Asymetrical history lessons

Victor Davis Hanson:

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In such an asymmetrical war of perceptions, the gruesome death of a single American does more harm to our cause than does the image of a martyred Zarqawi in sensual Paradise with his virgins. For Westerners, death ruins the precious good life; for the topsy-turvy Islamists, death salvages the bad life.

Our rules of engagement are aimed at winning “hearts and minds.” That precludes the age-old formula for such postwar rebuilding: reconstruct only after the enemy has been humiliated and defeated. A Curtis LeMay would have advised leveling Fallujah in April to save the war; we shrug that doing so would surely lose it. Somewhere the ghost of a Thucydides or Hobbes or Churchill might adjudicate our debate in ways that we might not like.

All this the enemy knows and manipulates to its advantage.

The terrorists also understand that their overtly fascistic ideology — intolerance for other religions, execution of the apostate, subjugation of women, killing of gays, and theocracy — will never earn the proper Western revulsion once reserved for a similar reactionary Nazism, since it butts up against the pillar of multicultural tolerance; no non-Western people can be any worse than the present-day West.

Al Qaeda and its followers can’t manufacture a machine gun or design an RPG. No problem — they realize there are enough petroleum-generated dollars floating around in the region, and enough eager arms merchants, to get what they need.

Politically, the Islamists accept that the world detests them — perhaps even the Chinese and Russians. But they also have discovered that much of the world finds them useful. For the Arab Street, macabre resistance to the West offers a vicarious sense of pride, especially if it is cost-free and does not completely forfeit access to Europe or the United States. Aspiring hegemons like the Chinese, or those in decline like the Europeans and Russians, enjoy it when America bloodies its nose, if for no other reason than envy and spite — and the hope that in the future they are given more consultation, befitting their prior status.

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But in the longer-term war, the Islamists have real problems. Their acquisition of weapons is always parasitical and can’t quite keep up with constant Western innovation, whether in the form of drones that take out terrorists sitting in front of their TVs, or anti-ballistic missile systems that might nullify Ahmadinejad’s nuclear blackmail.

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Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism, something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and Dubai. Westernization — whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted bare navels on MTV — is insidiously seductive and ultimately subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century.

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There is more. Hanson as always brings clarity to the modern world with his vision of the past. In contrast the enemy's fantasy of the past brings ignorance and mayhem.