More thoughts on Islam and war

I've been corresponding with a reader of this blog, a distinguished left-liberal journalist and commentator who writes frequently about war and foreign affairs. With his permission, I quote from the exchange, which began off my quoting the Nick Cohen essay from the Journal (which is now available online here). Cohen, you'll recall, is himself a secular-left commentator who is appalled by the Euro-left's embrace of Islamists. Cohen wrote that his leftist confreres appear to have embraced an appeasement mentality, in (vain) hope that the fearsome Islamists in their midst will leave them at peace. In my response, I pointed out that though I believe the Iraq war to have been a colossal mistake, I don't believe that we can escape the struggle with Islamism, and that sometimes we will have to use violence in that struggle.

N., the commentator, who frequently reports from Europe and the Mideast, wrote:

I'm not unsympathetic to Cohen's view as you report it, but when you talk about the need for the US to struggle, "sometimes violently," with radical Islam, I think you don't take into account the question of interests that divides Americans and
Europeans. The fact is that the Islamic immigration to Europe makes such a violent struggle a de facto call to civil war. In the great urban areas of France, Germany, The Netherlands or the UK, to go to war in this sense means going to war against the newsagent, the hospital nurse, the schoolteacher, the bus driver, the neighbor.
In other words, the problem is not European cowardice or lack of will ---here I do part company from Cohen---but a prudential calculus. Are you really comfortable
condemning this? After all, there are wars that are simply too costly to fight and times when accomodation, and, yes, appeasement, is better than war.

I don't for a moment doubt Cohen's account of the pathologies of the European left for whom anti-Americanism now trumps secularist and, indeed, feminist and post-Christian principles. But I think he is turning an (admittedly important) second order problem into the principal one. The problem here is not will; it's reality. Think of our own immigration situation, which, of course, is far less agonistic. Fighting bilingualism is, as a practical matter, a losing cause now that a critical
mass of hispanophones now live (and in some cases predominate) in major American cities. You don't need to speak English in much of LA, for example (and
certainly Houston and probably Dallas as well). Imagine an American Nick Cohen attributed the spread of bilingualism simply to an absence of will, or cowardice. Whatever your anxieties about immigration, I think you'd find that account too simple.

This provoked a thought experiment. I live in a city that is filling rapidly with Mexican immigrants. The proportion of Hispanic residents to non-Hispanics is quickly moving in Hispanics' favor. In the 2000 census, Hispanics constituted 35 percent of the population here, making them Dallas's largest minority. Their number has without question only increased this decade. For obvious reasons, it is very, very difficult to go anywhere in Dallas without encountering Hispanics and Hispanic culture. Similarly, the Netherlands' four largest cities will soon be majority Muslim. N.'s remark made me wonder what it would be like if every Hispanic I encountered going about my business in Dallas were a Muslim. How would I feel then about the wisdom of promoting a conflict, possibly violent, with them?

This set me back. It would be a nightmare, in the most literal sense. My own neighborhood, which is mixed between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, and surrounded by predominantly working-class and immigrant Hispanics, would be a war zone. N. is right: if conflict between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in Dallas became violent, the consequences would be unthinkable. And yet, says N., this is the reality that Europeans are facing today. Whether it should have been allowed to get to this stage is beside the point; this is where they are.

In my response to him, I said that in my own trips to the continent, I've been amazed and appalled by the willingness of Europeans to stand paralyzed before the threat. In Holland, to take a very minor but telling example, the Dutch have been closing public swimming pools to bathers after thuggish young Muslim males have been harrassing Dutch women there, calling them sluts and whores. The Dutch found it easier to close the pools than confront the thugs. This is insane in my judgment, and no good can possibly come of it. But I must admit that it's easy for me to make this judgment from the position of my safe American home.

Is it really too late to do anything to stop the Islamization of Europe (by which I mean the collapse of European secularist values in the face of an aggressive Islam borne by immigrants)? I wrote to N. and asked if he really thought that the Europeans had no realistic choice but to sit tight and try to ride this thing out, hoping that a moderate Euro-Islam emerges among them. He responded:

I AM suggesting that Europeans have to ride this out. The corollary is that I do not think it in Europe's interests to get too involved with the American project of the global war on terrorism (or 'long war' or whatever you want to call it), precisely because, as I wrote you, I do not think it in the interests of European countries to do so on prudential grounds.

There's a lot to say on all this and I'm not sure I can do so this morning. But a few points:

The reason I 'red-flagged' your remark about resisting or using violence to combat Islamic extremism is that I believe the real threat of Islamic extremism comes from countries where we are not going to be able to use force (e.g. Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, etc.) and from Islamic diasporas in Europe. What happened recently in Somalia, which is certainly defensible, is going to be the exception rather than the rule.

I also don't entirely see the point of going to war anywhere at present (police work, including secret police work is another matter entirely, and something
I support, though I believe it can and must be done without torture). More precisely, to use the military term of art, I don't see how we can achieve the
desired end state of moderating Salafism and radical Shi'ism through violence. The only place we're actually widely liked in the Islamic world is Iran, where we have been unable to influence events. Familiarity (with us) breeds hatred; it doesn't
engender change. That for me is the real lesson of the American way of war in our time.

Much as I hate paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, you deal with the Islamic world you have, not the one you wish you had. Force is only going to make more recruits for
the extremists. As far as I'm concerned, you do your best to track, arrest, deport, imprison the terrorists. But going to war? I just think that's a recruiting poster for the extremists. Britain could never stamp out the IRA, Rod! You thhink force is
going to stamp out what is, in effect, a millennarian movement within the Islamic world at least as powerful as Protestantism in the current condition of the mass
migration of peoples?

For me, a combination of bribes, along side longterm efforts to more intelligently assimilate people, and removing hot button 'recruiting poster issues' like
Israel-Palestine (which are in some way pretexts, but effective ones nonetheless) are the best we're going to do The template for this situation is urban Cairo and suburban Paris, not Afghanistan or Somalia, and force is a minor component of what is needed in such places, which to me is why the war idea (call it what you will) is so misleading and counter-productive.

Lastly, to finally come around to your question about suitcase bombs [I'd raised what I considered the likelihood of Islamic terrorists using a suitcase nuke to take out a European city -- RD], sure, I suppose it's possible. But again, to the extent it's possible to believe this can be averted, it will be done through surveillance and cooptation (and they must go hand in hand; alone, either will fail)---that is, because the authorities are informed on time, which is going to require local community support as borders are simply too porous to make keeping the bombers out a feasible option.

You spoke of the Netherlands. Look, what Ayaan Hirsi Ali stands for is what I believe in too. But her influence in the Islamic community is zero. In contrast, I have grave doubts about Tariq Ramadan. But he may represent a moderating influence in his own community. On a practical level, who is more valuable in the struggle against Islamic radicalism within the diasporic Muslim communities that are the point of the spear? I submit, assuming he's not a complete fraud, it's Ramadan, much as I might wish it otherwise.

I'm not a pacifist. But I am persuaded the challenge the Islamists pose will not be successfully resisted---to use your word---or even blunted through war.

You know, I've come to believe, as does N., that in the wake of the Iraq war's failure, conventional war as a means of fighting Islamic terrorism is not only useless, but actually counterproductive. Someone in one of the comboxes a day or so ago said, basically, "OK Mr. Smart Guy, you think Bush has bombed, but what would you do?" My answer is pretty much what N. suggests: constant police action, counterterrorism, espionage, and so forth. I don't see that we have a better idea.

But I find myself deeply distressed by N.'s words about Europe and civil war. He knows much more about the situation in Europe than I do, and while I resist his conclusions, it's mostly from a sense of instinct than from reason. (In other words, I keep thinking, "The Europeans have got to fight the Islamists, they can't give in." Which is admittedly a sentiment, and an easy sentiment for an American to have; it's not much of a basis for policy. Is it over for Europe? If to meaningfully resist its own Islamization would be to provoke civil war -- and a well-known British journalist shocked me last year by saying quite soberly that he foresees "religious war" coming to the UK -- is there nothing left to do but to manage Europe's capitulation? Was Jean Raspail right in "The Camp of the Saints"? (M. Raspail certainly believes today that it's all over but the shouting.)

Is European resistance to encroaching Islamism even feasible at this point, given the angry Muslim ghettos the Europeans have allowed to develop in their midst? At what cost? Discuss.