Mr. Leiken, let’s start with you.
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Leiken: Thanks Jamie. It is always a mistake to underestimate the enemy or its appeal. Yes we are at war vs. Islamist terrorism. But the basis of Islamism runs deeper than irrational animosity against the West and freedom. Islamism is a combination of an anti-imperialist and a revivalist movement. To take the latter first:: if it despises “human freedom,” that’s because Islamists believe Western freedom, which it would call license, destroys family, community and man’s proper relation with God and nature – a criticism not far removed from social conservatism. As an anti-imperialist movement, it arose after the great powers divided up the Middle East, despite their WWI promises of freedom. Then, like nationalism and communism, it sought to blame the underdevelopment of Arab and Muslim nations on Western influence.
It pursues suicide bombing and mass terror as tactics in an asymmetric war, in which Islamism faces a better-armed enemy. These tactics can work, having provoked the US to take necessary pre-emptive actions (of which some have proved counter-productive, as in Iraq), thus dividing it from important allies, and having thrust Israel into a state of siege. The task before us is how to unite the country and Israel with the West and mainstream traditional Islam as well as civilians the world over against a common threat.
FP: Thank you Mr. Leiken. To be sure, of course there are always some “deeper” reasons for hatred and the impulse to kill -- and your insights into Islamism in this context are instructive. But I stress irrationalism because it is crucial to emphasize that there isn’t always some explainable “reason” why tyranny-worshippers perpetrate the crimes that they do. This is what the Left loves to do -- rationalize evil -- and in so doing, it weakens our battle against our enemy.
For instance, right after 9/11, a former academic colleague of mine said to me, in an agonizing tone full of personal pain: “Imagine how hurt those poor men [the hijackers] were by America to have been driven to that.”
No. The hijackers blew themselves up alongside 3,000 innocent people because they sought to kill others and themselves for no particularly logical or explainable reason. Of course we can examine their rage over the supposed and delusional injustice they perceive in Palestine, or in Western women wearing bikinis on Arab territory somewhere, but the point here is that there are movements, like fascism and communism, that simply hate human life and existence and yearn to extinguish it. And Islamism, like fascism and communism, is one of those movements.
In recognizing that this modern ideology seeks to suffocate life, without and within, we won’t waste our time trying to figure out what rewards our enemies want to stop killing. We’ll just get down to the business of killing them before, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, etc., they succeed in exterminating as many human beings as possible -- for its own sake.
Mr. Peters, go ahead. Share your wisdom with us.
Peters: I have no "wisdom" to offer. But I certainly have my views, formed by extensive travel, in uniform and in mufti, in the morbid ruins of the caliphate. First, although I use the term myself--one has no choice--I dislike calling the current conflict the "War On Terror." It's really the Islamic terrorists' war on us. I prefer "The Terror War." But the die is cast.
While I agree with much of what Mr. Leiken offered, I do not see al-Qaeda and its affiliates as anti-imperialist; on the contrary, I see them as Islamic imperialists--savage crusaders of their faith. They do not wish merely to repel interlopers, but to conquer. They do not wish simply to defeat the West, but to destroy it. And the caliphate they wish to restore--although they'll settle for apocalyptic destruction--once reached into southern Poland, into Ukraine, throughout Hungary and much of former Yugoslavia, throughout the Iberian Peninsula (and, briefly, as far north as the Loire), and it included Greece, Sicily and part of mainland southern Italy, and the Swahili Coast of Africa as far south as old Sofala in Mozambique--south of the Zambezi River. Their appetite for Allah's real estate on earth is second only to the hope of the inner circle to nudge their god toward an apocalypse (indeed, all monotheist religions have succumbed, at different times, to something equivalent to the Christian eschatology of the Book of Revelation).
In my view, the inner circle of terrorists about whom we must worry most consists of apocalyptic terrorists whose articulated goals are ephemeral and, at most, secondary. They are, above all, bent upon destruction, and their appetite for slaughter is and will remain insatiable. If Israel and the U.S. were destroyed, Europe would have to go, too (in fact, Europe is going to suffer far more in the coming decades than we are). Meanwhile, in Iraq and elsewhere, the terrorists are delighted to purge Islam of less-rigorous, less-doctrinally satisfactory Muslims by killing them. We are facing the psychotic progeny of a neurotic (at best) civilization.
Finally--for now--I was baffled a decade ago by the outrage over Samuel Huntington's concept of the "clash of civilizations." Clashing is what civilizations DO. It's their inherent mission. There is no example in history of adjacent civilizations cooperating constructively over an extended period. And we not only are experiencing a clash of civilizations, but a situation unprecedented in history: The crash of a major civilization, that of Middle Eastern Islam, before our eyes.
The struggle in which we Americans find ourselves today began in the seventh century A.D. (or C.E., if you prefer). As Islamic conquerors burst out of Arabia, a war began that has never ceased. Only Islam's weakness over the past few centuries has lulled us into a false sense of peace (the fighting never really stopped--we only pretended it did).
American carriers now cruise where once the Portuguese caravels sailed (although we're considerably better-behaved). Both sides remain crusaders of their kind. If we are able to find a means of consistent, productive cooperation between Islamic and Western civilization by the end of the 21st century, it will be a miraculous, unprecedented achievement.
Meanwhile, there's a war to fight.
FP: Mr. Laqueur?
Laqueur: I am also not happy with the term "War on Terror". War implies armies and navies and air forces and uniforms. And this of course is not the case at the present time. Nor do I think that the "war" against terror can be won, simply because it is one of the manifestations of human conflict in our time, perhaps the prevailing one in the years to come.
I find it difficult to envisage a world without conflict as far as one can look ahead. One can do a great deal to reduce the danger and the frequency of terrorism. Fanaticism, as historical experience shows, does not continue with equal intensity forever, in fact it is often a matter of a generation or two. But after relatively quiet periods it tends to reappear.
What can be done to reduce the dangers? Intelligence should be greatly improved, Western counter propaganda is virtually non-existent, political use should be made of the mistakes of the terrorists. But democracies will find it exceedingly difficult to act effectively for reasons which need not be elaborated in detail. This will change only following terrorist attacks in which weapons of mass destruction are used and it is probably unwise if governments are moving too far ahead of public opinion.
As for the ideology of radical Islamism, it is a mixture of a variety of motives, religious, nationalist etc,. but anti imperialism hardly figures. It is true that they may think of themselves as anti-imperialist, but I do not see any good reason to accept this self image. Iran and Turkey were never colonies and as for the Arabs they were indeed subjects of an empire throughout most of their history, but it was a Muslim empire.
FP: Mr. Laqueur, you never cease to amaze me. In four short paragraphs you say more than I have read in 300-page books on this subject.
Your words suggest that in the human condition there is a recurrent virus of fanaticism and hate that perpetually surfaces, always mutating into different forms. Human history has taught that this is, indeed, undeniable. So no, we are never going to “win” the war against evil, for it will always be with us in our human condition (in this phase of human history anyway), but we can, as you suggest, keep it at bay to our best ability.
Your comments regarding how we can best keep it at bay reveal the horror of our future. We live in a time when individuals such as al Zarqawi and bin Laden will eventually get their hands on WMDs. Only after they use these against our human populations will our democratic societies acquire the courage and will to defeat our current enemy effectively. But, thanks to the Michael Moores, Noam Chomskys, Teddy Kennedys and John Kerrys of this world – we do not yet have that courage and will. |
