Posted on 03/15/2006 2:02:56 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
Is Islam compatible with a free society?
This is the key strategic question of our day.
In October, William Buckley wrote:
The moment has not come, but it is around the corner, when non-Muslims will reasonably demand to have evidence that the Muslim faith can operate within boundaries in which Christians and Jews (and many non-believers) live and work without unconstitutional distraction.
[h-t to a Belmont Club commenter]
Buckley is correct that this is a question demanding an answer, but he misjudges the timing of its asking and answering. The truth is that assumed answers to this question have been fundamental in developing our strategies in the war on terror, and that we have yet to answer it definitively.
Is Islam compatible with a free society? A 'yes' answer offers a far different set of strategic imperatives than a 'no' answer.
In his book The Universal Hunger for Liberty, Michael Novak notes the tone of discourse in the beginning of our war:
"Surely," the proposition was put forward, by many Islamic voices as well as by the president, "a modern and faithful Islam is consistent with nonrepressive, open, economically vital societies."
To say yes to our question, one assumes that there are aspects of being Muslim and faithful to Islam, that can coexist peacefully with liberty, tolerance, and equality. The strategy that follows is one of identifying the groups and sects within Islam that adhere to these notions of their religion, and then encouraging them, favoring them, propagating them, and splitting them off from the elements of Islamic practice that are all too incompatible with the portions of modernity that invigorate men's souls: free inquiry, free association, free commerce, free worship, or even the freedom to be left alone.
To answer no, one states that Islam itself is fundamentally irreconcilable with freedom. This leads to a wholly different set of tactical moves to isolate free societies from Islam. They might include:
-detention of Muslims, or an abrogation of certain of their rights;
-forced deportation of Muslims from free societies;
-rather than transformative invasions, punitive expeditions and punitive strikes;
-extreme racial profiling;
-limits on the practice and study of Islam in its entirety
And even some extreme measures if free societies find the above moves to be failing:
-forced conversion from Islam, or renunciation;
-colonization;
-extermination of Muslims wherever they are found.
These last are especially ghastly measures. But a society that thought Islam incompatible with freedom might in the long term slip towards them.
Since 9/11, the assumption of our government has been that Islam can be compatible with freedom. The Bush administration has been exploiting all manner of divides within the Muslim world, not to conquer it, but to transform it such that a type of Islam compatible with freedom -- and therefore the West and the US, the wellspring and birthplace of modern individual liberty -- will come to the front at the expense of a type of Islam that is irreconcilable. Every institution of government answers our key question with a resounding yes. The Pentagon, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, makes a distinction between "bin Ladenism" and moderate Muslims, our would-be allies. Bush makes speeches in praise of freedom in general and especially in the Muslim world. The defense establishment is addressing what it calls a 'war of ideas':
The U.S. government is also focusing more attention on the intangible but vital dimension of the "war of ideas" between radical Islam and moderate Western and Islamic thought. The Pentagon's September 2004 National Defense Strategy stressed the need to counter ideological support for terrorism to secure permanent gains in the war against terrorism.
It stated the importance of negating the image of a U.S. war against Islam, and instead, developing the image of a civil war within Islam, fought between moderate states and radical terrorists. This kind of imagery will feed into the broader debate beginning in the U.S. on how to win such a war of ideas and how to cultivate moderate democratic Islamic states.
A yes answer to the question requires Red State Christians in the US to tolerate an Islam that tolerates them. A no answer to the question requires an abandonment of belief in the universality of ideas originating in the west, because it becomes clear that a large portion of humanity -- a fifth perhaps -- follows an incompatible religion. A yes answer forces one to attack totalitarian elements within Islam. A no answer forces a clash of civilizations, a Great Islamic War, as it assumes that all Islam is totalitarian.
A yes answer might lead to the establishment of something like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as discussed in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The idea of the congress, however, grew out of a feeling among independent intellectuals on the non-Communist left, as well as American officials, that the West after World War II faced a huge Soviet commitment to propagandizing and imposing Communism, and might lose the battle for European minds to Stalinism.
So the congress — established at a 1950 Berlin meeting at which the writer Arthur Koestler declared to a crowd of 15,000, "Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!" — launched magazines, held conferences, mounted exhibitions, and generally sought to expose Stalinist falsehoods from its liberal position. At its height, according to Coleman, the CCF "had offices or representatives in 35 countries, employing a total of 280 staff members."
One principle of the CCF's founding document was, "Freedom is based on the toleration of divergent opinions. The principle of toleration does not logically permit the practice of intolerance."
A no answer might disparage the notion that Westerners can say anything of import to those practicing Islam. I'm not sure if Bruce Thornton would answer no to the key question, but he doesn't seem to like the idea of Westerners trying to convince Muslims of anything new about their religion:
If, then, you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely certain holds the key to universal happiness in this world and the next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should you tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you “live and let live,” the credo of the spiritually moribund who stand for everything because they stand for nothing? And why wouldn’t you kill in the name of this vision, when the infidel nations work against God’s will and his beneficent intentions for the human race?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
A yes answer to our question might force us to reexamine the religious roots of our own conceptions of freedom, in order to figure best a way to help Muslims look for such roots in their faith. This might resemble the efforts of David Gelernter in his recent Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, "A Religious Idea Called 'America'"
The most important story in and for American history is the biblical Exodus; the verse “let my people go” became the subtext of the Puritan emigration to America in the seventeenth century, the American revolution in the eighteenth, and--in significant part by Lincoln’s own efforts--of the Civil War in the nineteenth. It became important, also, to the twentieth century Americanism of Wilson and Truman and Reagan and W. Bush--Americanism as an outward-looking religion with global responsibilities.
In the end we do need to know the real character of Americanism. The secular version is a flat, gray rendition--no color and no fizz--of this extraordinary work of religious imagination: the idea that liberty, equality, and democracy belong to all mankind because God wants them to.
A yes answer might say that if God gave Biblical antecedents for the freedom of all mankind, He might have put some in the Koran as well . . . A yes answer would try to figure how to play our own religion-based beliefs into a conversation with Islam, as Henry Jaffa seems to argue in the Claremont Review:
We [are], in short, engaged in telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions.
Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others.
A no answer, on the other hand, might first start with Islam as anathema to free society, then move to other religious creeds, seeing them through a lens of general suspicion.
Is Islam compatible with a free society? Like a Zen koan, this is the question that vexes us.
Our answer of course, might change. The Bush administration has been answering yes for five years. But, inhabiting a democracy, it is of course reflective of and responsive to public sentiment. Several commentators believe that sentiment may be shifting. A piece by Jim Geraghty on his National Review blog wonders if Americans' answer to the key question is changing:
This strikes me as the fallout of the Tipping Point™ - my sense that in recent weeks, a large chunk of Americans just decided that they no longer have any faith in the good sense or non-hostile nature of the Muslim world. If subsequent polls find similar results, the port deal is dead.
Perhaps the people's answer to the question is changing.
And what to make of the Manifesto from a dozen European intellectuals, Muslims or former Muslims many of them? How are they answering the key strategic question?
It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats . . .
Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others.
In Glenn Reynolds' podcast interview with Claire Berlinkski, author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too, she relates this story:
Reynolds: You have this wonderful scene in your book where you talk about this, this Englishman of Bengali descent, and he said that when he traveled to the United States, he saw all these immigrants who were US citizens being welcomed by the INS and told, "Welcome home!" And he said, you know, if I ever got that kind of treatment you know when I returned to England, I'd happily lay down my life for England right there . . .
Berlinski: I would have died for England on the spot, that's what he told me. If ever once, someone had said "welcome home" when I showed them my passport at customs and immigration, I would have died for England on the spot.
In a dissenting statement to the above-mentioned manifesto, Paul Belien in Brussels Journal quotes Dr. Jos Verhulst:
And now he stands at the dawn of the 21st century: the maligned individual, unsteady on his own feet after executing the inner breach with every form of imposed authority, uncertain, blinking in the brightness of the only god he is willing to recognise – Truth itself, stretching out before him unfathomably deep – full of doubt but aware that he, called to non-submission, must seek the road to the transcendent, carrying as his only property, his most valuable heirloom from his turbulent past, that one gold piece that means the utmost to him, his precious ideal of complete freedom of thought, of speech and of scientific inquiry. That is the unique advance that he received to help him in his long and difficult quest.
Meanwhile he is being beleaguered and threatened on all sides; from out of the darkness voices call him to submit and retreat; they shout that the gold in his hands is worthless, while the brightness ahead of him still makes it almost impossible for him to see what lies in store. In short: what this contemporary individual needs most of all is courage, great courage. And the will to be free and to see, which is tantamount to the will to live.
When I was in Iraq, one Iraqi told me he wished Iraq could be the 51st state in the union. Our experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan seems to indicate that there are many Muslims who would prefer that we answer the key question with a yes, saying to those Muslims who can find Islam compatible with freedom, "Have courage!" and once they've achieved their freedom, "Welcome home!"
To what fate are we assigning them if we answer no?
There will be peace when the surviving Muslims repudiate jihad and dhimmitude.
How many do we want to survive?
This is not a question for us to answer, it is a question for the Muslims to answer.
The question for us to answer is: are we willing to submit, in any way, to Islam? The answer to that question is not no, it is HELL NO!
The other question for us to answer is do we have the long term political/social will to fight?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
What words of incredible wisdom ! Fascinating how the port deal apologists call everyone who questions it a 'racist' or a 'bigot' while it is they who reek of Great White Father condescension in assuming that their 'little brown brothers' admire and worship them and want to be just like them. They babble about the 'racism' of people who take it for granted that Muslims have their own value and priorities while they flatter themselves with the assumption that jihadism is a Muslim misunderstanding of Islam and they have some profound cultural and moral influence over the Muslim world. It is the height of arrogance to say that the Salafists have 'hijacked' Islam. The Salafists are pure Islam. We can't define Islam.
That's all I need to know about Islam.
These people will never be our "friends."
Every society and government that has taken us on, from Hitler and the warlords to the commissars in Hanoi to the Wahhabist zealots, has wagered on the same answer: no.
Only the North Vietnamese won their bet, and we made them pay for it. We wrecked them for the next 75 years. We gutted their cadres, killed them on the battlefields in huge numbers, wrecked their infrastructure, and generally did for their society what World War I did for Europe and the Civil War did for the American South.
They won their war and their bragging rights, courtesy of the U.S. Democratic Party, but none of their neighbors will need worry about them for the next 100 years.
That's certainly a valid point, but I don't think the opponents of the port deal really understood what was involved. I think they overestimated the dangers and caused the Senate to give an unnecessary rebuff to Gulf Arabs whose cooperation we will value a great deal in the future. I think the opposition was a mistake, frankly.
Yet within just a few years they occupied Laos, invaded and conquered Cambodia, and successfully defeated a Chinese invasion .
I don't think Vietnam was as devastated as you think. It is difficult to really thoroughly devastate third world countries. You can certainly kill people, but there aren't a lot of things there to break.
Vietnam is presently in an economic boom, imitating China.
Exactly. I believe two things: (1) Islam is incompatible with liberty, and (2) liberty cannot be imposed on those who have other commitments.
Their cadres are still dead.
Reminds me of an old "Wizard of Id" cartoon in the funny papers:
King (to prisoner): "Any final words?"
Prisoner (to King): "The death penalty doesn't work!"
King (to prisoner): "I'll believe that when I see you again."
Same thing with those North Vietnamese Communist true believers.
Saddam likewise gutted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which is why the mullahs' control of Iran is compromised today.
A 25 year old (in 1975) Vietnamese commie is 55 years old today. Those who died in the war would largely have been replaced by now anyway.
Your point seems to be that the death of a lot of soldiers in war creates semi-permanent damage to a society, crippling it for decades or perhaps as long as a century.
This no doubt explains how Germany, which suffered enormous loss of life in WWI, especially among the officers and other cadre, came very close to conquering the world 20 years later.
Begs the question what are we now doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both these countries are Muslim and will continue to be so after we have left.
The goal of toppling Saddam achieved.
The question of WMD well whether they existed, or are in Syria under the control of either the Russians or some group are no longer under Saddam.
Iraq's infrastructure for creating WMD is wrecked.
So if we are in Iraq nation building then the answer has to be yes, otherwise we are wasting our time being over there.
I believe that is the point of the war-weary former supporters of the war in the States, that we can't win, these people are irredeemable, and we ought to start the genocide.
You're an imam now?
But warplanners and warfighters MUST answer the question, if only provisionally, because the wars they plan and fight are contingent on the answer.
The most important question, IMO, is WHY do our warplanners and warfighters believe Islam is reformable and capable of peaceful coexistence with civilization?
Do they believe it because it is true (or they think it true), or do they believe it because the only war they are prepared to fight presupposes it to be true?
War weary former supporters, we have only started in Iraq.
I hate told you so's.
But before we went in I pointed out on FR that toppling Saddam was the easy bit, if we were not ready to take on the hard part phase 4 pacification, stabilization and normalization we should never go into Iraq.
As for starting genocide.
That will never happen, after all you are on earth for what 80 years most, who wants to spend a eternity in hell because they were judged on that on judgment day, something many people on this site seem to forget.
How do you explain you killed millions of Gods children women children the elderly as well as the men, the unborn (would that be a abortion on a grand scale) because we perceived them to be a threat to our earthly existence.
Having given up entirely on ever living in peace with Muslims, what do you propose to do?
"...or do they believe it because the only war they are prepared to fight presupposes it to be true?"
That is well phrased. Of course, I don't know that anyone can know one way or another with certainty. What the cartoon jihad showed is that we are going to have to fight this war on the streets of Europe, Australia and probably America before it is over. And regardless of what one is willing to do bombing the hell out of London, etc. would be counter-productive.
This is a very serious problem, and it is getting worse. I don't think it is getting worse because we invaded Iraq, I just think invading Iraq did not really achieve the intended effect of quelling global jihad. The jihadists are not organized or centralized and they are working on their own timetables. We are not fighting them strongly enough in places like the Phillipines, not at all in Africa it seems, insufficiently in Thailand, etc. And esp. in Europe were people seem to be cowed, and Bush of course can barely bring himself to say "Islam" without following it up with "religion of peace".
I don't think (I certainly hope not, anyway) that we'll have to kill "all" the Muslims, but we really ought to get serious about killing the jihadis, not just the ones on the battlefield, but the ones in the jails also. The idea that Yale admitted a former taliban, and that the state dept. granted him a Visa shows just how pusillanimous we are being. I'm not saying that guy should be executed, but he sure as hell shouldn't be in the US.
I am critical of both of them for missing the chance to do this in 2001, when it WAS (briefly) possible.
Bush did not do it because he believes that It's a Small World After All. Rummy didn't do it because it would have cost him transformation and empowered his bureaucratic enemies, who are now retired instead of commanding Army Groups and Fleets.
Defeating global jihad requires territory to be seized and control of the children and grandchildren of the jihadis for at least 50 years.
Not enough people believe we can lose.
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