As we were driving somewhere yesterday my wife asked me how a more civilized people can deal w/ the savagery of savages, i.e., people whose culture leads them to acts and thinking which we deem barbaric.

Answering her prompted me to remember and consider certain historical examples. In relating these examples I should admit that they may be inaccurate in minor detail. After all, I have not reviewed the histories from which I learned them as much as 30 or 40 years ago.

1. 19TH CENTURY INDIA

The English conquest of India during the 18th and 19th Centuries brought them into forcible acquaintance w/ the fundamentally different values of a culture alien to them. Though the English were scarcely even enlightened, much less "feminists," they were appalled at the Indian view of women as little better than sub-human. (Nor is this Indian view adhered to only in India; historically Western civilization has been almost unique in according women any respect whatever.)

Exemplifying this contempt for women Indian custom forced on women by men was that upon the death of a husband his wife or wives were to be incinerated on his funeral pyre. The horrified 19th Century English conquerors energetically tried to suppress this despicable custom. As an early Victorian conqueror, Gen. Napier starkly declared: "when men burn women we hang those men." [To reiterate, this quotation is probably not exact being just my memory of something read 3 decades ago.]

Though the process of change was not rapid, and involved killing a goodly number of savages, today setee (widow-burning) is just a horrific memory of India’s barbarous past.

MORAL: you can argue mores with savages till you are blue in the face.

But to actually impact barbarian mores requires not just pronouncing civilized mores but enforcing them by the ruthless use of superior force. Or, as Otto von Bismarck asserted, "the great problems of the day are to be settled by blood and iron."

2. LATER 19th CENTURY JAPAN.

In the 1500s the Portugese brought firearms to Japan – a technological revolution resulting in the eventual triumphs of Oda Nobunaga and his successors, Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa Shogunate. To cement their power the Tokugawas isolated Japan from the outside world. They forbade contact with the outside world so as to preclude further introduction of technological innovations that might be inimical to their supremacy

But excluding foreign-originated technological innovations did not preclude those changes from occurring in the outside world. By the mid-1800s such change had made the West so powerful that the technologically backward Tokugawas could no longer keep the West at bay.

Seeing Western power at close range in their port-capital Edo (Tokyo) the Tokugawas reluctantly began to back away from their exclusion policy as to Westerners.

Ironically, that exclusion had become an almost religious Japanese tradition by the mid-19th Century, especially among the "outer" clans who had never been fully integrated into the Tokugawa hierarchy. Unable to force the Tokugawas to honor the exclusion policy, those clans, or some within them, began acting on your own.

Members of one powerful "outer" clan, the Satsumas, slaughtered some English tourists who visited their area. The English responded by having their fleet shell the Satsuma capitol into rubble, inflicting substantial loss of life. Another clan – which I shall call the Cs because I don’t now recall their name – slaughtered a party of Frenchmen and endured a similar bloody retaliation from France.

It would be predicted by what may aptly be called the Neville Chamberlain Memorial Wing of American liberalism that the Japanese reaction would be a perpetual hatred of England and France. But, no, that was not the reaction at all. Within a decade the Tokugawas were overthrown and a more Western-type national government emerged based on compromise between the powerful clans. And two further startling things happened:

The Satsuma clan established, and for decades dominated, the Japanese Navy. This entailed sending their sons en masse to England to study its institutions, particularly its navy and naval traditions. When in the early 20th Century England entered into a formal alliance with Japan the Japanese were overjoyed at this formal recognition by a great civilized power. And the C clan established and dominated the Japanese Army which was based on their sons’ education in France. (Until France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, after which C sons were sent en masse to Germany.)

MORAL: you can argue mores with savages till you are blue in the face.

But to actually impact barbarian mores requires not just pronouncing civilized mores but enforcing them by the ruthless use of superior force. It is useful to contrast how Chamberlain’s appeasement policy affected Hitler. He thenceforth despised Chamberlain and the French appeasers and was emboldened to gobble up the Czechs and then attack Poland – initiating WWII which killed more than 50 million people.

In sum, the "peace through weakness" policy of appeasing savages brings only death and destruction.

3. USSR Negotiators in the Middle East.

The following is not supported by book-learning. It is just a tale I heard some years ago and so it may be apocryphal:

Second only to the U.S. ("the great Satan") Arab and other Islamic fanatics hated the USSR ("the smaller Satan"). QUESTION: So why weren’t Russians kidnapped and murdered in the Middle East as Americans have been in the period starting c. 1970 to present?

ANSWER: they were – just once! In that instance some Russian officials were kidnapped as a method of political pressure. There followed a meeting between the kidnappers and Russian representatives at a neutral location. The chief Russian "negotiator" walked in carrying a box.

Without exchanging greetings or further comment he overturned the box and dumped its contents on the negotiating table. Out tumbled the head and genitals of the chief kidnapper’s uncle. The Russians turned and exited. Their kidnapped officials were returned the next day.

4. Russian-flag ships in the Persian Gulf.

Piracy by Arab ships is a centuries-old tradition. In recent decades piracy against merchant shipping has re-emerged as a special hazard in the Persian Gulf and other Middle Eastern waterways. When Russian flag vessels began to be targeted the Russians responded by arming their merchant crews and posted among them Russian commandoes (Spetznaz - sp?). Attacks on Russian flag ships ended after multiple incidents in which the pirates were repulsed whereupon the Russian ships sailed close enough to shore so that the pirates who had been taken alive could be shot in the stomach and thrown overboard to swim or float ashore.

MORAL: you can argue mores with savages till you are blue in the face.

But to actually impact barbarian mores requires not just pronouncing civilized mores but enforcing them by the ruthless use of superior force.

NOTE: I anticipate vehement denunciations from the Neville Chamberlain Memorial Wing of American liberalism which sees appeasement as the only moral and peaceful tactic for dealing with savages. This is the policy which has given the world a nuclear-armed North Korea – and soon a nuclear-armed Iran.

The Chamberlain-ites claim, incidentally, that a policy of strength rather than appeasement of Islamic (and other Middle Eastern) savages will deeply offend all Muslims and Arabs who will will extend their loathing of Bush to a hatred of America and Americans which will last for decades if not centuries. But for this prediction they can cite no evidence. Rather it is just a projection onto the Arab world of the Chamberlain-ites’ own loathing of Bush. Per contra, compare an article discussing actual Arab views from at least one university in one city in a nation whose official position is deep antagonism to Bush and America.

This article appeared in 2004 in a Middle Eastern newspaper called THE DAILY STAR which claims to have the greatest circulation of any Middle Eastern Newspaper: Significantly, the author is a liberal Democrat of typical Chamberlain-ite views:

In Damascus, they voted for George W. Bush By Tyler Golson * Special to The Daily Star December 04, 2004

While the results of this year's American election may have liberal Democrats and much of the extended international community shaking their heads in disbelief, a surprising number of Arabs seem to have not only expected President George W. Bush's return to power but also supported it.

Since I began teaching in Damascus six months ago, I have been continually surprised to find support and even admiration for Bush in that city, mixed in with the usual polemics about American imperialism.

The presumed wildfire of anti-American and anti-Bush sentiment that has consumed much of Europe and Asia has apparently skipped over parts of the Arab world, where people often have more in common with Middle America than they do with the Middle East.

A few days after moving into my new home in the middle class Christian quarter of old Damascus, my landlady asked me whom I preferred between the two American presidential candidates. I replied, almost in passing, that of course I was voting for John Kerry. Besides being an Ivy League-educated New Englander and the son of extremely liberal parents, I was a foreigner and a guest in a country laboring under American economic sanctions. As a guest, surely I would be expected to distance myself from my own government, which had started a pre-emptive war against Syria's neighbor, denied considerable foreign investment to the Syrian economy and branded Damascus a "supporter of terrorism."

"I like Bush," she said, without a trace of irony. "He's a good man - a good Christian."

Okay, I thought. This is a Christian woman, representing a tiny and often overlooked minority in a predominantly Muslim region. She probably doesn't identify as deeply with the average Syrian, doesn't feel threatened by Bush's perceived crusade against Islam. So I filed the incident away in the back of my mind and didn't hear much about U.S. politics again, apart from the occasional exchange with bored taxi drivers.

Two months into my stay, the issue of pro-Bush Syrians suddenly re-emerged when I began teaching English classes to several dozen students. The students were, almost without exception, from the upper echelons of Damascene society: well educated, financially comfortable, with many hailing from important Syrian families involved in high-level economic and governmental decision-making.

One afternoon I was explaining the passive tense of verbs, and I used an example that came to mind from American culture. I asked them if they knew who was nominated by the two main parties to run for president.

"John Kerry was nominated by the Democratic Party, and George Bush was nominated by the Republicans," replied one of the brightest in the class, a veiled Muslim engineering student named Rahaf. "Very good," I said. "Now, who do you think will be elected?" "Bush," cried several of the students at once, smiling. Abandoning my lesson plan for the moment, but curious at this sudden display of interest in the election, I ventured: "Who do you want to win?" "Bush," said Rahaf, while a number of others nodded in solid agreement. I pressed them further for a few minutes, asking individual students why they liked Bush. The same ideas came up again and again: he is a strong leader, an honest man, and, most of all, a believer. Like the winning margin of American voters this year, these Middle Easterners related to Bush's sense of religious conviction and his confident steering of a nation and culture they admired.

"But doesn't he scare you?" I asked finally, unable to contain my personal feelings and throwing the lesson plan out the window. "Because of Bush's ideas many people in my country think that all of you are terrorists." Rahaf and most of the others just shrugged. Maybe that was all true, they said, but he was still a good president.

I found these same sentiments expressed almost word for word in my two other classes. In addition, some of the most articulate students expressed intense misgivings about central Democratic electoral platforms, including gun control, limitation of the death penalty and especially abortion and gay rights. Just the word "homosexual" made many of them cringe and click their tongues in that uniquely Arab way of showing disapproval. A final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I learned that more than half of the students in my advanced class, among them a third-year medical student and daughter of a Western-based diplomat, rejected the theory of evolution. "I just can't believe that we came from monkeys," she said.

Afterwards I brought up what had happened with a fellow teacher, an American-born Muslim of Syrian descent who had taught at a number of schools in and around Damascus for years. "It's a religious thing," she explained to me, citing a particular Koranic verse that tells of God's creating man from a seed and that seed growing into Adam and Eve. "There is no room in traditional Islam, nor in traditional Syrian Catholicism, for a theory which links apes to humans." But how do you explain all of it, I asked, all the support for Bush, the social and even the scientific conservatism? They're more like the average American than I am. My colleague clicked her tongue, shrugged and agreed it was pretty strange.

And thus I came to realize something that the Democrats could never admit: that there exists a support base for both the Republicans'

domestic and foreign agenda among the very people we thought most opposed current U.S. policy. The cultural background and value systems which inform many of these young Arabs' outlook on the world mean they will always favor men like Bush over men like Kerry. The tenets of faith, family and, yes, "moral issues" determine the overall political leanings of a considerable number of the Middle East's future leaders, in rejection of Democratic stump issues like increased liberalism, internationalism and scientific progress.

Though Democrats are often quick to criticize their opponents for seeing the issues in stark black and white, "us and them" terms, perhaps they ought to step back from their own obsession with "red" and "blue" dichotomies and recognize this nuance of Middle Eastern reality. Having a truly even-handed and practical approach to peace in the Arab world means realizing that not everyone, and certainly not all of the elites in Arab society, sympathize with the anti-American movements taking place within their own ranks, and that these heartland Arabs could prove a valuable ally in future U.S.-Arab relations.

* Tyler Golson is an English teacher in Damascus. This commentary was written for THE DAILY STAR