By Steve Bolton
As I predicted in detail three years ago in Blood in the Water: America Wins Another Battle While
Bin Laden Wins the War, the decline
of Al Qaeda and the death of its most prominent leader were ephemeral
victories, since a more radical yet competent force was bound to take its
place. That has transpired in a shorter timeline than I expected with the
meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which until a few
short months ago was merely a splinter group of Al Qaeda on the verge of
defeat. It may soon be on the verge of defeat once again, but we can be assured
that the demonic ideals it represents will erupt anew in a more virulent form,
since the intellectuals charged with understanding the phenomenon only have a
superficial understanding of its dynamics – in part because they do not want to
admit the root causes and would be silenced by their fellow Westerners if they
did.
Many foreign policy commentators have taken note of
how skillfully the group has capitalized on political and military conditions
in Syria and Iraq to dramatically turn its fortunes around over the past year,
but almost down to the last man, they miss the broader and deeper trends in
international politics that are enabling the rise of an entire set of
like-minded groups, including Al Qaeda, Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in
Nigeria. They don’t fully grasp the dynamics, in part because there are taboos
against even speaking of them in the Western press - which means that we can be
certain that the underlying causes will never be addressed. ISIS will go down
to defeat sooner or later, but we can be certain that something far worse will
in time take its place. ISIS is akin to a brushfire that the West and its
allies of convenience in the Middle East will probably put out fairly quickly,
because they are now responding in a sufficient (albeit sloppy) manner. What
none of our policymakers appreciates is that the entire region is slowly
turning into kindling, like a forest in the middle of a drought. Unless we
address far deeper and more intractable issues like the Clash of Civilizations,
the Retreat of the West and the decline of orthodox Christianity in The Falling
Away, brushfires like ISIS will continue to multiply until one day, our
firefighters are overwhelmed and they engulf the entire Umma.
From Fringe to Forefront: ISIS and the
Resurrection of the Caliphate
That is the catch-all term for the entire
one-billion-strong international community of Muslims, which ISIS aspires to
bring under one banner. It is not a completely far-fetched idea, given that
most of the Umma (excepting some distant parts of Africa and southeast Asia)
has twice been united into vast empires, first under the Umayyad Caliphate
(661-750 A.D.) and then by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. In 1923, a few
years after the final demise of the latter, radical atheists like Kemal Ataturk
who dominated the new Westernized Turkish government abolished the titular
office of the caliphate, which went back to the first bloody conquests by
Mohammed and lieutenants like Abu Bakr; initially it was an exceptionally
powerful position, which roughly combined the offices of a head of state with
that of the head of the armed forces and the equivalent of a papacy, but by
that point it had been reduced to a mere figurehead. It is critical to note
that this occurred precisely at the high tide of Western influence over the
Third World, when great powers like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Germany, Italy, Russia and the U.S. ruled vast colonies overseas that were home
to most of the world’s Muslims. It was during these few decades when Europe and
its extensions succeeded in partially implanting Western values in many of the
Muslim territories under its rule, including secularism; it is also important
to note that they made no effort to convert them to Christianity, because by
that point most Westerners had already abandoned all but its ceremonial aspects
and lip service to its teachings. The generations of Western leaders who
subjugated and often exploited such colonies mercilessly were almost
exclusively interested in using them for financial gain or as pawns in global
power politics, because by that point our civilization had already succumbed to
a philosophy entirely opposed to Christianity: decadent commercialism and
materialism, combined with enforced secularism.
With the exception of the founding Egypt’s relatively
moderate Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, the first stirring of effective resistance
among the Umma to this completely alien system did not occur until more than 50
years after the demise of the caliphate, when the first mujahedeen began
fighting on the furthest frontiers of Afghanistan against a Soviet-backed
government. Also in the mid-‘70s, the Shah of Iran encountered the first
organized political and religious resistance to his attempts to reengineer his
nation’s culture along Western post-Christian materialistic lines. The mullahs
who criticized them were often tortured by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police,
with the aid of the CIA (which is part of the reason for their deep hatred of America)
but no one in Washington ever expected them to ever take power. In 1979 they
graduated from a curiosity to an international menace when Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini led the Iranian Revolution, which brought the mullahs into power.
Likewise, no one in Moscow expected the mujahedeen to actually threaten the
capital of Kabul by the late ‘70s, let alone defeat the Red Army and force its
withdrawal in 1989. Throughout the 1980s, the official party line in the West was
that these were aberrant cases, brought about by specific local social and
political conditions, or extreme poverty, or misinterpretations of the
teachings of the Shia branch of Islam. Yet the appeal of Islamic
fundamentalists continued to grow until around the turn of the millennium, they
were at least the second-most popular or powerful political force in almost
every Muslim majority country west of Southeast Asia. As I pointed out in The Arab Spring, the NATO Fall, the so-called Arab Spring merely served to bring
fundamentalists to power or the brink of it in states like Libya and Syria
where they were previously weak. The exponential geographic spread and growth
in popularity has occurred alongside a complementary trend towards steady
radicalization. Al Qaeda and the Taliban were anathema to some of the more
moderate mujahedeen they sprang from, and rejected by the last generation of
fundamentalist leaders, like Sudanese ideologue Hasan al-Turabi, Iranian
President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps the most
despicable Islamist guerrilla group of the era was the Armed Islamic Group
(known by its French initials, GIA), which lost the Algerian Civil War
precisely because their brutal tactics violated the first rule of guerrilla
warfare: the side which treats civilians the most humanely is more likely to
gain their allegiance. ISIS is acting upon even more radical views than the
GIA, in the latest manifestation of what I call “Islamic Leapfrog” for lack of
an academic term: each generation of fundamentalists keeps trying to outdo the
last in terms of zealotry. This practically logarithmic trend towards
radicalization has been missed by many professional pundits, but their greatest
failure is not recognizing that this is truly bringing fundamentalists ever
closer to their goal of faithfully imitating Mohammed, who outdid them all in
violent fanaticism.
The caliphate is one of the elements of Islamic
fundamentalism that has now moved to the fore in tandem with its radicalization
and steady spread. A decade ago it was still considered a fringe cause even
among Islamists, but as I have pointed out all along, its restoration is hardly
preposterous. It is unlikely to become reality anytime soon, but the
declaration by ISIS earlier this year that it was claiming the ancient title
speaks to its feasibility and latent appeal among the Umma. The Taliban in
distant Afghanistan, for example, responded by pledging fealty and Boko Haram
and Syria’s rival Jabhat al-Nusra faction with rejoinders announcing their own
mini-caliphates. Less than a year ago, al-Nusra seemed to be the most likely
candidate among the welter of Syrian rebel groups to finally overthrow Bashar
Assad, a secularist who also qualifies as perhaps the most brutal tyrant of the
21st Century; the indiscriminate state terror Assad launched during
the Arab Spring forced the Syrian people first to take up arms merely out of
self-defense, then to gravitate towards the most capable rebel groups, whose
battlefield effectiveness seems to be linearly related to the degree of their
fundamentalism. I did the equivalent of a Master’s thesis in Latin American
counterinsurgency history while finishing graduate school and used that
expertise in The Berlin Solution to the Syrian Conundrum to provide a detailed assessment of Assad’s
scorched-earth strategy, which is chiefly responsible for his own defeat. In
fact, his wanton human rights violation are forcing so much of the Sunni Arab
majority to fight whether they want to or not that his forces are now incapable
of overcoming the rebels, who are still perhaps the most decentralized and
fractious guerrilla fighting force in history. A year later, Assad’s position
is still slipping, thanks to the kind of indiscriminate violence tyrants often
unleash against guerrilla movements – which always inevitably backfires on the
battlefield. The major development has been the emergence of ISIS out of the
welter of rebel groups as the most effective force on the battlefield. This is
surprising, given that many rival factions, including al-Nusra, had united less
than a year ago to expel it from many of its strongholds as a punishment for
tactics so brutal that even Al Qaeda disowned them. The initial insignificance
of ISIS was underlined by the constant turbulence, splits, metamorphoses and
moniker changes it has undergone since its inception in 2004, from Al Qaeda in
Iraq (AQI) to the Mujahedeen Shura Council to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)
to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) and now the Islamic State (IS).[1]
One of the secrets to its comeback from the brink of
obscurity was its retreat across the porous frontier with Iraq, where they were
able to take advantage of widespread grievances among Sunnis in the north and
center of the country against the Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki and its
sectarian agenda. Sunni tribes and disparate rebel groups with incompatible
agendas, like the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party, joined
forces to thrust the government out of northern Iraq. The speed with which
Iraq’s paper army melted away in major cities like Fallujah and Mosul earlier
this year was less of a testament to the strength of ISIS than to the ripening
conditions for revolt among the Sunni population, but ISIS was the most
organized force on the battlefield and therefore in a better position to fill
the power vacuum than any of its putative allies. The national army fled in such disarray that
several hundred million dollars’ worth of equipment paid for by U.S. military
aid since the last Persian Gulf War was basically handed to ISIS on a silver
platter. Unlike Iraq’s paper army, ISIS also had the experience to put its new
arsenal to immediate use - but in this case, after crossing back across the
border again picking off some of Assad’s key bases in the north and center of
the country over the past few weeks. The string of uncanny battlefield
successes has endowed ISIS with a mystique of sorts, which has enabled it to
bleed off thousands of rebels fighting with other rebel factions and become a
global beacon and rallying point for like-minded jihadists across the planet. A
spokesman for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a trustworthy
source of information on the civil war, said in mid-August that ISIS gained
another 6,000 recruits in the previous month alone.[2]
If this trend continues, it will become a self-fulfilling vicious circle in
which Syrian rebels who are fighting merely for survival against Assad and espousing
a milder brand of Islamism will no longer have any choice but to back the only
potential victor – especially after ISIS uses its lion’s share of the recruits
and resources it is draining off from its smaller rivals to force them into
line, subsume them or extinguish them by force. The situation could rapidly
snowball out of control within a matter of months, much like a game of Risk. On
the other end of the battlefield, the Assad regime is on a slippery slope, as
it deserves to be. The more bases that ISIS overruns, the more military
equipment it captures and the greater its prestige becomes, thereby enabling it
to seize more territory; the more ISIS wins, the more dissent mounts among
Assad’s supporters, mainly among the Alawite minority.[3]
There is a real possibility that the retreat will turn into a rout, as ISIS
parlays its battlefield successes and gruesome tactic of beheading captured
soldiers into the aura of an irresistible juggernaut. A few days ago Gen. Essam
Zahreddine promised to bravely defend ISIS’ latest target, the besieged
sections of the desert city of Deir Ezzor, but by fleeing in terror today to
the safety of Suweida with 400 Republican Guards in tow, he may have
unwittingly brought about a stampede that leads to the demise of the whole
Assad regime. All of the Syrian bloggers I have been reading since Assad began
his rampage three and a half years ago are all fixed on the ISIS now, wondering
where it will strike next, including Assad’s nervous supporters. Another factor
in favor of ISIS is its sheer competence. It essentially represents the latest
iteration of a floating army of jihadists that has been moving from one Muslim
conflict zone to another since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan at the end of
1979. Most of the thousands of jihadists who have fought together in these
conflicts have of course been killed in the course of battle, maimed or are now
too old to fight, but the remainder of this polyglot mix of Syrians, Iraqis,
Chechens, Pakistanis, Libyans and dozens of other nationalities have
accumulated more than a decade of battlefield experience. U.S. Special Forces
commanders have expressed dismay at the level of their expertise[4],
which matches some of the intelligent tactics they’ve been employing on the
ground from battle to battle. If they did not know what they were doing, ISIS
might not qualify as the perhaps the first rebel group in history to successfully
fight two rebellions against powers of moderate size simultaneously.
A Throne of Bayonets: ISIS and the
Conservation of Enemies
Nevertheless, ISIS has some serious weaknesses which
will in all likelihood prove to be their well-deserved downfall. In fact, these
countervailing factors are so strong that we can almost count on it, as long as
the West does not fail to amount a serious and competent response to their
reign of terror. Their only real shot for success resides in the possibility
that the leadership of the West will be paralyzed with inaction, or act in the
wrong way by intervening openly on the Shiite side of this regional sectarian
war – which wouldn’t be in our interest anyways, since the alliance between
Iran, Hezbollah, Assad and the Shiite militias of Iraq area also virulently
anti-Western. Given that only 35 percent of Britons surveyed in a recent poll back
airstrikes and are outnumbered by the 50 percent who are positively against it,
we can be certain that we cannot count on anything more than tepid British
support.[5]
Given the abysmal track record of the British and French in Libya and other
foreign conflicts, thanks to the slow dissolution of their military capabilities
dating back to before the onset of World War II, anything more than token
European intervention is simply out of the question. Russia is far more likely
to be menaced by ISIS than the rest of Europe, let alone America, given that it
has large Muslim majority regions like Chechnya and Dagestan that have recently
been wracked by independence battles, as well as some simmering separatist
sentiment in Tatarstan. Yet Vladimir Putin remains fixated on getting back at
America and Western Europe, which have no territorial claims against Russia,
while ignoring ISIS and cozying up to regional powers like China and Iran which
represent tangible long-term threats to Moscow’s national interests. The U.S.
is the only Western power in a position to affect the outcome of the struggles
in Syria and Iraq, yet it has been almost completely devoid of competent
leadership since Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter left office almost a
half-century ago. As I warned back in 2003, the second war against Saddam
Hussein was bound to open up a vacuum that would be filled by Islamic
fundamentalists, which has now come true in the form of ISIS and the Shiite
militias of the south. We essentially shelled out several trillion dollars to
undermine our own security. Now we are compounding the problem by not fighting
when we should, to stop both ISIS and Assad. There have of course been limited
airstrikes, as well as scattered reports of U.S. Special Forces fighting on the
ground in Iraq as we speak - which are probably accurate, given that the
executive branch has routinely done such things for decades to skirt oversight
by the media and Congress.[6]
It may be necessary to fight another major war on the ground in both Iraq and
Syria to prevent an exceptionally hostile new great power from establishing
itself in the Middle East, but given America’s recent track record, we can’t
count on any branch of our government to make sane decisions. We only have a
limited window of opportunity to stop ISIS from establishing itself in both Syria
and Iraq, in which case the entire balance of power in the Middle East will be
in play for a generation to come; after that, it could snowball further into a
threat to Europe. The longer we wait, the higher the price in blood will be,
just as it was when Europe failed to stop Hitler in time.
Time
is of the essence, if we want to exploit one of its primary weaknesses, its
sheer lack of manpower. At the moment, ISIS may be the world's most hardened,
battle-tested and highly motivated force, but there are only 50,000 of them in
Syria[7]
and about 15,000-20,000 in Iraq. That is a pittance compared to the million-man
army Hussein once wielded against us in the Persian Gulf War, or the number of
soldiers that Iran could put in the field against them on behalf of the Middle
East’s most potent military force. On paper, the U.S. can of course also muster
a few million men, but it would financially and politically impossible to wage
another large-scale war in the region, regardless of the consequences for our
interests. As mentioned earlier, however, ISIS is recruiting jihadists from
across the planet and either cajoling or attracting Syrian rebels to their side
so rapidly that this huge deficit in manpower may be overcome within a year or
two; given that the pool they are recruiting from is still largely untapped,
they could continue drawing from it for a long time to come to swell their
ranks. Of course, if ISIS were to succeed in establishing a true state, it
could forcibly recruit its subjects like any other power; it is unlikely that
such a state could be quickly established over the whole of Syria and Iraq, but
it is still worth noting that both countries combined have a total population
of 54 million people. Out of all the substantial obstacles to the rise of ISIS,
this is the one it is most likely to overcome in short order.
Nevertheless, I don’t think they can hang on to their
gains in Iraq, in large part because they were only successful in conquering
all of this territory by cooperating with other groups with disparate agendas.
As time passes it will be easier to sideline some of them whose time has
passed, like the Baathists, but other one-time allies like some of the Iraqi
tribes are likely to turn against ISIS in the long run. This is primarily due
to the sheer brutality of the group, which may force other factions and in time
the common people themselves to defend themselves from ISIS, just as they have
been forced to defend themselves against Assad. ISIS was able to capitalize on
the rebellion engendered by Assad’s own stupid counterinsurgency tactics, but
the use of the same kind of tactics may ultimately spell its downfall. It is
true that the more people they execute, the more people they intimidate, but
also the more people they alienate. Secondly, regardless of whether or not ISIS
accurately represents the teaching of Mohammed, most people calling themselves
Muslim do not like what they stand for. Al-Shabaab has been marginalized
precisely because when it nearly succeeded in taking power in Somalia, it
alienated ordinary Somalis by banning such innocuous pleasures as soccer. Like
the GIA, they may ultimately perish for disregarding the first rule of
guerrilla warfare, which is to never antagonize the civilian population; the
craftiest butchers in history, like Mao Tse-Tung, waited until after they took power to unleash their
reigns of terror. The same blind unleashing of terror upon the civilian
populace was what undermined their previous incarnation as the AQI, in which Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi made himself an object of revulsion by wantonly car bombing
civilians by the thousands without once furthering his military goals or
winning the populace over to Islam. I’ve heard of the ISIS leadership issuing
directives to their subordinates not to bother civilians, but it is apparently
routinely ignored by the rank-and-file, who are simply too bloodthirsty for
their own good; to borrow a phrase from Mick Jagger, their master is “in need
of some restraint.” This same brutality may even serve to motivate their
existing enemies to defend themselves with more intensity, once it becomes
clear that running merely postpones the inevitable confrontation, as it did
with the Nazis a few generations ago. Massacring prisoners of war may indeed terrify
the enemy, as it has apparently done to Gen. Zahreddine and his entourage, but
in the long run it merely serves to harden the resolve of more courageous
enemies; if they’re going to be executed anyways, it only makes sense for
besieged troops to fight till their last drops of blood. In the process, they
will extract more blood from ISIS.
It may be a highly motivated and battle-tested force,
unlike your average run-of-the-mill terrorist group, but ISIS is stupidly
violating one of the cardinal principles of power politics, the Conservation of
Enemies. Any state that unnecessarily multiplies conflict with rivals
simultaneously is simply doomed to fail. Napoleon and Hitler both succumbed to
the temptation when they attacked Russia without finishing off Britain first;
the U.S. repeatedly undermined its own position in the Cold War by needlessly
backing Third World dictators, which forced reformists of all stripes to
embrace or lean towards the Soviets; the Russians are doing it now under Putin,
by engaging in petty quarrels with Western Europe when the true long-term
threats to its security come from its southern and eastern borders. ISIS is not
merely violating the principle, but doing it in a spectacular way, by
simultaneously taking on a list of enemies so long it beggars belief: the
remnants of the dissolving Iraqi army; the Peshmerga; other factions of Kurdish
separatists in both Syria and Iraq; the Assad regime; other Syrian rebel groups;
the U.S. Air Force and Special Forces; Iraqi Shiite militias; various Alawite
militias, Hezbollah and the Iranian Republican Guards, who represent the Middle
East’s strongest military force. They even fought a skirmish with the Lebanese
Army in Arsal. Even if ISIS managed to somehow establish its caliphate against
this vast combination of enemies, they would require a period of
nation-building just to acquire the economic resources and military equipment
to take on other regional targets like Jordan, Lebanon (the two softest targets
within reach) and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; the former targets would bring them
into conflict with Israel, and the latter with the U.S., Europe and possibly even
East Asia, which is now a major competitor for the Middle East’s energy
resources. ISIS is simply too rabid to wait for any of these fruits to fall
into their lap. If they do wait, they take the risk of being tamed, like Iran
has been (to a deceptively slight degree). Either way, they're not going to
gobble up the whole Middle East all at once, and if they did, they would simply
go on the warpath again far too quickly for their own good. Furthermore, they
cannot achieve any of these regional ambitions without papering over their feud
with the Shiites. Regardless of how successful they are in the next decade or
two, they will never succeed in converting the more than 100 million (a very
lowball figure) Shiites to the Sunni version of Islam through military conquest
alone. Yet there is now at least a generation’s worth of bad blood between the
two sects thanks to the recent events in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, which basically
amount to a regional sectarian war. Iran destroyed its own regional ambitions
the day it backed a butcher like Assad against his own people merely out of
nervousness that its land route to Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut; it was a
self-fulfilling prophecy, in which Tehran shot itself in the foot by backing a
secularist adamantly opposed to their own religious ideology, when the
like-minded Sunni rebels fighting Assad originally had much admiration for
Hezbollah and probably would have helped them willingly. Likewise, ISIS has
deepened this feud by labeling Shiites as infidels and deliberately attacking
them. The bad news for them is that there are no more political vacuums to fill
in Iraq; their conquests have stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, precisely
because that is the northernmost edge of the Shiite majority regions of Iraq.
They are out of soft targets, at least in Iraq – which begs the question of how
long it will be before they either expend their strength futilely attacking
harder targets like the southern regions of Iraq and the Shiite shrines there
(which Iran might defend with their full military might). As the old saying
goes, that which is not moving forward is moving backward, and ISIS may find
out the hard way just how quickly things can move backwards in desert warfare.
They exploited it to ascend at an astonishing pace, and they may likewise
dissolve in a fortnight once their long list of enemies puts together a
concerted plan of reconquest. The sooner ISIS is entombed, the better off the
world will be, including the people of Syria and Iraq. Above its crypt should
be engraved the all-encompassing reason for its fall, from the famous quote by
Episcopalian priest John A. Sanford, “Evil eventually overreaches itself and
brings about its own destruction.”[8]
Or perhaps more colorfully, Boris Yeltsin’s famous words of wisdom, “You can
make a throne out of bayonets but you cannot sit on it.”
The Next Iteration of Al Qaeda
The dark cloud in the silver lining here is that an
even more virulent form of militant Islam is guaranteed to emerge from the
wreckage of the Islamic State, for the simple reason that wars are fought first
in the heart and mind and lastly on the battlefield. We are fighting a
spiritual war against the ghost of Mohammed, who continues to counsel
generation after generation of Muslims to do evil things from beyond the grave.
Most of the horrific deeds that ISIS is accused of are specifically commanded
in the Koran – such as the recent crucifixion of two rebels who resisted ISIS
rule and were left on public display in Syrian city of Raqqa. This is exactly
what Mohammed demands in the Koran passage The Table 5:31-5:34: “Those that
make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be
put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate
sides, or be banished from the country.” Likewise, the recent kidnapping of
several hundred Yazidi women as future brides for ISIS soldiers is also
repeatedly legitimated in Koran passages like Light 24:33-34 and The Confederate
Tribes 33:50-62, or worse yet Women 4:24, which permits Muslim warriors to sell
the slave girls they’ve taken as war booty into prostitution. The rough
equivalent of canon law in Islam are the Hadiths, or sayings of the “Prophet,”
which are collected in the six books of the Kutub al-Sittah that all Sunnis
must accept. They are worse than the Koran in terms of brutality, containing
such humanitarian advice from Mohammed on how to hit your wife without
disfiguring her. Of course, it is also riddled with the same plain
authorizations of rape and detailed directions for splitting up war booty, such
as Hadith #2159 in Vol. 2 of Sunan Abu Dawud: “And it is not permissible for a
man who believes in Allah and the Last Day that he uses a slave woman
(sexually) until he confirms she is free of pregnancy. And it is not
permissible for a man who believes in Allah and the Last Day that he sells any
spoils of war until it is divided.” Another is Hadith 2157, which states, “It
was reported from Abu Sa'eed Al-Khudri, that he narrated it Marfu (from the
Prophet) regarding the slaves that were captured at Awtas: 'No pregnant (slave)
shall be touched (sexually) until she gives birth. And no non-pregnant (slave)
shall be touched until she menstruates once.”[9]
That is what the Koran and Hadiths say, and that is
the end of the matter. They should not say it, and I wish they didn’t, but they
do. I have belabored this point in greater detail elsewhere, like The
Inequality of Religions and Mali and the Return of Mohammed, but the Koran is far worse than Mein Kampf – and
just as Western leaders dismissed Hitler’s written words in the ‘30s while
saying many flattering things about how we wasn’t such a bad chap after all,
today they are deliberately squeezing their eyes shut to the content of the
Koran and the sordid life of Mohammed, thereby enabling his successors to gather
strength. Let me easily dispense with the clichéd, canned responses that
Westerners are programmed to respond with, such as the charge that I am taking
such passages out of context. I can’t do that, because the Koran has no context
and rambles like the ravings of a madman, and consists of little but such commands and sloppy thinking.
Another popular counter-attack is to accuse critics of Islam of bias, but that
can’t be true in my case, given that I read it enthusiastically long before I
became Catholic and never expected it to promote such a despicable code of
morality. I once believed all of the cant about how Islam is a “religion of
peace and tolerance” until I actually read it several times over, which very
few of my critics or many hundreds of millions of people who call themselves
Muslims have ever done. Only a fraction of them are familiar with the military
history of how Islam was spread by the sword, battle by battle by Mohammed and
his successors, which is precisely how it came to engulf the entire Middle
East; moreover, like most Westerners who call themselves Christian, few Muslims
actually know what is in their holy book. They are unaware of the fact that
they are only Muslim because their ancestors were subjugated by a degenerate
cult centuries ago, which overran the mostly Christian and pagan populations of
North Africa and the Middle East, expunged the Zoroastrian religion after
overcoming Persia in several battles between 633 and 651, and exterminated
Hinduism from what are now Pakistan and Afghanistan centuries later by brute
force. Critics will often play the card that they have met a few Muslims who
are not jihadists and do not approve of many of their evil deeds, but this is
not admissible evidence; if they do not follow the entirety of Islam, they are
no longer Muslim and have invented their own religion, just as Christians who
cherry pick from the Bible and extra-Biblical sources invent their own
heretical denominations. Nor are imams or secular Western scholars competent
judges of what the Koran consists of, because the viewpoints of both stem
directly from deep-seated biases; in fact, many of the most highly
credentialed, respected Muslim scholars are jihadists, some of whom are
fighting for Al Qaeda and ISIS. Khomeini was perhaps the most esteemed scholar
of the Shiite sect, who was so revered that throngs of ordinary Iranians mobbed
his funeral in such a wave of fanaticism that they accidentally tipped over his
casket. Yet Khomeini wrote a book known as Tahrir al Wasilah, which can be
openly purchased by Shiites in the same way that Catholics can buy the writings
of popes like John Paul II and Francis I – but it contains such unspeakable
advice as this:
“A man can quench his sexual
lusts with a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate.
Sodomizing the baby is halal (allowed by sharia). If the man penetrates and
damages the child, then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her
life. This girl, however, does not count as one of his four permanent wives.
The man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister. It is better for a
girl to marry when her menstruation starts, and at her husband's house rather
than her father's home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a
permanent place in heaven.”
If you have the stomach to read such filth,
Khomeini’s book gets worse. Only Khomeini can say what he meant by such
comments and likewise, only Mohammed has the authority to say what Islam
consists of. That is the only standard of evidence by which we may judge the
Koran; everything else is inadmissible. “Interpretation” does not mean
substituting one’s own meaning, which amounts to a lie, but of discerning the
intention of the duly empowered authorities, which in the case of a book is
usually the author himself. The problem is that we know beyond a shadow of a
doubt exactly how Mohammed himself interpreted the Koran: he and his successors
went on a rampage across the Middle East, looting, pillaging and raping like
barbarians, then converting some of the conquered people by the sword (like the
Zoroastrians) and other groups like the Christians through centuries of
oppression, such as the differential tax rates the Koran calls for on
unbelievers. At some point after capturing the famed library of Alexandria in
642 A.D., his troops burned it to the ground as part of this regional rampage,
thereby robbing mankind of an incalculable treasure trove of ancient knowledge.
The long-term process of radicalization is not making Islamic fundamentalists
less Muslim, but more like Mohammed, a child molesting butcher who openly
admitted taking part in the massacre of 900 Jews and took his own nine-year-old
first cousin as his ninth wife (in addition to slave girls). This mass murderer and pervert unfortunately
acquired the power to force his views on large section of humanity generations
ago and his specter has continued to haunt humanity ever since, as waves of his
demented followers have gone on the warpath periodically ever since. We’re
going to continue to be haunted by his specter until doomsday, unless Muslims
come to the realization that they are only Muslim because they too are the
victims of these ancient crimes, which ISIS and Co. intend to add . We will
only have peace when the Umma freely reads their unholy book, grasps its
sinister origin and voluntarily throws it in the trash where it belongs. All
that I have said above can be proven quite easily, but I will go out on a limb
and speculate about just how sinister that origin really is: the similarities
between the Book of Mormon and the Koran are too uncanny to dismiss, and may
have arisen when Joseph Smith and the False “Prophet” Mohammed both spoke to
whatever fallen archangel is in charge of writing fake holy books. ISIS, Al
Qaeda and anyone else who acts on the contents of such books place themselves
at the service of a demon, thereby damning their souls as badly as any
Christian who fails to act on the Old and New Testaments.
I would single out the Koran as the real root of the
problem, but at a deeper level, it is the moral and material decline of the
West that is enabling Islam to emerge from the grave to haunt the world once again.
The West simply has simply buried its head in the sand and refuses to take note
of the deep-seated causes of Islamic fundamentalism, which include the precipitous
decline of our civilization’s temporal power. As I demonstrate in great detail
in my would-be dissertation, The
Retreat of the West, the set of nations including Europe, Russia and
extensions like North America, Australia and New Zealand peaked in terms of
national power vis-à-vis the Third World around the first few decades of the
last century and have been in steady decline ever since in all ten categories
of national power identified by famed political scientist Hans Morgenthau. The
symptoms of this inter-generational, global shift in the world’s power balance
has manifested itself in innumerable crises over the last century or so,
beginning with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and continuing with the Vietnam
War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
deindustrialization of the West by East Asia and many others I discuss in there
in great depth. One of the most recent manifestations was the erasure by ISIS
of the artificial borders between Syria and Iraq, which Britain and France
imposed haphazardly on their Arab subjects in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of
1916. Foreign affairs specialists are right to point out the temporary
political vacuums in Iraq and Syria that made the rise of ISIS possible, but
they miss the fact that Islamic fundamentalism as a whole is an indicator of
the West’s waning cultural and military influence, which is sweeping away the
artificial Western ideas and institutions implanted a century ago. The Islamic
world is slowly reverting to what it once was prior to the rise of the West a
few hundred years ago, a rival civilization capable of threatening Europe, just
as China is gradually reverting to its ancient role as the master of Asia and
epicenter of technology and international commerce. It is also making possible
the gradual descent of the planet into the “Clash of Civilizations,” the
post-Cold War conflict scenario predicted by political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington.
Western nationalists don’t want to accept this
temporal decline for reasons of hubris, but our leaders are blinded by
something far more blameworthy: a deep religious bias that prevents them from
grasping the reasons for the meteoric rise of both Islamic fundamentalism and
its latest manifestation, ISIS. Temporal power can be but is not necessarily
connected to the moral strength of a nation; Nazi Germany the Soviet Union were
powerful but riddled with moral faults, whereas tiny Ireland and Poland have
historically been weak yet upstanding. In the same vein, the average Latin American
peasant has a great deal more virtue than the average American yuppie. Although
the two trends are not necessarily connected, the West now has the terrible
misfortune of undergoing a decline in national power at the same time it is experiencing
an unprecedented spiritual decline and collapse in morals. The first problem is
due to vast and long-lasting trends in global politics which are difficult to
control, but the latter is a product of our own misuse of free will. I’ve
written at length about the moral decline of the West in The Falling Away,
which outlines a process of decay that has accelerated over the course of
several centuries and has manifested itself in myriad disgraces, like Hitler’s
death camps and the more recent horror of abortion, which has claimed the lives
of 1 billion unborn children in just the last 40 years. I cannot prove here
that the highly detailed ethical and spiritual teachings of the Catholic Church
(as they have been meticulously defined by the papacy and church councils under
specific conditions) are an accurate reflection of God’s will, but it is easy
to demonstrate that the Western world has gradually been rejecting every
element of that standard over the course of the last couple centuries; all it
takes is simple statistics, like America’s 50 percent divorce rate, the
universal acceptance of usurious lending and fornication, and the incredible
gap in wealth between rich and poor, all of which are explicitly banned by
Catholic doctrine. Some of the latest manifestations are gay marriage, the
idiocy of Rush Limbaugh and the cult of personality surrounding Ronald Reagan,
all of which spring from anti-Catholic motives. To this list we can add
legitimation of Islam, the ancient rival of the Catholic Church, which is the
only institution that has ever managed to withstand the spirit of Mohammed.
Invariably, critics of Islam bringing the record of Christianity into the
debate along with all sorts of bigoted and demonstrably false accusations about
the Conquistadors, Galileo, the Inquisition and other such myths. That only
serves to reveal the real motivation of Westerners who cravenly defend Islam:
it is a ruse to attack orthodox Christianity by building up its greatest enemy.
The fact that they don’t even examine their own motivations and merely blurt
out such charges in a predictable manner is a symptom of a breakdown in
rational thought among the Western intelligentsia, which has occurred alongside
The Falling Away. Westerners have likewise been conditioned by their
educational systems and mass media their whole lives to regurgitate these
secularist prejudices without even questioning them, including the overarching
tenet of comparative religion that All Religions Say the Same Thing. There
isn’t a shred of truth to it, which can easily be proved by merely reading
books like the Koran, the Hadiths, the Hindu Upanishads, the Buddhist
Dhammapada and the like. If they resemble each other, it is because we are so
far away from them all; the point of teaching that they are of equal worth is
to accuse them all of being equally worthless, except perhaps as a form of
psychotherapy or out of a strange affectation for hymns and stained glass windows.
The aim of this is to ensure that people only think of the ceremonial trappings
of their faith, while they continue acting day-by-day as if the Almighty Dollar
and the status it brings where what is really important.
This false form of comparative religion is ideal for
a commercial civilization in which materialistic values have taken the place of
religion, in an uncanny imitation of the ancient Syrian worship of Mammon. The
distinguishing mark of the post-Christian West is its embrace of the love of
money, that “very great sin” singled out by Jesus, and the explicit rejection
of such passages as Luke 12:14-21 which warn against accumulating material
goods.[10]
This religion of money colors everything else the West does, including the
forcible teaching of secularist values like comparative religion no matter how
preposterous or demonstrably false they are. You simply can't work in academia
if you do not bow to the secularist party line in every discipline, nor can you
deny the value system openly in the mass media. We can’t even point out the
roots of the problems afflicting Western society, let alone fix them, including
the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. The depth to which materialistic
biases have clouded our judgment is evident in the way political scientists,
historians and others weighing in on foreign policy debates always ascribe
economic motives to America’s foes. If they sprang merely from poverty and
oppression, we would see Nicaraguans and Namibians driving truck bombs into our
embassies, yet we do not. Islamic fundamentalism cuts across all classes; some
of them, like Bin Laden, gave up great riches and comfort in order to martyr
themselves for Mohammed’s demon. That’s also why we are recklessly allowing the
followers of that demon to settle within our own frontiers, in order to
maintain the West’s standard of living by driving down menial labor costs by importing
millions of immigrants. Just as the U.S. has foolishly surrendered its hard-won
industrial base to East Asia in the course of one generation, so too has this
single generation of decadent Europeans undone all of the hard work their
ancestors did to liberate the continent from the menace of Islam over the last
millennium and a half. Tours, the heroism of John Sobieski and the valiant
stand of Constantinople are being undone in a single fit of decadence. Nations
like France, Germany and Britain now have sizeable Muslim minorities who have
been somewhat tamed by succumbing to the temptations of Western materialism
themselves, but not entirely. Most Muslims that Americans and Europeans come in
contact with are either among the narrow Westernized elites of Middle Eastern
or Central Asian states, or worse, immigrants who have shed their religion just
like many Christians have, in order to substitute a commercial religion, the
worship of Mammon. In the end, a society based on materialistic, worldly values
and the love of money cannot possibly defeat an adversary that is willing to
make great sacrifices for an otherworldly goal, regardless of the whether that
other world is Hell or Heaven. It’s not like we can motivate our soldiers with
pay and honor alone when such benefits cannot be enjoyed by the dead, which
means that sooner or later, the professional armies of Europe and North America
are going to cut and run when faced with the hellish determination of jihadists
who want to die for their cause. As I
have said before, the Clash of Civilizations between the West and Islam is like
a game of “rock-paper-scissors”: they may still be several hundred rounds
behind, but they will beat a society animated by the spirit of Mammon every
time, thereby guaranteeing that they will eventually close the gap in power.
The
same dynamic has played out repeatedly since Mohammed’s successors stormed the
eastern section of the Byzantine Empire and its main rival, Sassanid Persia,
although both seemed to have the early caliphs bested in every category of
national power, on paper. Historically, such eruptions have occurred whenever
Christianity has suffered a period of decadence - and this is by far the worst
period of decadence it has ever endured. A generation that has grown accustomed
to deliberately thumbing its nose at God by commending homosexual marriage,
that cannot even keep its families together, that praises the wealthy while
tolerating and profiting from starvation overseas, or worst of all aborts its
own children, is in no shape to make the kind of sacrifices required to stop the
heirs of Mohammed. Thanks to the Retreat of the West, we cannot count in the
substantial gap in technology, military training and finances to protect us
forever. In the end, the only institution that has proved capable of protecting
the world from Islamic fundamentalism is the Catholic Church, but it too is in
the worst condition in its long history. We have been completely devoid of
competent leadership for more than six decades; I have no doubt that Pope John
Paul II was a saint, but riding around in a Popemobile having crowds adore you
does not qualify as leadership, when what is required is cracking down on the
rebellious and decadent priesthood and laity. Almost down to the last man, the
leadership of the Church either silently applauds or tolerates every practice
that was once forbidden; it is not like you can find any priest in the U.S.
willing to tell his congregation every Sunday not to divorce or take interest
on the banking accounts or gamble in the stock market, all of which are a
matter of Catholic doctrine. In Africa, Latin America and Asia, millions of
Catholics worthy of the name can still be found and are in fact increasing at a
torrid pace, but in the West they have succumbed to the temptations of
materialistic values as much as anyone else. The periodic sufferings inflicted
by Islam are among the weapons God has periodically used over the last
millennium and a half to purify the Catholic Church and judging from the
depraved depths to which we’ve sunk and the rapid rise of ISIS and like-minded
groups, an unprecedented amount of suffering is heading our way in due time. We
are in the midst of a spiritual war, which is occurred chiefly because a vacuum
has opened at the top of the rudderless Catholic Church. I have great respect
for many people who call themselves Muslim because they don’t know any better,
and a person who loves them would want them to be free of the main cause of
their suffering, which is Islam; unfortunately, the paralysis within the
Catholic Church means there are no alternative philosophies for them to turn
to, except for the decadence of Western materialism and its worship of Mammon.
John Paul II once kissed a Koran in public and more recently, Cardinal Timothy
Dolan foolishly said that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, which
simply factually false; for the entire history of the Church, priests would
have been sent off to monasteries for uttering such nonsense, which underlines
the complete breakdown in leadership we are living through. The chances that
the Church will revive in time to offer Muslims a constructive alternative are
virtually nil. Nature abhors a vacuum – and if it is not filled with something
positive like Catholicism, it will be filled by something abhorrent, such as
authentic Islam. We should be doing practical things to confront the rising
tide of Islam, like engaging in missionary work and preparing for defensive
crusades, but our leadership is mesmerized by a modernist outlook that is not
just anti-Catholic but manifestly failing before our eyes.
This combination of factors makes it very unlikely
that we will be able to prevent these current trends from intensifying, and if
they are not blunted quickly, a generation from now our children will face
another group with goals and tactics identical to those of ISIS. By that point we
will have far less temporal power to confront them with, thanks to the
continuing Retreat of the West. Judging from the present rate of decay, Western
civilization will likewise not have any moral strength left to combat it. It
will in all likelihood still be a civilization which still kills its unborn
children, adding to its enormous blood debt, but which also encourages a new
holocaust in the form euthanasia of the elderly and disabled, in order to shirk
the costs of the inverted age pyramid brought about by conception and abortion.
Despite the vast sums that will save in terms of pensions and health, the West will
still not be able to maintain current standards of living after losing our
entire manufacturing base and being flooded with cheap goods. We will have
neither the backbone nor the means to pay off creditors like the Chinese,
because if we can kill our own children, break up our families and gas our own
grandparents, coming up with an excuse for stiffing distant foreigners of
another race on our trillions of dollars in debt will be child’s play. Europe
is already little more than a nursing home full of nations just waiting to
expire, a museum of past glories that is degenerating into a mausoleum; worse
still, it is fracturing, as regions like Scotland and Catalonia pursue
independence bids that will further debilitate major powers like Britain and
Spain. By that point the next incarnation of this inter-generational, floating
army that ISIS is serving as a beacon to will be in a position to do something
more substantial than knocking down a couple of skyscrapers, or even taking
down a city or two with suitcase nukes. That’s all kid stuff compared to their
heart’s desire, which is a world war to subjugate and convert the entire
planet, using weapons of mass destruction as needed. It will take a long time
for them to overcome such barriers as the Sunni-Shiite feud and the substantial
lead of the West in terms of military equipment, but long-term trends like the
Retreat of the West, the Falling Away and the Clash of Civilizations strongly
suggest that their only substantial obstacle is time. Evil indeed always
overreaches itself, which is why ISIS is doomed to fail in the short term. Yet
the next generation of jihadists is taking notes as ISIS gives them a credible
blueprint for how their caliphate might be feasible in the future, once the
next iteration of their floating army has grown more numerous and coherent and
the West has slid further into feeble senescence. Yes, evil overreaches itself,
which is also which the post-Christian, materialistic West will also fail,
because our civilization is also morally bankrupt; as Matthew 5:13 warns Christians
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it
be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out
and trampled underfoot.” If the next generation is trampled underfoot, it will
be because of the West’s own willfulness blindness. Stephen King once wrote
that "The salvation of all that is good is only this - at times of great
import, evil beings sometimes fall strangely blind."[11]
Neither the West nor Islam represent the “good guys,” for there are none now
that the Catholic Church has fallen silent. ISIS will fail because it is blind
to faults like its own brutality and violations of the cardinal principle of
foreign affairs, the Conservation of Enemies. The West will fail in due course
because its own prejudices about religion and economics blind it to the true
dynamics of Islamic fundamentalism, thereby guaranteeing it will soon rise
again in an even more horrid form, as that monster named Mohammed emerges from
his tomb to terrorize humanity once again.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] I
was unaware of the Shura Council name change until I did some routine fact
checking at the Wikipedia page “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant
.
[2]
See “Islamic
State 'Has 50,000 Fighters in Syria',” published Aug. 19, 2014 in the
online edition of Al Jazeera.
[3]
For accounts of how disgruntled Assad’s power
base is becoming (and how badly it has been coopted by Assad’s allies, Iran and
Hezbollah) see Clifford, Peter, 2014, “Syria News: Rising Tide of Anti-Assad Rhetoric Among Alawite
Supporters After Tabqa Airbase Defeat,”
published Sept. 2, 2014 at PeterCliffordOnline.com. This is an excellent
source of accurate news on the Syrian crisis.
[4]
Meek, James Gordon, 2014, “ISIS
an 'Incredible' Fighting Force, US Special Ops Sources Say,” published Aug.
25, 2014 at the ABC News website.
[5]
Morris, Nigel, 2014, “Majority
of Britons Opposed to Bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria but David Cameron Leaves
the Door to Action Open,” published Sept. 2, 2014 in the online edition of The Independent.
[6]
For an example, see “Are
American Troops Already Fighting on the Front Lines in Iraq?” published
Sept 2., 2014 in the online edition of The Daily Beast.
[7]
See the aforementioned “Islamic
State 'Has 50,000 Fighters in Syria',” published Aug. 19, 2014 in the
online edition of Al Jazeera.
[8] I
originally thought Stephen King said this, but while fact-checking I ran across
the true source at the Radiant Health webpage “Evil Quotes,” at http://owen.curezone.com/prose/evilquotes.html
[9] pp.
556-557, Qadhi, Yasser, 2008, English
Translation of Sunan Abu Dawud, Vol. 2. Maktaba Dar-us-Salam: Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia.
[10] “Jesus
replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he
said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life
does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” And he told them this
parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He
thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then
he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger
ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You
have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be
merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be
demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? This
is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich
toward God.”
[11]
Also found at the the Radiant Health webpage “Evil Quotes,” at http://owen.curezone.com/prose/evilquotes.html
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