.

It all began with Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher, who wrote, “Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed,.” he wrote. What Pascal meant was had Mark Anthony been less captivated by Cleopatra's charms, he might have turned in a better performance at Actium, the battle which decided the Roman civil war after Caesar’s death, with all the fascinating "what if" consequences for subsequent Western civilization.

Pascal couldn’t have been more wrong, logician though he were. [It is not the first time a brilliant French theorist has led us down the garden path.]

For it is a mistake, in effect, to project from a single unique example to a wider generalization. Obviously, life is much too complicated to pull one brick out of the wall and know what would happen to the structure. To go back into the past, change a single element, and draw conclusions about where it would have all led and where we would be today, is an exercise in futility and a detour from reality.

But it is a very common practice — in many instances, not just an “honest” mistake, but work of propagandists seeking to counter an opponent’s line. We do it all the time, in our private lives as well as our public discourse.

We are in a lather of such thinking today.

Actually there are two aspects to the phenomenon. One is to simply speculate on what chance occurrences, had they been individually different, would have done to the continuum of history. That is, suppose Cleopatra had had an ugly, flat Nubian nose instead of the aquiline Macedonian-Persian-Syrian proboscis, would she have been the legendary beauty and seductress who brought warriors to their knees?

The second phase of such speculation is to concoct a scenario of what would have happened were that aspect different or if an occurrence had not taken place. Interesting speculation perhaps, but Cleopatra’s sex life is hardly fundamental to unraveling any significant part of the complicated sociology, economics and politics of the beginnings of the Roman monarchy.

Today we get the same sort of extrapolations.

President Bush is being attacked for having chosen Iraq as an entry point to consolidate a campaign against worldwide terrorism. There are good and sufficient reasons for questioning the move just as there are solid arguments which the President makes for what he did.

But to argue had he not done so, as his critics often do argue, the U.S. would have made more progress toward its goals in other parts of the world, not the least in tracking down Osama Bin Lad3n, for example, and preventing the current reemergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, is bogus.

We must put the Iraq invasion and the war on terror in their contexts if we are to speculate on cause and effect. What about Sadam’s intentions? What about Sadam’s effort to control Persian Gulf oil when he attacked Kuwait? What about the then growing consensus to end the Anglo-American overflights in Iraq which were preventing Sadam’s rearming? What about the failing and [we now know totally corrupt] UN embargo? What about the possibility [which not only American but all Western intelligence believed] Sadam had or would go after weapons of mass destruction under new circumstances?

The same game is played with events all over the world almost all the time.

What if we had pulled out of South Korea when Presdent Carter’s advisers recommended it, would there be no North Korea crisis at the moment?

If Sec. of State Acheson had not made a public statement seemingly putting the Korean peninsular outside the U.S. security perimeter, would the Korean War not have taken place?

If the young Lieut. Dean Rusk at SEAC command in Ceylon, had gotten a response when he asked Washington after the Cairo Conference for guidance on policy for Indochina, would there have been U.S. support for France, and no Vietnam War?

If in 1945 FDR hadn’t met Ibn Saud on an American cruiser in Egypt’s Bitter Lake, would there have been an Aramco, American dependence on Mideast oil, and two American wars within a decade in the region?

It is all great fun. But it is a mug’s game.

In the end, we live in a very convoluted world, difficult at best, to understand and there are no easy answers — not even with brilliant Sherlock Holmesian.discoveries of the nonbarking dogs.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

Thursday, September 14, 2006


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