How to win the war on militant Islam

View From the Right ^ | September 16, 2003 | Lawrence Auster

[rmlew]

What would victory in the war on terror consist of? As I’ve written recently, President Bush doesn't seem to have any idea. All he says is that we've got to "stay the course" in Iraq until, somehow, the Ba'athist and Jihadist resistance ceases. But, I've asked, what if it doesn't cease?

An antidote to the dangerous muddiness of the Bush administration's thought process is provided by Mark Helprin in an article at the Claremont Review. While the piece, like all Helprin's writings, is wordy and overcharged with adrenaline, it contains this clarifying insight:

[T]here can be but one effective strategy in the war against terrorism, and that is to shift Arab-Islamic society into the other of its two states- out of nascent 'asabiya [defined as "an ineffable combination of group solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps, and the elation of victory feeding upon victory"] and into comfortable fatalism and resignation.... [T]he object of such an exercise is not to defeat the Arabs but to dissuade them from making war upon us...

This, Helprin notes, is what the British so brilliantly succeeded in doing to Islam in the 19th and early 20th century.In order to put the Arabs back into that desired state of passivity today, America in the Iraq war needed to impress the imagination of the Arab world with the total futility of resisting us. Instead, we used the bare resources needed to win. Helprin continues:

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over.

But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

While Helprin doesn't mention it, it occurs to me that Bush's emphasis on the narrow goal of eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (a theme that controlled almost the entire debate on the war, including VFR's own participation in that debate) had the effect of blocking our vision from the much larger goal we should have pursued, which was the utter demoralization of militant Islam, or, rather, just plain Islam. The neoconservatives, with their stress on democratizing and empowering the Muslims rather than on crushing their will, also contributed to this blinkered vision.

[RLK]

In order to win this war Mohammedism must be thoroughlly refuted and discredited, not portrayed as the religion of peace. Mohammed must be portrayed as the villainous psychotic that he was.

[stradivarius]

The U.S. has been holding back because we're merciful and place a premium on human life. Nuking Kabul and Baghdad on Sept. 12, 2001 while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and his sons were still celebrating would have been much less expensive and far more effective at ending terrorism.

I think if there were another major terrorist attack on American soil, particularly with weapons of mass destruction, God forbid, then the U.S. will not hold back.

Probably, the U.S. would atomize Damascus and the Bakaa Valley to send a message to other Arab regimes that they should seriously consider stopping their support and cover for terrorists and the madrasas that produce them. That would send a clear message to Iran, and produce the needed internal pressure for democratic revolution. That would also isolate Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

I don't think it will make a difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat, that's what the U.S. national security would require, for the reasons stated in the article. We already tried the polite way with precision smart targetting, ground troops, and economic support.

Unfortunately, I don't believe the state sponsors of Islamic jihad want a peaceful alternative; they still believe the U.S. is hamstrung and weak in our capabilities, for the reasons stated in the article.

The Arab regimes cannot be seperated and viewed in isolation - they see themselves as a large single Arab nation. All of them fully support the cult of jihad, and educate their children to murder Non-Muslims, and have the goal of Islamic law dominating the entire world.

[tkathy]

Both the doctrines and the deeds of world wide Islam must be publicized.

[rmlew]

Defeat every one of the unfriendly states in the region.