Will we win too soon?

Here is an interesting thing to worry about: that the coming war between civilizations will not to be too difficult for America and the West, but too easy.

A correspondent wrote:

I increasingly fear the war against Islam will end too soon.

Frankly, we need to use this as the Left used WWII: as a massive lever for domestic social change.

I replied:

What are you talking about? End too soon? My gosh, we’re in this vast horrible situation that looks as if it’s going to go on for our lifetimes. What could you possibly mean?

My correspondent answered:

Try this scenario: we crush Iraq and succeed in installing a secular tame government. This is not so unlikely since Saddam has actually been rather tough on Islamists. We use Iraq to subvert Iran, which falls and becomes the world’s great center of anti-Moslem fundamentalist propaganda as the younger generation takes revenge for their stolen youth. The ideology of holy war, like all ideologies of war, is only attractive as long as it is winning. We declare the war won.

Meanwhile, the decay goes on through immigration etc.

I wrote back:

This is very interesting. Most of us tend to be frightened and worried about this world-wide clash of civilizations, with the prospect of terror attacks going on all over and a protracted struggle with a ubiquitous fanatical enemy, and with the only positive aspect of this being that at least this war against Muslim fanatics wakes up Westerners to the idea that the Other is really the Other and that we have to protect ourselves from him. Your notion reverses that whole concept. We win quickly, Islamism fades as a threat, America emerges again as the unchallenged world power spreading democracy and pop culture everywhere and opening its borders to everyone, and we’re back in the same old mode of the steady, peaceful self-destruction of our civilization.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 30, 2002 12:29 PM | Send