A response to Reuel Marc Gerecht's The Audacity of Shallowness in Weakly Standard. Herein, Barack Obama and his recent intemperate remarks are parsed at length. Thus it is with Republican policy and Reuel Marc Gerecht: the dangerous hubris of their conventional wisdom has brought us to this sorry pass, and yet again, the Democrats are called on to clean up after the Elephant.
Back in 2002, Reuel Marc Gerecht told fairy tales of popular uprisings in Iran and the beneficial effects of American intervention in Iraq. Unlike the happy little Disney version, the unexpurgated Grimm’s fairy tale of Cinderella told us of the two wicked stepdaughters cutting off their heels and toes to fit into the glass slipper. Only the dove over Cinderella’s mother’s grave told the prince the truth. The procrustean glass slipper has proven to be a terribly apt metaphor to describe the discomfiture of Gerecht’s original happy talk.
I always wondered about that glass slipper. How many women in the kingdom had Cinderella's shoe size?
The Arab elites do not wonder how a Democratic administration would differ from the eight years of George Bush. They already know. As Mr. Gerecht is doubtless aware, Mr. Clinton has put in many visits to Saudi Arabia since his presidency, bushel basket in hand, collecting speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi has been to Saudi Arabia this year, speaking with the unelected inner council of advisors.
The Saudis are discreet: he who says he knows their mind is either a fool or a liar, and given Gerecht’s distressingly bad record of predictions, he may be both. Saudi political relations are all personal, very little business is transacted through the State Department. The Saudis know us very well: our electoral system produces new policy makers every four or eight years, but they remain.
What do you make of Islam, Mr. Gerecht? Its doctrines are very few, and the entire Qu’ran is shorter than the book of Psalms. Any man may utter the Shehada in a single breath and enumerate all that is required for a Muslim to believe. Muslims are enjoined in the First Sura to seek the true path from Allah Himself (saw), for no man may guide the faithful. This simplicity produces a multitude of Islamic forms, each culture adhering to its own traditions. Of all people, Mr. Gerecht, trading as you do on your pedantry and woefully inadequate Arabic, you should know these things, every Saudi boy of eight or nine has memorized the First Sura. More Qu’ran for you, and less bloviating upon the mysteries of geopolitics.
Nobody can point a finger at Islam in toto. The religious dynamics of the Muslim world are little different than the sectarian divisions of the Thirty Years War. You will not find much guidance in the religious divisions to that series of religious wars which left a third of Europe dead. All wars assume a slightly religious dimension. Six hundred wars in Ireland cannot be laid exclusively to the theological differences between Protestant and Catholic religious beliefs. Be done with this nonsense, Mr. Gerecht: once Who, What, When and Where have been answered, the Whys are blazingly obvious.
How I wish you would not use the word Wahhabi to describe the Salafi sect of Islam. Wahhabi is a word used exclusively by their enemies. They are not to be confused with the Deobandi Taliban of Pakistan. Islam is now as Christianity was before the Enlightenment in Europe put a division between Church and State, an incestuous union of the absolutes of faith and the slippery provisional truths of politics. It is seldom religion which seeks out the union, but rather politicians who wish to be anointed and wear the cloak of religious authority, as does our current Administration with its Faith-Based Initiatives.
In the old logical problem of the Pilgrim on the Road to Jerusalem, two brothers stand at the fork of a road. Only one fork leads to Jerusalem. One brother will always lie, the other will always tell the truth. The pilgrim may ask only one question. The answer is, of course, "Which way would your brother say is the road to Jerusalem?" and the pilgrim takes the other road. Any good Democrat would retain the services of Reuel Marc Gerecht and ask him daily for what to do in the Middle East then do the exact opposite. Where Gerecht counsels war, I would offer peace. Where others bluff and posture, notably Barack Obama, I would counsel saying nothing, substituting deeds for words. Where Gerecht notes the tyrant Musharraf changed his tune after 9/11, I would scoff politely and observe Musharraf has not allowed the USA to hotly pursue Al Qaeda into his country. George Bush stood on the rubble of the World Trade Center and said he would get the guys who did this to us, and pursue them to the ends of the earth. The earth seemingly ends at the border of Pakistan, but it did not end at the borders of Iraq, another country whose equally monstrous dictator was overthrown. Musharraf is merely Saddam writ large, but Musharraf got his weapons of mass destruction. Following Gulf War One, someone asked a Pakistani general what the region had learned from the USA’s rescue of Kuwait. "Now everyone will race for a nuclear bomb. The USA does not invade a country with a nuclear bomb" the general grimly replied. Pakistan not only procured nuclear material and built a bomb in secret, but it has been the agent of nuclear weapons proliferation. This is the sort of ally Mr. Gerecht would have us believe is on our side.
Iraq has become a nest of vipers, not because of Democratic indifference, but because men like Gerecht counseled war against Saddam. Now the Ba’athist 1920 Brigades, now calling themselves Hamas in Iraq and Islamic Jihad, (names carrying much freight, surely as much as Al Qaeda), are on the American payroll. Men who once killed American troops (and would kill them still) are now our condottieri in Iraq. We are now paying the Ba’athists to fight the foreign jihadis. Such is the parlous state of our intelligence that we again repeat the errors of the French in Lebanon, dividing a multi-confessional state along its confessional lines. Mr. Gerecht again draws false distinctions: the Americans find it useful to simultaneously back a Shiite government and its malevolent Interior Ministry and a Sunni Ba’athist cabal of militia. Meanwhile Bush and Petraeus ignore the now-raging three-way Shiite on Shiite war for Basra: that’s the British sector.
Mr. Gerecht urges us to put aside the issue of Al Qaeda training camps in Iraq. Iraq IS the training camp for jihadis, every last square meter of Iraq has become the perfect proving ground for every would-be glory seeker. Heavy mortar fire even reaches into the Green Zone. Jan Schakowski’s (D-IL) visit to Iraq could not drive 20 miles to Taji training base, she was airlifted, in helmet and body armor, to visit. Taji is divided among the Americans, who live relatively well with a Pizza Hut and McDonalds, (though they’re often out of supplies) but the Iraqis get less than a month of training. Iraq has not proven an effective training ground for our counterinsurgency. So much for training camps.
Mr. Gerecht says "Al Qaeda has done rather well in Iraq precisely because many Iraqi Sunnis have been sympathetic to its methods and tactics, against both the Americans and the Arab Shiites." This is more fatuous nonsense. After the murder of a prominent Sunni sheikh in January of 2006, Sheikh Naser Abdul Karim al-Miklif of the huge al-Bu Fahad tribe in Anbar province, bounties were put out on the Al Qaeda. The Sunnis are as sick of the foreign jihadis as they are of the Ameriki.
The Pashtun are not Arabs, Mr. Gerecht. There are no similarities. The Pashtun are a hospitable people, and they also protected a US Navy SEAL. The Pashtun have their own agenda, Mr. Gerecht.
We could do worse than befriend the Pashtun, for in the division of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they were cut in half, rather like the Kurdish people, divided among many nations, creating trouble for all those countries. Were they promised a de-facto nation state, they would come over to our side in droves.
I do not fear Al Qaeda in Iraq so much as I do the new Shiite militias, now looking somewhat ridiculous in their new Interior Ministry uniforms, now caught attempting to purchase yet more weapons in Italy. The Sunni of Iraq now have oil under their lands, huge new reserves have been found, the Sunni of Anbar have withdrawn from Maliki’s feckless regime. They know which side their bread is buttered on, they will not be gainsaid in an Iraq they ruled for a millennium.
Mr. Gerecht, America cannot baby sit someone else’s religious civil war. I do not see many Democrats urging an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the logistics of removing 160,000 troops would require at least a year at any rate. The Democrats I know are urging a withdrawal into Kurdistan, where we are welcomed. The Surge is failing, I repeat myself in saying the deteriorating situation in Basra means we will eventually be forced to fight our way out of Iraq. Basra, not Baghdad, is the linchpin to Iraq, and the Shiites know it. Bush and Petraeus clearly do not understand this obvious geopolitical fact.
Nobody will ever conquer either Iraq or Afghanistan. The Democrats understand we must continue this fight, but their ideas are radically different. We Democrats would consider terrorism for what it truly is: criminal activity. Considered strictly from a law-enforcement perspective, terrorism and crime overlap substantially, especially in Hizb’allah, now widely understood to be involved in the Lebanese expatriate community Hizb’allah appear in Paraguay, as arms dealers. They are to be found in Lagos, Nigeria, involved in drug running. They have been detected crossing the American border in Mexico. They do the dirty work for Syria and Iran in many evil parts of the world. While we concentrate on Al Qaeda, we ignore other far more significant menaces. Terrorism is crime, and we do not send Marines into war with the Crips and Bloods in the heart of Los Angeles and Houston. Terrorism cannot be eliminated, only attenuated by patient police work and cooperation with other countries through such agencies as INTERPOL.
There is another aspect to the War on Terror, the war for hearts and minds. The Bush administration has made a complete botch of PsyOps, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Operating contrary to every sound principle of counterinsurgency, Bush has responded callously and stupidly to terrorism, playing into the hands of the terrorists. Our reputation now stinks in the nostrils of the world.
I’ve spent a good deal of my life outside the USA, somewhat more than half of it, long enough to make jokes at Americans’ expense. Americans seldom speak a second language, and become comically paranoid when the people in their group suddenly lapse into the language of the home country. The Americans turn to me and whisper "what are they saying about me?" I respond, "they’re not talking about you at all. Now listen closely, you’re trying to learn this language, remember?"
And thus it is I must remind Mr. Gerecht: Islam is not being convulsed by our involvement in the Middle East. Nor is it troubled by modernity per se. Since the end of the First World War, the Arabs have been stultified by various oppressive regimes: Ba’athism and Nasserism have had their turn, they did not produce equality or democracy. After Sayyid Qutb condemned these regimes for their nominal Muslim-ness and their craven capitulation to Western ideals and vices, he was imprisoned and executed. This act of stupidity set in motion what we see today in the likes of Osama bin Ladin, Ayman al Zawahiri and the UK Doctors.
The threat does not arise from some pesthole of a madrassa in Pakistan but from the anomie of expatriate Muslims in Europe and the USA, living in the twilight of Western decadence and Muslim authoritarianism. Sayyid Qutb came to the USA and was repelled by our culture. There are thousands upon thousands of such people now among us. Our manifest connivance with the secular dictators of the Middle East has led us into this quagmire. The Arabs are not petulant children, but they are mainly illiterate and therefore of little use to any organized campaign of terror. We must wage a new war for the hearts and minds of these people, and acknowledge we have sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Only then will we achieve any rapprochement with the world’s Muslims, and it begins right here at home, addressing the Muslims among us, building the bridges of good will and kindness.
The Republicans have failed, horribly, addressing the ancient society of Iran as the Axis of Evil, when we could have turned over a new leaf with them. Did we not remove their worst enemy, Saddam Hussein? Did we not remove the Taliban from Afghanistan? Why do we perpetuate this madness, playing along with that sock puppet Ahmedinejad in Iran? The Persians are sick of their Islamic Republic, it has not proved the paradise they imagined. They are ready for change: the same students who swept Khomeini into power are now in open rebellion against the mullahs of Qom. Here is a capital opportunity to do away with one of America’s worst enemies, and we are missing it. Gerecht, you are a fool, Iran could be turned to our side, were we only to treat them with respect.
When was the last time you were in Peshawar, Gerecht? Were you one of those idiots, running around in the arms market in your shalwar kameez, sticking out like a turd in a punch bowl, acting like Indiana Jones? The Pakis still laugh at the CIA’s involvement in the war against the Russians. You were swindled then and the USA is being swindled now, backing allies of convenience who will later turn on us. You attempt to parse Barack Obama, but you miss his point entirely. The USA must reconfigure its war on terror, not based on your sort of ideological madness, but along more pragmatic lines. I do not approve of Barack Obama’s intemperate statements, words must match deeds.
Al Qaeda is not the problem. Al Qaeda is a symptom. Instead of looking over the shoulders of kids furtively looking at porn sites, you might instead re-read your Sayyid Qutb. He is the equivalent of Tom Paine for Muslim youth. Paine said in his introduction to Common Sense: A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right. Thus it is with Republican policy and Reuel Marc Gerecht: the dangerous hubris of their conventional wisdom has brought us to this sorry pass, and yet again, the Democrats are called on to clean up after the Elephant.