Horror and humiliation in Fallujah (How humilating Islam is a winning strategy in the WOT)

Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us - if at all - not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. - T S Eliot, The Hollow Men

Allah is the Greatest. I bear witness that nothing deserves to be worshipped except Allah. Come to prayer. Come to success. - The Muslim call to prayer, translated by Maulana Muhammad Ali

As the American military weighs the reduction of Fallujah, there come into focus the grand vulnerabilities both of the Americans and the Sunni resistance. The West cannot endure without faith that a loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His throne. Horror - the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end - is lethal to the West. Europe is dying slowly from the horror of the 20th century's world wars, ending the way T S Eliot foresaw in the poem cited above, "not with a bang but a whimper". Despite its intrinsic optimism, America is vulnerable as well.

The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to "come to prayer" is the same thing as to "come to success". Humiliation - the perception that the Ummah cannot reward those who submit to it - is beyond its capacity to endure.

Radical Islam has risen against the West in response to its humiliation - intentional or not - at Western hands. The West can break the revolt by inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the Muslim world.

But radical Islam yet may horrify the West into submission, not only by large-scale acts of terrorism against Western countries, but also by provoking the West into mass destruction of life in the Islamic world. By operating in the midst of civilian populations, Islamist radicals put Western counter-insurgency in a delicate position. The Western response must be harsh enough to humble its adversaries, without turning the stomach of the Western population itself. To do this requires intelligence precise enough to target enemy resources without killing too many civilians.

I am grateful to Dr Amar Manzoor for the following summary of the issues (as well as praise). He writes from the UK (my excerpts):

Having read some of your articles on how radical Islam might win, I am amazed at your bravery in declaring the obvious in the cultural and deep-seated religious exclusivity which we face on a daily basis. The Islamists seems to be carrying a victory. This victory seems to be to prove that radicals are right in the perception of America. Simple fact: they are losing to win (also called the rope-a-dope strategy by [world champion boxer] Muhammed Ali). Each time the United States starts to kill and maim large numbers of civilians, and gory images are blasted to living rooms all around the world, the Islamists are appealing to the conscience of every person on the planet. Once the US does the killing, rape, pillage, murder, and looting, they [Islamists] will have won the hearts and minds of the people. Guess what, Spengler: it looks like it is working and working very well.

Dr Mansoor is right, at least in large measure. Just after the fall of the Twin Towers, I wrote: The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy of "des Schreckens" (to cause horror) and "Entsetzens" (terror; literally, dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.

America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America's experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: 'The horror! The horror!' It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization, The Hollow Men, with a quote from the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead." (Sir John Keegan is wrong: Radical Islam can win, Oct 12, 2001). There is of course more to the story, for radical Islam just as well might lose. Were the United States and its allies to carpet-bomb Fallujah in order to destroy Sunni armed resistance, the horrifying result would appall the population of the West and advance the Islamist cause. Crushing the resistance with limited civilian damage would humiliate the Islamists and weaken them. The nicety of this problem no doubt explains why the American command has taken its good time to decide upon a course of action.

On the other hand, surgical strikes against resistance leaders, such as Israel's targeted killings of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, enervate rather than energize the Islamist side. When the long arm of Israeli vengeance can reach into the heart of the enemy camp, the Islamists are humiliated and thus weakened. Intelligence is the decisive variable in the equation, and the poor state of America's spy agencies, acknowledged by the CIA's George Tenet, has been the Achilles Heel of the coalition, as I argued in Why America is losing the intelligence war (Nov 11, 2003). But I also predicted that America's deficient capacity for human intelligence would make Washington depend more upon Israel. Precisely that appears to be happening.

Nations have interests, not friends, observed Otto von Bismarck, and it is commonality of interest that brings Washington and Jerusalem together. A host of Western commentators attacked President George W Bush for taking the Israeli side over settlements and the Palestinian right of return, on the grounds that it humiliated the Arab world, and a plethora of Muslim voices bemoan their humiliation at the hands of the United States.

Much, much more is to come. The "rope-a-dope" tactic Dr Mansoor cites can work both ways. Israel offers many things to Washington, including Arab-language translators, intelligence operatives, and tactical expertise in urban search-and-destroy missions. But its transcendent value to American strategy lies not in what it does, but what it is, namely an ever-present source of humiliation to the Muslim sense of self-worth. The price of recalcitrance, Bush has told the Palestinians and indirectly the Arab world at large, is that some part of the Dar al-Islam has fallen to Jewish hands for the indefinite future.

Analysts unfriendly to the Muslim world speak of a "pride-and-honor culture", in which the prickliness of the Arab street regarding the Palestine issue and so-called honor killings are supposed manifestations of the same social traits. There is another way to look at the matter. Among the world's religions Christianity and Islam alone have the capacity for mass absorption of converts from different races and ethnic groups. It is hard to tell which of the two is growing faster. One of them will be the world's dominant religion in the 21st century. There is a radical difference between Islamic and Christian conversion. Both seek to supercede Judaism, but in different ways. Christianity offers a New Israel, called out from among the nations by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because God's love for mankind is the premise of the New Israel, there is a limit to Christian tolerance for bloodshed. To propose open genocide, the Nazis had to repudiate Christianity and embrace paganism only.

The Christian's participation in the vicarious sacrifice of the Cross offers salvation at the end of the soul's journey. Christian practice puts enormous effort into sustaining the conviction of the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven: prayers, hymns, cathedrals, paintings, and so forth. No such concept of individual spiritual transformation exists in mainstream Islam. The individual submits wholly to Allah, who controls all things without qualification. That is Islam's enormous strength; the individual believer can leave behind the carping self-doubt of the Christians. For the same reason, however, setbacks to the Ummah are a challenge to the faith of every believer, for all events are in the hands of Allah, not those who have submitted to His will. Success therefore is a theological necessity for Islam. Humiliation for Jews and Christians is a chastisement from God; did not Christ accept His humiliation on the cross? For Islam, humiliation is a refutation of the faith itself.

For a generation, Western policy towards the Muslim world has emphasized deference towards Muslim sensibilities, the Bush White House emphatically included. It does not occur to Muslim radicals that their enhanced status in the Islamic world might prompt the West to undertake the opposite, namely to humiliate some aspects and some leaders of Islam, if not the religion itself. The Islamists' vision of the future is audacious, as Dr Mansoor recounts:

Irrespective of their color, religion, or culture, we can see that their foothold and leadership methods are taking hold. This has been transferred across the world to China, South America, the Middle East, the Far East, South Asia, as well as the Central Asian republics. The general dismay coupled with the dividing lines of rich and poor in the world and the complexities of culture and capitalism are allowing their message to gain ground steadily. This means more recruits, more audacious plans in the pipeline, and even more difficulty in using third generation forces to counter fourth generation asymmetric threats which appear and disappear like ghosts. The question for me is not the method of implementation, widely regarded as terrorism, throughout the world. This has always been in existence. The question for me is the message and why it is so blindingly powerful. The message provides the impetus to the heart, and perception drives the mind into the court of the Islamist. Again, the opposite may be the case. Muslims of different ethnicity and sect are more likely to fall out when the credibility of the Islamists suffers a reverse. During the past week, the United States has for the first time humiliated the Islamic world openly and without compunction, in the small matter of the West Bank settlements. If it continues in this direction, Dr Mansoor's scenario may not work out as he expects.

Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical Islam could win

By Spengler

"In this war of civilizations, the West will prevail," argues the distinguished historian Sir John Keegan, the Defense Editor of the Daily Telegraph, in a commentary on October 8. Why is he so sure? If Sir John were in command on the Western side, I would be inclined to bet on a different outcome.

Sir John references Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory and adds:
"Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go on until one side or the other gives in. They choose the crudest weapons available, and use them with appalling violence, but observe what, to non-Westerners may well seem curious rules of honour. Orientals, by contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy."
Although the nomadic raid lost out to Western resistance over the centuries, Keegan writes, "On September 11, 2001 it returned in an absolutely traditional form. Arabs, appearing suddenly out of empty space like their desert raider ancestors, assaulted the heartlands of Western power, in a terrifying surprise raid and did appalling damage."

Readers who reproached me for using the word "racism" to qualify Washington's orientation toward the Islamic world should read Keegan's essay carefully. Here we have the upright Westerner against the underhanded Oriental. Kipling (who wrote vividly about the sneakiness of the British in the Great Game) would blush.

It's all completely, totally, revoltingly wrong. The West confronts not a throwback to medieval Islam, but a Westernized version of Islam transformed into a totalitarian political ideology. Although it draws upon Islamic sources and overlaps with some strains of Muslim belief, the ideology of Al-Qaeda has greater kinship with Nazism, another synthetic pagan religion, than with traditional Islam.

Like Nazism, it is a deadly threat. Remember that Hitler very nearly won. If Hitler (to cite one among many examples) had not declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor but instead offered himself as a mediator between Washington and Tokyo, would the US have declared war on Germany? And in the absence of US involvement in Europe, would Hitler have lost? Or if Hitler had thrown the British into the sea at Dunkirk rather than holding back his tanks? Or if Hitler had enlisted the Ukrainians and Balts as allies rather than butchering them? Like the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Al-Qaeda might win, and by the same methods.
Keegan dwells on a strained analogy of tactics and ignores a fundamental difference in objectives.

No traditional society destroyed for the pleasure of destruction; at least none of which we have had reports. The Islamic conquerors of the past raided for identifiable goals. They wished to rule new territories and bring new peoples under their sway. Whether greed or missionary zeal drove them on, let historians argue. The West ultimately drove back these incursions and broke the back of Islamic power.
Al-Qaeda wants no territory, no conversions, no loot, no slaves.

It wishes to destroy the West and happily will sacrifice millions of Muslim lives in order to do so. Indeed, the mass sacrifice of Muslim lives may lie at the heart of its battle plan. It has more in common with the Dostoyevsky of The Possessed or the Wagner of Die Goetterdaemmerung than with the Muslim conquerors of the Middle Ages.

Evil for its own sake becomes imaginable only when the Christian civilization of the West abandons Christianity and stares into the abyss of its own destruction. Before Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, and Wagner presented the relevant profiles, Western literature had the matter in its pure form, in the character of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust. "I am a part of that part which in the beginning was everything," he tells Faust. "A part of darkness that gave birth to light; the proud light, that now contests Mother Night's old rank and space." Al-Qaeda is the darkness that covets the position of light and wishes only to destroy. "I am the spirit that always negates," Mephisto offers, "and rightly so, because everything that comes to be is worthy of its own destruction." Unlike the Western adherents of Nietzsche, who cried, "God is dead, and everything is permitted!", the Islamist radicals have invented a God who permits everything.

Sir John should read carefully Fouad Ajami's profile "Nowhere man" of terrorist Mohammed Atta in the New York Times of October 7. "In more recent years, younger Egyptians gave up on the place, came to dream of fulfillment - economic, personal, political - in foreign lands. Mohammed Atta, who left for Germany in 1993, was part of that migration, of that rupturing of things on the banks of the Nile. Religion came to Atta unexpectedly, in Hamburg, where he had gone for a graduate degree in urban planning ... The modern world unsettled Atta. He exalted the traditional, but it could no longer give him a home. He drifted in 'infidel' lands but could never be fully at ease. He led an itinerant life. The magnetic power of the American imperium had fallen across his country. He arrived here with a presumption, and a claim. We had intruded into his world; he would shatter the peace of ours. The glamorized world couldn't be fully had; it might as well be humbled and taken down," wrote the professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

"It must have been easy work for the recruiters who gave Atta a sense of mission, a way of doing penance for the liberties he had taken in the West, and the material means to live the plotter's life. A hybrid kind has been forged across that seam between the civilization of Islam and the more emancipated culture of the West. Behold the children, the issue, of this encounter as they flail about and rail against the world in no-man's-land," concludes Ajami.
Mohammed Atta, to Ajami's expert eye, is the direct descendant of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, the impoverished student from an Old Believer family adrift in St Petersburg, who kills for the sake of doing evil.

The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy "des Schreckens" (to cause horror) and "Entsetzens" (terror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.
America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war.
America's experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: "The horror! The horror!" It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization, The Waste Land, with a quote from the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead."

From America's moral collapse in the face of the horror of Vietnam, there arose a repudiation of classical Western culture unlike anything seen previously in the English-speaking world. The West nearly threw up its hands in the face of the challenge from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

Getting down to tactics, how can Al-Qaeda overcome the West with horror? Let us suppose that some state or state agency over which Al-Qaeda wields influence possesses a weapon of mass destruction, with sufficient potency to cause a very large number of deaths in a Western country. If it deploys that weapon and causes a very large number of casualties, the West may have no choice but to bombard the offending country with nuclear weapons and destroy its capacity to make war. Given that Al-Qaeda has tendrils deep in numerous governments, even a nuclear bombardment of one rogue state might not diminish its capacities. The West would be left with the horrific fact of mass destruction of civilians combined with continued insecurity.
Time is on the side of Al-Qaeda. Sir John's strategic advice is dangerously wrong. He wrote on October 8 that "President Bush in his speech to his nation and to the Western world yesterday, promised a traditional Western response. He warned that there would be 'a relentless accumulation of success'. Relentlessness, as opposed to surprise and sensation, is the Western way of warfare. It is deeply injurious to the Oriental style and rhetoric of war-making."

On the contrary, the West should think of itself as the underdog, fighting against the clock, and seize the tactical initiative. It should act unpredictably, with the objective of confusing and disrupting an enemy who until now has chosen his targets at leisure. Rather than batter Afghanistan, whence any terrorist worth his Cemtex departed long ago, the West should act unexpectedly and without mercy against states which allow Al-Qaeda. There is no need to go into details here. Doing so now offers at least the chance of gaining the respect of the Islamic world. Failing to do so makes probable a gradual accumulation of failures. It means that the war will be Al-Qaeda's to lose.

We were lucky with Hitler. We may not be so lucky again.

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