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COMMENTARY
August 10, 2005
Should we despair?
Here are five unanswerable reasons to despair about the future of the Middle East -- and therefore about any alleviation of the “root cause” of the Islamist violence that promises to turn Western countries, including Canada eventually, into one long Gaza Strip.One. Iran is about to go nuclear. The same Iran that is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, abroad through Hezbollah, and at home through its Revolutionary Guards. The ayatollahs are only a little more responsible than the North Korean politburo; but compensate for this with a more vicious ideology. Nuclear weaponry may preserve them for at least another generation in power, as it did the Soviet Communists; while much improving their ability to do mischief far beyond their borders. Neither America nor Europe “has a plan” for dealing with this, beyond diplomatic talk. Talk is useless. Two. Nor has anyone a plan, nor could have a plan, for dealing with Saudi Arabia, many of whose several thousand polygamous royal princes are still directing vast, and again growing sums of oil money into radical Muslim proselytizing and associated terror cells, across Dar al-Islam and around the world. The prevailing wisdom is that when the porcinely distended Saud family finally loses its grip, Arabia will fall into the hands of such exiled princes as Osama bin Laden. Three. As I wrote Saturday, the case of Sayyid Mahmud al-Qimany in Egypt has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that even where the secular state is willing, official Islam is unwilling to countenance the opening of Muslim society to democracy and responsible government. In at least twenty other Muslim nations, the mosque is increasing, not decreasing its power over secular political life, and the Islamic injunction against the separation of “church and state” is being clarified in the public mind. Four, one of those countries is Iraq, where what had promised to be a battle between a people craving peace, order, and democracy, on one side; and on the other, Baathist diehards and insurgent Islamist allies-of-convenience; is degenerating into a struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam for control of an expressly theocratic state. I have not given up on the will of Iraq’s political representatives to forge a viable, secular, democratic constitutional order; nor on the desire of the huge majority of Iraqis to put fanaticism behind them. That’s why the U.S. Marines are there to help. There is, I think, more scope for “civil society” in the Shia than in the Sunni scheme of things (and the Shia have the numbers to prevail in Iraq). But the odds are turning against an Iraqi success story. Five, never forget Palestine, the formal chief banner of Islamic grievance; the rattle on the tail of the Islamist snake; and generally, the “King Charles’s head” of the whole Umma. No progress whatever has been made by the post-Arafat Palestinian Authority in establishing a “civil society” to confront terrorism. Not one single undertaking of the PA, to advance across the “roadmap to peace” with Israel, has yet been fulfilled. And the response of the general population in Gaza to the voluntary withdrawal of Israeli settlements -- which is to hold a victory parade -- shows a whole society committed to war with Israel so long as Israel shall exist. With repercussions everywhere else. So to the question, “Is there a crisis in Islam?” -- the answer might be a droll, “No, it is flourishing.” The crisis is developing in Former Christendom. President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair of Britain and Howard of Australia have made a brave start in leading Western response to what is becoming less deniably a “clash of civilizations”. They were right to take the battle to the enemy; they remain right in attempting to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan as “beacons”. They rightly grasp that the alternative is worse. What they have done is just a start, however, and I see no one in mainstream Western politics with the glimmering of an idea about what to do next. Plenty of evidence, on the other hand, that our “ruling classes” have been rotted away by moral relativism, and by the cowardice that is the rot below that. And, especially in Canada and western Europe, evidence that “the people” do not have the stomach for any challenge at all. Lately, therefore, I notice myself returning to what I wrote, much sooner after 9/11, when I was not sanguine about the prospects of containing the Islamist menace. As recently as this spring, we saw evidence that something like a “democracy wave” was building across the Middle East -- the best hope to achieve that containment. Now, quite frankly, that wave is subsiding, and I can find little impetus for it to continue. It appears to have been only a wind-whipped wave, not an ocean-deep tsunami. So why not despair? I leave my reader to think about that, until I return to this subject on Saturday. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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