America Alone (24 page)

It depends how clear the fingerprints were. "Mutually Assured Destruction" only works if you know who lobbed the thing your way in the first place. One reason Iran set up Hezbollah and other terror franchises is to have "plausible deniability." Actually, it's implausible deniability, but that's good enough for the UN. So, if the links back to the
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mullahs were just the teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the United States be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might, but an administration of a more ClintoPowellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under the auspices of the UN? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security Council coalition-building with the secretary of state making a lastminute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote. The Iranian version of No Dong will be able to hit not just Tel Aviv but also Rome, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and London. How will the European political class react? Will it stand firm against threats from Tehran? Or will it take the view that there are ways to avoid having to confront incoming Islamonukes? You might, for example, approve the spectacularly large mosque wealthy Muslims have been wanting to build in your capital city. Or make certain well-connected heads of Muslim lobby groups members of a special government commission. You might appoint a minister for Islamic education to your cabinet. In other words, "the Muslim bomb" is likely to accelerate the Islamification of Europe, because Islamification more or less brings you under the Persian nuclear umbrella and encourages Tehran and its clients to turn their attentions elsewhere.

OUR WORD IS OUR BOMB

"Men of intemperate mind never can be free; their passions forge their fetters," wrote Edmund Burke. From the ayatollahs to the freelance jihadists, there are, in the end, no "root causes"--or not ones that can be negotiated by troop withdrawals from Iraq or the flagraising ceremony for a Palestinian state. There is only a metastasizing cancer that preys on whatever local conditions are to hand. Five days before the slaughter in Bali in 2005, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. Must be all those French troops in Iraq, right? So much for the sterling efforts of President Chirac and his prime minister, the two chief obstructionists to Bush-Blair-neocon-Zionist warmongering since 2001.

In the months after the Afghan campaign, France's foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis, and Saddam understood from the getgo that the French veto was his best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. Yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it. But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."

No problem. They are all infidels.

When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it,

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. No problem. We are all infidels. You can be a hippy-dippy hey-man-I-love-everybody Dutch stoner hanging out in a bar in Bali, and they'll blow you up' with as much enthusiasm as if you were Dick Cheney.

Back in February 2002, Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent (i.e., he's reliably wrong about practically everything), wrote a column headlined "Please Release My
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Friend Daniel Pearl." It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you'll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is "an own goal of the worst kind," as it ensures he won't be able to get your message out, the message being--Fisky presumed-"the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees," "the plight of Pakistan's millions of poor," etc.

Somehow the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out. Pearl's severed head is the message. That's why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrassas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. It was a huge hit. The message got out very effectively. In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been canny enough to cover their darker impulses in bathetic labels. The Soviet bloc was comprised of wall-to-wall "People's Republics," which is the precise opposite of what they were--a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its "Ministry of Truth" (i.e., official lies). But the Islamists don't even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say--and we choose to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G-8 summit and the world's leaders twitter about how "tragic" and

"ironic" it is that this should have happened just as they're taking steps to deal with the issues--as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. Even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can't wait to switch the lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling, plain.

A world without order eventually liberates all restraints. Even in low-level conflicts there's no monopoly of depravity: Americans think of "Northern Ireland" as being the IRA versus the Brits. But it doesn't stop there: there were plenty of "loyalist" paramilitaries too, groups that took the view that if the other side was blowing up their civilians maybe a little reciprocity was in order. Islamists are foolish to assume that freelance nukes go one way. If a dirty bomb with unclear fingerprints goes off in London or Delhi, it's not necessary to wait for the government to respond. As in Ulster, there'll always be groups who think the state power is too pussy to hit back. So unlisted numbers will be dialed hither and yon, arrangements will be made, and bombs will go off in Islamabad and Riyadh and Cairo. There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side. In the end the victims of the Islamist contagion will include many, many Muslims.

But we surely don't need to wait for Iranian nukes, do we? The Bali bombs and Madrid bombs and London bombs have already lit up the sky: they make unavoidable the truth that Islamism is a classic "armed doctrine"; it exists to destroy. One day it will, on an epic scale.
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Chapter Eight

The Unipole Apart

A M E R I C A V S . E V E R Y O N E E L S E

In the end it will be America vs. the Rest of the World. Whose side will you be on?

MATTHEW PARRIS.
SPECTATOR
(UNITED KINGDOM), FEBRUARY 2. 2002

Can America win its "long war"? If you think the question's ridiculous, well, other countries are certainly asking it. Because, if America can't, nobody else in the developed world can, and they'd be well advised to begin reaching their accommodations with the new realities, an Islamic Europe and a nuclear Iran being merely the warm-up acts. A good place to start any consideration is the Sunni Triangle. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove into Fallujah. What a dump--no disrespect to any Fallujans reading this. I had a late lunch in a seedy cafe full of Sunni men. Not a gal in the joint. And no Westerners except me. As in the movies, everyone stopped talking when I walked through the door, and every pair of eyes followed me as I made my way to a table.

I strongly dislike that veteran-foreign-correspondent look, where you wander around like you've been sleeping in the back of the souk for a week. So I was wearing the same suit I'd wear in Washington or New York, from the Western Imperialist Aggressor line at Brooks Brothers. I had a sharp necktie I'd bought in London the week before. My cuff links were the most stylish in the room, and also the only ones in the room. I'm not a Sunni Triangulator, so there's no point pretending to be one. If you're an infidel and agent of colonialist decadence, you might as well dress the part.

So I ordered the mixed grill, which turned out to be not that mixed. Just a tough old stringy chicken. My tie would have been easier to chew. The locals watched me--a few obviously surly and resentful, the rest somewhere between wary and amused. Or so it appeared. But in cultures that are as foreign to one as a just-liberated Arab dictatorship it's hard to say for sure. Even facial expressions don't always mean what they seem: at times my fellow diners appeared to be grinning in another language. Still, I've had worse welcomes in Berkeley, so I chewed on, and, washed down with a pitcher of coliform bacteria, the unmixed grill wasn't bad. As a parodic courtesy, me in host switched the flickering black-and-white TV from an Arabic station to the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom about the quagmire.

And I gave no further thought to Fallujah until a year later, when four American contractors working in Iraq--Scott Helvenston, Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko, and Michael Teague--were ambushed while driving through town. They were dragged from their vehicles, shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was dangled from a bridge over the Euphrates while the natives danced in the streets. The "insurgents" were pleased as punch, made a video of the attack, and distributed it around the world.

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There's not a lot to be said for the oh-my-God-that-could-have-been me routine. But, watching the scenes on TV, I did think back to my lunch eleven months earlier, and wondered about some of those inscrutable toothy grins at the adjoining tables. Would those fellows have liked to kill me? Well, I'll bet one or two would have enjoyed giving it a go. And if they had, I'll bet three or four more would have enthusiastically beaten my corpse with their shoes. And five or six would have had no particular feelings about me one way or the other but would have been generally supportive of the decision to kill me after the fact. And the rest might have had a few qualms but they would have kept quiet. So why didn't they kill me? I'm not brave, and certainly not suicidally brave. And, if I'd known the Sunni Triangle was the most dangerous place on Earth, I wouldn't have been there driving around on my own in some beat-up rented Nissan.

But, of course, Fallujah wasn't dangerous in those days. Why?

Because, as Osama gloated after September 11, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. And in May 2003, four weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition forces were indisputably the strong horse. They'd removed Saddam Hussein--the self-declared new Saladin--in nothing flat. And so, even when a dainty little trotting gelding of a touring writer comes through the door, they figure he's with the stronghorse crowd and act accordingly. What happened within the next year was that America ceased to be perceived as a strong horse. It was a range of factors, from the West's defeatist media to the Bush administration's wish to be seen as, so to speak, a compassionate crusader. Nice idea. But to the Arab mindset there's no such thing. So the compassion got read by the locals not as cultural respect but as weakness. And the quagmiritis diagnosed by the media from Day One suggested that a hyperpower of historically unprecedented dominance didn't have the stomach for a body count that in the course of a year added up to little more than a quiet week's internal policing for Saddam. By comparison, some four million people died in the Congo in the couple of years either side of the turn of the century--and how many books or TV investigations have you seen on that subject?

Before I got to Fallujah, on the deserted highway between the Jordanian border and the town of Rutba, I came across my first burnt-out tank. You'd see them periodically-a charred wreck blocking the lane or shoved over to the shoulder. With that first one I stopped, walked around it, and pondered the fate of the men inside. Sobering. Yet as the great strategist of armored warfare Basil Liddell Hart wrote: "The destruction of the enemy's armed forces is but a means--and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one--to the attainment of the real objective."

The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but to destroy his will. As Liddell Hart put it: "Our goal in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will .... All such acts as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centers of government and population are seen to be but means to that end." America is extremely good at destroying tanks. If you make the mistake of luring the United States into a hot war--i.e., tanks, bombers, ships, etc.--you'll lose very quickly. The Taliban did, and so did Saddam Hussein. That's why my lunch in Fallujah required no personal courage on my part: just about the safest time to visit anywhere in the Muslim world is in the month after the United States has toppled its dictator. But an enemy folds when he knows he's finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it's not clear the enemy did know. Even during the combat phase we were
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playing the compassionate crusader. The Western peaceniks' prewar "human shields" operation proved to be completely superfluous, mainly because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday, and Qusay as a de facto human shield. Washington made a conscious choice to give every Iraqi the benefit of the doubt, including the fake surrenderers who ambushed the U.S. Marines at Nasiriyah. The main victims of Western squeamishness in those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition troops but the Iraqi civilians who two years later were providing the principal target for

"insurgents." It would have been better for them had more Baathists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable, too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally been met with the "accidental" bombing of certain targets on the Syrian side of the border. Wars fought under absurd degrees of self-imposed etiquette are the most difficult to win--see Korea and Vietnam--and one lesson of Germany and Japan is that it's easier to rebuild totalitarian states if they've first been completely smashed. Colin Powell famously framed Iraq in Pottery Barn terms: you break it, you own it. But Saddam's Baathist apparatus and other parties concluded the opposite: we didn't have the guts to break it; therefore, we didn't own it.