CULTURE WAR:

Religious Freedom and Foreign Policy (Jack Miles, Fall 2003, NPQ)

Al Qaeda is a Muslim power but not a nation. That point can scarcely be stated too often or too emphatically. Its key support comes not from Arab governments, which fear it for good reason, but from a thin but widespread stratum in Muslim society. Perhaps the differences among terrorism as practiced by a militant sect like Al Qaeda, by a criminal cartel like the Mafia and by a nationalist movement like the Basque ETA do not matter in the end. But the working assumption of our consultation is that such differences do indeed matter. In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin blames much of the instability of the modern Middle East on British and French overestimation of Arab nationalism and underestimation of Muslim religiosity. The comparable error in our day would be to assume that there are, there must be, government sponsors of Al Qaeda such that to eliminate the one is to eliminate the other. That assumption reflects an a priori disbelief that a religion, relying only on its own social resources, can ever generate a grave challenge to a world power.

The sweet dream of American political thought -- reborn in each generation, it seems -- is that cultural factors will shrink into insignificance as blessed pragmatism finally comes into its own. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many were eager to go beyond religion and announce that even secular ideology had now become that about which no war would ever again be fought. But something close to the polar opposite has now occurred. The West is confronted with an extra-national, religiously self-defined entity with something ominously like a nation's power to make war.

Al Qaeda is a novelty because it is a throwback. It is not that the West has never faced anything like it before. It is just that the West has not faced such a thing for a very long time -- not, in fact, since before the US came into political existence. Novelties sometimes fade quickly, but we cannot yet know whether this one will do so. One French observer of Islamism has spoken of a hundred years' war. All we know at this point is that the end is not in sight.

Given a virulent challenge of potentially long duration, how is the US to respond? If religion constitutes all or much of Al Qaeda's reason for attacking the US, should the US advert to this religious motive in framing its continuing campaign against Al Qaeda? How much, if anything at all, should the US say about Al Qaeda's claim to be, in effect, the only true form of Islam? Need we care how many just now accept that claim? Is a dismissive phrase enough, or will a more extended refutation and a counter-campaign eventually prove necessary? Just as important, how much, at such a juncture, should the US say to the world about its own religious polity and the relation thereto of its own dominant religious traditions?

The formulation I used a moment ago for Al Qaeda -- "extensive, transnational terrorist network" -- is Samuel P. Huntington's in a 2002 interview in NPQ. Before speaking that nicely balanced phrase, Huntington had pointedly observed to the interviewer, Nathan Gardels, that Osama bin Laden is an outlaw expelled from his own country, Saudi Arabia, and later Sudan. The Taliban, which supports him, was recognized by only three of 53 Muslim countries in the world. All Muslim governments except Iraq -- but including Sudan and Iran -- condemned his terrorist attack. Most Muslim governments have at least been acquiescent in the US strategy to respond militarily in Afghanistan.

Huntington went on, however, to note that despite widespread official condemnation, Bin Laden had extensive popular support in the Muslim and, especially, the Arab world and that "just as he sought to rally Muslims by declaring war on the West, he gave back to the West its sense of common identity in defending itself."

I believe that Huntington was quite right in this assertion. Paradoxically, 9/11 was a stroke that simultaneously split apart the Muslim umma and knit together the Western international community, weakening the one and strengthening the other, much against the intentions of the suicidal hijackers themselves. Eighteen months later, alas, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have functioned as an anti-9/11, splitting apart the West and knitting together the umma, at least temporarily. Yet rather than linger over that matter, let me instead draw attention to Huntington's reluctance to be drawn into the deep theological or philosophical waters to which Gardels, quoting Octavio Paz and Jean Baudrillard on the spiritual condition of modern man, clearly sought to lure him. Huntington declined to linger over such larger questions and tacked sharply back toward the practical issue of intolerance. "Appropriately," he said to Gardels, "the US thinks of its response not as war on Islam, but as a war between an extensive, transnational terrorist network and the civilized world." In that endorsement of the Bush administration's conception of the threat posed by Al Qaeda, one detects no appetite whatsoever for any deeper engagement with religion as a policy issue. Religiously motivated terrorism in such a view is simply intolerance intensified, and there the matter may safely rest. In this I believe Huntington is altogether typical of his profession.

Saying this, I do not mean to fault either the man or the profession for deliberately restricting engagement with religion in policy formulation. On the contrary, I want to underline the intellectual coherence of this stance and to concede in so doing the same coherence to the core of the Bush administration's response to 9/11. The administration's response to that event, like Huntington's to Gardels, is much in the American grain. Americans, by and large, would surely have been made exceedingly uncomfortable by a president who saw fit to take sides in a Muslim debate, sorting out the ideological underpinnings of Islam as differently understood by mainstream Islam and by Al Qaeda. This is simply not the sort of thing that American presidents do, this one least of all.

And yet if the outcome of a contest between contending Muslim ideologies or theologies bears heavily on whether or not there will be continuing traumatically violent attacks on the US, then does this contest not merit a good deal of American attention, even at the level of policy? At a comparable moment in the struggle with militant communism, the American foreign policy establishment certainly did not hesitate to engage its opponent intellectually. It was judged crucial in the 1950s to distinguish carefully and publicly between democratic socialism as practiced by several of America's most important allies and undemocratic socialism as practiced by the Soviet Union. Had that distinction not been made, some of our friends might have thought themselves our enemies, and our enemy would not have understood the basis for our enmity. Numbing as the Cold War debate may seem in retrospect, it had much to do at the time with winning an international battle for hearts and minds. In our day the rallying of Muslim allies and the isolation of the Islamist enemy would seem to call for an analogous effort, particularly so if the enemy can only be isolated by close police cooperation with Muslim countries. Granting that the making of theological distinctions is not a task that falls exclusively or even principally to the president, it may nonetheless be an urgent task and properly part of any American diplomatic response to the Islamist threat.

Mr. Miles is right on two front> First, Western Civilization is a religious civilization, so it's silly to pretend this isn't a religious war. Second, Islam will have to be reformed before the war can end. But he's wrong in one important way. As Richard Pipes said on Booknotes this week, it was only Ronald Reagan who challenged the socialism of the USSR and it made a decisive difference:

LAMB: And how much impact did you have during the time when the communists were in control in Russia, how much did they read what you said and how often were you able to tell them exactly in person what you thought was the truth?

PIPES: Well, in person, this was not really possible in Soviet days, that is, you couldn`t, because that just endangered the people you talked to. But my books were read. In fact, some of them were translated by the government. Particularly my -- when I entered the government, they started translating my writings, so they could know what my views were, and I know, I heard from some Russians that I became some enemy number one.

And that was especially true after I contributed to president`s speech, the so-called Westminster speech, which delivered in `82 in London, where he said Marx was right when he said that when the political system and the economic and social system are out of step, the country is in a revolutionary situation. But that applies to Soviet Union, not to us. And when they read that, they knew that I contributed to that, they climbed up the wall, because it`s the first time that an American president criticized the system. Traditionally our presidents criticized Soviet behavior, and our policy was, we don`t really care what your system is. You have whatever you like. If that`s what you like, OK. But don`t become aggressive. And we acted on the kind of premise of behaviorist psychology, that if you slap them long enough and often enough for their misbehavior, they will start behaving. And my argument was, no, that`s not so.

Up until then, the West and its own more or less socialist leaders had shared the delusion that socialism could work. It was Reagan who exposed the lie.

Similarly, to save the Middle East it will be necessary to force upon the Moslem world the realization that Islamicism can no more be the foundation of a successful society than could any other totalitarianism. Perhaps this is why the multiculturalist Left finds this war so objectionable (the split in the West that Mr. Miles refers to): it does indeed require a chauvanistic--but accurate-- assertion that our culture is superior to others.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2003 11:57 AM