We’ve Been Here Before... October 7 was an Auspicious Day to Strike

We’ve Been Here Before
October 7 was an Auspicious Day to Strike
By Duncan Maxwell Anderson
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 10, 2001

"A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from American and British vessels, including American submarines, in the Arabian Sea.

"This official said targets included air defenses, military communications sites and terrorist training camps inside Afghanistan. ‘This is going to be a prolonged, sustained effort over several days,’ the official said."

THE SHOOTING has begun. We've seen little, and heard a lot of words since the attacks of Sept. 11, and some commentators have suggested that there have been no American strikes until this past Sunday because President Bush hasn't really known what to do next, against an invisible, perhaps omnipotent enemy.

But listening to the news every hour can be deceptive. In a real military campaign, much of the time, words are issued to mask action. The reality is that Delta Force and British SAS commandos infiltrated Afghanistan within days of Sept. 11 to pinpoint the air strikes that have just begun. The purpose is not to destroy aspirin factories, but to "take out the enemy’s eyes and ears" in preparation for a ground attack. U.S. Army Rangers and 10th Mountain Division troops are ringing the country preparing to roust detachments of Taliban troops from their tunnels.

No doubt the Talibans and their Arab mercenaries are tough. On the other hand, to make Ranger, you have to run a 5:30 mile carrying a 60-lb. pack on your back, followed immediately by a second mile at a 5:50 pace — and be one of the first 50 men to finish the race. Those who qualify get a year's pressure-cooker instruction in weapons, tactics, and hand-to-hand fighting, if they last.

Mountain Division troops can do all that on skis, and live outdoors in any weather for two weeks (or more) without re-supply.

Technology will probably be more important to this conflict than we can now imagine. Satellites and Northern Alliance scouts have probably been mapping the movements of individual donkeys. In short, the experiences of the British and the Soviets in this country may or may not be relevant. This will be an American war.

I'm reminded of the closing of John Keegan's brilliant book Warpaths—Travels of a Military Historian in North America:

There is, I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos—masculine, pervasive, unrelenting—of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way.

Once they have been forced to take up the task of war, Keegan observes, "Americans shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose."

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden, the Yuppie murderer and drug dealer, seems to have lost a little of his swagger. Trapped in a darkened Afghanistan of his own making, he is no longer declaring that the Americans will not dare come after him, and that the descendants of the Crusaders are soft and impotent. Instead, he is calling on Muslims around the world to come to his assistance. Please. Now.

Like most men from the East, bin Laden is acutely aware of history in a way that puts our ignorance of it to shame. Four hundred and thirty years ago, the Ottoman emperor Selim II pursued the same Islamic imperialism to which bin Laden lays claim today. The Ottoman Turks controlled an army and navy that had conquered Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Greece, and were poised to take Italy. Ali Pasha, commander of the Muslim fleet, announced that he would pull down the cross atop St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and replace it with the crescent moon. It was a similar gesture to destroying the World Trade Center.

But before Ali Pasha could carry out his threat, Pope Pius V, an astute diplomat, united squabbling factions from Spain, Venice, and the Papal States to mount a last-ditch resistance—headed by Don John of Austria, the 25-year-old, illegitimate son of the Austrian emperor. On September 17, 1571, although badly outnumbered, Don John led a fleet of ships in search of the Muslim navy and finally met them on October 7 in the Gulf of Lepanto, off the western coast of Greece.

Back in Rome, Pope Pius led processions of the faithful, praying the Rosary for a Christian victory.

Four hours after hostilities commenced, the Ottoman fleet had been destroyed. The Battle of Lepanto – memorialized in G.K. Chesterton’s poem "Lepanto" – was the turning point in the long war to save Europe from the steady march of Islamic conquest.

In thanksgiving, the Pope fixed the date of the naval victory at Lepanto as the Feast of the Holy Rosary. That feast is October 7, the commenced air strikes on Afghanistan.

The campaign against Islamic terrorists may be long. But as the terrorists themselves are well aware, it has begun on an auspicious day for the West.

Unnoticed or not, here it is, from "The Great and Enduring Mohammedan Heresy" by Hilaire Belloc (1938):

"Millions of modern people of the white civilization - that is, the civilization of Europe and America - have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. …

"The last subject of all in this connection, the one which I will treat next, is the very important and almost neglected question of whether Mohammedan power may not re-arise in the modern world. …

"Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least. We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohammedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohammedan Government centred at Constantinople had better artillery and better army equipment of every kind than had we Christians in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history - September 11, 1683. But the peril remained, Islam was still immensely powerful within a few marches of Austria and it was not until the great victory of Prince Eugene at Zenta in 1697 and the capture of Belgrade that the tide really turned - and by that time we were at the end of the seventeenth century.

"It should be fully grasped that the generation of Dean Swift, the men who saw the court of Louis XIV in old age, the men who saw the Hanoverians brought in as puppet Kings for England by the dominating English wealthy class, the men who saw the apparent extinction of Irish freedom after the failure of James II's campaign at the Boyne and the later surrender of Limerick, all that lifetime which overlapped between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, was dominated by a vivid memory of a Mohammedan threat which had nearly made good and which apparently might in the near future be repeated. The Europeans of that time thought of Mohammedanism as we think of Bolshevism or as white men in Asia think of Japanese power today.

What happened was something quite unexpected; the Mohammedan power began to break down on the material side. The Mohammedans lost the power of competing successfully with the Christians in the making of those instruments whereby dominion is assured; armament, methods of communication and all the rest of it. Not only did they not advance, they went back. Their artillery became much worse than ours. While our use of the sea vastly increased, theirs sank away till they had no first class ships with which to fight naval battles.

"The eighteenth century is a story of their gradual losing of the race against the European in material things.

"When that vast revolution in human affairs introduced by the invention of modern machinery began in England and spread slowly throughout Europe, the Mohammedan world proved itself quite incapable of taking advantage thereof. During the Napoleonic wars, although supported by England, Islam failed entirely to meet the French armies of Egypt; its last effort resulted in complete defeat (the land battle of the Nile). ..

"To what was due this collapse? I have never seen an answer to that question. There was no moral disintegration from within, there was no intellectual breakdown; you will find the Egyptian or Syrian student today, if you talk to him on any philosophical or scientific subject which he has studied, to be the equal of any European. If Islam has no physical science now applied to any of its problems, in arms and communications, it has apparently ceased to be part of our world and fallen definitely below it. Of every dozen Mohammedans in the world today, eleven are actually or virtually subjects of an Occidental power. It would seem, I repeat, as though the great duel was now decided.

"But can we be certain it is so decided? I doubt it very much. It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

"Why this conviction should have arisen in the minds of certain observers and travellers, such as myself, I will now consider. It is indeed a vital question, "May not Islam arise again?"

"In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed. It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adhesion of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense "Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?" The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable. Let us then examine the position.

"I have said throughout these pages that the particular quality of Mohammedanism, regarded as a heresy, was its vitality. Alone of all the great heresies Mohammedanism struck permanent roots, developing a life of its own, and became at last something like a new religion. So true is this that today very few men, even among those who are highly instructed in history, recall the truth that Mohammedanism was essentially in its origins not a new religion, but a heresy.

"Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the Catholic truths which it had retained. Its insistence on personal immortality, on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator - these are its strength.

"But it has survived for other reasons than these; all the other great heresies had their truths as well as their falsehoods and vagaries, yet they have died one after the other. The Catholic Church has seen them pass, and though their evil consequences are still with us the heresies themselves are dead…

"But Mohammedanism, though it also contained errors side by side with those great truths, flourished continually, and as a body of doctrine is flourishing still, though thirteen hundred years have passed since its first great victories in Syria. The causes of this vitality are very difficult to explore, and perhaps cannot be reached. For myself I should ascribe it in some part to the fact that Mohammedanism being a thing from the outside, a heresy that did not arise from within the body of the Christian community but beyond its frontiers, has always possessed a reservoir of men, newcomers pouring in to revivify its energies. But that cannot be a full explanation; perhaps Mohammedanism would have died but for the successive waves of recruitment from the desert and from Asia; perhaps it would have died if the Caliphate at Baghdad had been left entirely to itself; and if the Moors in the West had not been able to draw upon continual recruitment from the South.

"Whatever the cause be, Mohammedanism has survived, and vigorously survived. Missionary effort has had no appreciable effect upon it. It still converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time some European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes a Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine.

"In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam upon Christendom…

"These things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war? Where is the political machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world? I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic - but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past: - one might say that they are blinded by it.

"Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it - we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines - the very structure of our society is dissolving.

In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.

"In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine - or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.

"The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: - but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.

"There is nothing in the Mohammedan civilization itself which is hostile to the development of scientific knowledge or of mechanical aptitude. I have seen some good artillery work in the hands of Mohammedan students of that arm; I have seen some of the best driving and maintenance of mechanical road transport conducted by Mohammedans. There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war. Indeed the matter is not worth discussing. It should be self-evident to anyone who has seen the Mohammedan culture at work. That culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it - whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it…

"Now it is probable enough that on these lines - unity under a leader - the return of Islam may arrive. There is no leader as yet, but enthusiasm might bring one and there are signs enough in the political heavens today of what we may have to expect from the revolt of Islam at some future date perhaps not far distant.

"After the Great War the Turkish power was suddenly restored by one such man. Another such man in Arabia, with equal suddenness, affirmed himself and destroyed all the plans laid for the incorporation of that part of the Mohammedan world into the English sphere. Syria, which is the connecting link, the hinge and the pivot of the whole Mohammedan world, is, upon the map, and superficially, divided between an English and a French mandate; but the two Powers intrigue one against the other and are equally detested by their Mohammedan subjects, who are only kept down precariously by force. There has been bloodshed under the French mandate more than once and it will be renewed while under the English mandate the forcing of an alien Jewish colony upon Palestine has raised the animosity of the native Arab population to white heat. Meanwhile a ubiquitous underground Bolshevist propaganda is working throughout Syria and North Africa continually, against the domination of Europeans over the original Mohammedan population.

"Lastly there is this further point to which attention should be paid: - the attachment (such as it is) of the Mohammedan world in India to English rule is founded mainly upon the gulf between the Mohammedan and Hindu religions. Every step towards a larger political independence for either party strengthens the Mohammedan desire for renewed power. The Indian Mohammedan will more and more tend to say: "If I am to look after myself and not to be favoured as I have been in the past by the alien European master in India - which I once ruled - I will rely upon the revival of Islam." For all these reasons (and many more might be added) men of foresight may justly apprehend, or at any rate expect, the return of Islam."

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