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June 23, 2006
Despair and Hope
The short and long wars against radical Islam
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In the short-term, the ongoing war with Islamic fascists from
Afghanistan to Iraq , and in peripheral areas from Canada and Manhattan
to Madrid , Bali, and London , seems surreal.

Not to mention frustrating: almost every day the press highlights
another furious outburst from some entertainers or intellectuals who
are just enough on the fringes of American popular culture to warrant
momentary coverage of their lunacy. Neil Young is worried about the
reception of his new album? He hypes George Bush's malignancies. The
Dixie Chicks and Madonna are bothered about being pegged abroad as part
of George Bush's empire? Presto, they call Iraq the real problem. The
dropout Sean Penn can't quite shake his off-screen image of Jeff
Spicoli? He seeks acceptance from the Western Left as a serious critic
of U.S Middle-Eastern policy.

The largest American aid program since the Marshall Plan has become the
receptacle for all the conflicting personal frustrations, unhappiness,
and thwarted idealism of Western elites, a sort of scapegoat or totem
through which the ennui and angst of contemporary sensitive man can be
momentarily excised.

The terrorists in Iraq know this and thus trust that our press corps
will harp on the last minutes, rather than the last four years, of the
wretched life of the mass-murdering al Zarqawi - did he receive
proper medical attention? Was he roughed up by us? Did he die
immediately or suffer?

Indeed, the more our own troops are tortured and exploded, the more our
own media will rush to judgment on Haditha to assure the world, before
an inquiry has even finished, that the U.S. Marine Corps murdered
innocents. The more non-uniformed Islamists behead civilians and
torture innocents, the more international "rights" organizations
will accuse the United States of humanitarian violations in Guantanamo
Bay - at least up until the point of calling for the return of such
killers to their native countries.

In such an asymmetrical war of perceptions, the gruesome death of a
single American does more harm to our cause than does the image of a
martyred Zarqawi in sensual Paradise with his virgins. For Westerners,
death ruins the precious good life; for the topsy-turvy Islamists,
death salvages the bad life.

Our rules of engagement are aimed at winning "hearts and minds."
That precludes the age-old formula for such postwar rebuilding:
reconstruct only after the enemy has been humiliated and defeated. A
Curtis LeMay would have advised leveling Fallujah in April to save the
war; we shrug that doing so would surely lose it. Somewhere the ghost
of a Thucydides or Hobbes or Churchill might adjudicate our debate in
ways that we might not like.

All this the enemy knows and manipulates to its advantage.

The terrorists also understand that their overtly fascistic ideology
- intolerance for other religions, execution of the apostate,
subjugation of women, killing of gays, and theocracy - will never
earn the proper Western revulsion once reserved for a similar
reactionary Nazism, since it butts up against the pillar of
multicultural tolerance; no non-Western people can be any worse than
the present-day West.

Al Qaeda and its followers can't manufacture a machine gun or design
an RPG. No problem - they realize there are enough
petroleum-generated dollars floating around in the region, and enough
eager arms merchants, to get what they need.

Politically, the Islamists accept that the world detests them -
perhaps even the Chinese and Russians. But they also have discovered
that much of the world finds them useful. For the Arab Street , macabre
resistance to the West offers a vicarious sense of pride, especially if
it is cost-free and does not completely forfeit access to Europe or the
United States . Aspiring hegemons like the Chinese, or those in decline
like the Europeans and Russians, enjoy it when America bloodies its
nose, if for no other reason than envy and spite - and the hope that
in the future they are given more consultation, befitting their prior
status.

Oil is their best ally, or so the Islamists trust. The Iranians, even
if shackled, boast that, Samson-like, they can pull down our entire
petroleum temple upon all of us anytime they wish. The terrorists know
that billions will always filter down from autocracies as bribe money
into their coffers. And no gas-hungry American wants his Labor Day
Winnebago parked dry on his pad because some nut let off a bomb in the
Middle East .

But in the longer-term war, the Islamists have real problems. Their
acquisition of weapons is always parasitical and can't quite keep up
with constant Western innovation, whether in the form of drones that
take out terrorists sitting in front of their TVs, or anti-ballistic
missile systems that might nullify Ahmadinejad's nuclear blackmail.

The Islamists are also in a dilemma about escalation. They have a
deep-seated suspicion that another 9/11 might unleash an unpredictable
Western response that would pollute the favorable Middle East waters in
which they swim. Behead a Canadian prime minister; blow up the Eiffel
Tower or the Vatican; take out the Empire State Building - and
Western bombs may be dropped first, beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and
questions asked later. So for now, jihadists accept that their best
strategy is not to upset too much the multifarious forces that conspire
to restrain Western power.

Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the
American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism,
something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China
to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and
Dubai . Westernization - whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised
gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or
navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air
conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted
bare navels on MTV - is insidiously seductive and ultimately
subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century.

How do you arrange a marriage, insist on a beheading for adultery,
conduct a proper honor killing of your daughter, or calmly call Jews
"pigs and apes" when the wider Westernizing world broadcast into
your living room, car, and workplace thinks you are some groveling
zombie? Can an Airbus or Compaq be constructed according to the
principles of Sharia? How can you demand amoxicillin as your
birthright, but hate the system of free thinking and rationalism that
created it? Does the Islamist despise equally Chinese internet
pornography; does he issue fatwas against South Korean video games;
does he ostracize Latin American evangelical Protestants, or burn down
Bollywood? In the short-term maybe; in the long-term it is not so easy.

The Middle Easterner is also starting to realize that his once romantic
jihadist has turned even approving bystanders into international
pariahs. You doubt that? Try getting on an international flight with a
Saudi or Egyptian and watch the passengers' reaction; or wear a veil
in Paris or Rome , and see how many smiles you receive. That radical
change in attitudes toward radical Islam and its appeasers, the
jihadist - and those in the Middle East who tolerated him - begot.
How they finally wore down the Western therapeutic mind from Amsterdam
to Copenhagen , I don't know, but somehow they have nearly
accomplished that once impossible feat.

So there is no guarantee that the multiculturalism, utopianism,
cultural relativism, and moral equivalence that infect Western capitals
today will necessarily always predominate, being as they are a
fashionable relish in times of calm and plenty. The more the Islamist
insults his benefactors, the more he gradually tries their patience.

A Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky still resonates with a minority of the
public because he can; thanks to Western capitalism and freedom, both
jet at will around the globe, live comfortably, and count on the
tolerance of the Western bourgeoisie society that they so roundly
condemn. But should the Islamist endanger that comfortable embryo -
as they almost did on 9/11 - then folks like these would be as
quickly forgotten as were Neville Chamberlain and Charles Lindbergh by
1941.

As for Iraq , while the post-Saddam reconstruction may not have started
out as the new ground zero in the war against Islamist terrorism, it
has surely devolved into that, as the Islamists themselves concede. In
the short term, because they understand that the juggernaut of Western
capitalism, freedom, and choice will spell their death knell, the
jihadists have imported and adopted as their own every conventional
Western munition, repackaged every Western self-critique, manipulated
every Western media outlet, and tried to boomerang every Western
liberal virtue and humanitarian protocol back at its creators. And, if
the polls on Iraq are any indication, such a strategy has worked, for a
time, brilliantly.

But these are ultimately not acts of confidence, but of desperation. As
an al Zarqawi knew, the world is evolving; if for the present we can
keep our heads, then for eternity the Islamists will eventually lose
theirs.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson