The Grand Delusion

NY Times via www.tbo.com ^ | Sep 29, 2006 | DAVID BROOKS

[neverdem]

Worse, more and more people are falling for the Grand Delusion - the notion that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone. On the right, some believe that if we just stop this Wilsonian madness of trying to introduce democracy into the Arab world, we can return to an age of stability and balance. On the left, many people can't seem to fathom an enemy the United States isn't somehow responsible for. Others think the entire threat has been exaggerated by Karl Rove for the sake of political scaremongering.

Perhaps it's understandable that many Americans would fall for this Grand Delusion. The Israelis, who have more experience with Islamic extremism, recently did. They imagined that they could build a security barrier and unilaterally withdraw from their historical reality. It took the war in south Lebanon to make them see there is no way to unilaterally withdraw. There is no way to become a normal society. Even if they pulled out of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, they would still have to...

--snip--

The blunt fact is that groups of Islamic extremists will continue to compete and grow until mainstream Islamic moderates can establish a more civilized set of criteria for prestige and greatness. Today's extremists are not the product of short-term historical circumstances, but of consciousness and culture. They are not the fault of the United States, but have roots stretching back centuries. They will not suddenly ignore their foe - us - when their hatred of us is the core of their identity.

The National Intelligence Estimate predicts terror violence will get worse in the years ahead. The scarier estimate was made by a veteran of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in conversation with his grandson who now lives in Boston: "This is forever."

[tang-soo]

This is from the Times? Sounds like Ann Coulter without the humor.

[furquhart]

Brooks is quite right.

The problem, I've been saying for years, is that, after 9-11, we weren't able to overcome the legacy of the 1990's quick enough.

Too many hugs, not enough bombs. Not enough killing.

We needed, I think to identify Islam as the enemy early, and to mobilize on a grand scale.

We should have hit all of them - Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria - all of the them - after 9-11. Right after, hard on it.

Of course, it tooks us too long (even I - I didn't have this insight until 2003) to wake to the real meaning of 9-11, that it really is a Holy War and a war of anhillation.

Islam must be defeated and destroyed.

[Maynerd]

Bush is attempting to thread the needle - fight islamofacism but not Islam. If his strategy fails, millions of people will die and most will be Muslims.

[Prokopton]

Bush is attempting to thread the needle - fight islamofacism but not Islam

The two cannot be so easily distinguished. Islamo-facists are just the pointy end of the spear of Islam.

[zarf]

Bush is attempting to thread the needle - fight islamofacism but not Islam.

I agree. Bush is conducting a grand experiment. Can a softer gentler military operation help the indigenous population establish order.

If it all fails then it's back to traditional war:

Killing enough people and destroying enough cities to coerce capitulation.

[RobbyS]

May not be the best place to introduce this, but Father Schall has his head screwed on right, even if he does work at Georgetown. The Claremont Institute's Ken Masugi interviewed Gerogetown's Father James V. Schall regarding his reaction to Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg.

Schall addresses big issues, in particular the role of faith and reason in Christian and Islamic thought.

Among Schall's observations:

The principal critics of the Pope, in the beginning at least, do not even attempt to engage the argument that he saw fit to place before the human mind for consideration about a serious issue—namely, is, or is not, it permitted and approved to use violence for religious rule and expansion? The claim is made against the Pope that his mere citing of a text is itself a sign of intent to insult. On the surface, such a reaction is simply absurd. The proposed discourse about violence is to be brief, short. In the Platonic tradition, it deserves a brief, short, unambiguous answer, not political and diplomatic declarations that Mohammed was somehow insulted by attributing to him what not a few Muslims themselves, on the historical record, attribute to him. The response to an invitation to academic discourse by threats or even violence is itself an admission that there must be some concern that the answer to the question as asked is, in effect, affirmative. Violence is justified in the name of religion.

. . . One explanation for such violence is clearly "religious." It holds that Allah could make what is violent to be good, or what is wrong to be right. Or perhaps more basically, the divine will, presupposed to no "logos," is what makes right and wrong. No objective distinction can exist between the two that Allah cannot change at will. Will in this understanding becomes blind power, something that will reappear in Western political thought.

. . . Islam claims to be a revelation subsequent to Judaism and Christianity. It claims to give the final revelation of God that rejects the previous Christian revelation's two basic tenets, the Trinity and the Incarnation. Within this claim is an understanding of submission to Allah that cannot question whatever Allah might be said to decree, since to do so is blasphemy.

The Greek Emperor whom the Pope cites anxiously wants to know whether God can approve violence. Obviously, He can, if He is ruled only by will such that nothing in nature or revelation needs be what it is. On this supposition, we cannot "reason" with Allah, only obey him whatever he says.

The Pope's academic question is this: is this view tenable? It is tenable if Allah is ruled by a will that has no relation to reason, to logos. Most Muslim philosophy holds precisely this view. Muslim custom and polity decrees uphold it with its law and force. Assuming these are obvious and prevalent statements of what is held and practiced in Islam, the Pope proposes a discourse about their validity in a forum where no one is threatened for simply suggesting that this question needs attention..

Basically, I think it could be argued that the Pope did a very great service, both to the free world and to Islam itself, to bring up this precise question about rationality. One can only say that the widespread reaction was precisely "irrational." It is an attempt to impose a rigid view of academic and intellectual investigation on everyone in the world so that no reasonable discussion about these tenets is allowed. There is left no academic or intellectual space to examine the truth of a claim. There is only violence in enforcing its stated and unexamined position.

The Pope's initiative made it clear, by the response to it, as nothing else does or can, that the political and ordinary culture of Islam has little place within it for a reasonable discussion of the truth of its own tenets. And it does not want them discussed outside its own control either. This is the heart of the issue and the world needs to know this. An Islam that bases itself on this proposition that Allah is bound only by pure will can only require obedience, not rational obedience. What else can one conclude from reaction to a simple scholarly invitation to discuss the truth of its own clearly stated positions?

[neverdem]

Thanks for Schall's comments. Do you have the URL?

[Armigerous]

Wel as a good old fashioned southern fundamentalist evangelical,(Church of Christ) I hold no brief with the Church of Rome....but you gotta love those Jesuits when it comes to logically taking apart something as vile as blind obedience to 'allah'

[truth_seeker]

"Bush is attempting to thread the needle - fight islamofacism but not Islam. If his strategy fails, millions of people will die and most will be Muslims."

A lot of innocent German and Japanese civilians died, too. But that is the price societies pay, for the adventures of their extreme elements.

So most societies these days decide to follow paths of peace and co-existence.

Push the civilized too far, and there will come a response.

The enemy has chosen to attack the most powerful. Those with bombs, planes, ships and submarines. Computers, radars, lazers, missiles, warheads.

I think they have calculated we are to docile and civilized to strike back.

Yamamota had it right.

[nathanbedford]

I think George Bush has gotten it right in fudging the issue with respect to who the enemy is. In the beginning he called the enemy "terrorism." Some of the posters on this thread suggested that the enemy should be labeled "Islam." Can you imagine the hurricane of criticism which would have been mounted against Bush for having made enemies of 1.3 billion people?

Later Bush attempted to move the labeling a little closer to home, calling the enemy "islamo-Fascist" and we have seen the criticism he drew for that, and it appears that the administration has subsequently backed off from this description.

No matter, the lapse is self-correcting. In order to advance their war, the islamo fascists must strike our homeland again. When they do, we will be in no mood for labeling games. If they do not, no harm - no foul and there is no war against terrorism, against Islam, or against "islamo fascists."

As important as clearly identifying the enemy is the need to clearly identify one's friends and allies. There are hundreds of millions of Arabs and over a billion Muslims. From this immense worldwide pool of Mohammedens the enemy needs to find only 19 suicidal terrorists to kill 3000 of our citizens, throw our economy into recession, shut down at least temporarily our stock market, and nearly bankrupt our airline industry. As the direct and indirect consequence of the of the attack by those 19 terrorists (out of a pool of 1.3 billion potential terrorists) we are waging two wars.

In neither war have we demonstrated that we are able to convert Muslims into allies who will root out the potential terrorists in their midst to make their own world safe, if not our own. Worse, we have demonstrated that we cannot bail out the boat fast enough in either Iraq or Afghanistan to kill the terrorists ourselves.

Under these circumstances, unless we want to wage unrestrained nuclear war against the whole of the crescent of Islam, murdering over a billion people, and still having tens of millions of Muslims in our midst, we ought to think through our policy about how to wage the war against terrorism. Before we declare war on one out of every five people in the world, we ought to pause for at least a moment.

I think we are in grave danger of losing this war against Islamic fascism which will not shrink from mass murder in our homeland with weapons of mass destruction. I think we don't know how to identify and destroy the cancer within Islam. I think only the Muslims themselves can do that. I think we should rack our brains to find ways of mobilizing the sane, moderate, Muslim world against the crazies in their midst. I do not see how labeling all Muslims our enemy advances that cause.

In addition to allies in the Muslim world, America cannot hope to survive this war if we lose our allies in western world. As one who lives in Germany, I walk in a world where anti-Americanism is rife and contempt for George Bush is as common as beer and sausage. I think George Bush pushed the envelope about as far as he could go after 9/11. I think he would have succeeded in overcoming the left-wing resistance of Europe except that no WMD's were found in Iraq. With that, his cause, I mean George Bush's personal standing, was irretrievably lost, and with it The Bush Doctrine. What do you suppose will happen to the Western alliance if we declare war on all of Islam?

[Frwy]

Grand Delusion - the notion that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone....

I seem to remember on September 11, 2001 we were doing just that and wasn't there a few incidents inflicted on us that day? I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a dream. More like a nightmare I'd say.

[Once-Ler]

In neither war have we demonstrated that we are able to convert Muslims into allies who will root out the potential terrorists in their midst to make their own world safe, if not our own.

Zarqawi was offered to Iraq security forces by citzens. Zarqawi was offered to America by Iraq security forces. What is your definition of an ally? Al Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf was arrested in Pakistan...by Pakistan, a day before the UK arrested the rest of the co-conspirators in the recent airplane plot. The examples of cooperation are numerous, but more to the point you discount the millions of Iraq voters who elected a government to expell Al Qaeda. Clearly we are able to convert Muslims into allies who will root out the potential terrorists in their midst.

I fully expect the population of other nations to loath Bush. I much prefer it to the adoration they had for Clinton.

I think we are in grave danger of losing this war against Islamic fascism which will not shrink from mass murder in our homeland with weapons of mass destruction. I think we don't know how to identify and destroy the cancer within Islam. I think only the Muslims themselves can do that. I think we should rack our brains to find ways of mobilizing the sane, moderate, Muslim world against the crazies in their midst. I do not see how labeling all Muslims our enemy advances that cause.

Agreed.

[Buckhead]

Thanks for posting Father Schall's brilliant commentary.

[Buckhead]

The contention that we cannot gain the cooperation of other muslims against the extremists is clearly incorrect.

It is true, however, that the overall problem is extremely difficult because of the clear doctrinal basis within Islam for violent jihad against the infidels until the entire world submits.

Regards,

[Jim Noble]

Can you imagine the hurricane of criticism which would have been mounted against Bush for having made enemies of 1.3 billion people?

This quote is unlike you.

George Bush never had the power to "make them our enemies".

They are our enemies already. They were our enemies when Prescott Bush was in boarding school.

They were our enemies when George Washington put his hand on the Bible.

George Bush can recognize our enemies, but he doesn't create them.

[Jim Noble]

If it all fails then it's back to traditional war

When this fails (not if), it may be too late to mobilize for war.

The time to do that was September 2001. I don't think our people will consent to that now.

[MARTIAL MONK]

The basis of this war is still forming. It is a slow process. Public opinion, which burned white-hot on 9/12 has cooled and that is a good thing. This will be a long war and will require a hard and tempered response based on more than a horrific intrusion on the public consciousness that an enemy exists out there somewhere. The institutions of our civilization have to reform along the lines of defense, not the least of which is the moral exculpation of what we have to do to defeat this enemy.

The laggards will be along in time. It will take more outrages but more outrages are inevitable.
The best we can hope for is that the price in blood is not too high. Had George Bush the plain eloquence of a Victor Davis Hanson the process would be faster and easier but we have to deal with the realities that are.

It will take the modern equivalent of the slaughter at Omdurman to break the will and capabilities of this enemy. The world is not yet ready for that. The last thing we need now is to be maneuvered into machine-gunning legions of 12 year olds as Iraqi troops did in the Iran - Iraq war.

[EQAndyBuzz]

The Muslims who are moderates are looking for a leader to guide them. It has been that way for a thousand years. The radicals know this and are taking advantage of it.

It's like the Chronicles of Riddick. You kill the leader then everyone follows you. Cut off Radical Islams head and the rest of Islam will backdown and follow that leader.

Our problem is no one wants to lead.

[Carry_Okie]

In this piece, Schall completely blows off the book of Joshua.

21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

While the children of Israel didn't convert with the threat of violence, they (supposedly) slew every idolator within their prospective land. How is it possible for a Christian to discuss the role of violence in religion without addressing that history?