There has been several long discussions here recently detailing many of the opposing positions on the Global War against Islamic fascism. A prominent divide occurs between those who claim that our enemies represent only a small fraction of the Muslim world versus those who believe that Islam itself is the enemy. Although I would take issue with the idea that only a small fraction of the Muslim world supports armed violence against the West, in an important way both sides are correct.
[In most surveys of Muslim public opinion, the level of support for such activities as suicide bombing ranges from lows in the 10-20% range, up to 75% in the Palestinian population, and even if only 10% of the Muslim world supports terrorism against the West, we are talking about more than 100 million people, not a small number.]
The Muslim Ummah is nothing so much as a large tribal affiliation. Most Muslims are Muslim because they were born into the faith and just as, in all likelihood, most Jews and Christians have a relatively basic knowledge of the key tenets of their faith, I suspect most Muslims, even those who have memorized the Koran, have only a fairly superficial grasp of the core theology of Islam. One's faith is rarely dependent on a deep knowledge of theology; we typically rely on our Rabbis, Priests, Ministers, and Imams to help us clarify the core beliefs of our religious tribe.
The understanding that we are dealing with a large tribal affiliation, one that has significant areas of fundamental disagreement with the beliefs of the tribal affiliation known as America and the larger Anglosphere, ie those of us who believe in liberal democracy and free markets, is informative. What is currently at stake in our war is ultimately the determination by the Muslim world of how Islam will be defined.
It does not matter that a small number of radicals are at the core of this war. After all, a minuscule number of committed people took over the Soviet Union and ushered in the Communist Dystopia which threatened the world for much of the last century. An equally small cadre of true believers seized control of Europe's most advanced and cultured state in the 1930s and ushered in WWII and the Holocaust. On a smaller scale, Saddam Hussein, with a small band of clansmen, was able to take over the Nation of Iraq and achieve a 30 year reign of terror. A small band of true believers gained control of the Middle East's most prosperous and cosmopolitan Nation in 1979 and we are still trying to find a way to break their stranglehold on their people. It is not the absolute number of Jihadists that is the problem but it is their ability to impose their model of Islam, their paradigm of a blood thirsty Islam involved in a perpetual war with the non-believer, that is the problem. Whenever they have been successful at gaining control, they have been able to leverage their commitment and religious passion by indoctrinating large parts of their communities into their particular brand of Islam. Until shortly after 9/11, the Islamists were on the ascendancy. Their paradigm of the world was winning converts, they were training thousands of fighters, building networks, and preparing for the war that we only realized we were in the midst of on 9/11.
Dr. Douglas J. Macdonald is an extremely well credentialled specialist on National Security Affairs, now working at the The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.
Dr. Douglas Macdonald is a Visiting Research Professor of National Security Affairs at SSI. He is on temporary leave from Colgate University where he has taught for 18 years in the Department of Political Science, and is a former director of the university’s International Relations Program. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1967 to 1971, attaining the rank of Sergeant, and was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal in 1970. His principal study for SSI this year will deal with transnational terrorist networks in Southeast Asia and the region’s institutional response to the New Terror.
I mention his credentials because it is always a source of intellectual pleasure to recognize when an expert in his field agrees with some of my musings and he has produced what looks to be a very important document, The New Totalitarians: Social Identities and Radical islamist Political Grand Strategy, (HT: Judith Apter Klinghoffer) which dovetails very nicely with some of what I have written about the potential clash of civilizations. I have only read a portion of the report and quote from the foreword:
Much discussion has occurred over a possible "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and the West for the last decade. While controversial, the "clash" thesis has had a large influence in the debate over the causes of, and possible remedies for, the spread of terrorist activity.
Dr. Douglas Macdonald argues that the social identity theory behind the "clash" thesis is useful for analyzing the tasks before us in the "Long War" on Terrorism. The "clash of civilizations" is not actually occurring, he argues, but is rather the end goal of radical Islamist political grand strategy. This is largely the result of the totalitarian nature of the beliefs of the radical Islamist terrorists: like the Fascists and Communists before them, they ultimately cannot allow alternative value systems to exist in areas they control.
Their goal is to spread such totalitarian beliefs to the ummah, that is, the entire Muslim world, in order to create a violent "clash" with non-Muslim societies, and, in some versions, radical Islam is expected to spread to the entire world. Unlike some recent academic calls for negotiations with the radical Islamists and arguments that their goals are limited and negotiable, Dr. Macdonald argues that the first thing to understand about the enemy is that there is nothing to negotiate with them because of their radical totalitarian nature.
He warns that, historically, Western liberals have had difficulty understanding this type of threat.
Dr. Macdonald argues that the first imperative of any strategy in the "Long War" on Terror must be to prevent such a totalitarian ummah from being created in order to prevent a "clash of civilizations." This can best be accomplished by supporting the majority of mainstream Muslims, rewarding moves towards moderation, and avoiding unnecessary irritants to Muslim sensibilities.
My post yesterday on Ayman al-Zawahiri can be understood as a look at an individual example of a new Totalitarian. Their ideology, based on their strict interpretation of the most ascetic version of Islam depends on the use and threat of force and violence to force all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to submit. As noted by Dr. Macdonald, there is no room for diplomacy or discussion; they may temporarily set their goals aside in the interest of their long term success, but they cannot negotiate away any of their desires because their paradigm collapses once anyone else's desire is treated as equal to theirs.
The primary short coming in our war against the Totalitarians is that we have not engaged the enemy as a society. Whatever efforts the Bush administration has made to engage the ideological struggle, by advancing democracy in the Middle East, for example, have been undone by the difficulties we have had in bringing stability to Iraq and by their inability to fully address the problem of Saudi sponsorship of Sunni Totalitarianism. (The Bush administration {enabled by the environmrntal lobby} probably for their own ideological reasons has been tragically inept in pressing for an energy policy that could wean us off of ME oil; further, their need for reasonably priced oil has allowed the Saudis to essentially get a pass on their behavior.) Furthermore, and of even greater significance, large portions of our elites have failed to understand that they are threatened by Islamic fascism in multiple ways, and that they have a significant role to play in the fight.
The battle against Islamic fascism depends on discrediting their ideology, ie, shattering their paradigm. Military force can be a useful part of such a struggle but in many ways it is the least important part of the battle. Since we no longer hold with "total war", the only kind of military engagement that could destroy the Islamist paradigm (as happened in WWII with Nazism), all the military can do is allow for the time and space that the Iraqis require to achieve some semblance of democratic stability. The Democrats and those Republicans who are so frightened by the opinion polls that they are ready to undermine the mission, fail to see that our retreat from the battlefield would be a tremendous victory for the Islamist ideology.
Unfortunately and of even greater concern, the most powerful agents in the American information war armamentarium are too often inadvertently assisting the Islamists.
Islamic fascism is a fragile ideology. The need to silence all critics is not based on strength or confidence but is based on the exact opposite.
Ralph Peters today highlights an extremely important aspect of Islamic fascism that should be trumpeted daily by our major news media:
Mook's Spooked Iraqi Militia Bully Bails Out
* Mookie ran to Iran.
* Osama's so scared he won't let himself be photographed.
* Hassan Nasrullah of Hezbollah ducked for cover as soon as Israel started shooting.
* The key leaders of Hamas hide out in Damascus, not Gaza or the West Bank.
Anybody see a pattern here?
The pattern reflects the cowardice of bullies. When you give a bully your lunch money on the first day of school, you end up missing lunch for the whole year. We have been giving the bullies our lunch money for decades and our MSM are worsening the problem. When the New York Times refused to publish pictures of the Mohamed cartoons, it was a major victory for the Islamists. A campaign of ridicule at our enemies, taunting them, questioning their manhood, is precisely the kind of "insensitive" behavior our MSM would never consider in their multi-cultural addled minds.
One area of disagreement I have with Dr. Macdonald concerns his suggestion on "avoiding unnecessary irritants to Muslim sensibilities." This is not possible, as shown by the Flushing Koran story or the use of the Mughrabi renovations to inflame Palestinian sensibilities. It is time for us to recognize that there is nothing we can do to avoid humiliating the Arabs; our existence, the existence of Israel, woman in bikinis, women without burkas, almost everything about us is a constant humiliation to the ultra-sensitive Islamist and he will always take the opportunity to vent his rage against those who cause him to feel shame.
It is time for us to leverage our information technology. Forcing Muqtada al-Sadr to run for his life back to Tehran will do more to discredit his ideology than any sensitivity we show to Allah. Calling him out for the coward he is, in a society which considers death by martyrdom the highest calling, would collapse his support and ensure his failure. It is time for us to shine the light on these people and for our MSM to stop protecting their sensibilities in the name of some vapid ideology of their own.
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