Big wars come not so much because of military but because
of mind-set buildups. The latter start with the idea that
"we" are different from "them" which then
evolves into the notion that we can't co-exist together and
finally crystallizes into the belief that "they"
are a mortal threat to us. Either we die or they do.
The big new war started building up in the early 1980's
when Americans kept staring at pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
What they saw was a medieval religious fanatic who was leveling
a mortal threat against them. They sensed the threat had something
to do with the Islamic religion.
During the Bosnian War, however, many Americans sympathized
with the Muslims suffering genocide at the hands of Serbs.
But even though the Serbs were pictured as Nazi-style murderers,
few Americans saw them as a personal threat. Today, after
condoning so many massacres, leading Serbian intellectuals
say openly that so long as there are Muslims in the Balkans,
there never will be peace. These intellectuals are convinced
that in the end, the West will understand why they had to
kill so many Muslims.
A lot of people all over the world are beginning to ask
themselves a similar question: Will there ever be peace in
the world as long as Islam exists? Many Evangelical Christians
see a war between Christianity and Islam as the axial struggle
of the coming century. After the Nairobi and Dar Es-Salaam
bombings a lot of Westerners, whether Christian, Judaic or
secular, agree.
Examples abound of big wars that were touched off when dramatic
incidents enflamed pre-existing mind-sets, from the sinking
of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 which triggered
the Spanish American war to the Tonkin Gulf incidents of August
2 and 4, 1964, which made the Vietnam War inevitable. History
may well record the dramatic incident that sparked the new
big war as being the August 20 strikes on Khartoum and Kabul.
The mind-set build-up for the new big war has been going
on in the Islamic world as well. Khalid Al-Qashtini writes
in the London-based As Sharq al-Ausat about "the hatred
of and paranoia about America and Americans" that has
been sweeping not just the Arab world but Muslim populations
in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. At its core is
an image of America as alternately munificent and malevolent.
"Who put Saddam Hussein in power? The Americans. Who
egged him on to attack Kuwait? The Americans. Who got him
out of Kuwait? The Americans. Who now wants to overthrow him?
The Americans."
Of the world's six billion people one billion are Muslim.
And the vast majority live in countries undergoing some sort
of political turmoil. But when "kafara," unbelievers,
threaten the faith, Muslims rally around each other regardless
of race, class or language. When Malcolm X, assassinated in
1964, saw such a scene of unity in Mecca, he had a vision
of a new revolutionary force in the world.
This big new war will not be another Vietnam or El Salvador
but scores of them at the same time. There are alone some
29 Arabic speaking countries not to mention several score
more Islamic lands. The U.S. has already attacked two of them,
Afghanistan and the Sudan. They did so without asking over-flight
permission of a third country, Pakistan.
Whether real or planted, the warning of a new militant group,
the "International Islamic Front against Christians and
Jews," printed in the Cairo-based newspaper "Al-Hayat,"
has to be taken seriously: "We shall fight against America
until America has pulled out its military forces from every
single Islamic country."
Americans and Westerners, no matter how negative their feelings
about Islam, should seriously consider whether, over the next
decade, they want to fight in some dozen Islamic countries
simultaneously. We also might remember that when the West
fought Communism the latter only got more powerful. What finally
pacified Communism was peace.
Those who know Islamic history see a similar potential pattern.
When fighting wars Muslims become monoliths of military power.
But when peace was declared, their natural pluralism came
to the fore. And it was under such plural conditions that
Muslim civilization reached great heights of prosperity, advancement
and world renown.
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