A long comment about Islam and terrorism and the rest of it.

What on *earth* did you say to get the Other Barnett so riled up. Goodness gracious!

I’m a Hindu. I’m pretty much equally dazed and confused by all of the Monotheisms. This “I’M RIGHT YOU’RE WRONG” thinking about religion is quintessentially Un-American. This is supposed to be a country in which the nature of your religious beliefs is your own business, and that foundational agreement to disagree is critical to our interface with the Muslim world.

Let us consider the venerable Treaty of Tripoli (1796)

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/treaty_tripoli.html

So that’s the first part. Whatever people want to say about Islam from their own personal perspective, let them, but this is not the Crusades with a Christian country on one side and a Muslim country on the other. We’re fighting these guys for reasons which have nothing at all to do with religion on either side, and everything to do with political self-determination.

Should the Muslims be free to live under Muslim theocracies if they choose to?

Of course. If a group of people vote for a theocratic government because they wish to live under those laws, let them. Is force, civil war, revolution an acceptable way for power to change hands to a theocracy? Maybe – certainly the US has it’s fair share of dictators who were considered allies and friendly powers over the years.

So this is not about religion.

It’s about a political group using religious language to try and achieve a political end: a Sharia-based “superstate”, the Ummah, a sort of Muslim European Union.

But that’s not the same as a religious war. The distinction is that within Islam there is a “constitution” as well as a religion. Sharia is a *system of Law* and the primary motivation of a lot of the Fundamentalists is that they want to live under that system of law **as a political choice, not just a religious one.**

This is something that gets lost in the simple minded-rhetoric about Islam a lot, but there’s actually a sophisticated and coherent political philosophy in there, and it’s got a lot more influence on the current situation than people thing. Sharia as a nation-state level legal system, if you include the Islamic Finance sections, is about as livable as many other national legal / political codes. It’s not some kind of abomination. It’s a code of law, and people did just fine under it for century after century, including the Jews who were often far better off under Muslim rulers than Christian ones.

What does Osama want? He wants his chosen political viewpoint to be dominant in Saudi Arabia, and he can’t get there with us interfering in Saudi internal affairs to keep the oil in the hands of a sympathetic regime. He also can’t get it because of the bad blood between the folks in the region and Israel.

But if Osama was an anarchist, would his actions change any? No. It’s the same set of tactics any small revolutionary group would use – the Anarchists of Europe are probably the closest historical parallel. Invading countries would not have freed us of the anarchists. Over-reacting to them, however…

It’s not religion, it’s just politics, with religion being used to get the troops moving. The Ummah – the “Muslim Superstate” is a very close parallel to the Holy Roman Empire back in the day and, I think, equally unlikely to be a major modern military force even if the Islamic Fundamentalists succeed in rolling over Saudi Arabia to create it. Muslims have proven to be perfectly able to keep their heads level when in possession of nuclear weapons – witness Pakistan – and yes, a new era of Mutually Assured Destruction would be awful – but if we were fast on our feet with the diplomacy, even a fundamentalist Saudi might be kept free of nuclear weapons.

Seriously. It’s not unthinkable. Pakistan has bombs, and nobody’s used them. So at that point, it’s not that Muslims are inherently unstable as nuclear powers. What’s going on is simply not that simple.

Frankly, we could simply have ignored these Al Queda more or less completely and still come out ahead by a massive margin. 9/11 should have been treated as a matter for Interpol and special forces rather than as a major foreign policy event.

The mistake we made was that we involved nation states in fight against non-nation state actors.

Invading countries is no way to handle non-state actors.

Death from above, in various appropriate forms, is.

Ask yourself how Mossad would have handled 9/11 if it had happened in Israel. That’s probably what we should have done. And there would be no “Global War On Terror” – there’d be three or four or five hundred dead guys shot in the back of dark alleys, and generally life would go on without us breaking the bank fighting wars against states that are largely irrelevant to terrorism.