Capitulating to the caliphate

Current Affairs/Imperial Hubris by Anonymous: It's a bad idea to write anonymously, as it is to wear masks: the usual rules …

Current Affairs/Imperial Hubris by Anonymous: It's a bad idea to write anonymously, as it is to wear masks: the usual rules of personal consequence for what you say (or do) are removed. Which is perhaps why Imperial Hubris often reads like the writing of a sneering, know-all adolescent, writes Kevin Myers

In its omniscient facetiousness, it resembles a similarly anonymous book, Cato's Guilty Men of 1940, which lambasted Chamberlain's policies of appeasement. Its worthlessness became evident with the discovery that it was part-written by Michael Foot, a member of the very Labour Party which had resolutely opposed the re-armament in 1938, which saved Britain in 1940.

Anonymous's central point is that the US has alienated the Muslim world by its policies, and that it has two options: one is to conform with the desires of that world, or two, to fight a savage war of national survival against its Islamic enemies. As it is, maintains Anon, such minimalist fighting as the US has been engaged in has been shaped by a reluctance to accept casualties.

This last is the theme to which the author repeatedly returns, insisting it prevented the US from deploying massive forces to seal Afghanistan's borders during its war there, so allowing the al-Qaeda leadership to escape. The author is (apparently) a member of the US intelligence community, so he must know that it is impossible to "seal" the Hindu Kush, even if the US deployed some of the many hypothetical mountain divisions it does not possess. Pakistan is incapable of even rudimentary policing of its side of the border, never mind securely sealing it.

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Yet in the same breath in which he condemns the failure of the US to use substantial force in Afghanistan, he blithely talks of the calamity that followed the Soviet Union's large-scale invasion. So what does he want? Light, relatively unsuccessful military incursions, or large-scale disasters? Afghanistan is rather good at providing either: what it will not give any outsider is outright military victory. Moreover he treats the Afghanistan operations as a complete failure, whereas that country has just had its first free elections in its entire history.

He sneers at the failure of the US to perceive the threat before 9/11. Yet not even a worst-possible war-game scenario had suggested that 18 suicide bombers could hi-jack four passenger planes and fly them into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the White House, killing thousands of people. Indeed, 9/11 taught us as much about human nature as it did about Islamic fundamentalism.

The main reasons why the US is detested in the Muslim world, Anonymous proposes, are US support for Israel, Russia and China - all of which are in conflict with local Muslims - its backing for corrupt Islamic regimes in the Middle East, and its determination to install a democratic regime in Iraq.

So what's it to be? If the US backs an existing Islamic regime, it is wrong because the regime is corrupt (as almost all Islamic regimes are). If it tries to introduce a democratic government elected by Muslims, again it is wrong because it is interfering in a Muslim country. And if any state is in dispute with Muslims, then apparently the US must not be on friendly terms with it.

Anonymous's "pragmatic" answer is essentially for the US to yield to Osama bin Laden's demands, including an abandonment of Israel - and then, he implies, all will be well. The Muslim world will settle into its ways, and we into ours, and the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio will meanwhile be somehow mysteriously but satisfactorily resolved. Indeed, Herr Hitler himself promised a comparably peaceful resolution was at hand, once he had digested Czechoslovakia.

But there are not two simple, discrete worlds. Aggressive, proselytising Islamic fundamentalism is now to be found in many "Christian" countries - hence the 1,200 British Muslims trained by the Taliban (and who now await orders in Bradford and Leeds), the British suicide bombers and beheaders in Iraq and Pakistan, and even the introduction of "Islamic" banking in London. The esteemed Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, now maintains that the ineluctable demographics of Europe are such that by the end of this century, ours will be a predominantly Islamic continent.

So it is not US policies which are preventing us reaching some benign, enduring stasis: on the contrary, the world is now in a state of religious and cultural flux. And mere conciliation of Osama bin Laden's current demands, as Anonymous proposes, will not slake the appetites of those many Muslims who yearn for the global caliphate.

Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist

Imperial Hubris by Anonymous Brassey's Inc, 320pp. $27.50