maybe we need to rethink a war on terrorism

Submitted by Peter Herz (Taiwan), Jul 29, 2003 at 01:54

I certainly agree with Dr. Pipes that organizations like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc. are a danger to be watched and countered. and that it is always a good idea to keep the proverbial powder dry (reasonable defense spending). If some US soldiers in Afghanistan reach into holes and pull out Mullah Omar and Osama BL by their beards, I promise to give a big Bronx cheer to the first American lawyer who whines about some failure to read them their Miranda rights. But I have some second thoughts about fighting an open-ended "War on Terrorism". Islamist radicalism, like Marxism-Leninism fifty years ago, is an idea whose time has come, even if we all agree it's a pretty bad idea (as Marxism-Leninism was in its heyday).

I think USA badly needs to find a way to climb off its rhetoric of fighting terrorism and "UGH!--Fundamentalism!" and recognize that many of the regimes in the Muslim world are over-ripe for change, then learn to live with what comes next, just as we have come to accept a Far East largely under the control of Leninist parties. Even if the Islamist radicals were to remake the political map between Mauritania and the bend of China's Yellow River, as well as that of insular Southeast Asia, there is not a single Islamic state with the wealth, power, and savviness to form the nucleus of new superpower capable of threatening the West; the region would still have to sell its oil somewhere because it can't drink it; and numerous sectarian, national, regional, and political fissures would still keep this radicalized Islamic world weak and divided.

As for Israel, even secular nationalists and Arab communist parties offered it the dismal choice of victory or extinction. And what would happen to the Islamist radicals if they had to expain why the "armies of martyrs" sent against Jerusalem became just that, while losing further chunks of Arab land and getting two million Falastin Arabs thrown into the desert into the bargain?

As for Europe, an anti-Muslim reaction is already building steam, and probably won't cool down until a similar cooling down is evident across the Mediterranean. Non-Muslim Asians are also starting to mutter some pretty ugly things, too.

But before Huntington's inter-civilizational war breaks out all over, there is a good chance that a rising tide of radicalism in the Islamic world might force to the fore responsible and capable Islamic leadership from other quarters. The Iranian populace has started to show that it will take only so much from the mullahs, while even in Sa'udi Arabia, a newspaper has started to question the practice of blaming Israel for everything. The Muslim world has already started to show that it's a lot larger than Khomeini, Bin Laden, Turabi, and their ilk.

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