The not so cold war

I've been wondering lately why so many people all over the world care so passionately about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It's easy to see why Jews and Palestinians in their respective diasporas care. But what about the Malaysians and the Norwegians and Robert Fisk and Victor Davis Hanson and all the passionate letters to the editor and the blogs that are written by gentiles? Why all this passion about this tiny little region which has about the same population and area as New Jersey, and where few of the passionate outsiders have a direct interest in the conflict? Why aren't people equally passionate about the conflict in, say, Sri Lanka, which involves twice as many people? Why do people care more about the Palestinians who blow themselves up even though they're not starving, than they care about the North Koreans who aren't blowing themselves up even though they are starving?

Israel is obviously a symbol for something far bigger than itself. But what? The answer has slowly been dawning on me.

We are in the midst of a fundamental geo-political realignment. The Cold War ended a dozen years ago, we won. Who would take the Soviet Union's place as the new enemy? Several years ago one might have thought that Japan or China would play that role. But no, China appears to seek regional dominance, not global. The Japanese economy has since collapsed into a deflationary anti-bubble. It is now the Arab/Islamic world that is the primary rival/enemy. In simplistic terms, Islam is to the 21st century, what Communism was to most of the 20th. Contrary to what George W Bush said last Fall, Islam is not a "great religion" any more than Communism is a "great political party". They are both systems for organizing a polity and an economy that are totalitarian, unyielding and diametrically opposed to our own. This is not yet fully acknowledged in public discourse, but it is becoming so.

This conflict has been building for years. The Sept. 11 attacks certainly accelerated this process, but they are more of a symptom and not a cause in and of itself. And the reason, I think, that the Israel issue is arousing so many passions, even among those who have no natural ethnic allegiances, is because it is a proxy for the larger "clash of civilizations". It is the currently the primary battleground between the forces of western modernity and the forces of backwards Islam. Look at the groups of Americans who are supporting or opposing Israel. They are essentially the same that were hawkish or isolationist during the Cold War. Those Americans who write their letters to the editor sympathizing with suicide bombers are more or less the same people who campaigned against nuclear weapons 20 years ago. The support for Israel in say, the National Review, is akin to the support that, say, the Baltic states enjoyed while they were occupied by the Soviets.

The Europeans are again caught in the middle, and not fully comfortable signing up completely with the Americans. Too soft, too close, too many Muslims to take as strong a stand as we do. But Europe is by no means a lost cause. The recent support for populist parties -- e.g. Fortuyn in Holland, and Le Pen (this time) in France was largely due to anti-Muslim sentiments.

So yes, the conflict with the Arab/Muslim world will intensify and clarify. It's not just about Iraq and alQaida. It's also about Iran, and about Syria and about Palestine and about our non-allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This week's Bush speech was a seminal event, I think, because it suggested a growing recognition of this issue, and it drew some lines that have been begging to be drawn.

In some ways this will be a more difficult struggle than that against Communism. Communism was a soulless bureaucratic ideology. Islam is in the hearts and minds of its adherents. Communism collapsed from its own idiocy and impracticality. The prevailing idiocy and impracticality within Islam would also eventually transform itself internally, in the meantime the west will need to force changes on the Islamic world from outside. The goal would not be to eliminate Islam but for it to turn into a more innocuous secular version, such as the mainstream Turkish variety.

The conflict is also shaped by oil, of course. Part of our homeland defense must be to diminish the economic clout that Arabia has against us. That includes conservation, non-Arabian petroleum sources and adapating to other forms of fuel altogether. In the meantime we must not allow the Arab/Muslim world to use its mineral wealth to procure strategic weapons that shift the balance of power.

The next war against Iraq is coming and it will have broader implications. An important early step in preparing ourselves for that is to understand more clearly where we are, what's at stake and where we are headed.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 26, 2002 07:17 AM