In an opinion column which appeared in the New York Times in February 1992, Mikhail Gorbachev remarked on former President Bush's then-recent assertion that America had finally won the Cold War.
\My reply would be that the long years we spent plunged in the Cold War made losers of us all,"" Gorbachev said. Both countries had willingly participated in a pointless battle of ideological chicken which cost billions and wasted half a century. If there was victory to be claimed, it was an empty one at best.
Gorbachev might have added that in the process of ""winning"" our war against the Soviet enemy, America unwittingly planted itself a poisoned crop in the Fertile Crescent of the Persian Gulf. The reason, it turns out, was the country's unique foreign policy of ""containment by proxy,"" especially when it came to the Middle East. The strategy, designed to prevent the spread of communism abroad by fighting foreign battles with foreign troops, resulted in America's funneling of money and training to those people whose interests coincided with our own. It was thought that the United States would thus escape the risk of an actual engagement in which American soldiers could be killed.
Eventually, this foreign policy backfired'something foreign policies tend to do'and the United States got itself into the ironic position of having supplied training and weapons to the very nations who would antagonize us a decade later: namely, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fast forward 10 years, and the latest catchphrase among journalists and news anchors is the possibility of a ""clash of civilizations"" set in motion by the al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 2001, and looming even larger as now-President Bush deliberates on how he'd best like to cook Iraq.
What bothers me about the term ""clash of civilizations"" is its nuanced aura of inevitability, as if such a conflict between peoples were a matter of historical determinism or divine fate, or a perverted case of Darwinian ""survival of the fittest."" It lends the concept of ""civilization"" an oversimplified divisibility'be it into West and East, Christian and Muslim, or Good and Evil'that doesn't really exist except in our minds, and not unless we want it to.
The point is, no such clear lines can be drawn between human societies because they have a tendency to appropriate and spill into one another. Indeed, what we generally think of today as ""Western civilization"" originally began in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. It was there, more than 5,000 years ago, that modern notions of urban existence and the rule of law came to take shape. It was there, in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom of Sumer, that humans began to set down their thoughts in writing.
Which is why it seems odd to call the hostilities between ""us"" and ""them"" a ""clash of civilizations."" By all accounts, the Middle East is where it all started. At what point can we draw a clean break?
What troubles me is that some of us seem to think that we can at all. Enough of us must see the people of the Middle East as having such a radically different world view from our own that it doesn't cause us any alarm when we casually demarcate them into a different civilization in our newspapers. Yet isn't the whole point of globalization'apart from getting rich, that is'to create a global civilization of connected'but unique'cultures? To be sure, it does make sense to refer to various epochs in world history as civilizations in themselves; the ""civilization of ancient Rome"" would be one example. But we can not afford to apply such idealized divisions to the connected world of the present.
In the end, Bush will need to understand the cultural subtleties which our media sometimes ignore. He will need to abandon his closetful of convenient good-and-evil dualisms. Otherwise, he'll get his regime change in Iraq much as I imagine he gets his steak: bloody instead of well-done.
