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An 'Imaginary' President Appeases a Very Real Islam
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American intellectual Will Durant's The
Lessons of History—co-written with wife Ariel and published in 1968, when
the Soviet Union posed a threat to the United States—still offers insightful
lessons, especially concerning American-Muslim relations.
In the chapter titled "History and War,"
the Durants posit some hypothetical speeches and approaches concerning war.
First, an imaginary U.S. president says before the leaders of communist
Russia:
If we should follow the usual course of
history, we should make war upon you for fear of what you may do a generation
hence…. But we are willing to try a new approach. We respect your peoples and
your civilizations as among the most creative in history. We shall try to
understand your feelings, and your desire to develop your own institutions
without fear of attack. We must not allow our mutual fears to lead us into
war, for the unparalleled murderousness of our weapons and yours brings into
the situation an element unfamiliar in history. We propose to send
representatives to join with yours in a persistent conference for the
adjustment of our differences, the cessation of hostilities and subversion,
and the reduction of our armaments…. Let us open our doors to each other, and
organize cultural exchanges that will promote mutual appreciation and understanding….
We pledge our honor before all mankind to enter into this venture in full
sincerity and trust. If we lose in the historic gamble, the results could not
be worse than those that we may expect from traditional policies. If you and
we succeed, we shall merit a place for centuries to come in the grateful
memory of mankind.
Once the imaginary president concludes,
"the general smiles," write the authors, and retorts:
You have forgotten all the lessons of history
and all that nature of man which you described. Some conflicts are too
fundamental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged
negotitiations (if history may be our guide) subversion would go on. A
world order will come not by a gentlemen's agreement, but through so decisive
a victory by one of the great powers that it will be able to dictate and
enforce international law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius. Such
interludes of widespread peace are unnatural and exceptional; they will soon
be ended by changes in the distribution of military power.
Now, consider how well this hypothetical
exchange, written in 1968, applies to the current situation between the U.S.
and the Muslim world:
First, the "imaginary" president
has become all too real, in the person of Barack Obama. Above and beyond his
so-called "historic Cairo speech," where he reached out to and
cloyingly flattered the Muslim world, everything this man has subsequently
said and done—from expunging
all references to Islam in U.S. security documents, to ordering NASA to
make Muslims "feel good" about themselves—far exceeds the expressed
outreach of the imaginary president.
Next, the situation has changed in a way that
makes it even more naïve and irrational for the U.S. to be so appeasing of
the Islamic world. Whereas the U.S.S.R was a nuclear-armed superpower—making
dialogue and cooperation logical, practically risk-free options, since, as
the imaginary president concluded in his speech, the alternative was war,
anyway—that is not the case with the Islamic world, which is currently
militarily inferior, and thus need not be appeased.
Quite the contrary, by giving one's opponent
time and freedom, "subversion would go on," as the imaginary
general correctly points out, whether Muslim nations like Iran grow to become
nuclear powers, or whether Muslims in the West work to subvert their host nations.
This threat of subversion is especially apt considering that Islam's own
teachings promote
subversion and deceitful
tactics.
Likewise, the imaginary president's
idealistic approach was directed at Russia, which, while communist for
several decades, still shared in the Western heritage and worldview, and so
may have been better expected to reciprocate and cooperate—certainly more so
than the Islamic world, the culture of which is fundamentally alien to such
utopian principles expressed by the imaginary president, the utopian
principles expressed by Obama. Accordingly, the general's observation,
"Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation,"
is especially applicable to today's conflict with the Islamic world—a
conflict that stretches back some 1400 years.
Even so, as the Durants indicated, no matter
how utopian an American president might be, it was a safe assumption (in
1968) that at least America's generals would maintain sobriety. Yet today,
that, too, no longer appears to be the case, as naivety and censorship have
so thoroughly penetrated the war colleges and intelligence agencies—evinced
by a politically-correct
Pentagon, an Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense who absurdly refuses to
associate "violent Islamist extremism" as motivating al-Qaeda, and
an Intelligence Chief who thinks the Muslim
Brotherhood is "largely secular."
What, then, are the "lessons of
history"? This: Ideas that were once recognized as overly naïve, put
only in the mouths of imaginary characters, have, in the course of half a
century, become so mainstream, despite the fact that the political
circumstances that may have warranted them then, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union,
have changed to make their application now, with the Muslim world, wholly
irrational—a sort of slow-motion suicide.
Raymond
Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center
and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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