Radical Islam's edge
lies in its willingness to horrify the West, I have
contended since October 2001. Now this sword is
unsheathed, and America is reeling. In the unlikely
personage of Private First Class Lynndie England,
America has confronted its grand strategic weakness.
What has horrified the West during the past week or so
is not so much the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, but rather
England's clueless expression while holding a naked
Iraqi by a dog lead. "We are turning our children into
monsters," whisper the mothers of America. Abu Ghraib is
only one battle in a long war, but it is the first that
strikes directly at America's willingness to wage war in
the first place.
"By operating in the midst of
civilian populations, Islamist radicals put Western
counter-insurgency in a delicate position. The Western
response must be harsh enough to humble its adversaries,
without turning the stomach of the Western population
itself," I wrote on April 26 (Horror and Humiliation
in Fallujah). It is quite possible to inure
Westerners to an extreme level of violence against
civilians, for example, the destruction of German and
Japanese cities during World War II, by casting the
enemy population as an enemy. But in Iraq, American
soldiers were told that their mission was to remove a
hated tyranny in order to allow the people to pursue
their inherent impulse for Western-style freedom.
Instead, the coalition confronts a resistance willing to
die to delay the Westernization of Iraq.
Nothing more than this horrifies Americans, who descend
from people who willingly abandoned and traded away
their culture in return for a fresh start. The dead hand
of the past does not weigh on the American mind. Put
a young American from a West Virginia trailer park
among the diehards of an alien culture, and she will
imagine that she stumbled through the silver screen into a
monster movie.
"Mistah Kurtz, he dead," was the
epitaph for Joseph Conrad's mining official gone native
in The Heart of Darkness, as well as the epigraph
for T S Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men", a horrific elegy
for World War I. At Abu Ghraib, Mistah Kurtz may not
quite be dead, but he evidently is extremely confused.
The scandal over the prison parallels the
stalemates in the cities of Fallujah and Najaf. A
hardened band of fighters sheltering among an apathetic
but half-sympathetic population does not present an
insuperable problem for counter-insurgency, as the
British showed in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and the
Israelis more recently with Hamas. Operations of this
sort require excellent intelligence, which the British
and Israelis had, but the Americans manifestly do not
(Why America is
losing the intelligence war, Nov 11, 2003).
They also require a somewhat callous attitude towards
the surrounding civilian population, which must learn
the hard way to steer clear of the resistance.
Washington does not merely wish to crush resistance to
its military forces, but rather to turn Iraq into a
model for Mideast democracy. If that is the mission,
open warfare with either a Sunni militia in Fallujah or
a Shi'ite militia in Najaf presumably will generate too
much collateral damage and general ill-will. Unable to
reconcile the situation on the ground with its policy,
American forces have stumbled from one expedient to
another without, however, improving their grip on the
situation.
Who now doubts that radical Islam
might win? Both the mission and the soldiers assigned to
execute it are wrong to begin with. Many Iraqis would
rather be dead than Americanized, far more than the
Americans hoped. Short of well-trained, linguistically
qualified counterinsurgency forces to begin with, the
American military has had to spread the burden of
dealing with hostile locals across the broad and flabby
base of its available personnel, sadly including
England's 372nd military police company. Of secondary
importance is whether the 372nd operated under the
direction of higher authority or invented these
grotesqueries. In the absence of reliable intelligence,
soldiers attempting to control guerrilla attacks will
resort to whatever interrogation methods seem best at
the time in order to protect their comrades. What the
photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused have shown
is less harsh than the methods the British, Israelis,
and others routinely employ with suspect terrorists.
Nonetheless, to young soldiers unprepared for a culture
of absolute resistance, the encounter will be
horrifying. Through them that horror is projected into
American living rooms.
What will happen next?
America will not fold its tents and silently steal away,
and those who expect a few photographs from Abu Ghraib
to undermine America's resolve underestimate American
stubbornness. An open repudiation of past errors is most
unlikely during an American presidential election year,
but some adjustment is inevitable.
Ultimately, I
expect failure to establish order in Iraq will lead
Washington to jettison the goal of Iraqi democracy, as
George Will suggests in the May 4 Washington Post. It is
likely to embrace the next best thing, namely Iraqi
chaos (The devil and L Paul
Bremer, Jan 20, 2004). Rather than make
itself the common enemy of all Iraqi factions by raising
its profile, the coalition will allow the Iraqis to
settle their differences by the usual means by lowering
its profile. The "usual means" bespeak unpleasantness
unimaginably worse than anything that occurred at Abu
Ghraib but, like the Sudanese civil war, barely will
disturb the slumber of Americans.
Postscript: The Horror!
The Hanson! In a May 7 essay, the
omnipresent Victor Davis Hanson has changed his tone
from triumphalism to authentic concern that radical
Islam might win. In fact, his arguments are flatteringly
similar to this writer's, eg, "The challenge again is
that bin Laden, the al-Qaedists, the Baathist remnants,
and the generic radical Islamicists of the Middle East
have mastered the knowledge of the Western mind. Indeed
they know us far better than we do ourselves ... These
rules of the strategy of exhaustion are complex, and yet
have been nearly mastered by the radicals of the Middle
East. First, shock the sensibilities of a Western
society into utter despair at facing primordial enemies
from the Dark Ages."
"In [a
Sept 20, 2003] 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."
Better late
than never! Prof. Hanson, welcome to my
world.
