Posted on 09/09/2002 4:55:50 PM PDT by Pokey78
Mankind’s most lethal poisons require careful incubation. To manufacture anthrax and botulinum you need “growth media”. The toxins require a particular mix of chemicals to grow into weapons of terror. Throughout his period in power President Saddam Hussein has been acquiring these chemical cultures by the tonne to manufacture his biological weapons arsenal. And for much of the time the West has looked on with indifference. Indeed in some cases, such as Germany, Western nations have profited from providing the infrastructure for the manufacture of poison. But anthrax and botulinum are not the only toxins which have been manufactured in the Middle East. There are two other poisons which have been incubated over years in that region, and which have proved lethal to those who come into contact with them. They are Islamic fundamentalism and Arab national socialism. Like the anthrax and botulinum which bubble in Saddam’s vats, these twin ideological toxins have also been developed in special cultures conducive to the manufacture of poison. It has been the mix of social, economic and political factors prevailing in the Arab Middle East which have provided the growth media in which these ideologies have fermented. They have poisoned thousands of minds, and led to the death of thousands more. One of those toxins, Islamic fundamentalism, created the killing fever in the bloodstream of the men behind September 11. The other poison, Arab national socialism, is driving Saddam towards the acquisition of terrible weapons with which he could pose an even greater threat to the West. The most important lesson of the past year is that the world’s security now depends on dealing with these poisons. And the surest way of doing so is to tackle the cultures in which they grow. For the real root causes of the conflict which has become known as the War on Terror are the failures of Arab and Islamic elites. No Arab nation is a democracy, none enjoys a free press or speech. None can guarantee basic human rights, whether it be respect for property, life or conscience. Whether they are oil-rich or resource poor, they prefer to keep their people in ignorance and poverty. In the wider Islamic world there are related problems. Few Islamic nations, perhaps only Turkey and Malaysia, have made any halfway satisfactory progress into the modern age. There is nothing intrinsic either in Arab life or Islamic belief which means this state of affairs is preordained. The success of Arab and Islamic individuals in the West, when they enjoy freedom of thought, association and speech as well as security of person and property, proves that. Arab nations and Islamic states could provide their peoples with the opportunity to prosper. The talents which currently flower only in the West could make a garden of desert lands. But that will not happen as long as corrupt sheikhs, military strongmen and assorted other kleptocrats remain in power. While they do, the stench from these thieves’ kitchens pollutes the world. But something even more noxious than the smell of corruption emanates from four of these nations. They are the countries whose cultures have, pre-eminently, become the growth media for terror. They are Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. A successful War on Terror requires that all these nations change, that their regimes reform or are removed. Each of these countries has a different history and poses a discrete challenge. In Iran and Saudi Arabia the poison of Islamic fundamentalism is generated and spread across the globe. In Syria and Iraq it is Arab national socialism, known as Ba’athism, which poses the threat. The two ideologies have different roots, indeed they have been at each other’s throats, most notably during the Iran-Iraq war. But, as with Nazism and communism, both ideologies are much closer to each other than their adherents admit and both are implacably, malevolently, hostile to the free West, its peoples, values and interests. Both poisonous ideologies were synthesised from older traditions in the years after the Second World War by two very different thinkers, Michel Aflaq and Sayyid Qutb. Aflaq was the founder of Ba’athism and Qutb the founding ideologist of modern Islamic fundamentalism. Ba’athism stands comparison with German National Socialism in many ways. It shares the same attachment to revolutionary violence, a belief in racial destiny, with the united Arab nation taking the place of the German Volk, and a desire to build an enduring totalitarian political order. Islamic fundamentalism is a similarly totalitarian creed, which also celebrates the purgative power of violence. But it is in its way perhaps closer to Marxism. While Ba’athists and Nazis divide the world on nationalist and racist lines, Islamists, like Communists, split humanity on the basis of belief. There is an elect who have been redeemed by their faith in a Utopian project, and entry to that group is potentially open to all who will submit to its terrible simplicities. But those who resist conversion are, for Islamists perhaps more than Marxists, enemies of the faith who must not be allowed to stand in the way of its triumph. Appreciating that each of these poisons of the mind has a different DNA is important. But not as vital as understanding the joint threat they pose to all of us. Like Marxism and Nazism before them, these ideologies define themselves by opposition to the West. The joint hostility of Baghdad and Tehran to the US is not a consequence of America’s military presence or diplomatic policies in the Middle East. It is a basic defining feature of tyranny. Totalitarian regimes which govern in the name of a political religion require an enemy; to maintain their supporters in a state of fervour, to provide a scapegoat for the failure of their rule to deliver improvements in living conditions, and, above all, to legitimise internal repression. That enemy can at different times be a neighbouring nation or an indigenous minority, the Jews or the Kurds. But, inevitably and always, the worst tyrannies elevate to the position of mortal enemy those nations whose very existence and success as beacons of freedom is a challenge and a goad. America, Israel and Britain are vilified by these extremists because they stand in opposition to everything Ba’athism and Islamism hold dear. The hostility which these regimes, and the terrorists they sponsor, feel towards the West is existential. It cannot be assuaged by more international aid, a reordering of the world financial system, a new peace plan for the Palestinians, the signing of the Kyoto treaty or any other of the panaceas for soothing away world tension peddled by the new Left or old Arabists. As with Nazis and the Communists, they hate us for what we are, not what we do. And that hatred, being molten, is dynamic. It cannot be limited by lines in the sand, or constrained by diplomacy. Just as it is in the nature of totalitarians to hate so it is endemic to them to attack, to expand, to export their violence. As the distinguished scholar of the Middle East David Wurmser has pointed out, “states that launch wars on their own people eventually escalate their conflicts beyond their borders”. It is no surprise that Ba’athist Syria has sought to make a colony of Lebanon, that Ba’athist Iraq has invaded its neighbours and that both of them, as well as Iran, have sponsored terror across their region. As for Saudi Arabia, its elites fund organisations which promote terror abroad to ensure that they can continue practising repression at home. Against these evils there can be no effective containment, just as there could be no lasting appeasement of the Nazis or no meaningful detente with Communists. Weakness in the face of evil only encourages its practitioners. The events of September 11 did not follow assertions of Western strength. They were the acts of extremists emboldened by our irresolution in the face of terror, our preference for peace processes and bombing aspirin factories over the hard business of tackling evil at its source. The enduring tragedy of that day is that we did not act before, to save the West from terror by saving the Middle East from tyranny. The enduring legacy of that day is that we cannot rest until that work is done, until we dismantle the cultures in which the poison still ferments.
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