A Perfect Enemy Is Very Useful
Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism has been the perfect enemy to fight. If you are ever to have a nemesis to battle you want them to be vile, big and weak (perfectly flawed). Your conflict with them is morally pure, your side sees the necessity of strong preparation and you win.Fundamentalist Islam can be made to tick every box.
The terrorists are vile, they show no compunction against killing anybody in their way. Almost everybody is in their way so they kill anybody. Beslan was the epitome of evil, they put themselves at a level of utter contempt. Every suicide bomb in a market or a pizzeria is done knowing that it is a pointless exercise in killing, they kill because they can. There is no tactical reason and very little strategic point in killing a few civilians at a time. The action is undertaken as a promotional exercise to show that they are doing something, to show that their holy war is proceeding. Any actor can be morally justified in confronting this vile enemy.
Islam is a big religion. A fundamentalist following of the Koran allows for holy war to be practiced against everybody. Lacking any reformation or later day teaching the Koran is the word of G*d that must be obeyed and fosters fundamentalism. It is a big book and so can justify almost any type of action from peace to war through selective reading. An actor that can portray Islam as the enemy makes a long conflict seem unavoidable.
Islam is weak, it weakens itself through the application of its holy law. The sharia was designed to provide stability in ancient Arab communities. The laws were designed to field an army of fighters to ride horses and carry swords into battle. It was very successful, it allowed Arabs to conquer the World (or near enough). However today it still relies on direct application of that unchanged and ancient law, the stability it creates is to the detriment of the economies of Muslim states. The economic weakness dooms Fundamentalist Islam to lose any massive conflict against non restrained actors. An actor can use this weakness to make victory seem inevitable.
Fundamentalist Islam is such a great enemy to have that it is used to justify actions that are beneficial without being moral, unavoidable or inevitable. Taking an oil rich country for the benefit of the economy, adding a few more houses to the west of your nominal border or showing force against restive southern provinces. Fundamentalist Islam is such a "perfect enemy" that it is fostered by stronger powers - America protects Fundamentalist Islam in Saudi Arabia and Russia protects the Mullahs in Tehran and once upon a time Israel promoted Hamas as an alternative to the PLO.
The problem is that humanity is inventive, adaptive and progressive and above all less than perfect. The Fundamentalist Islamist terrorists will change their behavior, the longer the conflict persists the greater the risk they will get it together and become strong. To prevent this from happening we need to realise that the protection of Fundamentalist Islam in Iran and Saudi will be as damaging to us as the protection of Hamas proved to be for Israel. If the protecting powers stop being protective and become massively hostile then Fundamentalist Islam is doomed.
posted by unaha-closp @ 3:40 PM
5 Comments:
Someone is wrong.
Let's fight about it and God will determine the outcome.
As to any and all apparent errors in the scriptures you can take them as mysteries of God or you can obsess over them or you can use them to dismiss the scriptures altogether.
unaha-closp,
http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2006/01/believers-response-to-islam-and-end.html
There are answers to his objections and many can be found at answeringislam.org
Great post. Don't know about the rest of this stuff, but I liked your thought process.
Is "democracy" and liberty-based culture similarly bound in it's freedom of action? And thus militarily vulnerable to a more effective ideology, even if that ideology isn't fundamentalist Islam?
Yes. I think there are no ideals that work in absolutely all situations.
It is witnessed now by the changes in China. Both communist and facist governments rely on their ability to cherry pick the best available talent into the governing party - difference being communists use a command economy and facists a free market. Now China has moved from communism to facism. The Party in China consists of both the traditional beureaucrats and newly rich entrepeanuers - who are encouraged to join. The Party desires to make Cina strong through economic and military progress, all is sacraficed to drive Chinese growth forward. It has advantages over a democratic system, because all the best people are within a single system and not split across partys. It is not hindered by commonly held but non-helpful beliefs because common people do not matter (there is no save the whales or abortion debate). If China remains stable (which is the big problem) its facism may outcompete our pluralism in economic power and it could become militarily supreme.
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