CenterFeud

Imagining an American intifada

Daniel Pipes conjures a grim near-future scenario that deftly mixes speculative fiction with recent history and current events:

Just as the 7/7 bombings had revealed in Great Britain, Islamist sleepers in substantial numbers lived quietly and unobtrusively in the United States. The violence became daily, ubiquitous, endemic, and routine, occurring in rural towns, upscale suburbs, and metropolitan centres, targeting private houses, restaurants, university buildings, gas stations, and electricity grids. As its frequency increased, terrorists became less cautious, leading to many arrests and bulging prisons. Some terrorists avoided this ignominious fate by engaging in suicide attacks, usually accompanied by boastful Internet videos. In all, roughly 100,000 incidents meant an average 10,000 deaths and many times more injuries each year.

Jihadis for Justice laid siege to Capitol Hill and the White House, inspired by three prior terrorist assaults on symbols of sovereignty: the attack on Trinidad's Red House in 1990, on India's Parliament House in 2001, and the failed plot to storm Ottawa's Parliament Hill in 2006. Despite massive security in Washington, sniper attacks picked off some legislators and presidential aides. Jihadis for Justice relied on Iranian and Saudi patronage but no U.S. retaliation followed because, before acting, President Obama required proofs that would pass muster in a U.S. court of law, something the intelligence agencies could not provide.

As in other countries – Israel offering the most obvious comparison – major changes in American life followed. Whoever wished to enter supermarkets, bus stations, malls, or campuses had to produce identification, show his bags and perhaps submit to a search of his person. Cars routinely underwent inspections at road blocks. As airline passengers had to arrive four hours before flight time to run the gauntlet of security questions about their travels, airports emptied and airline companies went bankrupt. Local public transportation went through similar upheavals, as commuters took up bicycling rather than submit to interrogations and near-strip searches on their way to work. Telecommuting finally took off.

Read it all.

"George Bush, true Democrat"

Victor Davis Hanson points up the irony of how the US public, and particularly Democrats, have come to view Iraq: "If we fail..."

Prior to Iraq, there was some American guilt over past realism, whether stopping before Baghdad in 1991, playing Iran off Iraq, cozying up to dictatorships, or predicating American Middle East foreign policy solely on either oil or anti-Communism. Read the liberal literature of the 1990s and it was essentially a call for what George Bush is now doing — and being damned for. Then the liberal bogeyman was not Paul Wolfowitz, but Jim Baker (“jobs, jobs, jobs”/”F—- the Jews”). Now the latter is the model of Republican sobriety.

Arab intellectuals and much of the Western Left once decried Bakerism and called for a new muscular idealism that put us on the side of the powerless reformers and not with the entrenched authoritarians. But if we fail in Iraq, then again, fairly or not, the verdict will be far more sweeping than simply the incompetence of the Bremer proconsulship or the impotence of the Maliki government.

Rather, the conventional wisdom will arise that an infantile Middle East ipso facto — whether due to Islamism, tribalism, gender apartheid, sectarianism, engrained dictatorship, or corruption — is simply incapable at this time of consensual government. Anyone who seeks such reform, whether in the Gulf, Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt, is to be written off not only as naïve, but as reckless as well. A Libyan dissident, a feminist writer in Egypt, or an Iraqi intellectual who decries Western indifference to their plight or American tolerance of regional dictatorships will be told to quit whining and get a life, by a been-there/done-that American public.

Both carping hothouse Arab intellectuals and Western liberals should be put on notice of this change to come. However imperfect, however flawed, however improperly explained our efforts in Iraq were, they nevertheless represented a costly American about-face to offer something in the Middle East other than theocracy or dictatorship — something we are not likely to see again in our lifetime.

Democrats and liberals should likewise realize that for all their hatred of George Bush and the partisan points to be gained by coddling up to the libertarian and paleo-conservative Right, George Bush’s embrace of freedom was far closer to their own past rhetoric than almost any Republican administration in history.

There is definitely a sense of having slipped into some alternate reality from the one I knew pre-9/11. I remember in early 2001 a sense of foreboding that, with the Republicans having won the White House, there would be a shift back to the realpolitik of Bush I and James Baker. The warnings of the Clinton administration about the strategic threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the urgent need to push for regime change in Iraq would be ignored, and we would continue to treat the Middle East as, in the words of Thomas Friedman, "a big dumb gas station". I fully expected the Republicans to stick to their traditional script, and ignore democratic reformers in the Middle East in favor of the usual dictators, tyrants and strongmen.

I didn't figure on George W. Bush, the most unlikely figure in the world to make democratic reform a centerpiece of Middle East policy. In a post-9/11 world, he concluded that there was no safety in the old "stability", only societies forced to choose between rule by thugs or theocrats, who would continue to demonize the West in order to redirect the anger and resentment of their people against an external "other", i.e. "decadent" democracies. Something had to be done to change that dynamic, otherwise it was only a matter of time before we were confronted with an alliance of terrorist networks equipped by their state sponsors with terrifying weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands and wreak social and economic turmoil. He concluded that confronting dictatorial regimes that were actively pursuing such weapons would be far less costly than fighting them when they had achieved their aims and had become emboldened.

It has now become fashionable to deride the so-called "neocons" as Machiavellians ruthlessly plotting global American hegemony, but an objective reading of their writings reveals an idealism rooted in the belief that America should stand with the forces of democratic reform and liberalism in places like the Middle East. Given a choice between coddling dictators and championing rule of law, the equality of women, and a free press, we should be unapologetically in favor of the latter. That support would not necessarily have to be military in nature, but diplomacy must to be backed with a credible threat of force or else it is ineffectual, especially in dealing with despotic regimes.

Now, with the neocons discredited and the general consensus that post-Saddam Iraq is ungovernable, we are back to a weird nostalgia for the dictators. James Baker is suddenly considered the voice of reasonableness by his erstwhile Democratic critics, even as he urges cutting deals with the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad and Syria's Assad, who he assures us with a straight face have a long-term interest in a stable Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraqi democrats who risked their lives to elect a representative (if flawed and ineffectual) government are to be ignored. And bizarrely, Israel, the only true democracy in the region, is treated as a bargaining chip as we pursue the delusion that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the magic key that will resolve Sunni-Shia bloodletting in Iraq and cause Iran to abandon its nuclear program and ambitions to dominate the region. And these are the "realists"!

And in the midst of all of it, there's George W. Bush, his popularity in the toilet, his credibility losing altitude by the minute, his every statement second-guessed, his war-fighting strategy undermined -- and yet he keeps at it, sending in yet more troops to take on the militias and terrorist gangs that are determined to impose their will on post-Saddam Iraq and make it a base for jihad against the West. Many of us have checked out, having concluded this war is already lost and not worth a single additional American life. Others want it to be lost if only to repudiate George W. Bush, whom they despise more than Saddam Hussein, the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, or Moqtada Al-Sadr. Ironically, Bush remains a "true democrat" while his critics on the left and right seem to have retreated to the comforts and illusions of the old realpolitik.

But whether the so-called "surge" turns the tide or represents yet another failed attempt to stabilize Iraq, we should all be desperately hoping it succeeds. Because to hope it fails, or to express ambivalence -- as apparently one third of Americans do according to a recent poll -- is to objectively side with religious zealots, Ba'athist thugs, and ethnic cleansers against the majority of Iraqis who want to live decent lives, just because you don't like Bush and want him to go down. If, like me, you retain the liberal idealism you grew up with, that realization should make you shudder.

UPDATE: In a must-read essay on America's checkered history with Iraq and the choices the US has made over the years, Neo-neocon makes a similar observation:

The funny thing about the whole thing (and I mean funny-strange, not funny ha-ha) is that it is the neocon philosophy that represents one of the only strategies offering a possible way out of the realpolitik dilemma. And yet those who criticize our realpolitik decisions to back dictators also criticize our neonconnish decisions to overthrow them and try to institute a better and more democratic form of government. Odd, isn't it?

Fallaci-Khomeini smackdown

In tribute to the recently departed Italian journalist, interviewer and polemicist Oriana Fallaci, Neo-neocon recalls her famous encounter with Ayatollah Khomenini. As good as you remember (or would imagine).

I was introduced to Fallaci's work through reading her 1977 collection, Interview with History, in which the Khomeini interview appears, along with similarly revealing interviews of Golda Meir, Mohamar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. Hard to get hold of but still highly relevant and a showcase for Fallaci's take-no-prisoners style. She was one tough lady and feared no one. She will be sorely missed.

"The highest form of a citizen"

Christopher Hitchens in the Wall St. Journal: "Memorial Day: Reflections on those who made the ultimate sacrifice":

Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in midconflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.

The once and future quagmire

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson imagines (very convincingly) how World War II would have been reported if the media of that era were like our media today:

May 1, 1945—After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable “super-weapon” (with the patently absurd name “Manhattan Project”—in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders—no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.

We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing—again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.

Hard to imagine actually winning such a war. And harder to imagine what there was to be gained by doing so. How will our attitudes about the first 21st century war appear several decades from now? In a recent widely-linked post, science fiction writer Dan Simmons conjures up a Time Traveler who tells us:

“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and you, the innocents of 2006 and beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame your brothers and yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law, tolerance, science, democracy – even while your enemies grow stronger.”

“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and growled at him. “The world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

Simmons vision of the unfolding "Century War" is harrowing, all the more because of it is suffused with a bitter nostalgia for our current era, wallowing in the luxuries of high-flown civil liberties debates. The Time Traveler knows that such liberties will soon be a distant memory in many parts of the world:

“At least understand that such decency goes away quickly when you are burying your children and your grandchildren,” rasped the Time Traveler. “Or watching them suffer in slavery. Ruthlessness deferred against totalitarian aggression only makes the later need for ruthlessness more terrible. Thousands of years of history and war should have taught you that. Did you fools learn nothing from living through the charnel house that was the 20th Century?”

And here we are, pondering whether Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's 18-page letter to President Bush is a "diplomatic opening" or in fact, as some experts warn, a pro-forma invitation to embrace Islam, a religious pre-requisite to open warfare. We shudder at the prospect of military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and instead attempt to rationalize living with a nuclear Iran capable of making good its threat to "wipe Israel off the map" and targeting Europe with its Shahab missiles. In the face of a genocidal madman who talks openly of ushering in an end-of-times religious war, we instead delberate on whether our own government is violating our privacy by trying to gather intelligence on jihadists already within our borders who may be preparing to wage that war against not our military but our civilian population centers.

Hanson's historical satire and Simmons' chilling history of the future are bookends of a cautionary tale about our own time, the war we find ourselves in, and the way we choose to see ourselves. Both deserve careful reading and consideration.

The Cartoon War: defiance and capitulation

So much has been written about the Danish cartoon controversy that it seems almost pointless to chime in with another me-too post. However, it has become clear that this is not just a minor flap but an event that marks a turning point in the struggle between the liberal West and fundamentalist Islam - and, it is not yet clear which way things will turn.

First of all, there are the cartoons themselves, originally published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which commissioned them as an experiment in countering self-censorship when it came to depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Not all were offensive in nature, in fact most would not strike the average Western reader as anything more than mildly so. Some, like the much-referenced image of Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban made satirical points associating the Prophet with the worst of his violent adherents. But others were mere renderings of the Prophet with no other comment, and a couple of them poked fun at the paper itself for its "publicity stunt". One was not even of the Prophet but of a student named "Mohammed" who jeered the paper's editors as "a bunch of reactionary provocateurs". If you haven't seen the actual cartoons, you are in no position to judge for yourself. You can find them at Jihad Watch as well as many other sites. Overall, they strike me as relatively mainstream by the standards of societies who uphold the right of the press to poke fun at religious figures including Jesus, the Pope and indeed the very concept of God.

But I am a liberal Westerner, and not a Muslim, so my opinion is only half the story. Are these cartoons indeed offensive to Muslim sensibilities? Based on the reaction throughout the Muslim world, the answer would have to be "yes". Here is a take from Seema Munir, an American Muslim writing in an op-ed piece for the Arizona Republic:

I think it fair to say that each of the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world feels personally offended by the cartoons. But not every one protested. A small percentage demonstrated and an even smaller percentage reacted violently. Probably all, however, were hurt.

Not surprising - as has now been pointed out ad nauseum, Christians frequently take offense at works of artistic expression that they see as denigrating their beliefs, the most blatant examples being "Piss Christ" in which artist Andres Serrano immersed a crucufix in a jar of his own urine, and the image of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung by Nigerian Catholic artist Chris Ofili. (An aside: Ofili has also used elephant dung as an African symbol of fertility/reverence in pieces honoromg African-American icons such as Miles Davis, and some have countered that his rendering of the Virgin Mary is not quite the slap at Christianity the critics frame it as). To this add the recent Rolling Stone cover featuring rapper Kanye West as a crucified Jesus, complete with crown of thorns, and Corpus Christi, the controversial 1998 off-broadway play that featured a gay Jesus having anal sex with Judas. Christians protested these works as sacreligious and insulting to their faith, just as they had protested "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" in their day. At best, in their view, these artistic works insulted or belittled their faith - at worst, they were seen as outright blasphemy.

So to Muslims who now take offence at cartoons depicting their Prophet, I say, "Welcome to the club." A free press by its nature will question those in power, question received wisdom, and yes, question religious doctrine. And cartoonists (as well as artists, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers and comedians) do occasionally take shots at religious figures and sacred cows. It comes with the territory in any free society. And yes, sometimes lines are crossed and sensibilities are offended. When that happens, people write angry letters, cancel subscriptions, organize protests and boycotts, and otherwise attempt to attract media attention to their grievances. But only extremists burn down buildings, make death threats and advocate for mass murder as retribution for the perceived offense.

And extremists are the ones fanning the flames in the current controversy. When the cartoons first appeared last October, largely as a challenge to the extent of self-censorship in the media, they went relatively unnoticed and created little stir. They were even published in the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr with nary a peep from the Islamic street, a fact that only recently came to light. Nothing else happened until January when all hell broke loose. What happened in the meantime? A group of Danish imams circulated the cartoons, adding three additional images that were highly offensive to Muslims (one showed a Muslim being raped by a dog, another purported to depict Mohammed wearing a pig snout). The intent was to incite Muslim rage against the cartoons, an effort that has by and large been effective.

This underground campaign by Islamist groups went undetected for several months, during which time groups all over the Middle East apparently acquired quantities of Danish flags for the "spontaneous" angry mobs to burn in January for the cameras. The Islamists have repeatedly shown their sophistication in media manipulation in what many are pointing out is actually an information war.

What about the charge that even if the cartoons were not really that offensive per se, the key issue is the reproduction of images of Mohammed, which is forbidden in Islam. Well, two issues with that: first, if we think it prudent that Western newspapers should abide by such restrictions, why not other aspects of Islamic sharia law? This slope becomes slippery quite rapidly, as Christopher Hitchens observed:

The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

Secondly, it turns out that the ban on images of Mohammed in Islam is not absolute, at least in the historical sense. It's true that in the present era Islam is strongly opposed to depictions of not just Mohammed but sees as idolatrous images of Jesus and other prophets. But that wasn't always the case. You can find depictions of Mohammed in early Islamic art (search on "Mohammed image archive") . In some cases, his face is blank or veiled, in other cases he is fully realized. In the current era, depictions of Mohammed can be found in many unexpected places, from the Supreme Court to South Park. That there has been no reaction in the Muslim world to these prior Western depictions of Mohammed are further indications that much of the furor is the result of a deliberate campaign of incitement.

I would agree with commentators like Hugh Hewitt that the media should should not play into the hands of the radicals, and in general should show more sensitivity across the board when it comes to treatment of religion and religious figures. Censorship or even self-censorship is not called for here -- more like common sense and good taste. And if Western journalists choose to apologize to the Muslim world for failing to show sensitivity and respect for Islam, we should be prepared to demand that newspapers across the Islamic world demonstrate their good faith by denouncing and refusing to publish hateful cartoons like these, which appear in government-controlled papers throughout the Middle East on a daily basis. For too long, we have allowed the press in these countries to play a double-game, fanning the flames of religious incitement at home while claiming victimhood at the hands of the West.

In fact, a call for a consistent moral standard is not just a good idea but is essential. Here's Victor Davis Hanson:

The deluded here might believe that the divide is a moral one, between a supposedly decadent secular West and a pious Middle East, rather than an existential one that is fueled by envy, jealousy, self-pity, and victimization. But to believe the cartoons represent the genuine anguish of an aggrieved puritanical society tainted by Western decadence, one would have to ignore that Turkey is the global nexus for the sex-slave market, that Afghanistan is the world's opium farm, that the Saudi Royals have redefined casino junketeering, and that the repository of Hitlerian imagery is in the West Bank and Iran.

The entire controversy over the cartoons is ludicrous, but often in history the trivial and ludicrous can wake a people up before the significant and tragic follow.

The matter is far from trivial. Islamist organizations whose goal is to establish a foothold for sharia law in European societies have engineered this crisis as a means of intimidating the West and deflecting attention away from Iran's nuclear ambitions and Syria's perfidy in Lebanon. Their strategy has thus been highly effective and they can see the writing on the wall. The Danish cartoonists are now in hiding, in fear for their lives. News editors who chose to run the cartoons in France, Egypt and Jordan have been sacked. Britain and the US are issuing soothing apoligetics. The Prime Minister of liberal Holland refuses to stand in solidarity with either his counterpart in Denmark, or one of his own Ministers of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch citizen and ex-Muslim who has been marked for death by the radicals for speaking out on the treatment of women and gays under Islamic law. Hirsi Ali is herself unequivocal as to where she stands -- with Denmark and against the economic boycott targeted at punishing the entire country for the actions of a single newspaper:

Liberty does not come cheap. A few million Euros is worth paying for the defence of free speech. If our governments neglect to help our Scandinavian friends then I hope citizens will organise a donation campaign for Danish companies.

We have been flooded with opinions on how tasteless and tactless the cartoons are -- views emphasising that the cartoons only led to violence and discord. What good has come of the cartoons, so many wonder loudly?

Well, publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists and journalists who wish to describe, analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe.

Hirsi Ali warns us that the radicals who are committing violence and threatening lives must be defied, not appeased. We may be appalled at the intensity of the reaction, and wish to not provoke it further but capitulating to the violence and death threats has the effect of rewarding that behavior, leading to more, not less, as Glenn Reynolds recently pointed out. And their rage is not reserved for Denmark - it is free-floating, turning now against France, now against Norway, and routinely invoking death to Israel and the United States, countries which have in this case stayed on the sidelines.

On that basis alone, however we feel about the cartoons themselves, all free-thinking people should stand with Denmark. Those of us who value freedom of expression should not capitulate to the demands and threats of any one religion that it is off-limits to question tenets of their doctrine. Were we to go down that route, there are a great many questions we would be forbidden to ask; someone will always be offended, if not by cartoons of the prophet, then by Valentine's Day or statues of the Buddha, or women as clergy or same-sex marriage, or for that matter, The Da Vinci Code. These topics cannot be avoided or suppressed merely because they run counter to orthodox religious teachings, whether they originate in Islam, Christianity or Judaism. We must always be able to question our faith in the face of those who would impose it on us, and we must always be able to defend our faith in the face of those who would attempt to take it away.

So - let's agree that the Danish cartoons are offensive to the religious sensibilities of Muslims, and further agree that Jyllands-Posten has the right to print them, as an independent publication in a country with a free press. Let's agree that it is the responsibility of journalists to weigh the consequences of printing any provocative image - whether it be a cartoon of Mohammed, a snapshot from Abu Ghraib, a political cartoon of a wounded soldier, or a grisly image of a terrorist beheading a hostage - the public's right to be informed vs. the overall public good; and let's also agree that the standard has to be high. Finally, lets agree that we will apply that standard across the board to all journalism, and that those who publish an image to incite rather than to inform will face public opprobrium for their actions.

Press freedom is guaranteed in open societies. But with freedom always comes responsibility. The publication has to ask, "Are we printing this to titillate, to be provocative for its own sake, to incite public outrage in relation to an agenda? Or are we honestly presenting a piece of information essential to the public debate?" The former is abuse of a free press, the latter is the reason we must defend freedom of the press, even when we don't like what we see in the newspaper.

VDH: The virus is spreading

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that the modern virus of global fascism strongly resembles its previous outbreak prior to the Second World War - and the world seems just as much in denial now is it was then:

Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.

Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam.

Most Americans think that our present conflict is not comparable with World War II, in either its nature or magnitude. Perhaps — but they should at least recall the eerie resemblance of our dilemma to the spread of global fascism in the late 1930s.

At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the new imperial Roman?

In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they’re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles’s silence about Iran’s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).

The lesson of World War II is that, when the tipping point comes and people finally pay attention and realize how high the stakes really are, it's almost too late. It's not too hard to extrapolate how bad things could get: cities throughout Europe held hostage by civil unrest and rioting such as we are seing in France; or outright terrorism a la the Madrid or London bombings; or religiously motivated killings of free thinkers such as Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, who dared to make a short documentary critical of Islam's treatment of women (in collaboration with Aayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Dutch MP whose personal suffering formed the basis of the critique and who is herself now threatened with death).

And that's just Europe. In the Middle East, Iran and Syria don't agree on much, except that the nascent democracy in Iraq must be strangled in its crib at all costs. The elimination of Israel remains a top goal for Iran, who intends to wipe it off the face of the earth with that nuclear capability that they certainly want only for peaceful civilian use. And Gaza, now free of Israeli occupation can finally pursue statehood - of course, the model so far seems to be Taliban-era Afghanistan, but surely once Hamas wins a majority in the upcoming elections it will turn away from thoughts of genocide and turn its attention to zoning ordinances and school lunch programs - that is, when it isn't otherwise busy executing young Palestinian women for holding hands in public.

In the US, as elsewhere, we at least know the true nature of the problem, and it's not a fanatical movement that wants to impose a worldwide ultraconservative religious regime. Heck no, it's that ol' debbil George W. Bush, of course, as the recent "World Can't Wait" demonstrations in San Francisco drove home. I'm sure the prospect of living under sharia law doesn't worry them in the least.

Reality check: this is a long, long war. Within three years, Bush will be out of office and the blame for fanning the flames of global fanticism will shift either to his successor (if a Republican) or his legacy (if the Democrats take over). In the meantime, we will pretend that the spread of a murderous ideology can be addressed by bringing the troops home, taking a lower profile on the world stage, and trying to address the supposed root causes of terrorism with soothing diplomacy, pressure on Israel and more concessions to governments like that of Iran. Hanson's prescription is far grimmer, but grounded in historical reality rather than wishful thinking:

Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi’s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.

Second, any who tolerate radical Islam should be ostracized. Muslims living in the West must be condemned when they assert that the Jews caused 9/11, or that suicide bombing is a legitimate response to Israel, or that Islamic immigrants’ own unique culture gives them a pass from accustomed assimilation, or that racial and religious affinity should allow tolerance for the hatred that spews forth from madrassas and mosques — before the patience of Western liberalism is exhausted and “the rules of the game” in Tony Blair’s words “change” quite radically and we begin to see mass invitations to leave.

Third, nations that intrigue with jihadists must be identified as the enemies of civilization. We often forget that there are now left only four major nation-states in the world that either by intent or indifference allow radical Islamists to find sanctuary.

If the petrolopolis of Saudi Arabia would cease its financial support of Wahhabi radicals, most terrorists could scarcely travel or organize operations.

If there were sane governments in Syria and Iran, then there would be little refuge left for al Qaeda, and the money and shelter that now protects the beleaguered and motley collection of ex-Saddamites, Hezbollah, and al Qaedists would cease.

So in large part four nations stand in the way of eradicating much of the global spread of jihadism — and it is no accident that either oil or nuclear weapons have won a global free pass for three of them. And it is no accident that we don’t have a means to wean ourselves off Middle East oil or as yet stop Iran from becoming the second Islamic nuclear nation.

Having just noted the death of 2000 soldiers in Iraq (and having resolutely ignored those who died in Afghanistan), poll after poll shows a desire to withdraw from the world and return to arguing over domestic problems like health care, or social issues like gay marriage. But confronting the global jihad on its home turf in the Middle East - and the thwarting of the goals of the four regimes singled out by Hanson - is the key to the defeat, or at least containment, of this current virulent pandemic.
(Hat tip: Little Green Footballs)

GWB = FDR?

A recent editorial in USA Today draws some interesting parallels between George W. Bush and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in terms of "Grand Strategy":

With a logic that Bush would find familiar, FDR was lambasted by his critics for his WWII military strategy of defeating Germany first before focusing on Japan. They considered Germany a diversion. Wasn't it Japan and not Germany that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor, asked Sens. Arthur Vandenberg and A.B. Chandler? One foreign minister called the idea "suicidal heresy."

By 1942, American generals were complaining that precious resources were being diverted to fight Germans in North Africa, hardly a direct strategic concern. All of this should sound familiar in the debate over Iraq and the war on terrorism...

In a very strict and narrow military sense, FDR's critics were correct, just as Bush's are today. Germany did not pose an immediate military threat to the United States the way that Japan did.

In a fascinating parallel to Bush and Iraq, part of FDR's motivation for defeating Germany first was fear that the Nazis were working on atomic weapons. Alas, postwar intelligence revealed that Germany (like Saddam Hussein's Iraq) did not have much of a program. But military victory led most to ignore this massive intelligence failure.

FDR was not concerned with just the narrow military question of threats. Like Islamist extremists and secular Saddam, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were opportunistic allies. Though the Nazis considered the Japanese racially inferior, no better than mongrels, they were part of a worldwide movement. Using the same logic that Bush does today, FDR understood the need for a grand strategy that destroyed the movement, not just certain military aggressors that were part of it.

Grand strategy is not only about defeating enemies, but also defeating them in a sequence and a manner that leads to a favorable postwar situation. Can anyone seriously doubt that defeating al-Qaeda but leaving the political situation in the Middle East the same is at best a temporary victory? Bush, as FDR did, understands that only with political transformation will the postwar prospects for peace improve.

It's become a truism that those who oppose the Iraq war almost uniformly see it as Viet Nam redux, while those who support it tend to compare it to the Second World War and the struggle against global fascism. What we forget is that the so-called "Good War" was not without its controversies. It's only in retrospect that we credit FDR for backing Churchill and moving against Hitler in Europe, even though the direct attack had come from Japan. As the article notes, at the time those moves were met with fierce criticism.

And even after the military victory in Europe, Allied occupation forces were beset with an insurgency similar in many ways to the one faced by Coalition troops in Iraq. And once again the criticisms are eerily parallel.

"Plus ca change..." as the French would say.

Guantanamo vs the Gulag

For those unclear on the concept, (which of course includes Amnesty International), Eric the Unread has posted an easy cheat sheet for comparing Guantanamo with the Gulag, sourced from an excellent op-ed piece by John Podhoretz:

Number of prisoners at Gitmo: approximately 600.

Number of prisoners in the Gulag: 25 million, according to peerless Gulag historian Anne Applebaum.

Number of camps at Gitmo: 1.

Number of camps in the Gulag: At least 476, according to Applebaum.

Political purpose of Gulag: The suppression of internal dissent inside a totalitarian state.

Political purpose of Gitmo: The suppression of an international terrorist group that had attacked the United States, killing 3,000 people while attempting to decapitate the national government through the hijack of jets.

Financial purpose of Gulag: Providing totalitarian economy with millions of slave laborers.

Financial purpose of Gitmo: None.

Seizure of Gulag prisoners: From apartments, homes, street corners inside the Soviet Union.

Seizure of Gitmo prisoners: From battlefield sites in Afghanistan in the midst of war.

He follows up with some commentary on the sad tendency of once-idealistic organizations like Amnesty International to sink into a reflexive hatred of the US:

One of the lasting legacies of Bin Laden's attacks on the US, has been the increasing number of Western liberals willing to pour scorn, cyncism and vitriol on their governments, often with little evidence, while at the same displaying nothing short of stunning naivety about the motivations of terrorist groups or radicals. At worst these agonised handwringing liberals* give excuses for extremism or act as apologists for terror. The War on Terror has knocked the left so far off balance, they have forgotten that the values they believe in occassionally need to be defended vigourously - and not from George W Bush.

That the corrosive bile of anti-Americanism has seeped into Amnesty International should come as no surprise; it was inevitable.

The irony is that it was the left who closed their minds to the Gulags of Stalinist Russia; now the left use their imaginations to shout "Gulag" at the US.

* I hate using the term liberal in a derogatory sense, since I consider myself one. If I was in Twelve Angry Men, I'd be the Henry Fonda character.

Eric's blog is going on hiatus, leaving us with a fine essay to hold us over the summer: Liberalism is not a death wish.

The real Abu Ghraib

Christopher Hitchens reminds us what Abu Ghraib was before it became inextricably linked to those infamous photos of Pvt. Lynddie England holding the leash:

Ian McEwan observed recently that there were, in effect, two kinds of people: those who could have used or recognized the words "Abu Ghraib" a few years ago, and those to whom it became a new term only last year...

Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.

I visited the jail a few months later, and I can tell you about everything but the stench, which you would have to smell for yourself. Layers of excrement and filth were being shoveled out; cells obviously designed for the vilest treatment of human beings made one recoil. In the huge, dank, cement gallery where the executions took place, a series of hooks and rings hung over a gruesome pit. Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.

Hitchens' essay in Slate is actually about a Colombian artist's attempt to draw parallels between Abu Ghraib and the destruction of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, famously memorialized by Picasso in his celebrated painting. With his usual clearsighted knowledge of history, he walks us through what really happened, and why the parallel is both shallow and misguided. Read it all.

(Hat tip: Roger L. Simon)