Islamic Jihad, the radical Palestinian group, announced March
30th that it had dispatched an unspecified number of suicide
bombers to Iraq to combat British and American forces in the region
and thus “fulfill the holy duty of defending Arab and Muslim
land.”
The thought that a dozen or so yahoos in me-go-boom vests could
have an effect on coalition forces is rife with pathos, a squadron
of gnats buzzing across the desert to stop a herd of charging
elephants, but beneath the pathos lies a critical delusion — a
delusion that, one way or another, must be dispelled if a lasting
peace in the Middle East is ever to be achieved, and the war on
terrorism concluded.
The delusion, of course, is that there’s such a thing as “Arab
and Muslim land.” There are countries in which Arab people are the
majority. And there are countries in which Islamic law reigns. But
these are contingent, rather than necessary, facts. Nothing in the
geography of the region is mystically tied either to Arabs or to
Islam; the Middle East per se does not belong to Arab
Muslims any more than America belonged to Indians. To be blunt, the
reality that Arab Muslims were spared the decimating upheavals
visited on American Indians owes more to quirks of history,
topography and climate than it does to Arab Muslims’ innate
capacity to defend the land.
Nevertheless, the delusion persists. Even though they have as
much chance of resurrecting the extinct glories of Medieval Islam
as they do of summoning up the lost continent of Atlantis, Saddam
Hussein calls for a holy war against trespassing infidels on
Pan-Arabist grounds, and Osama bin Laden calls for a holy war
against trespassing infidels on Islamist grounds… as though such
calls will deter the Anglo-European civilization which, literally,
left Islam in the dust half a millennium ago. But the calls go out,
and the Palestinians, always the hapless, deluded Palestinians,
answer: Allahu akbar!
Regime change in Baghdad will not end the war on terrorism
because what we are fighting is not a particular government or
revolutionary movement but rather a mindset. To be sure, Saddam
is/was a world class scumbag, and taking him out is ultimately a
humane gesture — especially since he provided us with a viable
pretext by never living up to the terms of the cease-fire he signed
12 years ago. But the larger war on terrorism will end only when
both Pan-Arabists and Islamists abandon their desperate desire to
turn back the calendar to the year 1000, when they accept that
neither ethnic purity not scriptural fidelity can serve as the
raison d’être of a modern state.
The war on terrorism, in other words, cannot end with a
surrender treaty; it can only end by compelling vast numbers of
people to change their minds, to recognize their most heartfelt
aspirations as impossible fantasies and to cut them loose. The war
on terrorism can only end with an outbreak of mass sanity in the
Islamic world. That’s what we’re after. Pulverizing Saddam is most
readily justified not in geopolitical terms but as a kind of
collective slap upside the head of Muslims everywhere: You can wage
jihad to your heart’s content, but your heart is where
jihad must end; take it to the streets, and you’ll get
smacked down every single time.
The past is never coming back.
DELUSIONS ARE A TWO-WAY STREET, however, and the West is not
immune. The West’s principal delusion is that we can promote mass
sanity among Muslims through diplomacy. It’s an absurd pipe dream.
You don’t talk people out of the thing that gives their
lives meaning; the best you can hope for is convincing them of its
futility with minimal bloodshed. The great exemplar here is the
intellectual Left’s perennial call for a “diplomatic solution” to
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it’s up to the United States,
their argument goes, as the world’s only superpower, to bring the
two sides together, to find a suitable middle ground. In the
abstract, this sounds fine. But when the Palestinians’ persistent,
heartfelt, non-negotiable demand is for the rest of the world to
recognize their divine right as Arabs to possess the Islamic holy
land — in effect, to drive the Jews into the sea — what would a
middle ground look like? Jews agreeing to be driven into the sea up
to their waists?
The antidote to such delusions is unwavering moral clarity. It
serves no purpose to pay lip service to the grievances of those who
mean us harm, to indulge in reflexive two-sides-to-every-story
rhetoric. The Pan-Arabists and Islamists have no case.
Their ends range from merely oppressive to genocidal; their means
range from consistently underhanded to sub-human. Nothing is more
futile than to hoist up false cognates in order to domesticate, and
thereby diminish, their depravity. The intellectual Left, for
example, loves to compare conservative Christians with radical
Muslims; thus, Barbara Ehrenreich of the Progressive wrote
last year: “In a world that contains Christian Wahhabists like
[John] Ashcroft and Islamic Calvinists like bin Laden, what sense
does it make to talk about culturally monolithic ‘civilizations’
like ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’?” Likewise, former New York
Times columnist Anthony Lewis bowed out in December 2001 with
this howler: “Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in
people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John
Ashcroft.” There’s even a smirky quiz floating around the Web in
which isolated statements by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and bin
Laden are shuffled together, and the reader is challenged to figure
out who said what.
The parallel is utterly, and dangerously, false. If Robertson,
Falwell and (for the sake of argument) Ashcroft have a cognate in
the Islamic world, it’s the overwhelming majority of
moderate Muslims — decent folks who happen to believe
that a moral society must be tempered by religious principles, that
church and state cannot be walled off from one another. This is an
arguable point. But it’s a far cry from the will to govern strictly
by celestial fiat, in accordance with divine revelation.
That is the motivation of bin Laden and his cronies — who
do, in fact, have a proper Christian cognate, albeit a minuscule
one … namely, the killers who gun down doctors outside abortion
clinics. It’s an instructive comparison. For even as the leaders of
the Christian Right in America are always quick to condemn such
killings, they are no doubt sympathetic to the killers’ objective
of stopping abortions. Likewise, in the Islamic world, moderate
Muslim leaders are always quick to condemn attacks on Western
civilians, but they are no doubt also sympathetic to the
terrorists’ Pan-Arabist or Islamist objectives.
The key differences are (1) whereas there might be a dozen or so
potential right-to-life killers lurking in backwoods huts in the
United States, there are a million or so potential Muslim
terrorists scattered throughout Islamic countries; and (2) whereas
in the United States, the civil authorities have no sympathy
whatsoever for the killers, and thus have no qualms whatsoever
about cracking down on them, in Islamic countries, the terrorists
are being policed, when they are being policed at all, with evident
qualms, by sympathetic co-religionists.
For perspective, consider: To this day, the
intellectual Left does not trust Attorney General Ashcroft, hemmed
in by 200 years of Constitutional Law and a ferociously free press,
to set aside his religious sympathies and run the Justice
Department; yet they propose relying on entire nations of
Ashcrofts, hemmed in by pretty much nothing, to set aside their
religious sympathies and help eradicate Muslim terrorism.
So how do you convince a million or so murderous fanatics to
forsake their delusions? The short answer is you don’t. You deal
with them as you would deal with a cancer; you cut them out of the
body politic and hope to minimize collateral damage to the
surrounding tissue. But this becomes problematic when the body
politic refuses treatment, when indeed it curls up with the cancer
in its midst.
Thus, our agenda after Iraq: Keep slapping around the moderates
until they come to their senses, until they recognize the cancer
that besets them for what it is and work with us to get rid of it.
The future of Islam depends on their cooperation, their sanity. If
it does not come, Islam itself is doomed.
