Posted on 09/14/2001 11:20:18 PM PDT by Billy_bob_bob
Is our enemy Terrorism or Islam?
By Billy_Bob_Bob.
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.
We will never forget or forgive the sneak terror attack of September 11, 2001.
There have been actual elections. In Algeria, the Islamic parties got about 52% of the vote - and the government responded by banning the parties and ignoring the election result. In Turkey the more moderate Islamic party there receives about 30% of the vote, and has taken part in governments, but usually are frozen out by the other parties combining against them. In Egypt, Islamic parties have received up to 25% of the vote but are usually banned; they form new front parties to evade the ban until those are banned as well. In Iran, the hardliners get about 40% of the vote but retain control of the highest levels of the state, and force the opposition to accept most of their agenda as a condition for operating; more direct opposition to their agenda is broken up by the secret police. The Taliban took power in Afghanistan at least as much by political organizing as by military success; it was a broadly popular movement in the south and southwest of the country. It subverted rival military factions from below, winning over the rank and file of the warriors.
In Pakistan, the Islamic parties themselves are small splinter groups, but the nationalist parties make concessions to their agenda in order to win the votes of their potential supporters, bring them "inside" the party system, and moderate them. And of course one such nationalist now holds power as military dictator, after a coup d'etat against the previous corrupt civilian administration (which looted the country of several billion dollars and tried to assassinate the present dictator, then just a senior general, when he blew the whistle).
In other countries, Islamic parties or sects are minorities, often without access to elections. They form part of the underground opposition in Saudi Arabia; they are the chief rivals to Arafat for influence in Palestine; their militias (e.g. Hezbollah, backed by the Iranians) act as local warlords in some parts of Lebanon, on an uneasy footing with their Syrian overlords, who sometimes treat them as useful for dirty work, sometimes as inevitable, sometimes as a treasonous group backed by the wrong outside power, etc.
"It seems that even if the Islamists are a minority in these problem countries, it doesn't matter. The Islamists are in control"
In Sudan, in Afghanistan, and in Iran, that is true. It is not true in a number of other countries we think of as problem countries - Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the PA. All of those support terrorism, without being governed by the Islamicist outlook directly. The ruling outlook in each of those cases is a hard line socialism, anti-western throughout the cold war but not interested in returning to medieval life internally. The rulers of those places use Islamic rhetoric and try to keep ahead of any Islamic resistence, while also using police power to prevent organized Islamic resistence to their own rule. Sometimes they make use of internal Islamic radical factions - e.g. the PA. But from the standpoint of the Islamicist ideologues themselves, none of those governments has any Islamic legitimacy to speak of, and they'd overthrow them in a heartbeat if they could. In Algeria, they are in the process of attempting exactly that - that is the nature of the civil war there.
"and they will be for the forseeable future"
Some can forsee more than others, I suppose. The primary US objective in the coming campaign ought to be to prevent radical version of Islamicist ideology from controlling governments anywhere in the Islamic world, for starters. And ought to insist on the dismantling of tolerance of organized terrorism by such groups, by governments of other parties and persuasions in the region. The last is not an easy task for us, because it involves working with somewhat unsavory governments against the ideological outlook of significant portions of their populations. And when we do, that outlook will sell itself internally as the only party that really stands up to the west.
Others have mentioned the issue of the relations between Middle eastern versions of Marxism and Islamic ideology. Socialism in the Arab world is usually of the nationalist stripe rather than doctrinaire Marxism, but certainly exists as a second source of evil policies, domestically and in relations with the west. Saddam is no priest; neither is Qaddafi. The former's idol is Stalin, the latter's is Mao. Saddam fought a large scale conventional war for almost a decade against Islamicist Iran, and while he did so was funded by the gulf states and Saudi Arabia. Not that those traditional governments can live with his own brand of socialist extremism - it is just that in the early 80s they were far more afraid of internal Islamicist parties, being backed by Iranian intelligence operations seeking to support their own revolution.
On matters external, and especially in war policy toward Israel, the socialists and Islamicists see eye to eye, and sometimes work together. In the Sudan, they manage to operate the government in cooperation. Both support terrorism of one kind or another, against one set of targets or another. Both are anti-capitalist and anti-semitic outlooks. They have their Ribbentrop-Molotov pacts when expediency warrants it. But in the end, neither can live with the other's full blown program. The socialists want a version of modernism, and the Islamicists are as dead-set against that form as against the west. Syria did not fight the Soviet Union and is not today hostile to Russia, as the Islamicists did and are.
If it helps, one can think of the traditionalists as natural allies of the UK in the days of its now vanished empire, the nationalists as natural allies of the cold war US, the socialists as natural allies of the cold war USSR. The Islamicists are natural allies of no external power, but their ideology is closest to ultramontane views of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in parts of Europe, and their propaganda-line ancestors can be found in European fascism.
I do not mean that last to be an empty slur, but as descriptive of definite similarities in the forms of propaganda used. I am thinking of anti-semiticism, opposition to capitalism and communism both, external jingoism, internal repression, fantasies of reviving long-dead ages of empire, claims that social justice will follow from unity and selfless subordination to the ideology, wounded pride as the main selling point. Of course there are differences, as the cultures in which the movements occur are different, and so are the political histories of the various countries. But many similar "tropes" are used by the Islamicists today.
I hope this helps.
One of my buddies says blaming Islam for recent outrages is like blaming Christianity for Hitler...
Thoughts, Jason? (BTW, you remind me of a Naderite from the West Coast that I knew once... I guess it's the name.)
Additionally, I do not believe we need point to the nazis to find similar kinds of extremism in the west. I'm often amazed at what I have seen right here on FR, even before the 9-11 attack. On a thread last week, a poster was calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from every Mediterranean country from Morocco through Egypt. And since the attack, a number of posters have called for our use of nukes. These people are of little significant difference than those we may end up legitimately targeting for termination in the coming months.
Thanks for the great, most informative replies.
As for others advocating extreme uses of force here these days, I agree with you that we should not go overboard. I do not, however, agree in the least with any pretended moral equivalence between those shouting that way in their passion right now, and either the people who attacked us on Tuesday or the ideology they believed in.
There remains a moral chasm between advising one's government to use extreme force after one's country has been attacked, and taking such matters into one's own hands, aggressively. I trust our system and leadership to filter out the noise of such extreme calls; that is just what states are meant to do. Those who act on their own lack the restraints that come with responsibility.
The anger people in the US feel right now is wholly justified, and is the energy behind justice. But like all passions, it must be regulated, channeled, and aimed by reasoning and responsible men. I am sure those voicing such attitudes will be governed by the more moderate actions our leadership will soon take.
It is also worth keeping in mind, however, the danger involved in the power of modern nation states. As a wise man who taught me much history once put it (John Mearsheimer), modern nation states are tremendously powerful killing machines, and they are not as easy to switch off as they are to switch on. That power must be handled with great care. So far as warning about that was all you meant, I quite agree with the sentiment.
I simply deny that morally speaking, those advocating extreme measures of retaliation today are on a par with the men who did this on Tuesday. Their advice is extreme and should not be taken. But they have offered it as advice; the men who crashed into the towers offered nothing and brooked no review of their murderous passions. That is not a trivial difference. The passions of mankind are always with us; they are in human nature. How they are governed makes the difference between civilization and its absence.
I think you are right.
John Derbyshire's version of this struggle:
KILL THE TERRORIST
DESTROY THEIR RESOURCES
PRAY FOR OUR VICTORY
Yes.
BUMP
Can you cite the exact passage from the Koran ? I was in a bookstore today and I couldn't find it.
Thanks in advance.
BUMP
I see 3 countries on the hot seat and 4 hiding from our immediate anger, with about 1/12th of the total Islamic population in each of those categories. Not counting internal opposition - two of the hotseat cases have ongoing civil wars.
I am asking for something beyond generalizations and mere opinions. Name specific countries, and what you think their position supposedly is. You won't convince me of anything practical without specifics.
Calling for the killing of Americans, will be in effect a crime. And rightly so. Morally speaking, so also will the calling for the killing of Arabs and Muslims. Its just that the latter may be a safer crime.
The reasoning is simple; the more we attack, and the more successful our attacks are, the more polarized the "moderate" Moslems become, the more likely they are to become radicalized, and the radical Islam factions will become more powerful. Eventually all of the moderate regimes will be toppled, and all of the Islamic nations of the world will be radicalized and united in their violent opposition to the West.
I've simplified my arguments, but I trust you get my point. My question to you is; am I correct in my assumptions? Or, am I totally off base? I look forward to your reply.
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