Is our enemy Terrorism or Islam?

I have been doing a whole lot of thinking about the sneak terror attack of September 11, 2001. I have been thinking about how the attack was waged, who did the attack, and the horrifying results of the attack.

How we got here no longer matters. The simple fact is that we are at war. The question remains, at war with what or whom? Are we at war with a nation? Are we at war with a band of pirates? Are we at war with an ideology?

I am personally convinced that this is nothing less than a clash of civilizations, civilizations that have been clashing for over a thousand years, and will continue to clash until one prevails over the other. The frightening conclusion that I keep coming back to is that we are at war with nothing less than Islam itself.

If this conclusion is correct, the consequences and ramifications of the approaching conflict will be breathtaking. I very much want to believe that we are not going to war against every Islamic nation on Earth, but I am very afraid that this is exactly what we are about to do.

I realize that every Islamic nation has issued strong denouncements of the terror attack, but I'm seeing nothing more than the flow of crocodile tears from their eyes and lies from their lips. When I see pictures of the spontaneous celebrations that broke out in Egypt, Palestine and who knows where else, I become convinced that all of Islam wants to see our nation in flames.

Considering how many billions of dollars we send to Egypt every year, to see their people dancing in the streets celebrating our suffering convinces me that they are not on our side, that they never have been, and they never will be. It is not much of a leap to suspect that if our so-called "ally" Egypt feels this way, then the other, less "moderate" Islamic nations out there can only harbor even more bitter feelings.

Furthermore, I am convinced that even if we start out carrying out a war against "terrorism", that this campaign will very quickly escalate into a war against Islam. In fact, it is my belief that the more effective our campaign against "terrorism" is, the more rapidly the conflict will escalate into a full-scale war against Islam.

I have found FreeRepublic to be a valuable source of information and intelligent analysis of current events. I would very much like to hear what other people have to say about this. I look forward to all of your inputs. Please try to keep the dialogue as civil as possible, since I know that we are talking about an extremely incendiary subject here. Thank you.

Our enemy is a particular ideology that is trying to attain power within all the countries of the historic Islamic civilization.

That ideology, taken straight and as the folks we are fighting mean to establish it, is a minority opinion in all Islamic countries but three - Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. And Iran has its own brand of the ideology, its own faction of it as it were. This ideology is a powerful opinion in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, and in Algeria, but does not hold direct political power in any of those. Syria, Iraq, and Libya are ruled by extremist parties that have some similar ideas about the outside world, but are focused on Arab nationalism and left-wing socialism, rather than on islam and theocracy. The full blown thing is a politically important but minority opinion in Egypt, Pakistan, and parts of central Asia, and a comparatively minor presence in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Kazakstan, Saudi Arabia and the smaller gulf states. Only tiny fringes are at all interested in such ideas in Indonesia and the Philipines. Almost nobody cares about such ideas in Nigeria or Malaysia.

The ideology in question seeks to define Islamic civilization negatively, by its hostility to all non-Islamic countries, and to regulate internal matters in Islamic countries essentially by a standard that any sympathy with anything modern or western is a kind of treason. They are trying to pretend a new unity of the Islamic world into existence, which in practice has been wholly absent from Islamic civilization for more than a thousand years.

There is a full spectrum of political opinion in Muslim countries. I'll explain a few of the main types to give a sense of the "spectrum".

- There are traditionalists who are culturally conservative but not violently anti-western, and tend to support monarchy. The more liberal among them would prefer constitutional monarchy. Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states are examples. The Shah of Iran was also in this category before his overthrow.

- There are socialist regimes, hostile to the west but embracing what they view as some aspects of modernism. They will generally make some use of Islamic rhetoric, but internally they struggle to prevent religious leaders from gaining more influence. Many of these were once clients of the Soviet Union, at least partially. Examples are Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, and the Palestinian Authority. Egypt was once in this category, but since Sadat the government has been more pro-western, blending this with the next.

- There are nationalists, often with the military playing a large role in the regime, who sometimes have allied with the west, are sometimes culturally conservative and sometimes modernizing and secularizing. Turkey and Pakistan have both been in this category - Turkey always as a US ally and generally modernizing culturally, Pakistan mostly so but with ups and downs, and more conservative culturally.

- And there are the Islamic fundamentalists, in the sense meant here those who want a theocratic regime, traditional shariah law, and usually violently anti-western. Examples are Iran and Afghanistan. Sudan combines elements of this position and elements of the socialist position above.

Each of these positions is represented not just in the countries listed, but in all of them. The ruling powers I have listed, but all have their internal opposition. I will give some examples, so the pattern is clear.

- In Algeria, the socialists are in power and engaged in a violent civil war with the fundamentalists.

- In Egypt, the government straddles the socialist and nationalist positions above, but roughly a quarter of the population support the fundamentalist position, in often banned political parties (Islamic Brotherhood e.g.).

- In Turkey, the nationalists are in power and the fundamentalists in opposition, but more moderate in their views than anywhere else, with between a quarter and a third of the population supporting them.

- In Saudi Arabia, the traditionalists are in power and the fundamentalists and socialist outlooks divide the opposition between them.

- In Pakistan, the nationalists are in power and the socialists are in opposition.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah - these are names of factions that agree with the fundamentalist ideology and have supported terrorism against Israel and the west. But they are not governments.

In fact, much of the motivation of the terrorist attacks in "domestic", rather than any effect they might have on our policies. Those perpetrating them are trying to show themselves more stridently opposed to foreigners than their rival views, more willing to engage in direct action. They are trying to make all of the other views look like half measures, dupes of the west, un-islamic, lukewarm.

It is not a monolith. The fourth faction wants to make it one, and foreign policy is the issue on which they try to do it. They try to equate internal unity, foreign policy violence and stridency, pride, high morals, and a show of piety. That is their "sales pitch". It is nothing like the uniform opinion of even the mideast, let alone the Islamic world. Which incidentally also includes fringes were many of the ideas above are quite secondary to other domestic political questions (e.g. Nigeria, Malaysia, Kazakstan, etc).

The illusion that it is the whole Islamic world comes from at least three sets of blinders. One, we tend not to notice the parts of the Islamic world, in purely religious terms, that do not fight the same political pattern. We don't think of Nigeria as part of Islam but as part of Africa; of Malaysia as part of south-east Asia. Two, we see examples of adherence to the view itself in most countries, since it is an international ideology, like liberalism or socialism, and thus has party adherents in Egypt, the west bank, Afghanistan, etc. In other words, we are fooled merely by its being an international opinion. And three, we fail to distinguish one ideology from another, when they seem close enough in practical terms for us. Thus we make relatively little distinction between anti-western sentiment motivated by Arab nationalism, and by socialist ideas, vs. those motivated by Islamic fundamentalism. But a glance at Algeria, where a civil war has raged for more than a decade between the socialist and the Islamicist outlooks, is enough to show these are violently opposed views, within Islamic civilization itself.

I hope this is interesting.

Do you think everyone in Chicago believes everything written in the old testament? They don't, you know. Neither does everyone in Egypt or Pakistan (let alone Indonesia or Nigeria) believe everything written in the Koran. If they've even read it. If they can even read.

The political opinions I laid out are not any imposition of outside categories, they are the things the people of the region fight with each other about, all the time. Do you think all the Algerian soldiers fighting a civil war against Islamic fundamentalists in their own country agree with the guys they are shooting? Whether you delude yourself that far or not, they don't.

Understanding the politics even of your own country with any accuracy and nuance can be trying to the impatient. Thus the popularity of the common American sentiment that all politicians are the same and it doesn't make any difference anyway. I trust everyone at Free Republic knows better than that about politics -here-. Well, there are real differences elsewhere, too. Your lack of interest in them does not mean they do not exist.

On a practical level, I quite agree that anyone who defends Tuesday's attack, or is pleased by it, shares the guilt of the perpetrators - politically speaking. That hardly embraces the whole of Islam, however, and who thinks otherwise is kidding himself. Remember, when we speak of the whole of Islam we are talking about 1 billion people from west Africa to New Guinea, and from Madagascar to the Urals. Not just Sudan and Afghanistan, and a quarter to a half of the population of the countries in between. Which is all you will find cheering this outrage.

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