Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  Leaving aside the social and humanitarian mayhem that the Ethiopian invasion will cause in Somalia, that invasion and the U.S. military action have put America at a turning point in the Horn of Africa. In a locale not of pivotal importance to the worldwide Sunni Islamist insurgency, U.S. policy and actions have quickly brought it close to that status. This evolution is due not only—or even mainly—to the air raids and the invasion, but also to the fact that U.S. leaders again walked into a trap laid by bin Laden over the past decade. Since the withdrawal of the U.S.-led UN mission in 1994, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have warned Muslims that the United States would return to Somalia, Sudan, and all of the Horn for three reasons: (a) to control oil reserves in Sudan and elsewhere in the Horn; (b) to stop the spread of Islam in the Horn; and (c) to acquire ports on the coast of East Africa to give the U.S. military bases from which to strike at Yemen and the holy places in Saudi Arabia.84 None of these three points, of course, may genuinely be part of the U.S. strategy in the Horn of Africa; indeed, one doubts that U.S. strategy there amounts to anything more than knee-jerk anti-Islamism. As always, though, perception is reality, and the Bush administration has taken a thoroughly necessary military action—trying to kill Somali-based al-Qaeda leaders when the chance arose—and turned it into another casus belli for jihadists by endorsing the Christian Ethiopians’ destruction of an Islamist government and subsequent stationing of troops in the country to fight Somali Islamists.85

  Europe: While the Islamist fire burning in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, is neither as bright nor always as obvious as the fires burning elsewhere in the world, it may be burning more deeply and damagingly than most anywhere else.86 For the United States, this reality is worrisome and poignant; worrisome because America is Europe’s child and natural international partner, and poignant because Europe’s Islamist problem underscores just how close to irretrievably America and Europe have parted ways and how very little America can do to help. Indeed, given demographic realties, there is strong reason to doubt that the Europeans can even help themselves.

  Like Americans, Europeans are bedeviled by a failed governing generation that has few contact points with reality and virtually no knowledge of or respect for either history or the power of religion. Unlike Americans, however, Europeans appear to lack the courage—may one say the manliness?—to refute their weakling, utopia-purveying European Community leaders and reassert the national identities that once made Europe the world’s center of material, social, educational, artistic, and economic progress. On the basis of the cringing, cowardly, and fantastical assertion that European nations’ amalgamation into the European Community was mandatory because they could not otherwise prevent themselves from going to war—has man not free will?—European leaders have turned their backs on nationalism, the tool that has, despite savage interstate wars, brought more good to more people than any other instrument in the toolkit of human organization. In its place they have erected a banal, bureaucrat-ridden, and economically bankrupting supranational authority that combines the French Enlightenment’s goal of perfecting man and society, a hysterical animosity toward Christianity (without which of course there be would no entity identifiable as Europe and no reminder in men’s minds that only God is perfect), and a pacifism that reeks not of conviction and humanity but of cowardice, sloth, and an insatiable desire for ease. In place of self-respect, tradition, nation, and faith, the Europeans have adopted an appeasing, guilt-ridden multiculturalism, the euro and the Common Agricultural Policy, an unrelenting presentism, and a ferocious appetite for atheism and for ignoring history. The governing philosophy of today’s European leaders, as then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote accurately in 2005, “consciously severs its own historical roots depriving itself of the regenerating forces from which it sprang, from the fundamental memory of humanity, so to speak, without which reason loses its orientation.”87

  Most Americans and Europeans are simply not on the same wavelength. While a few of America’s elite are still representative of their harder-working, tougher-minded, more nationalistic, and far more religious countrymen, the tie between Europe’s leaders and people seems to be much closer. This is especially and most fatally true in the area of religion’s role in shaping individual lives and civil society. “[C]ontemporary Europe is the closest to a godless civilization the world has ever known,” Mark Lilla wrote in early 2006.

  Since World War II, Europeans have stared in blank amazement across the Atlantic at a new global power whose citizens and even leaders seem to believe myths about the old bearded man in the sky. They call that American “exceptionalism” on the assumption that living without God is the ultimate destiny of the human race…. The Europeans find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously and want to shape their society according to his dictates.88

  While a person’s or a people’s religious beliefs or nonbeliefs are no one else’s business, Europeans, (like much of the American elite, and especially Democratic leaders) seem unable intellectually to credit the importance and dangerous ramifications of the religious resurgence in today’s world. Inside Europe the EC bureaucracy and its emasculated national governments continue to attribute the growth in Islamism’s appeal and in the number of jihad-oriented young Muslims to economic inequality, a failure to eradicate the last Muslim-offending remnants of Christianity from the public square, and evanescent racism among those they regard as the few retrograde Europeans with archaic attachments to their own nations and histories. Increase the dole, annihilate Christianity, coerce the perfection of the thinking of all Europeans by enforcing stringent anti–hate speech legislation, and maybe throw in a Europe-wide Islamic holiday, goes the EC’s recipe, and the Islamist fire will be smothered and out will pop peaceful, cowardly Euro-Muslims ready to have no children, spurn God, and like all good Europeans, quietly obey their nonelected bureaucratic masters in Brussels.

  Well, no. These steps certainly will not solve Europe’s Islamist problem, but they may blind the Europeans to the problem until it defeats them. Why will they fail? What makes it almost impossible for Americans to help Europe control or defeat its Islamist foes? It is simply another case of what John Adams called “stubborn facts,” this time demographic facts. I cannot improve on the excellent descriptions and analyses of Europe’s pending demographic calamity already provided by Niall Ferguson, Tony Blankley, George Weigel, and Mark Steyn.

  Ferguson: The greatest of all the strengths of radical Islam…is that it has demography on its side. The Western culture against which it has declared holy war cannot possibly match the capacity of traditional Muslim societies when it comes to reproduction…While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement level in the 1970s, the decline in the Muslim world has been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and a half times higher than the European figure.89

  Blankley: The replacement rate for a population is an average of 2.1 babies per woman. Western Europe is currently at approximately 1.4. Russia is about 1.1…As birthrates slip below the replacement rate, two things happen. First, the average age of the population goes up. This becomes important for funding retirement benefits, with ever fewer working and tax-paying younger people supporting ever more non-working and benefit-collecting older people. It is also significant for the overall productivity of an economy. There is no example in history of a nation becoming more prosperous when it doesn’t have an expanding population.90

  Weigel: Above all, and most urgently, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself…Why do 18 European countries report “negative natural increase” (i.e., more deaths than births)? Why does no western European country have a replacement-level birthrate?…Why will Europe’s retired population increase by 55 percent in the next 25 years, while its working population will shrink by 8 percent—and, to repeat, why can’t Europeans, either populations or the public, draw
the obvious conclusions from these figures about the impending bankruptcy of their social welfare, health care, and pension systems?91

  Steyn: For a stable population—i.e., no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010—you need a fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low…Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries—or, more precisely, these people—are going out of business…Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birthrates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor [Muslim] population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.92

  So that is Europe’s problem in a nutshell—or time bomb?—made of cold, hard demographic statistics. Today Europe is faced with a shrinking and aging native population that will require an ever increasing flow of immigrants to maintain a workforce to keep its social-welfare system from bankruptcy for a bit longer. Where will the new workers come from? “[A] talented ambitious Chinese or Indian,” Mark Steyn has correctly argued, “has zero reason to immigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancient regime of indolent geriatrics.”93 Europe’s thirst for young workers therefore will be quenched by the high birthrates of its already on-hand Muslim citizens and increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants from the Islamic world, especially North Africa.

  This number-driven coming reality seems to have so far escaped the notice of Europeans—leaders and led—who continue to speak and behave as if increased funding for national-level and EC-wide social-welfare programs will satisfy Muslim discontent and buy them away from the faith. In many ways European leaders have come to resemble Saudi rulers, by attempting to fix all problems with the checkbook, the difference being that the Europeans are edging toward bankruptcy and have neither the Saudis’ oil-based cash cow nor their jugular-cutting instinct for survival. There are no duplicates of Riyadh’s execution square in any European capital. So bribery will not work for the Europeans. Indeed, the more social programs are used to bribe Muslims, the more taxpayers will be needed to pay for them, the more Muslim immigrants will be needed to become taxpayers, and the larger will become the mass of Muslims still confronted and angered by Europe’s racism and aggressive war on religion.94 And so the cycle will begin over again and continue until the euro is replaced by the riyal.

  Europe is determined not to pay the piper for having governed for the last thirty years by the philosophy of the French Enlightenment; that is, for trying to mandate through universal laws and coercive regulations the perfection of that absolutely nonperfectible entity, man. The EC elite’s decades-long effort to legislate the end of class, public debate, religion, nationalism, and history in Europe will come to its unintended but predictable end by producing a passive, homogenous, self-centered, non-competitive, bureaucrat-ruled, militantly secular, and antimilitary society that is consuming itself and heading toward extinction. The contemporary EC’s elites are much like the French philosophes, of whom the brilliant Gertrude Himmelfarb has written: “[T]hey could aspire to bold and imaginative thinking, unconstrained by such practical considerations as how their ideas might be translated into reality…[They] believed that the function of reason was to produce universal principles independent of history, circumstance, and national spirit.”95 As things stand, Europe seems destined to leave its decaying and bankrupt hulk in the hands of a vibrantly religious, semimartial, youthful, and hardworking Muslim population.

  But hold on. What is of interest to the United States will be to see if Europe goes quietly into its Islamic good night. The end of French Enlightenment thought, the end of all efforts to produce the perfect European man, has been massive human destruction. From the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars through the eras of fascism, Communism, and Nazism, totalitarianism and mass murder have been the end-state of political systems aimed at perfecting humanity. Total warfare and genocide, moreover, are European inventions and thus reside in the history locker that contemporary Europeans have kept double-padlocked and tried to ignore. Who is to say that Europe, in extremis, will not try to save itself by taking recourse to that at which it has traditionally excelled: chauvinistic nationalism, government-sponsored persecution of minorities, and unlimited warfare? And because history suppressed has a way of roaring back to life, might not a last-ditch European survival effort wage its battles under the banner of a revived Christianity? EC leaders already have fully absorbed the attitude Walter Bagehot attributed to the French philosophes—“everything for the people, nothing by them…they wished to do everything by fiat of the sovereign”96—and might well turn into supernationalists in order to save their own skins. Whether Europe seeks to save itself or simply begins studying Arabic and the lunar calendar, the United States can do little to affect events as they unfold, save perhaps stopping our idiotic insistence that the EC leaders commit demographic suicide even more quickly by allowing Turkey and 70 million more Muslims into the EC.

  What Does It Mean for the United States?

  Although geographically dispersed, the locations just discussed have several commonalities. None of the six, for example, is a direct nation-state threat to the United States. Rather it is the internal instability and rising Islamist militancy in each that poses concerns for Washington, challenging its traditional fixation on threats from nation-states.

  How to cope with these problems? First, Washington must look at each with the narrow and more accurate definition of national interest captured in the idea of life-and-death issues. From this perspective, it is clear that of the six locales only two, the North Caucasus and Nigeria, meet the life-and-death standard; the former because it provides access to the FSU for Islamists seeking to procure WMD, and the latter because of the fast-growing importance of its energy resources to the U.S. economy.

  Three of the locations, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Somalia, present no obvious threat to U.S. national security. That said, the risk that Washington will become involved in each is significant and already under way on a small scale in Somalia. In Thailand, Cold War–era commitments leave open a possible requirement for U.S. military support for the Bangkok regime against the growing Thai Muslim insurgency. Such a U.S. involvement would dramatically increase the anti-U.S. focus of Islamists across the Far East and would provide further validation for bin Laden’s claim that Washington intends to keep Muslims under the control of oppressive governments. U.S. interests therefore would be best served by revisiting and abrogating any commitments that could lead to U.S. military involvement in Thailand.

  Washington has no treaty obligations in Bangladesh or Somalia, but antinationalist groups are certain to press for U.S. intervention, and it will be at risk of involvement to the extent that it lacks the will to resist their entreaties. As political instability and the Islamists’ ascendancy increases in each place, NGOs, human rights groups, and women’s rights groups will demand that the United States “do something.” But in neither country would U.S. involvement be wise, let alone necessary. Violent human tragedies seem certain to unfold in each place, but none of that violence will be directed against America or its interests unless we intervene. Washington should turn back the pressure from the antinationalists. If Amnesty International, or an NGO, or Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse organization wants to ride to the rescue in Bangladesh or Somalia, the U.S. government should advise them of the dangers in each and likewise warn them that if they do go into such dangerous environments they will be on their own—no U.S. military units will be coming to their aid. This must be made especially clear regarding Somalia, as antinationalist groups tend to couple Somalia, Sudan, and Darfur into a single “cause” and already have the support of Senator John McCain and sev
eral of his colleagues for sending some sort of U.S.-U.K. military force to Darfur, where no conceivable U.S. national interest is at stake.

  Europe is a quandary for Americans and their government. There is nothing that the United States can do to slow or halt Europe’s demographic free-fall and the inevitable reshaping of societies and foreign policies there in a more Islamic direction. Only the Europeans can save themselves, but it seems too late for them to do so simply by having more babies. Their only other option is to take a draconian approach to limiting Muslim immigration and apprehending and deporting all Muslims who are in Europe illegally. But given Europe’s need for ever more workers to fund their pensions and other social programs, and the impervious-to-reality nature of EC institutions and member-state governments, such draconian measures are likely to be put off until their implementation is futile. The choice at that point would be a turn toward authoritarianism or get fitted for a burqa. For the United States, the beginning of wisdom seems to be to plan deliberately for a troublesome future for NATO and overall transatlantic relations due to the demographic realities of Europe.