IRAN, IRAQ AND ISLAMIC TERRORISM

• First a further word about Ahmadinejad’s comments about the Holocaust.  Absurdly, for purely ideological reasons, Iran’s president has denied the Holocaust, one of the most thoroughly and factually documented events of human history.  During his recent visit to the US, he seemed to back off a bit from this ridiculous claim.  He is calling for more “research” and he said something like this during several recent news interviews:  “I said that during World War II around 60 million were killed.  All were human beings and had their own dignities.  Why only six million?”  His logic seems to be that in a war where 60 million were killed, why has the West focused on the 6 million Jews killed?  Were the others not equally important?  Was the world not equally impoverished by the other 54 million being killed?  The answer, which Iran’s president seems unwilling to embrace or accept, is that The Final Solution was the deliberate act of the Nazi state to exterminate a portion of its own people.  As Mark Bowden has argued, “It employed the resources of the state—its policy makers, planners, intellectuals, legal system, police and military, industry, transportation system and to a large extent its people—to single out a particular group of citizens, systematically demonize and isolate them, and then count them, label them, strip them of everything, round them up, ship them to concentration camps, kill them, and incinerate them.  It attempted to squeeze some last value out of them as slave labor or subjecting them to medical experimentation before killing them, and even then looked for ways to make saleable products out of their remains.”  Bowden further comments that “the Holocaust disturbs us so deeply because it demonstrates that none of the things we associate with the advancement of civilization—peace, prosperity, industrialization, education, technological achievement—free us from the dark side of the human soul.  Just as there is evil in the heart of every man, there is evil at the heart of even the most ‘civilized’ human society.”  The Holocaust demonstrates the utter danger of a one-party state, say like Iran, where the mullahs control everything and rewrite everything for their own ideological and theological ends.  The very thing that Ahmadinejad says he denies is the very thing that the power of the state of Iran would do and has done to its citizens who are not Muslims.  Ahmadinejad is becoming the very thing he says he doubts—a purveyor of monstrous evil.  See Bowden’s thoughtful essay in the Wall Street Journal (4 October 2006). 

• Second, some thoughts on how Islam has changed over the 20th century.  Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, has detailed the evolution of Arab and Islamic society.  (1)  The effect of modernization.  The state, a product of modernization, gave the Arab and Islamic leaders the capacity to increase their power and place at their disposal the whole modern apparatus of control, repression and indoctrination.  Rulers now used the state’s power to accomplish their own selfish ends.  (2)  As the Nazis moved into this area during World War II, they set up in Syria and Iraq for awhile a pro-Nazi, fascist regime.  This became the nucleus of what would become the Baath party, which still rules Syria and had ruled Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s regime.  (3)  The response of Islam to the above two developments was a revival, which took three forms:

• Wahhabism, founded by Abd al-Wahhab, argued that the Islamic world had abandoned the true faith that God gave it through his prophet and holy book, the Qur’an.  The need was to return to the pure, original Islam.  In the mid-1920s, the local tribal chiefs of the House of Saud—converts to Wahhabism—conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.  The other important development that enhanced the Wahhabi revival was the discovery of oil in the same period.  The Saud family, who now ruled Saudi Arabia, used their oil wealth to spread the revival of Islam known as Wahhabism.  Wahhabism is now a powerful force among Muslim immigrant communities.  Remember:  Osama bin Laden was trained in a Wahhabi school.

• The Iranian Revolution of 1979.  It has produced an enormous change in Iran and produced a massive shift in power—socially, economically and ideologically.  As with most major revolutions—e.g., the French and Russian—there was a struggle between the moderates and the extremists, with the extremists winning out in the early, formative stages.  Iran is now entering its Stalinist phase and is thereby impacting the entire Muslim world.

• The formation of al Qaeda.  This final Islamic revival is the most deadly.  Founded by Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda was energized in the late 20th century and became powerful after the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan in 1989.  As Lewis argues, this was “a Muslim victory in a Jihad.”  The Taliban and al Qaeda elements drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan to defeat and collapse.  They therefore viewed 9/11 as the final phase in the struggle between Islam and the West, or more specifically between Islam and Christianity.  This struggle of attack and counter-attack, conquest and reconquest, Jihad and Crusade, ended so it seemed in a final victory of the West with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire—the last of the great Muslim states—and the final partition of most of the Muslim world between the Western powers.  Osama bin Laden, however, sees this struggle differently:  “In this final phase of the ongoing struggle, the world of the infidels was divided between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union.  Now we have defeated and destroyed the more difficult and the more dangerous of the two.  Dealing with the pampered and effeminate Americans will be easy.”  But the response of President Bush to 9/11 was a nasty surprise.  Al Qaeda got a forceful response in Afghanistan and now in Iraq.  But they now look at the US as again weakening.  As Lewis puts it:  “. . . remember, they have no experience, and therefore no understanding, of the free debate of an open society.  What we see as free debate, they see as weakness, fear and division.  Thus they prepare for the final victory, the final triumph and the final Jihad.”

Americans would do well to remember Lewis’s words.  What is occurring in Iraq is, from the perspective of al Qaeda, the final Jihad.  What they did to the USSR in Afghanistan, they seek to do to the US in Iraq.  This is the importance of Iraq.  Al Qaeda perceives the US as weak, losing its resolve and on the verge of defeat.  There is every indication that they are right—at least for now.  We are delusional if we really think that walking away from Iraq will end the terrorist threat.  That is absurd and ultimately self-destructive.  Our leaders must define Iraq in this much larger perspective, for our entire way of life is at stake here.  See Bernard Lewis’s brilliant essay, “Freedom and Justice in Islam” in Imprimis (September 2006).