<<Previous -- Table of Contents -- Next>>

ISLAMISM AND THE ARAB WORLD

From Berlin to Baghdad
FOUAD AJAMI

... Soviet power seemed at its zenith in the 1970s. The cause of freedom was embattled-Jean-Franc;ois Revel said a "totalitarian temptation" was in the air. Soviet troops and their proxies were deployed in Vietnam, Cuba, Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, etc. A nativist revolution had plunged Iran, America's "pillar" in the
Persian Gulf, into a new darkness, and in affluent Western Europe a willful Euro-Comrnunism had resonance all its own.

It was against this dismal background that Ronald Reagan had risen. He may not have known much about the foreign world, he may not have always been a master of his brief-the details and the execution and the discipline were supplied by his gifted collaborator, Secretary of State George Shultz-but he trusted his own instincts. He had his feel for history's march, his faith in human freedom. He had recoiled from all the talk about America's decline. He had boundless belief in the American mission in the world. "I do have a strategy," Reagan said after one detailed briefing on the challenge of the Soviet Union: "We win, they lose!"

He was to be vindicated .... In Afghanistan, the last battle of the Cold War, the Soviet imperial thrust was broken. American weapons and American will, Saudi money, a Pakistani sanctuary, and a ragtag army of volunteers from the wider world of Islam broke the Soviet will. (We thought well of these volunteers then,
they were freedom fighters, the mujahideen, and we nicknamed them "the mooj" in affection.)

It would stand to reason that 45 years of vigilance would spawn a desire for repose. The disputations of history had ended, we came to believe. Such was the zeitgeist of the '90s, the Nasdaq era, a decade of infatuation with globalization. [However, t]his wasn't quite a time of peace. Terrorists were targeting our
military installations and housing compounds and embassies. A skiff in Aden rode against one of our battleships. But we would not give this struggle the label-and the attention-it deserved.

A Harvard academic had foreseen the shape of things to come. In 1993, amid this time of historical and political abdication, the late Samuel P. Huntington came forth with his celebrated "Clash of Civilizations" thesis. With remarkable prescience, he wrote that the end of the Cold War would give rise to civilizational wars. He stated, in unadorned terms, the threat that would erupt from the lands of Islam .... The young jihadists who shattered the il1usions of an era practically walk out of Huntington's pages. We had armed the boys of the jihad in Afghanistan. They came to a conviction that they had brought down one infidel empire, and could undo its liberal rival ....

Once again, there arises the question in our midst of whether political freedom, broadly conceived, can and ought to be taken to distant lands. In the George W. Bush years, American power and diplomacy gave voice to a belief in freedom's possibilities. A different sentiment animates American practice today.

For the peoples of Islam, the question can be squarely put: Will they tear down their walls in the manner in which the people of Central and Eastern Europe tore down theirs? The people of Islam are thus sorely tested. They will have to show their own fidelity to liberty. Strangers with big guns and ample means can ride into
their midst with the best of intentions and skills, but it is their own world, their own civilization, that is now in history's scales.

(Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2009)

Top of the Page

<<Previous -- Table of Contents -- Next>>