The Pan-Islamist Threat

"Actually, the Middle East Is Our Crisis Too," writes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in this week's Time. In Gaza, he says, Hamas

... is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment."

From Lebanon, meanwhile,

Islamist Hizballah — client of Islamist Iran, ally of Islamist Hamas — provokes a war with Israel. Hizballah's motivation has nothing to do with Arab nationalism. Israel withdrew from every square meter of Lebanese territory six years ago. But legal obligation means nothing to Hizballah. Like Hamas and Iran, Hizballah views the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.

Hamas and (as I'll spell it) Hezbollah are, Krauthammer says, part of the movement called pan-Islamism, unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat, which was just a "secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement." Even Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pan-Arabist, not pan-Islamic. "The successor Arab rulers [to the pan-Arabists of yore] no longer dream of a single Arab state," writes Krauthammer, "and have grudgingly come to accept a small Jewish state in part of Palestine. Hence the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel."

But pan-Islamism is unwilling to tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. The destruction of Israel, once but a geopolitical goal, has become a tenet of religious duty, in service to a "larger Islamist vision of a cataclysmic showdown with the infidel West as a harbinger of the return of the 12th Imam and the End of Days."

So, as Israel's staunchest ally, we're in for a "struggle against [pan-Islamism that] will be long and painful, and enduringly surreal."


We may be able to take some comfort from the fact that pan-Islamism has, in effect, two rival churches, with two Vaticans and two Popes vying for primacy — like Rome and Avignon in medieval times. The "Iran-Hizballah-Hamas axis" is one of these "churches" (even though Iran and Hezbollah are Shi'ite and Hamas is Sunni). The other "church" of pan-Islamism consists of al-Qaeda and its spawn, now trying to catch back up to the wave pulsed out recently in the Middle East by the activity of the first axis.

Krauthammer asserts:

For all their medieval trappings, these two sources of Islamic fervor now vying for possession of the newly transmuted Arab-Israeli dispute confirm the Bush Administration's view that, after a holiday from history in the 1990s, the global ideological struggles of the 20th century have been rejoined with a change only in the cast. In place of the ersatz Western religions of fascism and communism, radical Islam, bastard child of a real and great religion, has arisen. Led by two rival Vaticans, one in Tehran and the other cavebound on the Afghan-Pakistani border, it raises the banner of a militant religion that will not rest until, as al-Zawahiri pledged, Islam has retaken every piece of Waqf "from Spain to Iraq."

I'm not sure I concur that the Bush administration has the right attitude on all this. My understanding is that the administration is stuck ideologically in a world where states — nations, countries — remain the major players. By Krauthammer's own logic, this will never do.


oldstyleliberal likes the approach outlined in a companion article, "Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism," under the subhead, "By insisting it is, President Bush clouds the real issues, which are how much the U.S. should do for Israel and what it should do to Iran." Lisa Beyer, in her analysis, insists Bush is wrong to lump Hezbollah and Hamas under the umbrella epithet of "global terrorism." Doing so obscures the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas don't threaten us directly ... at least, not yet. We need to keep our powder dry, so to speak, and direct our ammunition only at those who threaten us face-to-face. Otherwise, U.S. power loses credibility abroad, as we stretch ourselves too thin.

Where Krauthammer sees a single pan-Islamist movement with two rival "Vaticans," Beyer maintains that such a view

... implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah's military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran's sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi'ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda's late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi'ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

We can combine the Krauthammer and Beyer outlooks, which are really not as incompatible as they seem, by noting that the former attitude inspirits us for the long fight ahead while the latter cautions us not just to fight hard, but to fight smart. If there are fissures within pan-Islamism, a smart fight against it would seem to require that we do everything we can diplomatically, politically, economically, and socially to drive a wedge into it — using "soft" power, as the policy wonks say.

If there are moderate and hard-line wings in Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to play our cards so as to support the former at the expense of the latter — holding our noses all the while, perhaps. The moderates have, after all, shown signs in the past of being willing to accept our ally Israel's existence. Per the Beyer article:

"The strategy should be to identify the fissures in a terrorist group and widen those chasms to cause it to explode, to isolate the hard-liners and strengthen the moderates," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and the author of the new book Inside Terrorism. "The risk of painting all terrorists with one brush is that you miss those signs, and so you miss those opportunities."

It would be downright stupid of us to drive together our various enemies, whether direct or by proxy, when there is now, practically speaking, faint daylight between them:

An additional downside to tossing all terrorists under one heading is that if you treat them the same, address them as one, you may encourage them to see themselves that way. "Bush has really been the great unifier of all the previously divided and often mutually hostile groups we're trying to defeat rather than assemble," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. "Waging war in Iraq to combat terrorism has transformed Iraq into a nexus of terrorism it hadn't been before. Justifying the operation in Lebanon by putting Hizballah on the same terrorism shelf as al-Qaeda is getting radical Sunnis to back radical Shi'ites in a way we'd have never imagined."

The current Bush they're-all-terrorists rhetoric hurts our cause by feeding Muslim "paranoia." We need, Beyer suggests, leadership with greater capacity for strategic nuance, since

... there is no one ideology among terrorists. And terrorism isn't even an ideology. It's a tactic. The President would be better off leveling with the American people. The U.S. has interests in the Middle East, such as protecting Israel. Some of them are subtle and require explaining, like resisting Iran's efforts to expand its influence. And many of them have nothing to do with global terrorism.

Well, "nothing to do with global terrorism" puts it a bit too strongly, oldstyleliberal feels. Many of them, it is true, don't threaten us directly. But they still feed into global crosscurrents that could capsize our ship. Krauthammer is right about that.