Those who have
crossed With direct eyes, to death's other
Kingdom Remember us - if at all - not as
lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow
men The stuffed men. - T S Eliot, The
Hollow Men
Allah is the Greatest. I
bear witness that nothing deserves to be worshipped
except Allah. Come to prayer. Come to success.
- The Muslim call to prayer, translated by Maulana
Muhammad Ali
As the
American military weighs the reduction of Fallujah,
there come into focus the grand vulnerabilities both of
the Americans and the Sunni resistance. The West cannot
endure without faith that a
loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His
throne. Horror - the perception that cruelty has no
purpose and no end - is lethal to the West. Europe is
dying slowly from the horror of the 20th century's world
wars, ending the way T S Eliot foresaw in the poem cited
above, "not with a bang but a whimper". Despite its
intrinsic optimism, America is vulnerable as well.
The Islamic world cannot endure without
confidence in victory, that to "come to prayer" is the
same thing as to "come to success". Humiliation - the
perception that the Ummah cannot reward those who submit
to it - is beyond its capacity to endure.
Radical Islam has risen against the West in
response to its humiliation - intentional or not - at
Western hands. The West can break the revolt by
inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists,
poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the
Muslim world.
But radical Islam yet may horrify
the West into submission, not only by large-scale acts
of terrorism against Western countries, but also by
provoking the West into mass destruction of life in the
Islamic world. 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. To do this requires intelligence precise enough
to target enemy resources without killing too many
civilians.
I am grateful to Dr Amar Manzoor for
the following summary of the issues (as well as praise).
He writes from the UK (my excerpts):
Having read some of your articles on how
radical Islam might win, I am amazed at your bravery
in declaring the obvious in the cultural and
deep-seated religious exclusivity which we face on a
daily basis. The Islamists seems to be carrying a
victory. This victory seems to be to prove that
radicals are right in the perception of America.
Simple fact: they are losing to win (also called the
rope-a-dope strategy by [world champion boxer]
Muhammed Ali). Each time the United States starts to
kill and maim large numbers of civilians, and gory
images are blasted to living rooms all around the
world, the Islamists are appealing to the conscience
of every person on the planet. Once the US does the
killing, rape, pillage, murder, and looting, they
[Islamists] will have won the hearts and minds of the
people. Guess what, Spengler: it looks like it is
working and working very well.
Dr
Mansoor is right, at least in large measure. Just after
the fall of the Twin Towers, I wrote:
The grand vulnerability of the Western
mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued
a policy of "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.
Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be
more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The
most horrible thing of all is that he well might have
succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity
to overreach.
America, as Osama bin Laden
taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not
military setbacks, but the horrific images of
Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the
war. America's experience in the war is enshrined in
popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now,
modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of
Darkness. The Belgian trading company official,
Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these
words: 'The horror! The horror!' It was a dreadful
film, but a clever reference. At the close of World
War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western
civilization, The Hollow Men, with a quote from
the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead." (Sir John Keegan is wrong: Radical Islam can
win, Oct 12, 2001).
There is of
course more to the story, for radical Islam just as well
might lose. Were the United States and its allies to
carpet-bomb Fallujah in order to destroy Sunni armed
resistance, the horrifying result would appall the
population of the West and advance the Islamist cause.
Crushing the resistance with limited civilian damage
would humiliate the Islamists and weaken them. The
nicety of this problem no doubt explains why the
American command has taken its good time to decide upon
a course of action.
On the other hand, surgical
strikes against resistance leaders, such as Israel's
targeted killings of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, enervate rather than energize
the Islamist side. When the long arm of Israeli
vengeance can reach into the heart of the enemy camp,
the Islamists are humiliated and thus weakened.
Intelligence is the decisive variable in the equation,
and the poor state of America's spy agencies,
acknowledged by the CIA's George Tenet, has been the
Achilles Heel of the coalition, as I argued in Why America is losing the intelligence
war (Nov 11, 2003). But I also predicted that
America's deficient capacity for human intelligence
would make Washington depend more upon Israel. Precisely
that appears to be happening.
Nations have
interests, not friends, observed Otto von Bismarck, and
it is commonality of interest that brings Washington and
Jerusalem together. A host of Western commentators
attacked President George W Bush for taking the Israeli
side over settlements and the Palestinian right of
return, on the grounds that it humiliated the Arab
world, and a plethora of Muslim voices bemoan their
humiliation at the hands of the United States.
Much, much more is to come. The "rope-a-dope"
tactic Dr Mansoor cites can work both ways. Israel
offers many things to Washington, including
Arab-language translators, intelligence operatives, and
tactical expertise in urban search-and-destroy missions.
But its transcendent value to American strategy lies not
in what it does, but what it is, namely an ever-present
source of humiliation to the Muslim sense of self-worth.
The price of recalcitrance, Bush has told the
Palestinians and indirectly the Arab world at large, is
that some part of the Dar al-Islam has fallen to Jewish
hands for the indefinite future.
Analysts
unfriendly to the Muslim world speak of a
"pride-and-honor culture", in which the prickliness of
the Arab street regarding the Palestine issue and
so-called honor killings are supposed manifestations of
the same social traits. There is another way to look at
the matter. Among the world's religions Christianity and
Islam alone have the capacity for mass absorption of
converts from different races and ethnic groups. It is
hard to tell which of the two is growing faster. One of
them will be the world's dominant religion in the 21st
century. There is a radical difference between Islamic
and Christian conversion. Both seek to supercede
Judaism, but in different ways. Christianity offers a
New Israel, called out from among the nations by the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because God's love for
mankind is the premise of the New Israel, there is a
limit to Christian tolerance for bloodshed. To propose
open genocide, the Nazis had to repudiate Christianity
and embrace paganism only.
The Christian's
participation in the vicarious sacrifice of the Cross
offers salvation at the end of the soul's journey.
Christian practice puts enormous effort into sustaining
the conviction of the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven:
prayers, hymns, cathedrals, paintings, and so forth. No
such concept of individual spiritual transformation
exists in mainstream Islam. The individual submits
wholly to Allah, who controls all things without
qualification. That is Islam's enormous strength; the
individual believer can leave behind the carping
self-doubt of the Christians. For the same reason,
however, setbacks to the Ummah are a challenge to the
faith of every believer, for all events are in the hands
of Allah, not those who have submitted to His will.
Success therefore is a theological necessity for Islam.
Humiliation for Jews and Christians is a chastisement
from God; did not Christ accept His humiliation on the
cross? For Islam, humiliation is a refutation of the
faith itself.
For a generation, Western policy
towards the Muslim world has emphasized deference
towards Muslim sensibilities, the Bush White House
emphatically included. It does not occur to Muslim
radicals that their enhanced status in the Islamic world
might prompt the West to undertake the opposite, namely
to humiliate some aspects and some leaders of Islam, if
not the religion itself. The Islamists' vision of the
future is audacious, as Dr Mansoor recounts:
Irrespective of their color, religion, or
culture, we can see that their foothold and leadership
methods are taking hold. This has been transferred
across the world to China, South America, the Middle
East, the Far East, South Asia, as well as the Central
Asian republics. The general dismay coupled with the
dividing lines of rich and poor in the world and the
complexities of culture and capitalism are allowing
their message to gain ground steadily. This means more
recruits, more audacious plans in the pipeline, and
even more difficulty in using third generation forces
to counter fourth generation asymmetric threats which
appear and disappear like ghosts. The question for me
is not the method of implementation, widely regarded
as terrorism, throughout the world. This has always
been in existence. The question for me is the message
and why it is so blindingly powerful. The message
provides the impetus to the heart, and perception
drives the mind into the court of the
Islamist.
Again, the opposite may be the
case. Muslims of different ethnicity and sect are more
likely to fall out when the credibility of the Islamists
suffers a reverse. During the past week, the United
States has for the first time humiliated the Islamic
world openly and without compunction, in the small
matter of the West Bank settlements. If it continues in
this direction, Dr Mansoor's scenario may not work out
as he expects.
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loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His
throne. Horror - the perception that cruelty has no
purpose and no end - is lethal to the West. Europe is
dying slowly from the horror of the 20th century's world
wars, ending the way T S Eliot foresaw in the poem cited
above, "not with a bang but a whimper". Despite its
intrinsic optimism, America is vulnerable as well.
