As someone who has gravitated toward the cold war model, I read this piece carefully. He made his assertion but he didn't back it up. Do you think it holds water?
Yes, I do, and I rate the failure to recognize the faith of the Islamists as one of main reasons that so many reasonable people don't get it about what we're fighting. For instance, I heard Bill Moyer's interview someone on his show last night (didn't catch the name), someone who's supposed to be an expert on Islamism, and the underlying tone of the answers I caught was 'well if they are so very mad at us then they must really have profound grievances, which we should check out and try to assuage.'
IMO, this misses several points in a big way. First, while there are certainly some grievances, most of them are unassuagable by us, no matter what we do. Furthermore, the totalitarian-Sharia solution that the Islamists have concocted is not only completely unreasonable, but the Islamists really do believe in it and are willing to kill and die for it. It is not a negotiating position on their part, or some kind of ploy to get their grievances addressed. It is an encompassing ideology, however fantastical it may look to us.
Whenever somebody spouts something so crazy, there is always a reluctance to take him seriously, a tendency to dismiss it all as rhetoric for the masses. How many people spent all of the 1930s calling Hitler a clown? But he really believed, and he got the Germans to follow him. The Islamists really believe too, and have got many Muslims to follow them, and have intimidated most of the others.
It took a long time for people in Britain and America to wake up to the true nature of Nazism, and that was a European state with a government and an army. This shadow network of AQ franchises is much harder for us to even notice. But I suspect that they will keep sending the message until we do get it.
You should check out Lee Harris, Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology, and the book he wrote from it (which I haven't read yet). That's the man who is really making the arguments. Den Beste links the Harris article on his blog. |
