INTERESTING TIMES: The return of history

It is beginning to sink in that what happened on September 11 was not a single terrorist attack on a single country, but the Pearl Harbor of Islamism in its war against the West. In 1941, Americans were surprised by the Japanese attack, but at least knew what and where Japan was.

In retrospect, the great defeated "isms" of the last century, Nazism and Communism, are well understood. Now we are groping for an understanding of the new "ism" that has declared war on us.

The first shocker, of course, is that someone is out to get the West in the first place. For the past decade, the West has been operating under a paradigm characterized by the title of Francis Fukuyama's celebrated article, "The End of History?" (National Interest, 1989). As Fukuyama put it then, "we are witnessing not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of history, but the end of history as such: that is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Just as this new paradigm was settling in, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington wrote a blazingly contrarian article that now looks prescient. In "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Foreign Affairs, 1993), Huntington suggested the conflicts that had dominated the 20th century were essentially "Western civil wars," while this century would be dominated by conflicts between the West and other civilizations, primarily the Islamic world.

"The West's next confrontation," according to M.J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author quoted by Huntington, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin."

Huntington predicted the 1,300-year-old conflict between Islam and the West, far from declining, "could become more virulent."

The full-blown revival of this conflict is Osama Bin Laden's dream. It is no coincidence that he describes his enemy as "Judeo-Crusaders," accurately lumping together two former foes, while recalling the ancient Christian wars against Islam.

DOES THIS mean the West is now at war with Islam? Not yet, not exactly. In some ways, Islamists such as bin Laden understand the situation much better than we do. They realize the struggle is whether Islamism - a militant, politicized form of Islam - or Western liberal democracy will define the political structure of the Islamic world.

In this struggle, the West has an enormous head start. Islamists provide no cultural competition within the West, but the West is a profound source of attraction and influence within the Islamic world. All the Islamists have to offer is war, oppression and stagnation, while the West represents the opposite.

Judaism and Christianity both went through militant phases, but outgrew them many centuries ago. The "end of history" paradigm pretended that Islam's militant phase was similarly buried, but that was a tad optimistic. Now the question is whether or not the Islamic world can, as Judaism and Christianity did, reinvent itself in a manner consistent with modernity.

It is not enough for the Muslim political and religious leaders to condemn terrorism, they must provide positive competition to militant Islamism. The founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, provided such a positive vision, melding Islam and democracy. But such voices are few and far between in the Arab world and other places infected with Islamism.

In a column calling on the Arab world to extradite all terrorists, Lebanese writer Hazem Saghiya listed all the ways that the September 11 attack "eliminated, one by one, the political elements of the Arab strategy." Saghiya blasted bin Laden's "madness" for causing "injury to millions of Muslims in the West: to their lives, their bodies, their freedom; ...[and] insult to the Arab and Muslim role in world civilization..." (translation by www.MEMRI.org).

The most important way for the West to help those brave enough to stand up for an alternative, modern, peaceful vision of Islam is to defeat radical anti-Western regimes such as Iran and Iraq. The last century pitted the God of the democracies against the pagan, anti-religious ideologies of Nazism and Communism. In the Bible, ancient peoples would fight each other to prove whose god was stronger.

Our weapons now include cruise missiles and radio broadcasts, but not that much has changed. Now we are back to the basic struggle over visions of God, a struggle in which the fate of both Islam and the West hang in the balance

This article is exactly right. I don't know if we understand that we're on the verge of WWIII.

Bin Laden may be an evil genius, but he's a suicidal evil genius. Militant Islam has nothing nothing to offer. And the West has an overwhelming military advantage. The only weapon the Arabs have is oil.

In a column calling on the Arab world to extradite all terrorists, Lebanese writer Hazem Saghiya listed all the ways that the September 11 attack "eliminated, one by one, the political elements of the Arab strategy." Saghiya blasted bin Laden's "madness" for causing "injury to millions of Muslims in the West: to their lives, their bodies, their freedom; ...[and] insult to the Arab and Muslim role in world civilization..."

Good for this guy!

This is a very good article, thanks for the post.

I never thought the we "achieved" the "end of history" despite all the squaking about it in the nineties.

After reading The End of History, I thought that Mikail Gorbachev was the last man - get it, the end of history & the last man - but not so. Obviously, Osama Bin Laden had other ideas.

The most important way for the West to help those brave enough to stand up for an alternative, modern, peaceful vision of Islam is to defeat radical anti-Western regimes such as Iran and Iraq.

Amen to that! Iran turns out terrorists like Detroit turns out Fords. If we don't defeat Iran and Iraq any war against terrorism will be a noisy and bloody distraction, but that's all. As quickly as our Special Forces can round up the bad guys Tehran will put in place their replacemants.

Yes, this is exactly right. Persuasion, propaganda, and the use of every tool to divide and conquer our enemies will be essential. We need to get rid of the clintonoids at the Voice of America (who gave equal time to terrorists in their Arabic broadcast on September 11) and put in some real operators, as in the classic days of broadcasting to countries behind the Iron Curtain.

Bush has mentioned war on many fronts. Naturally he did not use the word "propaganda," but that is one of the most important fronts of all. We need to get the word out, while doing everything we can to prevent militant muslims from brainwashing more generations of children to hate the West.

The radical Islamic terrorists can be likened to cockroaches. Now let me hasten to add that there are millions of "good and peaceful" cockroaches scurrying to and fro out there and I am not talking here about them.

But the cockroach analogy fits. As Darrell Royal, former University of Texas football coach, once said, it's not so much what the cockroach can carry off, but what he steps in and messes up.

What they are messing up is the confidence in the intertwined economies of the U.S. and its Western allies. They cannot "carry off" any plunder physically, but they can shatter the stability needed for us to have the kind of life we had pre-Sept. 11.

I believe the terrorists will believe they are winning as long as this situation holds true, and it may hold true for the next 10 years.

After all, Saddam Hussein still thinks he won the Gulf War.

Southeast Europe, Central Asia, Central Africa, the Sulu Sea, and possibly the so-called moderate Arab states -- Jordan, Egypt, The Emirates, Saudi Arabia -- will be the battlegrounds of today and tomorrow against Islamic fundamentalism. It's no accident that's where the wars of the 1990s and 2000s have been fought. The culture of Central Asia is Muslim but partially Westernized thanks to our late enemies and current and future allies, the Russians. Central Asian oil is a potential offset to Gulf oil, which we may lose. The terrorists are our enemies hiding in plain sight. We have a friend hiding in plain sight -- Turkey. Turkey is the only secular Islamic democracy in the world. Not a perfect democracy, but a democracy nonetheless in a very dangerous part of the world. Turkey has been overlooked by our government and held in contempt by the EC. It's the key to aligning Central Asia with the West and the alternative to Islamic fundamentalism -- not the so-called moderate Arab monarchies and Egypt. I wouldn't care to bet on their survival. This is the second time in 10 years that we've asked for the use of Turkish air space, ports, roadnet and airbases to launch a major military campaign. For the second time in 10 years, they've said yes. They always say yes, because Turkey wants to be a Western country. One of these times, we should ask ourselves: Who are these interesting people who have good relations with both the Israelis and the Arabs, and what can we learn from them?

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