FEBRUARY
9, 2015
In the aftermath
of America’s invasion of Iraq, Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative polemicist
and editor of Commentary, wrote a long essay arguing
that the battle against Islamist extremism amounted to “World War IV.”
Podhoretz had a flair for the apocalyptic coinage, but many commentators on
both the right and left understood al Qaeda’s shocking attack on American soil
as the opening round of a war between the West and “Islamofascism,” as
Christopher Hitchens called it. That mood subsided as the terrorists failed to
mount similarly spectacular attacks (at least in the United States) and as the
grotesque failure of the war in Iraq cooled the ardor of many armchair
combatants for a battle to the death between radical Islam and the West.
Suddenly, however,
the metaphor of world war does not seem so hyperbolic. The establishment of a
self-declared “caliphate” in the heart of the Arab world, as well as the
slaughter of a group of cartoonists in the heart of Europe, has made radical
Islam look far more effective, more powerful, and more threatening than it had
when the movement was led by a handful of men in caves. Even some of the
realists who would have laughed off Podhoretz’s call to arms — and would have
recoiled at the premise that the Cold War constituted World War III — now fear
that the West is in peril. George Friedman, the Kissingerian analyst who runs
the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that
“a war between two worlds” — Islam and Christianity — has dawned. Foreign Policy’s own Aaron David
Miller, a reliable skeptic of grandiose adventures abroad, has described the
conflict with Islamic extremism as a “generational struggle” and “the long
war.”
I do not find this language ridiculous.
The radical Islamist denial of the primacy of individual choice in a
secularized public space, along with the willingness of large numbers of people
to kill others and themselves in order to destroy that way of being, poses a
fundamental challenge to the West. Yet the metaphor of civilizational struggle
misleads us into believing that we can do, and must do, what we cannot do and therefore
should not do.
What kind of “world war” do we now find
ourselves in? The only world war of the 19th century, that between France and
Britain in the decades after the French Revolution, was — despite France’s
republican pretensions — a classic struggle for mastery between great powers.
World War I constituted the last of these geopolitical, rather than
ideological, convulsions. Global struggle since that time has been precipitated
by totalitarian ideologies that seek to extend themselves across the globe.
Both the struggle against fascism and the struggle against communism, though
global in their geographical spread, were wars between a liberal and a
profoundly anti-liberal conception of how to organize Western society.
Islamist extremism
presents the exact opposite situation — a war inside a non-Western civilization
that has overtaken and consumed the West. This did not at first seem to be the
case. Long before al Qaeda, Islamic terrorists targeted U.S. Marines in
Lebanon, European and American airlines, and synagogues and Jewish
institutions. But the 9/11 attacks, as well as Osama bin Laden’s own rhetoric,
gave Podhoretz and many others good reason to believe that radical Islam had
declared war on the West. That rhetoric, and those tactics, have continued to
this day in the form of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the plots
against the United States that were hatched in Yemen, and the mayhem inflicted
by terrorists in London, Madrid, and other cities. Western capitals constitute
the citadels of the secular order that jihadis have pledged themselves to
destroy, and for those terrorists who live in the West, these cities and their
citizens are ready targets of opportunity.
But even if we say
that we have entered upon a war between Islamist extremism and modernity, the
locus of that struggle is shifting from the West to the Islamic world itself.
This is the significance of the rise and spread of the Islamic State.
The
“caliphate” in Iraq and Syria represents a very serious threat to the West, but
it is an existential challenge to the Islamic regimes in the region.
The
“caliphate” in Iraq and Syria represents a very serious threat to the West, but
it is an existential challenge to the Islamic regimes in the region. Like al Qaeda, the Islamic State views the nation-state as a
Western invention alien to Islam, but unlike al Qaeda, the Islamic State has
actually created an alternative model that reflects pre-modern Islamic
tradition. The Islamic State “brand” has spread with astonishing speed —
to Libya, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. Even if these new groups represent little
more than a few terrorists with a black flag, the wish to drape oneself in that
flag shows the tremendous power of the idea of setting up a “pure” Islamic
state inside an allegedly corrupted Islamic world.
The 9/11 attacks thus gave the
misleading impression that the rise of Islamist extremism was “about” the West
and required the West to fight a war on terror in order to defeat it. But
Islamist extremism is about Islam and about the regimes that rule in the name
of the faith; it is hard to imagine the extremist narrative losing its appeal
unless and until Arab regimes gain real legitimacy in the eyes of their own
citizens. Alternatively, the very act of setting up a protostate, as the
Islamic State has done, may expose the jihadi ideology to expectations of
effectiveness it cannot possibly satisfy, so that the radical vision will
collapse of its own contradictions, as communism eventually did.
There is a great deal that the West
can, must, and will do to defend itself from the terrible consequence of this
struggle inside another civilization. Much of that will come under the heading
of “homeland defense” — police work, intelligence, border security, and the
like. Some will involve rethinking national policies on the treatment of Muslim
immigrants. And some, but not much, will involve the use of force abroad. The
United States and Europe cannot afford to allow the Islamic State to
consolidate its control over territory any more than neighboring states can; it
would be absurd to gamble that a Wild West nation of fanatics will not seek to
destroy other Islamic regimes and kill all those they deem apostates. The
actual fighting, however, will have to be done by Iraqis, Syrians, and other
local forces.
The West can defend itself, but there’s
little it can do to change the terms of that struggle.
If in fact we’re facing a
civilizational war inside someone else’s civilization, then many of the tools
we used during the Cold War will prove unavailing. From the first years of the
long struggle against the Soviets, the United States engaged in a vast public
diplomacy campaign, covert and overt, designed to demonstrate the superiority
of democratic capitalism over communism. President George W. Bush sought to
revive this effort immediately after 9/11, appointing Charlotte Beers, a
leading Madison Avenue figure, to develop new “messaging” for the Islamic
world. Beers’ TV spots touting America’s respectful treatment of Muslims were
ridiculed in the Arab world and were soon pulled. She later conceded that America should not expect to win hearts and minds. Her
successors did no better. President Barack Obama’s public diplomacy office is
now hard at work manning an anti-Islamic State Twitter feed to match the vast, uncoordinated pro-Islamic State one. It’s a
futile endeavor — not because the United States isn’t good at public diplomacy,
but because so few people in the target audience will be listening.
One common criticism of public
diplomacy is: It’s deeds that matter, not words. Happy talk about American
tolerance means nothing when the United States is torturing Muslim detainees
and locking them up in Guantánamo. Obama announced on his first day in office
that the United States would forswear torture. He gave a major address in Cairo promising “a new beginning” in relations between the
United States and the Arab world based on “mutual interest and mutual respect.”
As an experiment in influencing Arab public opinion, this seems to have been
little more effective than advertising happy talk. It would be good to perform
the additional experiment of closing Guantánamo, another alleged irritant, but
I can’t believe it would matter. Forging a two-state solution between Israel
and the Palestinians would constitute the supreme test — one of Beers’s
successors, Karen Hughes, admitted to me that she told Bush that she wasn’t
likely to get anywhere with Arab public opinion until Washington pushed Israel
to make peace — but it probably wouldn’t do much to drain the swamp of
jihadism.
Of course, a far more fundamental
American strategy during the Cold War was delivering military, economic, and
diplomatic support to allies threatened by communism. Despite a theme
reiterated from President Harry Truman onward that the United States would come
to the aid of imperiled democracies, virtually all the beneficiaries were
authoritarian states — Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Chile, Morocco, etc. Only with
the waning of the Cold War, during the tenures of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan,
was the United States prepared to take the risk of criticizing such autocratic
allies as Chile and the Philippines. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush concluded
that supporting authoritarian regimes in the Middle East had become a
self-defeating strategy. The United States had learned, as he said in his 2005 inaugural address, that it would
remain vulnerable to terrorism “as long as whole regions of the world simmer in
resentment and tyranny.” This was the foundation of Bush’s policy of promoting
democracy in the Middle East
The Freedom Agenda, like public
diplomacy, made only a modest dent on its intended targets. Iraq, which Bush
saw as an opportunity to prove that democracy could take root in the Arab
world, proved notoriously resistant to American efforts to improve governance,
much less to establish democratic principles. What’s more, the Bush
administration found that it still needed autocratic allies like Egypt and, of
course, Saudi Arabia.
Obama took his cues from those
failures, soft-pedaling the language of democracy and emphasizing a doctrine of
“engagement” with autocratic regimes in the hopes of winning their compliance
on global goals like nuclear nonproliferation — in effect, restoring the status quo
ante. The Arab Spring briefly kindled hopes that Arab publics would
demand a voice in their own affairs, leading the president to restate, in a more modest key, Bush’s claim that
America had a compelling interest in democratic reform in the Middle East. But
the collapse of popular movements everywhere save Tunisia has largely put an
end to that rhetoric. Obama’s recent decision to change his plans in order to
visit Saudi Arabia immediately after the death of King Abdullah showed just how
heavily Washington continues to rely on traditional sources of Arab stability.
The Saudis are prepared to join the West in the campaign against the Islamic
State, just as Iran under the Shah was prepared to stand firm against
communism.
Of course, that very analogy
demonstrates the brittleness of autocratic stability. I suspect that the time
will come when the United States will rue its single-minded support of the Saudi
royal family, as it once did with the Shah. Perhaps more so, for in this war
the legitimacy of Islamic states is an even more central issue than was the
legitimacy of capitalist ones half a century ago. Islamist extremists are
motivated by many of the same grievances that moved non-extremists to protest
against brutal, corrupt, paralytic regimes. (If you doubt this, just read FP Middle East editor David Kenner’s recentdispatch from Jordan.) The reactionary fantasy of the caliphate, even the
sectarian rule embraced by millions of both Sunnis and Shiites, can only be
upended by a state that rules in the name of more inclusive principles. In that
very central respect, Bush was right, even if he was wrong about the capacity
of the United States to address the problem.
It’s understandable that the Obama
administration goes to endless lengths to soothe ruffled Saudi feathers — every
prior administration has done the same. But the immediate benefits that the
Saudis provide, in the form of oil and security and emollient rhetoric, is more
than offset by the malign influence of the harsh, intolerant Wahhabi faith in
whose name Saudi kings rule, and of the brutal repression that makes the
implicit claim that Islam is inimical to democracy, human rights, and
self-expression. Let’s be clear: Saudi Arabia is more a fountainhead of
extremism than a bulwark against it.
A far more appealing, and potentially
legitimate, form of Islamic rule appears in islands of stability like the
United Arab Emirates, where the practice of religion is privatized, as it is in
the West — though public morals, in matters of dress and alcohol consumption
and the like, comport with mainstream Islamic precepts. As someone who travels
regularly to Abu Dhabi (where I teach at NYU Abu Dhabi), I can testify that
this system — at least when underwritten by billions of dollars in oil revenue
— works very well for the people who live in it, though no one would mistake it
for a democracy. Perhaps such a system might even have worked in a relatively
prosperous, relatively moderate state like Syria had it been governed more
benevolently; we’ll never know. But it will not work in bigger, poorer, more
pious places like Egypt. As Shadi Hamid points out in Temptations of Power,
his book on political Islam, Egyptians are deeply pious people who do not
accept the idea that religion belongs in a privatized space. They want to live
under sharia, though they disagree among themselves about what that means. So
do hundreds of millions of people in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
In a recent conversation, Hamid argued
that the only Islamist movement that has seriously tried to accommodate the
nation-state is the Muslim Brotherhood, which came into being in the 1920s as
the Ottoman caliphate disappeared. The Brotherhood, as Hamid makes clear in his
book, is in no sense a liberal organization — but it has largely come to terms
with democracy and has even accepted non-Islamic democratic outcomes, as
Islamists do in countries like Morocco and Tunisia, which permit the
consumption of alcohol and the like. The election of a Brotherhood government
in Egypt in 2012 gave the Arab world its greatest chance to demonstrate that
Islam and democracy are compatible. But thanks to the incompetence and
narrow-mindedness of the government of President Mohamed Morsi, as well as the
active conniving of the military and the judiciary, Morsi’s government was
overthrown after a year in office — one of the great self-inflicted wounds of
the Arab Spring. Egypt is once again, as it long was, a secular autocracy
dominated by the military. I wonder how long the Egyptian people will put up
with brutal repression and economic stagnation. Whether or not President Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi’s regime endures, though, the events of recent years have
demonstrated to Islamists that there is no place for them in the Arab political
order.
The destruction of the Muslim
Brotherhood is now treated as a tremendous success in Egypt and across the
Persian Gulf (except in Qatar, a Brotherhood stronghold). Yet it is hard to
think of anything that would strengthen the long-term legitimacy of Arab
governance more than an embedded, democratic role for moderate Islamists. It is
as deeply in the interest of the United States to encourage its Arab allies to
find a place for such groups as it is to encourage democracy itself. But it
won’t happen. I recently asked a senior administration official whether she
thought Washington could nudge regimes to rescind the prohibition of the
Brotherhood as a terrorist organization across much of the Middle East. “No,”
she said, flatly.
At least for the moment, the issue is
an existential one: The only acceptable form of political Islam will be that
practiced by the regimes themselves.
In
this war of the civilization next door to our own, there is very little that
the West can do to fortify the legitimacy of Arab regimes — even if it seems
that those regimes are harming their own long-term prospects.
In this
war of the civilization next door to our own, there is very little that the
West can do to fortify the legitimacy of Arab regimes — even if it seems that
those regimes are harming their own long-term prospects.
But doing little is not the same as
nothing. Anything outside actors can do to fortify the legitimacy of Arab
states — in the eyes, that is, of their own citizens — will help tip the scales
in the war inside Islam. This includes economic assistance aimed at improving
education or public health, or at increasing entrepreneurship, or at providing
jobs for young people. It is a simple fact that young men and women with jobs
will be less angry than they were without jobs. It includes the kind of
training and education programs organized by groups like the National
Democratic Institute. And above all it includes the kind of hardball diplomacy
that led Iraqis to dispose of the harshly sectarian Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki in favor of the far more inclusive Haider al-Abadi.
Such things matter; but only just so
much. The United States is not about to separate itself from Saudi Arabia; the
Obama administration has not even been prepared to punish Bahrain, a minor ally
that has repeatedly crushed any hint of political dissent. After all, it
wouldn’t do any good: Bahrain is effectively a satellite of Saudi Arabia, which
has sent in troops to help throttle the political opposition. The
administration has begun to sharply criticize the mass trials through which peaceful protesters in Egypt are
given endless prison terms, but Cairo remains a crucial ally in the face of
spreading chaos in the region.
If the United States and other outside
actors can do very little to change the Islamist narrative and improve the
legitimacy of Arab states, what is left is the use of force. This, too, will
raise a series of fundamental questions. At the outset of the Cold War, many of
Truman’s military advisors, along with senior political and policy officials,
argued for an all-out mobilization in order to roll back Soviet gains in
Eastern Europe. Despite deploying the rhetoric of rollback, both Truman and
President Dwight Eisenhower adopted the more measured policy that came to be
called containment. The public execution of American hostages gave an exhausted
and largely apathetic American public the appetite for Obama’s air war in Iraq
and Syria; even a modest attack on American soil could have the public baying
for revenge. One of the problems with the rhetoric of civilizational war is
that it prepares one for actual, not metaphorical, war.
Obama has tried to adjust the
dialing-up of hostilities with exquisite care. He agreed to bomb the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria only after Abadi replaced Maliki — only, that is, after
Iraq made a serious bid to establish legitimate political authority. I think he
has done right there. I can’t quite fathom his policy in Syria, where two to
three years ago he passed up the chance to support nationalist, if still
broadly Islamist, rebels in the face of the homicidal regime of Bashar
al-Assad; now he hopes to train those rebels, currently decimated, to fight
against the Islamic State rather than against Assad. Meanwhile, he hopes to
contain and degrade the Islamic State in Syria through a separate campaign of bombardment
until the rebel force is ready. Or so we’re told. Perhaps, in fact, he expects
little to come of his training program; his real policy may be to make peace
with Assad in the hope of enlisting him against the extremists. Assad, however,
is a cunning realist: He may be prepared to live with the Islamic State so long
as it stays within its current borders in northeast Syria. He may believe, in
fact, that this is the best of a series of bad options.
So, yes, it will be a long war — not
between “us” and “them,” but inside the Islamic world. The next U.S. president
may prove to be a more bellicose figure than Barack Obama. The nation may tire
of appeals to patience in the face of more attacks by al Qaeda, or from an
expansionist Islamic State. Containment may begin to look like appeasement. But
in this one respect, at least, the Cold War metaphor is right: Americans will
have to learn to contain an enemy that they can neither destroy nor convert.
And that will be a great national test.
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