HOW TO MANAGE SAVAGERY
Bret Stephens
Commentary
http://www.commentarymagazine .com/viewarticle.cfm/how-to-manage-savagery-12507
Aug 29 2008
NY
"Islam has bloody borders." So wrote Samuel Huntington in "The Clash of
Civilizations?," his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later expanded (minus
the question mark) into a best-selling book. Huntington argued that,
eclipsing past eras of national and ideological conflict, "the battle
lines of the future" would be drawn along the "fault lines between
civilizations." Here, according to Huntington, was where current and
coming generations would define the all-important "us" versus "them."
At the time of its writing, "The Clash of Civilizations?" had, beyond
the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something to recommend
it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed especially plausible as
applied to the "crescent-shaped Islamic bloc" from the Maghreb to
the East Indies.
In the Balkans, for example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats
of Bosnian and later Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were
either skirmishing or at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and
Ethiopia. In the Caucasus, there was all-out war between Orthodox
Russia and Muslim Chechnya, all-out war between Christian Armenia and
Muslim Azerbaijan, and violent skirmishes between Orthodox Ossetia
and Muslim Ingushetia.
In the Middle East, some 500,000 U.S. troops had intervened to expel
Iraq from Kuwait. Israel had just endured several years of the first
Palestinian intifada, soon to be followed by a fraudulent peace process
leading, in turn, to a second and far bloodier intifada. Further to
the east, Pakistan and India were at perpetual daggers drawn over
Kashmir. There were tensions–sometimes violent–between the Hindu
majority and the large Muslim minority in India, just as there were
between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority in Indonesia.
For Huntington, all this was of a piece with a pattern dating at
least as far back as the battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles
Martel turned back the advancing Umayyads and saved Europe for
Christianity. Nor was the pattern likely to end any time soon. "The
centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is
unlikely to decline," he wrote. To the contrary: "It could become
more virulent."
As predictions go, Huntington’s landmark thesis seemed in many ways to
have been borne out by subsequent events. Long before 9/11, and long
before George W. Bush came to office, anti-American hostility within
the Muslim–and, particularly, the Arab–world was plainly on the
rise. So was terrorist activity directed at U.S. targets. Meanwhile,
the advent of satellite TV brought channels like al-Jazeera and
Hizballah’s al-Manar to millions of Muslim homes and public places,
offering their audience a robust diet of anti-American, anti-Israel,
and often anti-Semitic "news," propaganda, and Islamist indoctrination.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that Muslim reaction to the
attacks of September 11, 2001 tended toward the euphoric–in striking
confirmation, it would seem, of Huntington’s bold thesis. And that
thesis would seem to be no less firmly established today, when opinion
polls show America’s "favorability ratings" plummeting even in Muslim
countries once relatively well-disposed toward us: in Turkey, for
example, descending from 52 percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2008,
and in Indonesia from 75 percent to 37 percent in the same period
(according to the Pew Global Survey). These findings are all the more
depressing in light of the massive humanitarian assistance provided
to Indonesia by the U.S. after the 2004 tsunami. The same might be
said of Pakistan where, despite similarly critical U.S. assistance
after the 2005 earthquake, already low opinions of the U.S. have sunk
still further.
Nor is the phenomenon of "Muslim rage" directed against America
alone. In Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France and
Germany–countries with widely varying foreign policies toward, and
colonial histories in, the Muslim world–terrorist plots, terrorist
attacks, spectacular murders, and mass rioting have made vivid the
gulf that separates embittered and often radicalized Muslim minorities
from the societies around them. Even in tiny, inoffensive Belgium,
whose government was among the most vocal in opposing the war in
Iraq and has bent over backward to respect the sensitivities of the
Muslim community, the entire Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek,
according to the Flemish newspaper Het Volk, has been turned into a
"breeding ground for thousands of jihad candidates."
_____________
And yet even as these trends unfolded, and continue to unfold, a second
and almost opposite set of trends can be perceived today. Contrary to
Huntington’s forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly
characterized by fighting and competition not between or among
civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the
Muslim world.
Look again at the peripheries of the Islamic crescent where Huntington
perceived a collision course between Islam and the West. In the
Balkans, NATO intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo secured
Muslim populations and ultimately ended the Serbian regime of Slobodan
Milosevic. In Africa, U.S. diplomatic mediation helped to bring an
end to the 22-year second Sudanese civil war and to initiate de-facto
autonomy–with the ultimate goal of independence–for that country’s
largely Christian south. In Israel, the second intifada with its
wave of suicide bombings was all but stopped cold by a combination
of aggressive counterinsurgency operations and the building of a
separation fence.
In the Caucasus, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended with
a ceasefire that has held to this day, while Chechnya was brought
to heel by a brutal military campaign directed by Russian President
Vladimir Putin. In Kashmir, there has been no direct fighting between
India and Pakistan; the head of the main jihadist group lamented this
past July that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had "murdered the
Kashmir cause." Even as far afield as Mindanao in the Philippines,
the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement has been crippled by a
combination of Filipino and American arms.
True, not all the wars of the Islamic periphery have ended: Hamas’s
Kassam rockets continue to fly from Gaza into Israel, and Hizballah,
itself an Iranian proxy, has fully re-armed following the summer 2006
Lebanese war. In January 2007, Ethiopia invaded neighboring Somalia
to depose a Taliban-like regime. Bombay was hit with a Madrid-style
bombing attack on its commuter rails in 2006. Thailand’s Muslim
minority has been restive and violent.
Remarkably, however, the wars that chiefly roil the Islamic world
today are no longer at its periphery. They are at the center, and they
pit Muslims against other Muslims. The genocide in Darfur is being
perpetrated by a regime that is every bit as Muslim–and black–as
its victims. The Palestinians went from intifada to civil war: in
2006 and 2007, nearly as many Palestinians died violently at the
hands of other Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis. In Lebanon,
there have been bloody clashes this year among Shiites, Sunnis, and
Druze. Last year, the Lebanese government had to send troops into
Palestinian refugee camps to suppress an insurrectionary attempt by
a Syrian-sponsored terrorist group.
It does not end there. Saudi Arabia has been under attack by al
Qaeda since 2003. In November 2005, Jordan suffered devastating
suicide bombings at three Amman hotels in which nearly all the
victims were, like their murderers, Sunni Muslims. In Afghanistan,
a Muslim government led by Hamid Karzai–a Pashtun–fights an Islamist
rebellion by Taliban remnants and their allies, also mostly Pashtun. In
Pakistan, the axis of conflict has shifted from the east to the west,
where sizable areas are under the control of Islamist militants; in
2007 alone, some 1,500 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks,
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto notably among them.
Then there is Iraq. Though Americans naturally focus on the more than
4,000 U.S. servicemen killed so far since the country was liberated
in April 2003, that figure pales in comparison with the number of
Iraqis killed in inter- and intra-sectarian violence: Sunnis against
Shiites and Kurds, Sunnis against Sunnis, Shiites against Sunnis,
Shiites against Shiites. Cumulatively, the number of civilian deaths
since early 2006, when sectarian fighting got under way in earnest, now
stands at just over 100,000 (according to the Brookings Institution).
All this serves as a useful reminder of another significant fact. In
the years immediately prior to 9/11, non-Muslims tended to be the
likeliest targets of terrorism. In recent years, Muslims themselves
have overwhelmingly been their co-religionists’ primary victims. In
2007, of the nearly 8,000 deaths due to terrorism in the Middle East,
only a handful were Israeli. Similarly, of the roughly 270 suicide
bombings in 2007, some 240 took place in predominantly Muslim
countries. Nearly 100 mosques were also the targets of terrorist
attack, many at the hands of Muslims.
_____________
Taking the long view, one might note that intra-Islamic feuding is as
old as the religion itself. Of Muhammad’s immediate successors–the
"righteous caliphs," according to Sunni tradition–the first, Abu Bakr,
may have been poisoned; the next three are all known to have been
assassinated, with the murder of the third caliph (Othman) resulting
in the schism from which the Shiite branch of Islam emerged. The
Abassid revolt destroyed the Umayyad caliphate in the 8th century;
the early 9th century was marked by civil war between the sons of the
fifth Abassid caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Al Qaeda itself has ancient
Islamic antecedents: the 8th-century Kharajites, for instance, were
notorious for their extreme puritanism, frequent recourse to violence,
and the belief that they could declare their Muslim opponents to be
infidels and treat them accordingly.
To be sure, endless feuding is hardly unique to Islamic civilization:
the history of the West is also one of intense competition, bitter
conflict, and outbursts of religious fanaticism. On the whole, though,
these conflicts have dissipated and evanesced as the West has almost
universally adopted democratic forms of governance. By contrast,
Islam’s foundational patterns not only persist into the present day
but in many ways have intensified.
There have been devastating civil wars in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq,
and Yemen, and an even more terrible war between Iran and Iraq. Even
a partial list of prominent political assassinations in the Muslim
world since World War II runs to over 100 names. It includes two prime
ministers and a president of Egypt; two presidents and a prime minister
of Bangladesh; three prime ministers and a president of Iran; a king
and two prime ministers of Jordan; two presidents, a president-elect,
a prime minister, and a former prime minister of Lebanon; a president
of Syria; a king and two prime ministers of Jordan; a king and a former
prime minister of Iraq; a president, a prime minister, and former prime
minister of Pakistan; a king of Saudi Arabia. And these are just the
successful attempts. The list of coups in the Muslim world is about
as long. In Syria alone there have been no fewer than nine since 1949.
Several explanations have been offered for this history of
violence. There is the absence of democracy, which forecloses
opportunities for non-violent political change and pushes most forms
of dissent into the mosque. There is the oil curse, which allows
states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to finance expensive wars, buy
political support, sustain huge sclerotic bureaucracies, and prevent
the diversification and modernization of their economies. There is
the endemic tribalism of Muslim, and particularly Arab, societies,
and the values that go with it: the claims of kinship, the premium on
familial honor, the submission to established hierarchies, suspicion
of those outside the clan. There is the moral abdication of the Muslim
intellectual class, which, with some notable exceptions, fell prey to
nearly every bad idea that came its way, from fascism to socialism
to third-worldism. And there is the history of Islam itself, which
has made a virtue of military conquest, dealt sharply with heretics,
and, until the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Turkey’s Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, typically combined political with religious authority.
There is also the fact that European colonial regimes overstayed their
welcome in their Middle Eastern possessions, with the effect that
more or less liberal movements like the Egyptian Wafd came to be seen
as stooges of the West, incapable of achieving national goals through
nonviolent means. Partly as a result of this failure, the Muslim world
soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it, and traditional
liberal parties and policies were discredited in favor of more radical
alternatives: the Muslim Brotherhood, the violent Arab nationalisms
of the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the
"Free Officers" in Egypt, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and
so on. Despite the manifest failings of these movements, and the
triumph of liberal politics from Mexico City to Warsaw to Seoul,
liberalism has never really recaptured its good name in the Muslim
world beyond a handful of courageous individuals.
Exactly how to weigh the relative importance of these factors is
hard to say; plainly they are mutually reinforcing. And while Muslim
and especially Arab societies are not alone in suffering from them,
they have come together in a unique way in those societies to produce
a culture of perpetual failure and worsening crisis.
_____________
Should this have been more apparent to Huntington when he wrote
"The Clash of Civilizations?" Perhaps. It may have been obscured,
in part, by what later turned out to be the Muslim world’s own
version of a holiday from history. The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988,
and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in the following year seemed to
cool Iran’s revolutionary ardor. Civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen were
brought to an end, leaving most existing Arab regimes as entrenched
as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the Middle East was
no longer a cold-war battleground. Socialism lost favor, and some
Middle Eastern regimes began expressing an interest in reforming
their economies. From the outside, at least, one could almost begin
imagining a "New Middle East," as Israel’s Shimon Peres did with
consummate naiveté in a 1993 book.
But the Soviet (and Yugoslav) collapse had another important
consequence: it reshaped the map of the Muslim world by bringing newly
independent post-Soviet states into its fold. Some independence
movements, notably in Chechnya and Bosnia, took on an Islamic
coloration. Elsewhere, a pan-Islamic consciousness, which had already
gained considerable momentum with the 1979 Iranian revolution and
the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was
spreading rapidly. It was aided immeasurably by advances in mass
communication and by the worldwide establishment of thousands of
Saudi-funded madrassas preaching an inflexible version of desert
Islam. If, previously, the very idea of an "Islamic civilization"
would have seemed at most a remote abstraction to most Muslims living
within it, in the 90’s it became at least possible to imagine this
as an expression not only of common religious identity but also of
shared political aspirations.
Most deeply invested in the concept were the Islamist radicals for
whom the abolition of the caliphate represented not the passing
of an outdated institution but a historical calamity. To them, the
90’s presented its own set of opportunities. Unable to dislodge the
"apostate regimes" of the Middle East through terrorist campaigns, they
decided to focus on dislodging their patron–the United States–from
the region.
The idea of killing large numbers of Westerners, particularly
Americans, had the additional advantage of being both plausible and
popular. Plausible, because the Reagan administration’s precipitous
withdrawal from Beirut after the 1983 bombings of our Marine barracks
and embassy, followed a decade later by the Clinton administration’s
equally precipitous withdrawal from Somalia, suggested a superpower
easily frightened. And popular because the U.S. really was broadly
detested throughout the Muslim world, not least on account of its
support for the selfsame apostate regimes that were detested by
the radicals.
The strategy of an "escalating sequence" of terrorist attacks on
American targets was explicitly laid out by the jihadist theoretician
Abu Bakr Naji (the name is almost certainly a pseudonym) in a
document, The Management of Savagery, published on the Internet in
2004. Predicated on the idea that everyone loves a winner, it was not,
in its own terms, a bad strategy.
In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration
and other governments had been quick to brand Osama bin Laden as
an outcast among Muslims. But the overwhelming weight of evidence
suggested differently. There were large public demonstrations
of support for bin Laden in the Philippines and Indonesia. In the
Muslim areas of Thailand, the name "Osama" became suddenly popular
among newborn boys and girls, according to an October 2001 report in
the Hindustan Times. Portraits of bin Laden were hot-selling items
from Bangladesh to Nigeria. A poll found that fully 42 percent of
Kuwaitis, whose country the U.S. had liberated only a decade earlier,
considered bin Laden a "freedom fighter." Among Palestinians, 9/11
made bin Laden "the most popular figure in the West Bank and Gaza,
second only to Arafat," according to a Fatah leader in Nablus.
Al Qaeda’s popularity would not soon fade. In 2004, the Pew Global
Survey found 55 percent of Jordanians and 65 percent of Pakistanis
holding a favorable view of bin Laden. Nor was al Qaeda slow to
capitalize on its stardom. By 2002, European intelligence agencies
were reporting a sharp uptick in the organization’s recruitment
efforts. More worrisomely, al Qaeda was able to transform itself
from a group into a movement. Some jihadist outfits, like Abu
Musab al Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal-Jihad and the Algerian Salafist
Group for Preaching and Combat, swore loyalty oaths directly to bin
Laden. Others, including Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, began imitating
al Qaeda’s methods by attacking prominent Western targets. Cells
sprang up in Gaza. Al-Qaeda "wannabes" murdered 52 people in the
London bombings of July 2005 and plotted to murder the prime minister
of Canada.
But it was the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that, as Naji
wrote in The Management of Savagery, had the most galvanizing effect
on would-be jihadists. Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban,
the radical televangelist Sheik Yussuf al-Qaradawi had decreed:
"Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other
Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money,
until it is liberated." His call was widely heeded. By late 2006,
al Qaeda could count on as many as 5,000 to 10,000 active members
in Iraq, many of whom (including nearly all the senior leadership)
had come from abroad. And while they were never the major part of
the Sunni insurgency that gripped the country until last year, they
accounted for an estimated 90 percent of all suicide bombings.
Late 2006 was also the moment when it became at least conceivable
that Naji’s strategy, which foresaw the creation of "liberated zones"
under the dominion of al-Qaeda-like groups, might actually succeed on
the ground. Al Qaeda in Iraq had largely "liberated" Anbar province
through an unbridled campaign of terror against other Sunnis. It had
also pursued a policy of deliberate carnage against Iraq’s Shiites,
with the intent, and effect, of creating all-but ungovernable chaos
in the country. In the United States, the report of the Iraq Study
Group, headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, recommended that no
more U.S. troops be committed to Iraq, while the Democratic party,
which had largely supported the initial decision to invade Iraq,
began issuing increasingly hectic calls for immediate withdrawal.
Had those calls become U.S. policy, Naji’s strategy might
have been vindicated. The "fall of prestige of America" that he
prognosticated would have accelerated dramatically throughout the
Muslim world. Precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have been
seen by jihadists and their fellow travelers in a similar light to
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988–as proof that it was
possible to defeat a superpower, and as a harbinger of their enemies’
complete rout. Al Qaeda would have had every incentive to apply the
Iraq model–the "management of savagery"–to other Muslim states,
particularly weaker secular states like Jordan, deemed guilty of
"apostasy." And al Qaeda’s own prestige would have been hugely
boosted, offering a large pool of new recruits to replenish those
who had been lost.
_____________
That, however, is not how matters have turned out, at least so
far. President Bush pushed ahead with his "surge" strategy, under
a new commanding officer using tried and true counterinsurgency
tactics. Its effects were soon felt. Al Qaeda’s ranks were decimated,
and the flow of foreign fighters dried up.
In late 2007, the U.S. military captured letters from two of al Qaeda’s
"emirs" in Iraq. One of them appraised his situation thus:
There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the [Sunni]
tribes changed course 360 [sic] degrees. . . . Many of our fighters
quit and some of them joined the deserters. . . . As a result of that
the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less. We were mistreated,
cheated, and betrayed by some of our brothers who used to be part of
the jihadi movement, therefore we must not have mercy on those traitors
until they come back to the right side or get eliminated completely.
The second emir offered similar testimony:
The Islamic State of Iraq [al Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary
crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al Qaeda’s expulsion from
Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created
panic, fear, and the unwillingness to fight.
Nor was it only in Iraq that al Qaeda found itself on the run. In
summer 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that the terrorist
group was once again in a position to strike the U.S. Yet less than
a year later, CIA Director Michael Hayden offered a strikingly
different assessment to the Washington Post. "On balance, we’re
doing pretty well," he said. "Near-strategic defeat of al Qaeda in
Iraq. Near-strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant
setbacks for al Qaeda globally . . . as a lot of the Islamic world
pushes back on [its] form of Islam." Polls found declining levels of
support for al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in several places in the
Muslim world; in Pakistan, Islamist parties were trounced in February’s
parliamentary elections. Key al-Qaeda leaders were also killed in
Predator strikes in the Pakistani hinterland bordering Afghanistan.
In short, al Qaeda’s star has dimmed considerably, and it is important
to consider the reasons why. Though there can be little question that
the surge accounts for a large part of the explanation, it is equally
true that the surge would not have succeeded without the support of
the very Sunnis who, until 2007, had provided sanctuary and support
to men like Zarqawi and his minions. This switch is in turn explained
by al Qaeda’s barbaric treatment of ordinary Sunnis and their tribal
leaders during the period of the "Anbar caliphate."
And that raises a question: why did al Qaeda put itself "in a state
of war with the masses in the region" (in Naji’s words) rather than
using those masses as allies or pawns in their war against America
and the so-called apostate governments? The answer, it turns out,
is inscribed in the very nature of the jihadist movement.
_____________
"All existing so-called Muslim societies are also Jahili societies,"
wrote Sayyid Qutb, al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather, in his 1964
book Milestones. By "Jahili societies," Qutb was referring to the
pre-Islamic, pagan world of Arabia that lived in "ignorance of divine
guidance." Put simply, Qutb, his fellow travelers, and his spiritual
heirs were, and are, not merely at war with the modern world, as
defined by liberal democratic government and Western social mores. They
are also murderously inclined toward "heretical Muslims," particularly
Shiites. They object violently to Muslim attempts to fashion a kind
of compromise modernity between Western and Islamic norms. They seek
to overthrow secular Muslim regimes like Indonesia and Jordan, and
religious Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia that maintain relations
with the West.
They are also–crucially–at war with the pre-modern world: traditional
tribal societies in which authority is handed down from father to
son and in which Islam is a religion and not a binding legal code or
political ideology. Typically, Muslim regimes have been careful to
accommodate their tribes, plying them with money, government jobs,
small arms, and other tokens of honor, and above all by allowing them
to govern their internal affairs. This was (generally) true even in
Saddam’s Iraq. To the jihadists, however, tribal structures represent
a twofold political challenge: first, they instill a powerful sense
of local identity as opposed to a strictly pan-Islamic one; second,
their systems of patronage and charity get in the way of the jihadists’
agenda of radical social change.
It was this anti-tribalist attitude, combined with the utter savagery
with which the jihadists put it into practice, that proved to be al
Qaeda’s undoing in Iraq. And that was not the only manner of its
undoing. Precisely because of the post-9/11 transformation from a
group to a movement, al Qaeda’s leadership lost control of what in
the West would be called message discipline.
"I repeat the warning against separating from the masses, whatever
the danger," wrote Ayman al-Zawahiri to Zarqawi in an intercepted
2005 letter, stressing the need to avoid killing other Muslims,
including Shiites. Zarqawi ignored the advice. The mass killings
of fellow Muslims reversed the popular support previously garnered
through attacks on Western targets. Worse, al Qaeda picked fights
with countries that might have otherwise looked the other way at
its activities. As late as early 2002, for example, Saudi Arabia’s
interior minister, Prince Nayef, was flatly denying that al Qaeda
even existed in his country. Four years later, after spectacular
al-Qaeda attacks on the kingdom, the same prince was threatening to
"cut off the tongues" of bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Most significantly, al Qaeda’s failures and reversals began to sow
deeper doubts about its basic purposes. The breakthrough came with
the publication of The Document of Right Guidance for Jihad Activity
in Egypt and the World, a systematic refutation of al Qaeda’s theology
and methods by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, a/k/a "Dr. Fadl." The importance
of this work derived from the standing of its author. Dr. Fadl was
the first "emir" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the author of the 1988
Foundations for the Preparation of Holy War, a bible among jihadists.
There are various theories as to why Dr. Fadl–now imprisoned in
Egypt–wrote the book; these range from a long and bitter personal
feud with Zawahiri to coercion by the Egyptian government to a genuine
ideological volte face. Whatever the case, its chief significance
lies in its insistence that jihadist activities must be subordinate
to ordinary moral considerations. The jihadi, Dr. Fadl writes, cannot
steal for the sake of jihad, or murder Muslim civilians, religious
minorities, or foreign tourists, or seek the overthrow of existing
Muslim governments, or cavalierly decree the apostasy of others, or
disobey his parents. ("We find parents," Dr. Fadl states severely,
"who only learn that their son has gone to fight jihad after his
picture is published in the newspaper as a fatality or a prisoner.")
Even now, after his "conversion," Dr. Fadl is no one’s idea of a
modern secular thinker. Rather, his manifesto rejects the inherent
radicalism of jihadism in favor of more orthodox conservative values,
a return to a kind of Islamic mean. More than that, it is a frank
recognition of reality–namely, that the jihadist fervor of men like
Zawahiri can only lead Muslims down one dead-end street after another.
_____________
How widespread is this recognition? That remains to be seen,
as do its consequences. As Max Boot has noted in COMMENTARY,1 it
takes neither a large organization nor particularly deep pockets
to perpetrate devastating terrorist attacks, and terrorist groups
have shown considerable resilience even in the face of the most
devastating setbacks. Furthermore, although al Qaeda may have been
gravely wounded in the past year, Hizballah has grown considerably
stronger and more confident. The Bush administration kept its nerve
in Iraq, and may finally have won the war. But it seems to have lost
its nerve vis-a-vis Iran’s quest to become a nuclear power. Israel
defeated Yasir Arafat’s second intifada, but it may soon be beset by
a third one, this time planned and instigated by Hamas.
Still, al Qaeda’s decline offers a kind of portrait-in-miniature of a
civilization that seems perpetually to be collapsing in on itself. Here
is a movement in which suicide–that is, self-destruction–is treated
as the ultimate act of self-assertion. A movement that sees itself
as an Islamic vanguard, leading the way toward a genuine Muslim umma,
but is permanently at war with the Muslim communities it inhabits. A
movement whose attacks beyond the Islamic world have mainly had the
effect of accelerating the very forces by which it is sealing its
own fate. To use an inexact astronomical analogy, this is a movement
with the quality of a supernova: even as an envelope of superheated
gas rapidly expands outward, its core is compressing and ultimately
implodes.
A similar pattern played out with the pan-Arabist regimes of the
1950’s and 60’s. And the same forces are at work today in Iran, where
the regime’s outward-directed, "revolutionary" activities–from
supporting Hamas to engineering Hizballah’s de-facto takeover
of Lebanon to developing nuclear weapons–seem almost purposely
designed to counterbalance the weight of the regime’s manifold
domestic discontents.
As for how the United States and its allies should attempt to deal with
this new reality, one temptation is simply to stay away, on the theory
that no good can come from putting our hands in such a mess. This is
roughly the view of the libertarian and paleoconservative Right, and
perhaps a majority of the Left. But the view hardly bears discussion:
all mention of Israel aside, access to Middle Eastern energy resources
is a vital American interest and will almost certainly remain so for
decades. The Muslim world is also inextricably a part of the Western
one, particularly in Europe. Nor is the global terrorist threat likely
to go away even if al Qaeda does. The possibility that a regime that
sponsors or supports terrorists might be in a position to supply them
with weapons of mass destruction is a direct threat to us.
A second option, associated with the so-called realist school,
contends that with rare exceptions, the U.S. should deal with the
Muslim world more or less as it is, without seeking to change it.2
This is a view that has much to recommend it–at least in the hands
of a master diplomatic practitioner. But Metternichs are hard to come
by, and in the hands of lesser statesmen, realism easily slides into
passive acquiescence in an intolerable status quo–or into intolerable
changes to it. Witness the readiness of Colin Powell, as chairman of
the joint chiefs of staff during the first Bush administration, to
accept Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a fait accompli.
A third view, shared to varying degrees by neoconservatives and liberal
internationalists, is that the U.S. and the West have no choice but
actively to seek domestic reforms in Muslim countries. Needless to say,
such a course is fraught with risks and often prone to mishandling,
overreaching, and failure. But some version of it is the only approach
that can, if not heal the pathologies of the Muslim world, then at
least ameliorate and contain them so that they do not end up arriving
unbidden on our doorstep, as they did one morning in September 2001.
This is not the place to lay out precisely how the U.S. might go about
pursuing such a course with greater success than it has achieved thus
far. But a few points are worth noting in light of the experience
detailed above:
â~@¢ First, while we should pursue democratic (and economic) openings
wherever we realistically can do so, our overarching and primary
aim is to make the Muslim world unsafe for radicalism–whether that
radicalism is of the Islamist, pan-Arabist, or Baathist variety. This
means a policy of unyielding opposition to groups like Hamas and the
Muslim Brotherhood and to the Iranian and Syrian regimes, despite
growing calls to come to terms with all of them. But we must also
come to terms with the limits of what intervention in Muslim politics
can plausibly achieve. In particular, we need to be attentive to the
fact that Western-style political or social prescriptions can often
be counterproductive.3
â~@¢ Second, the experience of the so-called Anbar Awakening of tribal
leaders against al Qaeda is an instructive reminder that the Muslim
world does not, as was widely asserted in the wake of September 11,
divide merely between a handful of extremists and a "vast majority"
of moderates who can easily be rallied to our side. Instead, Muslim
societies typically divide into at least three significant blocs: a
"pre-modern" element, consisting mainly of tribesmen, peasants, nomads,
and the like; a "modern" element, typically urban, educated, and, by
the standards of their societies, middle-class; and an "anti-modern"
element, consisting mostly of Islamists but also of members of the
Baath party and other fascistic groups.
So far, many of our democracy-promotion efforts have been aimed at
the middle group, the one most familiar to us. But this is not, in
all cases, politically the most consequential element. What we have
learned in Iraq is that it is possible, indeed necessary, to isolate
anti-moderns by creating political alliances between the urban middle
class and the tribes.
â~@¢ Third, we can seek ways to cultivate nationalist sentiment in the
Muslim world, not least because jihadists detest, and fear, the notion
of Arab and Muslim nationalism as yet another locus of loyalty that
has nothing to do with Islam. In hindsight, Iraq’s near-miraculous
soccer victory in last year’s Asian Cup was a significant moment in
its evolution as a post-Baathist state, confirming that there really
is such a thing as an Iraqi nationalism shared by Sunnis, Shiites,
and Kurds alike.
â~@¢ Finally, although the internal factors that ultimately did so
much to cripple al Qaeda were, so to speak, written into its very
DNA, they were not triggered until the United States proved itself
capable of defeating the bin Laden gang militarily–first incompletely
in Afghanistan, later decisively in Iraq. The importance of these
confrontations lay not only in the actual killing or capture of al
Qaeda’s leadership and its foot soldiers but also in the demonstration
to a watching Muslim world of the full extent of American power and
the comparative weakness of al Qaeda. Its defeat finally pricked the
Muslim myth that the jihadists were a military match for the U.S., just
as Israel’s victory in the Six-Day war of 1967 made a mockery of the
martial pretensions of pan-Arabism and dealt Nasser a near-fatal blow.
Now the government of neighboring Iran has invested some $20 billion
of scarce national treasure, and the weight of the regime’s prestige,
in its nuclear programs. Aside from the inherent case for getting rid
of these programs for the threat they pose to core U.S. interests,
it ought at least to be considered that their swift destruction might,
far from rallying Iranians to their leaders’ side, produce precisely
the opposite effect.
These suggestions are only a sketch of a policy. But effective
policy depends above all on a correct understanding of the people,
places, and things toward which it is being applied. To speak of an
Islamic civilization is to speak in error. Rather, there is a Muslim
world. It is fractured, and fractious. At times, Muslim causes or
conflicts spill over into the non-Islamic world, as they did in the
1990’s. Today, thanks in no small part to our actions, they remain
internal–expression not, or not merely, of a clash of civilizations,
but of the convulsion of one. In this internal disunity lie our
strength and our opportunity–and ultimately, perhaps, the reform of
the Muslim world itself.
_____________
Footnotes
1 "Are We Winning the War on Terror?," July-August 2008.
2 I dealt at length with this school of thought in "Realists to the
Rescue?," COMMENTARY, February 2007.
3 In Morocco, for example, the king, not parliament, appoints
and oversees the minister of religious affairs. He, in turn, is
solely responsible for approving religious rulings, weighing their
compatibility with sharia in much the same way the Congressional
Budget Office assesses the fiscal impact of a tax cut. The result is
a religious environment that is at once more tightly controlled and
more progressive in its attitudes toward family law, women’s rights,
and so on.
About the Author
Bret Stephens is a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street
Journal and the author of the paper’s "Global View," a weekly column.
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