Assessing the Threat

Armed Liberal at Winds of Change, and Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly are conducting a spirited and mostly high-level debate trying to quantify the threat to the United States posed by radical Islamic terror. Drum's initial post was inspired by Peter Beinart's New Republic article quoted here earlier. Hundred of comments have been filed; Armed Liberal has a follow-up thread. This post is an edited version of my comments.

Drum--the more liberal of the two--proposed a four part analytical framework: "For what it's worth, I think any honest account needs to address at least the following four items:

• Nuclear terrorism. A terrorist group with a nuclear weapon poses an entirely different threat than one without, so this needs to be treated as a danger all its own. How likely is it that a terrorist group could really acquire a nuclear weapon? And deliver it? And what's the best way to stop it? The fact that the Bush administration has been so lackadaisical on this score is going to make this a hard argument to deliver convincingly. If they don't take it seriously, why should anyone else?



• Garden variety terrorism. Aside from the nuclear scenario, what's the actual danger from terrorist groups like al-Qaeda? 9/11 was due to luck and poor foresight, but now that we know the danger how much military harm can they really do to us? How much economic harm? And how likely is it?



• Expansionism. Do Islamic extremists really have much interest in anyplace outside the Middle East? To the best of my knowledge, no Islamic country in the greater Middle East has ever invaded or shown the slightest interest in invading a country that wasn't a neighbor. Is Islamic extremism fundamentally expansionist, like fascism and communism, or not?



• Oil. Nobody wants to talk honestly about this, but it's obviously the reason we care about the Middle East in the first place and don't care much about, say, sub-Saharan Africa — and therefore care about Islamic totalitarianism but not sub-Saharan totalitarianism. The problem here is shared by both liberals and conservatives.
  
  On the left, "no blood for oil" is childishness. Economic interests are and always have been a legitimate concern of national governments, and a steady supply of oil is plainly vital to the industrialized world. If a Taliban-like regime deposed the House of Saud and took over Saudi Arabia, for example, they might decide to tighten the taps because they figure they only need half as much oil money as they currently receive — after all, most of it just went to those decadent westernized royal princes anyway. The resulting oil shock would almost certainly cause a global depression of enormous magnitude. This would be a disaster, and one that would hurt the poor far more than the rich.
  
  On the right, conservatives hypocritically refuse to admit that oil has anything to do with anything. It's all about democracy promotion, you see — despite the fact that our national policies have virtually nothing to do with genuinely promoting democracy. What's more, conservatives make a bad problem worse by practically sneering at the idea that anyone should take seriously the idea of greater energy conservation or alternative energy sources. Squawking endlessly about ANWR — which contains a minute amount of oil — just trivializes the whole problem.

Kevin concedes that he's omitted any "humanitarian case for intervening (or not intervening) in the Middle East," presumably because agreement between left and right might be easier.

I think Kevin's framework is helpful; this post addresses only the third point. Kevin calls it expansionism, but I'd rephrase it as follows: Has something changed to make conflict between "the West" and Islam either inevitable or desirable? The opposite sides are polarized: a liberal who compares the invasion of Iraq to the genocide of Native Americans and a conservative who's convinced that tension between Islam and the West "will inevitably lead to conflict in the future" unless either the West or Islam changes drastically.

I'm risk averse about a catastrophe potentially sudden and widespread. America must guess--without perfect knowledge of our opponents or of the future, I think radical Islam is a grave threat, for two reasons:

• The word of God: start with what the terrorists themselves say, i.e., with the Koran:
  
  
  1. 2.193 "And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should be only for Allah, but if they desist, then there should be no hostility except against the oppressors."
  
  
  
  2. 8:39 exhorts the faithful to "fight them [unbelievers] until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah."
  
  
  
  3. 9.5 "slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush."


• History: The West didn't "do" anything to warrant Islamic terror. Muslims still nursing a grudge about the "Reconquista," ejecting Islam from Spain in 1492, forget that Moors invaded and conquered Spain in 711. Complaints about medieval crusades ignore that Muslims themselves seized the Holy Land by force (late 7th Century), destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, blocking Christian pilgrims (1009), and controlled most of the Mid-East until the late 19th Century. Claims that the British and the UN unlawfully "gave" historically Arab Palestine to Jews elide mentioning that Jews first settled in Palestine before 1200 BC, well before any Arabs, and that the last independent Palestine was a Jewish state conquered by Rome about 70 AD. Moreover, appeals to history eventually point toward the oldest written record--the Old Testament, accepted as accurate by Christians, Jews and Muslims, in which God unambiguously allocates Israel to Jews (see Genesis 12:1-2, 32:28).

Experts and scholars such as Bernard Lewis insist combining the Koran with shared historical grievance (even if objectively erroneous) likely will be lethal. The Catholic Answers Organization predicts Endless Jihad:

To understand the connection between Islam and violence, one must understand certain facets of the Muslim worldview. One of the most important is the fact that, according to the historic Muslim understanding, there is no separation between religion and government—what in Christianity would be called the separation of church and state. We are not speaking here of the secularist idea that the state should marginalize religion and discourage people from voting their consciences as Christians. We are talking about the idea that church and state are not the same thing and that they have different spheres of activity.

[This] means that Islam is not only a religion. It is also a political ideology. If the government of the Muslim community simply is God's government, then no other governments can be legitimate. They are all at war with God. As a result, Muslims have typically divided the world into two spheres, known as the Dar al-Islam--the "house of Islam" or "house of submission" to God--and the Dar al-Harb, or "house of war"--those who are at war with God.

Remember, before submitting to Islam, North Africa and Persia didn't seem to share much with what now is Saudi Arabia. But, Islam arrived rapidly, and conquered:

Islam spread in North Africa with remarkable speed, and by the year 732 C.E., which marked the first centennial of Muhammed's death, his followers were the masters of an empire greater than that of Rome at its Zenith, an empire extending from the Bay of Biscay to the Indus and the confines of China and from the Aral Sea to the lower contracts of the Nile.

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But, nearly all terrorists are Muslim. And, globalization and mass media alerted radical Islam to the infidels (which they define as ALL the West, not just America and Israel). So they declared war on us--as the Koran requires.

In sum, we don't have to decide whether radical Islam is expansionist. Radical Islam already said so. And opposition, without action, won't stop 'um.

More:

I've replied to some of the arguments:

I agree completely with Glenn and jinnderella.

lewy14's argument is utterly off-track. The issue is not whether terrorists are good or bad Muslims. It's irrelevent whether terrorists are mistaken about the requirement of the Islamic cannon: their victims remain murdered. Moreover, whether or not Islam eventually experiences an enlightnment sometime in the future also makes no difference: the President has to defend America today.

The West's appropriate security/defense policy can't turn on whether any particular terrorist has a direct pipe-line to Allah, or whether there there will be a Martin al-Luther in the 22nd century. This fourm's focused on quantifying the threat today. Let's stay on topic.

Still More:

I've posted another reply, number 58, here.