ISLAM: What Is To Be Done?
by Hugh Fitzgerald (July 2010)
The following is an expanded version of the speech Mr. Fitzgerald delivered to the New English Review Symposium on June 19, 2010.
Shortly after the 9/11/2001 attacks, that have entered history under the too-casual shorthand of “nine-eleven,” the American government began to plan to conduct a war against those whom, it correctly believed, were those most immediately involved in the attack. These were the members of an identifiable group called Al Qaeda. Its head was a mediagenic son of a Saudi billionaire, Osama Bin Laden, ably seconded by the scion of a prominent Egyptian family, Ayman Al-Zawahiri (his great-uncle Azzam Pasha had been the first Secretary of the Arab League), with others who had, from their lairs in Afghanistan, been plotting against the West at least since 1993, when the first attack on the World Trade Center took place. And within months it carried out that plan, directed not only at Al Qaeda but at the Taliban that had given Al Qaeda refuge and succor in Afghanistan.
Nor did the word “Jihad” have any application in the war that began in Iraq when the Americans invaded that country in March 2003, with our leaders having been convinced by Shi’a Iraqis in exile that if only we were to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraq could become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations, for American policymakers, unaware of the real nature of Iraqi society, and the sectarian and ethnic fissures within it, fell for the line that Ahmad Chalabi and others peddled. They wanted to fall for such a line, of course, wanted to believe that “democracy” could be transplanted to a Muslim country, and wanted to believe, as well, that the combination of “democracy” – what Bush described as “freedom for ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East,” and prosperity, which would surely come if the Americans encouraged all those members of the Iraqi middle class just waiting to give free rein to their entrepreneurial flair under American direction, and this would make Iraq, a “key” country in the Middle East, a grateful and devoted friend of the United States. Nothing was said about the Shi’a-Sunni split, nothing was predicted about a Sunni refusal to acquiesce in the certain loss of power, or in the Shi’a determination to hold onto power that until the American invasion had been held by the Sunnis during the entire history of modern Iraq.
No, as in Afghanistan, so in Iraq, the subject not to be mentioned was Islam. American soldiers were taught nothing about Islam, and it was only here and there, as in an Arabic class taught by a Jordanian Christian in Tikrit, that some American soldiers were exposed to virulent denunciations of Islam.
And the entire premise of both wars was that in each country there was something called an “insurgency” and, for some of the Leavenworth colonels who were said to form such an impressive Brains Trust for General Petraeus, there were also said to be “laws” that governed “insurgencies.” Foir example, we were treated to the information that, “in general, insurgencies last about ten years.” This was a ludicrous conclusion, one whose silliness can be seen if, for example, we solemnly declare that “our research shows that, on average, civil wars last 12.7 years” or “our research shows that, on average, wars last 11.2 years.” Such notions offer a false arithmetic certainty. They ignore all kinds of things, but the biggest thing of all that is ignored is that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people we thought we were fighting were Muslims, and the people whom we were aiding were also Muslims, if of a slightly less virulent or fanatical brand – though even this does not adequately describe the situation in Iraq, where now Sunnis, and now Shi’a, of different kinds and with different interests, seemed to be the most dangerous enemy of the Americans, and their goals. While the Shi’a were still not certain that they would have control of the country, they were the least difficult to deal with. When some of the Sunni Arabs believed that they had more to gain by collaborating with the Americans, and in any case welcomed all the money and weapons the Americans could give them to fight Al Qaeda (which had made the mistake of attacking local Sunni Arabs), understanding full well that that money and those weapons could be used later on against the Shi’a or, if necessary, against the Americans themselves, they were perfectly wiling to collaborate, in tribal allegiance temporarily assigned to “The Awakening,” and this was misinterpreted by the Americans as a great strategic achievment, when it represented merely the temporary rental of some allies who, for reasons of their own quite different from ours, were willing to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The Americans never allowed themselves to see their task in Iraq and Afghanistan as connected to a larger effort, that effort seen best as a war of self-defense, not by America alone, but by all the non-Muslim nations, against those promoting Jihad. There was a lot of talk about the “center” of the “war against terrorism” – first that “center” was Afghanistan, and then that “center” moved to Iraq, and then that center moved back to Afghanistan, and then it was located hovering somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and lately we read that perhaps the “center” has shifted to Yemen – or perhaps to Somalia, or somewhere else. It never was suggested that the very idea of a single “center” for Islamic terrorism – or, still more obviously, for those conducting Jihad through other instruments, such as deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest – made no sense. It showed a misunderstanding that the problem was not a “failed state” here, or a malignant regime there, but rather, the ideology of Islam, its appeal, its demands and pressures, that never let up, on non-Muslims, whether those non-Muslims lived in countries dominated by Islam, or whether they lived in countries that had always been peopled by, and developed by, non-Muslims who had, in an excess of negligent enthusiasm for the Idols of the Age, Tolerance and Diversity, had without too much thought, allowed milions of Muslims to settle within their borders. There is no “center” for Islamic terrorism, and no “center” for those who use other, even more effective, because less attention-getting, instruments of Jihad, in order to promote the Cause of Islam. as connected to the world-wide march of Islam, a march – or a Jihad, rather – made possible not because of any changes in the ideology of Islam, but in the ability of Muslims to conduct, or think they could conduct, Jihad against non-Muslims everywhere.
Those changes were threefold. First, there was the money that Muslim peoples, incapable of creating modern economies and thus of becoming rich otherwise, received because so many Muslim states sat on large reserves of oil and natural gas. Those countries received tens of billions of dollars even before the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973. And since 1973, the Muslim members of OPEC have received more than thirteen trillion dollars, without having to lift a finger for any of it, for it was solely the result of an accident of geology. That money has been spent on vast arsenals, and for some countries, on projects to attain weapons of mass destruction. It has been spent to promote Islam, by paying for thousands or tens of thousands of mosques and madrasas all over the world, including the non-Islamic world, and for academic departments and whole institutions carefully vetted by Arab donors, to make sure that the people hired and promoted agree with and promote propaganda on behalf of Islam and Muslims. And some of the money has gone to pay Western hirelings who help in the propaganda effort – businessmen, journalists, and present or former political figures – whose work on behalf of Islam and of Muslim causes has also been paid for quite handsomely. In the entire 70-odd years of its existence, the Soviet Union spent about $8 billion on propaganda throughout the world. Saudi Arabia alone has over the past 30 years spent about $100 billion on furthering the Cause of Islam.
So what did the American government then do? Instead of standing back, and analyzing why it was so natural for the people in Iraq (not “the Iraqi people”) and the people in Afghanistan (not the “Afghan people”) to find fault with, to resent, the Americans, and for quite a few of them to begin to forget what it was they had hated (in Afghanistan) about the Taliban, but to find the Taliban newly-appealing, or in Iraq to forget how much they had hated Saddam Hussein, and for Sunnis he was once again their late lamented champion, and the Shi’a never showed the gratitude Americans expected they would for freeing them from Saddam Hussein, but rather, once they had secured their hold on power and no longer needed the Americans, treated them with mistrust and hostility. Only the Kurds in Iraq seemed to be genuinely friendly to the Americans, unlike either the Sunni or the Shi’a Arabs. There are two explanations for this, but only the first explanation has ever been mentioned, and then only very occasionally. And that explanation has to do with the protection offered by the Americans for the Kurds, ever since 1991, when American planes monitored the airspace over northern Iraq, and interdicted that space to the planes of Saddam Hussein. That allowed the Kurds a dozen years, from 1991 t0 2003, to develop their autonomy. And since 2003 the Kurds have been delighted that the Americans removed Saddam Hussein, their cruelest if not their only enemy. Secondly, they know that if an independent Kurdistan were to have a chance, it would have to rely on American diplomatic and military support. But that other part of the explanation for relative Kurdish friendliness was never mentioned.
But this war against “violent extremists” would have a special component, one that a number of military men talked excitedly about with great self-consciousness, as if it were a remarkably new idea. And that extra component was to accompany fighting, through traditional military means, Al Qaeda in Iraq and Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, with a great effort to “win hearts and minds” of the locals. And the ways to win over those hearts and those minds, it was felt, was not by appealing to any common effort, or view of the world that we shared with them and that neither of us shared with those horrible “violent extremists” we had come to fight and allowed ourselves to believe were our common enemy, as antipathetic to the local Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the same reasons, as they were to us, but rather through bribery. That bribery took many forms, and it was called “reconstruction” as if Iraq and Afghanistan had previously been “constructed’ and only the foreign invaders, in their fighting, had so damaged the infrastructure that it now needed “reconstruction.” This was false, and dangerous, but by no means the worst of the many false and dangerous things that the American government, in its inattention to language and the truth, has permitted.
Here’s why. During World War II the Allies were certainly responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in countries that the Nazis had seized, and even responsible for killing tens of thousands in Italy, in the attempt to dislodge the Germans after Italy had left the war. But that did not mean that the locals were against us, and always in danger of going over to the Germans. Not at all. When the American and British planes bombed a Dutch (or was it Danish?) hospital for orphans, by accident, in a raid meant to destroy the Gestapo headquarters next door, the reaction of the Danish (or was it Dutch?) resistance was to urge the Americans and the British to “keep on coming, don’t stop, keep on coming.”
Shouldn’t the American military and the civilian leaders have asked themselves why it was that they had to worry so much about the reaction of the locals, why it was so obvious that those, such as the Sunni Arabs in the Awakening Councils, who might turn on a dime and go over to Al Qaeda, or if they were Shi’a to support Moqtada al-Sadr or other Shi’a groups that treated the Americans as the enemy, had implanted in their brains a pre-existing grid upon which the universe could be laid, and on that grid, the enemy was always the infidel.
What has happened in Iraq, since March 2003?
Well, two trillion dollars has been spent. 4,500 troops have been killed, and about 35,000 severely wounded, so severely that they will require lifetime care. Tens upon tens of billions of dollars have been spent on projects, many of which were entrusted to local contractors who failed to build what they promised, or blew up what they built in order to be paid to build it again, and everywhere there have been fantastic examples of grand theft by the Iraqis, and by local Arabs, such as the overcharging Kuwaitis, who supplied the American army with oil and other services, and who took full advantage of the Americans whenever they could.
American policy in Iraq has resulted in a colossal squandering of men, money, materiel, and of attention too – we focused on Iraq, and by manically focusing on it for so many years, wasted time that might have been spent coming to grasp the meaning, and the menace, of Islam.
And Afghanistan?
Not quite the same, but almost.
Like Iraq, and for reasons only slightly different, Afghanistan represents a further squandering, of men, money, materiel and, also not to be overlooked, uses up attention by government officials, attention that should be spent on many other things, including far more effective and cheaper means to weaken the Camp of Islam and, therefore, the threat of Jihad.
An Arab or Iranian leader – at least in the Islamic Republic of Iran– needs to explain why he does not go to war. Right now no explanation is necessary: Israel is too strong, and understood to be too strong. But what if Israel is reduced in size? Then what appears on the map to be a ridiculously and hopelessly tiny country then seems to have become even more obviously impossible to defend, then the likelihood of an Arab attack grows. “Darura” may be invoked to justify not waging open warfare on an unsubmissive Infidel enemy if that Infidel enemy remains too strong. So “Darura” can be considered the doctrine invoked when Deterrence, by Infidels, that is the threat of inflicting far greater damage on a Muslim attacker than the Muslim attacker can himself inflict, is successful. Think of “Darura” then as simply a name we can use for Deterrence. For if Israel is not only stronger, but overwhelmingly so, and seen to be so, then there will be no war. There will never be real peace. That is impossible. But so what? The present situation is not bad, and perfectly manageable. Without permanent control of the “West Bank” Israel’s position is NOT manageable, war is more likely, for Arab leaders – including those who succeed Mubarak in Egypt, and King Abdullah in Jordan – will not be able to resist. The temptation of a gang-up will be too great, especially since the Arabs have never really known defeat as Germany and Japan knew it, with the ruination of their countries, lying in smoldering ruins. That Israel has never inflicted, and never wanted to inflict.
That is what should be done abroad.
We have all read about that U.N. Report on the squalid intellectual state of Arab countries – the one written by those described as “Arab intellectuals.” The report offers statistics as evidence for the lack of intellectual curiosity about all kinds of things, as reflected in the fact that all 22 of the Arab countries manage to translate a mere 330 books a year (many of them junk novels, or military technology, no doubt), that is fewer books than tiny and impoverished Greece manages to translate for the profit and pleasure of Greeks, every year. But what the Arab authors did not do is compare, for example, translation in Pakistan with translation in India, that is to examine other Muslim lands. And what they fail to mention, fail even to hint at, is the role of Islam in discouraging free and skeptical inquiry. For Muslims, Islam is supposed to contain everything, and the rest is merely a footnote, possibly to be consulted when weaponry is needed, but otherwise unnecessary. There is no curiosity about the history, the culture, of non-Muslim lands and peoples, nor about their art, their science, their political theory. That curiosity originates in the West – the same West that Muslims are taught to despise.
I reviewed with you the twin follies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and suggested that the best way to contain Islam was not to invade, not to conquer, not to try to win Muslim hearts or minds, but simply to take the doctrines of Islam seriously, and to understand that they cannot be reinterpreted away, and so we should act to defend ourselves, and in defending ourselves to husband our resources, by exploiting, cleverly and relentlessly, the pre-existing fissures – sectarian, ethnic,and economic – within the world of Islam, with special attention to disseminating among the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs that Islam, despite its universalist claims, is – as Anwar Shaikh called it – “the Arab national religion.” It is not hard to show all the ways in which the practices that Islam reinforce the use of Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism. That should be a major theme in the exploitation of those identifiable fissures I have discussed.
And the second point I wished to make is that if we study Islam, we begin to understand all the ways that Islam itself explains the failures of Muslim societies, and that the explanations of those political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures are no convincing, and so impossible to rebut, that once stated, and re-stated, and re-stated, by Infidels, speaking among themselves, Muslims will overhear the discussion, and be forced to respond, and will be unable to do so convincingly.
Perhaps, if you have read this far, you will find reasons to agree.
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