Yet another attempt to account for the Iraqi insurgency by
Eric Westervelt on NPR’s “Morning Edition” falls foul of the sin of
intellectual pride. Some interviews with captured Islamist fighters
in Iraq who came into the country from Saudi Arabia are said to
have revealed (1) that they were quite happily minding their own
business down at the sheep and goat pens with never a thought of
engaging in jihad until America invaded Iraq and (2) that
the invasion itself had persuaded them that America’s ambitions in
the Middle East were to occupy Arab territory and seize control of
Arab oil. That’s why they are fighting against us, we are told, and
so our task is to persuade them of their mistake in failing to
recognize that we are really nice guys with no designs on their
land or their oil. Left unspoken is the rather obvious conclusion
that the best way to do that is to set a timetable for withdrawing
American troops, which is what the left has been calling for all
along.
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe a word of it. If there were ever
a study which was designed to reach a conclusion in accord with the
designer’s preconceptions this was it. And those preconceptions can
be summed up in one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons,
published a few months after 9/11. The cartoonist, Alex Gregory,
shows a quartet of Southern California types sitting poolside in
bathing suits with their martinis and cigarettes as one of them
says to the rest: “I think that if these Islamic fundamentalists
got to know us they’d like us.”
How hard it is for intellectuals, in particular, to shed the
illusion that all conflict is the result of misunderstanding or
ignorance! In fact, of course, if the jihadis got to know
us they would hate us even more. It is not because of what they
don’t know about us that they want to kill us but because of what
they do know, namely that we are a liberal society inclined to
tolerance towards other religions, respectful of individual freedom
and privacy in matters of sexual practice and insistent on the full
humanity of women and their rights of citizenship. As a recent
YouGov poll in Britain discovered, a third of British Muslims were
prepared to agree with the proposition that “Western society is
decadent and immoral, and Muslims should seek to bring it to an
end.”
Boy, have they got us pegged! It’s true, we are self-indulgent,
frequently immoral (or at least more open and unashamed about our
immorality than they are), addicted to mindless entertainments, and
lax in our religious observance. Above all, at least in the view of
such a traditional society as the Muslims have been able to
preserve, we are shockingly lewd about exposing our bodies in
public. Everything about us proclaims that we are infidels — and
not only to the fanatics but to ordinary Muslims as well. But the
only conciliatory gestures likely to placate the fanatics in the
slightest — our conversion to Islam, for example, or the
compulsory return of women to domestic tasks only — are
unthinkable.
To these guys, that is, America is the enemy, and about the
enemy enough bad can never be said. Do we want to occupy the Arab
lands and steal their oil? Of course we do! What else could be
expected of the hated infidels? But the jihadis don’t hate
us because they think that; rather, they think that because they
hate us. This is what the anti-war and anti-Bush left cannot bring
themselves to understand. They have a vested interest in believing
the contrary. If it is some fault or mistake of our own which
motivates the terrorists, it means that whenever there are new
terrorist outrages, like the recent bombs in the London
Underground, or American soldiers are killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan, they can blame the blunders of the Bush
administration. They are actually comforted to think that if only
we hadn’t antagonized these people, they wouldn’t be trying to kill
us at all — because it means that they have someone to blame other
than the terrorists, and someone who is a good deal easier to get
rid of than the terrorists.
That kind of wishful thinking is something that intellectuals
are particularly prone to — because they wouldn’t be intellectuals
in the first place if they didn’t believe that it is clever
political decisions which make good things happen and stupid ones
which make bad things happen. If people are getting killed, it must
mean that somebody powerful goofed. Guess who that might be? Yet
the propensity of the American left to blame the goof in the White
House is not only predictable but lazy. It is quite literally a
cartoonish view of the world, as anyone can tell who regularly
reads Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” At least the Euroleft shows a
little more inventiveness. “I have not the slightest doubt,” said
Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, recently, “that, if at the
end of the First World War, we had done what we promised the Arabs,
which was to let them be free and have their own governments, kept
out of Arab affairs and just bought their oil [the matter of the
London terror bombs] wouldn’t have arisen.”
This bit of ratiocination owes at least something to the vanity
of knowledge in finding the real reason for terrorism in
the Balfour declaration of nearly a century ago. Bet you didn’t
know that! Perhaps Red Ken should be given some credit, at least,
for blaming his fellow Britons, rather than the Americans for once.
But for the British left, hatred of America is just another form of
self-hatred — the two are practically indivisible. Hence the
Chatham House report which blamed British support for the American
invasion of Iraq for the increased risk of terrorism in Britain.
It’s not that this is untrue. It is true in exactly the same sense
that British support for Poland in 1939 led to an increased risk of
German bombs falling on London. But foreign policy is not and
cannot be a matter of avoiding all risks. It is rather the process
of deciding what risks to run and for what reasons. And since 1939,
there have been few risks more worth the running than those of
opposing the jihadis wherever we can find them. The best
comment on the Chatham House report was that of the British defense
secretary, John Reid: “The idea that somehow by running away from
the school bully, then the bully will not come after you, is a
thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the
playground.” Or at least every kid who’s not an intellectual.
