Mish, I'll have to keep my comments simple - happens to be a very busy week for me. Here they are. Please forgive possible typo's and poor editing.
It occurs to me that most arguments in the debate with respect to our conflict wit the militant Islamists can be broadly placed into one of two categories. One, for convenience sake, we may label as "blowback" arguments. The other, perhaps, for the lack of a better term, Religious/Historical.
"Blowback" theories tend to place the main emphasis on connections between our (relatively recent) actions, and the anger and actions of the Jihadis. It is claimed that they attack us because of infidel boots on the Muslim soil, because of our meddling, because of our support for Israel, because of the war in Iraq, etc.
The "Religious/Historical" line of arguing maintains that the grievances like the ones mentioned above are merely (tactical) excuses, that the underlying reasons for their hatred are far deeper, and in some respects they go back for several centuries. The belief is that if we remove all our troops, if we abandon Israel and fulffill all other demands on Osama bin Laden's laundry list of grievances, they would still find reason to hate us and to attack us.
I submit that ignoring deeper psychological, historical, socioeconomic - AND religious - reasons for this great conflict of our age is a mistake.
The post to which you replied offered some - imo - interesting insights related to such "deeper" analysis. You quoted and commented on the first part of the post, but the stuff further down, I think, is more important.
I would like, if I may, present another example of thinking along such lines. It is a post by me, written in October or 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. By and large, I think, it remains valid. I haven't looked at it for a few years, and I think it's kind of fun... many of those thoughts back then were new and original.
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Last but not least -- I saved an article about the life and works by a person who remains the most important ideologue of the modern Islamist movements - Sayyid Qutb. Fascinating man. I actually read parts of his "Milestones", which is the ideological "bible" of the extremists. Interesting writing - very logical, "clean" - and absolutely... uncompromising. Quoting from memory - "Anyone who walks even one step along with a man who is in a state of Jahiliyah (religious ignorance) is himself in a state of Jahiliyah". That's what I call zero tolerance... :)
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Part 2 is the reply to this post.
The story about Qutb is a longish read - but it is probably the key, the conditio sine qua non - towards understanding what's on the mind of the opposition. An if we don't want to go through the effort of truly understanding them, that will keep us at a disadvantage.
Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion, hope to continue. |
