In response to yesterday’s post, Greg Scoblete emails:
I read your post “Overrated” following an Instapundit link. I think you’re right, re: doctors, but I noticed you derided the notion that the jihad has any basis in U.S. policy. I think you simplify the argument. There is absolutely some causality between the two, just as there is causality between Islamic fundamentalism and violence. There is ample evidence of this in the writings of bin Laden and among analysts who study Islamic terrorism. (I wrote as much at TCS Daily here).
Nor is it a “progressive” myth. George Bush, Wolfowitz, and other administration officials have explicitly linked U.S. policy to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. This isn’t in the spirit of blaming the victim but of knowing your enemy. Believing we’re being attacked solely out of religious animus is a comforting myth, but not one that will help us win a needed victory over jihadist terrorism.
Of course, I oversimplified. The post was running long as it was.
Of course we have made foreign policy mistakes that have resulted in the current mess, going back for decades.
My point was that they’re not the mistakes that the “progressives” and transnationalists think they are, and that it’s not because we do things that make the Caliphists and hirabis upset, or explain “why they hate us,” which is the prevailing mind set.
Our foreign policy mistakes have been to give in to them, and thereby encourage them. Terrorism is not an ideology of hopelessness, but of hope. Hope that by making us fear them sufficiently, we will give in to their unreasonable, savage, medieval demands.
[sigh]
It will take a long essay to explain this properly.
There are (at least) two categories of error in foreign policy. One is to commit egregious acts against a people such that they rise up against you.
The other is to show weakness, such that they think that if they can hurt you badly enough, you’ll give up, and give in to their demands, no matter how outrageous and unreasonable they may be.
While we’ve done more than we should have of both over the last…well…half century, if not longer, the latter is the major reason that we are currently under siege (at least metaphorically, if not literally).
Yes, bin Laden whined about the “occupation of Arabia” during and after the first Gulf War. And the Arabs continually whine about the oppression of the “Palestinians” by the “Zionists” (see, I can use scare quotes just as well as Reuters, except…well, mine are actually accurate).
But the real reason for the war we’re in can be found in the part of bin Laden’s speech about the “weak horse” and the “strong horse.”
In Tehran in 1979, in Beirut in 1982, in New York in 1993 (when we treated the first Trade Center bombing as a criminal operation), in Mogadishu, in the Khobar towers, in the Cole attack, etc., etc., etc,.) we have shown ourselves to be the “weak horse.” And, of course, it all started when we abandoned the south Vietnamese in 1975.
Only when we decided to take out the Taliban did we surprise the Hirabis. And then, when we decided to topple terrorist sympathizer Saddam Hussein, they trembled. Not because he had been providing them with a great deal of support (though it was not zero, as popular myth has it), but because they recognized that a) a major US military presence in the heart of Arabia was a great threat from a military standpoint and b) the notion of democracy there was an even greater threat to their medieval designs, that depended on an Arabia in thrall to fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam.
So, yes, our foreign policy, at least since 1979, has been based on a delusion–that we could ignore Islamic militancy, or treat it as a criminal problem. This is a delusion in which the Democrats have indulged in particular (though many Republicans supped the koolaid as well, down to the present time, as Pete Domenici has).
But the solution is not to change our policy to placate religious fanatics.
Douglas Hofstadter
He describes a mother presiding over two disputing little boys. She has just baked a cake. One of the boys thinks that the two boys should share the cake. The other thinks that he should get the whole cake.
What is a compromise?
Well, if one listens to people at the UN, or even our own State Department, a compromise between the two positions would be that the boy who wants the whole cake would get three quarters, and the one who thinks it should be shared would get one quarter.
That is, as long as he was willing to fight for it, of course (though only diplomatically, and not, heaven forfend, really fight, with actually breaking things, and killing people), and continue to apologize for wanting even a quarter of it. No, war is evil. We must compromise.
That’s where we’re at with Islamicists.
We want tolerance of all religions. They want tolerance of theirs, and Dhimmitude for the others.
We want freedom of speech and thought. They want freedom of speech to praise Allah, and freedom to behead any who are less than appreciative of the obvious fact that Mohammed is the Prophet Who Must Be Praised.
The foreign policy mistakes that we have made are to be willing to “compromise” with such insanity. To attempt to meet it half way. To ignore it when it takes ambassadors hostage. To ignore it when it plants truck bombs beneath the World Trade Center. To ignore it when it blows up a barrack of Marines in Beirut. To ignore it when the Khobar Towers are blown up, and to rely on an ostensibly friendly regime to investigate it, despite the fact that it also funds the hatred and ideology that drives madmen to do such things. To ignore it when it attacks a US warship in the Middle East and kills US sailors and damages it to the point that it must put into port for repairs.
These are the things that our foreign policy has done to promote terrorism.
There is no half way. There is tolerance, which the West, and the Enlightenment, for centuries, has promoted, and there is tyranny. There is no compromise with tyranny.
How does one “compromise” with that?