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Friday, December 17, 2004Kaus is writing about "The Trouble With Beinart," specifically Beinart's call for the Democrats to stand up to Islamic extremism just as the best of the party stood up to the Communists.An e-mailer to Mickey notes: The e-mailer doesn't get it. We aren't going to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world by reassuring the clerics and Muslims but by marginalizing them the same way Western culture has marginalized the priest and the pastor. Lest we forget, a few centuries ago we had Christians by the boatload ready to die for Jesus. They called it the Crusades. From priests to bishops to the Pope himself the judgment was made that there were tons of young men who had nothing better to do with their lives than get speared by a Saracen in the hopes of recapturing the same ground the Jews and Palestinians are fighting over even today. This did not stop because Islam found a way to reassure Christian civilization that everything was cool, no need to worry about us, but because for the West 1) the missions weren't going well and 2) people therefore found better things to live and die for. Likewise, lest Beinart critics forget, Communism didn't fall because we reached an understanding with it. It fell because we faced it down. Kruschev said, "We will bury you." Reagan said, in effect, "You can't make enough shovels," and launched the arms race. What emerged from that little experiment is that the Soviet Union couldn't make decent toilet paper, let alone a worker's paradise. And so it crumbled away, less a threat than an embarrassment and evil not for the danger it posed to the world but for the human aspirations it stifled. In engineering the demise of Islamism, we do well to look at how we faced down Communism, for in both cases we are up against the same thing: An ideology that believes that the world works other than it does, that believes its failure in the world is a failure of the world and not of its own and that the dreams crushed and souls lost in its name are small potatoes contained with the glories it holds in store. The enormity of Islamism is greater in ways, lesser in others, than that of Communism. But in the end, it is another bit of absurdist arrogance in which the mass of man is chained to the ambitions of a combination of unrestrained megalomaniacs and unscrupulous managerial types, the first to break the system and the second to pretend it's still working. The solution, as with Communism, is to break it and show it's broken, to hold it up as an embarrassment of social management and a crime against humanity and watch the stinking mess crumble when the managerial side sees the handwriting on the walls and bails. What we're doing in Iraq is painful, it's tedious and it's beautiful. Day after day, the mullahs call on the armies of God. But where is God? Easy. He's watching the infidels take block after block, city after city. Even when the Americans are having troubles, what's God's great role? Oh yeah, He lets Islamists blow themselves to bits - you only get one or two missions if you're an Islamist - and if you're lucky He lets you hide undetected a little longer. Bit by bit, one suspects, the man in the street is beginning to wonder who this Allah is and what's taking Him so long if He's really so gung ho for this to go on. Eventually the idea seeps in that the store's been closed for six months now so that single men who aren't providing for families can play soldier of God and patience starts to run thin. This is happening. It would be crude to run into Islamist dens screaming "Where's your God now?" but it's a fair question. The real problem for Islamism, though, is not on the battlefield, any more than the USSR's real problem was military. The problem is the whole thing doesn't work. The Taliban took less than a decade to turn back the clock in Afghanistan by centuries. That may have suited the leadership just fine, but keeping the masses happy in such circumstances is challenging. As time goes by, the leadership keeps turning over and turning over till all of a sudden your country's being run by a Saudi financier and a one-eyed sheik and even Oliver Stone won't make your movie because the script's too implausible. And then really stupid things happen, things like you challenge the most powerful nation on earth to a duel. Oh sure, Osama's still alive. So is Barbra Streisand, but that didn't keep Bush from being reelected. One word, people: pathetic. When the Islamists ran Afghanistan, even the self-winding watches stopped working. We know they didn't educate the girls, but it doesn't look like even the young men were learning very much. I mean, Blowing Up Buddha 101 sounds so Berkeley, doesn't it? And so when the decadent Americans and their buddies on the ground joined up, the mighty Taliban and the triumphant Al-Qaeda saw there was just one thing to do: turn tail and run. As fast as they could. Sure they lived to fight another day, to shit in someone else's soup. But wrecking the bouillabase and building a working society are different tasks calling for different skills. And the Islamofreaks don't pass muster. We must do to Islamism what we did to Communism. Blue jeans, cell phones, Starbucks. We need Muslim teenagers sitting angst-ridden in their bedrooms: Sure if I'm an Islamist I get to die in a mess of guts and plastique, but what if the bomb doesn't accessorize with my cellphone? I'd die of embarrassment. We need Palestinian men looking at would-be suicide bombers and growling, "Get a job." We don't need to find a way to make it okay to oppress women, stone homosexuals and mire your people in the twelfth century as long as you promise not to bomb us. We need to make it clear that Islam can dump the Islamist strain and adapt itself to the 21st century or the whole thing might join Communism on the ash heap. Our most potent weapons in the fight against Islamism are Western commerce and Western ideals. What we are doing in Iraq is to try to start a small-scale Enlightenment. It won't be easy and it will take time. After all, the French launched the first one and even they didn't really catch on to what they'd done for more than a century. What we're going to do is to start with the base questions: Why can't I have a cell phone? Why can't I drive a car? We're going to move to the political: Why does he get to be in charge? Since when does reading the Koran make you a better city planner? In time, when everybody else is too busy with other things to care, the thinkers will move from memorizing passages of the Koran to thinking about what they mean, whether they square with reality and whether what the imams say seems appropriate either to modern life or the teachings of the Koran. When we're done, it will not be up to the people to prove themselves worthy before the mullahs, but up to the mullahs to prove themselves relevant to the people. One wishes them well. They've got a pretty good book, even if it's not the one I believe in. They've got some decent historical lessons to build on. They've even got a history as a learned and cultivated people. The smart and thoughtful mullahs will be able to deal, showing how the age-old lessons of their holy books help one find solace and stability in a turbulent world. They'll create a modern Islam in Iraq that is already found elsewhere, one that helps its adherents stand strong, do right and live well. The cranks will have sway for a time, but like the cranks here, their congregations will splinter, their followers will drift and their teachings will fade in importance. And thank God for that. It is amazing to me that there is a strain of liberalism that can fail to abhorr, to have its stomach turned by a movement that lets depressed teenagers make themselves into bombs to fulfill the ambitions of religious authority figures. What is the Left for, if not to rise in outrage against such things? Hitchens was right (no link, don't remember where he wrote it) to note that Voltaire today would be screaming "Ëcrasez l'infâme!" at the top of his lungs to anyone who would listen about the Wahabbists. People like Kissinger are supposed to utter horrid remarks about "the enemy of my enemy..." while Leftists decry the fascist running dogs we're hanging with. And so Beinart's call is reassuring, indicating that there is still a sane Left, however small. Beinart is right. As I've argued, Islamism can be defeated. Can be stared down and laughed off the human stage, making way for a better life for 21st century Muslims and a safer world for us all. The Left should be a part of that. Sure, Islamism will have its flirters - even the Communists got sympathy from the likes of Kennedy, Dodd and Kerry. But the sooner the main of the Left recognizes the real oppressors of our age and joins in the fight to liberate their victims the better. 
posted by gbarto at 4:30 PM |
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