If you know yourself but not your opponent, you may win or lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always face defeat.
- Sun Tzu
We are still very much in danger from terrorist attacks. While we are not at war with Islam in general, we are at war with a large Islamist underground who supply money, expertise and soldiers to a global effort to undermine the West. When the next terrorist attack comes to the US, it will come from an Islamist terrorist backed by an Islamist organization providing materiel, training and financing for the operation. This could be another 9/11 or it could be something more like the recent Mumbai attacks involving commando teams with small arms. In any case, it is coming our way.
It used to be that to kill 3,000 people on an enemy’s soil would take an army of perhaps 5,000 people as well as a fleet to get them there. The kill ratio might be roughly one to one, or less. In suicide bomber attacks one often sees a ratio of at least 20:1. On 9/11, using technology, 19 people killed 3,000, which is about a 150:1 kill ratio.
As people get more effective and smaller weapons, this ratio will go up. As miniaturization evolves, it becomes dangerous to have people who hate you amongst you. Whereas we used to have to worry about armies, now we have to face the difficult and new task of worrying about individuals, which is tougher. Miniaturization of weapons creates a whole new world.
To some extent the right approach to the miniaturization problem depends on our tolerance for risk. Do we want it to be 80% probable that life in the United States can continue in a reasonably peaceful manner for the next 100 years? 50%? 99.99%? If your answer is 50% then perhaps we are doing the right thing. But if we want to secure life in America as we know it for an indefinite period of time to a very very high likelihood, we will have to something now or we wait until the next attack occurs and do it then. Success depends on understanding Islamic peoples and being able to make accurate predictions about their future behavior.
It is not perhaps reasonable in order to set some context to note here that in many majority-Muslim nations, being an advocate of violence against the West is no more a “fringe” or “extremist” view than, say, being opposed to the death penalty is in the United States. In 2009, 54% of Nigerians, 52% of people in the Palestinian territories, 28% of Jordanians and 23% of Egyptians, were “confident” in Osama bin Laden’s leadership. 67% of Nigerians believed that suicide bombing against civilians is sometimes justified; 83% of people in the Palestinian territories agree, as do 48% of Egyptians, 44% of Jordanians and 26% of Turks. (These numbers are from the Pew Global Research Study, which can be found here. Apparently they didn’t go to Saudi Arabia.) When we talk about Islamic “extremists” we may be soothing ourselves with semantics. Believing in terrorism in the Muslim world is not a non-mainstream point of view. I am not trying to agitate, but I don’t want to whitewash the situation either. You might want to remind yourself how 9/11 was received on the streets of the Palestinian Territories:
I write this concededly unpleasant essay because I am concerned that the Obama administration’s view may be too rosy, indeed misguided, and his olive branch policies a waste of time, at best, and dangerous at worst. It is important to be fact-based and not just hopeful in determining what Arab nations actually want, who, in a sense, they are. Are we basing our foreign policy strategy on realism? I think it is quite debatable.
The Administration’s View of Islam
President Obama has a very sympathetic view of Islam. He wants to put to rest the multi-century conflict between the West and Islam by being pleasant and focusing on things we have in common. Obama believes that Islam is ready to make friends and he is relying on that assumption in devising his strategy for peace.
Obama’s core belief, in general not just with respect to Islam, seems to be that people are naturally good, they share underlying goals with us, but they sometimes are misinformed; a good chat, akin to the Beer Summit or the upcoming healthcare summit, is all it should take to set people straight. His instinct is, essentially, to play “community organizer” to the world. I am not saying that with a sneer. I am just trying to accurately describe what he does.
The trouble with this view and approach is that it does not work well in certain cases. Specifically, it does not work well when your fundamental premise is wrong and you are dealing with people with whom you do not share fundamental values. For instance, in dealing with Hitler, Neville Chamberlain found that reconciliation was the wrong approach. It was the wrong approach in dealing with the Soviet Union. It is the wrong approach whenever people actually have fundamentally incompatible views and goals.
So what is Obama saying? In Egypt 9 months ago, Obama said:
I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.He also said that “faith should bring us together.”
On February 14, 2010, Hillary Clinton rearticulated Obama’s views at the US-Islamic Summit at Doha saying that “our shared purpose and values have often been obscured by suspicion and misunderstanding.”
Since many in the Islamic world do not share this rosy view of co-prosperity with the Judeo-Christian West, this is explained away in the Obama-Clinton interpretation as being the product of poverty (i.e., it is not that they are different from us, it is that they are temporarily confused). As Clinton said at the US-Islamic summit:
True and lasting security takes root in places where people have the opportunity to find jobs, to be educated, to raise healthy families, and benefit from the scientific and technological breakthroughs that have transformed the way we live in the 21st century. When these opportunities are absent, frustration and anger often follow.
The initial Liberal line on 9/11 was that America had to sympathize with the terrorists because they were poor, indeed that poverty caused them to do what they did and it was to some extent our fault because we don’t contribute more to development in poor countries. Remember? (Overview here ; David Corn discusses here.) Well as it turned out, many of the hijackers of 9/11 and many of the major Islamic terrorists after them have been at least middle class, the more educated members of their societies who could learn English, get degrees and study in Western universities. So Liberals for the most part put away that somewhat embarrassingly wrong poverty-causes-terrorism theory. But sometimes they still return to it anyway because it just fits much better with their worldview. It’s too convenient to resist.
So the question at hand is whether it is fair to say, as Obama did in Egypt, that “faith should bring us together.” Should it? That might be a quite suitable remark if we were at war with Italy, given that nation’s catholic background, but is it a totally unrealistic remark about Islam? We have to ask ourselves, what if Islamists are more violent and antagonistic, less motivated by temporary political issues of the moment and less similar to us than Obama believes? What would our strategy be if we had to find a way to live together not because of our shared values but in spite of our radically different values? Would we be doing things differently then? Because that may be the case.
Let’s keep in mind as we investigate this issue that our primary job is to create a great future for Americans, not to be polite. So I am going to walk through this in an honest way, not in a polite way necessarily. What do we know about the Islamic world?
Do we share a purpose and values with Islam?
When you see a man leading his three black-shrouded wives down the streets of London (interesting video here), does he strike you as someone who probably “share[s] common principles about tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” with the people of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Do you imagine he reads Jefferson and longs for a perfect democracy of yeoman farmers? Do we think a society that believes in stoning an adulterous woman to death, and which held Hitler in much higher regard than it will ever hold Obama, shares principles with us?
Before you answer, you might want to watch this recent and somewhat randomly selected slice of Egyptian popular culture, a boy lecturing about children’s love of martyrdom in the name of Allah. No that’s fine. Do it. I will be here when you get back.
How like us are they? It is interesting that Mohammed, unlike Abraham, Moses or Jesus Christ, was a military leader, which lends Islam a somewhat different character fundamentally than Judaism and Christianity. Imagine if we followed a religion that had been created by Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte. It would be different. You might have noted that the Saudi flag has a sword on it. That’s no mistake, brother.
Indeed war is fundamental in the history and the language of Islam. In Arabic the term for Islamic countries is dar al Islam, “the house of Islam” (or “peace”) and the term for non-Islamic countries is dar al harb, “the house of war.” Islam was created circa 620 AD and grew through a brutal military campaign, mass slavery and forced conversions to become a tremendous empire emerging from the Saudi desert to encompass all of North Africa, Spain, Turkey and much of the Balkans. Islam and the “house of war” were most of the time at war or on the cusp of war from the early medieval period to the end of World War II. Samuel Huntington pointed out, Islam has “bloody borders.”
Islam appears, at the least, to be very susceptible to a very bellicose interpretation. As I suppose one could say that about any religion except you would really be exaggerating; I can’t recall any Buddhist or Hindu terrorists recently whereas there are Muslim terrorists wherever there are Muslims.
Theologically, Islam is the one religion that has not in the modern era developed a sense of its own limitations. Most religions have reconciled themselves to the notion that they are not going to convert everyone in the world, that people will come to diverse conclusions on religious matters and the issue is sufficiently in doubt that religion should not be imposed on individuals. Mainstream Islam has come to no such conclusion. Islam, particularly Wahabbist Islam, remains an absolutist and totalitarian creed with no concessions to diversity of religious opinion. The goal of spreading Islam around the world through education, proselytizing and simple demographics is explicit in Saudi Arabia and billions of dollars have been spent to that end. It is to this day illegal to celebrate Christmas in Saudi Arabia, even after we pulled their fat from the fire with Desert Shield.
Politically, Islamic countries have made very interesting choices. Germany, in World War I, enjoyed the staunch support of the Islamic world. In World War II, Hitler was extremely popular among our current Middle Eastern “allies.” In the Cold War, the major Middle Eastern countries were quite friendly toward the Soviet Union. Stalin was very almost as popular as Hitler in the Middle East generally. They have a real knack for picking the good guys.
There are in Islamic countries no strong traditions of art or literature because these activities are discouraged as un-Islamic. Men marry up to four wives. Women are not allowed to drive. It is perhaps impossible to imagine a society this side of the Klingons whose instincts appear more different from ours.
So, taking this all in, is it sensible to assume that the natural character of Islam is very much like that of Judaism and Christianity, the cultures, history and leaders of which are less directly associated with war and war-like notions than those of Islam? That we share fundamental premises and goals?
In the least charitable interpretation of Islam, but one that cannot absolutely be controverted by facts, one could interpret it as an imperialist, militarist ideology fundamentally incompatible with Christianity (or with the secular, individualistic notions of the Western Enlightenment) that is bent on extending its domain over the world through whatever means necessary including military action, ideological propaganda and demographic takeovers. It could be interpreted as being more akin to Nazism than to Christianity.
Do we know that this is an unfair and uncharitable interpretation? For sure? Because if we do not know this is wrong, then we have to act as if it might be right. I am not going to say that Muslims are all one way or all another way. Any such assertion would be absurd. But it does seem to me that there is a lot we do not know about Islam but they do, en masse, seem to have a troubling and unusual inclination toward suppressing freedom and promoting brutality and violence. And many of them dislike the kafir (unbelievers).
Implications if we lack shared values
If we fundamentally do not share values and are in some ways incompatible and doomed never to live in harmony; or, if we think this could be true, how would we hedge our bets? This I do not know. I will propose some ideas below in the spirit of whiteboarding. But I believe that we need to devise policies that would make less optimistic assumptions than the ones the administration is making.
Some ideas:
Idea 1: Impose a “terrorism tax” on Islamic countries?
The West now spends a great deal of money defending against terrorism, whether in the form of law enforcement, intelligence, military operations in Afghanistan or extra security at home. The Islamic countries should bear this economic burden because they export it. We have essentially an ongoing tort claim against them. Whether they have directly sponsored the terrorism, as in the case of Libya, Syria and Iran, or their citizens are funding the terrorism as is the case in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, they are ultimately responsible on a res ipsa loquitur basis.
If there were pro-Western, pro-democracy or pro-vengeance militias from the US, funded out of the US, who were travelling to the Middle East and blowing people up, it would to some extent be our fault and our responsibility. We would legitimately owe the Middle Eastern countries some sort of redress. So Option 1 would involve a tax on the Middle Eastern countries forcing them to bear the full economic burden of Islamic terrorism on the West. These monies would be distributed to Western nations in proportion to their expenditures on anti-terrorist efforts. The goal of this program would be to internalize the cost of tolerating or promoting an intolerant, bellicose ideology back on its originators and encourage them thereby to change their ways and do more at home to prevent their people from exporting violence abroad.
Idea 2: Religion or not, can we manage the spread of Islam in the US more deliberately?
We wish to protect against terrorism, we observe that Muslims have a greater tendency than others to become terrorists and we know that it cannot be determined until one acts whether a given individual is inclined to be a terrorist or not. Imagine if some percent of, say, Bulgarians unpredictably developed a horrible disease that caused them to explode and kill everyone around them (which is kind of what happened with Major Hasan). We would change the rules regarding naturalization of Bulgarians who are here already. The TSA recently announced that if you have been to one of 14 (predominantly Muslim) countries on a given trip, you will be given extra scrutiny if you wish to fly into the US. This was done despite the fact that it will offend some of our Muslim friends. This is probably necessary. But why confine it to a given trip? Why not give people special treatment if they have ever been to one of those countries? People might say they are being singled out unfairly, but it wouldn’t be unfair. It would be based on quite objective data.
If we took this approach of trying to be careful about admitting Muslims to the US, it would essentially be a matter of agreeing to live in peace with the Islamic nations, but apart. It’s not that we have ill will toward each other necessarily but it might be for the best if we do not live together.
Option 3: We could do something we haven’t thought of yet
This is where you come in.
Option 4: Pretend the Muslims are a peaceful people who like us, and hope for the best
This last approach seems risky.
No comments:
Post a Comment