What Game of Thrones can Teach us About the War on Terror

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/17/What-Game-of-Thrones-ca
n-teach-us-about-the-war-on-terror

It's from the Wars of the Roses, of course, that George RR Martin gets a lot
of his gory detail, including the kill-or-be-killed mindset of his
protagonists. They don't think like us because they don't enjoy the luxury
of living in a society as advanced as ours. What to us might seem like basic
human decency would strike the Game of Thrones protagonists as fatal
weakness. Hence, for example, the House Bolton's practice of flaying its
prisoners: a) a dead enemy is never going to kill you and b) it so terrifies
your foes that - as Isis have found in Iraq - they would rather flee for
their lives than face you in battle.

This kind of insight is, I'm sure, one of the main reasons why Game of
Thrones has grown to achieve its status as unmissable, landmark television.
Yes, of course, the fine acting, great locations, pert breasts and CGI
dragons are a big draw too. But what really makes it stick out is that,
unlike almost any other fiction set in the past, it chooses not to imbue its
characters with the liberal values of the present. This brutal honesty is at
once exhilaratingly novel but also deeply unsettling, for it opens a window
onto a world where people may look like us and apparently share the same
hopes, dreams and fears as us, but where the progressive pieties to which
we've become accustomed in the post-war years simply don't apply. Not only
do they not apply but they actually look foolish, counterproductive,
suicidal.

One of the fatal flaws of the liberal West is its tendency to project its
own values on to all the world's other disparate nations and cultures. "If
only we give these poor benighted people a gentle nudge, here and there,
then soon they too will discover the joys of the free market, property
rights, universal suffrage, etc" the thinking seems to go - in defiance of
all evidence to the contrary.

But Iraq is one of the many places in the last 50 years where we have tested
this cosy theory to destruction. We went in to "liberate" Iraq and not only
did they hate us for it but we ended up creating a situation even worse than
the problem we were trying to solve. The same is true for much of what
happened during the Arab Spring. At the time, I remember some commentators
on the right borrowing the language of the left to explain why it was a
jolly good thing: the idea that Arab cultures simply weren't ready for or
receptive too Western style democracy was demeaning and patronising and
racist.

OK. Well at the risk of sounding demeaning and patronising and racist, I'd
say that there are a lot of countries in the world which simply aren't ready
for Western-style democracy. If we had limitless resources and manpower, we
could do what the Romans did and impose it on them anyway, at point of
spear. But since we have neither, I'd suggest that a bit more Game of
Thrones realpolitik is in order.

Let's just return to those beheading, crucifying, drive-by jihadist thugs
from Isis. They inhabit a world entirely alien to ours, with a different
rule book requiring a different form of governance. Given that we lack the
resources to do this ourselves, I think it's about time we got a lot more
cynical and a lot less squeamish about the kinds of bastard we want doing it
on our behalf. And we can start by attempting an honest answer to the
following question: is the Middle East really a better place since the
defenestration of Saddam, Gaddafi and Mubarak?

By Epictetus