It is called the “War on Terror.” But nations do not wage war against abstractions. This, perhaps, is the first time in history that one side in a major conflict has refused to publicly acknowledge the identity of its enemy, for reasons of cultural sensitivity and political expediency. Yet one side only, for the jihadis have no qualms about naming their foes: the Crusaders and the Jews, Western liberal democracy, and the Muslims whose governments dare to make alliance with those beyond the ummah. For us, the war began three years ago in Manhattan and Washington, or if we have longer memories, a half-generation ago in the streets of Teheran. But our enemies brood still over the loss of Al Andalus in 1492, and perceive in the very existence of the Israeli state an affront to Allah. Any territory once claimed by Muslims must remain Muslim: and as the Prophet turned to the sword to spread the revelation, so those who model themselves as the faithful remnant hold that Islam must have bloody borders.
By their fruit you will know them—by blood spilled in New York and Bali and Madrid; and in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines: violence against both the infidel, and the fellow Muslim who is judged insufficiently pious. These jihadis, and the several governments who still support them, are our primary foe. Yet it is far easier to call our fight a battle against “terror” rather than a war against a militant Islamic extremism that is both atavistic and revolutionary, as the latter and more truthful appellation is too uncomfortable a reminder that we also face a clash of civilizations.
This clash is not a hot war, though in the worst of cases it might come to that. For from its inception Islam divided the world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb—the House of Islam and the House of War, where the boundaries of the former may be enlarged by force if persuasion fails. Today there is but one multinational group meeting under the banner of a single religion: the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which last October made clear its views on the relations between Islam and the rest of the world.
We are enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah. Unfortunately we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence. But because we discouraged the learning of science and mathematics etc. as giving no merit for the akhirat, today we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies. […]
Today we, the whole Muslim ummah are treated with contempt and dishonour. Our religion is denigrated. Our holy places desecrated. Our countries are occupied. Our people starved and killed.
None of our countries are truly independent. We are under pressure to conform to our oppressors' wishes about how we should behave, how we should govern our lands, how we should think even.
Today if they want to raid our country, kill our people, destroy our villages and towns, there is nothing substantial that we can do. Is it Islam which has caused all these? Or is it that we have failed to do our duty according to our religion? […]
But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?
It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.
The speaker was Mahathir Mohammad, then prime minister of Malaysia. Although it is true that many Muslims do not see the world in such terms, the fact remains that his speech was enthusiastically received by the OIC delegates, including other heads of state. And, moreover, that Mahathir is widely perceived as a moderate.
If you read the rest of the address, the themes most prominent are those of humiliation, victimization, and revenge. The Europeans—and by implication the unnamed Americans—are not let off easily, but the true venom is saved for the Jews, who are portrayed, once again, as behind every ill infecting the Muslim ummah.
Let me be blunt: If Muslim “moderates” see in the Jewish state—a nation that covers barely 8,000 square miles—an existential threat to the Islamic world of over a billion souls, then there is something perverse at the heart of that world. And if the drive to nurse old grievances and patiently gather strength before striking with “guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships” beats that strongly within the Muslim breast, then the world as we know it may end in fire.
Above I said that nations do not wage war against abstractions. Strictly speaking, that is true: our conflict is with the jihadis—whether thousands or tens of thousands or scores of thousands—who have taken up arms against us and our allies. But even as World War II can be labeled as the campaign against fascism in Europe and ravenous imperialism in the Pacific, so too can our present war be called a battle against the pernicious worldview advocated by Dr. Mahathir and celebrated by the OIC.
And nowhere is that worldview embraced with more zeal than in the Arab nations.
Eighteen months back, Steven Den Beste wrote a pair of essays on the state of Arab society. His conclusions are bitter medicine for those weaned on the pap of multiculturalism: but they have the considerable virtue of being true.
It's really difficult to exactly delineate who our enemies are, but they number in millions. They're Arab and Muslim, but not every Arab is among them, and most Muslims are not. […]
The problem with our enemy's culture is that in the 20th century it was revealed as being an abject failure. By any rational calculation, it could not compete, and not simply because the deck was stacked against it. The problem was more fundamental; the culture itself contained the elements of its own failure.
The only Arab nations which have prospered have done so entirely because of the accident of mineral wealth. Using money from export of oil, they imported a high tech infrastructure. They drive western cars. They use western cell phones. They built western high-rise steel frame buildings. They created superhighways and in every way implemented the trappings of western prosperity.
Or rather, they paid westerners to create all those things for them. They didn't build or create any of it themselves. It's all parasitic. And they also buy the technical skill to keep it running. The technological infrastructure of Saudi Arabia (to take an example) is run by a small army of western engineers and technicians and managers who are paid well, and who live in isolation, and who keep it all working. If they all leave, the infrastructure will collapse. Saudi Arabia does not have the technical skill to run it, or the ability to produce the replacement parts which would be needed. It's all a sham, and they know it. Everything they have which looks like modern culture was purchased. They themselves do not have the ability to produce, or even to operate, any of it.
Some on the Left, in characteristic fashion, took Den Beste's commentary as evidence of racism. Odd, then, that a year later the Malaysian prime minister would make much the same point—except that Mahathir was bemoaning only the Muslim world's inability to produce armaments comparable to those of the West, rather than its ineptitude at developing the more general infrastructure of modernity. The latter and more comprehensive failure is not uniformly evident throughout the ummah. It is, however, almost total amongst the Arabs.
Yet in a cruel irony, the present condition of many Arab states can be traced, in part, to the enthusiastic importation of one Western idea: the European “scientific” socialism of the mid-twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, the result was economic ruin and despotism from Libya to Egypt to the Ba'athist states of Syria and Iraq. But the region's monarchies fared no better. Saudi Arabia is the paradigmatic case—a land swimming on an ocean of oil, but kept afloat only by Western expertise and multitudes of menials imported from further East.
The socialist experiment is therefore not the only culprit. For, as Den Beste also notes, Arab society is marked by all seven of the characteristics of failed states described by US Army analyst Ralph Peters.
• Restrictions on the free flow of information.
• The subjugation of women.
• Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
• The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
• Domination by a restrictive religion.
• A low valuation of education.
• Low prestige assigned to work.
Most of these traits are endemic; and when combined with stagnant economies and an exploding population of young males—an estimated seventy percent of Saudi citizens are under the age of 30—all ingredients are present for a perfect storm of revolutionary violence in service to a murderous and absolutist fantasy ideology.
Yet this does not mean that all Arabs, or even a majority, share the vision of al Qaeda and its many affiliates. Nonetheless, a committed minority within a culture united in bitterness and resentment towards the West is all that is required; and if we do not vanquish the worldview that is the true root cause of militant Islamism, then this conflict will not end. The present Administration is oft accused of contriving perpetual war. The truth is instead the contrary: it is the jihadis who plan endless battle against the Dar al-Harb; and they may be defeated only by breaking the power of the Weltanschauung that gave them birth.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman captured this point last spring.
The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough. Because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things “martyrs” was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such “martyrs” was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.
In this essay I am not concerned with providing an overall justification for the war against Iraq; for me, the arguments above are reason enough. Yet the question first posed has not been fully answered: if we do not war against abstractions, who then was, and is, the enemy on that front of the larger conflict?
Saddam did have ties to the jihadis. His support for Palestinian terrorism was well established, and though Western media is loth to report it, evidence linking the Ba'athist regime to al Qaeda is credible. There were many other reasons to desire the tyrant's end, from the weapons of mass destruction that every Western government believed his regime still possessed, to horrific ongoing crimes against humanity, to the constant flouting of the ceasefire conditions in place since the First Gulf War.
But the despot is now gone, and the Ba'athist holdouts must by now know that their cause is doomed. Over the past year there has been an influx of jihadis from other Arab states, Iran, and beyond; and although this has meant misery for the Iraqi citizenry and a stream of casualties for the Coalition, in some strategic respects such inflow is a feature and not a bug. Both of these groups—the Ba'athist remnant and the Islamist terrorists—are undeniably our enemies, though most will be killed or captured, and sooner rather than later.
The international Left was quick, as always, to use the flimsiest of pretexts in accusing the United States and our allies of war crimes. Yet the fact remains that the Second Gulf War was the most humane mass military action in history. It was not bloodless: credible estimates of civilian deaths run from the many hundreds to several thousands. Nonetheless, the tactics employed were designed to minimize the effects on the population, to destroy the offending government while leaving as much of the infrastructure untouched as possible. In this the Coalition was largely successful, even though the power vacuum left by the implosion of the former regime gave rise to a new host of difficulties.
The almost surgical removal of Ba'athist power meant that the Iraqi populace was not defeated: unsurprisingly, as they were never intended as a military target. But this also meant that the worldview that we intend to shatter was only cracked, not broken. The decisive blow may come with the establishment of a stable and free Iraq, governed by its own people—may, as there is yet no guarantee that this program will be successful. Democracy has rarely been imposed from without, but rather grown from within.
The future of Iraq will be shaped by its own people. If most are willing to move beyond an obsession with humiliation and revenge and a learned helplessness, and are willing to acknowledge the sickness at the heart of Arab society, then—and only then—their nation can become a model for the region, and indeed for the ummah as a whole.
But not all are so willing.
Our most determined foes are not just the ones with blood from this atrocity on their hands, but all who look to Fallujah as a rallying cry, a symbol of resistance against the infidel occupation.
And if they will not be persuaded, then they must be defeated, with deliberate and overwhelming force.
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