Brains running on empty at NRO

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In responding to the threat of Islamic jihad, the most tough-minded among us (meaning the most tough-minded thinkers with entré into the mainstream media of the modern liberal West) favor two things: better security measures, and better efforts to modernize, democratize, and assimilate Muslims. These tough-minded types think that they’re awake, and urge others to awaken, while they’re still in dreamland themselves. Consider Richard Lowry writing today at NRO:

We are engaged in a multifaceted war on terror. To fight it requires the military, law enforcement, international cooperation, and preventive domestic-security measures. The ultimate center of gravity is the hearts and minds of Muslims. We have to reach into the Middle East, because so long as the cradle of Islamic civilization is a cauldron of chaos and failure, it will spin off murderous fanatics. We also must engage in an ideological struggle within the West, where radicalism infects Muslims living among us…. [Italics added.]

All of this is the work of decades. In the meantime, get used to the 1 percent world [i.e., a world of massive security precautions, in which a one percent chance of a terrorist attack must be treated as a 100 percent chance].

So, what is Lowry’s bold thinking, brought on by the revelation of a vast network of British-born Muslim terrorists seeking to kill several thousand air travelers and paralyze the West? We have to transform the Mideast!!! We have to modernize the entire Muslim world so that Muslims will no longer believe in jihad!!! We have to wean Western Muslims from their radicalism and make them like us and be like us!!! These are the same false and utopian ideas that President Bush and his supporters have promoted all along—ideas that are always accompanied by the counsel that we must patiently endure FOREVER a life lived under draconian security measures that cripple and unman us and do nothing to defeat our enemies. Lowry has learned NOTHING.

But wait a second. Didn’t Lowry just this week reject in the clearest terms the fundamental premise of Bush’s democratization policy, that the love of freedom is the ruling desire of every human heart? How then can Lowry still be promoting the Bush policy of draining the Islamic swamp of its chaos and hatreds? If Lowry is not planning to drain the swamp by spreading democracy (since he has stated that many Muslims love religious purity and revenging themselves on infidels more than they love freedom and democracy), what then is he talking about?

The answer, as Lowry suggests at the end of the article just referenced, is that while he no longer believes that Muslims love freedom and democracy more than Islam, he still thinks we must keep attempting to democratize them—which, of course, would require that they give up their primary love for Islam. It’s a confession of the same kind of hopeless intellectual bankruptcy that made Stanley Kurtz call himself a gloomy hawk.

At the same time, the word immigration does not appear once in Lowry’s article. So, he talks about transforming the minds and hearts of all Muslims, which even he admits is not within our power to accomplish, while the one thing that is within our power to accomplish—making Muslims unwelcome in the West and steadily removing them from the West—is the one thing he doesn’t mention.

NRO also has a symposium today in which the participants were asked: “What should Americans be thinking about the foiled London terror plot?” The symposium is an exercise in wheel-spinning, with the exception of the never-foolish Heather Mac Donald, who asks: If, as President Bush says, we are at war with Islamic fascists, why are we still targeting ourselves in airport security ehecks?

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Stephen T. writes:

I say we give Lowry the benefit of the doubt and assume he has been temporarily dazed by the deafening chorus of public condemnation rising from those millions of good-hearted Muslims worldwide who are unified in common revulsion of the 24 terrorists in Britain.

Oh wait, there isn’t any.

Never mind.

Spencer Warren writes:

I just read in full his two columns that you link.

The self-contradiction actually comes at the end of his first column, I believe.

The first column, in the penultimate paragraph, bails out from the implication of what he wrote earlier because he is afraid to criticize Bush in a meaningful way, i.e., that his Iraq policy is anything but conservative. Thus he writes, “This doesn’t mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy. A democratizing Middle East offers the best alternative … But his administration would be well served to focus on the particular instead of the universal … .”

What does this mean? Nothing, of course.

He then goes on vaguely to endorse democratizing the Middle East.

And, as you write, the final paragraph of his second column completely contradicts the early part of his first column!

Jonathan L. writes:

Anyone who can still use the phrase “winning hearts and minds” in relation to Muslims this late in the day proves in the starkest terms that he is intellectually and/or psychically incapable of dealing with the reality of Muslim aggression. Which hearts and minds exactly is Lowry after? The shriveled, black hearts of all true Muslim believers for whom the moral reality of other people is always optional? Or the sick, sociopathic minds that so easily construct and deconstruct reality to further their basest impulses, not even bothering to maintain a facade of logical consistency as they in one breath deny the reality of the Holocaust, then assert that Europeans compounded their great crime by dispossessing Arab to compensate Jews, and then darkly warn that a “real Holocaust” is on its way? Or is it the hearts and minds of those for whom the infidel is always to blame, and so when Muslim schismatists occupy the Great Mosque in Mecca, the U.S. embassy is burned in Islamabad (1979), and when Israel defeats several Arab armies with French fighter jets, the President of Egypt and the King of Jordan conspire to claim U.S. involvement (1967), and when Sunnis murder a Shi’ite cleric in Pakistan, a Western fast-food franchise is attacked (2006)?

The problem is that Bush’s approach to Muslim jihad was always a Clintonian, “Third Way” bargain which sought to assuage the conservative desire for retribution and self-preservation without stimulating liberal abhorrence at those acts which would put us in conflict with the dark-skinned, primitive, and therefore morally impeccable “Other.” Conservatives thus got their action, while liberals were reassured by the lavishness with which U.S. wealth was spent in the cause of Muslim “uplift.” Now that Lowry has given up on the efficacy of action, or at least those forms of action that mainstream conservatism will allow him to consider, what indeed is there left for him to recommend but the other half of Bush’s bargain, i.e. unending wealth transfer to the Muslim world, spiced with occasional acts of civilizational self-humiliation and disarmament (in the form of continuing Muslim immigration to the West, and cringing deferral to “Muslim sensitivities”)? The job of Lowry and gang will be to sugar-coat this act of surrender to conservatives who, even if they are true right-liberals, still have a shred of dignity left in their being.

LA replies to Jonathan L.

What you’re really getting at is something I’ve been trying to articulate recently. It’s that conservatives are in this constant fever of, “We’re at war! We’re a nation at war! War, War! War, War, War!” (like the choral climax of Act I of Aida, “Guerra, Guerra! Guerra! Guerra! Guerra!”), while in fact we are NOT in any war. As soon as you ask them what the war consists of, there’s no clear war strategy or even specific enemy, no way to define or achieve victory. They keep saying we’re in a war, when we are not in a war, a point made devastating clear by Heather Mac Donald’s observation that if we were really at war with Islamic Fascists as President Bush says we are, we’d be behaving very differently. We’d be targetting Islamic fascists rather than ourselves. So there is this fantastic self-delusion in which the conservatives are deeply mired.

And the cause of this self-delusion is that our enemy is Islam itself, or, at least, the jihadist (or “fascist,” if we want to follow Bush) core of Islam. And we have no way of defeating such a vast foe. At the same time, the conservatives understandably want to fight this foe and to feel that they are fighting him. So they go for the symbolism and emotionalism and rhetoric of war but not the reality. They get very excited when they hear Bush say “Islamic fascists,” yet they accept the security lockdown and the continued comfortable situation of jihadist Muslims and the continued operation of jihadist mosques in this country, which of course would not be happening if we were really at war.

The way out of this dilemma is for people to understand (1) that we cannot defeat Islam, but (2) that we can roll it back and weaken and contain it.

The conservatives don’t want to consider this possibility because it means a permanent adversial relationship with a vast part of the human race. It would mean the total abandonment of modern, non-discriminatory, universalist liberalism and a return to something like the Middle Ages, when Europe was in constant confrontation with Islam. (The difference being, I hope, that while in the Middle Ages Muslims carried out continual raids on Europe, the contain-and-isolate strategy really would contain and isolate them.)

At the same time, while the conservatives are not willing to contemplate the perpetual containment of Islam, they ARE willing to contemplate living perpetually under the shadow of regularly recurring terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks and jihadist murders (as in Seattle and at the University of North Carolia) that are only made possible by the presence of Muslims among us (whom the conservatives aren’t willing to remove); and they are willing to contemplate living perpetually under the intolerable security regime made necessary by the Muslims among us (whom the conservatives aren’t willing to remove).

A reader suggests:

Isn’t the answer to Islamic terrorism, in addition to containment, their Christianization? They have a dhimmi tax; why don’t we do it in reverse, at least in Iraq. It was, after all, once a major center of Christianity in the Arab world. I suppose part of the answer as to why not is that we’re vulnerable enough as it is, undermanned as we are in that neck of the woods. But, since we can’t fully contain this ummah-blob, why not Christianize them and thereby neutralize them?

The Spaniards went into the Americas with Jesuits; why can’t we do something similar with Opus Dei and Maryknoll Missionaries? We can even make it ecumenical, though I’d prefer them all to be Catholic?

I honestly think the only hope beyond Christianizing them is to hope their economic and technological backwardness will keep them from being a major threat. But this may be wishful thinking. Pakistan has the bomb. The 9/11 hijackers used our technology in piggy-back fashion. Instead of designing their own bomber, they made one out of our commercial airliners. We may still be vulnerable even if we do our best to contain them; so the only real ideological solution, I think, is to Christianize them and put their fervor to good use.

Fat chance anyone making this modest proposal.

LA replies:

Apart from the very large spiritual questions, (1) Does the Christian energy exist in the West to attempt this, and (2) How many Muslims would even potentially be interested in being Christianized, there is a prior, overwhelming objection. In order to secure an environment safe for evangalists and those whom they convert, it would require that we directly control and govern the entire Muslim world. The attraction of the isolate-and-contain strategy is that we are not trying to reform the Muslim world and in fact we are having nothing to do with the internal affairs of the Muslim world, we are just isolating it from the outside. Christianization, by contrast, would require that we take over and rule the entire Muslim world. When we remember the fiasco in our attempt to occupy and democratize Iraq, it is clear that Christianization is out of the question.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 11, 2006 01:24 PM | Send