Acting dumb and nasty: Nick Denton (moreover, First Tuesday, yes, that Nick Denton) argues that we should invade Iraq to crush Arab millennial dreams.
I don’t worry about the morality of this: there are some political dreams which can and should be crushed by force. I don’t think any other method would have worked against Nazism.
But Millennial dreams aren’t like that. What makes them distinctive is not that they are concerned with thousand year periods, but that they are apocalyptic, and the nourishment of apocalyptic thought is in powerlessness. Millenialism is the religious equivalent of the lottery. You put all your bets on one hugely unlikely outcome, becasue nothing realistic can possibly help you.
Millennialism, indeed the word and concept of an apocalypse, came from a middle-eastern religion, crushed by imperial powers: yes it is an idea which arose in messianic judaism, and which descends straight from there to Christianity.
(It occurs to me as I write this, that the first suicide attackers in Palestinian history were the sicarii or dagger men, the first century Jewish equivalent of Hamas: Judas Isacriot is supposed to have got the name from them)
Now, the Emperor Titus might agree with Nick Denton. He did crush Jewish millennial hopes with military force. It can be done. But to do it, he had to conquer the whole country, deport most of the inhabitants, lay waste Jerusalem, and spend three years at war.
An American invasion of Iraq won’t take three years. But remember, the project here is not just to crush Iraqi ambitions. What Nick Denton proposes is to crush all Arab, perhaps all Islamic millennial hopes. That might involve us in a war that went on even longer than three years. Really to emulate Titus would require us to put an American garrison in Mecca.
There may be good reasons for invading Iraq. There may be deisrable ends that can be achieved in no other way, and that are worth the cost. I doubt both those propositions, but they’re not unthinkable, nor intrinsically ridiculous. But to try to invade someone in order to stamp out their hopes of armageddon is just ridiculous.
Even Titus didn’t quite manage it, though: still plenty of people nagging to rebuild the Temple and hasten the subsequent events. I suppose the only group of people who have had any apocalyptic tendencies thoroughly eliminated were the Tasmanian aboriginals, and there are a few minor moral niggles with that approach.
Perhaps it’s just some dark Freudian reaction to the profession of my father, or some sort of perverted neocolonianism, but sometimes I do fantasise about simultaneously nuking Mecca, Jerusalem, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Amritsar, Salt Lake City and The True Word Bible Church Of Redemption, Peckham. I’d probably have a go at the Falls Road, Ibrox and Celtic Park while I was at it.
What does America want? Does it know?
I think the answer to your last quesiton is in your first line. Of course “America” as a whole doesn’t want an apocalypse and wouldn’t be taking the risk of one if it knew that was what was happening. But there must be a fair number of people, a couple of million, say, who take the rapture, or something like it, seriously enough that they are unnervingly relaxed about what is going on.