{"id":161,"date":"2003-08-08T23:58:48","date_gmt":"2003-08-08T23:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:18","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:18","slug":"spengler_and_decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=161","title":{"rendered":"Spengler and Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Grim’s Hall<\/a>, 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’.<\/p>\n

Spengler (which I assume is a pseudonym<\/a>) writes a column in the Asia Times titled: ‘Why radical Islam might defeat the West<\/a>‘. In it, he(?) writes:<\/p>\n

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. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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…<\/i>” is certainly a powerful one.<\/p>\n

But I’ll challenge Spengler on a few fronts.<\/p>\n

The first one is simple; his statement of the problem from the radical Islamic point of view is factually incorrect. We can<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’ve commented earlier<\/a> on the imbalance between the power of Israel and it’s neighbors:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Saddam Hussein’s daughters are convinced that the armies collapsed because they were betrayed<\/a>. The reality is, as I kind of suggested<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/b>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It won’t be easy, painless, or cheap.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m confident that there is a deep well of faith in this country and in the values that we champion. <\/p>\n

After all, I’ve met Sumi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And while Spengler worries, and places his hope in<\/p>\n

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><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll suggest that we do<\/b>; it’s a nineteen year old girl driving a Humvee while listening to Pink<\/u> Limp Bizkit<\/s>. 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<\/a>, is in the freedom, and hope, and possibility that we represent.<\/p>\n

I’ll take Sumi and a million like her over Loyola and we’ll win this war in a walkover.<\/p>\n

UPDATES:<\/b> Porphy comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(musical selection corrected by reader email)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spengler thinks the West will lose to radical Islam because they have faith, and we don’t. A.L. disagrees: Our religion – our 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}