Understanding our Enemy

I normally don’t pay much attention to aging, eccentric primary candidates who are polling within the margin of error of having absolutely no support. Something Ron Paul said in an RNC debate this past May though has had me thinking–not because he was in anyway right or persuasive, but because I’ve heard too many of my friends spat off the same, fourth-grade Michael Moore argument regarding the most important event of our lifetime: 9/11.

Moderator: Congressman, you don’t think [our non-interventionism] changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?   

Paul: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor.

Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. [...]

Moderator: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

Paul: I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. [...]

Rudy Giuliani: Wendell, may I comment on that? That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.

Moderator: Congressman?

Paul: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.

 

My only question for Congressman Paul is, “Have you read why they attacked us?”  Yes, in his interview after the debate with Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, he pointed out the three anti-interventionism reasons for 9/11 as found in an October 2001 video recorded by Osama bin Laden: “the occupation with our military troops of their holy land in Saudi Arabia, bombing of a Muslim country for ten years, [and] putting on sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of people.”  It seems to me that the Congressman is being the revisionist he often criticizes his opponents of being.  These three reasons repeated ad nauseum are ones which, to an extent, support his paradigm (albeit a paradigm without a sound policy foundation), but leave out the vast majority of Osama’s reasoning—not to mention, all the ways we could have supposedly avoided 9/11 and avoid future attacks–as mentioned in his 2002 letter to the American people.

Congressman Paul and his supporters ask us to read Osama’s reasoning behind 9/11 and use it as a means to gauge whether or not we bear any responsibility in 9/11; we as an educated electorate need to ask Congressman Paul to qualify this statement in light of everything al-Qaeda has said regarding 9/11.  Reading Osama’s letter has done nothing more than convince me that this whole idea of a self-inflicted tragedy is nothing more than a pol’s sad misunderstanding of international affairs, and his supporters’ dog-like obedience to a dying campaign.

Listed among the reasons we were attacked which Congressman Paul forgot to mention are:

• We support the Jews in their unjust occupation of Palestine, who hold onto this antiquated notion that it is they, not the Palestinians, who are “inheritors of Moses,” and the rightful occupants of the Holy Land;
• We caused “the blood pouring out of Palestine”;
• We have prevented the jihadists from instituting Sharia law in their countries;
• We “steal” their oil at “paltry prices”;
• We elected our infidel leaders;
• We are immoral;
• We brought AIDs to Africa; and
• We have created and inculcated a community where freedoms and democracy exist for white Americans alone.

Even scarier and more telling are their demands of us to avoid future attacks:

• Convert to Islam (“Complete submission to [Allah’s] Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad”);
• Replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law;
• Weaken the control of the Jews over our economy and media, and end our support of Israel (and other nations); and
• Get out of the Middle East (“Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.”)

Bin Laden even goes so far as to tell us, “Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge.” He’s telling us there’s nothing we can do to stop them until every knee bows before Allah!  If our actions in anyway incited 9/11—which neither Paul nor his supporters seem to be able to muster the guts to say sans doublespeak and obtuse analogies—then that logically means there must have been a course of action by which we could have avoided 9/11. Responsibility necessitates a plausible and unpursued means to having avoided the end result.  Does cowtowing to Islamic and Shariah law really sound compatible with our national identity?  The root of our misunderstanding of the conflict is a failure to understand Islamic eschatology.  Capitulation will not bring an end to this conflict, and neither will appeasement on any level. There is nothing we as a nation can do apart from complete subjugation that will bring an end to this East/West schism because Islam subscribes to a works-based eschatology. Whereas our end of days begins when Jesus comes like a thief in the night, theirs (the Qiyamah) begins when they have reached a certain achievement. Islamic eschatology states that the Qiyamah will come about when the entire world is subjugated to the rule of Islam. (Notice, “subjugated to,” not necessarily “followers of.”) Islam teaches that there will come a day when the entire world is controlled by and subject to the divine rule of Allah, and it is the role of Muslims to help bring about that day. That is the end game of Islam.

Backtrack a few centuries and we see that the world was moving rapidly towards the rule of Allah. Around the turn of the first millennium, the Middle East was the center of science, philosophy, medicine, and the arts. Lords from near and far came to Baghdad for its immense wealth of material and immaterial goods.  A thousand years ago, the Middle East was the center of the world, and Islam was its driving force…but what now? Islam is a growing religion, yes, but for the most part confined and politically marginalized outside of the Middle East/NAMESTAN region. How can they conquer foreign powers–namely the United States–and move them towards subjugation to Allah, doing their part to bring about the Qiyamah? They cannot impose a blockade, the way we did against Cuba–they don’t have the international leverage. They cannot outspend us militarily, the way we did to end the Cold War–they have neither the money nor the infrastructure, not to mention the unity.   They cannot bring us to our knees with the threat and use of superior weaponry, the way we did in WWII–no matter how many WMDs they do or do not have, we and our allies have more.  They cannot even wage a true war against us, the way conventional wars have been fought for millennia–see previous reasons. The only means of bringing about that day, the jihadist movement believes, is to scare and terrorize the world into following the rule of Allah. They can’t make our economy tank via embargoes, but they can make the Dow reflect people’s fears to invest in the longterm or just return to business as usual. They cannot bankrupt us in a Reagan-Gorbachevesque blinking contest, but they can scare other countries away from investing in the US Dollar. They cannot wage open war on battlefields with conventional weapons, but they can turn our office complexes into battlegrounds and our airliners into weapons. They can bring us under the rule of Allah, but it is only through fear that they have any power. The bringing about of the return of Allah is more important to the jihadist movement than international credibility or the lives of women and children infidels. This eschatology permeates Osama’s letter to us, and it is the ideology we are fighting against.

We in America have defined members of such movements in many terms: fundamentalists, progressives, radicals, literalists, heretics, etc. I think it’s interesting to see what Osama himself labels his movement: “The Nation that desires death more than you desire life.”

May we have the fortitude to prove him wrong.