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Sunday, January 20, 2008
A Winning Horror: A Sunday Screed
Apologies, friends. I know you expect to find something focused on matters of faith and the spirit here on Sundays. Some of you might even look forward to those religiously focused pieces. But there won't be one today. Instead...well, instead...
Just read on.
The era of "low intensity warfare" conducted by "non-state actors" has brought the nation-state system the severest challenge it has faced since the Peace of Westphalia. The problem of facing off against an opponent that liquidates himself along with his target, supported by a stateless infrastructure that mingles inseparably with a largely innocent population, is one no classical military or political structure is adequate to confront. The greatest hobble the United States faces in the War on Terror is that it seeks to engage its enemies as the United States.
A nation cannot engage a "non-state actor" on a conventional field of battle. The whole point of "non-state actors" is that they confound traditional military responses.
The "non-state actor" doesn't wear a uniform. He hides among others of the same general allegiance and appearance until his moment to strike arrives. In most cases, he gives his life to his mission, leaving no one to chase down and no one to interrogate or investigate. His target is chosen, not to damage his enemy's military or command structure, but to excite terror among his enemy's civilian populace. He cannot be negotiated with, and he cannot be deterred.
If there's a more important problem than unearthing a winning strategy against the Islamist terrorists, "non-state actors" who seek to subjugate the world, I can't imagine what it might be, Nor could human intellect be put to a better use.
Many of the states of the Old World have striven to placate their Muslim populations, apparently from the conviction that perceived injustices against those populations are the "root cause" of Islam-powered terrorism. This is misconceived. Islamic terrorism is religiously motivated: it is commanded by Allah in the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and many of the ahadith. One cannot nullify the word of God with political or social accommodations; whatever developments might occur in the temporal world, it remains invariant.
If God has commanded the Faithful to make war on the "infidel," some percentage of the Faithful will take up arms in His Cause. If God has sanctified the sacrifice of one's own life in that Cause -- indeed, if He has promised rich rewards in the next life to those who do so -- some percentage of the Faithful will strap on Semtex vests and seek out concentrations of "infidels" to kill. Such motivations cannot be affected by any kind or degree of accommodation.
It is well established that the persons of whom we speak -- the jihadis of Islam -- are a minority among those who call themselves Muslims: no more than a few percent at most. But they exert a great pressure against the rest: first and foremost, to conceal the jihadis from the secular authorities; second, to provide money and weapons to be used in the jihad; third, to broaden the jihad's pressure against secular societies with social disruptions, demands for accommodation, and intimidation by implication.
Mao Tse-tung wrote that the general population is a sea in which the guerrilla warrior swims. In this, as in few other things, he was correct. Wherever there's a concentrated Islamic population -- that is, a geographic concentration, a district or village that's nearly all Muslim -- violence-minded Islamists will be able to secure the concealment and the material support they require for their undertakings, by sheer power of intimidation.
As previously noted, the Islamist terrorist is himself unreachable. He can neither be negotiated with nor deterred. But might it be possible to sever him from his support base: the larger Muslim population he coerces into concealing and supporting him?
If recent history is a reliable guide, this is a considerable gamble. Terrorists have routinely and successfully exploited measures intended to separate them from their less militant supporters as arguments for increasing that support. This is particularly the case when a nation-state moves against a nominally innocent population for the sake of suppressing its "non-state actors." Indeed, it's the principle on which this sort of insurgency is based: reprisals by the political authorities against persons overwhelmingly innocent of offense are pure propaganda gifts to the insurgents themselves. Even in a state-vs.-quasi-state situation, which Israel faces with the Palestinian irredentists, the Palestinian "authorities" have succeeded in evading all responsibility in the eyes of other Palestinians for the ongoing violence.
The sole governmentally-conducted approach that's shown any success has been the American counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. In a counterinsurgency posture, one's armed forces are no longer wielded in the conventional fashion, but instead are used as law enforcers and intelligence collectors. American soldiers have proved surprisingly effective in those roles, though their commitment has come at appalling cost in blood and treasure. Nor is it certain that the progress they've made will be enduring. The reason is Islam, which dominates Iraq as completely as any other Middle Eastern state save Israel. Islam has too firm a grip on the Iraqi majority to yield easily to secular pleas for peace and tolerance. If our forces were to withdraw from Iraq today, Islamic pressure would surely mount against the nominally secular government, supported by a terrorist campaign of familiar savagery.
The Administration's pacification / democratization gambit, to have any chance of success, will require long-term endurance. American forces will be required to remain in Iraq for a decade or more, in the hope that persistent, relentless enforcement of secular law and civil peace by disinterested foreign enforcers will acclimatize the Iraqis to peace, and will germinate in them a desire to maintain it. This throw has only a modest chance of success -- and to maximize that chance, it will be necessary to neutralize the influences and interventions of Iraq's hostile neighbors Iran and Syria, neither of which can afford to have a free, secular, democratic state next door.
Only 26 million of today's 1300 million Muslims reside in Iraq: a bare 5% of the world aggregate. The country is important, especially so for its potential as a Western bridgehead in the Middle East, but it can only be a small component of our effort against Islamic terrorism. If the cost of an effort such as the counterinsurgency in Iraq will usually be as high as this one has been, there's no point in making it the main motif of our anti-terrorism efforts; a tenth of the exertion necessary would bankrupt us. We must look elsewhere for a workable solution to the jihad.
Perhaps the most daunting aspect to the problem of Islamic terrorism is the openness of secular societies to infiltration by those whose desire is to destroy them. The states of Europe have demonstrated how easily a seemingly modest influx of Muslim immigrants or "guest workers" can become a pressure bloc of non-trivial strength. Unfortunately, America seems not to have drawn the moral from the tribulations of the Old World; Muslim immigrants are being welcomed here at a higher rate than ever before.
Part of the problem, and inseparable from the rest, is the tendency to grant Islam and its adherents "religious protection:" that is, to deem Islam just "one more religion," equally as protected by our Constitution and laws as Judaism or Christianity, and to make no objection to its importation to our shores. But no other religion abroad in the world today commands the subjugation of the "infidel" by any means expedient. Nor is it thinkable that Islam, a creed that explicitly sanctifies deceit that furthers its aims, could be trusted even if its spokesmen were to renounce, publicly and explicitly, all use of force or fraud in pursuit of the Islamization of the world. The founder of Islam, and the Qur'an he imposed upon his followers, make it plain that violence and guile are indispensable to that effort; by command from Allah, they cannot be renounced:
Fighting is prescribed upon you, and you dislike it. But it may happen that you dislike a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that you love a thing which is bad for you. And Allah knows and you know not. [Qur'an, Sura 2:216]
I was Umar's clerk. Once Abdullah bin Abi Aufa wrote a letter to 'Umar when he proceeded to Al-Haruriya. I read in it that Allah's Apostle in one of his military expeditions against the enemy, waited till the sun declined and then he got up amongst the people saying, "O people! Do not wish to meet the enemy, and ask Allah for safety, but when you face the enemy, be patient, and remember that Paradise is under the shades of swords." Then he said, "O Allah, the Revealer of the Holy Book, and the Mover of the clouds and the Defeater of the clans, defeat them, and grant us victory over them." The Prophet said, "Khosrau will be ruined, and there will be no Khosrau after him, and Caesar will surely be ruined and there will be no Caesar after him, and you will spend their treasures in Allah's Cause." He called, "War is deceit'. [The Sunnah of Sahih Bukhari, Book 52, entries 266 and 267]
Fourteen centuries of history speak eloquently to the attachment of Islam and Muslims to force and fraud.
Just to hold what we have against the Islamic tide, it's become irrefutably necessary to deny Islam and Muslims further access to the United States, to the states of Europe, and to Australia, New Zealand, and all other lands with an attachment to peace and freedom. But political policy alterations that would bar immigration by Muslims are not on the table in any legislature at this time, nor should we expect to see them soon. Politicians are exceedingly reluctant to incite the wrath of a special-interest group, most particularly one whose members are known for their penchant for rioting.
But a holding action is not and cannot be enough. Islamic terrorism is already transforming free societies, the United States included, into semi-garrison states. The use of mass transport involves major constraints and humiliating rituals. Gaining access to a large building or a sports stadium has become an arduous process as well. Few persons can avoid a twinge of uncertainty as they drive onto a bridge. We worry constantly about our drinking water, our power plants, and our fuel depots. Even our communications have become occasions for wariness; one never knows who might be listening, or how he'll choose to interpret what he hears.
Of special mention is this: even nominally peaceable Muslims are prone to making demands for accommodation on the societies that admit them. They press for exemptions and subventions through a variety of means, often with a component of threat to them. For example, when Muslim cab drivers in Minneapolis agitated for an exemption to the common-carrier rule, the threat was the disruption of airport traffic. When Muslim travelers agitated for foot baths in those airports, the threat was that they would render the conventional public rest rooms unusable by us "infidels." These threats to create marginal discomforts for the general public were more effective than a threat of suicide bombing would have been, as the accommodations proposed struck most persons as tolerable prices to pay for a return to harmony. Yet there's no qualitative difference between such threats and an ultimatum of war.
When Adolf Hitler said that "The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it," he knew whereof he spoke. Though borderless and without an explicit political structure, Islam is such a state -- and its ambition is to batten onto the entire world.
The above thoughts and observations are my reasons for believing that free peoples can have peace and security against Islamic terrorism only if Islam is either:
- Quarantined within its existing strongholds, or:
- Eradicated from the world.
If you're a regular reader of Eternity Road, you've encountered most, if not all, of the arguments above before. But how they bear on the composition of a strategy for bringing a quarantine about -- let's not leap to genocide unless it proves unavoidable -- might not be entirely clear.
The material above actually bears most heavily on the questions of what has not and will not work. Political action has proved unobtainable; military action is either unbearably expensive or inadequately effective. The nation-state, even one as powerful as the United States, cannot effectively combat a religiously-powered menace so diffuse and so passionate. To rely upon political or military countermeasures would be like brandishing a sword at a swarm of cockroaches.
A solution, if one exists, must emerge from non-political, non-military sources and institutions.
It would be theoretically possible to agitate successfully for a rigid exclusion of Muslims from the United States. Approximately enough Americans grasp the nature and size of the threat Islam poses to this nation. If it were made a steady drumbeat -- in other words, if more parochial interests would cede pride of place for the nonce -- Congress could be compelled to act. But that bet is against the odds; there are too many parochial interests, and too little willingness to face the threat to American demographics Islamic immigration implies.
I believe the problem is soluble. Indeed, I believe it will be solved -- but only after a sufficient number of terrorist acts and Islam-powered "demonstrations" have made it undeniable that the adherents of that creed cannot live in harmony with those of traditional Western views. The solution, however, will set millions of teeth on edge, for it involves doing something Westerners are largely too gentle to do.
To get Muslims into a state of quarantine, in the absence of political action to compel them, private persons have to act in such a fashion that Muslims voluntarily abandon their residences in the West. They have to be made uncomfortable by their presence among us -- considerably more uncomfortable than we are.
A joke that made the rounds these past couple of years is apposite:
A Plan to save bankrupt airlines:Replace all female flight attendants with some good-lookin' strippers! What the hell? The attendants have gotten old and haggard-looking. They don't even serve food anymore, so what's the loss?
The strippers would double, triple, perhaps quadruple the alcohol consumption and get a "party atmosphere" going in the cabin. And, of course, every heterosexual businessman in this country would start flying again, hoping to see naked women.
Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing naked women. Hijackings would come to a screeching halt and the airline industry would see record revenues.
Why the hell didn't Bush think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself?
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Now, I wouldn't expect the airlines to leap toward this solution to their terrorism-related problems, but as a strategic guide, the above story serves well. If the great majority of private citizens were to conduct themselves in such a fashion as to make Muslims maximally uncomfortable about being here, the growth of America's Muslim population would be reversed thereby.
- Commerce with Muslims, whether wholesale or retail, must be curtailed.
- The employment of Muslims must be avoided.
- Tight-knit Muslim communities, such as may be found in continental New York, Michigan, and New Jersey, must be put under penetrative pressures.
- Non-Muslim Americans must adopt patterns of behavior that make Muslims both uncomfortable and highly conspicuous when they venture out of their exclaves.
Would this deter terrorists from coming here? Of course not; terrorists are not deterrable, as I mentioned earlier. It would do something even more effective: It would cut deeply into the concealment and support terrorists could coerce from sullen-but-peaceable Muslim communities in the United States. It would also vitiate Muslims' agitation for special accommodations for their creed, as few would be inclined to propitiate the members of a shrinking, generally unpleasant sect.
To wipe out a species of animal, one doesn't heft a rifle and go out killing them one by one; one attacks the species's habitat: its ecological niche. The ecological niche for the Muslim terrorist is the Muslim exclave in a non-Muslim nation; the ecological niche for the Muslims in that exclave is the good will and hospitality of the non-Muslims around them. If we want to induce the Muslim diaspora in America and throughout the West to reverse itself, such that it will confine itself henceforward to its existing hegemonies, we must make those habitats uninhabitable.
More anon.
Comments
I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is…more bacon!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/20/2008 at 03:39 PMMost persuasive screed.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/01/re-winning-horror-sunday-screed.html
Posted by Consul-At-Arms on 01/20/2008 at 06:02 PMThere is a solution that is perfectly within our ability, if we have the courage to do it. We have applied it once before to a different scourge. We outlawed the Communist party, and we can outlaw the Muzlim party. Izlam is a political movement that is out to overthrow our government. The fact that they are going about it more slowly makes it appear a little bit different, but they are out to bring down the US Constitution for certain. We need them outlawed and then they will have to either leave or go underground. This will increase their discomfort level greatly, to the point that most will leave.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/20/2008 at 08:40 PMWherever there’s a concentrated Islamic population—that is, a geographic concentration, a district or village that’s nearly all Muslim—violence-minded Islamists will be able to secure the concealment and the material support they require for their undertakings, by sheer power of intimidation.
That sounds like a reason to disperse Muslims, not quarantine them.
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 01/20/2008 at 09:45 PMFrancis, I’ve read your manifesto through, very slowly and as I read it my mind was racing. I was thinking of political people I know…one Christian politician I know personally, who has/have recommended a complete moratorium on the immigration of Muslims into Australia. They are now trying to muscle him out. The person leading the fray is supposedly another Christian who is trying to find ‘common ground’ between Christians and Muslims…just the opposite of what you say here.
What you recommend is radical and it could be perhaps one of the few options left open to us. Would our politicians even consider it? Well, my Christian politician friend is one example. He’s fighting to remain in the party he himself founded!
I am planning to read what you’ve said again and see if I can weave it into a post about my Christian politician friend (which I’ve been tossing around in my mind for the past few days).
As always, excellent thoughts, Francis.Posted by Aurora on 01/20/2008 at 10:25 PMFran,
Some very good ideas here, but I wonder if an employer could get away with not hiring a Muslim. We have some very active human rights commissioners around here.Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/20/2008 at 11:23 PMLinda, I was recently in a position to hire and fire the employees of a company I worked for and I never employed anybody who wouldn’t fit in with the workplace culture.
Ve haf vays…..Posted by Keith on 01/22/2008 at 03:02 AM“It will solved...”
Indeed. My reading of human nature and the American political scene leads me to believe that the humane and rational methods you outline here will not be tried on a large enough scale in time. I predict that little will be done in Washington until a city is laid waste, followed by a terrible and unstoppable convulsion of retribution by formerly “average Americans” here, and a bloody and costly military response abroad.
It’s uncanny how perhaps 19 of 20 human beings can only be caused to take action by the scourge of immediate necessity. One in 20 is capable of seeing the right action in advance, and doing it soonest.
I don’t have any idea about how to change that.
Posted by Robert Pearson on 01/22/2008 at 05:31 PM“<b>It will [be] solved…” This is why even Hemingway and Heinlein had proof readers.
Posted by Robert Pearson on 01/22/2008 at 05:48 PM
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