Posted on 03/11/2006 8:24:15 AM PST by quidnunc
The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall. I thought both decisions to invade were right, before either had been taken. But I thought this for reasons I never fully explained, that were never quite George Bush’s reasons — more those of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). I was, for instance, sceptical about the project of bringing Western-style, bourgeois democracy — and everything needed to support that — to countries where politics by violence had so long prevailed. But if anyone could do it, I thought the Americans could, with their own history of heroic optimism, prevailing against insuperable odds.
-snip-
But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.
The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.
-snip-
And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.
I don't know who he's talking about here.
Who's been surprised by Muslim antics and atrocities? No one I know was surprised.
George Will wrote and article a few years ago, alluding to the fact that the Middle East was a mess, and the best you can do with a mess is contain it.
I think all of the terrorist bombings which culminated in 9/11 proved the mess wasn't contained.
With what we now know, and post 9/11, do you have a better suggestion in regards to how to deal with the Middle East?
Should read "George Will wrote an ..." sigh
East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.
Kipling knew it a long time ago. I think ?
“But what if they are not?”
The question has not been raised, because the answer is as obvious as it is horrific; they will have to be destroyed.
I sat and watched Fox News channel for some time yesterday, all the heads were talking around and round the problem.
There is no one who can correctly identy the real problem.
Maybe that they just can't say. Those with eyes to see,
know that the enemy is simply ISLAM. Islam can not exist
with anything else.
bump
It would have been prudent for Bush to cover his bet by building the Army we are going to need for the war which is certainly coming.
It will be harder, much harder, to do so now.
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