The ever-illuminating Amir Taheri has a characteristically sharp and important point to make about the manifest intellectual inadequacy of the US 9/11 Commission report:

'The report assumes that there is a single, readily identifiable enemy. This is the routine way of political thinking, that took shape during the Cold War. Anyone with knowledge of the Arab countries and the Muslim world in general would know that this is not the case. The problem with the current War on Terror is that the democracies, and those Muslims who aspire for democracy, are faced with a multi-faceted threat that assumes numerous forms, from the burning of books to the cutting of throats. This is a war that has to be fought on numerous battlefields and against many enemies that, though united in their efforts to destroy the democratic societies, and first among them the United States, use a bewilderingly wide range of weapons and tactics. The Bush administration has opened the military theatre of this war by liberating Afghanistan and Iraq and seeking to destroy the terrorists in there. But this is a war that must also be fought on diplomatic, cultural, religious and political battlefields. In all those theatres the United States would need, and can find, allies, including among a majority of the Muslims who have been the first victims of Islamic fascism and its ideology of terror. The commission has no suggestions about how to engage in those battles, who to choose as allies and who to identify as neutrals.'

What Taheri means is that we are facing a kind of 'total' war. Yet our leaders insist on seeing it as a limited political or military problem, capable of defeat either on the battlefield or through negotiation and agreement. As Taheri observes:

'This enemy does not want to give and take, to compromise, or to triangulate. He wants you to obey him in every detail or he will kill you... He will not be happy even if, in the spirit of liberal generosity, you gave him half of your power and wealth. Nor would he settle for a total American withdrawal from the world. Nor would he be satisfied if you helped wipe Israel off the map. This enemy's conflict with the United States, and alongside it other democracies, not to mention those Muslims who also aspire after democracy, is not political but existential. He wants to rule you because he thinks he is the holder of a "the highest form of truth." This enemy wants you, the whole world in fact, to convert to Islam because he believes the advent of Islam abrogated all other religions. Anyone who is not a Muslim is not a full human being. "Our struggle is not about land or water," the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini said in 1980. "It is about bringing, by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path." '

One day, this will become clear to everyone. The problem is, what state we'll be in by the time that happens.

Posted by melanie at July 27, 2004