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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Fitzgerald: Bleeding the West

Jul 13, 2006 5:59 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Not enough attention is given in the Western, and especially in the American, press, to all those Al Qaeda bulletins about “bleeding” the West of its economic resources. There is a keen understanding of how much this “war on terror” costs the West, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Administration, no doubt, would prefer that the public not focus on this. But the “wealth weapon,” or the economic weapon, is a key instrument of the worldwide Jihad. Money that the Muslims possess is used to spread Islam, to pay for mosques, madrasas, propaganda, and Western hirelings. And simultaneously, there is an effort to bleed the West, to have it engage in the most expensive counter-measures.

The Administration appears unable to consider the cheapest ways to weaken the camp of Islam, and hence the camp of Jihad. It thinks only in expensive military terms. It thinks of huge expenditures to swat a gnat or two — three terrorists over here, and on a good day, perhaps as many as twenty, or thirty. Are they crazy? These numbers are absurd. They are absurd by comparison with any other war. And they are absurd because these terrorists are easily replaced — replaced by recruits who simply continue recruiting, aided by the texts of Islam, by what it says in Qur’an and Hadith.
It is the Western world that should be inflicting as much economic damage as it possibly can on the camp of Islam, and hence the camp of Jihad. It should, at a minimum, cease any unnecessary transfer of wealth from Infidels to Muslims. This means no more foreign aid, which is merely disguised Jizyah. Let poor Muslims ask for support from rich Muslims, and either get it (and then they will promptly ask for more, and more) or not get it (in which case they will threaten the wellbeing of those rich Muslims, and show that Muslim solidarity means that the rich Muslims will pay for poor Muslims to fight and die but will not pay them so that they might live and prosper — and that is a lesson that needs to be learned by everyone).

Take that half-trillion now spent, or irrevocably committed to, the wars in Iraq and Afghnanistan. Suppose instead we had spent that $500 billion in the United States on building nuclear reactors, on building wind farms, on research and development of new kinds of solar collectors, and on subsidizing mass transit, and on biofuels, and cleaner coal scrubbers, and so on? What would the effect have been?

Would that way of spending $500 billion done more to cripple the camp of Islam, and thereby reduce the threat that the ideology of Jihad could effectively be put into practice, than the wars in Iraq? At this point Iraq is nothing more than a colossal waste. Still worse, the continued presence of American soldiers actually prevents the only kind of “victory” — sectarian and ethnic strife both within Iraq and outside Iraq, in other Muslim countries — that the West should not be seeking to discourage, any more than it should strive for “stability” in the Muslim lands that are sponsoring in various ways the worldwide Jihad. Constant instability, constant fear of threats from within or from bullies without (as with Qatar and Kuwait fearing Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and possibly a revived, if slightly diminished in size, Shi’a Iraq), is what we should seek.

A la guerre comme a la guerre. This is something that Bright Young Conservatives at My Weekly Standard, elderly pomposities uttering their portentous obviousnesses (Anthony Cordesman comes immediately to mind), never realize. Neither do students of international affairs who know neither history, nor Islam, nor the world, because they have gone from the Johns Hopkins or Yale or Princeton or Harvard degree programs in international thisandthat, or possibly gotten law degrees as the credential to be turned into “international NGOish expertise” — careerists on the make, breathlessly presenting their messianic views on What Is To Be Done, and never stopping to read a few books.

Look at them. Look at weapons-systems analyst Wolfowitz. Look at the assorted “terrorist experts” appearing on the Nightly News. Look, and listen, for mention of Islam and the Jihad. See if it occurs to any of them to suggest that our goal in Iraq should be one thing: to weaken the camp of Islam, and hence the camp of Jihad. Those who support the war have the wrong goals. Those who oppose the war, oppose it for all the wrong reasons.

A fantastic situation.

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