(Afghanistan and Iraq are only the beginning of a “War on Radical Islamic Fundamentalism”)

To believe that the current U.S. Military action in the Mid-East is unjust one has to believe that (1) 9-11 was an isolated criminal event and NOT, as the U.S. and Britain insist, an act of military aggression by all the countries that funded, harbored and aided various terrorist organizations and (2) that there is no credible threat to the West from fundamentalist Islam.

Both of those assumptions are, not only wrong, but dangerous.

The attacks on America on 9-11 were organized, well-financed attacks by the forces of fundamentalist Islam and the nations that have supported it against what they consider “the Zionist, Imperialist and decadent West.”


The History of Pan-Islamacism


Paul Berman wrote a great article on Sayyid Qutb (Kuh-Tahb), the founding philosopher of al Qaeda in March 27th, 2003’s Sunday, New York Times Magazine. Qutb’s book, “In the Shade of the Q’uran” is the basis for fundamentalist Islam and pan-Islamacism. According to Qutb, the Muslims discovered the scientific method, but it was stolen by European barbarians during the Crusades. The scientific method allowed Europe to rise ascendant and impose their barbaric schism between the physical and the spiritual, a split that goes back to the ancient Greeks. This schism that separates one’s spirituality from one’s actual or real life, is deeply offensive to Qutb and his followers. In fact Islam acknowledges no such split. To a Muslim, one’s physical life is an expression of one’s spiritual life, not something separate and apart.

The attacks of 9-11-01 were part of a larger Pan-Islamacist plan of attack on America, “the Zionist’s protector.” Islamic fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and with that comes a hatred for America and England, the two Western nations most connected to Israel.

According to Qutb, the Muslim’s hate for the Jews is relatively new, starting with the “Hebrew invasion of Palestine,” but the Islamic-Christian hate is deeper and more fundamental.

Qutb, who visited the U.S. in the late 1940’s while attending the Colorado State College of Education, railed against the schism between the spiritual and the material that exists in the West until his death in 1966. Sayyid Qutb saw the U.S. as extremely barbaric and decadent because of its insistence on separating one’s spiritual life from one’s physical life. Islam views the physical life as a mere manifestation of one’s spiritual life. In Qutb’s view, Christians who compartmentalize their spiritual concerns separate and apart from their greater material lives are an abomination.

Moreover, Qutb claimed that the Christian Crusaders had stolen the rightful legacy of the Muslim world by stealing the scientific method from them. Sayyid Qutb never makes clear how an idea could be “stolen” in any physical sense, but the charge permeates his works and indicts Christendom and the West in the eyes of all his followers.

For centuries the Arab world has seen the “barbaric Christians” rise ascendant on their stolen legacy and have waited for their chance to take back their rightful place as leaders of the world. They’d mistakenly sided with the Axis powers in WW I and WW II with devastating and embarrassing consequences, but now with the Clinton debacles in Mogadishu and Haiti they saw a new opportunity.

With Osama bin Laden (a former student of Sayyid Qutb’s brother Mohammed) leading the Pan-Islamacist al Qaeda group, they were emboldened by America’s apparent refusal to take on any significant American casualties. These two incidents, coupled with America’s pulling out of Iraq in 1991 without moving on Baghdad proved to al Qaeda and bin Laden that America was “a paper tiger.” America was, in their eyes, prime for the taking.


A Fatal Mistake


In the wake of 9-11 everything changed for both the Pan-Islamacists and Pan-Arabists. None of them believed that the U.S. would really go into Afghanistan until it happened and even at the start of that campaign, they didn’t believe the U.S. could effectively operate within the harsh terrain of Afghanistan.

This turned out to be a huge underestimation on their parts. The Taliban and al Qaeda relied on nature to defend them from the most sophisticated weaponry known to man and they were routed.

In Iraq, the defiant Baathist regime there refused to believe that this American President, “a shell of his father,” in their eyes, would do anything more than his predecessor, Bill Clinton did, perhaps lob a few Patriot missiles into the Iraqi desert.

Saddam Hussein continued to fund terrorism from Iraq and maintained terrorist training camps within the country, even while he played with UN weapons inspection teams (bugging their rooms, leading them from one empty site to another). So confidant was Saddam of America’s unwillingness to attack Iraq, that when G W Bush gave him a forty-eight hour deadline to either leave Iraq or fully comply with Resolution 1441, in the third week of March, 2003, Saddam replied that Bush leave his country instead.

The fall of Iraq has hit the Arab world hard. Arab news outlets like al Jazeera and Abu Daabhi TV had shown Coalition forces prisoners of war, downed helicopters as proofs that Iraq was repelling “these new Crusaders.” When Baghdad fell within three weeks, many in the Arab world were crushed, their faith in their news outlets irreparably shaken.

Apologist’s keep claiming that “no WMDs have been found,” while the U.S. continues to examine dozens of suspicious chemical and nuclear sites and at least two mobile biological labs. It took eighteen months after the first Gulf War to ascertain what weapons the Iraqi’s held, it’ll probably take at least that long to confirm the current sites either way. So can we, while dozens of sites are under investigation, say that “no WMD exist?” Of course not! At best, all we can say is that, “At this point the evidence is being evaluated.”


What next?


Those opposed to America’s current military intervention in the Mid-East complain, “That this will only exacerbate the threat of “the rogue states” like Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea.” This assumption has already been proven false as both North Korea and Syria have made serious concessions in the wake of America’s move on Iraq.

Bill Bennett recently made clear what America is up against. In Bennett’s view, “America is up against the forces of fundamentalist Islam, a force that controls the minds and hearts of between 100 and 300 million people worldwide.” America doesn’t have to fight every one of these people, but it does have to eradicate that poisonous ideology if there is to be anything close to a stable peace.

Opponents of military intervention also point to fears for WW III – an Armageddon type conflict between “The Eastern Coalition” (China, France, Germany, Southeast Asia, Pakistan, most of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic World) against the “Western Coalition” (the U.S., the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain, Eastern Europe, Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Canada, South & Central America)” Again, the current military action in Iraq has enhanced America’s standing in the world, not threatened it.

The Post-Saddam Iraq may well eventually divide up into three smaller nations – a Kurdish state to the north, a central Sunni state and a southern Shiite state. One thing’s for sure, the U.S./U.K. coalition will do their best to make sure that France, Germany and Russia’s former oil deals forged with the Baathis Iraq will be scuttled and that China’s ties to Islamic extremism also be cut.

That is the only way that Islamic fundamentalism can be defanged without further and massive bloodshed.