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COMMENTARY
July 28, 2004
Who gets it?
With the opportunity over the weekend of a more leisurely reading of last week's independent report from the U.S. 9/11 Commission I began to notice something interesting. For appearances sake if for no other the Commissioners Congress White House have all been rushing about promising urgent action on the recommendations in the 9/11 report. Perhaps I am obtuse but I still can't find any revolutionary suggestions for improving national security in the thing; only suggestions for incremental improvements. Nor do I find revelations about "what really happened" that are both new and interesting; at best a few rumours confirmed. But given the importance of the report as a book of reference -- as the common bipartisan fund of conventional wisdom or "dictionary of accepted ideas" -- it is interesting to note progress in the matter of "naming the enemy". (This may be found in the Commissioners' musings on pages 361 et seq.) The Commissioners speaking from what we might call the middle ground of the American intellectual establishment have gone a long way towards embracing the view that Lee Harris set out in "The Fantasy Ideology of Al Qaeda" an important article that appeared in the journal Policy Review two years ago (whose argument has since been extended in the book Civilization and its Enemies). They have moved away from the received idea that we have a problem with a terrorist network to the idea that we have a problem with a deep-seated religious and ideological worldview that is sworn to the destruction of the West and which uses terrorism only as an effective tool. This brings Commissioners and readers around to inevitable comparisons with the Cold War. The problem then was not Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles per se. Nukes don't kill people people kill people: and so the underlying problem then was rather with Soviet Communism itself. This analogy is as dangerous as it is convenient for it misses the principal difference between Communists and "Islamists". For the last several decades of the Soviet empire few if any of the people who ran it still believed in Marx or Lenin. And as we saw at the fall of the Berlin Wall none of their subjects believed in them. Though bristling with missiles the "Evil Empire" (as Reagan so aptly described it) had become an empty shell a huge but meaningless vested interest. Intellectuals and fellow travellers in the West were the only people who still took socialism seriously. It would be a catastrophic mistake to describe fanatical Islam as an empty shell. The enemy we face is not or not necessarily or not yet Islam as a whole: but it is a growing force that embraces the beliefs and aspirations of I would guess far more than 100 million Muslim souls. The terrorist manifestations are in turn only a small part of this; but given the strength of feeling that is engaged behind the post-modern version of Jihad there is a serious prospect of exponential growth. We actually have a recrudescence -- in a novel form but with historical parallels -- of this essentially religious ideal of a Jihad against all the infidels. It is as if the corresponding ideal of the Christian Crusades had been suddenly rekindled. (Nor in the longer historical view is a rekindling of the Crusading ideal in response to Jihad entirely unthinkable though it is more likely to come from the younger Christian communities of Africa and Asia than from the older and desiccated ones in the West.) This is not what the 9/11 Commissioners are predicting or imagining in their nightmares. It is what they are failing to imagine as they retreat towards the Cold War analogy. For the delicate question they cannot bring themselves to ask is this: Where do Muslim loyalties ultimately lie when the civilizational conflict which the terrorists are determined to provoke leaps over the firewalls? We do not have the equipment to fight such a fire. We have only equipment for putting out the odd arson attack here and there. And as I've argued in sundry previous columns there is no point in negotiating with arsonists when their whole object is to light a big fire. I listen in vain to the speakers at the current Democrat convention in Boston to hear any acknowledgement of the true magnitude of the challenge that lies before the U.S. and the West. But the 9/11 report does carry some promise that conventional opinion will shift. Indeed: we have an enemy who will not rest until he has shifted it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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