The following are interesting excerpts from the site pages of a person who shifted from ultra left to ultra right after 911:
Writings on Politics and Religion
by Mark Humphrys Pro-free private life: Atheist. Pro-science. Pro-reason. Pro-free speech. Pro-liberal democracy.
Pro-free economic life: Pro-capitalist. Pro-West.
Pro-interventionist: Anti-isolationist. End tyranny everywhere. End communism. End Islamic law.
His page of Islam:
Islamic Fascism
Islamic Fascism is really a modern phenomenon. (*) It is basically a 20th century totalitarian movement - like fascism and communism. Islam existed before Islamic Fascism, and will exist after it. Islamic Fascism is designed - like fascism and communism - to appeal to idealistic young people with a utopian future where the world will be "cleansed". It really started with the Iranian revolution in 1979, and used to be called "Islamic fundamentalism". Other names for it are "Islamofascism" or "Islamism".
I think "Islamic Fascism" is the clearest, most descriptive name, showing that this is simply the same kind of thing that the democracies spent the 20th century fighting. Islamic Fascism is genuinely fascist. It has contempt for democracy, free speech and human rights. It is full of hatred for Jews, atheists, homosexuals, and liberated women. It is linked to racist hatred of blacks in Sudan, slave trading of black Africans, and racist hatred of other ethnic minorities in the Islamic world. And, like fascism and communism, the only solution is the total and utter destruction of this philosophy. This will take a long Cold War, lasting for perhaps the next two or three decades, punctuated by perhaps one or two more Hot Wars. But Islamic Fascism will lose. Democracy will win.
- (*) I don't mean to imply that Islam in general respects human rights or human freedom. That is clearly not true. I am only saying that the Islamist movement we are up against - idealistic, utopian (full of young people), expansionist (let's attack the west), suicide-bombing, fantasy-based (let's conquer the whole world) - is really quite a new movement, which did not really exist before the 1960s-70s.
- The origins of modern Islamism:
- Islam
- Islamism
- Wikipedia
- Islamist Watch
- Internet Haganah - tracking Islamist websites
-
"It's In The Koran", by "Patrick Henry", humorously sums up the Islamist enemy.
Nobody should support a war on
Islam, but everybody should support a war on
Islamism.
Islamism is not simply a religious philosophy that one is free not to follow. Islamism is a political movement that aims to impose itself by force on those who disagree. Islamism aims to impose religious Sharia Law on the whole world, ending human rights and civil liberties, ending freedom of religion, ending freedom of speech, and ending freedom of sexuality. Islamism threatens us and everything we love, and will always threaten us, until it is defeated. A War on Islamism is something that every Christian, Jew, atheist, Hindu or other infidel should support. A War on Islamism is something that every freedom-loving Muslim should support. Islamism - or any other philosophy that imposes religion by force - should have no place in our world. A War on Islamism is a no-brainer, like a War on Fascism. Every liberal and every leftist should support a War on Islamism.
The two faces of Islamism.
Left, the destruction of our prosperity, our science, our learning, our culture, our beautiful cities - everything we have worked for for a thousand years.
Right, the institution of a reign of primitive superstitious savagery.
"All Arabs shall arise and annihilate the Jews! We shall fill the sea with their corpses."
- Hassan al Banna, founder of the original Islamic fascist group the Muslim Brotherhood, calling for a genocide of the Jews when Israel was declared a state, 1947.
Luckily, the Islamic fascists failed to carry out their genocide.
"We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity."
- Omar Bakri Muhammad sums up the world of the Islamist savages. See more.
"The term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic religious law. ... There is no such term as 'civilians' in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not."
- Hani Sibai makes clear what Islamism means.
The World Trade Centre attack is the greatest attack on civilization and liberty since 1945. The West is not simply "another" culture. It is a set of values that represent the
highest achievement of humanity. A set of values that the whole planet can - and should - adopt. Western values are worth dying - and killing - for. The West is the greatest, richest, freest, best part of planet Earth, the heart of science and all knowledge, the best hope for mankind. Anyone who seeks its destruction should be destroyed themselves.
- The World Trade Centre attack (also here and here)
- The Islamic Fascist killers Al-Qaida
- Al-Qaeda
- Al-Qaeda members
- The fascist Ayman al-Zawahiri
- The butcher Mohamed Atta al Sayed led the killing of 3000 civilians. Atta was not poor and desperate. He was a highly educated child of wealth and privilege. In short, he was a typical spoilt middle-class radical, of the kind that flocked to fascism and communism in the past.
- Mohamed Atta's father, a wealthy lawyer in Cairo, Egypt, hopes for more killing of infidels.
- The 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui was spared the death penalty, although, as Charles Johnson says: "I don't know if anyone in our country's history has ever deserved it more".
- The Onion's classic Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell. ""I was told that these Americans were enemies of the one true religion, and that Heaven would be my reward for my noble sacrifice," said Alomari, moments before his jaw was sheared away by faceless homunculi. "But now I am forced to suckle from the 16 poisoned leathern teats of Gophahmet, Whore of Betrayal, until I burst from an unwholesome engorgement of curdled bile. This must be some sort of terrible mistake.""
- The mass killer of innocents Osama bin Laden (and here)
- Bin Laden is dead?
- A Billion for Bin Laden by James Miller proposes offering a $1 billion reward for Bin Laden's capture - to encourage serious private enterprise to take part (this would be enough potential return to form a dedicated company to pursue, whereas $25 million really isn't, given the high risk of nothing) - and to encourage foreign governments to sell out (to whom $25 million is not really enough to take any serious risks or pain).
- The heroes of Flight 93 (also here and here) - the passengers who fought back against Islamist evil.
- Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs - Bill Whittle on the strength of free people: "the fact remains that .. one ordinary group of people on an ordinary flight on an ordinary day defeated the very best that the global terror network could put together. Our ladies junior varsity squad whipped the living shit out of their Super Bowl A-team over Pennsylvania that day, and they did it because for one brief shining moment enough passengers on that airplane went Grey."
- Blog encouraging people to watch an account of Flight 93. "Bring Kleenex, and thank God for forty Americans who beat al-Qaeda before most of us knew who they were."
- Could 9/11 have been prevented?
- No, is the short answer. Because nobody would have tolerated the US government taking strong action to prevent it before 9/11.
- Alternative history by Gregg Easterbrook. - Bush attacks Al-Qaida in Afghanistan before 9/11. The world (including the UN, Blair, Aznar and Richard Clarke) furiously condemns him. He is ultimately impeached and disgraced. Classic. Brilliant. This is what would have happened.
- Easterbrook expresses better than almost anyone else why 9/11 had to happen - why all those people had to die, why the democracies did not attack Germany in 1933.
- Tragically, it may also predict the future. Attacking North Korea now would lead to unbelievable world fury and get any president impeached. The fact that it would prevent the alternative future of North Korean nuclear attack on a western city will not matter.
- Pre-emptive war
- The tragic dilemma: In many situations, peace costs far more lives than war.
- Containment and sanctions often kill more people than a quick war to depose the regime.
- Even doing nothing often kills more people than war to depose the regime (because it leaves the regime in power).
- Often, war is inevitable anyway, and the only choice is between a short, early war when the regime is weak (e.g. 1933), or a far worse war later when the regime is strong (1939). It is irrational to choose the long war instead of the short one.
Pre-emptive wars can save thousands, even millions, of lives. But nobody will tolerate them.
The spoilt, wealthy butcher
Mohamed Atta.
I was typical liberal-left
At the time of the September 11th attack, I still believed in the left-liberal universe, and I was still reading the Irish Times and the Guardian, as you can see from some of my early links:
- The power, the glory and the grievances by John Burns, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2001 - on how, even when consumed by anti-American hate, people want to be Americans. People the world over look at America (and the West) and they want what we have - democracy, freedom, prosperity, power, and the heady excitement of being able to do anything you want with your life. They want the same as us. We should help them get it.
- Richard Dawkins
- Design for a Faith-Based Missile (also here), September 2001.
- Time to Stand Up, September 2001, Freedom From Religion Foundation, makes one think that Dawkins is about to stand up against Islamism. But he was to disappoint us.
- What Now? (discussion at Edge)
- Dawkins, 27 Sept 2001, shows how close Dawkins came to escaping from the liberal-left meme complex: "The chips are down, and I suddenly know whose side I am on. A world without Islam, indeed a world from which all three Abrahamic religions had been lost, would not be an obviously worse world in which to live. .. But a world which had lost enlightened scientific reason (which is at its best in America, and not only because more resources are spent on it) would be impoverished beyond all telling. So I hope I shall not sound too corny if I want to stand up as a friend of America. Even (and it feels like pulling teeth to say so) Bush's America." But the feeling didn't last.
- After an initial shock, the left rapidly settled back into old habits, and now behaves as if Sept 11th never happened:
- The modern left and Islamic fascism
- People who let me down after Sept 11th (People I admired who let me down)
Then I start to shift to libertarian-right
So my first reaction to September 11th was in the liberal-left press, and I still tried to fit it into that universe. Then I started reading the American media online. And I found my political philosophy starting to change. This was big. This wasn't about Israel after all. This was something much bigger. These were beginning to look more like the Nazis, come back again in different uniforms, with different names, but with the same mission, to destroy our civilization. This was beginning to look like the absolutely just war that we had not seen since 1945.
- September 11th made me leave the left
- This is the heir to fascism and communism. The bombers do not have a small, modest cause. They want to end our civilization:
- Article by Richard Cohen on the inadequate young killers, who lived in the free West, and hated it - or liked it, and hated themselves for liking it: "They remind me in this regard of men who pick up someone for sex - and then beat that person up afterward." It has since emerged that the killers were sexually inadequate - religious young men obsessed with sex with virgins in the (imaginary) afterlife, who, when they got to the West, rented porn videos, went to strip clubs, and paid prostitutes for sex, before they began their killing.
- What Islamic terrorists are really afraid of is women by Boris Johnson - says that what the killers hate is not Western foreign policy (why should Saudis care about the Palestinians?), it's the way Western culture threatens their culture. Good, I would say, and Johnson agrees: - "Let me say what the Left cannot say, since it chokes on the contradictions of its position, at once feminist, and yet relativist. It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about women. We are right."
- The 1990s are over:
- It's the war, stupid, Mark Steyn, on the 2004 presidential election - the first post-9/11 election - and how some people still can't see that the trivial era is over. This is serious, like 1940.
- "I'm like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: 'I put that dress away. When the Germans march out, I'll wear it again.'"
- "America, it's said, is divided into September 11th people and September 10th people. I'm in the former category. I'm a single-issue guy. All the other stuff can wait."
- "After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said that he feared all he'd done was wake a sleeping giant. But it's been two years now. If you figure it's time the sleeping giant resumed his slumbers, Kerry's your man."
- The Great Divide by Fred Barnes
- "George W. Bush is a September 12 person. John Kerry is a September 10 person. The difference is real. A September 12 person was traumatized by the terrorist attacks .. on September 11, 2001. A September 12 person believes the world we thought existed before the attacks doesn't exist anymore."
- "In contrast, a September 10 person was outraged by the attacks but not traumatized. A September 10 person thinks the world still exists as we perceived it before the attacks and thus hasn't fundamentally changed."
- Bill Whittle, October 06, 2004
- Deterrence (part 1)
- Let us assume that the left really do want to stop a nuclear 9/11. Then they are simply deluded about how to do so: "We both look at this: [9/11] And we both want to make sure that it - or worse - does not happen again. ... We want to deter it from happening again. And all of this rage and fury and spitting and tearing up of signs, all of these insults and spinmeisters and forgeries and all the rest, seem to come down to the fact that about half the country thinks you deter this sort of thing by being nice, while the other half thinks you deter this by being mean. It's really just that simple. ... It all comes down to carrots (liberals) or sticks (conservatives)."
- The left doesn't understand because the left doesn't understand the wolves that live outside our world: "I used to be a carrot man. Like most larval liberals, I grew up in a life that would be unrecognizable to all but the thinnest sliver of humans that ever lived on this great rock in space - that thin, thin sliver being everyone and everything you and I know and take for granted. Reality - meaning the wolves - have never been so far from the door as they are today. So believing in the power of goodwill and friendship, of handshakes and agreement and compromise, of trusting to the good and noble in mankind was easy for me, for the consequences of being wrong in that belief cost me nothing at all. I'd never been robbed, raped, beaten or victimized in any way. That belief in goodwill, compromise, concession and trust grew as a result of being surrounded by decent people in a well-ordered, lawful society, with a long history of compromise and cooperation."
- Outside of our world there is a Hobbesian world of tyranny, torture, rape, oppression, racism, genocide and proud, unaccountable, unrepentant evil. "I wish it were not true ... but wishing does not make it so. ... It would be nice to live in a world full of liberals. I say that as a staunch conservative. It would be nice to live in a world that behaved like a Hollywood party or a university campus, filled with kind, educated people with lots to lose, who cherish reason and responsibility and are incapable of brutal, violent acts. If all the world were filled with decent, compassionate, rational people, life would be a bouquet. But it's not. ... It's a damn shame, it really is."
- He describes what I went through, and there's no going back: "We like to say that the world changed that day. What a ridiculous, self-centered thought. The world didn't change. Our illusions about the world changed. The scales had (mostly) fallen from my eyes in the years leading up to that morning. But many, many conservatives (as I define myself) were born precisely at 9:17 am EDT, when United 175 flew past the burning North Tower - an accident? - and exploded through the second, on the morning of September the 11th, 2001."
- Deterrence (part 2)
- Every tyrant in the world is waiting and hoping that Kerry gets elected: "You lack the vision, Senator, to see this as a many-front war. You lack the insight to see how the sight of Saddam crawling from a hole inspired an identical self-possessed lunatic to give up Libya's nuclear weapons program. Iraq deterred Libya, you eternal defeatist. And all of the rest of the former free-range dictators now hang on the results of this election to see whether they will get a man who has capitulation in his very marrow, or one who has weathered unbelievable pressure, slurs and insults, and very likely thrown away his second term, to face reality and do something. Something unpopular. Something that he knew would make his poll numbers go down."
After September 11th, I thought I would go online and see what the much-reviled American right-wing hawks and conservatives were saying. I had never read their material before (it does not appear in the Irish media) and I was shocked to find that it appeared to be based on reason and evidence, and a strong sense of morality and belief in human freedom and dignity. These, I realised with a shock, are the people who defended us against the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. The Irish Times liberals are not the people who defended us against the Third Reich. They would never have stood with the Allies (and never will, no matter what). Their arguments are much the same as de Valera's. Their anti-American, anti-British worldview is little different to de Valera's. They are the heirs of de Valera, not Churchill.
I felt my left-liberal faith slipping away with every article I read.
Emotion
Emotion has its place. The anger and fear of 9/11 allowed many of us look at new ideas - such as conservative ideas - for the first time.
The liberal-left meme complex is self-sustaining and hard to break out of. Anger and shock has its place in giving new
memes a brief window to invade. As they say, "A Conservative is a Liberal Who's Been Mugged". Many of us were mugged on 9/11, and changed.
Ultimately, though, I look for new ideas based on reason and logic, rather than on emotion.
- Oriana Fallaci expresses well the raw western anger of 9/11, even if her analysis is poor:
- The Rage and The Pride by Oriana Fallaci - I'm not a fan of Fallaci (*) but God she expresses my anger at September 11th. Every time I think about it, I can't believe those murdering bastards did that.
- And she expresses my rage at the European left - "the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot's feet" - I think this contempt for the left is something I will now feel all the rest of my life.
- (*) Her writing is sloppy and emotional. And it is devoid of hope. She talks as if all of Islam is the enemy, rather than the Islamist movement within Islam. She talks as if Islam can't be liberal and tolerant. But the same could have been said about Christianity or Judaism in the past. People change. And religions change. Nothing is fixed, no matter how permanent it looks.
- She talks as if the problem is bad races. But this is a philosophy of despair. The problem isn't bad races. The problem is bad ideas. The solution is for the same races to adopt new ideas. Western values are for everybody.
- You are wrong, Ms Fallaci, by one of the writers I like, Amir Taheri.
- He notes that Fallaci was anti-American in the past.
- Whether she was even pro-Islamist back then - with that trendy left-wing sympathy for Ayatollah Khomeini - I do not know. The Iranian Taheri says she was: "Her praise of Khomeini, and her vicious attacks on the late Shah, are still part of the official literature of Iran." She has changed of course since, and now says about Khomeini: "What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion." The interview confirms again for me that she is generally sloppy, emotional and illogical.
- I prefer these writers.
- Discussion of terrorism and internal conflicts in general - Sometimes the correct response to armed groups will involve addressing their grievances. Not here. Here, the correct response is total war.
- The root cause of Sept 11th
- The idea that 9/11 must have had some logical cause:
- Infallible haters? by Thomas Sowell - The idea that hatred has to have a good reason is absurd and ignores history.
- Why talk is useless by Andrew Bolt - The Islamofascists "have no cause. They have nothing for us to discuss." Sometimes, it is true, there is a cause. There is something to discuss. But sometimes not. And this is one of those cases where there is not. The only proper response to Islamofascism is total war.
- These guys want to kill us anyway, Mark Steyn, March 15, 2004, after Madrid, on the difference between Islamist terrorism and IRA or ETA terrorism.
- Victor Davis Hanson rejects the Chomsky-Said idea that 9/11 must have had some logical cause. - ".. this post-Marxist idea that wars are the product of material grievance or clear-cut exploitation, unfortunately, is not true; .. so many wars in antiquity and in the modern world start because of perceived grievances only. They deal with irrational elements like fear and honour, and we don't necessarily have to believe they have any basis in fact."
- The Paradox of Cruelty: The greater the hatred, the less the reason
- The terrorists' complaints are fantastic and are not based on reason:
- Lo, the Poor Terrorist by Theodore Dalrymple - "The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to liberal intellectuals"
- Basically, the left don't understand the Islamists. Islamist terrorism is not caused by poverty. It is not caused by any rational grievance or logical complaint. It is caused by a sick fantasy ideology flourishing in a corrupt political world of dictatorships. The solution is not more aid. The solution is not to address their "grievances". The solution is to attack the followers of the fantasy ideology wherever they live. The solution is to invade and end the dictatorships in their home countries. The solution is to transform their entire world against their will.
- Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris
- The 9/11 attackers are motivated by fantasy that bears no relation to the real world, and "it is absurd for us to look for the so-called "root" causes of terrorism in poverty, lack of education, a lack of democracy, etc. Such factors play absolutely no role in the creation of a fantasy ideology."
- "Equally absurd, on this interpretation, is the notion that we must review our own policies toward the Arab world - or the state of Israel - in order to find ways to make our enemies hate us less. ... There is no political policy we could take that would change the attitude of our enemies - short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam."
- Describing them as simply "evil" is not a bad response. "There is one decisive advantage to the "evildoer" metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers' point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic - you try to wipe it out."
- The culture of shame
- Who is our enemy?, by Steven Den Beste - Their hate is not based on reason. It is not based on things we have done, or any rational grievance. They hate us because they are failures and we are successful.
- "They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours ... In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's that their score is zero. They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it. And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress."
- Arab psychology by David Gutmann, argues that Arab culture is driven by shame and avoidance of losing face. He argues that, paradoxically, western weakness and tolerance invites attacks, while western strength and aggressiveness brings peace and respect.
- Why Arabs love their oppressors and hate their liberators - article by Victor Davis Hanson, discusses why "Kids whose parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein and are now fed and protected by American money and manpower nevertheless dance upon a burned out Humvee while shouting for Saddam to return. The same is true of those on the West Bank who have their capital looted by the Palestinian Authority, their relatives jailed or murdered, and their votes and speech curtailed: They will still praise Arafat to the skies - if he at least mutters some banality about hating the West. Because these are irrational responses - people acting from their appetites and impulses rather than their heads" - because their philosophy, and their hatreds, are built on fantasy rather than reality.
- Terrorism is not caused by poverty:
- Department of Blithe Assertion - The claim that terrorism is caused by poverty.
- Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection? by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova - A survey that concludes there is no relationship between terrorism and poverty. See summary.
- What Makes a Terrorist? by James Q. Wilson - Terrorism is not caused by poverty: "Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the GDP of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved."
- Poverty Doesn't Create Terrorists, by Alan B. Krueger.
- "More terrorists do come from poor countries than rich ones, but this is because poor countries tend to lack civil liberties. Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account .. income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists."
- "Apart from the size of a country and the extent of its civil liberties, no factor that I could find .. could predict whether people from that country were more or less likely to take part in international terrorism."
- Freedom squelches terrorist violence - Alberto Abadie concludes that terrorism is not caused by poverty. "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there."
- Marc Sageman, University of Pennsylvania (see here and here and here and here), found that of Al-Qa'eda members and associates:
- 18 per cent were upper class, 55 per cent were middle class. 90 percent came from caring, intact families.
- 29 per cent had some college education; 33 per cent had a college degree; 9 per cent had a postgraduate degree. 91 per cent had a secular education.
- 70 per cent joined the jihad while away from home. They joined the jihad at the average age of 26 (mis-quoted as the average age of all of them being 26).
- In short, they are educated, alienated middle-class twenty-something young men, who as likely as not developed their hateful fascist ideas in the middle of tolerant, democratic western society. Just like Hitler, Marx, Lenin and a million other angry, hateful young men who reject the decent tolerant society that surrounds them.
- "Sageman describes them as the "elite of their country" sent abroad to study because the schools in Germany, France, England and the US are better. ... Al-Qa'eda's "breeding ground", it seems, is as much in fragmented cities in the West as in hotbeds of Islamism in the East."
- What this means is that the western media and the western left are partly to blame for the conversion of young people to Islamism in the west. The constant left-wing attacks on America and Israel one sees in the west is not simply being watched by westerners. Young potential jihadis are watching too, and it encourages some of them to join Al-Qa'eda. The media and the left encourage the enemy (even if they don't mean to). Sageman notes, for example, that France is breeding lots of jihadis while the US is not. The different media climates in France and America probably has a lot to do with it. If French political culture changed to become supportive of America, France would breed a lot less jihadi killers.
- Arthur Chrenkoff on Al-Qa'eda not being poor: "The problem is hardly new. Poor people rarely become revolutionaries because they are far too busy trying to survive to engage in political pursuits. Historically, it has always been the relatively well-off and the well educated who constituted a vanguard of any revolutionary and/or terrorist movement, from the French Revolution and 19th century revolutionary socialism to Bolshevism, Red Brigades-style terrorism, and Palestinian terrorism. ... Overthrowing existing order is and has always been an elite pursuit."
- The terrorists are not poor, they are revolutionaries:
- Under Our Very Noses: The terrorist next door by Adrian Karatnycky.
- Poverty is not the cause of 9/11: "It is indeed reassuring to view the terrorists who now threaten us as an exogenous threat rooted in the Middle East's Hobbesian environment of obscurantism, poverty, and repression - but police and press investigations offer evidence of a far more complex, and ominous, picture. The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression."
- So who are the 9/11 attackers, if not poor third worlders? In fact, they are very much like the middle-class anarchist, fascist and communist revolutionaries of the past: "To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class, shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin in Zurich or London; or of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in Paris."
- "many of the terrorists we are now confronting are a Western phenomenon, existing inside the Islamic diaspora that is an established fact of life in the U.S. and Europe. ... Like the leaders of America's Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy's Red Brigades, and Japan's Red Army Faction, the Islamic terrorists [are] university-educated converts to an all-encompassing neo-totalitarian ideology. ... youthful members of a bored middle class who have grown contemptuous of "soft" and corrupt elites and are drawn to the romance of revolutionary guerrilla movements."
- And like the 1960s and 1970s middle-class anarchist, fascist and communist terrorists, the proper response is war until their total destruction.
- Does Affluence Cause Jihad? by Zachary Constantino
- The Suicide Bombers Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple - On the confused mind of the starry-eyed young Islamist man. "According to Islamism ... Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time." It is incredible that anyone would believe such a thing. But, of course, we've seen this kind of insane utopianism before: "This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men."
- The problem - The central question is: What is wrong with the Islamic world?
- The solution - The Islamic world must be changed. Existing regimes must be ended, and replaced with democracies.
- Note this is not what the Islamofascists want. Indeed, it is the opposite of what they want.
- Madrid shows the alternative strategy of appeasement. Not responding to attacks - in the hope that the attacker will go away. Appeasement generally leads to far more bloodshed than responding.
- Offence, not defence
- The Bush Doctrine in Light of Madrid - Thomas Patrick Carroll on how defence is not enough. "The carnage in Madrid is a glimpse of the future for any nation in which counterterrorism passes for a national strategy against destructive ideologies like militant Islam. The great virtue of the Bush doctrine is its aggressive, even belligerent, stance against al-Qaida and the states that enable it. The best we can hope for from the defensive model are reasonably long breathers - months, maybe even several years - between vicious and evermore deadly attacks. Only a strategy that promotes genuine change in the Middle East, as the Bush doctrine does, holds out the possibility of victory and an end to terror."
- Israel's Fence and the Return to the Barbaric Past - John Lewis on the continued existence of barbarism in the world. He rejects the idea that the solution is for the free countries to defend themselves against the barbarians indefinitely. - ".. every nation in the world .. has accepted primitive warlords as a fact of modern life. But this cannot last. Every ancient walled fortress eventually fell, since a good defense could at best hold off invaders for a while." - The only long-term solution is to go on the offensive and end barbarism in this world. This is another version of the proposition that war will never end until non-democracy ends.
The solution - America and the West must assert themselves
It is clear that the West is under imminent nuclear threat. It is clear that if Al-Qa'ida get a nuclear weapon, they will use it immediately.
3 unfree countries already have nuclear weapons -
Russia, China and Pakistan.
And just 3 unfree countries have (or had, in Iraq's case) serious programs to develop them - Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Hence the logical use of the term, the "Axis of Evil", focusing on these 3 as the most immediate threat to civilization. "Axis of Evil" is the most clever term in international politics since the "Evil Empire". By calling a spade a spade, it infuriates all those western sympathisers with and apologists for totalitarian regimes.
Now it seems that
the butchers of North Korea have nuclear weapons. While their impoverished people starved to death in a state-caused famine, these butchers spent billions to construct nuclear weapons to threaten the free countries of South Korea and Japan.
Who is going to stop every genocidal tyrant, Islamic fascist, and murderous armed group on the planet getting nukes?
Only America can stop this. Only America is trying to stop proliferation. The rest of the world will not take this issue seriously until a western city is destroyed.
- Nuclear weapons
- Federation of American Scientists
- North Korea
- Iran
- Nuclear warfare
- Nuclear strategies
- Could Israel fall?
- Could Europe fall?
- Could the West fall?
- Nuclear attack on the west:
- Nuclear attack on the west will mean the end of the Islamic world:
- The New Arab Way of War by Peter Layton - The Islamists are playing with fire. If their attacks go too far - if there are WMD attacks on western cities - if the west starts to feel an actual existential threat - the Islamists may receive nuclear retaliation. They really are playing with fire: "there have been many instances in Western history where patience has been exhausted suddenly and merciless, ruthless responses undertaken. The Arab way of war could yet reap this whirlwind for the Middle East if attacks by assassins go too far. History suggests this line will not be known, or even articulated, until after it is crossed."
- Postmodern War by Victor Davis Hanson - It is extremely difficult for America to fight this enemy in this age of global news, but: "In our present context, all our concern about American combat casualties would vanish should there be another mass murder similar to 9/11. Like ancient man, postmodern man is hardwired to survive, and thus really will use his full arsenal when faced with the alternative of extinction. Should we lose the stock exchange or the White House, there would be almost no calls for restraint against states that harbored or aided the perpetrators"
- The "Belmont Club" by Richard Fernandez has some analysis of how the world will respond if there is nuclear attack by Islamists:
- Are suicide attacks the 'ultimate weapon'? says that Islamism's features - suicidal, cannot be deterred, committed to our destruction no matter how we appease it - are strategic weaknesses because they force its enemies to engage in total war against it. Unless it is defeated, Islamism will eventually force some country into using nuclear weapons against it. - "The natural outcome of the kamikazes was the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Nothing else would do. ... And the eventual reaction of nuclear-armed Israel, Russia and India to the unlimited slaughter of their populations does not bear thinking upon. And it will not be surrender, but rather something else."
- Et in Arcadia Ego Sum - Islamism forces its enemies to fight to the death, since it explicitly tells them they will die if they surrender.
- The Three Conjectures (and postscript):
- Conjecture 1: Terrorism has lowered the nuclear threshold.
- Conjecture 2: Attaining WMDs will destroy Islam. "A catastrophic outcome for Islam is guaranteed" [once Islamists acquire WMDs].
- Conjecture 3: The War on Terror is the 'Golden Hour' - the final chance. "It is supremely ironic that the survival of the Islamic world should hinge on an American victory in the War on Terror, the last chance to prevent that terrible day ... It follows that the War on Terror must not fail. Not if mankind is to live; not if the Muslim world is going to survive."
- More discussion here and here.
- Western weakness and isolationism
- "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today." - The West needs to stand up for itself. It's better for the West, and it's better for the world, when it does.
- Failures of Nerve by Roger Kimball - On American confidence. - "My own judgment is that the current orgy of anti-Americanism, fanned to a fever pitch by talk of war with Iraq, will dissipate in proportion to the resoluteness demonstrated by the United States."
- Appeasement Then and Now - FrontPage Symposium - Good debate on whether America should go out there and try and change the world, or stay at home. Pat Buchanan makes the case for staying at home. Victor Davis Hanson says the world would become a terrifying place if America did.
- Imagine if the US was not the lone superpower:
- If I could make one broad criticism about left-wing and radical thinking in general: It is not enough to criticise the existing world and propose alternatives. It is necessary to prove that the alternatives are better. This, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with socialism and anti-capitalism.
- Similarly, it is not enough to complain about the US being the only superpower. It is necessary to prove that the alternative world is better, not worse.
- Imagine a world where America was not strong - article by Paul Johnson - it would be horrifying.
- A World Without Power by Niall Ferguson
- "Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative. If the United States retreats from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the Muslim world - and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is not a multilateral utopia, but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age."
- "Unfortunately, the world's experience with power vacuums .. is hardly encouraging. Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative to U.S. primacy. Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves."
- "If the United States retreats from global hegemony - its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier - its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power. Be careful what you wish for."
- Rule America? Liberal elites ruined Britain as a hyperpower. Could America meet the same fate? by Jonathan V. Last, on how Britain ceased to be a superpower in the early-mid 20th century. "In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it." If the same happened to America, the result would be a very dangerous world.
- Pessimism - Western foreign policy is still flawed - Has US foreign policy changed enough?
Optimism - Let's change the world
America's lasting reaction to Sept 11th may not be the reaction bin Laden expected. America's strong, lasting reaction is:
Let's change the Middle East.
- Deterrence won't work
- Beyond Deterrence - article by Stanley Kurtz. - Deterrence won't work with this enemy. It's time for an era of pre-emptive invasion.
- Samuel Huntington - "a strategy which allows for preemptive war against urgent, immediate and serious threats is absolutely essential for the US and other Western powers in this period. Our enemies - primarily militant Islam, but also other groups - cannot be deterred, that much is obvious, so it is essential - if they are preparing an attack against us - that we attack first."
- Hitchens thinks he knows what is going on in the American mind, and it is very exciting for freedom-lovers, and terrifying for the Islamofascists: He thinks that: "After Sept. 11, several conservative policy-makers decided in effect that there were "root causes" behind the murder-attacks. These "root causes" lay in the political slum that the United States has been running in the region, and in the rotten nexus of client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be publicly admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once. But a slum-clearance program is beginning to form."
- Looking on the Bright Side (also here) - optimism by Fareed Zakaria - "There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I'll take my chances with change."
- And if it works, let us always remember that France and Germany, and all the "anti-war" youth, tried to stop it happening.
- We have no choice by Victor Davis Hanson. - America is on the march - "Two years ago nuts in caves talked about Americans who were scared to fight; now the world is worried because we fight too quickly and too well."
- Bush Didn't Squander the World's Sympathy; He Spent It by Jonathan Rauch - In the Cold War, the US supported Arab and Islamic tyrannies and not Arab and Islamic democrats. This policy is now over. - "This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. ... Spending the world's goodwill on reform in the Arab world is the most dangerous course the Bush administration could have set, except for all the others."
- This may fail, but it's worth trying:
- Yes, this is incredibly daring and hopeful. It may fail. Democracy and freedom may be simply impossible for Arabs. We may have to return to a clamped-down era of friendly dictators and realpolitik. But realpolitik sure doesn't look like the safest option right now. What a fantastic world if we could build something different. It has to be tried, at least once.
- A US soldier at the front in Iraq in 2004 says it best - "Long term prospects - I have to admit that after one year here I am largely pessimistic. Iraqi society is sick in many ways. Sometimes it's hard to tell if Saddam was the problem or the symptom. I just don't know how a society so divided along ethnic and tribal lines, with no democratic or liberal traditions and almost zero respect for the rule of law can build any kind of society [except an] autocratic one. I'm not ashamed that the US came here with good intentions and noble sentiments about the universality of our values - democracy, liberty, the rule of law etc., but I think all our efforts might be eventually futile. In essence, we have given the Iraqis an enormous gift, but they don't seem to be seizing the opportunity. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink ..."
- It's too early to tell if this will fail. But we have to try. And if it fails, in 10 years time we have to try again. I believe in democracy, human rights, free speech and freedom of religion for all mankind, including the Arab world. That is why I am a neo-conservative rather than a leftist. Leftists only believe in these things for westerners.
Iraq (separate page)
- Afghanistan - Al-Qa'ida, who had attacked America, and killed thousands of Americans for no reason, were supported by the Taliban of Afghanistan. The US, incredibly reasonably, offered to allow the Taliban butchers to stay in power enslaving their own people if they would hand over Al-Qa'ida. The Taliban refused. So the US took out the Al-Qa'ida bases and destroyed the Taliban regime, in just five weeks.
- Iraq - The butcher Saddam Hussein enslaved his people and threatened the world. The US, incredibly reasonably, offered to allow him remain in power, murdering and torturing and robbing his own people, if he ceased to threaten the rest of the world. Saddam refused. So the US destroyed his entire regime, in just three weeks.
- Libya folds without even waiting to be invaded:
- Message received: "America wins" by Mark Steyn - "You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don't have to invade everywhere else."
- Iran - Time for the mullahs to go. The Islamic revolution was a failure and it is time to abandon it.
- North Korea - Now probably the most evil, unstable, dangerous regime in the world.
- Saudi Arabia - The source of anti-American and anti-Jewish poison.
- Sudan - Another candidate for the most evil regime in the world.
Cartoon from
Cox and Forkum (see
here). See
Cartoon Use Policy.
Also on
Those Shirts t-shirt (see
here).
Next (after Iraq)
- Iraq and Iran are the best places to pick to start changing the Middle East, because there the governments are most hated by their people. - "the great paradox of the modern Middle East: the so-called moderate regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have populations irate with anti-American and anti-Western sentiments, while among the people in rogue regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria, there is sympathy for the West and support for the new American mantra for regime change."
- Mark Goldblatt on how it won't stop with Iraq. - "And after Saddam? Maybe Syria. Maybe Iran. Maybe the Sudan. ... Beyond that, the writing will be on the wall for Libya. For Egypt. For Saudi Arabia. Wherever radical Islam festers, we will go. And we will go in force, and in waves ... After a time, the people themselves won't wait for us"
- The war is going well - roundup country-by-country by Charles Krauthammer after Iraq - "[In] every [single] country from the Khyber Pass to the Mediterranean Sea ... the forces of moderation have been strengthened. This is a huge strategic advance"
- Bush's State of the Union Address, Jan 2004
- "9 months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America."
- "From the beginning, America has sought international support for our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have gained much support. There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."
- "We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again."
- Don't stop now
- Orson Scott Card - "I would not have chosen Afghanistan and Iraq to start with ... But once we chose Afghanistan and Iraq, once we began a serious campaign, we must continue the war until we achieve our objective, which is to remove all the governments that sponsor terror, or convince the remaining sponsors of terror to absolutely, thoroughly, and completely reverse their policy ... Anything less, and all our effort - all those American lives - were wasted."
- These five regimes must go, by Mark Steyn - the five regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and North Korea must go "if you want to be able to get to anything like a victory in this war"
- Angelo M. Codevilla says the war may have to go much further:
- No Victory, No Peace by Angelo M. Codevilla - If we stop now, after Iraq, we will lose. We need to do much more. - "nothing less than the bloody demise of the most egregious anti-American regimes [will] convince the others not to foster or allow terrorism. Only this [will] give us peace."
- War At Last? by Angelo M. Codevilla - "Where did all the Nazis go?" - To destroy an ideology, you have to go after the regimes. When the regimes are defeated, utterly defeated, people, strangely enough, abandon the ideology overnight and pretend they never held it. Where is Nazism now?
- Norman Podhoretz on Angelo M. Codevilla - "Of all the attacks on the Bush Doctrine, this set of arguments is the only one that resonates with me" - but ultimately he finds it too extreme, too unnecessary (hopefully). Victory may be achieved without such total war (as the Cold War showed).
- An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror by David Frum and Richard Perle - what to do next - a "manual for victory".
- See summary.
- Interview - Frum says we can win without (too much) further war: "Richard and I are often accused of believing that military power is the answer to everything. On the contrary, we believe that it is the answer to some things - as opposed to those who believe it is the answer to nothing. Force is to international relations what cash is to transactions between banks: the medium of final resort. So long as a bank is known to have abundant cash, it can do its business on credit; and so long as a nation is known to be ready to fight if necessary, it will discover that the necessity arises very seldom."
Let's change the world
- The fight for human freedom - WW2, the Cold War, and now the War on Terror.
- Our Own Hundred Years' War by Clark S. Judge - How we won WW2 and the Cold War.
- World War 4
- This is World War 4.
- This is World War 4 by Eliot A. Cohen (the Cold War was World War 3) - This is big. This could be the beginning of the end for Islamic fundamentalism, and the dawn of a new era of democracy and freedom in the Islamic world.
- R. James Woolsey
- World War IV - speech, November 16, 2002 - "I don't believe this terror war is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle East. .. This will take time. It will be difficult. But I think we need to say to both the terrorists and the dictators and also to the autocrats who from time to time are friendly with us, that we know, we understand we are going to make you nervous. .. We want you to be nervous."
- At war for freedom
- Norman Podhoretz
- Can the Arab world become democratic?
- Winning the War on Terror by John Lloyd - Britain and America brought democracy to, among other places, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Korea and Japan. Why do people think that is impossible in the Arab world? What if they're wrong? What if the Arabs are ready for it?
- Optimism from Natan Sharansky
- Muslims in India: Today's News Quiz by Thomas L. Friedman (and followup, Where Freedom Reigns). India has the 2nd largest Muslim community in the world. And Islamism is not remotely as strong among Muslims in India as in Pakistan. Why? Democracy. Democracy is the answer to Islamism.
- Muslim Populations and Freedom,
by Freedom House, shows that the situation with Islam is not as bad as you might think. The majority (60 percent) of the world's Muslims now live in "Free" or "Partly Free" societies. Only 40 percent live in "Not Free" societies.
- Can the whole world become democratic?
- The whole world becoming democratic will mean the end of war and famine forever.
- Optimism from Victor Davis Hanson:
- The Iron Veil predicts that the Islamic fascist regimes of the Middle East could collapse rapidly like communism.
- The World Upside Down - "Like the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is ahead is fraught with uncertainty and fear, but it is also, in some strange and macabre way, full of rare hope as well."
- From Manhattan to Baghdad - "Are we, then, confronted with a clash of civilizations? Not really, but rather the tottering of the last impediments to the reform of the Arab world before it joins the world of nations, and embraces freedom and tolerance, which alone can provide it with security and prosperity. While there are hundreds of thousands of terrorists and state fascists in almost every Arab government, hundreds of millions of more ordinary citizens are watching this war to see who will win and what the ultimate settlement will consist of. Many, perhaps the majority, may for the moment have their hearts with bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but their minds ultimately will convince them to join the victors and a promising future, rather than the losers and a bleak past."
- Again and again, war leads to unintended, unpredictable consequences - and 9/11 may not have been an Islamist success, but rather, in the long term, the shot that destroyed the entire Islamist world. "The suicide bombs and explosions that go off daily in Iraq are not proof that Americans are losing the Sunni Triangle, but rather that thousands of secular and religious fascists are desperate not to lose their entire Middle East."
- Bill Whittle on Islamism as the last chance, the furious last stand, of the enemies of human freedom. The Islamists represent a 5,000 year tradition of human tyranny and oppression, that pre-dates Islam and that now, in this 21st century, may finally be coming to an end, to be replaced by global democracy:
- "There is loose in the world a cancer, a cult of death and destruction, a force that loves nothing but destruction and pain and revenge for slights real and imagined. We face people whose hatred and rage sends them into fits of ecstasy at the thought of their own children being blown to bloody shreds so long as they can kill as many innocents as possible."
- "It is a sickness, it is a disease - it is, in fact, the last animal howling of rage and impotence at a new idea of humanity that is, at a long, bloody and terrible price, fighting and winning a war against racism, sexism, religious extremism, tribalism, conformity and slavery."
"This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It's a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It's a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It's a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It's a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don't let the whiners take this away from you"
- Andrew Sullivan on the fall of Iraq, 2003
"Let's get rid of them all"
- Tony Blair on the regimes of the unfree world.
"I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."
- An unnamed dictator, quoted by Silvio Berlusconi after the Iraq war.
It turns out it was Gaddafi!
"Others understand the historic importance of our work. The terrorists know. They know that a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle East will discredit their radical ideology of hate. They know that men and women with hope and purpose and dignity do not strap bombs on their bodies and kill the innocent. The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear - and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march. ... I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century. I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty. I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man. ... This young century will be liberty's century. By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world. ... Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom."
- President Bush's speech, Republican National Convention, Sept 2004.
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