David Brooks in the New York Times shows a glimmer of understanding that this is an ideological war, and not simply a battle against lovers of undifferentiated mayhem or raw power. He credits the 9/11 Commission with this great discovery (Dave, my books have been out longer; do I get to be George Kennan?), and makes a few good observations -- along with (this is the Times, after all) one ridiculous, PC one. (Thanks to Nicolei for the link.)
hen foreign policy wonks go to bed, they dream of being X. They dream of writing the all-encompassing, epoch-defining essay, the way George F. Kennan did during the cold war under the pseudonym X.Careers have been spent racing to be X. But in our own time, the 9/11 commission has come closer than anybody else. After spending 360 pages describing a widespread intelligence failure, the commissioners step back in their report and redefine the nature of our predicament.
We're not in the middle of a war on terror, they note. We're not facing an axis of evil. Instead, we are in the midst of an ideological conflict.
We are facing, the report notes, a loose confederation of people who believe in a perverted stream of Islam that stretches from Ibn Taimaya to Sayyid Qutb. Terrorism is just the means they use to win converts to their cause.
That's the ridiculous one I warned you about: "a perverted stream of Islam that stretches from Ibn Taimaya to Sayyid Qutb." A perverted stream of Islam that is 700 years old? Ibn Taymiyya died in 1328. The line from him to Qutb, who died in 1966, is as much of a "perverted stream" of Islam as Protestantism, which is 200 years younger than Brooks' perverted Islam, is a perverted stream of Christianity. That's not a "perverted stream," that's an entire tradition.
There are other things wrong with this as well. For one, Ibn Taymiyya invented nothing. He had plenty of antecedents, and his thinking wasn't out of line with that of other Muslim thinkers. Nowadays American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies try to portray him, because of his forthright statements about violent jihad and the frequency with which he is quoted by people like Osama, as some sort of heretic. But he has never been considered such in Islamic tradition.
A little quiz. Ready, Dave? Who said this: "...in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with "power politics," because Islam is "under obligation to gain power over other nations."
Got to have been that heretic Ibn Taymiyya, right? Wrong. It was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the pioneering sociologist who has, for a complex of reasons, become a kind of totem for the democracy movement in Egypt and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
That's right, the democracy movement.
Also: those who claim objectivity shouldn't make such distinctions between Islamic sects. Way back when I was in college, I noticed in studying both Christianity and Islam that my professors would studiously avoid words like "orthodox" and "heretical" (to say nothing of "perverted") when speaking of various sects; those words and judgments were the province of believers only. But Brooks and other members of the PC elite have no trouble identifying "true" and "perverted" Islam. If only they could convince the Muslims.
It seems like a small distinction - emphasizing ideology instead of terror - but it makes all the difference, because if you don't define your problem correctly, you can't contemplate a strategy for victory.
Just what I have been saying all along, Dave.
When you see that our enemies are primarily an intellectual movement, not a terrorist army, you see why they are in no hurry. With their extensive indoctrination infrastructure of madrassas and mosques, they're still building strength, laying the groundwork for decades of struggle. Their time horizon can be totally different from our own....Most of all, we need to see that the landscape of reality is altered. In the past, we've fought ideological movements that took control of states. Our foreign policy apparatus is geared toward relations with states: negotiating with states, confronting states. Now we are faced with a belief system that is inimical to the state system, and aims at theological rule and the restoration of the caliphate. We'll need a new set of institutions to grapple with this reality, and a new training method to understand people who are uninterested in national self-interest, traditionally defined.
Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. He observed that we are in the fight against Islamic extremism now where we were in the fight against communism in 1880.
We've got a long struggle ahead, but at least we're beginning to understand it.
Yes! When I saw Kean shaking his head and declaring, "This is a conflict our children and grandchildren will be fighting," (or something close), I knew they had had their eureka moment.
“There is no joy greater in the sinful heart of man than to do evil in the name of good. . . . And there is no emotion stronger or more pleasurable than that of hatred, especially when it is held in the name of justice.” - Theodore Dalrymple (National Review May 3, 2004)
“The ideology is the key, . . . . Militant Islam cannot be compared to any segment of Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. These religions do not embody groups with totalitarian utopian ideologies that seek world hegemony. In fact, militant Islam resembles fascism and communism more than any religious movement.” – Daniel Pipes (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, May 2, 2004)
People are listening!
One more thing. President Bush described our clash with Islam as a clash of "political visions" in a major foreign policy speech that was given short shift by the pundits. Tom Brokaw spoke dismissively about how President Bush "tried" to compare this conflict to what we experienced during WWII.
Also, the Palestinian meltdown is a sobering sight. Gosh, Could Bush be right about Arafat??
Interesting times..
Yes, this is a war of ideologies and cultures with a
transnational fanatical religious extremist cult:
Islamofascism
See our forums site at:
http://hspig.org/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1104
The closet comparison to Western culture and religion is:
KKK
Ron Wright, Moderator
HSPIG Forums Site
www.hspig.org
Ron:
Which usergroup deals with islamofascism?
This is encouraging. Hopefully some Islamic Apologists will actually READ Qur'an instead of
believing version presented by CAIR and ISLAMONLINE.
Does this mean our granchildren will be Crusaders?
Well at least some people at the NYT are slowly waking up. Knowing your enemy is the first step in defeating him.
Someone mentioned the Palestinians. Arafat has spent the years since Oslo when the PA was established plotting the destruction of Isreal first by teaching hate and then with a war waged on Isreali civilians. Arafat's plots have resulted in the defeat of the Palestinians, the destruction of the PA and the Palestinian people being worse off then ever.Isreal remains and is slowly recovering.Jihad fails miserably once again.
Re: CGW's question
I far as I can tell it was Victor David Hanson who coined the term, "Islamofascism," in an essay he published last week in the National Review Online, and later posted on Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog).
The essay is, "History's Verdict":
http://victorhanson.com/index.html
The essay is posted on our site at:
and is refered to in my piece, "FREEDOM - Thx to The Greatest Generation for Preserving It" (Posted as reply to "Shoe Bomber" sentencing:
http://hspig.org/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?t=1104
Ron
Islamofacism is one of those terms people like Hansen are using to designate Islam in its political dimensions. See also "militant Islam," "radical Islam" and so forth. Qutb would say, "rubbish, Islam is what it is, pure and simple."
It's good to meet you all and be a part of this group.
Islam is in it's death throes. Now is its most dangerous time, but don't think for a minute it can actually win. No way, no how. We just have to convince the Muslims of that fact. It's they who will determine how much it takes to do so. We can do it, no matter what it takes.
There’s been ZERO news to date from “Palestine” on its Legislative Committee’s emergency meeting, due several nights ago - it doesn’t publish any Hansard, and it looks to have quite excluded the media (not for the first time). The Council’s Special Session was convened to decide the future of the incumbency of the resigned PM, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) - a weighty topic indeed, but nothing whatsoever about it’s been heard since the conclave was hastily summoned!
With no direct information forthcoming, anecdotally, there’s been a palpable, mounting, private UNEASE discerned recently, among a number of the Arabs here, on the subject of the prospects for “Palestine”. Seldom do they distinctly articulate the cause for their slowly rising dread - and when they do, they always take care to lace any explicit expression of their anxieties with vehement denials, strenuous qualifications and dense obfuscations. Their common, gripping fear for “Palestine”, though, is of CIVIL WAR being unleashed there, sooner rather than later.
It depends on what’s meant by a civil war: two defined opponents, Reds and Whites, “the Blue and the Gray”, Loyalists and Nationalists, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Marians and Sullans, etc, or mayhem more resembling the crucible of Lebanon from the 1970s into the ‘80s?
There could possibly be a showdown between only two sides (“moderates” versus Islamo-fascists, it’s to be hoped) in “Palestine”. But - if so - somewhat more likely, there’ll just be a nasty struggle for power between the “secularist”, fascist PLO and the rabid Islamists of Hamas and Jihad Islami.
However, “Palestine”’s liable not so much to be plunged into a classic civil war, but instead, at least at first, for a while, for the “Revolution” to turn increasingly inwards, to feed maniacally upon itself, releasing all the demons of incoherency on which its mythos has been constructed, to witness “Palestine” become helplessly suspended in a state of total, extended, bloody CHAOS, featuring constant, swirling, opportunistically-shifting alignments.
Once the current, rump central authority dissolves, power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will most probably devolve in different districts to an assortment of local “warlords”. These various bosses, plus their multiplicity of operatives, gunmen, activists, apparatchiks, thugs, mercenaries and subornees - a predatory plethora of independent factional paramilitaries, ex-“security agency forces”, feudal and family militias, armed radical groups, criminal gangs, vigilantes, et al - would immediately be caught up in ferocious competition for advantage over a rapidly diminishing pie, as the spreading anarchy fully demolishes the residual “Palestinian” economy in its wake.
The concomitant, internecine violence there would be horrific, but (for the most part) could be CONTAINED - by Israel’s vital security barriers and, no doubt, by continual, competent, Jordanian and Egyptian border-patrols. (The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan definitely doesn’t want to be inundated with more “Palestinian” refugees - already about 2/3 of its population are “Palestinians”; Egypt doesn’t require more “Palestinian” Arabs either, scared that they would further destabilize the jittery rule of the “Pharoah”.)
“Palestine” might well see a protracted period - years, generations - of bitter, internal strife and fratricide, prior to the eventual emergence of some new leader there - who may then need to win a murderous, “standard” civil war against his own domestic rivals next, to finally secure his power - before “Palestine” (or what’s left of by that time) will ever be able to move on, at length, to SERIOUSLY addressing the larger questions of regional peace....
What a relief to hear that someone is beginning to see this for what it is - an ideological problem. So many people on the left have bought into the idea that wars are started on the basis of economics alone. As a result, when it comes to wars based upon other things, such as ideologies, they cannot clearly define matters. These people are effectively "out to sea."
But now, a new idea is beginning to sink in... There are people out there that actually believe that ideas are more important than money. What a complete surprise; its actually a revolutionary and novel idea. /sarcasm off. Of course, this idea has been around for millenia and they are just waking up to it again. I hope they continue to consider it as a possibility. It will make the war ahead - despite its being very sad - a little more understandable.
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