I found it to be rather insightful....here is the whole article, if you wish...Lee Harris wrote: Our World-Historical Gamble
By Lee Harris 03/11/2003
All previous threats in the history of mankind have had one element in common. They were posed by historical groups that had created by their own activity and with their own hands the weapons - both physical and cultural - that they used to threaten their enemies.
In each case, the power that the historical group had at its disposal had been "earned" by them the hard way: they had invented and forged their instruments; they had disciplined and trained their own armies; they had created the social and economic structures that allowed the construction of their armies and navies; they had paid their own way.
In each of these cases, to use Marx's language, the society in question had achieved through their own labor and sacrifice the objective conditions of their military power. Their power to threaten others derived entirely from their own skill and genius.
This, of course, is not to deny an amount of borrowing from earlier cultures, but in each case this borrowing was only the foundation upon which the affiliated culture proceeded to build its own unique structure, as evidenced, for example, by Japan's stunningly successful response to the Western challenge at the end of the nineteenth century - another vivid example of how a sense of the realistic can transcend cultural boundaries.
But the threat that currently faces us is radically different. It comes from groups who have utterly failed to create the material and objective conditions within their own societies sufficient to permit them to construct, out of their own resources, the kind of military organization and weaponry that has constituted every previous kind of threat.
In the case of Al Qaeda, this is painfully evident, as V.S. Naipaul has observed: the only technical mastery displayed by the terrorists of 9/11 was the ability to hijack and to fly Jumbo airliners into extremely large buildings, neither of which they were capable of constructing themselves.
But the same is true in the case of Saddam Hussein's Iraq: the money that funded both the creation of his conventional forces as well as his forays into devising weapons of mass destruction came not from the efforts of the Iraqi people, but from money paid by the West for the purchase of petroleum - natural resources that Iraq had done absolutely nothing to create or even to produce for sale.
Why does this matter? The answer to this question has been provided by Hegel in his Master/Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, and was subsequently taken up as a fundamental theme of Marx's own thinking.
When people are forced to create their own material world through their own labor, they are certainly not setting out to achieve a greater insight into the nature of reality - they are merely trying to feed themselves, and to provide their children with clothing and a roof over their heads. And yet, whether they will or no, they are also, at every step of the way, acquiring a keener grasp of the objective nature of world.
A man who wishes to build his own home with his own hands must come to grips with the recalcitrant properties of wood and gravity: he must learn to discipline his own activities so that he is in fact able to achieve his end. He will come to see that certain things work and that others don't. He will realize that in order to have A, you must first make sure of B. He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.
But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.
If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.
What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy.
Their power derives entirely from the fact that the West had committed itself, in the aftermath of World War II, to a policy of not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because it possessed the military might to do so - nor does it matter whether the West followed this policy out of charitable instinct, or out of prudence, or out of a cynical awareness that it was more cost effective to do so.
All that really matters is the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct: the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or costs of their action.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/ ... 51-031103A
), so he invents this idiotic notion that it's somehow the result of a resource-based economy.
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