War of Ideas, Part 1

Airline flights into the U.S. are canceled from France, Mexico and London. Armed guards are put onto other flights coming to America. Westerners are warned to avoid Saudi Arabia, and synagogues are bombed in Turkey and France. A package left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art forces the evacuation of 5,000 museumgoers. (It turns out to contain a stuffed snowman.) National Guardsmen are posted at key bridges and tunnels.

What you are witnessing is why Sept. 11 amounts to World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. As the longtime Middle East analyst Abdullah Schleiffer once put it to me: World War II was the Nazis, using the engine of Germany to try to impose the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race. The cold war was the Marxists, using the engine of the Soviet Union to try to impose the reign of the perfect class, the working class. And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam.

O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here's how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization.

With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life — an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe — you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust.

Trust is built into every aspect, every building and every interaction in our increasingly hyperconnected world. We trust that when we board a plane, the person next to us isn't going to blow up his shoes. Without trust, there's no open society because there aren't enough police to guard every opening in an open society.

Which is why suicidal Islamist militants have the potential to erode our lifestyle. Because the only way to deter a suicidal enemy ready to use the instruments of daily life to kill us is by gradually taking away trust. We start by stripping airline passengers, then we go to fingerprinting all visitors, and we will end up removing cherished civil liberties.

So what to do? There are only three things we can do: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their own, and only they can really restrain their extremists.

As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it: The cold war ended the way it did because at some bedrock level we and the Soviets "agreed on what is shameful." And shame, more than any laws or police, is how a village, a society or a culture expresses approval and disapproval and applies restraints.

But today, alas, there is no bedrock agreement on what is shameful, what is outside the boundary of a civilized world. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamist terrorists are neither a state subject to conventional deterrence or international rules, nor individuals deterred by the fear of death. And their home societies, in too many cases, have not stigmatized their acts as "shameful." In too many cases, their spiritual leaders have provided them with religious cover, and their local charities have provided them with money. That is why suicide bombing is spreading.

We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can't just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II.

We are in a war for CIVILIZATION!!

At Mass, on Thanksgiving, a dishelved foreign looking man walked in with a BIG backpack and went up the aisle to the middle and went to the middle of the pew....I broke out in a cold sweat and was ready to FLEA....MASS...I was ready to leave Mass on Thanksgiving because I though he was going to bomb us!! THAT is how the Trust is broken. I detest those Islamofacists because of this.

We are in a war for CIVILIZATION!!

At Mass, on Thanksgiving, a dishelved foreign looking man walked in with a BIG backpack and went up the aisle to the middle and went to the middle of the pew....I broke out in a cold sweat and was ready to FLEE....MASS...I was ready to leave Mass on Thanksgiving because I though he was going to bomb us!! THAT is how the Trust is broken. I detest those Islamofacists because of this.

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Friedman doesn't quite get it, yet.

Steven den Beste illustrated the stakes in an open reply on his blog to an email from an Iranian critic of the war. He maintained that the war would end in one of two ways: with America triumphant and Muslim societies advancing towards representative government, or with America triumphant and much of the Muslim world reduced to a radioactive debris. Because of the tendency of religious fanatics to overreach, there is a strong possibility that the outcome of the war will be the latter case.

The lack of understanding on the part of Muslims of the American psyche is key here. They believe that they can ask us to choose between their survival and ours, and we will cower or convert to Islam because we are too effete to defend ourselves. They can make no greater mistake-if we believe that we must commit genocide to survive, then we will do so. Period.

Those are the stakes. Friedman's column is mere window dressing.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

Chris, I always enjoy your insights, and this is no exception.

Seriously - "honest injun", as the old saying went - do you think we Americans still have the fortitude and determination to win the fight?

"This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust."

And it is something that, once lost, is very difficult to ever regain. Also, it doesn't help that many of their enablers are our countrymen.

"Honest Injun", I do.

The Arabs make the mistake of watching television news, CNN, or reading the scribblings of the chattering classes and mistaking those sentiments for the willingness of Americans as a mass to defend their faith, their liberties, and their lives.

There are two sides to Americans; the Athenian side and the Spartan side. We have shown our Spartan side these past two years, and it has been rather off-putting to Europeans, and bewildering to Arabs who expected us to fold up like a cheap card table after 9-11.

But we have not pulled our other fist out from behind our back. That is our Roman side. Woe betide the Muslim world should we be forced to show that side of us.

Trust me on this: if an when the Arabs make the mistake of forcing us to choose between our survival, and theirs, the choice will be an easy one to make.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

Two things - A writer named Robert Sherrod who accompanied the Marines when they fought the Battle of Tarawa in 1943, wrote in his book about the battle how he wondered "if the youth of today are up to the job". History tells us they were. I believe we are up to it now.

The "enemy" is using methods that we find abhorrent. However after enough body bags have been filled with people out shopping or on vacation, we will do what needs to be done. In a fight for survival there are no rules.

Point 2 - The muslims do have things that are important to them - that's what we go after.

You're right. And if the leaders of the islamic nations can't get a handle on their crazies, then

"we're going to find out, sooner or later,

If Abdul will pray, to a glowing crater."

And I'm not optimistic about their leaders being able to control their millions of insane murder cultists.

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