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front of our eyes, a new organizing principle is emerging in the world.
Islamic extremism is an ideological challenge, and states have to
respond to it accordingly. Another Cold War is taking shape. Its duration
and scope are uncertain. President Bush is already speaking of a year
or two, but some experts are forecasting as much as fifty years. The
implications are global. Once more, people will be deciding what exactly
freedom means to them.
Communist and
Islamic extremism both have militaristic and imperial aims, directed
to recruit where possible, and to attack elsewhere. Their claims
to be universal imply the actual destruction of all other values.
Communism turned out to be the Russian national interest in disguise.
Soviet grievances against the West were unreal, but the expression
of them was rational. In contrast, Islamic extremism has a restricted
territorial base, and by definition cannot appeal to non-Muslims.
The phenomenon arises from the complex interplay of an identity
wounded by modernity, and the complete political and social failures
of Muslim states. The grievances here are real, but their expression
is irrational, even suicidal. Islamic extremism is therefore a more
unpredictable and elusive enemy.
The failure
of Muslim states seems to have taken the West by surprise. Decolonization,
it was assumed after the world war, was the prelude to freedom.
Emerging nationalist leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt were
said to be "officers in a hurry," a phrase hiding the
reality that under the khaki of their uniform were traditional tyrants
intent on absolute rule. Such as it was, their modernization was
at the expense of traditional Islamic identity. Fighting back, Muslims
formed groups, some open, others clandestine, and all violent. In
every country they appeared at first as a fringe minority, but dangerous
to the state, therefore to be repressed. The Ayatollah Khomeini
revolution in Iran fanaticized this minority to believe that power
in other Muslim countries might be in their grasp.
A barbarous
civil war between Islamic groups and the regimes in power has already
spread through much of the Muslim world. Offering more of an identity
than a program, Islamic extremists have been able to impose themselves
only in Iran and Afghanistan, though in Algeria and even Egypt it
has been — and still is — a close-run thing. During the
past twenty years or so, fugitives from Islamic groups have been
settling abroad, partly to escape the fearsome crackdowns in their
homelands, and partly to pursue their cause in the countries of
the West, where they exploit the rule of law and the structure of
human rights that they have no intention of respecting for others.
Nobody knows
how many such refugee extremists there are. Estimates range between
1,000 and 5,000. Organized to be self-contained, members of these
groups cover their tracks with skill, making use of safe houses
and false passports and identification papers. They appear to have
acquired the techniques indispensable to subversion, with systems
of communication, access to hidden funds, and the infiltration of
"sleepers," or individuals planted to stay inactive until
the moment arrives for whatever operation is planned for them. Communist
cells throughout the West used to operate on just such lines, and
Islamic extremists have shown themselves every bit as thorough and
imaginative.
Most people
in the West appreciated that the organizing principle of the Cold
War had its either-or logic: for or against democracy. The NATO
alliance was a symbol of the general will for self-defense, although
in practice its military capacities and political inspiration were
almost wholly American. Neither was the either-or logic absolute.
Non-aligned countries played one superpower against the other, bidding
for aid and weaponry in return for support. Following the example
of Nasser, Arab countries specialized in this dubious variant of
blackmail and made the Middle East an arena in which the Cold War
was openly and regularly fought out. In Europe, the flashpoint was
Germany, which had the particular misfortune to be divided between
the two blocs, with the Berlin Wall to prove it. Successive West
German leaders devised the policy of Ostpolitik to explore
ways out of this predicament in the direction of neutrality and
unification.
The Left in
general did not share the either-or logic of the Cold War. "Better
red than dead," was one of their slogans. A wide-ranging assortment
of pacifists and Communist sympathizers, professors and students,
Sixty-Eighters and Vietnam protesters, counter-cultural drop-outs,
clergymen, Quakers, playwrights and actresses, historians and commentators
in the mainstream press — revisionists one and all — liked
to maintain that America was a greater threat to peace than the
Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of West Germans could demonstrate
against the stationing in their country of the missiles that alone
protected them. Defeatism appeared to accompany democracy.
The New Organizing
Principle
Under the immediate shock of the terror attacks, public opinion
in the West was unanimously in favor of striking back at the main
culprit, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group, to be followed
by measures for the long-term containment of Islamic extremism in
all its forms. "Every nation has a choice to make," President
Bush declared as he laid the basis for the world's new organizing
principle. "In this conflict there is no neutral ground."
Osama bin Laden confirmed it: "These events have divided the
world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels."
China, Russia,
and India are among countries with private agendas in choosing to
side against Islamic extremism. Muslim and Arab countries are in
the old non-aligned position of extracting maximum advantage in
return for any support they may give. Pakistan and Uzbekistan offer
military facilities conditionally. Confused as ever, unpopular,
and breeding extremists through its unjust handling of domestic
affairs, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia depends on the United
States for its security — as West Germany once did — but
dares not come out openly and say so, for fear of offending Muslims.
Israelis and
Palestinians face each other across the new ideological divide in
a dilemma that bears comparison to Germany's in the Cold War. Here
is a continuous flashpoint. Israel must share territory with Palestinians,
a growing number of whom are proven Islamic terrorists, and who
identify with bin Laden's cause, as he identifies with theirs. Exploring
terms of compromise and neutrality in conditions of incompatibility,
the Oslo peace process is to the Middle East what Ostpolitik
was to Germany and central Europe. Proposals to separate the two
peoples physically on the ground spookily evoke the Berlin Wall.
The moment
the new organizing principles emerged, the same Cold War objectors
of yesterday appeared as if they had been ready in the wings for
a reprise. That too is spooky. Without a hiccup, the professors
and students, actresses and clergymen, and all who used to hold
that an aggressive United States was responsible for starting and
pursuing the Cold War against a peace-loving Soviet Union, have
adapted this self-accusation to present circumstances. The Left
is again collecting petitions against war, mobilizing demonstrations
in major cities, pleading that humanitarian considerations ought
to exclude any military measures — never mind the victims of
September 11 — and calling for bin Laden to be brought before
a court, an Alice-in-Wonderland prospect.
One egregious
specimen typical among others in the media is an article in the
Washington Post by Robert Malley. A member of President Clinton's
National Security staff, Malley at present is a senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations. Lately he published a lengthy
and casuistical defense of Yasser Arafat's no-saying at Camp David
a year ago, and now he writes that there is no such thing as Islamic
terrorism. There are simply Muslims who are angry at their own repressive
regimes "and the American superpower that backs them."
Malley might have checked himself to consider that the truly repressive
regimes in the Muslim world are those of Saddam Hussein, Sudan,
the ayatollahs in Iran, Qaddafi in Libya, the Assad dynasty in Syria
. . . (and Malley's favorite Arafat is no liberal either). Far from
backing these tyrants, in reality America has expressed censure,
imposed sanctions, and sometimes taken outright military measures
against them. Useful idiots are evidently with us always.
Bin Laden's
declaration of war, broadcast on the Qatar-based television network
al Jazeera, has been widely judged a propaganda triumph, while faults
of presentation are found with Bush. Articles suggest that in the
minds of some women the handsome and soft-spoken bin Laden is already
in their apartment. At this level Uncle Joe used to be admired for
his moustache. Other articles whimper that this is five minutes
before bioterror and apocalypse. "Better Islam than anthrax"
— but it's not quite catchy enough for a slogan.
NATO declared
that the attack on America constituted an attack on all its members,
but so far as is known, Britain is the only NATO country yet to
provide any material help. A typical French commentator is afraid
that "the blundering American giant may overreact." Germany's
most prominent television anchorman, Ulrich Wickert, writes that,
while President Bush is no murderer or terrorist, he and bin Laden
have the same intolerant "thought structures." Schoolteachers
and lecturers in "peace studies" and of course the novelist
Günter Grass are busy condemning American attacks on Afghanistan,
and accusing the United States of trying to remake the world to
suit itself. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi uttered the
self-evident truth that "we should be confident of the superiority
of our civilization, which . . . guarantees respect for human rights
and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries."
European leaders bludgeoned Berlusconi until he qualified what he
had said and half-apologized.
The propaganda
war matters because we are in for another long haul, in which the
black arts of secret services must play a major part. Intelligence
is the only effective method for eliminating terror networks like
al Qaeda already established throughout the West. Intelligence involves
the underworld of double-agents, collaborators, and informers, and
runs the risks of entrapment, blackmail, bribery, and murder. In
extensive police work in a dozen countries, hundreds of Islamic
extremists have already been arrested. In the Cold War, the testimony
of defectors and Soviet dissidents steadily influenced public opinion.
The courageous writers Kanan
Makiya and Fouad
Ajami and others can do the same for fellow Muslims victimized
by those who claim to speak and act for them.
Much can go
wrong. A military campaign in Afghanistan faces formidable obstacles
of terrain and climate. The Taliban may merge into an even more
brutal successor regime. Bin Laden may escape and live to fight
another day. Panicky pressure to establish a premature or badly
defined Palestinian state could well push Israel, Arafat, and the
local Islamic extremists into a three-cornered showdown with unforeseen
consequences, perhaps even regional war. Cowardly doublethink in
Saudi Arabia or a coup by the mullahs in Pakistan might force those
countries into the sphere of Islamic extremism. Unchecked, the misplaced
defeatism of the Left is likely to demoralize public opinion as
it did before.
Muslims have
to define their identity for themselves; they alone can decide what
part Islam has to play in their lives. The political and social
failure of Muslim societies is not about to convert into success
now or in the near future; outsiders anyhow have no say in the matter.
But not long ago, the Free World created conditions in which people
were able to liberate themselves from Soviet tyranny, and it has
the chance to do the same now for those in the grip of another ideological
tyranny.
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