Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (23 page)

Taking the Right Lessons from Defeat

When the U.S. defeat in Iraq becomes clear and unquestionable, it will be very important, as it is in Afghanistan, that Americans do not permit the Republicans and Democrats, and the punditry aligned with each, to effectively sell the idea that all would have been well in Iraq if Washington had had an extravagantly expensive and ready-to-roll reconstruction plan to implement after Saddam’s regime was destroyed. As defeat becomes obvious, some in high places will step up this already loud assertion. They will say, if only we had stopped the looting; if only we had a plan for restoring and expanding electricity production, if only we had not disbanded the army; if only we had quickly modernized the energy infrastructure; and on and on, and louder and louder it will get. Most of this blather will emanate from the Democratic Party, which will argue that the use of military force against the Islamists has been unsuccessful and then urge the spending of untold billions of U.S. dollars on a “New Deal” for the Middle East. This, they will contend, will deradicalize Muslims and make them peaceful, moderate, prosperous democrats; in short, al-Qaeda and its allies will be made into a slightly more aggressive version of the Rotary Club. Armed with the irrelevant Marshall Plan analogy, officials from Mr. Clinton’s administration are already beating the drum for vast increases in U.S. aid to the Muslim world. “If we are to be serious about promoting fundamental reform in pivotal [Islamic countries],” Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have written,

Beyond the always pervasive Democratic itch to spend the taxes of Americans on things and people that do not benefit them, this passage brings to mind Machiavelli’s warning that history should be used creatively, not in a cookie-cutter fashion; history provides lessons to be learned and adapted, not opportunities for past experiences to be exactly duplicated. The Marshall Plan analogy is often used as a staple bipartisan justification for U.S. involvement in Iraq and across the Middle East. It provides a road map to disaster. Europe in 1945 was economically devastated and convinced that fascism was untenable; the enemy states and their militaries were annihilated; and the continent as a whole was, after witnessing the Red Army rape eastern Germany, afraid to death of the USSR. Perhaps more important, the United States shared a common heritage with Europe; both sides of the Atlantic were grounded in the Classical experience, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the several Enlightenments, and the Industrial Revolution. Utter defeat, fear of Moscow, and broad underlying cultural and religious commonalities made the Marshall Plan work as much as did dollars. In the Pacific, the annihilation of Imperial Japan’s armed forces and the Japanese will-to-war were complemented by a culture willing to submit to its U.S. conqueror, as well as by President Truman’s wisdom in sending the self-imagined divinity General Douglas MacArthur to deal with Emperor Hirohito. Here truly was an instance when the god America sent was bigger than the god sitting on Japan’s throne.

None of the conditions that allowed the Marshall Plan and its Pacific counterpart to succeed are present in the Muslim world. That world is not defeated; it is America that is being beaten by that world’s youth in two locations. In cultural terms, we share almost nothing with the Islamic world. There are no historical commonalities on which to build; indeed, the historical experiences that the West shares with the Islamic world are crusades, colonialism, imperialism, and military intervention—not exactly the stuff from which happy-ever-aftering is made. In the area of religion, we could not be more dissimilar. Our faith is a barely tolerated, once-a-week duty; an as-needed and often cynical fillip to political rhetoric; and nothing worth fighting for. Their faith infuses all of life and is lived daily, treasured and taught as a proud history, and dutifully and even joyfully defended to the death. With this lack of positive cultural, historical, and religious commonalities, a Marshall Plan for the Muslim world would be as successful as pouring water on sand and hoping for a bumper crop of wheat. Indeed, it would be just as successful as has been the many billions of dollars in aid that the West has poured into the Muslim world since 1945.

Americans also must reject any claim by their leaders that does not acknowledge the most important reason for U.S. defeat in Iraq—Washington’s attempt to build a secular democratic polity there. We failed to replace Saddam’s regime with a functioning, durable government precisely because we tried to export our political model to Iraq. Our subsequent bipartisan effort to blame the Iraqis for their failure to build the secular democracy we wanted reveals a staggering level of ignorance and dishonesty. The Iraqis had no appreciable experience with a democratic system, are deeply torn by sectarian differences, and are divided among three major ethnic groups, none of which had more than a modicum of interest in sharing power with the others, each fearing it would become the target of Saddam-like abuse if one group finagled a way to come out on top. Moreover, the great majority of Iraqis saw secular democracy as anathema to their Islamic faith. To a people whose religion rejects as apostasy the concept of deliberately separating church and state, American advice suggesting that Iraqis govern themselves on the basis of such a separation is tantamount to telling the advisees to turn their backs on God. This reality was easily knowable before we invaded Iraq; it is one of the first lessons drawn from even a cursory reading of Islamic theology and history. “If the Iraqi government,” write the Iraq Study Group’s geriatric Cold Warriors to fix blame on Iraqis for the catastrophe wrought by the elite to which the group belongs, “does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government.”
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In other words: “You ungrateful little brown brothers better shape up or the Yanks are going to ship out.”

The most important lesson for Americans to draw from defeat, however, is that our failure to install democracy in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan, shows beyond question that our current governing elite is either ignorant of U.S. history (what Paine called “a too great inattention to the past”) or holds that history and the people who have made it in contempt. The bedrock ethos, political philosophy, and religious principles on which the American republic and its democracy are based go back many centuries, with contributions dating as far back as Aristotle and the republics of Rome and Sparta. A plausible starting point for the political evolution that would lead to the American polity lies eight centuries back at the time of the drafting and signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, which circumscribed the arbitrary powers of England’s King John. Then Americans, as Americans, had 150 years of self-governing experience and reliable political stability in North America before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Since the Declaration, Americans have battled through bitter politics and elections; westward expansion; economic depressions; slavery and civil war; industrial strife; segregation, Jim Crow, and lynch mobs; two world wars; and the Cold War in an ongoing communal effort to bring our society as close as possible to the always unachievable targets of perfect equity and equal opportunity for all citizens and peace at home and with foreign nations. The length, the difficulty, and the many miles still to go in this process are starkly apparent in recalling that the Voting Rights Act is only a bit more than forty years old, and we remain engaged in wars, large and small, all around the world.

U.S. political leaders with any knowledge of, pride in, or respect for the political and social hardships and achievements of the American people could not possibly have expected to build anything even faintly resembling it in Iraq. The building blocks of the American republic—Runnymede, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Calvinist Christianity, Jefferson’s Declaration, Madison’s Constitution, Hamilton’s
Federalist,
the New Deal, the Voting Rights Act, etc.—are simply absent from the Iraqi experience and that of Muslims generally. The Iraqis and their Islamic brethren have their own set of founding documents—the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah—but U.S. leaders want no truck with the sort of society and country that would be built on them. The American governing elite’s effort to blame the Iraqis for failing to achieve in four years what America has not fully achieved in eight hundred years is the act of ill-informed, cynical, and utterly despicable villains. This is surely a vital lesson about their bipartisan leaders that Americans must keep foremost in their minds when deciding if they believe any current U.S. leader of note has any genuine desire to protect their families and their country’s interests.

While the U.S. government, the media, and Americans generally have focused on Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his allies have continued on their course of trying to instigate anti-American animosities and hostility across the Islamic world. The Iraq and Afghan insurgencies are important to al-Qaeda’s goals, but bin Laden et al. now regard them as self-sustaining, appropriately led by Iraqis and Afghans, abundantly funded, supported by al-Qaeda and non–al-Qaeda foreign volunteers, and largely won. For these reasons al-Qaeda has been free to use much of its resources to develop the jihad elsewhere, either through the dispatch of cadre or, as noted, by providing training in its reestablished camps in South Asia. The U.S. government seems largely to have missed this reality; indeed, Washington’s steadfast refusal to take seriously and analyze the words of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
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has yielded a situation in which few U.S. officials seem cognizant of al-Qaeda’s long-standing number-one goal: to instigate an ever-increasing number of Muslims in an ever-increasing number of places to join the jihad against America and its allies. Bin Laden and his lieutenants are preeminently incendiaries, and while America is bore-sighted on Afghanistan and Iraq, they have been setting fires—through words, deeds, and personal example—across the Muslim world.

The Ability to Set Fires

The Islamists’ post-9/11 fire-setting successes have much to do with the animosities sparked in the Muslim world by the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It would, however, be a great mistake and somewhat egotistical for Americans to attribute the international growth of Islamist sentiment to those conflicts alone. More important has been bin Laden’s steady avoidance of becoming engaged in what can be described as a civilization-based slanging match with America and the West. The Islamists’ extreme distaste for the West’s secular societies is beyond question; the countries they eventually conquer will not be ruled so as to resemble Canada. Still, the my-civilization-is better-than-yours-and-must-destroy-your-civilization theme has been at most a subtext of bin Laden’s rhetoric. On the other hand, the message of irrefutable civilizational superiority has been at the core of the rhetoric of Mr. Bush, the prime ministers of Britain, Australia, Canada, Israel, and other Western states.

The words of the main Islamist leaders have been a rhetoric of insularity directed at America and the West; they amount to an argument that you have your civilizations and lands, stay in yours, stay out of ours, and leave us alone. This reality has been deliberately obscured by U.S. neoconservatives who, after every aspect of their blood-soaked, imperialist, winone-for-Israel campaign in the Middle East had come a-cropper, raised the wild-eyed bogeyman of the imminent success of the Islamists’ plan to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
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And good Cold Warriors that they are, many U.S. and Western leaders have, in an almost default manner, purposely given the Islamists’ agenda a Bolshevik or even a Hitlerite today-Iraq-tomorrow-the-world cast. Their term of choice—
Islamofascist
—does the trick nicely, although several prominent scholars, including the neoconservatives’ patron saint, Bernard Lewis, have argued that Islam and fascism are incompatible and implicitly that if there are “Islamofascist” entities in the Arab world today, they are the nation-states that are the allies of the United States.
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Nonetheless the aching post–Cold War discomfort of U.S. leaders over the lack of a universal threat to replace the USSR has given the imminent-caliphate argument a much more receptive hearing than it merits. The term has the added benefit, for the pro-Israel U.S. governing elite, of cynically evoking the memory of the Holocaust conducted by genuine fascists, thereby making criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel by Americans appear pro-Nazi, pro-Holocaust, and anti-Semitic. But using the Nazi analogy is “usually false,” as Ian Buruma has correctly noted, “although [it is] highly effective as a way to denounce people with whom one diasagrees.” Behind this neoconservative smokescreen, however, the story of Islamic history and aspirations is often told with a very insular voice,
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and so the Islamists’ insular rhetoric resonates loudly and positively in Muslim minds. On the contrary, the West’s rhetoric of imposing elections, parliaments, and women’s rights is perceived as a universal and immense threat to Islamic insularity, and as such it is an oral recruiting poster for al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden and his ilk have been able to light more fires since 9/11 because they have found tangible issues that appeal to all Muslims, issues that are visceral, need little analysis, and easily lend themselves to those great and more or less unstoppable and globalizing engines of militancy—al-Jazirah, al-Arabiyah, the BBC, and the Internet. Al-Qaeda’s sharp, remorseless focus on the substance and impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world, reinforced graphically and endlessly by the just-mentioned media, is the always reliable dry kindling for jihad instigation. Holding an umbrella over this tinder, moreover, is the U.S. governing elite’s maintenance of a foreign-policy status quo and its refusal to even consider the possibility that those policies motivate America’s Muslim foes and thus undermine U.S. national security. The Islamists’ indictment sheet against the United States has been precise, limited, and consistent for more than a decade.

1. The U.S. military and civilian presence in the Arab Peninsula
   
2. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel
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3. U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India, and Russia
   
4. U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil and suppression of its price
   
5. U.S. military presence in the Islamic world—Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
   
6. U.S. support, protection, and funding of Arab police states.
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By keeping this list squarely in view, it is simple to see how events since 9/11 have strengthened bin Laden’s argument in the minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims. Beyond their much-strengthened bases on the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. military forces are now in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, and more than a dozen countries in eastern and western Africa. In addition, the summer of 2006 saw the United States and the other G-8 nations dutifully hold Israel’s coat while the Israel Defense Forces gutted Lebanon’s economic infrastructure, and Washington very publicly announced an urgent operation to replenish the arsenal of precision weapons that Israel had expended in dismantling Lebanon’s economy. In the same period and since, the massive run-up in oil prices—from $30 to above $90 per barrel—drove home to Muslims worldwide the validity of bin Laden’s message about how much revenue they are losing because of the West’s traditional ability to persuade Muslim oil-producers to keep prices acceptable to Western and especially U.S. consumers. While American motorists winced and railed against a gallon of gas costing more than three dollars, many Muslims entertained visions of what might be possible vis-à-vis their standard of living if a barrel of oil was pegged at bin Laden’s goal of at least $100 and the titanic thieving of their governments could be reduced to the merely gross.
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Post-9/11 events have seen the United States expand its support for powers that are perceived across the Islamic world as oppressing Muslims. Washington has continued to identify Russia’s war in Chechnya as identical to the U.S. war against al-Qaeda; U.S. diplomats continue to describe China’s Uighur Muslims as terrorists, abetting Beijing’s Tibet-modeled, genocide-by-inundation policy against them; and President Bush inaugurated a strategic relationship with India—complete with potential U.S. assistance for New Delhi’s nuclear program—that supports Indian military operations in Muslim Kashmir and that appears to threaten Muslim Pakistan. In what increasingly seems to be the single most damaging bin Laden indictment of the United States among Muslims, Washington continues to back and protect Arab tyrannies to the hilt. Since 9/11 Saudi Arabia has held rigged municipal elections that ensured little or no criticism of the al-Sauds’ dictatorship;
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Jordan has rolled back the ability of Islamic parties to operate, causing the Islamic Action Front—the largest opposition party—to withdraw from municipal leadership elections;
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and Egypt has cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood after it had gained an unexpected number of seats in parliamentary elections and plans to outlaw religion-based political parties.
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As in the case of the Israeli nation-state, I accept and support the idea that Muslim nation-states must do what they need to do to survive, but the discrepancy between Washington’s syrupy we-want-democracy-for-Muslims rhetoric and its hard-line, unquestioning support for brutal Arab tyrannies negates even the theoretical impact of America’s soft power and amounts to nothing less than a total and durable U.S. strategic defeat in the battle for Muslim hearts and minds, a defeat that has been steadily deepening for more than thirty years.

As important as is the substance of these issues, and the ease with which the media keep them in front of the Muslim masses on a daily basis, they are perhaps more important as the glue of unity they apply across the Muslim ummah. Bin Laden and his lieutenants were in their late teens and early twenties during the heyday of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, and they saw how Khomeini utterly failed to stimulate a durable anti-American jihad by relentlessly attacking the decadence and debauchery of U.S. and Western civilization. It is clear, in retrospect, that virtually no Muslims were willing to kill themselves by attacking Americans because they drank beer, voted in elections, and attempted to ensure that women and men are treated equally. Even the Lebanese Hezbollah fighters who killed themselves in attacks against U.S. and French targets in Beirut in 1982–83 did so under the umbrella of the ayatollah’s rhetoric, but they were in fact executing nationalist operations aimed at driving what they perceived as occupying Westerners out of Lebanon.
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Indeed, the still-dominant belief of U.S. leaders that these attacks were manifestations of Muslim hatred for Western civilization is a major reason they have incorrectly assumed that bin Laden is using the same arguments as Khomeini to inspire today’s jihadis.

Remembering the ayatollah’s fizzled Western-degeneracy-based jihad, bin Laden and other Islamist leaders have stressed the negative impact of what Muslims perceive as anti-Islamic U.S. foreign policies. In doing so, they have given Muslims around the world a focus that is based on issues that mean something to them no matter where they live in the world: the killing of Muslims by infidels and the occupation of Muslim lands and holy sites.
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Now, the use of the term
Muslims
is often criticized as a stereotyping mechanism that demeans Muslims through its implicit assumption that every Muslim thinks alike. Such criticism usually comes from the staunchest multiculturalists, a powerful subset of our governing elite whose members more often than not know next to nothing about any foreign cultures and even less about their own. Well, those with more than a tenth-grade education know that almost all societies lack homogeneity, but they also know it is almost impossible to have a substantive conversation or debate if generalizations cannot be used. In this case, however, the multiculturalists have a point, and no one recognized its validity more than Osama bin Laden.

Contemporary Islamic civilization is as diverse as any of the world’s other great civilizations, perhaps more so. Dispersed geographically across five continents, Islam, especially its Sunni variant, is further riven by ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences. Muslims also live under a variety of political systems (although most live under authoritarian regimes of one sort or another) and in places where their faith has roots as old as the Prophet Muhammad or as new and fragile as those formed in late-twentieth-century America. Likewise, the availability to Muslims of education, health care, employment, public services, and the rule of law varies wildly around the globe. Given this vast array of differences, the idea of asking Muslims to forgo their daily effort to work, care for their families, and avoid persecution by security services and instead risk their lives to fight to deprive Americans of their right to vote is ludicrous on its face. It brings into question the basic brainpower and common sense of those who argue that hatred of U.S. lifestyles and electoral processes motivates our Islamist enemies. So idiotic is this contention that any U.S. leader who asserts the point—that legion includes George W. Bush and most of his would-be successors, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Rudolph Giuliani—is either sadly stupid or a studied liar, because it is impossible to know anything about the Islamist enemy we are fighting and come to that conclusion. Whichever descriptor fits, any U.S. political leader who mouths this concept is a politically correct threat to America’s national security. Such men or women ought to be sent packing by the voters at the earliest possible moment so Americans can continue their search for someone who can see the world as it is and prevent America’s defeat.

So great is the diversity of the Islamic world that any kind of unity—anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jew, or otherwise—would be almost impossible to achieve if it were not for the one universal motivating factor that U.S. leaders refuse to acknowledge and talk about: the Islamic faith. From Chechnya to Chile, from Nigeria to North Carolina, and from Saudi Arabia to Sulawesi, Muslims share the same faith, one that is more pervasive and durable in its influence on individuals, personal relationships, community affairs, and international relations than any of the current iterations of the world’s other great religions. Now, before the multiculturalists go berserk, it must be recognized that Muslims are not an unthinking monolith acting on a single theological script as a 1.3 billion-person automaton. Yes, the practice of Islam varies in different regions of the earth, mixing, for example, with millennia-old local traditions and mores in the Far East and Africa. And yes, there are numbers of Muslims who have fallen away from their faith or are at best sporadic participants in its rituals. But at day’s end, each Muslim’s identity is grounded in his faith, its requirements, and the culture it has produced, and this grounding is about the only basis upon which any kind of Muslim unity, any sense of the Muslim ummah, could be constructed. And it is precisely on this grounding that Osama bin Laden has built.