Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (28 page)

For the United States, the Thai insurgency could ultimately require the provision of military assistance if the stability of the Bangkok regime is threatened. Under Cold War–era multilateral and bilateral agreements—the Manila Pact of 1954 and the Thanat-Rusk Communiqué of 1962—Washington appears committed to assisting the Thai government to prevent its defeat. U.S. policymakers added a much greater commitment of American prestige and credibility to those agreements when they designated Thailand a “Major Non-NATO Ally” in December 2003. In a less quantifiable category, Washington’s support for the Thai also is predicated on memories of Thai forces fighting alongside the U.S. military in the Vietnam War. Under the noted accords, the U.S. military has used Thai airbases, worked with Thai forces on Thai territory to stem the narcotics flow from the Golden Triangle, and established stockpiles of prepositioned, war-reserve munitions in the country. In addition, U.S. forces have equipped and trained Thai forces and regularly perform exercises with them.
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With a bilateral military cooperation agreement based on dated Cold War requirements, Washington may be committed to respond positively to a Thai request for military help against the Islamist insurgency. While this is clearly a worst-case scenario, even the bare possibility of U.S. involvement in Vietnam-like jungle combat—which would in turn draw other regional Islamist fighters to Thailand like a magnet—ought to give U.S. policymakers pause to reconsider its leftover Cold War commitments not only in Thailand but also across the international board.

Somalia:
Somalia is an overwhelmingly Muslim East African country of no particular strategic importance to the United States. Without a government since Prime Minister Muhammad Barre was overthrown in 1991, the country has been the scene of unending anarchy, tribal warfare, and starvation.
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President George H. W. Bush’s ill-considered, New World Order–building decision to lead a UN humanitarian intervention there in 1992 ended with a few dozen U.S. military casualties and an ignominious Clinton-ordered retreat in March 1994. The evacuation of U.S.-led intervention forces was followed by a decade of intra-Somali warfare between and among ruthless, well-armed warlords, as well as by an influx of Arabs and their money—especially Saudis and Saudi money—which together worked to move Somali Muslims toward a greater adherence to Salafism and Wahhabism and some of their leaders to aspire to form an Islamic state.
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The patient and bloody effort of Somali Islamists and their Arab supporters seemed to be helping Somalia to right itself in June 2006, when Islamist leaders, working together under the umbrella of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), took control of Mogadishu from more secular Somali warlords. Over the following months the ICU imposed a harsh sharia-based rule that brought some stability to Somalia for the first time since 1991.
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Turning its back on a useful measure of stability in the Horn of Africa, which is home to more than 90 million Muslims, Washington backed the December 24, 2006, invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian military. U.S. officials argued that Addis Ababa’s action was based on its “genuine security concerns,” but at least as important in Washington’s decision was its still dominant Cold War–era lust for finding proxies to do America’s dirty work. The Ethiopians quickly overthrew the ICU and installed Prime Minsiter Ali Mohamed Gedi’s secular, UN-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government that had been based in Baidoa. At this writing, Gedi has resigned and the regime—now led by President Abdullahi Yusuf—seems destined to become dependent, after the Ethiopians withdraw, on the same Somali warlords that the ICU defeated in 2006.
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The Somali Islamists’ anger over Washington’s public support for the Christian Ethiopians’ invasion, moreover, was sharpened by the simultaneous U.S. air strikes aimed at three al-Qaeda leaders reported to be near Hayo, in southernmost Somalia near the Kenyan border.
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Taken together, the invasion and the air strikes have strengthened the Somali Islamist leaders’ belief that the United States intends to destroy their faith, and the likely result seems to be that the ICU chiefs (whose forces and ordnance were dispersed not destroyed) will start an insurgency against the UN-supported Somali regime and perhaps launch terrorist operations inside Ethiopia and Kenya and against the U.S. Special Forces base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.
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Leaving aside the social and humanitarian mayhem that the Ethiopian invasion will cause in Somalia, that invasion and the U.S. military action have put America at a turning point in the Horn of Africa. In a locale not of pivotal importance to the worldwide Sunni Islamist insurgency, U.S. policy and actions have quickly brought it close to that status. This evolution is due not only—or even mainly—to the air raids and the invasion, but also to the fact that U.S. leaders again walked into a trap laid by bin Laden over the past decade. Since the withdrawal of the U.S.-led UN mission in 1994, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have warned Muslims that the United States would return to Somalia, Sudan, and all of the Horn for three reasons: (a) to control oil reserves in Sudan and elsewhere in the Horn; (b) to stop the spread of Islam in the Horn; and (c) to acquire ports on the coast of East Africa to give the U.S. military bases from which to strike at Yemen and the holy places in Saudi Arabia.
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None of these three points, of course, may genuinely be part of the U.S. strategy in the Horn of Africa; indeed, one doubts that U.S. strategy there amounts to anything more than knee-jerk anti-Islamism. As always, though, perception is reality, and the Bush administration has taken a thoroughly necessary military action—trying to kill Somali-based al-Qaeda leaders when the chance arose—and turned it into another
casus belli
for jihadists by endorsing the Christian Ethiopians’ destruction of an Islamist government and subsequent stationing of troops in the country to fight Somali Islamists.
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Europe:
While the Islamist fire burning in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, is neither as bright nor always as obvious as the fires burning elsewhere in the world, it may be burning more deeply and damagingly than most anywhere else.
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For the United States, this reality is worrisome and poignant; worrisome because America is Europe’s child and natural international partner, and poignant because Europe’s Islamist problem underscores just how close to irretrievably America and Europe have parted ways and how very little America can do to help. Indeed, given demographic realties, there is strong reason to doubt that the Europeans can even help themselves.

Like Americans, Europeans are bedeviled by a failed governing generation that has few contact points with reality and virtually no knowledge of or respect for either history or the power of religion. Unlike Americans, however, Europeans appear to lack the courage—may one say the manliness?—to refute their weakling, utopia-purveying European Community leaders and reassert the national identities that once made Europe the world’s center of material, social, educational, artistic, and economic progress. On the basis of the cringing, cowardly, and fantastical assertion that European nations’ amalgamation into the European Community was mandatory because they could not otherwise prevent themselves from going to war—has man not free will?—European leaders have turned their backs on nationalism, the tool that has, despite savage interstate wars, brought more good to more people than any other instrument in the toolkit of human organization. In its place they have erected a banal, bureaucrat-ridden, and economically bankrupting supranational authority that combines the French Enlightenment’s goal of perfecting man and society, a hysterical animosity toward Christianity (without which of course there be would no entity identifiable as Europe and no reminder in men’s minds that only God is perfect), and a pacifism that reeks not of conviction and humanity but of cowardice, sloth, and an insatiable desire for ease. In place of self-respect, tradition, nation, and faith, the Europeans have adopted an appeasing, guilt-ridden multiculturalism, the euro and the Common Agricultural Policy, an unrelenting presentism, and a ferocious appetite for atheism and for ignoring history. The governing philosophy of today’s European leaders, as then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote accurately in 2005, “consciously severs its own historical roots depriving itself of the regenerating forces from which it sprang, from the fundamental memory of humanity, so to speak, without which reason loses its orientation.”
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Most Americans and Europeans are simply not on the same wavelength. While a few of America’s elite are still representative of their harder-working, tougher-minded, more nationalistic, and far more religious countrymen, the tie between Europe’s leaders and people seems to be much closer. This is especially and most fatally true in the area of religion’s role in shaping individual lives and civil society. “[C]ontemporary Europe is the closest to a godless civilization the world has ever known,” Mark Lilla wrote in early 2006.

While a person’s or a people’s religious beliefs or nonbeliefs are no one else’s business, Europeans, (like much of the American elite, and especially Democratic leaders) seem unable intellectually to credit the importance and dangerous ramifications of the religious resurgence in today’s world. Inside Europe the EC bureaucracy and its emasculated national governments continue to attribute the growth in Islamism’s appeal and in the number of jihad-oriented young Muslims to economic inequality, a failure to eradicate the last Muslim-offending remnants of Christianity from the public square, and evanescent racism among those they regard as the few retrograde Europeans with archaic attachments to their own nations and histories. Increase the dole, annihilate Christianity, coerce the perfection of the thinking of all Europeans by enforcing stringent anti–hate speech legislation, and maybe throw in a Europe-wide Islamic holiday, goes the EC’s recipe, and the Islamist fire will be smothered and out will pop peaceful, cowardly Euro-Muslims ready to have no children, spurn God, and like all good Europeans, quietly obey their nonelected bureaucratic masters in Brussels.

Well, no. These steps certainly will not solve Europe’s Islamist problem, but they may blind the Europeans to the problem until it defeats them. Why will they fail? What makes it almost impossible for Americans to help Europe control or defeat its Islamist foes? It is simply another case of what John Adams called “stubborn facts,” this time demographic facts. I cannot improve on the excellent descriptions and analyses of Europe’s pending demographic calamity already provided by Niall Ferguson, Tony Blankley, George Weigel, and Mark Steyn.