The long war

As I write this there is chaos in Basra.  Tomorrow there will be chaos some place else.  In Basra today Iranians are backing every pony in this race, for what they want is chaos, and chaos is easy to create.  We are pursuing a strategy based on creating order.  Creating order in the Middle East is like pushing mud uphill.

As I wrote when the attack on the Taliban was launched, it is easy to destroy our enemies, wherever they may be, but state building is hard, no one knows how to build states, and in recent time the trend is for states to fail.  I recommend we abandon state building, and focus on destroying our enemies wherever they may be without regard to states and state boundaries – including those enemies located in Saudi Arabia, Britain, and Germany.  A religion, not a state, is at war with us.

The choice is not peace with defeat, or victory with endless and expensive war, rather the choice is what kind of endless war we shall fight.  If we do not fight, the enemy will not stop fighting. This war has been running from the massacre of the Jews of Medina by Muhammad in 0624, to the present day, with a brief one hundred and thirty year interruption from 1830 to 1960 caused by colonialist victory over the middle east.  To keep the Middle East quiet during that colonial period required mass murder on a very large scale in the most troublesome spots and the frequent and credible threat of mass murder in other spots.

Islam is a problem.  The original message and example of Mohammed was that Muslims must pursue domination and exercise theocratic state power, thus solutions based on tolerance and separation of Church and State are inherently unworkable.  Tolerance cannot work, because coexistence is unacceptable to true Muslims.  We can only coexist with those versions of Islam that accept separation of Church and State – which very few do.  Islam is not just another religion, just as the Communists were not just another political party.  If we are reluctant to commit genocide, and therefore unable to credibly threaten genocide as we did during the colonial era, we cannot stop Islam from fighting us, thus must find ways to fight Islam that are less expensive than the way we are doing it now.

Yes, the enemy is Islam.  Not radical Islam, not Islamofascism.  “Moderate” Islam does exist, but is an insignificant minority, subject to almost as much repression by mainstream Islam as Christians, Jews, and apostates.  Whosoever accepts certain key doctrines of Islam must always be the enemy of all who do not accept those doctrines, and thus always our enemy.

We should of course, encourage our enemies to fight each other, and fund and arm some of our enemies against other of our enemies, but should not mistake the enemy of our enemy for our friend.

Tolerance is an effective tactic for ensuring peace if those one tolerates reciprocate, or are sufficiently weak.  It was not possible to tolerate most communist parties during communism’s strength, and it is no longer possible to tolerate Islam now that the tide of colonialism has receded.