NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
June 8, 2011
Catastrophic mistake
Can we all go home now? Did the "war on terror" (as people persist in calling it, in the absence of an officially-approved and politically-correct alternative) end with the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden? Have exponents of a fanatical "Islamism" lost interest in their cause? Will they desist from acts of terrorist violence, and instead become insurance brokers?I ask these questions facetiously to suggest the answers, which are "no" in every case. Yet a variety of commentators, from the lunatic Left to the isolationist Right, hope the answers will be "yes." And at the official level - where Canada is completing its mission in Afghanistan, and the Americans are expediting their own departure, along with every other ally with military assets - we are, rhetorically, declaring victory. Our aid programs alone will remain, till they are shot to hell. Though I have tried, it is impossible at this distance to assess the degree to which al Qaeda, et al., have been attrited in the Afghan conflict. I suspect they benefited from the experience of seeing another foreign invader off. They are also declaring victory, which is no good sign. The Afghan government of Hamid Karzai remains as weak as when the Americans installed it, but now daily NATO support is being taken away. A country of feudal fiefdoms, warlords, and anarchic tribes has hardly become a model democracy. But has it improved, at least from our point of view? Is it less likely than, say, Somalia, or Yemen, or post-Gadhafi Libya - or Syria, or Iran, or frontier Pakistan, or western Sumatra - to source further attacks on the West, as it did continuously from the time the Soviets left until the Americans arrived (through the 1990s)? Arguably, we might as well be out of Afghanistan, as into all these other countries. Islamists are now almost spoiled for choice, in their search for safe havens. The fact Osama bin Laden was collected just down the street from the elite Pakistan military academy in Abbottabad suggests the extent of the problem. Osama had anyway become irrelevant. An evolution in this enemy's strategic thinking made him so. They have come to appreciate the advantage of controlling territory. A relatively stable Iran proved the most effective exporter of Islamist revolution, with Hamas and Hezbollah among their clients; and with the entire Arab world in political convulsion, the chance of a Sunni (as opposed to Shia) "caliphate" suddenly emerging gives them hope of something even better than Iran. They see that we, in the West, have no idea, since our own most recent interventions (Libya, chiefly) advance their cause: by directly abetting the forces of disorder. In the Obama administration, but also among the Europeans, we have leaders committed to the ridiculous notion that democracy may emerge wherever old, authoritarian regimes are overthrown. Our own rulers are, to my mind, prisoners of western, Enlightenment fatuities. As good multiculturalists they say, "Islam is a religion of peace," yet obviously don't believe it. They actually believe they are dealing with a strange religious force from out of the Middle Ages, which has erupted unpredictably into the modern world, and which can be defeated only by hosing it down with our homogenized, consumer mall culture. Islamism is not a medieval recrudescence. Nor, though it claims to return to Islamic foundations, is it a reversion to the conditions of the 7th century. It is instead an ultramodern phenomenon, of the age of fascism and communism, and is the product not of rekindled religious faith, but of the exact opposite. Islamism is the product of doubt, of a crisis of faith in the Muslim world, with analogies to the crisis of faith in our (formerly) Christian world. The Islamist leaders are not true religious believers at all, nor anything like the saints and thinkers of Islamic antiquity. As illustrated by the tapes of Osama's last days in his Abbottabad compound, they are not men steeped in prayer, but rather, men who to their last are preening for their place in a very material history. This is crucially important; and it is the reason both "Islam is a religion of peace," and "Islam is a religion of war," are useless concepts. The truth is only that, "Islam is a religion," in the sense of a doctrinal system, regulating the lives of believers. As a Catholic Christian, I find it flawed, but I nevertheless know sincere Muslims whose orientation is the religious one. That is to say, men and women who are essentially otherworldly. Such people do not make suicide bombers; never did and never will. Suicide bombers are recruited from among the young, mostly male, bored, frustrated, and indulged products of a debilitating consumerism (as our terrorist profiles show again and again). And, trying to make the world safe for consumerism is our catastrophic mistake. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top