Are Retard Despotates The Real Enemy?

It is fashionable today (if you are a member of the chattering classes) to proclaim that Islam and Muslims are not the enemy. Proponents of this position assert that Islam is really the "Religion of Peace" and those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Allah are despoilers of a vast and good religious tradition.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who maintain, invoking the Quran and other scriptural material, that Islam is the enemy. The proponents of this position point to both the essential doctrine of Islam and the behavior of Islamic regimes throughout history. From these twin pillars, the view of the Islamist/jihadist actions today are organic productions of the religion itself.

This "debate" of perspectives is important only because of its implications for policy. Defeating those who employ terror to pursue political ends requires understanding both what those ends might be and the depth of motivation in seeking them.

Two major schools of thought in recent years have focused either upon the specific demands contained in Osama bin Ladin's original "declaration of war" against the US or on the scriptural requirement that Muslims must fight on until the entire human race submits to Allah and the one true prophet, Mohammad.

To characterise the arrow-shooting and spear-chucking that has occurred between partisans of these two interpretations of Islamist/jihadist goals and motives as puerile is almost too kind. It is flatly irrelevant since it is the intellectual equivalent of parsing between the brown cookies and the white goop in the center to determine why Oreo cookies taste the way they do.

Obviously, both the immediate, real world goals and the injunctions of True Belief Islam are at work. Osama and Company as well as others of the policy-oriented jihadist group have narrow, definable political goals. Typically, and as unsurprising as a sunrise, these goals always demand the American withdrawal from the Mideast and Northwest Asia.

It is one more version of the hoary Yankee-go-home demand that has gurgled up time after time for more than a half-century now. The Osama and Company version is simply more extensive in its geographic coverage and bloody in its framing.

Supporting the jihad now! message of the politics oriented group is the very nature of Islam. At least a significant portion of the writings which have defined both the religion and the duties of its adherents since the prophetic giddy-up in the deserts of Arabia nearly a millennium and a half ago are easily invoked to assist in the motivation of jihadists.

The core documents of Islam, like those of Christianity and Judaism, are ambiguous, internally contradictory and wide open to interpretation by those having both religious authority and a temporal agenda. The Quran, the Hidith, the life of Mohammad all provide rich and fertile pickings for anyone with a set of political objectives here in the real world of flesh, blood, fear, hatred and death.

It is a historical commonplace that authoritarian rulers love religion. As long as those in authority can control the interpretation of the scriptures doled out to those who occupy the position best known as under-the-thumb, religion is a powerful tool for maintaining the governmental status quo.

The countries which comprise the historic heartland of Islam are all authoritarian. Saudi Arabia nearly defines the term "authoritarian" today. Spreading out from the rocky deserts of the Muslim "fatherland" and looking at other Muslim dominated states, what does one see?

That's right, bucko. Authoritarian states. While some Muslim dominated states may flirt with and even engage with democracy from time to time, the leitmotif is authoritarian.

Despots--and get a grip on it, most Muslim states are closer to the despotate than the democratic end of the political spectrum--fear and oppose change. They fear change because it may not be controllable. It may change the status quo.

Ferment, debate, disagreement bring change first in thinking and then in acting. This must not be allowed to happen. Invoking religion in support of community solidarity, intellectual sterility and in opposition to an external enemy is the finest prop despotates can have.

The absence of ferment, debate and disagreement history has demonstrated time after time leads to an equal absence of progress. It doesn't matter what the area might be, economics, technology, science, politics, social complexity--no tolerance, no openness to debate means no progress, no change, no flux.

A perfect condition if one is a retarded despot.

This is why the Geek is of the view that the current war is not a "clash of civilizations." Nor is it one which is religious per se, a battle between Jews and Christians on one side and Muslims on the other.

If anything the war between the West and the Islamist/jihadist movement is one between flux and stasis. It is one between democracy in all its several permutations and despotism in its different garbs. It is, in a real sense, yet one more version of the centuries old struggle between the distribution of power to the many and the garnering of power to the (very) few.

More fundamentally the current war is between people who can accept and even be comfortable with the risks and uncertainties of constant change, of unending flux, of endless gavottes of power transfer and those for whom risk is unacceptable and unsettling in the extreme, those who seek certainty in an eternal stasis and for whom the grave is an agreeable anodyne for fear.

Islam is a religion which--far more than the Judaism which emerged from the diaspora or the Christianity which evolved from the wars of the Reformation and its follow-on, the Enlightenment--lends itself to the needs of the fearful and those who keep power by feeding fear and its antidote, religion: the despots.

The time has come for a change. It is necessary to get a grip on the nature of our enemy. It shouldn't be hard. The enemy today is the same one which we in the West--and increasingly in the East--have faced before.

The enemy is the despot. The ruler who seeks to stop all change to the greatest extent possible. The ruler who invokes those parts of Islam which stoke fear and celebrate the submission of the individual to authority. The ruler who counsels that death with certainty is infinitely preferable to life with risk.

The enemy is not simply the retard despots who ramrod al-Qaeda, Taliban or Lashkar e-Tayyabe. The enemy is also the retard despots who rule Iran, Saudi Arabia, even those despots who hide behind a thin scrim of pseudo-democracy such as exists in Egypt and Algeria, Kuwait and Yemen. There are others, you can name them for yourself.

Defining the nature of the enemy, understanding his forms and guises, are as important as knowing his name and address. Without definition and understanding as well as having the moral and intellectual courage to act upon these, it is impossible to formulate and execute realistic policy which seeks to preserve, protect, and advance the national and strategic interests of the United States.

Isn't it about time we did that?