The Clash of Civilizations Doesn't Exist... Yet
By Joshua Holland
Created Sep 4 2006 - 5:40pm
"Seriousness" has become the word of the day for the Islamophobic set.

According to some of our more serious hawks, anyone who doesn't buy that the
liberal democracies of the West are engaged in a death-match with hordes of
dusky Muslim fanatics is "unserious" about America's security and can't be
trusted.

It's the latest in a series of attempts to forestall any meaningful
discussion of the causes of violent Islamist ideologies, much less how the
United States should respond to them. It locks us into the global "war on
terror."

Unfortunately, all too many otherwise sane people seem to accept the terms.

But it's hard to imagine anything more profoundly unserious than taking a
dozen complex conflicts that originated in a dozen countries, stripping them
of all historical and political context and lumping them together in an
amorphous blob called the "Clash of Civilizations." But that's exactly what
we're talking about.

So let's take them at their word for a moment and think seriously about the
framework they use to understand a dangerous and confusing world.

Consider this: in the epic struggle between East and West, some of our
staunchest allies are the undisputed champs in spreading violent Islamic
extremism. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan established fundamentalist,
anti-Western madrassas all across the world, funneled gobs of cash to
extremist groups, and nurtured and supported them in their infancy. It
wasn't just random individuals within those countries; Saudi Arabia made it
a foreign policy priority to spread its brand of Wahhabism, mostly to
counter the perceived threat of Pan-Arabism and other anti-colonial
ideologies. Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI -- sometimes called a
"state within a state" -- not only supported the Taliban in Afghanistan but
funded, equipped and helped train some of the most notorious terror groups
that grew out of that country in the 1990s. Talk all you want about Syria
and Iran supporting Hezbollah, these are the great terror-sponsoring states,
and they're on the side of the Western democracies.

What's more, the West isn't all that unified in this great existential
struggle to save itself from destruction. A recent poll [1] of citizens in
the United Kingdom, our most loyal ally and a country that largely believes
the Clash of Civilizations meme, found that -- "by a margin of more than
five to one -- the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W.
Bush and either go it alone in the 'war on terror', or work more closely
with Europe." Just 14 per cent believed "Britain should continue to align
itself with America." A Pew Global Attitudes survey [1] in June found that
in Spain, supposedly a target of "Islamic Imperialism" and the victim of one
of the most spectacular terror attacks ever, "four times as many people
oppose the war on terror as support it (76 percent to 19 percent)."

Of course, the hawks' response [2] is that there must be something wrong
with the rest of the world. Outside of the United States, they argue, the
West is "feminized [3]," spineless and too "politically correct" [4] to take
on the Muslim hordes. That's like an ugly, unhygienic man's sincere belief
that every woman who rejects his advances must be a lesbian. If there's a
consensus among your closest friends that you're wrong about something, you
probably are.

We're fortunate that most of the Clash of Civilizations rhetoric is obvious
nonsense peddled by cynics playing to our latent xenophobia, rather than
something inherently violent or nihilistic in Islam (it is violent, but no
more than any other religion).

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims" is a common
refrain on the many "war-blogs" that have proliferated since 9/11. That's
wrong, and purely racist -- like saying all crack-heads are
African-American. Last year, excluding the mess in Iraq (it's awfully tough
to distinguish between terrorism, insurgency, sectarian violence, etc.),
U.S. government statistics (PDF [5]) show that the country with the most
terror fatalities was India. Some were inflicted by Muslims, but more were
perpetrated by secessionist groups from the Northern provinces, the
Communist Party of India and various Hindu extremists. Next up was Colombia,
a country with a population that's over 90 percent Roman Catholic. Following
in fifth place -- after the mess in Afghanistan -- were the victims of
secular Maoist terror groups in Nepal.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Lex Rieffel noted [6] that while Indonesia --
the most heavily populated Muslim country in the world -- is considered by
Western analysts to be a hot-bed of Islamic terror, "violence against
innocent civilians has been ... committed by secessionist movements in
Sumatra and elsewhere, by Christian and Muslim fanatics [and] by indigenous
people threatened by migrants ..." The University of Chicago's Robert Pape,
who has studied terrorists exhaustively (and seriously), found that the
group that led the world in suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004 was the
Tamil Tigers, a secular group that draws its adherents from Sri Lanka's
predominantly Hindu population. Saying that terrorism is a result of some
deep flaw in Islam just isn't serious at all.

Even a serious analysis of Islamic extremism makes clear that these groups
are not fighting one ill-defined and melodramatic conflict with the "West,"
but a host of conflicts with national or regional origins. For the most
part, their primary targets are not liberal democracies or Western
decadence, but some of the most brutal, authoritarian regimes in the world,
many of which are considered "moderate" by our own extremists. The fact is
that virtually all terrorist attacks outside of the disputed Kashmir region
are perpetrated by extremists in their own country or in the homelands of
states that are occupying their country. The only exceptions are stateless
peoples whose desire for self-rule are violently suppressed -- Palestinians
and Kurds the most prominent among them.

To the extent that some terrorist groups have recently turned their eyes to
us, it's not a matter of hating our freedoms or our women's bare shoulders.
It's because we've supported many of those repressive regimes -- often with
troops on the ground -- from Indonesia to Iran.

As Katha Pollitt asks in the Nation [7]:

Who are the "Islamo-fascists" in Saudi Arabia -- the current regime or its
religious-fanatical opponents? It was under the actually existing
U.S.-supported government that female students were forced back into their
burning school rather than be allowed to escape unveiled. Under that
government people are lashed and beheaded, women can't vote or drive,
non-Muslim worship is forbidden [and] a religious dress code is enforced by
the state through violence .

Similar arguments can be made about the governments of Yemen, Sudan,
Algeria, Pakistan and Egypt (which has tortured tens of thousands of Islamic
activists, both violent and not). Some of them are on our "side," others
aren't; viewing them as part of one cosmic East-West struggle isn't serious
at all.

Consider a specific example: The terrorist group Abu Sayyaf in the
Philippines. They're loosely connected to Al Qaeda, they're violent, they're
extremists -- if you buy the global Clash of Civilizations/War on
Terror/Struggle Against Islamic Fascism, then logically, you can't view them
only as a serious problem for the Philippine government -- which they are --
but as a sworn enemy of America.

And the U.S. government certainly does. In 2002, 600 troops were sent to the
southern Philippine islands of Basilan and Jolo to fight Abu Sayyaf and
other militant groups. The operation was a miserable failure, and a year
later the troops were pulled out having had virtually no impact.

According to Steven Rogers, a Phillippines-based journalist writing in
Foreign Affairs ($$ [8]), much of that can be explained by U.S. officials'
simplistic analysis of the situation:

Washington's flawed understanding of the problem has hamstrung the mission
and lowered its chances of success. Policymakers treat the conflict as a
case of a violent Muslim population terrorizing its Christian neighbors
under the influence of radical Islamist agitators. They emphasize reports of
al Qaeda support and the presence of operatives from the Southeast Asian
Jemaah Islamiyah network. They have failed to recognize, however, that
terrorists did not create the conflict in the southern Philippines and do
not control any of the combatants. The troubles are rooted in specific local
issues that predate the war on terror by centuries, and neither soldiers nor
money will end Mindanao's war.

Manilla -- capital of the Philippines -- is 8,952 miles from where I sit,
and Abu Sayyaf poses exactly zero threat to me or my loved ones. We may
abhor the group's tactics, but there's no reason to consider ourselves at
war with them. The counterargument, of course, is that U.S. interests
mandate that we protect "pro-Western" governments in the Islamic world (as
long as they keep the oil flowing), regardless of how nasty or authoritarian
they may be. It would be a compelling argument but for one thing: in all of
human history, no government has ever been taken down by terrorist attacks.

In the end, the Clash of Civilizations rhetoric is, by design, a way to cut
short any discussion of neo-imperialsim (the same reason we hear gibberish
that foreign policy critics "hate America," that "they hate us for our
freedom" or that "you're with us or against us"). Osama Bin Laden himself
said, famously, "Unlike what Bush says --- that we hate freedom ---- let him
tell us why didn't we attack Sweden, for example." No answer was forthcoming
from the Bush administration.

Political and economic issues eclipse religion; terror attacks on oil
workers and infrastructure in Colombia represent a huge proportion of
international terror attacks in the past five years (according to our
government's definition). The overwhelming majority of Islamic terrorism is
aimed at business friendly pro-Western elites in their own culture, not
ours. There is a Clash of Civilizations, but its dividing line is not
between East and West but North and South.

Ultimately, these conflicts, like civil conflicts in the non-Muslim world,
are about power, control of finite resources or long-term ethnic and tribal
friction, regardless of whether they're packaged as religious-inspired
"Jihad" or not. Those who embrace the idea of a global struggle against
"Islamic fascism" would never suggest that decades of violence in Ireland
could be reduced to a story as simplistic as Catholics against Protestants,
much less that it was an indictment of Christianity as a whole. They'd be
quick to admit that the sectarian divide in Ireland was just one of a number
of factors that caused so much bloodshed, just as religion is one of a host
of causes of violence in Egypt, Lebanon or Turkey.

Even the ideology spread by Bin Laden -- who originally targeted the
"apostate" regime in Saudi Arabia before turning his eye to the West -- is a
mish-mash of Islamism and the nationalism and pan-Arabism that preceded its
rise. Al Qaeda's brand of Islamism has gained popularity among a diverse
community of extremists, but that isn't primarily about the warriors of
Islam battling the pernicious influence of Western culture either, although
it's often dressed up that way. Robert Pape pointed out in an interview with
the American Conservative [9] that "the central fact is that overwhelmingly
suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by
a clear strategic objective ."

The truth is that we're threatened by a number of lethal organized crime
networks -- with politics rather than profits as their chief motivation --
spread out over dozens of countries. We fight organized crime with law
enforcement and intelligence, and have done so for a long time, with notable
success (much more success than we can see by any objective measure in the
"war" on terror). We should approach terror groups the exact same way, and
that's not an ideological position -- it's a simple matter of applying "best
practices" to a problem.

But the danger of a Clash of Civilizations developing is there. It's a
self-fulfilling prophesy: If we keep saying we have one on our hands and
keep acting on it, we will effectively create some kind of long-term,
massive historical enemy from whole cloth. It's already happened to a
degree; before 9/11, large majorities in the Muslim world had a favorable
view of the United States, and Bin Laden and his followers were swimming
against the tide of popular opinion. That's changed dramatically, and Bin
Laden and his fellow killers are now lionized as heroes of the masses. The
rise in locally grown copycat groups -- especially those of young Muslims in
places like the United Kingdom and Canada -- shows that when our own
extremists declared an ill-defined war against an equally murky "them," they
sowed the seeds for an epic battle that didn't previously exist.

That's why it's so important to understand that those reactionaries within
our own society who are pushing the Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images
of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear; they're just as
xenophobic, just as irrational and, ultimately, are just as great a threat
to our security. Both have to be challenged aggressively before they give
birth to another, even bloodier generation of culture warriors.

About author Joshua Holland is an AlterNet [10] staff writer.
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Source URL:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86
Links:
[1]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/17/nterror17.xml
[2] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23846
[3]
http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXXII/Issue_4/Rawls_Report/Rawls1.s...
[4]
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=islamic_fascists&ns=ChuckColson&dt...
[5] http://wits.nctc.gov/reports/crot2005nctcannexfinal.pdf
[6]
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83509/lex-rieffel/indonesia-s-quiet...
[7] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060911/pollitt
[8]
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040101facomment83103/steven-rogers/beyond-the-abu...
[9] http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html
[10] http://www.alternet.org/

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson