A measured approach to radical Islam

THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN OCTOBER OF 2001

This is an email in reply to another FUSN member "Pete". Passages from the email I was replying to are in quotes.

"I am puzzled why some of us so faithfully point out deficiencies of the U.S.A and equally faithfully neglect to point out what is so good about the U.S.A that so many from outside our borders would like to live here."

Against the backdrop of a general cultural perception that the US is great and always has good intentions, critics naturally want to say the part that isn't being said: that the US in its foreign policy is often very self-interested. Foreign policy and domestic policies can be quite different. There's no conflict between wanting to enjoy the fruits of an empire domestically while also wishing it would treat subject peoples more humanely. The Roman and British empires come to mind. British subjects in India could reasonably want to both move to Britain and end British rule inIndia.

"I am puzzled as to why some of us cannot disentangle what we must do to become a more ethical player in the world from what we must do to defend ourselves against lethal enemies."

I think the crux of the disagreement is here. For the moment let's set aside every moral consideration and take a hypothetical amoral goal only: to make life as safe and pleasant as possible for (non-Muslim) Americans, whatever the cost to anyone else. Very harsh actions (like expelling all Muslims from the US or slaughtering them elsewhere in the world) will get in the way of that: the outrage this would cause will either put us in constant physical danger, or we will have to drastically curtail any mixing with other parts of the world (which would lead to a drop in trade and a big sag in our economy and standard of living). It may be true that Radical Fundamentalist Islam has strong currents that want us dead, and it may be true that they have power to cause us considerable harm. But their power is far from limitless, and in the wake of September 11 we have taken countermeasures to make large-scale attacks on us much harder.

I could be wrong, but I think the main reason people bring past self-interested and cruel US foreign policy actions into the debate is not to paralyze us. One purpose is to point out that since we have messed things up in the past, we should be suspicious that we are messing things up again, and scrutinize the Bush policy very closely. Perhaps even more important is to point out that anti-American sentiment elsewhere in the world is a reasonable reaction that reasonable people will have. You stated in an early post, Pete, that you didn't particularly care to understand why the fundamentalists hated us. I disagree on moral and spiritual grounds, but I also disagree on purely amoral grounds of self-interest, which is the point I will take up here.

Restricting our attention to Islam, I think a good model is that there is a broad range of sentiment. At the left extreme are some who idolize America, toward the middle are some who respect and understand us even if they are envious of what we have, a little further along are those who don't like what has happened to their world and think we have a lot to do with it, more to the right are those who choose freely to attend rallies and shout anti-American slogans, and then further along are those who might turn a blind eye to those plotting terror against the US, and finally are those who actually call for, organize, and carry out terror attacks. From our purely amoral perspective, it's not at all clear to me what to do. I have a strong hunch that if there are thousands in the last group, and we start killing them and many innocents too, then many of the millions who shout anti-US slogans might be moved to terrorism so we then have swelled the last group to tens of thousands. I care about this very much. I would like to see a sort of "Muslim opinion poll", where we can describe various US actions and see how various Muslims would react. Actions that outrage large numbers are almost certainly a bad idea. It's possible that money is the scarcest resource, so we could have solved our problem best without killing anyone at all. If we hadn't killed anyone, it's possible that some significant number of moderate Muslims would have been willing to infiltrate the radical groups as spies and give us the vital intelligence we need to thwart their plans.

Bringing ethics back in, it is just possible (he said slyly) that if we had a strong ethical basis to our foreign policies and combined that with a deep understanding of what goes on in the minds of various groups of Muslims, the culture of hatred against us would eventually dry up.

"I am puzzled by the so-called peace demonstrations in the U.S.A which have a kind of flower-power or naive quality for me. I certainly understand and sympathize with the humaneness behind such demonstrations, but they just don't work for me. Were the demonstrations to occur in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, to ask the governments of *those* countries to desist from violence, I'm not sure how many of the demonstrators would survive to demonstrate again. What *is* permitted (or governmentally orchestrated) in those countries are demonstrations *for* violence and hate, especially (maybe only) if directed at the U.S.A. or Israel."

I'm not sure what the relevance of this is. Should we suspend civil liberties because other societies don't have them? I hope not. Should we voluntarily refrain from criticizing our government? Until some foreign army threatens to invade our soil, I don't see any reason to even think about it. Popular will is felt even in repressive societies, as the governments of Egypt, Algeria, and Pakistan are finding out. The popular will there seems to be much more anti-US than the governments.

"I just don't understand how many wake-up calls we need."

I don't think the US government needs any wake-up calls. Some pacifists and people who want to proceed with caution may not be fully informed, but some hawks are also ill-informed, and that doesn't invalidate anyone's views.

"There is a world view, Radical Fundamentalist Islam, which has arrived on the world stage, and it is mortally incompatible with every humane culture or work-in-progress for a humane culture. Imperfect as our American culture is, it needs to be defended, and I see the the best way to defend it is by destruction of those who adhere to Radical Fundamentalist Islam."

It's possible, though I doubt it very much. It is very hard to kill ideas and belief systems, especially ones that have already shown they have widespread appeal. Killing those who espouse the beliefs hasn't worked in the past. I think our best bet is to crack down on preparations for terror itself where we can, find a balance between a level of terror attacks we can tolerate and a level of security we can tolerate, address legitimate grievances from around the world, but mostly wait for the conditions of the world to change. Like many of us, I grew up in a world where the US/USSR Cold War defined the landscape of international relations. It was very hard for us to see how this competition between two nuclear-armed states could ever resolve itself in a peaceful fashion. And despite Russia's current woes, it did resolve itself without a single battle or nuclear explosion. Those who advocated we "wake up" and risk a nuclear confrontation with the USSR turned out to be very wrong.