Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has described radical Islam as the greatest threat facing the world today.
He made the remark in a BBC interview marking the publication of his memoirs.
Mr Blair said radical Islamists believed that whatever was done in the name of their cause was justified – including the use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Mr Blair, who led Britain into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, denied that his own policies had fuelled radicalism.
I’m going to split this to keep it reasonable.
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We are entrained in but the latest phase of the third in a long series of wars during which the scope and nature of human power have been fought out for decades on end across wide arcs of the planet over the last 680 years.
Any halfway serious student of history will have encountered the Hundred Years’ War of 14th and 15th Century Europe. Begun in the late 1330s by the English king Edward III the Hundred Years’ War was at its heart a [b]battle for TERRITORY[/b], comprising a [url=http://www.xenophongroup.com/montjoie/hywchron.htm] series of smaller Anglo-French wars [/url] lasting until the 1450s.
In these wars the monarchies were relatively stable and the key question was how much of which territories they would control.
Many historians also reference a [url=http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/courses/his325/2d100yr.htm]Second Hundred Years’ War[/url] beginning in the late 1680s and ending at Waterloo in 1815.
As with the first, the second comprised a [i]series[/i] of wars, including both the American and French revolutions, that eventually began to challenge the whole idea of monarchy. In that respect the Second Hundred Years’ War can perhaps best be seen as a [b]battle for DYNASTY[/b].
Though Americans have typically named the wars of this era after the sitting British monarch of the time, their European names — e.g. War of the Spanish Succession and War of the Austrian Succession — make the dynastic nature of the ongoing struggle rather more clear. In these wars the territories were relatively stable, but the key question became who would control those territories.
There is increasingly good reason to believe we are now in the latter phases of what will eventually be known as the Third Hundred Years’ War — the [b]battle for DEMOCRACY[/b]. Beginning about 1912 with the Balkan Wars of liberation against Turkish despots we see again a [i]series[/i] of wars in which democracy as a concept has repeatedly had to defend itself against assorted forms of absolutism.
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In the Great War of 1914-18 through the Russian civil war of 1918-22, we find that democracy was obliged to defend itself against monarchial absolutism.
By the 1930s absolute monarchy was in decline or retreat across most of the globe, yet while democracy strengthened so also did two competing forms of absolutism, for with the rise of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini democracy faced a concerted attack from what we now call totalitarian despots.
In World War II, expanding democracy was forced to fight for survival against fascist and national socialist absolutism, as well as an extremist form of Shinto. Though after the war fascist absolutists such as Franco and Peron lingered on, the world saw continued expansion of democracy, most importantly in India. Democracy also witnessed the effective rise of a newly powerful and hostile force on the ‘Left’ — one that had been quietly in play since the 1920s — and which eventually snuffed out the emerging democracies in eastern Europe.
During the Cold War, often fairly ‘hot’ (Korea, Viet Nam, Central America, etc.), democracy was once again forced to defend itself, in the event against communist absolutism. This is familiar territory to most adults alive today, and was the defining conflict during the formative year of most Baby Boomers.
Since 1991 some communist absolutists such as Hu, Kim, and Castro have lingered on, democracy has continued to expand while witnessing the rise of yet another form of absolutism bent on its destruction — one that had been quietly in play since the 1970s.
Though it continues to spread and inspire people around the globe, democracy now faces a clear and credible threat from an islamist absolutism which has made abundantly clear its intentions to impose itself across as much of the planet as possible.
In the same way communism and fascism struggled for dominance in Europe before the fascist phase of the war, islamism and communism struggled for dominance in central and southwest Asia, for example Afghanistan in the 1980s.
In the communist phase of this long war we generally understood the enemy’s capabilities. What was at issue were their intentions and we devoted a lot of energy to figuring those out and preparing for the possibility we might be wrong. In the current phase, however, the islamists’ intentions are unmistakable. The question is the enemy’s [i]capabilities[/i].
Amongst other things this means the potential downside risks of being optimistically wrong are substantial. Consequently we must devote significant and persistent effort to minimizing the enemy’s ability to harm anyone.
One reason opponents of the Iraq Campaign often seemed so oddly out-of-key is that they were looking at the islamist phase of this war with the experience and outlook of the communist phase. More often than not they’re also looking at it from the communist perspective, which is the side they chose back in about 1968.
It carries all the poignant anachronism of Japanese soldiers stranded on remote islands encountering Americans in the 1960s. That’s why so little of what they say makes much sense to people who have managed to move beyond 1972. Unfortunately, however, to the extent such opponents are successful they will delay the end of this islamist phase and vastly increase its bloodiness.
History suggests that following these century-long paroxysms the western world has enjoyed something like a century or so of relative peace. I thus hope rather fervently that humankind may be nearing the end of this Third Hundred Years’ War. On several levels, however, history indicates that the crisis and climax will more likely come in about 2017-2019.
We might also have another phase beyond the current one, for we must not rule out the alarming possibility that democracy may yet have to defend itself militarily against some form of corporatist absolutism. Such a threat from non-state actors would certainly be a logical extension beyond the islamist phase. For now, however, we need to concentrate on the current phase, much as Reagan more or less ignored the deeper implications of the Beirut barracks attack in the early ‘80s as he focused on the Cold War.
The price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance, a fact of life repeatedly ignored and rejected during each and every phase of this long, grinding, remarkably bloody war in defence of democracy.
Thus it is that the second overarching theme of the last 98 years has been that those opposed to robust military action in defence of democracy have, at every single phase of this struggle, been repeatedly, consistently, persistently and incorrigibly 180-degrees bass-ackwards wrong. It would be amusing, even somewhat funny, were it not (without fail) so remarkably and profoundly dangerous.
Fascinating, Bart. Much to ponder in your posts. I’m particularly interested in the concept of corporatist absolutism. I would like to see your thoughts on that fleshed out. But, if I’m interpreting it correctly it makes perfect sense that corporations pose a threat to democracy and more. Trans-national corporations (business-oriented and otherwise) have been stealing a march on nations for decades, and the negative results for Americans have become only too clear in recent times.
Bart #1 and #2 —
I had somewhat similar thoughts, but I came to a different conclusion. I think that the theme of the past, oh, two hundred years or so has been the struggle between freedom and tyranny, culminating in the long Cold War and its eventual victory.
But I think that what we’re in now is something new, and 9/11 is as good a milepost for its beginning as any. I think the theme of the next couple of centuries will be the war between globalism and tribalism — between the ones who draw the circle of “we are the people” large and those who draw it very small. Tribalists will use a variety of markers to define who is in the tribe and who is not — ethnicity, religion, nationality, language, etc. — but in all cases, the specifics of the marker matter less than the fact that it can be used as a shibboleth to divide Us from Them.
Al Qaeda are tribalists. They’re using a particular form of fundamentalist Islam as their marker, but if they didn’t happen to have that available they’d just use something else. Deep down they hate us not because we’re not fundamentalist Muslims, but because America is (from their viewpoint) infecting the world with globalism and secuding the members of their tribe away with blue jeans and Lady Gaga videos. Not only are we not part of the tribe, we’re threatening the existence of the tribe; and so we must be destroyed.
Unfortunately, a lot of people here in America are still working in that same tribal mindset. You see it in the persistent depction of Islam as foreign, different, dangerous, other — the “Them” to our “Us.” You see it in the way the patriotic mood has become not, “I love my country,” but “We alone are good; all other countries suck.”
And this troubles me greatly, because I do love my country, and I think we’re busily fighting last century’s war for last century’s reasons, and not seeing that we’re playing right into Al Qaeda’s hands by doing so.
“…denied that his own policies had fuelled radicalism.”
This is an allusion to the liberals who, despite all the past examples given by Bart, still want to try the appeasement route and are now calling for this with the present enemy du jour.
The other point that I would make is that “radical Islam” doesn’t make it minority opinion Islam. Over half of what you would expect to be westernized Muslim youth in the Netherlands are for the criminalization of criticism of Islam and 40% are against western democracy. The majority of Muslims in Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Nigeria, etc., support suicide bomber attacks against civilians Jews.
Western liberals want to remake Islamic liberals in their own image. It may very well be that an Islamic liberal is nothing like a Western liberal.
I remember reading and studying about Nazi liberals and Nazi radicals. the Radicals want to kill the Jews, the liberals wanted to confiscate their property and expel them from Germany.
Ross: and just one example of the utter cluelessness of Mr Obama and his minions is that, particularly in Arab cultures, which are profoundly tribal — I shared a lab with three Iraqis for two years and speak a bit of Arabic — you do [i]NOT[/i] slag on your own tribe away from home.
His Cairo address in June of ’09 was, in that respect, an utter disaster demonstrating his weakness of both character and power to the entire Arab world. Probably others, too.
At a time when Arabs are desperate to show that they matter — because every economic and military power in the Muslim world is non-Arab (Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia) — Obama hangs a giant “Kick Me” sign on America’s arse end.
Pitiful.
So, someone with knowledge help me here: IS there such a thing as “radical Islam” or is there just “Islam?” That is, is it all “radical?”