America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  But what if that “desperation” goes global? What if it’s shared by large numbers of other people around the planet?

  Here’s another death scene. Photographed from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it’s only when you peer closer that you realize that that’s because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They’re children. Row upon row of dead children, over a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.

  It was a picture from the Beslan massacre—the pupils of a Russian schoolhouse, taken hostage and slaughtered in September 2004. And, as Ken Bigley did, the very last thing they heard as they departed this world was the voice of their killer screaming “Allahu Akhbar!”

  God is great.

  This virus has been a long time incubating. In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, terrorists shot the prime minister of Jordan at point-blank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Thirty-five years later, the Palestinian Authority elections were a landslide for Hamas and among the incoming legislators was Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She’s a household name to Palestinians, known as Umm Nidal—Mother of the Struggle—and, at the rate she’s getting through her kids, the Struggle’s all she’ll be Mother of. She’s famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her seventeen-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It’s the Hamas version of 42nd Street: you’re going out there a youngster but you’ve got to come back in small pieces.

  It may be that she stood for parliament because she’s got a yen to be junior transport minister or deputy secretary of fisheries. But it seems more likely that she and her Hamas colleagues were elected because this is who the Palestinian people are, and this is what they believe. After sixty years as UN “refugees,” they’re now so inured they’re electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice. When you’re there, in Gaza or the West Bank, that culture of death is pervasive. You go into a convenience store and they’re affable and friendly and you exchange some pleasantries, and over the guy’s shoulder you’re looking at the Martyrs of the Week he’s got proudly displayed on the wall. On my last visit, Palestinian schools were in the midst of a national letter-writing competition. Among the education ministry’s first-prize winners was twelve-year-old Mahmoud Naji Chalilah for this epistle to the Zionist Entity: “My heart has turned into a sad block of pain. One day I will buy a weapon and I will blow away the fetters. I will propel my living-dead body into your arms….”

  The famously “moderate” mullah Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the favorite imam of London mayor Ken Livingstone, was invited to speak at the 2004 “Our Children Our Future” conference sponsored and funded by the Metropolitan Police and Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions. When it comes to children and their future, Imam al-Qaradawi certainly has it all mapped out: “Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation.”

  Thank heaven for little girls; they blow up in the most delightful way. We are not dealing with “enemies” like the Soviets, or “terrorists” like the IRA. We are a long way from the common humanity that bound those German and British soldiers at Christmas Eve 1914. Try to imagine what a jihadist feels when he looks at a Russian schoolchild or an Israeli diner or a British contractor or an American pacifist.

  Now try to imagine how he’d feel if asked to participate in a nuclear plot, and to kill vastly greater numbers of Russians and Israelis and Britons and Americans.

  That moment is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported in 2006: “Iran’s hard-line spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.”

  Well, there’s a surprise.

  WHAT PART OF “KNOW” DON’T WE UNDERSTAND?

  In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld made a much quoted rumination. “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me,” the defense secretary began, “because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

  A lot of people jeered at Rummy. The witless twits at Britain’s Plain English Campaign gave him that year’s award for the worst use of English. But Rumsfeld is perhaps the best speaker of Plain English in English-speaking politics, and it would be a less despised profession if there were more like him. His little riff about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns is in fact a brilliant distillation of the dangers we face. Let’s take an example close to the heart of arrogant Texas cowboys: John Wayne is holed up in an old prospector’s shack. He peeks over the sill and drawls, “It’s quiet out there. Too quiet.”

  What he means is that he knows the things he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the precise location of the bad guys, but he knows they’re out there somewhere, inching through the dust, perhaps trying to get to the large cactus from behind which they can get a clean shot at him. Thus he knows what to be on the lookout for: he is living in a world of known unknowns. But suppose, while he was scanning the horizon for a black hat or the glint of a revolver, a passenger jet suddenly ploughed into the shack. That would be one of Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns: something poor John Wayne didn’t know he didn’t know—until it hit him.

  That’s how most of the world reacted to September 11: we didn’t know this was one of the things we didn’t know. For most people in the developed world, terrorism meant detonating bombs in shopping streets, railway stations, and park bandstands—killing a couple dozen, maiming another thirty, tops. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times: “The failure to prevent September 11 was not a failure of intelligence or co-ordination. It was a failure of imagination.”

  In other words, it was an unknown unknown: we didn’t know enough to be alert for the things we didn’t know.

  There’s a legitimate disagreement about that. Given al Qaeda’s stated ambitions, given its previous targeting of the World Trade Center, given the number of young Arab men taking flight lessons in America, one can make the case that September 11 should have been a known unknown—one of those things we ought to have been scanning the horizon for. Friedman insists that “even if all the raw intelligence signals had been shared among the FBI, the CIA, and the White House, I’m convinced that there was no one there who would have put them all together, who would have imagined evil on the scale Osama bin Laden did.” For the sake of argument, concede that. After all, the Cold War was a half century of very well-known unknowns. We didn’t know the precise timing or specifics of what would happen, but we knew the rough shape—a mushroom cloud—so well that, from Dr. Strangelove on, the known unknowns generated the most numbingly homogeneous body of predictive fiction ever seen.

  It’s trickier now. This is an age of unknown unknowns. If you’ve ever been at an airport counter buying a ticket when the computer goes down and the clerk explains that he can’t do anything until the system’s back up, you’ll know that blank look on his face as he sits and waits and sits and waits, an able-bodied man effectively disabled. It wasn’t like that if you were at the desk buying your ticket in 1937. He tore the stub off the book in his cash drawer and that was that. Today our system has a million points of vulnerability. Some of those are known unknowns—some type of terrorist-sparked electromagnetic pulse that wipes out every bank account in the United States and Canada and crashes the financial markets. We know some of the other things we don’t know—who North Korea’s been pitching its wares to, where the missing Soviet nuke materials have gone walkabout, who else has the kind of “explosive socks” found by Scotland Yard in 2003—but we have no real idea in what combination t
hese states and groups and technology and footwear might impress themselves on us, or what other links in the chain there might be. And we might not know until we switch on the TV and the screen’s full of smoke again, but this time it’s May 7 in Frankfurt, or February 3 in Vancouver, or October 22 in Dallas. Or we might not be able to switch on the TV at all, because the unknown unknown is a variation of technological catastrophe we haven’t imagined.

  Yet what we’re confronted with in Iran are known knowns: a state that’s developing nuclear weapons, a state that’s made repeated threats to use such weapons against a neighboring state, a state with a long track record of terrorist sponsorship, a state whose actions align with its rhetoric very precisely. What’s not to know?

  So the question is: will they do it?

  And the minute you have to ask the question you know the answer. It’s the same answer to the same question: Will they go ahead and slaughter the Beslan schoolchildren? Will they decapitate the bumbling Englishman? Will they kill the Iraqi aid worker and the American “Christian peacemaker”?

  In 1993 a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed twenty-nine people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The following year, the Argentine Israel Mutual Association was bombed in Buenos Aires. Nearly a hundred people died and 250 were injured—the worst massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. An Argentine court eventually issued warrants for two Iranian diplomats and two former cabinet ministers. The chief perpetrator had flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through the porous “tri-border” region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Suppose Iran had had a “dirty nuke” shipped to Hezbollah, or even the full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the country? And if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can’t project itself to the Middle East at all. It can’t nuke Tehran, and it can’t attack Iran in conventional ways.

  So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. “Mutually Assured Destruction” only works if you know who lobbed the thing your way in the first place. One reason Iran set up Hezbollah and other terror franchises is to have “plausible deniability.” Actually, it’s implausible deniability, but that’s good enough for the UN. So, if the links back to the mullahs were just the teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the United States be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might, but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under the auspices of the UN? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security Council coalition-building with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.

  The Iranian version of No Dong will be able to hit not just Tel Aviv but also Rome, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and London. How will the European political class react? Will it stand firm against threats from Tehran? Or will it take the view that there are ways to avoid having to confront incoming Islamonukes? You might, for example, approve the spectacularly large mosque wealthy Muslims have been wanting to build in your capital city. Or make certain well-connected heads of Muslim lobby groups members of a special government commission. You might appoint a minister for Islamic education to your cabinet. In other words, “the Muslim bomb” is likely to accelerate the Islamification of Europe, because Islamification more or less brings you under the Persian nuclear umbrella and encourages Tehran and its clients to turn their attentions elsewhere.

  OUR WORD IS OUR BOMB

  “Men of intemperate mind never can be free; their passions forge their fetters,” wrote Edmund Burke. From the ayatollahs to the freelance jihadists, there are, in the end, no “root causes”—or not ones that can be negotiated by troop withdrawals from Iraq or the flag-raising ceremony for a Palestinian state. There is only a metastasizing cancer that preys on whatever local conditions are to hand. Five days before the slaughter in Bali in 2005, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. Must be all those French troops in Iraq, right? So much for the sterling efforts of President Chirac and his prime minister, the two chief obstructionists to Bush-Blair-neocon-Zionist warmongering since 2001.

  In the months after the Afghan campaign, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis, and Saddam understood from the get-go that the French veto was his best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. Yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it.

  But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

  No problem. They are all infidels.

  When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they’re happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. No problem. We are all infidels. You can be a hippy-dippy hey-man-I-love-everybody Dutch stoner hanging out in a bar in Bali, and they’ll blow you up with as much enthusiasm as if you were Dick Cheney.

  Back in February 2002, Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent (i.e., he’s reliably wrong about practically everything), wrote a column headlined “Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl.” It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is “an own goal of the worst kind,” as it ensures he won’t be able to get your message out, the message being—Fisky presumed—“the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees,” “the plight of Pakistan’s millions of poor,” etc.

  Somehow the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out. Pearl’s severed head is the message. That’s why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrassas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. It was a huge hit. The message got out very effectively.

  In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been canny enough to cover their darker impulses in bathetic labels. The Soviet bloc was comprised of wall-to-wall “People’s Republics,” which is the precise opposite of what they were—a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its “Ministry of Truth” (i.e., official lies). But the Islamists don’t even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say—and we choose to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G-8 summit and the world’s leaders twitter about how “tragic” and “ironic” it is that this should have happened just as they’re taking steps to deal with the issues—as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. Even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can’t wait to switch the lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling plain.

  A world without order eventually liberates all restraints. Even in low-level conflicts there’s no monopoly of depravity: Americans think of “Northern Ireland” as being the IRA versus the Brits. But it doesn’t stop there: there were plenty of “loyalist” paramilitaries too, groups that took the view that if the other side was blowing up their civilians maybe a little reciprocity was in order. Islamists are foolish to assume that freelance nukes go one way. If a dirty bomb with unclear fingerprints goes off in London or Delhi, it’s not necessary to wait for the government to respond. As in Ulster, there’ll always be gro
ups who think the state power is too pussy to hit back. So unlisted numbers will be dialed hither and yon, arrangements will be made, and bombs will go off in Islamabad and Riyadh and Cairo. There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side. In the end the victims of the Islamist contagion will include many, many Muslims.

  But we surely don’t need to wait for Iranian nukes, do we? The Bali bombs and Madrid bombs and London bombs have already lit up the sky: they make unavoidable the truth that Islamism is a classic “armed doctrine”; it exists to destroy. One day it will, on an epic scale.

  Chapter Eight

  The Unipole Apart

  AMERICA VS. EVERYONE ELSE

  In the end it will be America vs. the Rest of the World. Whose side will you be on?

  MATTHEW PARRIS, SPECTATOR (UNITED KINGDOM), FEBRUARY 2, 2002

  Can America win its “long war”? If you think the question’s ridiculous, well, other countries are certainly asking it. Because, if America can’t, nobody else in the developed world can, and they’d be well advised to begin reaching their accommodations with the new realities, an Islamic Europe and a nuclear Iran being merely the warm-up acts. A good place to start any consideration is the Sunni Triangle. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove into Fallujah. What a dump—no disrespect to any Fallujans reading this. I had a late lunch in a seedy cafe full of Sunni men. Not a gal in the joint. And no Westerners except me. As in the movies, everyone stopped talking when I walked through the door, and every pair of eyes followed me as I made my way to a table.

  I strongly dislike that veteran-foreign-correspondent look, where you wander around like you’ve been sleeping in the back of the souk for a week. So I was wearing the same suit I’d wear in Washington or New York, from the Western Imperialist Aggressor line at Brooks Brothers. I had a sharp necktie I’d bought in London the week before. My cuff links were the most stylish in the room, and also the only ones in the room. I’m not a Sunni Triangulator, so there’s no point pretending to be one. If you’re an infidel and agent of colonialist decadence, you might as well dress the part.