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Thursday, July 28, 2005
Mobilizations
Even Homer nods, so your Curmudgeon will make allowances for a logical slip from one as clearheaded and courageous as Robert Spencer:
[A]lthough the resentment [Representative Tom] Tancredo has tapped is real and has legitimate causes, his suggestion that “among the many things we might do to prevent such an attack on America would be to lay out there as a possibility the destruction” of Islamic holy sites is still wrong -- but not generally for the reasons that most analysts have advanced.Primarily, of course, it contravenes Western principles of justice which, if discarded willy-nilly, would remove a key reason why we fight at all: to preserve Western ideas of justice and human rights that are denied by the Islamic Sharia law so beloved of jihad terrorists. But even aside from moral questions, which are increasingly thorny in this post-Hiroshima, post-Dresden world, there are practical reasons to reject what Tancredo has suggested.
[...snip...]
Will men who love death, who glorify suicide bombing and praise God for beheadings and massacres, fear the destruction of holy sites? It seems unlikely in the extreme — and that fact nullifies all the value this thread may have had as a deterrent. Nuke Mecca? Why bother? It wouldn’t work.
[...snip...]
The jihadists would have yet another injury to add to their litany of grievances, which up to now have so effectively confused American leftists into thinking that the West is at fault in this present conflict. But the grievances always shift; the only constant is the jihad imperative. Let us not give that imperative even greater energy in the modern world by supplying such pretexts needlessly.
Your Curmudgeon intends no disrespect to Spencer, whom he regards as highly as any commentator now at work on our current problems with Islam. However, the reasons Spencer has given for not using the destruction of Islamic holy sites as a deterrent threat completely miss the point -- a point Spencer himself is aware of, but which he's temporarily forgotten.
This is not a criminal justice situation, nor is it a "peacekeeping action." This is war.
War is a condition of armed belligerency between collectivized forces. In the most common case, those forces are nations. In some other cases, one side is a national government and the other side is an "insurgency." In a few others, all the participants lack "sovereignty," though each is striving to impose itself as sovereign over all the others. The essence of the thing is that large groups of persons have resorted to deeds that would be deemed criminal under the conditions of peace, specifically to impose their wills on their adversaries in the conflict.
Wars are possible because of Objection One:
| OBJECTION ONE:
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Principles of justice, as Americans understand them, obviously cannot be applied to battlefield conditions. Less obviously, they suffer gaping holes during a state of insurgency in which a large but well concealed group is laboring to overthrow all law and justice. Why else would the Islamic terrorists have adopted their favored tactics in the first place?
The civilized world's great challenge in these times is to find a way to maintain law and justice despite our condition of belligerency. Needless to say, if it were easy, there'd be a lot less discussion and disputation about the means. But never fear; your Curmudgeon is on the job.
"Know your enemy" is one of the oldest maxims of war. It's usually used to exhort us to understand the enemy: what he values; how he thinks; how he selects his strategies, tactics, and targets. This is indeed a primary requirement of war. But even so, there's one that comes before it and all other considerations of armed conflict. It, too, can be summarized in three meaty words:
Before one can locate and advance on the enemy, one must know who he is, in the crudest, least elaborate sense. In a more individualized form, this is also a requirement of peacetime justice. But note that peacetime police investigations, though they do inquire into motive, do so specifically as an adjunct to determining who perpetrated the crime and how to mount the case against him.
It is your Curmudgeon's contention that the enemy belligerents in our current war include several "undeclared" nations:
- Saudi Arabia
- Syria
- Iran
Have these nations explicitly sent their armies into the field against us? No. But in all three cases, they have provided personnel, shelter, and material support to the jihadis who seek to destroy our civilization. The case is strong that without their assistance, there could not be an Islamic terrorist movement of international scope.
Strange as it may seem, jihad is not, of itself, a profitable activity; it must be supported by "charitable donations." Therefore, if the jihadis could be deprived of their benefactors' support, they could be emasculated with a minimum of violence or disturbance of our preferred ways of life.
Many would counter that this is not a justification for assaulting the three countries named above, but rather for ferreting out the individuals in each who provide volunteers, shelter, arms and cash to terrorist groups. This runs full tilt into Objection One:
- Those persons are much, much more than 2% of the population of those nations;
- The governments of those nations have no interest in corralling those persons. Indeed, despite all protestations to the contrary, they're enthusiastically behind them.
To impose the principles and procedures of Western criminal justice on those nations would necessitate conquering and subduing them first.
The jihadis' and the Islamic world's "grievances" are fabrications from first to last. Their aim is to destroy Israel, to resurrect the Caliphate, and to impose shari'a rule on as many lands and peoples as possible. Nothing any "infidel" nation does or says can alter those goals, which their creed commands of them as religious obligations. So the notion that strong threats made against Muslim holy places in the interest of deterrence will somehow "increase their grievances" falls of its own weight. They would find "grievances" sufficient to power their jihad in any state of relations one can imagine.
We cannot hope to pacify the jihadis. We might not be able to deter the most bloodthirsty of them. But we should not deem the jihadis to be the first targets of our deterrent threats.
The question of prime importance with regard to any deterrent tactic is whether it would mobilize the "ordinary" Muslim to restrain the jihadis, or to join them in hostility toward us.
If we are to starve Islamic terrorism of personnel, shelter, and sustenance, we must do so by altering the incentives faced by those who provide it. History has demonstrated rather convincingly that we cannot do so with conciliation or bribes. Muslims regard all such things as signs of weakness. The Islamic world has never shown the slightest regard for international amity, for justice as Westerners understand it, or for the ethical obligations implied by negotiation of any kind (cf. taqiyya, kitman). It respects only strength and the appearance of strength.
As little as we like it, it is credible that threatening the jihadis' enabler nations with unacceptable destruction would cause them to reassess their behavior and withdraw their support for Islamic terrorism. If this judgment is accurate, then we must threaten them with the destruction of all that they most value, with their holy places at the very top of the list, unless they:
- Immediately desist from their terrorism-sustaining actions, and:
- Act promptly and harshly against any private parties within their borders who provide shelter or sustenance to any terrorist group.
We must threaten to destroy Arabian cities.
We may have to militarize to World War II levels.
We may have to invade several more Islam-dominated countries and kill large numbers of presumptively innocent Muslims.
We may have to impose occupation forces on other nations, as we've done with Iraq.
If our "bluff were called," the sequel would be bloodier and more costly than anyone can imagine. That's no reason to think it's not the proper course.
Comments
We are still basically in the PR stage of the war (with no disrespect meant to those on the front lines in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) As long as we have not yet clearly lost the PR battle for the hearts and minds of the moderate Muslims (I realize that you are skeptical of how many of them exist) I am ready to cut Pres. Bush, Spencer and other people with high perceived or real authority some slack in their public statements about Islam and proper ways to conduct the war.
I agree that there is far too much reassuring talk. I think Spencer, Tancredo etc. should simply shut up about it. Too much talk about not bombing Mecca looks like weakness, and too much talk about doing it looks like bluster.
Posted by on 07/29/2005 at 01:38 AMI’m appalled by what I read there…
Do you think bombing Mecca or any other holy places will calm the muslim world. To Start with, Islam is not the problem in this case, as it wasn(t for Christianism in the middle ages…
It’s how fanatics use it against people that doesn’t share their beliefs.If you bomb holy places, let me tell you that it’s not a gew extremists you’re going to have, it’s about a billion people…
Anyway, you already bombed Iraq for no other reason than the oil so let’s continue the nonsense that is affecting our countries at the end!
Posted by on 07/29/2005 at 07:11 AMStefan’s argument would be persuasive if the goal were, in fact, to calm Islam. But Francis has been quite clear that he does not believe this can be done. For one thing, how would we know if we had succeeded? Islam commands its followers to PRETEND to cooperate when they are met with a battlefield reverse. This isn’t just an option held out as permissible: they are under ORDERS to counterfeit reasonable behavior until they are strong enough to resort to the sword. Francis states, correctly, that with such a people you cannot trust any agreement, whether to surrender, disband terrorists, be nice, or anything else.
So we can’t really “calm” Islam in any case. We can certainly kill them, if we must. What Francis proposes, and Bush is trying to achieve, is something between empty words and genocide: that is, conversion or conquest. We’re trying to convert them, if not all the way to Western Christianity, then at least to a non-dangerous compromise religion.
Conversion should be tried, but if it fails, there’s always conquest. We can, if we must, depose all the hostile regimes and hold them in bondage until they grow up, as we did the Germans and Japanese. I believe conquest is preferable to genocide, if only because it spares the innocent among the guilty.
The public may well support conversion efforts indefinitely. But if the Moslems hit us again, and continue to do so, we’ll have to conclude that Bushian conversion has failed, or at least, doesn’t work fast enough in an age of nuclear weapons. We’ll need to resort to conquest.
Conquest, however, takes a long time, probably decades. (I mean the occupation and retraining, not the actual fighting.) Now suppose the American public will not long support conquest of the Moslem world. Kerry almost won, after all, and a Kerry victory would have meant a return to the “calm them down” strategy. Barring more Islamic attacks on our soil, eventually we’ll elect another appeaser (who may not necessarily be a Democrat!) and the war’s over.
Which means, I regret to say, that if conversion fails, all that’s left is genocide. Say Bob Smith is president and he sees that, first, conversion isn’t working, and second, conquest cannot be sustained by the fickle American public, especially with the antiwar media as powerful as it still is.
Won’t Smith have to decide to destroy the Middle East, and to hell with whether he gets another term?
I don’t like this option and regret my fellow-citizens’ gullibility which makes it necessary. But really, Stefan, once you and folks like you take conquest off the table, what else is there?
Posted by on 07/29/2005 at 08:24 AMIt looks like the WH had anticipated your argument that “this is war.”
In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the country’s top military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice.
Administration officials say the earlier phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign. —From IHT.COM
Posted by Pascal on 07/29/2005 at 09:00 AMThe New Name deal bugs me, greatly. First, it reeks of marketing, but I know that’s necessary considering who’s being sold. But second, if we must market, why in the hell is it being billed as a ‘struggle’? The only struggle I see is to continue to stay our hand.
My suspicion is that it makes a nice acronym, which makes me want to throttle somebody even more.
Posted by Scott Chaffin on 07/29/2005 at 10:20 PM
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