When the history of this age is written, our current conflict will likely be characterized as that between Unreformed Islam and the Modern World. Make no mistake, the Modern World is objectively at war with Islam as it is practiced in many places around the world. The Islamists have said so, and they are telling the truth. The Modern World, with its wealth, ease, licentiousness, mobility, and, above all, its relentless temptations to these through TV, the Internet and cheap travel, mocks traditional societies, family and tribal structures and ancient ways of life.

Globalization presents problems for all tradtional societies and many fundamentalist religions, but none more acute than the problems for Unreformed Islam. Those Islamists with a fighting spirit and a fervent belief in the literal truth and sufficiency of the Koran burn with the fire of Jihad, all the more so because the conflicts of their religious beliefs and the Modern World confront them every time they turn on the TV — or look in the mirror to the conflicts that also burn within themselves.

The heart of the current conflict was identified by Pope Benedict XVI in that famous speech of his. He said that in Catholic theology as it now exists, God has to act with Reason. There is a reasonableness test we can apply to commands of God to determine if they are genuine — spreading religion by the sword could not be of God, he said, because such violence was not reasonable. By contrast, Islam teaches the “absolute transcendance” of God — there can be therefore no test of “reasonableness” on God’s actions or commandments; there is only obedience or disobedience. So, to the Islamist, if man’s Reason and individual judgment must be made submissive to the word of God in the Koran, however unreasonable those words may seem, so be it. The problem for the Modern World is thus this: if you do away with that subjectivity, you may do away with a lot of the sins of the Modern World — however, the cost is doing away with the Modern World itself, because Reason – submissive to nothing but logic and experimentation — has also been responsible for all the wealth and technology created over the last several centuries.

Thus our first practical point is that there is no reason to believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or others similarly situated, will not use nuclear weapons. They are in a war with the Modern World, and if it must be literally destroyed for man to properly submit to the will of God, so be it.

Our second point is about Iraq and the recent election. There are those who say that President Bush and Republicans got caught in a pincer movement on Iraq between isolationsists and the anti-military. It is said they got caught beteween those on the Right who think that American soldiers should not kill and die for Iraq in an endless insurgency, and those on the Left who think that American soldiers should not kill and die for America for most any reason at all. We think there is an additional group of Americans unsatisfied with the war, who perhaps should be called Separationists.

We believe there is a pretty large group of Americans who, after watching 9-11 and all the daily witless violence in Iraq, have intuiitively arrived at the conclusion that the Islamic world is utterly irredeemable at present. They would be content to see our military wipe out Sadr and many thousands of Shiites and Sunnis, if necessary, in the hopes of teaching the Arab and Muslim world to go pick on someone else, but they no longer harbor any hope that an Unreformed Islamic world is fit for peace and democracy. They acknowledge that the vast majority of the people in these countries are probably fine folks, but observe that in country after country in the Arab and Muslim world, they count for nothing and one group or another of bully-boys always runs the show. Many of the Separationists would vote for total war if it was on the ballot; since it is not, they would prefer America not waste its time, treasure, and fine soldiers on a fantasy, but rather keep its powder dry for that day when total war will almost inevitably come from the enemy.

We observe that there are more Americans than ever who think that the best outcome in the current set of conflicts is a separation of those who would spread Unreformed Islam from those who choose to live in the Modern World. Absent some deus ex machina appearing soon, however, some now believe that the alternative to the uneasy separation of these groups appears to be the eventual destruction of one or the other of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under business, General, Iran, Left of Left, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.