February 27, 2006
Time for Democratization 2.0
"While the Islamists have recently chosen bold new offenses, aside from Iraq we are still in a defensive mode and have not adjusted. Saying how bad they are is not enough, when the Enemy is brazenly advancing in full openly declared evil. It is only if we honestly face the consequences of inaction and appeasement that we might summon the will to adjust our strategy. The time has come for the next phase in the war. To the uninitiated (i.e., most blue staters), to advocate a shift to the offense seems like bloodthirsty madness. Indeed, I think these “positive actions” are, all else being equal, terrible. But all else is not equal, and such considerations merely constitute a new political realism about the ongoing war to replace the illusion that our enemies are not openly advancing in their work on our destruction.
Iran’s bold statements on Israel, the holocaust, their nuke ambitions, and their Islamist ambitions. The Pally election of Hamas, openly striving for Israel’s demise and supporting the Islamist agenda overall. The global show of force that was so successful, even the major US papers and State Department deferred to their claims of “offense”. (This is not to say that the Mobombhead cartoon was not in poor taste, but rather that the prior and current offenses (and raucous silences) of the putative “offended” parties, which insult their prophet rather more than the cartoon does, remove the legitimacy of their censorship authority claims.) And now the Sunni attack on the major Shiite shrine which was so successful in fomenting civil war that even some sensible non-dove conservatives, such as WF Buckley, are talking about failure. (I’m skipping over dozens of smaller Islamist terrorist attacks on Jews, Israel, Europe, etc., and hundreds of open neo-Nazi global Islamofascist pronouncements that have become unremarkable lately.)
Is Democratization 1.0 working? Not while there are Bin Ladens and Irans out there cheering on and funding the global jihad. No, in this climate, the Arab street still, to the extent they can, “votes” for Bin Laden and against America.
What to do? Aside from Democratization, Bush’s SOTU mentions only one other idea: Undermine their economic support by getting off of oil. That helps, but they’ve already substantially diversified, and getting off oil is apparently somewhat of a long term process (it’s not that nobody thought of that idea in the 1970s). Divest from terror? Also a nice idea, but wouldn’t that just invite certain less scrupulous trading nations with whom we will continue to trade (if only because we are overwhelmingly interlocked with them already) to monopolize on both the economic and political benefits of trade with the bad guys? Obviously the generally harmful UN, as it stands, would not help. In a world where France could be so weaselly on Iraq and where Google can’t help but assist in political censorship in China, can we really expect other (mostly unfree) countries to care for US interests?
Seems kind of hopeless.
Some on the left and even paleocons, dovish “withdraw from the world” libertarians, and Islamo-sympathetic white Neo-nazis (we seem to ignore that Jerusalem Nazi Grand Mufti al-Husseini thoroughly infused modern Islam with Hitler’s ideas, not to mention giving Hitler a few Islamic ideas), like Churchills opponents, like to think that we can obtain a satisfactory outcome by appeasing our enemies. We might withdraw from Iraq, and the mid east in general. Israel? “She can take care of herself.” And maybe “Fuck ‘em.” Erm, but what about Europe? Shariah for them too? Including France with its nukes? “So? They go Islamist, and make our vacations there less fun.” Or “Screw those guys; we're going home.”
Well, there’s some vaguely reasonable hope that by this point Russia and China’s Jihadists are so encouraged that they push these behemoths to our side, conditional on tremendous concessions from us. Maybe. On the other hand given the destruction to the global economy that the above losses would cause, China and Russia will probably be too busy with their own civil wars by now.
And they will still need to prove unambiguously that America is not hegemon, and Islam is. That means tearing down all the symbols that might suggest to anyone that America might be hegemon and replacing them with symbols that show that there’s a new hegemon. Military forces, McDonalds and other US corps, English as the standard global language, etc. Basically America will have to Submit to Shariah too. Not so likely, so they will have to settle with nuking America to the point that nobody could possibly still consider this country a Superpower, and regardless of their own domestic “fallout”.
Then, they will have the level playing field in which Islam can thrive.
OK, is this too negative? I think it’s a pretty realistic projection of the consequences of the direction we have been going in. Should we despair? Maybe a bit.
But then maybe we just might be foresighted enough to change directions.
Can we wake up and realize we’re in a hot-and-cold war with crazier-than-Nazi motherfuckers, armed with a suicidal all-encompassing ideology, hate, knives, planes, guns, rockets, $, media, and maybe already, nukes? Victory is only possible through a de-nazification that we have not had the nerve to implement. Must we wait to be nuked first? Probably. Our democracy is too bureaucratic (slow) and divided to elect someone to do this in 2008 or in any case before we are nuked. But by then, and hopefully before then, we will launch the next phase of the war:
Decapitate Syria and Iran as a farewell to Iraq? (Invite Israel to) really wipe out Hamas? (But would Israel do it?) Fund popular resistance movements in Europe? Take the Saudi oil fields? Offer moderate Muslims the chance to pass a democratic competence / loyalty test and find asylum in the new Muslim mid-east state of New Islamabad? Supervise our madrassas? New Sedition laws? Strike some (counterbalancing) fear in the hearts of our own Fifth Columns?
As far as I see it, this counter-Islamism program is not a matter of whether, but of when. OK, the whether is whether we will still have the capability after the next 9/11.
By the way, Mark Humphry's Islamic Fascism page , which I found as the top entry from Googling "the answer to Islamism" has good and thorough background analysis on Islamism and the war to help bring the uninitiated up to speed."
Note from Matt: Warren Churchberg asked me to post this essay, and let me know he would kick my ass if I did not.
Posted by Matt at 09:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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