On the Need to Recognize Islam as the New Cold War

Below are excerpts from a long article by Hugh Fitzgerald that appeared on the JihadWatch site. The entire post is here and well worth a read.

Fitzgerald: Jihadology: Unremarkable, and remarkable

The other day I was asked by an email correspondent to comment on a recent piece by David C. Engerman that appeared in "Foreign Policy." Engerman's piece is both unremarkable and remarkable at the same time. It may be called "unremarkable" though the word seems somehow churlish when used about it, because - as we shall see - the piece is also, in these great times, even more "remarkable" than it is "unremarkable."

But we can begin by noting that, looked at in one way, it is "unremarkable" because its gist is simple and, one might think, obvious: that the American government should do today, with the threat it currently is attempting to deal with, just as it did during the Cold War. And what did Americans do in the Cold War, daddy?, you may well ask. The answer is: just about everything. But in order to have the ability, and will, to do just about everything, the American government, which had treated Soviet Russia as an ally during World War II, had to put away that temporary (and justified) alliance, and begin to get a more reasonable idea of what the Soviet Union was all about. Two decades of warnings from Russian émigrés had done little. The Comintern had been most effective in blunting Western opposition, and then along came Mr. Hitler with his crazed invasion of the Soviet Union, his greatest error of tactics and timing, and the Soviet Union was, in the American view, off to the races as our ally.

But then came the peace, or the haggling over what the post-war settlement would look like. Franklin Roosevelt was not quite as suspicious as Churchill of the Soviets, and unfortunately it required acts of obvious aggression - the Red Army entering, and not leaving, the countries of Eastern and Central Europe - for the Americans to finally get the point. But once they got the point, there was no further wavering on this side of the Atlantic, among those who were in the government, being our leaders and not merely "taking a leadership role." During the 1930s there had been a series of defectors from the Soviet Union, given little attention, but after World War II new defectors, some even from the KGB, appeared in the West, and they were joined by large numbers of people who had, in the turmoil of the war and post-war periods, managed to escape from the new satellite nations or, in some cases, from the Soviet Union itself. And some of these people had even fled Europe just before the war, one step ahead of the Nazis and, as it turned out, two steps ahead of the Communists who would follow the Nazis. Such names as Richard Pipes, Adam Ulam, Czeslaw Milosz, Leopold Labedz, come to mind.

[...]


It's quite a story, and no doubt Engerman, who has written that history of that story, was struck by the contrast between what the Americans did then, and what they are so singularly failing to do now: to make use of similar refugees from the world of Islam, including those who, while not Muslim, have a native command of the relevant languages - Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and so on. These should be supplemented by the subsidized creation of a homegrown cadre of experts on Islam who, being well-prepared in the ideology of Islam, will be immune to personal charms radiating from individual Muslims (think of the effect of Ahmad Chalabi on various members of the Bush Administration).

Europe realized that it had to learn a good deal about Communism, and Russia, and the way the Soviet system worked. And so it did. For once the Soviet Union, and smiling Joseph Stalin, our World War II ally, had their measure taken. The government remained steadfast in its correct understanding that the Soviet Union was a mortal enemy of the West, that it would try, through every means at its disposal, to undermine the position of the West, not least through a worldwide propaganda effort, in which "Peace Festivals" and "Youth Congresses" would play their part, and Soviet agents would find many, especially in the Communist parties of the West, who would act as apologists and agents for the Soviet Union and its polices, foreign and domestic.

And thus, says Engerman, just as the history of Communism in theory and practice, and Russian history and literature and culture, and Soviet-Area studies (including all the member-republics back in the USSR), including relevant languages, were all subsidized and promoted by the American government. For all of them constituted aspects of the problem.

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Engerman suggests that now the American government should go and do likewise, that is, imitate its former self. He suggests that this new field be called "Jihadology," a term that I think many will find so rebarbative, and comical, that they won't want to use it. And there really is no need to use it, for we can talk about "study of Jihad" or, if we are truly daring, create "experts on the ideology of Islam" or "experts on the doctrine of Islam" and other - or sometimes the same - "experts on the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslim peoples." Might such people not be called, simply, "students of Islam"? Apparently that will not do for some. Perhaps the proffered term "Jihadology" will at least focus attention on the word - on the duty - of Jihad, and that would be a good thing.

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The word-wars can be fought later. But those who come to JW know just how obvious, how "unremarkable," Engerman's suggestion is. Think of how many dozens of times, at this website, the point has been made that unless Islam is studied, unless the texts of Islam - Qur'an, Hadith, Sira - are read and understood, unless the attitudes that arise naturally from the tenets of Islam, and the atmospherics of societies suffused with Islam analyzed, the flailing about, the endless gullibility in dealings with Muslims will continue. See those who rule Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, and how they intend to extract even more tens of billions from the Americans. We shall continue to have the squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, that has been such a dismal feature of the response, so far, to all that has happened since the attacks of 9/11/2001, which ought to have merited a response with a lot less baby-huey tromping around, and a lot more thought and cunning, exploiting every pre-existing fissure within the Camp of Islam, and attempting to create the conditions that will force at least the most advanced Muslims to recognize all the ways in which the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of their own societies are a result of Islam itself.

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Why is Engerman's plumping for the encouragement of a field he calls "Jihadology," then, "remarkable"?

Because it is an achievement to state the obvious these days: to note that there is no discernible American effort to analyze the ideology of the enemy - an ideology which we will demurely pretend is limited to just a few, those who believe in "Jihad" and whose view of the world can, therefore, be understood by those well-versed in "Jihadology." And it is all the more "remarkable" to do this not on the web, but in the pages of one of the mainstream foreign-policy journals. It is a sign that things are moving. The ice is melting. Those who have for so long remained impervious to the idea that they have a responsibility to study, and to encourage others to study, the ideology of Islam (for that is what "Jihadology" means, what it synecdochically stands for), are losing out. They are having to recognize, at long last, that every other explanation or excuse has been held out and found wanting -- such as those various "root causes" which were initially identified with poverty or joblessness or Western foreign policy, all in order to delay the day when those who presume to protect us would have to grapple with the texts and tenets of Islam, not only a religion but a Total Belief-System, and one with a hold on the minds of its most brainwashed adherents akin to that of totalitarian political doctrines, Communism or Nazism.

The appearance of Engerman's piece in such an establishment setting indicates that not everyone can remain impervious to the obvious forever, even among those heretofore so willfully insistent on refusing to look into the ideology of Islam. Could it be that the days of the banana-peel slip-and-sliding up and down those corridors of power at long last coming to an end?