David Warren essay:
While I'm away
I am going on holiday for four weeks. I know it is unprofessional to mention this (and want you to know I know), but the times are rather extraordinary. I have been writing almost daily about "the war against terrorism" since the attacks on New York and Washington, seven months ago. Anything could happen in the next four weeks. And since I won't be in the paper, I want to deliver my commentary in advance.
There are two large fronts in this war, and may soon be three. Israel/Palestine is currently taking all the headlines, but the arrest in Pakistan this last week of Abu Zubaydah, the Al Qaeda operations chief, was a reminder that the "Afghan" front is still quite alive. There are also many little fronts, in Yemen, the Philippines, international banks, every city in North America and Europe -- too many to count. At any moment any one of these could suddenly "frontpage".
A third large front will open when the United States begins to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- when, not if. And there is a danger the fronts will coalesce, before or during. Iran and Syria may come to Iraq's aid, sensing a shared fate; all three, and Syria's client, Lebanon, may become the bases for frightful missile and suicide pilot attacks on Israel; and Iran may extend its present malign activities in Afghanistan.
In other words, all the materials are in place for a regional conflagration, that could begin at any time. I doubt this can be avoided; though the preparations by the respective sides are such that -- note to news desk -- I don't think it is likely to happen before I get back.
One of the advantages of an occasional holiday is the chance to think. The inability to do this is a problem all of our political leaders endure while in office. There are always urgent matters day to day, which they must pretend to be on top of, leaving no time to consider what's important. They go into office with their accumulated "intellectual capital". No one has so much of this that it will not be entirely expended after several years of continuing crisis, which is why no politician should ever be re-elected, unless the alternative is unthinkable.
That the Middle East is full of presidents-for-life helps explain a few things. That each is still operating upon premises with which he came to power -- years, sometimes decades ago -- is equally evident.
Moreover, it helps to explain the success of one Osama bin Laden, a man who has proved an intellectual giant in this region of burned-out pygmies. Gamel Abdul Nasser, the disastrous but significant president of Egypt, set the political agenda for the previous long generation, which was secular, socialist, pan-Arab nationalist, and violent. The Assad family of Syria, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, are among the holdovers of that distant era, rapidly accommodating themselves to a new environment in which religious fanaticism is the sine qua non.
The late Ayatollah Khomeini for the Iranians, and now Osama bin Laden for the Arabs, have set the new agenda; and new leaders emerging tend to give at least lip service to their ideals. They are religious, entrepreneurial, pan-Islamic, and violent. Among the Iranian people, the thrill of Islamism has largely worn off, for they have lived with its consequences through 23 years. Among the Arabs -- especially the huge number celebrating in the West Bank and all over, the day the World Trade Centre came down -- there is still the thrill of novelty. The belief that "Islam" has a new weapon that will bring the arrogant West to its knees is widespread. The desire to use it is as widespread. Our Western media still do not grasp quite how widespread.
It is my hunch that in another couple of decades, "Islamism" will have gone the way of "Nasserism" -- will be utterly discredited, and treated by its survivors as if they had never been involved (as many Germans remembered Nazism). And it will, perhaps, be replaced by a new ideology, that may also be violent. (When its exponents say, "Islam is a religion of peace", they correctly describe about three of its 14 centuries.)
But for now, and in the foreseeable future, the surprise is not that Islam can be violent, but that it is armed with a vicious new weapon. This is the suicide bomber. It is adaptable to deliver warheads as simple as the explosives strapped around a Palestinian shahid, or as complex as a fuel-laden commercial airliner.
Moreover, it is egalitarian, as the youth of the West Bank and Gaza have shown us. Once the example is set, any number of people have the means to achieve their Andy Warhol moment, even without an elaborate terror infrastructure to back them up. It is centuries since the Arabs were strong on organization. It is precisely because it exploits the simmering anarchy in failed societies, that the principle of the suicide attack has shown such promise.
Little Israel, for instance, never had to fear conquest, even when attacked at the moment of her foundation in 1948, and before she had a proper government and army, by the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq. Since Napoleon invaded Egyptin 1798, every single military encounter between Western and Muslim forces has been a cakewalk for the West.
But even at the highest level of organization, the principle of suicide is being embraced. Iran, Iraq, Syria, are now mounting threats to Israel that cannot possibly succeed as military ventures, can only hope to kill large numbers. With extraordinary complacency, Ayatollah Rafsanjani told cheering crowds assembled for him in Tehran recently that the moment Iran had nuclear weapons, it would use them on Israel. They even cheered when he casually acknowledged that millions of Muslims would die in the reply.
On the one hand, in "Islamism" or "Jihadism" we are dealing with a worldview, an ideology, more murderous than Nazism. It is also, arguably, more widely diffused. On the other hand, it is pathetically organized.
These next few years will be a very rough ride. But the same Western values that make us so much better organized, to say nothing of sane, will, in the end, ensure that we prevail. Like every fanatical ideology before it, Islamism won't work, can't, and in the end even its exponents will tire of their failure.
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