Women in Muslim Societies

[JerrySeinfeld]

Here is an interesting exchange which I thought could fuel some discussion here:

P. J. O'ROURKE: There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives. I won't say, Lord of the Flies or teenage gangs or even poker night at the deer hunting camp. But there is this absence of female influence in some of the behavior that I've seen in the Middle East.

SECRETARY POWELL: I see it in our urban areas. I don't want to lay it all off on women. Men have a role to play, too. The intention was for two people to have children and raise them.

P. J. O'ROURKE: Yes. But the Middle East does seem to be a world without the constraints that ... if I started acting like the Iraqis are acting, my wife would be after me: "You get right in here, stop looting and blowing up the car. If you blow up the car, how can I get the kids to school?"

SECRETARY POWELL: You've heard the wonderful story about the elephants? This was at a game reserve in Botswana or somewhere. They had found a dead rhinoceros, and they couldn't figure out who had killed it. The rhinoceros doesn't have any natural enemies. They looked and looked and found that there were these elephants, male elephants, that were killing rhinoceros. They were young elephants that had been brought from another reserve far away, but they had been brought just as two adolescent male elephants, and—

P. J. O'ROURKE: An elephant gang.

SECRETARY POWELL: An elephant gang. And so the game keepers didn't know what to do. They didn't want to kill them. And it occurred to some guy, very early one morning he said, "I've got it." They just went and got some older male elephants. They brought two male elephants, adult male elephants in with these teenagers, and within a few months, problem solved. The teenagers didn't know how to act. The male elephants made it clear to them: "Excuse me, boy. This is not what elephants do. We don't go around chomping on rhinoceri."

I've seen this in schools in Washington, D.C., where there are young men, about age eight or nine, who do not know the taboos of family, the shibboleths of the society, the expectations of a family, the need for self-restraint. They don't get it. And so what happens, they go bopping out, and they're out of control.

And then the Army's the same way. That's what drill sergeants do. Young recruits hate their drill sergeants with a passion. It's unbelievable the first week. They want to kill him. By the second week, they're kind of relaxing a little bit. By the eighth week, there's one overpowering emotion in those recruits. Know what it is? They want to please him. They'll do anything to please him, and they will never forget his name.

I was having dinner with Ted Kennedy once. We were kidding around. He was talking about some fight he had in the Army or something. And I said, "Ted, what was the name of your drill sergeant?"

P. J. O'ROURKE: And he had it.

SECRETARY POWELL: Instantly.

P. J. O'ROURKE: You know, that drill sergeant could have been a useful influence at times during his life. But I won't go there.

Something I really wanted to ask you about, because there's been so much whining about the war on terrorism. I don't have to tell you. Do you see any parallels between the early Cold War and the early part of the war against terrorism? It's not like we didn't make any mistakes then or didn't have any problems.

SECRETARY POWELL: I don't know. What were you expecting?

P. J. O'ROURKE: The way that Eastern Europe kind of got away from us and China fell. The Doctrine of Containment. I guess that wouldn't really apply. Mistakes we made in the Korean War.

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, I think there's something to that. A dawning recognition of a new kind of threat. The President spoke about it in his—I guess it was his May 24 War College speech—that we have to see this terrorism problem not just as a temporary aberration that's going to go away. He really saw it in the very beginning, right after 9/11, when he said this is not just a fight against al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, but against a persistent threat. And he took a little heat for it. We don't know when it's going to end. I mean, it took the Cold War forty years. It took World War II six.

P. J. O'ROURKE: And very few people were ambivalent about the Nazis.

SECRETARY POWELL: We were until 1941.

P. J. O'ROURKE: People don't own up to it now. But the Communists, that was another matter. A lot of people styled themselves as some kind of Marxists or Socialists. To all of a sudden regard this as evil, as the late Ronald Reagan did, twinkle in his eye and all. When he said "Evil Empire," people gasped.

SECRETARY POWELL: One of my colleagues thought all you had to do was détente them forever, and you'd do okay. But Reagan said no, they're evil.

P. J. O'ROURKE: I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning. But I think a lot of people are having trouble getting their head around who's the enemy.

SECRETARY POWELL: There probably is a parallel to the Cold War. You need somebody like a George Bush to come along and say this is our challenge for this generation and then start to put together coalitions, as was done in the post-World War II period, with the creation of NATO, ANZUS, CETO and CENTO.

There was a growing realization of the threat. Even though it was localized initially in Europe and the Soviet Union. Suddenly we saw it could be China. And remember, Greece almost fell. And the Italian Communist Party had a hell of a good time for a long time ...

It was a real danger that could have swept everywhere. It was for real.

P. J. O'ROURKE: This is why I don't feel as discouraged by events in Iraq as some people do, because looking back, none of our previous fights have been instantaneous victories.

SECRETARY POWELL: No, and maybe we should never have characterized this thing as something that would be a tough fight but then it would all be over.

P. J. O'ROURKE: I don't think anyone did say that.

SECRETARY POWELL: I didn't.

P. J. O'ROURKE: Yet the feeling grew.

SECRETARY POWELL: The feeling grew.

P. J. O'ROURKE: Do you think, as in World War II and the Cold War, it may take us a while to find out what the right policies are going to be—what's most effective?

SECRETARY POWELL: Everybody thinks all you do is sit in a room and design a policy and that's it. But if you look at the experience of World War II and the Cold War, there was a great deal of trial and error, or as I like to call it, "audibling." You know, no plan—no military plan—survives first contact with a real enemy. Who was it who said that? Was it Clemens? Some humorist. "Even the most brilliant strategist must occasionally take into account the presence of an enemy." There's a thinking, breathing enemy out there and he's not subject to our policy whims. You have to respond to how he responds. Therefore, you are always modifying policy, changing policy, discarding that which doesn't work and looking for something that does work. Why this should shock and surprise people, I don't know. But it does. Everybody wants perfect answers right up front, and then they start criticizing right away if—

P. J. O'ROURKE: They want all D-Day, no raid on Dieppe.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes.

[M.Dancer]

Pj used to be funny.......

[JerrySeinfeld]

Pj used to be funny.......

He still is:

"There is also the problem of issues for the Democrats to run on. You're going to elect Democrats to control government spending? And you're going to marry Angelina Jolie for her brains. The privacy issue--government spying on U.S. citizens--isn't going to work. True, NSA has been collecting all our telephone information, but anyone who's answered the phone during dinner knows that every telemarketer on earth has that information already. Illegal immigration? When the Democrats were in charge, the illegal immigrants were from al Qaeda. And as for Iraq, the best the Democrats have been able to do is make the high school sex promise: "I'll pull out in time, honest.""

[August1991]

Thanks for starting the thread, Jerry. Here's a link to the whole conversation.

Here's one funny quote from Powell about Soviet missiles:

My favorite story is, after we got rid of the Pershing IIs and they got rid of their SS-20s, my counterpart Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the Soviet military general staff, visited Washington in 1991. We had brought one of each of the missiles to the Smithsonian. And he and I are down there with adoring fans watching this unfolding of their SS-20 model and our Pershing. Well, the SS-20 is a big thing. And the Pershing is small. It's much more efficient, a better missile. And so everybody is looking at this. And my wife, Alma, is with me. She pays no attention to any of this military stuff. She's only been a military wife for the past forty years. And she looks at it and says, "How come theirs is bigger?"

Powell on what the world should expect of the US:

What we would like to see is a greater understanding of power, of the democratic system, the open market economic system, the rights of men and women to achieve their destiny as God has directed them to do if they are willing to work for it. And we really do not wish to go to war with people. But, by God, we will have the strongest military around.

Or Powell on rock music:

SECRETARY POWELL: I knew Elvis.

P. J. O'ROURKE: Really?

SECRETARY POWELL: I met him when he was in the Army. I was a lieutenant; he was a sergeant. He was in the neighboring regiment—or combat command, as we called it—in the Third Armored Division in Germany.

We were in the training area one day and I was driving my jeep around and suddenly came upon this unit from the other outfit and there he was. And so I went over and shook hands.

He was a good soldier. You never would have thought he was anything but a soldier. He had a pimple on his face and everything else. He was not a big star. He was just another soldier.

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Your quote above Jerry has little to do with women and men in a Muslim world and much more to do with the long term "battle" before us. The West must confront people from a medieval age - people who are superstitious yet can use cell phones. Lacking the scientific method, they can only mimic us but they can't discover or analyze as we can.

I don't know if these Islamists and other heathens are as much a danger to individual liberty as the Soviets and Marxists were. But like the Soviets, these medievalists have many apologists among us.

I don't know how best to deal with threat. For the moment, we are dealing with the physical threat to our security but I think we should think more broadly.

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Last point. The conversation shows dramatically the great American weakness: they're young kids who want to be liked. Both Powell and O'Rourke demonstrate this on several occasions. It's almost charming in its self-conciousness.

[myata]

Much easier approach, which would also save us much philosophical searching and self-conscious goodness would be, of course, to leave the medieval people alone in their medieval barbarity. But we are too good for this, aren't we? We'll confront them, and we'll drag them into civilization, even against their will.

[August1991]

Much easier approach, which would also save us much philosophical searching and self-conscious goodness would be, of course, to leave the medieval people alone in their medieval barbarity. But we are too good for this, aren't we? We'll confront them, and we'll drag them into civilization, even against their will.

Such is the modern world that we must come into contact with one another. Those medieval people certainly want all of our modern inventions so contact is inevitable.

If that's all it was, then we could stop there. Unfortunately, contact upsets some of them and so they fly planes into our buildings, take hostage hundreds of innocent school children, place bombs on our buses and in dance halls. They intimidate us into silence.

In any Chinese or Indian village today, you can meet people with superstitious beliefs little different from medieval European peasants. But those villagers don't threaten us.

[myata]

Contacs like meddling in their affairs, remoivng, installing and supporting friendly governments by military force and such upset them? How strange and unusual!