The enemy's war of menace

Shelby Steele:

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... it was out of this sense of invisibility, this feeling of having fallen out of history, that certain Middle Eastern countries found a way to play the ingénue once again. They would not compete with or seduce the West; they would menace it.

Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace. It empowers those who, but for menace, would languish in the world's disregard. The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history. And they are greatly loved for this. If their achievements follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing. Worse than evil is invisibility.

So, in the Middle East, America has gone to war not against Islam but against menace as a formula for power--menace as the force that brings the First World in toe to the Third, and that makes bargaining between the two inevitable. Whether the issue is an obsession with nuclear weapons or terrorism in London or assaults against Israel, menace is the power that draws the West backwards into engagement with otherwise forgotten parts of the world. Iran cannot produce a digital camera or a Ferrari but, through menace, it can affect the balance of power in the world. We in the West, and especially America, then, are at war with menace--the indulgence of evil for strategic advantage--because today it is the power that most compromises us.

And yet Americans are also at war in the Middle East with our own fate as the world's singular superpower. Our sacrifice is more in proportion to our responsibility as a superpower than to our survival as a nation. We fight menace in Iraq and yet we know that complete victory there will only make us into colonialists, and thus expand our level of responsibility even further. So we fight a little against victory even as we fight for it. At the beginning of this war we delivered the "shock" but not the "awe," and then as the insurgency developed, we made a kind of space for it, almost as if we believed it had a right to fight us. Victory threatens us with the obligations and moral stigma of empire.

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For every reason, from the humanitarian to the geopolitical to the military, Iraq is a war that America must win in the hegemonic, even colonial, sense. It is a test of our civilization's commitment to the good against the alluring notion of menace-as-power that has gripped so much of the Muslim world. Today America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because we are a powerful bully but because we don't fully accept who we are. We rush to war as a superpower protecting the world from menace, then leave the battle before winning as a show of what, humility? We confuse our enemies, discouraging them one minute and encouraging them the next.

Could it be that our enemies are really paper tigers made formidable by our unceasing ambivalence? And could it be that the greater good is in both the idea and the reality of American victory?

The answer is clearly yes to both. Our enemy is one who wants to coerce the world into accepting its weird religious beliefs. Their willingness to coerce the world is without inhibition. Their strategy is to openly violate the rules of war and the Geneva Conventions. That is how they project menace. It is not an accident that they also bully and brutalize women when they have the opportunity. That is who they are and they believe that brutality can cow dissent and opposition to their weird ideas.