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.