The West vs. jihadis: what sort of horse are we?
I wrote yesterday that the current machinations of our Congress can only hearten the jihadis.
I just came across an opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that drives home that idea. In it, Bernard Lewis—Princeton professor, scholar of Arab history and thought, and neocon advisor extraordinaire—makes a further point, which is that Muslim jihadis believe that they, not President Reagan or the West in general, were the real instruments of the downfall of the Soviets.
Makes a certain amount of sense, actually, despite its simplistic narrowness, because the Afghan War—interminable, unpopular, and above all costly—is widely regarded as one of several straws that broke the Soviet back.
Lewis also indicates that Osama (he of the famous strong/weak horse quote) and his followers considered the Soviets the far more powerful and ruthless “horse” compared to the United States, whose track record of response to terrorism, kidnappings, and the like displayed a muddled and well-meaning tolerance that was seen by the jihadis as weakness. Once the stronger opponent of al Qaeda, the Soviets, was defeated, it would be a relatively simple matter to overcome the weaker one, the US. In fact, we would probably cooperate in our own defeat.
The attacks of 9/11 were planned with that understandable mindset, but the muscular response of the US was a surprising break with precedent. Now there is evidence that the big stick we’ve been carrying has grown way too heavy for us to tolerate, and we ache to put it down and rest awhile.
Lewis is correct, I think, in saying that the jihadi perception of our weakness may be faulty; no one knows at this point what our response would be to another attack, for example. It may be that when push comes to shove, both parties in the US would unite to retaliate effectively and with strength no matter which party happens to be in charge at the time.
Or it may be that the whole thing will descend into political wrangling and impotence. But it seems clear to me that the signals we are now sending to the enemy only reinforce the idea that the US, despite all its weaponry and bluster, is a weak horse after all, and make future attack more likely.
More and more I fear our day is past. When we have to hope for some new attack which will be horrible and bloody enough to finally unite the country — we’ve lost. Wasn’t September 11 horrible enough? Wasn’t 3,000 dead enough?
If that wasn’t sufficient to “wake up” the Left, nothing is. I remember the reaction. Within hours of the attacks they were already blaming America, blaming Bush. Looking for someone to apologize to. Looking for guilt to wallow in.
They are incurable. They have been indoctrinated for 40 years now that America is evil, Caucasians are evil, technology is evil, Christianity is evil, free markets are evil, and our democracy is a sham. They believe those things, totally and wholeheartedly. So when America is attacked, they see it as justice. They approve.
After 9/11 they held rallies opposing any armed response. Since then they’ve only grown stronger and better-organized. Any new attack would be answered by even greater calls for surrender and suicide.
What’s really depressing isn’t the reaction of the Left. They’re just doing what one expects. It’s how thoroughly brainwashed and beaten-down the majority of Americans have become. The people who once marched to defend democracy now can’t be bothered to even defend themselves. The America of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy is dead.
And I think we conservatives know that, even though we can’t bring ourselves to admit it. Hence our hope for some atrocity which will finally “wake up” the people and purge the liberal poison. We can’t see any other way to restore America because the liberals control education, control the media, control all the ways to influence opinion and mold minds. They’ve done their work very well.
It’s time we face the truth: America is doomed. Human freedom is doomed. Western civilization has been dead for a generation but the corpse is so huge it hasn’t gotten cold yet. Our task now is making our plans to survive the coming dark age.
We want to be loved, not (horrors) feared. The Nanny State has emasculated many of us and the MSM has contributed confusion to the brew. I’m afraid we are going to have to be hit “upside the head” several more times before we get our priorities straight, discover we have things worth defending and backbones too and start to destroy our enemies.
Trimegistus–I, too, despair sometimes that we’re just too dumb to live. But, I think that the example furnished by Islam’s accelerating devouring of Europe will finally wake enough of us up to make fighting back possible. It will be close, perhaps, but I think it will happen. At my age I am much more worried about my children’s fate than mine but, educated as they were in today’s schools, their often multi-culti mindset is hard to break through.
Everyone wants to believe that things such as a Muslim takeover can’t happen but, the fact of the matter is that Islam conquered half of the Christian world–Syria, Armenia, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan, North Africa, Spain and parts of India– in its first century after Muhammad’s death in 633 A. D. and, despite Islam’s loss of Spain to the Reconquista, it has retained the majority of lands it conquered in the past. I see no bar to its conquering again, especially since so many of us, closing our eyes and yelling La, La,La as loudly as we can to drown out reality, seem to want to be conquered.
I am supporter of a strong response to terrorism because of the reasons cited by Prof. Lewis, but I do not predict doom if we fail to follow up all the way. What Osama sees as our weakness is actually a part of our strength.
America is not Rome. We do not salt the earth once we have conquered our enemies – that is what Osama expects and respects. As Jackson, Sherman and others have shown America can be as ruthless in war as the Roman legions(a ruthlessness which it has not yet displayed in the current war), but America’s goal is not an empire along the Roman, British or Soviet model. Our ruthlessness is limited to the execution, not the goal. We want to do business, build instead of destroy. This is a model that has a much better chance to survive in the long run, then those of other empires. It is the source of America’s strength, the ability to create a war economy in no time, and go back to a peace time economy, to think in terms of practical achievements and progress, instead of grant dreams of empire. The ability to discuss and rethink the costs of your actions.
War is a distraction to America. America has always helped those it vanquished in battle, but the American generosity has its limits. America was angry after 9/11, we kicked _ _ _ in response. That anger has been spend, for most Americans it is time to get back to business, if Iraq or Afghanistan don’t want our help, so be it. That is not an unhealthy attitude. I disagree, because it will virtually guarantee more attacks, but I have no doubt in America’s ability to fight again, and in the end to prevail. Americas enemies have always underestimated America’s ability to fight, and in the end they had to learn the hard way they were wrong. Those of us that do want a stronger response should not underestimate the ultimate strength of America either.
After Sept 11 I thought, finally we’ve been hit so hard that even the Democrats and most of the immoral pacifists even demand retribution. That lasted a few months. America’s internal enemies are determined to define every situation in a manner which blames us. Can anyone doubt that if the US is hit by something even bigger than 9/11 the fifth colum won’t use that as evidence we must stop all this crazy war business? The bigger the next attack is the more urgently the left will call for us to stop fighting. Bush waited how many years after it was obviously needed to marginally increase US response in Iraq. We have lost our will and seem to be fighting for our lives as if checking off items on a to-do list, not as if our very lives depend on winning, and winning now.
What Would William Sherman Do?
What Would Curtis LeMay Do?
We won’t even fight for our lives without undue concern for how it makes our enemy feel.
People are people and do what they do because they have goals.
The barbarians at the top of the enemy’s roster want power. Their model for political power, as based on two thousand years of Arab/Islamist experience, does indeed pivot on the strong horse/weak horse fulcrum.
Being “at the top of the heap” of this particular model always manifests as totalitarian regimes doomed to endless cycles of repression, violence, barbarity, and ultimately stagnation. This stagnation – the natural result of cutting women out of society except for being chattels and other ruthless enforcement of dogma to control political expression, among other things – explains why Islamism shatters on contact with western civ when western civ gets around to confronting it.
Without the oil beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia and other muslim countries, Islam would have died the death normal for social models incapable of adjusting to environmental changes.
Think of petrodollars as life support for a diseased monster… or more charitably, maybe akin to the medical support keeping somebody like Fidel Castro out of a dirt bed.
Al Q, the Sauds, PLO, Hamas, etc are ultimately just tiny groups of individuals who have marshalled the hate, fear, and desperation of others to accomplish their own worldly ambitions. Islam does indeed make a fine vehicle for hijacking… but that’s primarily because you don’t have to really change course much to turn it into a killing machine. The machine in fact is doomed to run a closed course; its inherent failure to appeal to and embrace the potential of its adherents will always ensure that the most dogmatic Islamic regime will automatically be the most backward and corrupt.
Look at the governance of any Islamic nation. Without the existence of easy capital in the form of oil exports, you have societies that make Tijuana, Mexico look like Athens of the Enlightenment.
They can’t win. Not “win” as in overwhelm western civ. Even with their demographic time bomb ticking in Europe, they won’t win even there. They are too impatient.
It’s just sad that we are jaded and comfortable enough with “now” that we will wait until something orders of magnitude more horrible than 9/11 comes along.
Democratization as it was intended for Iraq might have forestalled what is to come. We’ve abandoned that and will just have to wait for history to reassert itself as it has before when the conflict was between civilization and barbarism.
Re: “we have to hope for some new attack which will be horrible and bloody enough to finally unite the country”
When hope is for an attack. It’s hopeless.
When horrible and bloody is the wish. Horrible and bloody it will become.
If the country isn’t united. It’s because the country isn’t united.
There’s a reason for everything is there not?
thewhitepath.comIt’s not all about our response to terrorism. There are moderate Muslims (see http://www.thewhitepath.com/archives/2007/05/islam_will_modernize_if_secular_fundamentalists_allow.php for a moderate Turkish Muslims take on Islam can exist in the modern world) and it is their response that is even more important than our response. Assuming Al-Qaeda and Iran do succeed in driving the US from Iraq, I think it will quickly become apparent to those who have been blaming the US for the current problems there that they were very wrong.
Can anyone doubt that if the US is hit by something even bigger than 9/11 the fifth colum won’t use that as evidence we must stop all this crazy war business? The bigger the next attack is the more urgently the left will call for us to stop fighting.
Absolutely. I predict that if (god forbid) another attack should happen, what we will see is an instantaneous hardening of battle lines–the left will dig in, start screaming that this is their proof that Bush/the right/etc. is wrong, and we need to bring our children home NOW etc. etc. etc. 9/11 was completely without precedent, and for a while it jolted people out of their accustomed thought patterns and let them think outside the box. The same break won’t happen a second time.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that while the deranged left will simply stay deranged if a second attack should occur, the *rest* of the country will find its resolve strengthened. I hope so….but I wouldn’t count on it.
To better understand a correct action to take, I suggest we do away with some of the more obvious inconsistencies in the arguments above.
Item #1
From Trimegistus we get, “Within hours of the attacks they were already blaming America, blaming Bush. Looking for someone to apologize to. Looking for guilt to wallow in.”
From Scott we get, “After Sept 11, I thought, finally we’ve been hit so hard that even the Democrats and most of the immoral pacifists even demand retribution. That lasted a few months.”
Well, which was it, hours or months? I recall that only the most radical of us were condemning the US for getting itself attacked in the first days after it. The rest of the nation, along with most of the world, recognized we had had war declared on us.
Item #2
This from Uhlenspiegel
“…but America’s goal is not an empire along the Roman, British or Soviet model. Our ruthlessness is limited to the execution, not the goal. We want to do business, build instead of destroy.” and “America has always helped those it vanquished in battle, but the American generosity has its limits.”
I am sure we can all think of many examples where these thought-cliques are exposed as untrue. I will provide examples but only after I specify that we need not reseed the fields of our enemies. Not with salt and not with corn. While we did quite well in rebuilding Japan and Europe after WWII we did nearly nothing for Spain when we had finished our war with them, nor for Mexico or the Indians. We don’t owe it to our enemies to rebuild them nor should we do so for altruistic reasons. The most convincing argument for rebuilding Europe and Japan was to help control Communist China and the Soviet Union.
We should stick to the task of first pacifying and then rebuilding Iraq because it would provide a stable ally who would help us in a war against our real enemies, Saudi Arabia. Saudi oil is sold in dollars. Their other export is sold in blood and this is Wahabiism. It is Saudi money that finances the terror cells among us. They also finance some of our media and have a strong presence in our Universities. From Iraq we are up against Iran and Saudi Arabia with the ability to pressure them to better action, while guarding the various straits that allow trade to pass from all parts of the world. A stable and friendly Iraq, while an imperfect ally, is an ally worth our support. On the other hand, we cannot keep pouring money into our armed forces without falling to the same state as Britain did in its Victorian heyday. Dreadnoughts and socialized programs (both of whom were bought on by a young MP named Winston Churchill) lead to money pouring more and more into their military and government programs. Movements in Scotland put some credence to the idea that the United Kingdom may dissolve in the next few decades. This began with the dreadnoughts and social programs in Edwardian England.
As for Goodman, it seems he would prefer seeing us behave like the Soviets we managed to defeat. I don’t think one needs to react with brutality at every attack. As some of the posters above suggest, part of what makes us great is our slowness to anger. Our other portion of greatness comes from the viciousness of our response when we finally do react. While we don’t send the sort of forces to Iraq that once liberated Europe, we send machines that, relative to our current enemy and in comparison to our mid-20th century equipment, are millions of times more precise and powerful.
Just as all our wars have had moments of indecision and each has given reason to question our fate, we have always come through when we needed to. Ask Jackson, ask Sherman, ask Macarthur and Macarthur again. Precedence is our ally, not theirs. They must look back centuries to find success. We have centuries of success, strung up in lines. Our oldest folk have made their own contribution to some of the greatest events in history and have conveyed them to us personally (Defeating Hitler, defeating the Soviets, a cornucopia in foodstuff, unprecedented international connectivity, landing on the moon). We will do the same for our grandchildren, warning them that some men will always find comfort in servitude and fear self-reliance, while other men are comforted by abolishing service and fear civil responsibility. We can’t know why men such as these are born any better then we know why there is evil in the world, but these men are dangerous when close to power and we have a history of divorcing such men from power.
I see many people worried that they are alone in their love of America, prosperity, civility and freedom. We simply need to accept that liberty and democracy are hard to maintain but enough of us are up for the work. We will win.
I do believe that America will be eventually, kicking and screaming, against its will, engaged not only in world leadership, but in world governance. This will be simply a question of national survival. In globalised world even moderate isolationism do not work. Actually recolonization of failed states is the only possible solution, and most of the Third World is now failed. India and China are huge exceptions from this rule, but all ME, Africa and Central Asia also could survive only beeng recolonized by Westerners.
From Middle East scholar Efraim Karsh’s opinion piece in today’s New York Sun titled, “Islam’s War for World Mastery”
“This is not to deny that American failures to respond to rogue actions and terrorist attacks have been harmful to its deterrent image, or that Osama bin Laden has misconstrued certain American setbacks for an indication of its diminishing resolve.
Yet it was not America’s perceived weakness that brought about the September 11 attacks, as Mr. Lewis argues, but rather its undeniable prowess. This is because Mr. bin Laden and other Islamists’ war is not against America per se but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire, the umma.
As the preeminent world power for quite some time, and the only remaining superpower after the collapse of the Soviet empire, America blocks the final realization of this goal and hence is a natural target for aggression. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.”
The funny thing, Neo, is that Sergey is Russian.
I’d like to highlight one of the differences that I see between American national character and Russian national character. It basically revolves around the interesting discussion over house to house fighting va Chechnya and Fallujah, where Sergey advocated artillery barrage from out of range of terrorist ambushes in the city. Where as Americans want to go in and engage the enemy, one on one, like in some sort of Western, and dominate them at their own game. The Marines that is, not the politicians and moral high ground snakeoil salesmen.
This produces a result where the Russians tend to use more brute force methods, a sort of quality to quantity all on its own, whereas Americans tend to use surgical strikes, humanitarian concerns, and elite soldier campaigns to do its thing. This makes the Americans seem weaker to the Arabs, Neo, but weakness and strength are always variable and mercurial in war. What was once a strength can become a weakness, and what was once a weakness can become a strength. Not only via illusion and perception, via sun Tzu’s war of deception, but also in reality.
For example Neo, remember the power and strenght of the so called intimidation campaign by the Al Qaeda boyos? How everyone was worried, well except for the Left, about how the intimidation campaign makes it hard for Iraqis to choose the side of Good, which is the revolution led by Bush?
Now it somehow ends up with AQ’s tactics helping us in Al Anbar. So did AQ’s strong horse tactics of intimidation and blowing up the children, stay strong Neo? No. They say wars are unpredictable for a reason, simply because every action by every human being changes the face of the battlefield in their own small way. After a time, the entire battlefield has changed to something totally different. War is chaos, and those who have mastered Chaos Neo, will be the masters of war. But in order to master Chaos, one has to be able to resist entropy, because Chaos will not obey someone who is so weak that it cannot resist entropy’s pull. Personal strength is a constant while battlefield strength is variable, that is the rule that I think is true.
As a Brit, what fascinates me about all this is how complex the European ‘front’ is. Our ‘war’ against Islamism – my use of inverted commas should become clear soon – is largely (though not entirely) a culture war, with of course a hugely significant demographic element, and as such the outcome is extremely hard to read.
That said, essentially I’m in agreement with the Turkish journalist quoted above by Martin Bebow (thewhitepath.com). Turkey is a crucial real-life example of the way in which Islamism, moderate Islam, moderate secularism and extreme secularism and all the shades in between interact. It is unrealistic to pursue your own extreme secularist agenda and hope that your cultural enemies will vanish or be won over – they won’t. Instead you have to carefully and patiently construct a forum where all these elements can interact – and yes, influence each other – without violence. That is now at the heart of the European project, whether it eventually admits Turkey or not.
For what it’s worth, this is also the view of the Economist, who usually have their heads screwed on. For example, they invariably describe Turkey’s ruling party as ‘mildly Islamist’, and although that may provoke snorts of derision across the pond, it is consistent with the position laid out above.
No culture and no religion can withstand the great forces of modernity indefinitely. The great solvent is women x education: as generations of Muslim women encounter western education for the first time (and yes, I know some of them are currently shut away in faith schools, but even they can’t insulate themselves completely), so they will gradually change, and so too will the values they pass down to both their daughters and their sons.
All this is not to deny the importance of military measures where and when appropriate. But there are a lot more tools in the box.
(For more on women, education and worldwide value change, check out worldvaluessurvey.com.)
worldvaluessurvey.orgSorry, that should have been .org, not .com, and in fact the main page seems to be having problems at the moment. But try http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/library/
I’m not sure weakness or strength really enters the picture. As Lewis wrote, the jihadis considered the USSR to be the stronger foe, and so they were taken down first. Weak or strong, the existence of the USA as a world power stands in the way of their great caliphate. They must take us down, and how we appear to them will have little impact on their planning in that regard. It might slow them down in terms of support from rogue states or independently wealthy donors. Still, we should keep in mind that 9/11 wasn’t exactly an expensive operation. A few hundred dollars would suffice to send an individual up through the Mexico border, outfit him with a fully functioning AK-47, and get him inside a crowded sporting event/mall/elementary school.
So long as people feel themselves called to jihad, we’ll have to face this, no matter how ruthless or kind we appear to be.
Thanks again for the blog, Neo. As always, you’re a joy to read, and inspire thought and reflection.
– Brian
We must remember there were large divisions in the west preWW2. It took some ruthless acts by the nazi’s to finally unite us for the cause.
I think the west is perpetually scared of being seen as the aggressor, and as such waits as long as possible before we engage an enemy in full out conflict. Once we are united, we are playing a game of catch up, but I have confidence in our society. When we band together amazing obstacles can be overcome.
PS I am such a n00b
Godwin wins again
allthingsbeautiful.comHey James, you might want to read this piece by Alexandria.
Godwin’s Rules are only for crack addicts and servants of entropy. Not those wishing to construct a better argument.
http://www.allthingsbeautiful.com/all_things_beautiful/2007/05/the_black_pleas.html
I’m not sure weakness or strength really enters the picture.
It does enter the picture, Brian, but you’re right in the sense that it won’t affect the hardcore jihadists. But those guys are going to be dead, locked up, or shot by a missile anyhows. The important folks are the fish in the sea, those around the jihadis, who either give them soft support or verbal support or just moral support. Those, you can convince by a show of strength, honor, and consistency.
Nobody is going to have you as an ally if you’re as finicky as a trophy wife and about as loyal.
No offense to trophy wives, of course. Trust is an issue that comes from strength. If you are weak and you fall to every temptation, seemingly like the US does all the time, then how can anyone trust you to be by their side when they need you? So why should they back you against the Jihadis who they know will kill their family?
nysun.comHave you read Efraim Karsh’s response to Bernard lewis’s article?
http://www.nysun.com/article/54794?page_no=1
“During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward.” Thus wrote the eminent historian Bernard Lewis in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. According to Mr. Lewis, these different responses evoked very different attitudes toward the two superpowers among Muslims and Arabs, which eventually culminated in the September 11 attacks:
While American policies, institutions, and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim, colonial empire accumulated by the tsars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.
Of course Muslims have never acquiesced in the loss of these territories, as evidenced by the numerous Russo-Ottoman and Russo-Persian wars during the last few centuries. Even the disastrous Ottoman decision to join World War I on the losing side, which led to the destruction of this empire and the creation of the modern Middle East on its ruins, was largely motivated by the desire to reverse the Russian imperial expansion.
Superpower behavior in the Middle East during the Cold war years did not correspond to the picture painted by Mr. Lewis of endemic American timidity and aggressive Soviet determination.
In reality, the two superpowers were heavily constrained by their global confrontation and the nuclear balance of terror. Time and again, both found themselves powerless to contain undesirable regional developments and were often forced to give a retrospective blessing to actions with which they were in total disagreement.
If anything, it was America that showed the greater inclination to resort to military force whenever it deemed its interests to be seriously threatened. This ranged from the toppling of the Musaddaq regime in Iran in 1953, to the 1958 landing in Beirut to shore up the Lebanese government in the face of Egyptian subversion, to the announcement of a nuclear alert during the 1973 October War, to the 1986 bombing of Libya, to the 1980s support for the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, to the 1991 Gulf war that reversed Iraq’s brutal occupation of Kuwait.
In this respect, President Bush’s interventionism has been far more congruent with U.S. post-World War II power projection policies than both his admirers and detractors seem to realize.
By contrast, and despite its immediate adjacency to the Middle East, Moscow proved a rather cautious bear. It supplied weapons and military equipment to its Arab clients, but rarely took direct action on their behalf. The first large-scale intervention occurred during the Egyptian-Israel war of attrition between 1969 and 1970, when the Soviets sent an air defense division to neutralize Israel’s overwhelming aerial superiority. But this was a reluctant move taken under intense Egyptian pressure.
Likewise, the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an imperialist drive for the Persian Gulf oil, as was widely believed at the time, but a desperate bid to stem the mounting the tide of Islamic militancy, fuelled by the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran earlier that year.
But the story doesn’t end here. Far from looking up to Moscow in fear and awe, let alone “submit[ting] to Soviet authority,” the Arab states repeatedly annoyed and humiliated their Soviet patron with impunity.
For decades Moscow was forced to acquiesce in the brutal repression, and the occasional slaughter, of its communist followers in the Arab and Muslim states for fear of antagonizing the local regimes. The Soviets similarly failed to persuade their Arab protégés to disavow their total rejection of Israel and time and again were forced to acquiesce in Arab wars and invasions they deemed detrimental to their interest, from the Egyptian war of attrition to the Iraqi invasions of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.
Nor have the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan and the ongoing bloodletting in Chechnya done much to endear Moscow to Muslims and Arabs throughout the world or to enhance its prestige as a first class military power.
The most caustic humiliation was perhaps the expulsion of thousands of Soviet military personnel from Egypt in July 1972 in retaliation for Moscow’s refusal to arm Egypt for its planned war against Israel. And how did the Soviets respond? By exacting a “swift and dire” punishment? Hardly. They dutifully resumed arms shipments to Egypt, only to see President Sadat wage the war they were desperate to prevent, then make an astounding u-turn by moving Egypt to the American orbit, abrogating the 1971 Egyptian-Soviet friendship and cooperation treaty, and terminating Soviet naval services in Egyptian ports.
If American institutions and individuals in the Middle East were subject to more deadly attacks than their Soviet counterparts, as they may have well been, this had far less to do with the fear of Soviet retribution, or dismissal of American deterrence, than with the fundamental asymmetry in the nature of the superpowers’ regional allies.
While America’s Middle Eastern allies were essentially conservative regimes, respectful of the international rules of the game and anxious to maintain the regional status quo, the Soviet Union supported a string of revisionist powers, ranging from pan-Arab regimes such as Nasser’s Egypt, Baathist Syria, and Iraq, that were bent on destroying the Middle East’s contemporary state system, to terrorist organizations to rogue regimes such as Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s Libya.
This is not to deny that American failures to respond to rogue actions and terrorist attacks have been harmful to its deterrent image, or that Osama bin Laden has misconstrued certain American setbacks for an indication of its diminishing resolve.
Yet it was not America’s perceived weakness that brought about the September 11 attacks, as Mr. Lewis argues, but rather its undeniable prowess. This is because Mr. bin Laden and other Islamists’ war is not against America per se but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire, the umma.
As the preeminent world power for quite some time, and the only remaining superpower after the collapse of the Soviet empire, America blocks the final realization of this goal and hence is a natural target for aggression. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.
Professor Karsh is head of Mediterranean studies at King’s College, University of London. A revised paperback edition of his “Islamic Imperialism: A History” was published this month by Yale University Press.
newamericanliberalism.orgeustonmanifesto.orgdemocratiya.comspectator.orgdemocratiya.comTrimegistus, I have a somewhat similar perspective to yourself, although I would differentiate liberals from the radical left, just as I differentiate conservatives from the radical right. I think both groups of radicals–left and right–are dangerous and often subscribe to totalitarian ideologies. Conservatives and liberals, while we may disagree on domestic and international policies, still share some commonalities, including working our political differences out through the democratic process without resorting to violence. The radicals–left, right and jihadist–do not share this view. Let’s be clear about that.
There are liberal voices calling for a muscular foreign policy and direct military confrontation with the jihadists, people like Nick Cohen, Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, Oliver Kamm, etc.:
http://www.newamericanliberalism.org
http://www.eustonmanifesto.org/joomla/
http://www.democratiya.com
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10945
In Nick Cohen’s “What’s Left? How Liberals Lost their Way,” Cohen tells the story of how parts of the Liberal-Left of the 20th Century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st in the shape of Islamic extremism.
Snowonpine and mal, you might be interested in this review of Efraim Karsh’s “Islamic Imperialism: A History” at Democratiya:
http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=32
“Beyond its historical merits, this latest work is a solid and studious refutation of the commonly held notion that the rise of Islamism is an historical reaction to European imperialism or that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East led to the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001. As Karsh writes, ‘Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism, have little to do with U.S. international behaviour or its Middle Eastern policy. America’s position as the pre-eminent world power blocks Arab and Islamic imperialist aspirations. As such, it is a natural target for aggression. Osama bin Laden’s … war is not against America per se, but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire (or umma)’ (p. 234).”
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