| FrontPageMag.com | Articles By Robert Spencer | Articles By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Robert Spencer Bio |  |
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
Common sense from Dan Greenberg in the MetroWest Daily News (thanks to Nicolei):
It has become almost impossible to have a detached discussion -- one that takes historical considerations into account -- about the war on terror, and the position of Iraq in the context of that war. Here, I would like to do my best to contribute to such a discussion.Let's begin with some basic facts. First, for some time now, radical Islam has engaged in a brutal war on Western culture, seeking to eliminate all vestiges of that culture within the Muslim world and to undermine its existence in the Western world. This is a no-holds-barred attack, governed by none of the so-called "rules of war" that supposedly civilized nations claim to have put in place. There are no distinctions made between belligerents and non-belligerents; any and every person in the West is a target, apparently including even Muslims who live in the West or are at peace with the West.
Second, there is no single coordinated command structure to radical Islam. New terror groups form, old groups disband, but all have a common goal, and all applaud each other's successes and support each other's efforts. They try to infiltrate official Islamic governmental structures and, where this does not succeed, they gain cover and support through the threat of violence.
Third, these groups use a broad range of tactics and strategies to achieve their goals. They employ unfettered physical violence; they take advantage of people's greed in order to purchase their weapons and influence; and they use normal diplomatic means to insert themselves into international power politics.
Fourth, these groups gain succor from willing supporters and unwitting fellow-travelers in all countries, who aid them in achieving their goals.
Finally, the radical Islamists have gained strength and momentum in more recent years, thanks to the increasing availability of sophisticated weapons having far greater destructive power than any before. With each passing year, it has become easier to create or purchase weapons that can disable planes and tanks, that can spread disease and toxic chemicals, and even those that can create a nuclear disaster, either in the form of "dirty bombs" or in the more sinister form of atomic warheads.
For years, the terrorists have been refining their tactics and preparing for ever more destructive operations. Israel has been a fertile proving ground for them, and continues to be. Throughout the world, they have experimented with hijacking and destruction of planes and ships, bombing embassies and military bases, and individual assassinations of opponents.
Sept. 11, 2001 was distinguished from other days only in that it was a clear, unambiguous declaration of global war, just as Dec. 7, 1941 differed from preceding days and years in that it made Japanese intentions of world conquest manifest to everyone.
We are dealing with an insidious, cruel enemy that has spread its tentacles throughout the world. We are also dealing with particular places that are havens for these terrorists. It took no genius to identify Afghanistan as one such place, and the operation to neutralize that haven has indeed eliminated it as a safe base from which terrorists could operate unmolested.
Iraq was a much more insidious focal point, because in that country, the ambitions of a monstrous dictator coincided with those of the terrorists. Saddam Hussein was open about his intention to dominate the entire Middle East -- a new Babylonian empire, in his eyes -- and control Western access to its major source of energy, oil.
Using his own vast resources, he converted his plans into action, first by trying to conquer Iran, another major supplier of oil, and then, when that did not succeed, by turning south to conquer Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the process, he supported radical terrorists operating against other governments in the Middle East, including Israel, and operating against the West in general.
He was assiduous in developing or obtaining every dangerous weapon known to man. He was the first Muslim ruler to develop a program for atomic weapons, which the Israelis were intelligent enough to hamper by destroying his main nuclear reactor 20 years ago. He developed chemical and biological weapons that he perfected by using them against his own people, and then against the Iranians.
When he was defeated in Kuwait by a wide coalition of powers, including many Muslim governments who felt threatened by him, he continued with his development programs throughout the 1990s, openly defiant of agreements he had made and repeated demands made by the United Nations Security Council.
To say that this regime was not a direct menace to the United States and to world stability in general is to bury one's head firmly in the sand. Perhaps we shouldn't have gone to war against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, but only sought to find and prosecute in a court of law the bombardiers who dropped their bombs and torpedoes on the American ships. Indeed, why did we fight the Axis powers -- Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary -- at all? All they did was make a paper declaration of war on us in 1941; they didn't actually attack any American troops or cities.
Notice that I am not talking about Saddam Hussein being a "bad person." I am not even addressing the question of whether one should use military force to rid the world of horrendous mass murderers, of whom he ranks as one of the worst in history. We don't seem to have reached any sort of consensus on that question.
We certainly didn't go to war against Hitler or Stalin when they slaughtered their own people, or against the Hutus in Rwanda (or any of the other mutually murderous tribes in Burundi and the Congo). We intervened in the Balkans, ostensibly to prevent further "ethnic cleansing," but that reason was hardly plausible; the numbers involved there were far from comparable to those that were killed in other places, even during the same years.
No, the world has not decided that mass murderers have to be eliminated, nor have we in this country reached that point.
But we are certainly clear that we will do everything necessary to defend ourselves against declared enemies who have taken overt actions that threaten our safety and security. Radical Islam is top on the list, and Iraq was far and away the most dangerous and menacing official government that actively promoted the same belligerent goals.
Posted by Robert at February 20, 2004 6:19 AM
Print this entry
| Email this entry
| Digg this
| del.icio.us
|
One caveat about Greenberg's otherwise excellent article. It was right, proper, necessary to destroy Iraq's military power, and its regime. Despite being ostensibly "secular," the Ba'athist regime -- which owes its origin to the desperate attempt of Syrian Christians to concoct an ideology that would be an alternative to naked Islam (Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba'athism, converted to Islam on his deathbed; his life was one of pathetic dhimmitude,while his Communazi Ba'athism did little, really, to defang Islam)-- whenever necessary made appeal to Islam (Saddam Hussein's use of the Battle of Qadassiyah, the Koranic inscription put on the flag, the Qur'an written using his own blood, etc.--like that other "secularist," Nasser, Saddam Hussein, was Muslim through and through in his essential attitudes -- simply one who wanted to start with a unified Arabdom rather than aim for a worldwide Caliphate a la Bin Laden).
But the current campagin is a diversion of men, materiel, and attention. We should be winning back Europe by promoting a long-overdue alarm about the demographic invasion. We should expose the international alliance of fellow-travellers of Islam, from certain members of the BBC (such as John Simpson), Agence France Press (which is, in its MIddle East coverage, virtually a handmaiden of the PA), and elsewhere in the European media and in the EU hierarchy, including Javier Solana, Chris Patten,and others (antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are mutuallly reinforcing; those who display either or both are obviously, in their analyses and attitudes, the ones least inclined to see Islamic tenets as a threat to Western (and other ) civilizations, and most inclined to ascribe our problems to that pesky affair in western Palestine -- like the antisemites who were those most inclined, of course, in the 1930s to pooh-pooh the Nazi threat).
But the winning of "hearts and minds" in Iraq cannot be accomplished. It is a chimera, a Sisyphean and hopeless task, and it is cruel to cause American soldiers to risk their lives to do something which is impossible. There is almost no gratitude directed at the Americans by more than a small fraction of the Iraqi population -- for rescuing them from a monstrous regime. There are many reported cases -- and returning soldiers have many more to tell -- of mobs celebrating the killing of Americans. They will pocket the rebuilt infrastructure, the electricity grids, the dams, the hospitals, the schools, the soccer balls handed out by touchingly trusting and hopeful Americans -- but what will be taught in those schools? what will that electricity light up? how will that hydroelectric energy be used? if not to recreate an even more Muslim civlization, at least as hostile, and perhaps more potent in its hostility, toward Infidels?
It is not "democracy" that matters, but human rights -- the rights enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights, which, as Reza Afshari, Ibn Warraq, and others have shown, are in every single particular contradicted by Islam and the Shari'a. Will the new Iraq allow real free exercise of religion? Will those born into Islam be allowed to convert out, or openly show their lack of belief? Will women be given equality? In Islam, the greatest reforms that Infidels should welcome -- that is, the reforms which limit precisely the power of Islam -- have not emerged from "democracy" (a democratic but Muslim state is only more, not less dangerous, to Infidels), but from enlightened despots. These include the vain, stupid, but relatively decent Shah Reza Pahlavi, the farsighted Habib Bourguiba and the Destour Party in Tunisia, King Mohammed V of Morocco, King Hussein of Jordan (the "oily little king," as Alan Clark once dubbed him, was a great favorite all over the West, from that eternal innocent, Anthony Lewis, to Prince Charles, that great admirer of what he takes to be Islam), and by far the most important, Kemal Pasha Ataturk).
The "democracy" industry -- all those bright-eyed people in Washington with Centers for This and That Pertaining to Democracy -- has failed to adequately study, understand, and thoroughly assimilate the doctrines of Islam, or to study Islamic history. They understand there is something deeply wrong, but they cling to the notion that it is not the basic texts of Islam itself, but some perversion of those texts. They have it wrong.
No, the troops should not all come home, but a much smaller force, in the Syrian desert, well away from roadside bombs, should replace the current crazy "hearts and minds" effort. The invasion was completely justified; that was War #1. The remaining around to search for, collect, and destroy major weaponry (not just WMD), to find Saddam Hussein, to capture or kill most of the top Ba'athists, was also fully justified. That was War #2. But the current attempt to do the imposible, to make those three former Ottoman vilayets into a single nation-state (when, since 1920, the Arab treatment of the Kurds, and the Sunni treatment of the Shi'a, has only made things much worse) is hopeless. The Administration should declare that it has done all it can: removed Saddam Hussein, sought for and destroyed WMD programs, sought and destroyed all major weaponry, effectively demollished the Ba'athist structure, and left a small -- 50,000 combat troops -- force in the desert to keep the essential peace.
It is time to get serious about destroying the real WMD threat in Iran, which incidentally will put a nail in the mullahcracy. If the U.S. fails to do so, and the Iranian regime obtains such weaponry, its prestige among the simple Iranians will be sky high and the reformers will be doomed -- so they too have a vested interest in seeing us destory the Iranian WMD program.
Posted by: Hugh at February 20, 2004 9:40 AMGreat post Hugh....great points
Posted by: DCWatson37 at February 20, 2004 11:05 AMYou guys have to check out the post from Freedom on "Spencer on the Real Terrorist Enemy"
Posted by: Wild Hare at February 20, 2004 12:05 PMOh and well Said Hugh!
Posted by: Wild Hare at February 20, 2004 12:05 PMThe onerous task of dealing with "Radical" Islam puts you in mind of picking mushrooms. A mushroom here; a mushroom there. The true nature of the organism is much larger than the manifestations of itself, below the surface and unseen. Some fungae actually cover several cubic miles in the fabric of the a contiguous organism.
Each attack, while isolated geographically or instigated by a rogue "cell" is typically met with a predicatble,consensual reaction from the majority of muslims - "I disagree with violence, BUT...".
How should we interpret this as those occupying the dar-al-harb? The fact that since 9/11 there have been no significant attacks on Western Countries is a cause for escalating the level of concern regarding the severity of the dangers we face. Here's some compelling reasons why I think we're in even greater danger than currently imagined.
SILENT NIGHT
1. A profound level of discipline and restraint by all those jihadis who would like to rain chaos on our "decadant" societies. I return to my fungal theory here, a complete and coherent strategy is being followed by all of the faithful, no unexpected mushrooms popping up. Why?
2. A consensus of weakness in two ways, they refrain for the time being, realizing their vulnerability to military repisals and reversing any sympathy and bases of operation in western states that any subsequent attacks would bring. Paradoxically, western states have been all to willing to actually reinforce islamist sentiments, by chronically apologizing for "misunderstanding" them. Energized by this weakness in moral clarity, it acts as incitement to the radicals as they see their vision of the future as the correct one.
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD - LITERALLY
A vision exists in Islamic world, where its destiny is as the dominant religious and political power over the entire globe. How can this be achieved, since radical islam lacks the power or infrastructure to mount such a campaign, much like the sixth century charge across the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammed's new sword is of course a mushroom, cloud that is.
I truly fear for those living in Washington, Paris, London and Moscow. It is difficult to conceive that this interlude is a matter of coincidence or military operations, we're not in a somnolent quiet, this bunch is going to go for a head shot, the response by the west and the aftermath is difficult to conceive.
Whether it can be halted or not lies in the hands of those in the Islamic world who can see through the madness of this vision and derail it.
Posted by: bobnoxious at February 20, 2004 12:06 PMhugh-
i loved your analysis. but what to do about europe? seems to be as much a fool's errand as the hearts and minds of iraq. they too exist to spit in our faces. besides, they seem to be figuring the census thing out by themselves these days. i wish i could say that i wish them the best.
Posted by: mike at February 20, 2004 12:19 PMHugh-I completely agree with your analysis, Yes, we have to win back Europe, but even more pressing for us is to overcome the frivolous and superficial thinking of most Americans regarding this problem. How can we get Americans to understand that this is a real poblem that will actually affect their lives?
Most people I talk to about this problem do have an opinion, but they feel powerless in the face of an invisible enemy, politicians and journalists that not ignore their concerns, but try to keep them in the dark.
Hugh & Bobnoxious: great posts. No sense trying to add to them!
Posted by: Doug at February 20, 2004 8:26 PM
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)