There never was any doubt — at least for most American observers — where the heart of the enemy was during the half century of The Cold War. From its beginnings about 1948, the direction and much of the enemy’s resources were centered in the Moscow Kremlin.
That is not the case with The War on Terror, of course. The enemy’s direction and resources are diffused — ironically, there is no Caliphate, no transnational/transregional Moslem hierarchical center many Islamicist radicals say is their goal.
There may not even be one central ideology. Islamicists nominally adhere to both the two great branches of Islam, Sunni and Sh’ia. They sometimes collaborate whatever their differences over the Koran and their early “church”. But intra-Islam violence is prominent, for example, indirectly partly sustaining Pakistan’s Musharraf regime and its collaboration with the U.S. in the face of violent Islamicist internal agitation just as in Iraq it is being fanned to bring on civil war.
One might even posit the Sh’ia-Sunni divide as a fuzzy replica of the Moscow-Beijing split after Stalin’s death. Mao demanded policies which made him more royal than the king, more Stalinist than the Soviet dictator’s heirs. Today Tehran often sounds even more violent than Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda.
After all, fear and enmity of past Persian/Shi’a suzerainty by the Sunni-dominated Arab colonial constructs in the Persian Gulf has been near the center of all post-independence Mideast politics. And in its own way it now lends weight to confrontation of a good part of the world behind the U.S. with a Tehran regime dedicated to building weapons of mass destruction.
Whether Washington can, at least marginally as Nixon-Kissinger tried with Moscow-Beijing feuding during the second Cold War stage, exploit this divergence to fight terrorism remains to be seen.
What is increasingly clear is Washington faces many of the same strategic conundrums — and the poor choices — posed.over the half century before the Soviet Union imploded.
The first set of course, is the use of surrogates by the terrorists to enfeeble the U.S. Just as in the Greek Civil War, the Korean War and Vietnam, you see that phenomenon repeated. Whether you accept growing evidence there was indeed secret collaboration between the supposedly secularist Sadam regime and the Islamic fanatics or you hold the opposite thesis — that the American attack on Iraq was off mark, actually a distraction, and provided new “soft power” for the Islamicists — it is a test for American military and financial strength in the war against the worldwide terror networks.
The Korean stalemate and the Vietnam defeat, whatever their origins, were long term victories for Moscow in its undeclared war against the West. That is why the fate of American efforts in Iraq could dictate a prolongation of the conflict with worldwide Islamicist terrorism as those two wars did with Communism. A victory for the diversionary forces in Iraq would lengthen the struggle against worldwide terrorism by inspiring the nihilists and perhaps providing them with a new base.
The second phenomenon, although more difficult of analysis, is the necessity for the U.S. — even though a far more hegemonic power than in the fight against Communism — to make contradictory alliances. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Middle East. For at the same time Washington pursues a campaign at great cost to create a democratic Iraqi state, it courts regional unrivaled tyrannies. The reason is obvious: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. One of the Islamicists’ principal targets are these same regimes. Their precipitous collapse would be a victory for the Islamicists and further infeeble The War against Terorism, a sample of which we are already experiencing in the Palestine territories.
The third area mirroring earlier struggles [and momentary defeats] is the sometimes covert, sometimes overt, allegiance of elements of the Western community with the enemy’s ideological rationalizations. It is sad to look back now on the long history of flirtation of Western intellectuals with Communism’s professions of commitment to reform, a siren song that seduced so many otherwise intelligent people. Yet one often catches the scent of befuddlement in arguments turning around the current ideological struggle with radical Islam. Too often PC attitudes substitute for clear thinking on problems such as freedom of expression. There is sometimes a disproportionate critique [and equating] of corruption and demoralization in our freewheeling society, or the special treatment for Islamic religious prejudice, the Danish cartoons episode a grim example. [Unknown to a younger generation the term PC originated with the Communists who maligned accomplished artists and intellectuals who refused to follow the Party line by minimizing their accomplishments as “not politically correct”.]
In what President Bush has rightfully promised as a long haul to defeat Islamic nihilism, it might be well to hark back to these problems — as dangerous and fraught with danger as historical analogies always are — for a proper compass to see what lies ahead.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
