Via Grim’s Hall, a new blog to me but one that I’ll catch up on after my brother’s wedding, I see that someone’s concerned that we will lose the ‘War on Bad Philosophy’.
Spengler (which I assume is a pseudonym) writes a column in the Asia Times titled: ‘Why radical Islam might defeat the West‘. In it, he(?) writes:
Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. “You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand.” That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.
Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe’s appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.
Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare.
He goes on to talk about the demographic implosion in Europe, and ties it to the philosphic collapse of core faiths – by which I can only interpret that he means religious faith. His quote “The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed…” is certainly a powerful one.
But I’ll challenge Spengler on a few fronts.
The first one is simple; his statement of the problem from the radical Islamic point of view is factually incorrect. We can kill them all (and, as has been said, let God take his own). For the foreseeable future, will be able to do so with relative physical impunity, while they may be able to damage two or three of our cities and kill a few hundreds of thousands of our people.
Somehow one of the issues that has been forgotten here is the imbalance of absolute power between the United States (and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) and the forces we confront. North Korea can badly damage Seoul before collapsing; they have a million hostages, and that is their source of power. The Islamists (my term for the followers of radical, militant Islam) can hijack a few planes and blow up a few hotels.
I’ve commented earlier on the imbalance between the power of Israel and it’s neighbors:
Let’s be clear. It would take Israel two, maybe three hours to demolish every structure in the West Bank and Gaza. The limit would be how fast they could rearm and turn around the aircraft. They could do it with conventional munitions and would easily have enough left over to defeat the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and mount a credible threat to the Iranians.
They haven’t. Why? Because they have to live with themselves, and because they are smart enough to realize that they ultimately have to live with their neighbors. The fact that they would mightily piss off the United States might factor into that as well.
The Islamist world is fragile economically and politically (a big part of the driver for Islamist growth), and as a result is fragile militarily as well.
Saddam Hussein’s daughters are convinced that the armies collapsed because they were betrayed. The reality is, as I kind of suggested, that the military might of Saddam’s Iraq was a sham. Col. Jeff Cooper (not the law professor) says that “owning a gun no more makes you a gunfighter than owning a guitar makes you a musician”; a mob of men in uniform, armed with AK-47’s may look like an army, may drill like an army, but without the training, doctrine, etc. etc. that makes up a real army, they are in fact, a mob of men armed with AK-47’s. Similarly, oil wealth may buy advanced fighters, and the tools to make missiles, but the ability to make – and use – these weapons is a part of a far more difficult task.
I can go buy much of the gear that a Ranger carries (I do, much of my backpacking and hiking gear is the effective equivalent). I may have some measure of the training with small arms that a Ranger has (as in fact I do); but that doesn’t make me and three friends like me the equivalent of a Ranger team.
Brutal dictators aren’t very good at the details. It’s a defect; they have a whole country to run and very few people they can trust.
So we have brittle armies defending weak states. They can (and will) resort to guerilla warfare and terrorism. Given time, and patience, we will defeat those.
It won’t be easy, painless, or cheap.
And we do have a potential vulnerability that Spengler correctly highlights; we do not appear to be as strong in our faith as our opponents. Our faith is harder to articulate, it is not based on a few greybeards who sit and read a holy book whose content is fixed.
But appearances can be deceiving; those who drive the nicest cars are not always the richest, nor those who spend all their time quoting scripture the most devout.
I’m confident that there is a deep well of faith in this country and in the values that we champion.
After all, I’ve met Sumi.
And while Spengler worries, and places his hope in
Grim men of faith – Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin – led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed prophet. It doesn’t even have an armed theologian.
I’ll suggest that we do; it’s a nineteen year old girl driving a Humvee while listening to Pink Limp Bizkit. It happens that that girl is trained to maintain the communications equipment being used by five teams of twenty-something young men as they chase down and kill Saddam’s last soldiers or the remnants of the Taliban. Their religion – their faith, like that of Sumi, is in the freedom, and hope, and possibility that we represent.
I’ll take Sumi and a million like her over Loyola and we’ll win this war in a walkover.
UPDATES: Porphy comments.
(musical selection corrected by reader email)
Spot on.
I see where he’s coming from, though. I agree with you, but I understand exactly why “Spengler” can reach the conclusion he does.
Note also that phyisical ability to do something isn’t the whole story regarding whether one can do it or not. If push came to shove, we have the material capacity to shove harder than anyone can push us. Willing to live with ourselves afterwards or not is contingient on living afterwards or not.
My point has always been that not only can we defeat the enemies we face – even if it’s all one billion Moslems (something I don’t believe to be even close to true), and I don’t mean that simply in a military sense, but in a wider sense because we can only lose to Islamist Totalitarianism in the same way that more moderate Moslems might – by letting them, more importantly by not being firm in our own convictions and believing them to be valuable enough to defend against intellectual and moral assault.
How well are we doing that? The link to your conversation with Sumi is instructive; the counterparts to the ninteen year old driving a Hmmwv and listening to Limp Bizkit are the young Americans that puzzle Sumi so much. Yes, there are those of us who hold the beliefs of the value of Western Civilization and our own to be self-evidently valuable and worth championing, but there are others, many others, who lack such confidence.
Will we win over Radical Islam when we have left anti-Western Radicals take over so many of our cultural institutions and not wanted to engage in what it would take to confront them, root them out, and restore those institutions to what they should be? That’s something that’s independent of whatever capacity we have to inflict military suasion on anyone, is something that will, IMO, be critical in this conflict, but not something we have shown much capacity to rise to the occasion for. And IMO that’s not a matter of whether a handfull of political leaders have the fortitude for that, but whether our civilization as a whole – that is, the people who make it up will stand up for it, or will not find it valuable enough to preserve against the forces, either foreign or domestic, who assault it.
Some of us, especially the sort of people who congregate do, are willing, but are enough people?
If we do, then we will not only win decisively, but do so in a way that is remarkable not for the level of gratuitious devastation we inflict on our foes, but for its opposite; for not only do we have the material and technical capacity to inflict massive, unrestrained destruction (something we have enchewed), but we and we alone have developed the means to win with the least amount of gratuitous destruction (something we have so far shown a preference for) and a genuine willingness not to leave our defeated foes in a state of utter destruction and deprivation, but, again, for its opposite – to invest in lifting them back to their feet and a sincerely felt desire to help them to achieve better lives than they had before. To the degree to which their is debate in our Civilization on that, it is tilted not towards “are we killing enough of them, leveling their cities enough, looting them of their wealth and listening to the lamentations of enough of their women?” but, rather “are we doing enough to rebuild? To create security in the lands of the defeated? To implant civil society there? To build up their economies?” – this Civilization, assailed by both foreign and domestic critics for its cruelty, racism, and indifference for the “other”, spends its time wringing its hands over whether we’re doing enough, not to destroy, but to rebuild and help. That’s a quality I value and it is a good thing – it is also not something inherent to all parts of the world – but many of our fellow citizens, instead of understanding this, have nothing but criticism and scorn for us and take little or any notice of what is positive about our civilization, seeing only negative qualities in it, that are unworthy of defense.
By the way, your “Spengler and Decline” post reminds me of one more book I should have recommended when commenting on Joe’s post on reading recommendations:
“Carnage and Culture” by Victor Davis Hanson, which may as well be subtitled “why we kick ass”.
The world keeps operating on these assumptions about Americans since 1914 or earlier. Every 25 or 80 years we prove them wrong and the world doesn’t get it.
Neither does Spengler.
Sometimes silent waters run deep.
If you want a counter to the Spengler nonesense I suggest Oriana Fallaci. “The Pride and the Rage.” Or is it the “Rage and the Pride.”
Spengler doesn’t understand the American faith. We believe in free men.
Our religion is liberty.
For good or ill liberty is our god. This is so unusual that it goes unrecognized. The only similar god was selling materialism and couldn’t deliver. The American god delivers material with liberty.
In addition our determination is not based on faith but on practice. It is proven not just in holy books but in practice. Plus libery gives us the freedom to adjust our practice to circumstances.
I’ve wondered why we aren’t doing a “Wouldn’t you rather be alive?” propaganda campaign in radical Islamist regions. Or, to paraphrase _Catch-22_, “Anyone who’s trying to kill you is your enemy, even if he’s your imam”.
The religion of liberty promises the right to pursue your happiness in this life.
Islam promises happiness in the next life.
Which would you rather have?
Spengler is simply wrong on one of his premises, that a billion Muslims are our enemies. In fact, very few non-Arab Muslims are trying to destroy the West, and the non-Arab Muslims that are have been radicalized by Wahabbist Arabism.
As I explained in my PDF-format opus, The Soil of Arab Terrorism,
“For just as the reactionary Islamists of the Arab world feel their day is arriving, the fact is that demographically, worldwide Islam is not gaining significant numbers of new converts.
In contrast, Christianity is spreading rapidly in the Third World, both by birth-rate and by conversion.
Islamism does not find root there, except where Arab Islamists have directly worked to export it.”
That would seem to belie Spengler’s conmtention that no ideological-religious challenge is being made to radical Islam. Furthermore, the overtly-stated plan of the Bush administration to “work with those in the Middle East who seek progress toward greater democracy, tolerance, prosperity and freedom” is also a ideological-political challenge of a very deep order.
In fact, radical Islam (meaning Arab Islam) is surrounded by ideological and political challengers: in heavily-Christianized Africa, mostly Hindu India, Europe (most places) and of course, America.
Furthermore, Islamists lack allies among Muslims in Western countries. Except for immigrant ghettos of Arab emigres in Europe, Muslim westerners have turned their back on Arabist Islamism and are trying to forge a westernized version of Islam.
Great post!
Donald,
America is going to have to be much more ruthless in Iraq if we are to make an impression on the Arabs that will break their fantasy ideology. If we do not, they will keep coming after us in our homes. That will get the American public getting worked up to a killer rage in an age where America has 6,000 nukes.
This is from a Daniel Pipes column:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/1200.htm
DISCARDING WAR’S RULES
By DANIEL PIPES
(much snippage)
Had the United States retaliated in kind for 9/11, Harris tells me, the Islamic holy places would have been destroyed. Had Israelis followed the Arafat model of murderousness, the West Bank and Gaza would now be devoid of Palestinians. Had the West done toward Iraq as Iraq did toward Kuwait, the Iraqi polity would long ago have been annexed and its oil resources confiscated.
While morally commendable, Harris argues, the West’s not responding to Muslim ruthlessness with like ruthlessness carries a high and rising price. It allows Muslim political extremists of various stripes to fantasize that they earned their power, when in fact that power derives entirely from the West’s arch-civilized restraint.
This confusion prompts Muslim extremists to indulge in the error that their successes betoken a superior virtue, or even God’s support. Conversely, they perceive the West’s restraint as a sign of its decadence. Such fantasies, Harris contends, feed on themselves, leading to ever-more demented and dangerous behavior. Westerners worry about the security of electricity grids, computer bugs and water reservoirs; can a nuclear attack on a Western metropolis be that remote? Western restraint, in other words, insulates its enemies from the deserved consequences of their actions, and so unintentionally encourages their bad behavior.
For the West to reverse this process requires much rougher means than it prefers to use. Harris, author of a big-think book on this general subject coming out from the Free Press in early 2004, contends that Old Europe and most analysts have failed to fathom the imperative for a change. The Bush administration, however, has figured it out and in several ways has begun implementing an unapologetic and momentous break with past restraints:
* Pre-empt: Knock out fantasist leaders (the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat) before they can do more damage.
* Rehabilitate: Dismantle their polities, then reconstruct these along civilized lines.
* Impose a double standard: Act on the premise that the U.S. government alone “is permitted to use force against other agents, who are not permitted to use force.”
In brief, until those Harris calls “Islamic fantasists” play by the rules, Washington must be prepared to act like them, without rules.
This appeal for America to act less civilized will offend some; but it does offer a convincing explanation for the inner logic of America’s tough new foreign policy.
====
What Spengler does not realized, and Joe and perhaps Pipes do, is that Americans are fully capable of using genocide as state policy. We nuked Japan after all and were prepared to gas Japanese urban populations like bugs if the A-bomb had failed to get their surrender.
The fact that the Bush Administration is considering the punishment of Israel for its security fence shows a great deal of back sliding on the need to be ruthless. America cannot accept a terrorist supporting state anywhere and any Palestinian state will be terrorist supporting by definition.
What Spengler does not realized, and Joe and perhaps Pipes do, is that Americans are fully capable of using genocide as state policy. We nuked Japan after all and were prepared to gas Japanese urban populations like bugs if the A-bomb had failed to get their surrender.
One crucial difference: When the Japanese government said “surrender”, the Japanese military did.
Who will say “surrender” for militant Islam and be heeded?
>Who will say “surrender” for militant Islam and
>be heeded?
The easiest way to avoid massive American retaliation is to occupy and reform Arab societies. That is what we are doing with Iraq.
The problem I have is Pakistan. They are infected with the jihadi meme. The greatest nuclear threat to American cities is a Pakistani nuke in Al-Qaeda hands via the Pakistani ISI. And there are 150 million Pakistanis compared to 20 odd million Iraqis.
If we take out Pakistan’s WMD customers in the Arab world, we _might_ be able to avoid the ruthless retaliation I fear.
Maybe the horse will learn to sing, but it is not wise to bet that way.
What Spengler misses (and Pipes too) is that we are not fighting an all-out war – but that we are using the tools of war to shape and manage the problem (militant Islamic-fascists who seek to destroy us, but absent unconventional weapons are unable to do so) such that “moderate/potentially secular” (or “non-militant,” if you prefer) Muslims step up and defeat the militants.
Failing to recognize this is critical. We do not seek to defeat Islam – we simply seek to defend ourselves (and all that we are associated with vis a vis international economic and political orders) by defeating militant Islamic fascism and rehabilitating its cultural incubators. That we are generally doing so with lukewarm support at best and ardently passive-aggressive opposition from much of the rest of the developed world may indirectly bolster Spengler’s point – but more importantly it proves the practical constraints we are operating under.
Spengler (and Pipes) should not confuse our desire to wage this war carefully with an inability to wage this war to victory. After all, we are waging this war despite European and U.N. intransigence not just because we were attacked on 11 September 2001; but also because we are not infected with European nihilism.
Unlike the Europeans, we still believe we are good; we still believe we are worth defending; we still believe the values that guide our social and political institutions are not only good but also universal. And unlike the Europeans, we will not let the lack of our moral perfection stop us from defending ourselves and our institutions through war.
Call these the manifestations of a secular religion if you wish – for they are as real to Americans as the Eucharist is to Catholics. We do not need Christian (or Jewish or other faiths) leaders to call us to an ideological crusade against Islam. As of now, our enemies may be Islamic – but Islam is not our enemy. We know what we believe, we know for what we stand, and we know for what we fight.
And this is the final reason Spengler (and Pipes) are wrong. If the war proves that Islam is indeed our enemy, 1 billion strong, we will still defeat them. Why? It is because we Americans will not permit surrender. Let their God try and protect Mecca from a nuclear missile. Let their God protect all of their capitals and peoples from utter and complete destruction. We have the ability to completely destroy any physical manifestation of Islamic cultures and societies and most of their adherents should we see fit – even if they should destroy Washington first.
The absence of such an aggressive waging of war, or of a highly charged theological basis for this war does not discount our abilities. All they do is illustrate a careful, judicious approach to this war, notwithstanding the lunatic fringes of the peace movement, the appeasement-driven Europeans and the irresponsible Democrats.
You just CANNOT take out the Muslim world. They are that powerful. Israel, the wests best armed fighting forced, could not even take over bint jubeil and had to withdraw in face of massive opposition from a rag tag militia. You folks had better come to your senses pretty soon. Islam in a force that cannot be defeated. You better acknowledge its superiority. And yes, spengelt is right. We will see a Muslim Europe by 2030, starting with a Muslim majority Russia by 2020.