I have not previously written anything about the "Clash of Civilisations" (or "Long War" or whatever you want to call it). Bigger brains than mine have focused on it, as have smaller ones such as George Bush's. I am going to offer a few thoughts on it now for two reasons:
1. I have been reading a biography of Gertrude Bell, the remarkable adventurer (or poet or author or mountaineer or photographer or geologist) without whom the state of Iraq would probably never have been created;
2. Martin Amis has broken a fairly prolonged silence on the issue this week, publishing a very odd article.
Why do I say it is "very odd"? Well, to start with, Amis devotes almost a quarter of the piece to a completely pointless rant about the appropriateness of the term "9/11" to describe the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He even says that there is an "unfortunate resemblance" to the "911" emergency call number used in the US. Martin, old pal, that's exactly why 9/11 came into such widespread use.
The article is also odd because it indulges Amis's penchant for using obscure words -- or for making up some of his own. "Thanatism"? "Ratiocinative"? Very helpful for the average reader trying to digest this stuff on the train to work. (He also talks about a "negative eureka", which prompted my wife to say "What? You mean 'I've lost it'?" Maybe so.)
Moving on to matters of greater substance, Amis seems to believe (perhaps because he has been living in Latin America for the past few years) that his views on the war on terror are in some way unique. He recounts an appearance on Question Time in 2006, wherein he "said that the West should have spent the past five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan, while in the meantime merely containing Iraq. In Afghanistan we have already seen, not the “genocide” eagerly predicted by Noam Chomsky and others, but “genogenesis” (in Paul Berman’s coinage) – a burgeoning census. Since 2001, the population has risen by 25 per cent. Meanwhile, too, needless to say, the coalition should have been tearing up the earth of Waziristan in its hunt for the remnants of al-Qaeda". He claims that this "centrist" (his word) view was greeted with disbelief -- which I find very surprising, as I suspect that the position he advanced would be shared by a large proportion of the UK population.
Amis's main contention is that Islamism should be seen as a death cult. Well, duh. However, I don't think he is on firm ground in suggesting that this makes it comparable to (or even "indebted" to) Bolshevism and Nazism. There is a world of difference between people who are keen to kill other people, and people who are willing or even anxious to kill themselves in the process. As Amis himself might say, I think his ratiocinations on thanatism are inapposite.
Like a lot of other commentators given to foaming at the mouth about Islamism (Mark Steyn, Christopher Hitchens), Amis falls seriously short when it comes to offering any practical suggestions for what the West should do next. I don't claim to have any big ideas either, which is one reason I've stayed away from this topic until now. However, I do have one thought. Clearly, if there's a death cult out to get you, you have to do everything possible to kill it. It's like dealing with the Terminator, rather than with the IRA -- it doesn't have an exit strategy or a fallback position. But it makes no sense to adopt a policy that results in the addition of ten new recruits to the death cult for every one that you eliminate.
That's what the "war on terror" has managed to do, thanks mainly to the invasion of Iraq, and that's the key reason why that invasion was such a colossal error. Judging from the quote a couple of paragraphs back, Amis realises that too. The problem is, there's no way of uninvading Iraq. Dubya and pals have fed the death cult, instead of starving it.
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