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EDITOR’S
NOTE: This is from the November 19, 2001, issue of National
Review.
 o
win a war, you must first identify the enemy. In our current war,
the enemy's name is Wahhabism.
The Wahhabis,
based in Saudi Arabia, are the extremist sect that provides religious
support for the horrors inflicted by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic
terrorists. Wahhabism emerged in the benighted wastes of Nejd in
central Arabia in the middle of the 18th century. Other religions
had already experienced bouts of revivalist utopianism, but by the
time Wahhabism emerged, these other movements had already been redirected
into socially constructive paths: The apocalyptic frenzies that
gripped Christendom from the time of St. Francis had been reformulated,
through Protestantism, into the intellectual and economic revolutions
of the European bourgeoisie. And Judaism had passed through a similar
revitalization, embodied in the kabbalistic radicalism of the 17th-century
"false messiah" Sabbatai Zevi; the Sabbataean heresy,
too, had been redirected into a modernizing, Enlightenment trend.
Wahhabism might
at first seem utterly different from these parallel phenomena. Protestantism,
after all, became the state faith of the British Empire; and neo-Sabbataeanism
led to the assimilation of Jews into Christian Germany and Poland.
Both of these outcomes grew out of geopolitical opportunities-chiefly,
the expansion of trade, or what today would be called globalization.
Protestantism led the English, and assimilation drove the Jews,
to new worlds in every sense, to encounters with realities previously
unknown to them.
No such opening,
however, was available to the shepherds and camel drivers of Nejd.
Wahhabism "reformed" and "revived" Islam not
by opening to the world, but by turning deeply inward, becoming
narrow, rigid, literalistic, and puritanical-before finally exploding
into a violent challenge against the Islamic civilization of the
Ottomans. The Wahhabis' anti-Ottomanism resembled the Protestant
rebellion against the papacy, and some observers have seen in it
an explicit emulation of the Christian Reformation. But then something
strange happened to Wahhabism: It leaped far ahead in the process
of the politicization of faith to anticipate the coming of totalitarianism.
Before Jacobinism, Leninism, fascism, Stalinism, Japanese militarism,
and Hitlerism, there was Wahhabism. It was as if the Arabs of Nejd
were so far behind the rest of the world that they were ahead of
it.
We too often
forget that all of the totalitarian threats to the global democratic
consensus emerged from nations lagging in their development, and
represented attempted short cuts to economic and geopolitical power.
Russia, coming late to a modern economy, tried to rush ahead by
fabricating the socialist "new man"; Italy and Germany,
slow in their national unification and delayed in the competition
for colonies, produced fascism; Japan, closed to the world until
the mid 19th century, launched itself into the brutal subjugation
of the Asian mainland.
If these countries
were handicapped in their modernization, Nejd was apparently retarded
beyond remedy, and the Wahhabis did not attempt a serious assault
beyond the Arabian peninsula until centuries had passed. But then
another strange thing happened: Arabian oil became a key factor
in global economics, and-for Wahhabism-an asset comparable to Hitler's
military industries. Imagine Microsoft headed by a president of
the United States-who also happens to be a follower of David Koresh-and
you will have an idea of Wahhabism's material base.
But the Wahhabis'
interests are not economic, and do not involve intervention in the
petroleum markets; they are ideological and religious (rather than
secular and nationalistic). Like Nazism, Wahhabism is separatist
and supremacist. It argues for a world in which saved, purified
Muslims will have no contact with Christians, Jews, and non-Wahhabi
Muslim "unbelievers." Prior to the stabilization of the
Saudi regime in the 1930s, Wahhabism-like Italian fascism-drafted
the nation's young men into a militia living in disciplined colonies
and drilled in hatred and sadism toward alleged foes. Like Soviet
Communism, it recruits cadres worldwide. And like Japanese militarism,
it is utterly ruthless.
All of these
earlier threats had in common their leaders' conviction of a superiority
permitting them to dictate to the whole human race. That is why
the West had to destroy Hitlerism: because Hitler made up his own
rules (in dealing with the Jews, the rest of Europe, and international
law). The Italians did the same in despoiling Ethiopia, and the
Japanese in massacring millions of Koreans and Chinese. Resisting
such forces is the backbone of U.S. foreign policy: It motivated
Truman's stand on Berlin, and Kennedy's on the Cuban missiles, as
well as Reagan's support for the Nicaraguan contras and, yes, the
Afghan mujahedin.
It's true that
the war against bin Ladenite terror-that is to say, the anti-Wahhabi
war-is no more about Islam per se than the war on Hitler was about
Nietzsche, or the Cold War was about socialist economics. But the
war on Hitler was fought in Germany, and the Cold War was fought
against Communists: The war against terrorism, too, must be fought
where the enemy is, and that means the Islamic countries. Wahhabism
has declared a war to the death against us, as the Nazis and Communists
did. And we must fight Wahhabism to the death, to secure not only
our survival but that of Islam itself as a great religion and civilization.
Bin Laden and his Saudi backers threaten to bring the world of Islam
crashing down in flames as Hitler did Berlin. But just as we liberated
the Germans from Hitler and the Japanese from Tojo, we can liberate
the world's Muslims from bin Laden and his Saudi accomplices. Bombing
the Taliban and other extremists will no more destroy Islam than
the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed Japanese culture.
Of course,
there is a short-term alternative: containment. The Saudi ruling
family, the Sauds, repressed the Wahhabis' Ikhwan military brotherhood
in the 1930s, and-if it were demanded of them-they would probably
do it again; they would cut off funding for such groups worldwide,
and more effectively restrict their influence inside Saudi Arabia.
But this would be a temporary solution analogous to accepting an
imperial Japan after World War II, a Japan in which the militarist
generals were deposed but left unpunished. The Sauds repressed the
Ikhwan, but later resorted anew to Wahhabism as a geopolitical weapon;
for the West, that is simply an unacceptable prospect. Wahhabism
must go.
And the way
to get rid of it is to work with the millions of anti-Wahhabi Muslims.
Here, too, the analogies with 20th-century totalitarianism offer
cause for optimism. Hitler claimed to fight for Europe against the
Bolsheviks and the Anglo-American Jewish plutocrats, but Europe
did not support him; most countries produced armed resistance movements
against Nazi occupation. The Japanese militarists appealed for Asian
support against the Americans in the Philippines, and against the
British in Malaya and Burma; but Japanese occupation turned the
Filipinos and Burmese against Tokyo, and when Douglas MacArthur
returned to Manila he was hailed as a liberator. In the end MacArthur
was also hailed as a liberator in Tokyo, and the Germans turned
to Truman, not to some Nazi straggler, to hold the line against
the Russians in Berlin.
Our task now
is comparable to that which faced the World War II generation. We
will have to fight Wahhabi terrorism-bin Laden, his Egyptian and
Algerian allies, his stooges elsewhere in the Islamic countries,
his backers in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and Wahhabized
fringe groups like the Taliban and Hezbollah-with the faith and
firmness we drew on in beating the Nazis. And as part of that commitment
we should directly and actively assist the millions of anti-Wahhabi
Muslims.
Our action
against Wahhabism should begin with a series of ultimatums to the
Saudis. The first demand ought to be full and immediate compliance
with airline-security, banking, and other antiterrorist measures
the Saudis have flouted. The second: the full investigation, arrest,
and handing over to the U.S. of all active coconspirators with bin
Laden found in Saudi Arabia. The third: an immediate stop to all
funding of overseas Wahhabism, including Wahhabi imams and interest
groups in the U.S. These three actions would provide more valuable
support to our antiterrorist effort than would any direct military
assistance. If compliance is not immediate and total, we should
freeze all Saudi assets in the U.S.
If the world
is to be made safe from terrorism, Wahhabism must suffer a definitive,
irreversible historic defeat. Liberation, not containment: Only
in a world where Wahhabism has been crushed can we hope for the
survival of world peace, and of a legitimate, peaceful Islam.
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