A Triumphant Call To Arms
The Apocalyptic Agenda Of The Neo-Conservatives
Neo-conservative writers have become increasingly vocal about an apocalyptic conflict involving the United States and Muslim world.
Start with Norman Podhoretz, the former longtime editor of Commentary and now a Hudson Institute fellow. Podhoretz calls for en masse regime change in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and Iran from the original "axis of evil" list, and extending it to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia and Syria. He wants the United States to unilaterally overthrow these regimes and replace them with democracies cast in the Jeffersonian mold.
What neo-cons seek is not just a political transformation of the Muslim Middle East. Their end game, as Podhoretz says in Commentary, is to bring about "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."
Rather than being dismissed as fringe thinking, these pronouncements frame the hard-right boundary for debates in conservative political circles.
In the call for wider U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, the ideologues recognize that such action will likely provoke terrorist attacks on Americans, both at home and abroad. But, in their view, the terrorists will unwittingly provide the pretext for even stronger U.S. military intervention. Neo-cons believe the United States will emerge triumphant in the end, provided it shows the will to fight the war against militant Islam to a successful conclusion, and, as Podhoretz says, "the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties."
Meanwhile, consider these policy prescriptions for today's Middle East:
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, notes on the magazine’s Web site that if terrorists from Muslim countries detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States, the United States should consider launching a nuclear attack on Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
Elliot Cohen is the most influential neo-con in academe. From his perch as a professor of national security studies at John Hopkins University, Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as WWIII). He claims America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars; and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of "terrorism."
In Cohen's view, Afghanistan was merely the first campaign in WWIV, and several more are likely to follow. Cohen argues that the United States should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic state in Iran.
Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum opines that U.S. academics are trying to sugar coat the true meaning of jihad, and thereby hide its violent and political character. In the November issue of Commentary, he cites numerous Islamic scholars -- most of them non-Muslim -- who state that jihad is confined to militarily defensive engagements, and its primary meaning is the attainment of moral self-improvement.
Pipes contends that Osama bin Laden and his followers understand the meaning of jihad better than the academics. He alleges that 14 centuries of Islamic history confirm the bin Laden view, since jihad has been used as an offensive weapon for expanding Muslim political power. When groups such as the Council of American-Islamic Relations contend that jihad is not a holy war, Pipes argues that they are engaged in spreading misinformation.
In mid-November, the neo-cons quietly launched a bipartisan Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. One prominent members is George Schulz, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution. In a recent interview, Schulz said he would be surprised if the United States does not initiate military action against Iraq by the end of January. His words seem to confirm the hypothesis that the Bush administration will merely use U.N. Resolution 1441 as a cover to wage war against Iraq.
The neo-cons are determined to bring their apocalyptic vision to reality -- even if their critics dismiss their call to arms and American triumphalism.
Critiquing their worldview, columnist Philip Stephens writes in the Financial Times that, "in the long term, even a nation as uniquely powerful as the United States cannot remake the political systems at the heart of the Islamic world: not in 30 years and probably not in 100."
The Muslim world will view a string of U.S. military attacks on Muslim countries as the aggression of an oil-thirsty superpower on the Muslim world, not a march to liberate people from tyranny.
Ahmad Faruqui is an economist and a fellow at the American Institute of International Studies in California. He is author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan, to be published later this year by Ashgate Publishing in the UK.
