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SPENGLER
How 'cherry-picking'
militant Islam can win
 Do you
wonder what President George W Bush reads at night?
Westerns? Methodist sermons? His favorite, it seems, are
popular military histories by Professor Victor Davis
Hanson, who reads classics in the California state
university system. Hanson now advises the Bush
administration, reported the London Times on September
20.
Recently, Hanson dined with Vice President
Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne, while his book Why
the West Has Won has a place on the president's
night-table.
Fine fellow that he is, Hanson is
the wrong man for the job.
In the Times story,
Hanson unintentionally explained to Times journalist
Giles Whittell precisely how it is that radical Islam
might destroy the West, namely, by "cherry-picking
Western culture". He said, "If you're a Wahhabi mullah
and you want American antibiotics for your daughter's
strep throat, do you deny her them because that's the
country that gives the world [television shock jock]
Jerry Springer? If you're a Saudi sheikh and you want a
heart bypass or Viagra, do you go without because it's
contaminated with Western decadence? I don't think so.
It's as if they don't realize that the whole supporting
infrastructure ... is a product of a complex system of
secularism, rationalism, tolerance, sexual equality,
consensual government and free expression ... they've
tried for 50 years to cherry-pick the West and it
doesn't work well."
Despite himself, Hanson has
put his finger on the reason militant Islam well might
defeat the West. It can cherry-pick Western
culture, eg weapons of mass destruction. But that is not
the most dangerous adaptation of Western culture in the
hands of militant Islam.
Hanson's examples (a
Wahhabi mullah or a Saudi sheikh) betray the racism of
which I accused the Western leaders immediately after
September 11, 2001.
The challenge to the United
States comes not from ignorant relics who do not
understand the US, but from a generation of
Western-educated Muslims who understand the US perfectly
well, and would rather be dead than be absorbed into it.
Two years ago in Asia Times Online, I took issue
with a better military historian, the estimable Sir John
Keegan, over the same subject (Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical Islam
could win, October 12, 2001). Keegan's argument was
identical to Hanson's: the Westerner stands up and
fights to the finish, while the Oriental raids and runs.
That is self-consoling delusion.
Suppose that
the concept of tragedy is the element of Western culture
that Islamic radicals have cherry-picked? By this I mean
that the target is not the Western capacity to make war,
but rather Western morale. There are Islamist leaders
who think in terms of classical tragedy. Author and
expert on Islam Daniel Pipes cites the case of Islamic
Jihad founder Fat'hi ash-Shiqaqi. Prior to his
assassination in 1995, he spoke to a Western interviewer
of his love for William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Anton Chekhov, Jean-Paul Sartre and T S Eliot.
In particular, he expressed a passion for the
Greek tragedian Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex he
had read 10 times in English translation "and each time
wept bitterly" (see "The Western Mind of Radical Islam",
First Things 58, December 1995).
Just how might
militant Islam succeed against the enormous might of the
US? The racist stereotypes of Western military
historians do not explain Islam's early success. It is
worthwhile reviewing how it was that Islam conquered the
world from Spain to the Indus Valley in the first
decades after its founding. There was nothing "Oriental"
about Islamic generalship. Mohammed's tactics closely
resemble those of Albrecht von Wallenstein during the
Thirty Years' War of 1618-48, or Francisco "Pancho"
Villa in the Mexican Civil War of 1910-18.
Asked
in 1626 to raise 8,000 soldiers for Holy Roman emperor
Ferdinand to oppose Danes and Northern Protestants,
Wallenstein instead offered to raise 50,000, on the
condition that he could take whatever he needed to
sustain the army from the countries through which it
passed.
Seventh-century Arab raiders attacked
the frontiers of the Byzantine and Persian empires,
where prolonged strife had weakened defenses. Quite
small forces were able to destroy the riparian
agriculture of Mesopotamia and later Persia, leading to
mass starvation. Those who wished to live joined the
army and moved on to the next objective, and the army
grew in snowball fashion.
Islam wiped out
long-resident Christian and Jewish populations, reduced
huge stretches of irrigated land to a desert,
drastically shrank the population, and turned the
remnants into a conquering force. It is remarkable how
much one can conquer when human life becomes a free
resource. That is the secret of Islam's appeal to the
downtrodden: whoever joins the war has an equal chance
at promotion. Wallenstein was an egalitarian, just like
Mohammed.
Later Islamic rulers
Today's
raiders are not horsemen but terrorists, and their
objective is not to conquer territory but to demoralize
the populations of the West. When I say that they yet
may defeat the West, I do not mean their victory is
assured or even probable (asked to bet, I would give
them odds of 1:2). Flushing out the terrorists is a
wearisome, dirty, costly chore that threatens to exhaust
the patience of Western populations.
In his
"National Review Online" column, Hanson frets that the
US public may lose patience over Iraq and America's
foreign commitments in general. "The American public is
tiring of them all - and that will be the real challenge
for any president in the years ahead," he wrote on
September 26.
That the US will be worn down by
having to send two or three soldiers a day home in body
bags is an obvious danger, as opinion polls appear to
suggest. Less obvious is what future terror attacks may
bring. As I remonstrated to Sir John Keegan in 2001,
"The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror.
The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy des
Schreckens [to cause horror] and Entsetzens
[terror, literally: dislodgement]. Horror was not merely
an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a
form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on
the grand scale. [Adolf] Hitler's tactical advantage lay
in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents
could imagine."
One danger is that al-Qaeda or
some similar organization might compel the West to
inflict collateral damage on a very large scale in
response to future terrorist attacks. How much civilian
suffering can the US tolerate without succumbing to
horror?
A terrorist who understands Sophocles,
as I have written in the past, is a formidable opponent.
He provides an opportunity for his enemy to play out the
role of tragic hero, who wishes to bring the benefits of
Western democracy to the Arab masses, but only redoubles
their suffering.
The winner in this game is the
one who best can tolerate instability. US policy remains
obsessed with bringing stability to the Middle East, no
matter how much the US must spend. Bush gambled and lost
a good deal of his reputation blowing soap-bubbles about
an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.
Islamic
radicals benefit from instability, like Mohammed,
Wallenstein or Villa. More chaos means more recruits and
less patience on the part of Americans. At the point
that American patience with counterinsurgency operations
in distant theaters has exhausted itself, only then
launch the next mega-terrorist attack. It is not hard to
imagine the will of the West gradually eroding over a
decade or two.
What should the West do? Again,
he wins who best can tolerate instability. Once upon a
time the British were quite good at that. They ruled
India with a tiny civil service and a small army,
recruiting local forces and using them to excellent
effect in a fragmented, multi-ethnic subcontinent. In
essence it means recruiting Turks to patrol Basra, Kurds
to patrol Tikrit, Shi'ites to occupy Baghdad, while
offering bribes, territory and other inducements to
Iraq's neighbors to meddle. The result would be a
ghastly mess, perhaps even a state of perpetual war, but
one for which the US could take limited responsibility.
At the same time, the US might try a campaign of
psychological warfare against Islamic fundamentalism.
Rather than bend over backward to show that it is
fighting terrorism rather than a religion, it might
offer sly incentives to (for example) Christian
evangelists to popularize Koranic criticism. Judging by
the war of the websites between Christian and Islamic
partisans, something like this already might be in the
works, at least on a small scale.
In the
meantime, Bush should find other things to read than
Hanson's military histories. Hanson's books are quite
enjoyable. The Soul of Battle compares the
ancient Greek commander Epimanondas with Civil War
general W T Sherman and World War II commander G S
Patton Jr. Keegan did the same thing better in his
Mask of Command (Alexander the Great rather than
Epimanondas, Ulysses S Grant rather than Sherman, and so
forth).
Why the West Has Won convinces me
less, due to fallacy of composition; it excludes any
number of battles in which the West came to grief. More
to the point, the problems that Hanson's Greeks had to
confront bear little relation to the military issues of
the day. If he dares, Bush should instead read up on
Cardinal Richelieu, and how the prime minister
ruthlessly solidified the authority of the French crown
against the Huguenots in the 17th century, among other
things.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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