Francis Fukuyama was wrong: history stubbornly refused to come to an end. Just when the funeral rites of “the evil empire” of the Soviet Union had been pronounced, so the menace of militant Islam loomed into view. But what sort of threat does the West really face? Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives and still a dynamic if outspoken force on the American right, has no doubts about the scale of the struggle involved. “We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war,” Gingrich told Newsnight viewers last week with reference to the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel over the corpse of Lebanon.
He is not the only one: President Bush cited the third world war with reference to 9/11 and Tony Blair has spoken of “an arc of extremism” across the Middle East to Afghanistan. Is it time to get out the tin hats? The American strategic thinker Samuel Huntingdon’s influential Clash of Civilisations thesis was bad enough, pitching as it did a billion angry Muslims against the West, but a world war assumes horrendous casualties and a perpetual war footing that democracies fear and would prefer to avoid thinking about.
The idea of the “Islamo-fascist” enemy makes a great soundbite but in reality leaves something to be desired. Certainly Michael Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath movement that came to power in Iraq and Syria, was an admirer of Hitler. But he came from a Christian family and his movement was militantly secular. A Ba’ath fascist like Saddam Hussein may exalt the use of violence but that does not make him an Islamist — as his Shi’ite victims can bitterly attest.
Bashar al-Assad of Ba’athist Syria is allied to theocratic Iran by opposition to Israel and America, not ideology. Israel does face real Islamist enemies who would like to see it “wiped off the face of the earth”, but the Palestinian issue has its own dynamics, its own rights and wrongs. Nor is a Sunni Muslim the same as a Shi’ite.
It is one thing to posit a titanic struggle for existence with a deadly foe. But how does that explain our dilatory, penny-pinching response? A world war implies the mobilisation of vast resources, of entire societies, to one end. Yet our latter day Roosevelts and Churchills have mobilised if not exactly diddly-squat, hardly the resources that produced the Normandy landings in 1944.
The preference of Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was for war-lite in Afghanistan and Iraq, not societal transformation of the defeated on the scale of the allied occupations of Germany and Japan after 1945. Pity the US commander in the green zone in Baghdad who has to “rule” a vast territory with too few boots on the ground. In world war terms, sacrifices are not being made on the home front either. The price of petrol at the pump is not being raised a cent to wean America off dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
As for our own extremely thin red line of heroes in Helmand and Basra, Gordon Brown is not opening his coffers for them any time soon. Forget the paltry defence budget and minimal air cover, Brown can’t even manage decent kit and home leave for British soldiers. This is a challenge for our have-your-cake-and-eat-it chancellor. Either he should say that Blair’s theory of liberal interventionism was all a huge mistake, or, in his latest hairy chested guise as friend to the nuclear deterrent, he should fund the military properly.
That said, there are some things worth defending: democracy and liberal values. And yes, Israel shares them. In Muslim countries there is a real threat from fanatics determined to purge their fellows of any western taint, death cultists who worship only the dark side of religion. They are determined to hit western interests around the world and western civilians whether we choose to fight them or not, although as targets we come second behind their co-religionists.
True, all the intelligence agencies of the West — and Russia as well — made the mistake of assuming that Saddam still had chemical weapons when they had been destroyed after the first Gulf war. But the thought of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists or an apocalyptic fanatic like President Ahmadinejad of Iran is enough to make the blood run cold.
It is encouraging that writers and politicians on the left and right in Britain, through coalition groups such as the newly founded Henry Jackson Society (named in honour of a Democratic senator who believed that Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy of realpolitik lacked a moral dimension or any sense of optimism in eventual victory over the Soviet Union), and the centre-left Euston Manifesto group are taking up the baton of George Orwell and other cold war intellectuals to stand up for liberal values and oppose anti-Americanism.
Yet to fight a new cold war against militant Islam at home and abroad takes skill and cunning; it means striking a balance between restraint and the use of force, between security at home and the protection of ancient liberties from the security state. This is the warning from history about the cold war. Some highly principled people then, as now, were seduced by the notion of a monolithic satanic enemy. They reduced complexity to one crusade, one foe.
Some cold warriors saw a single enemy made in Moscow, not realising that Mao’s China and even Tito’s Yugoslavia had their own ambitions. Third World dictators allied to the Soviet Union had their own agendas, too.
Disagreements about how to fight such an enemy are inevitable. Without the benefit of hindsight, if you supported the successful Korean war should you have automatically advocated fighting the communists in Vietnam? If you did should you have tried to play on Sino-Soviet divisions? Did it matter if our allies in the Third World were a sons-of-a-bitch as long as they were our sons-of-a-bitch or should we have made deals with only the purest democrats (as some neoconservatives suggest today)? Apply the analogy to the Middle East, Al-Qaeda, the Iraq war, the Iranian nuclear programme and the Ba’athists. When to fight and when to contain? Are we uniting our enemies instead of dividing them? Certainly an Afghanistan under Taliban rule could not be tolerated. As for Saddam, in my view he should have been toppled a long time before. But even the most belligerent supporters of the Iraq war cannot deny that its opponents have a stronger case today. And Iran is an even trickier proposition. Is the problem the bomb or the regime? We urgently require a synthesis of idealism and realism.
The urgent task is to deal with Blair’s “arc of crisis” in the Middle East. Perhaps we should first find out if we can separate the Palestinians from some of their “friends”. Is Hamas’s leadership in Gaza and the West Bank irrevocably opposed to the existence of Israel or could it be detached from its military leadership in trouble making Syria? We should find out fast.
In Britain we have a curious way of fighting terrorism. Blair has called for a war of ideas against fundamentalist ideology, yet the Foreign Office, the intelligence agencies and latterly the Home Office have connived to make London into Londonistan, home to suicide missions abroad and a missionary base for militancy.
Even after 7/7 Whitehall is still giving its ear to radical Islamists at the expense of the vast unradical majority; the security establishment hopes to co-opt “tractable” radical Islamists as it did Sinn Fein/IRA. These clerics don’t, yet, advocate suicide missions in Britain, but approve of them against Israel. Their prestige and influence among Muslims can only grow. If this really were a third world war then on the home front we would be losing.
