Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Islamic Terrorism Is Over If You Want It
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 16 Comments
In time for Christmas, the National Intelligence Council is predicting that Islamic Terrorism will end by 2030. And that seems reasonable. What room will there be for headchopping barbarians in the enlightened world of tomorrow where food comes in pill form, flying cars take you around the country in a minute and everyone follows international law.
By 2034, the last murder will have taken place and by 2042, a scientific cure will be found for crime. By 2051, even bad thoughts will have been eliminated, and by 2062, work as we know it will be abolished and everyone will mediate all day on the serious questions of life. "Why are we here? What is our purpose in life? How can there be a National Intelligence Council so devoid of intelligence?"
In the real world, by 2030, there will be thousands of emirates, many no more than small terrorist groups, but some of which control sizable territories. Mali is a reminder that a dedicated Islamist militia backed by oil money can create its own Afghanistan anywhere it likes. And once it has its emirate, then like any good bunch of robber barons, the Islamist militia will take a cut of the drug trade, kidnap the sons of the wealthy for ransom and shake down the international community for foreign aid.
Western countries are already paying their Jizya as foreign aid, trading cash for the promise of stability. The United States and its allies have paid out fortunes to Afghan and Iraqi militias during the past two wars. And that doesn't even begin to take into account the sheer amount of money spent on development in the Muslim world. It is likely that the United States has spent more on Jizya, the traditional protection money payment of the Dhimmi to the Muslim, than every other nation had throughout all of history. And that's just the down payment on the big bill.
Back when the Marines first saw action against the Barbary pirates, most nations found it easier to pay the savages than fight the savages. There are countless such private deals that have been made already and there will be countless more made to allow Western countries, and their companies and NGOs to function in territory controlled by Islamist Emirates. And that territory will include international shipping lanes.
The world could end Islamic terrorism by 2030, or at least depress its stock by quite a bit, but that would require doing something about the supply of terror preachers, oil money and spare males, and we have no interest in doing that. Instead the new program is to invest in Political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while maintaining selective peacekeeping operations against some of the more odious Islamic Emirates.
By 2030 there will be a hundred miniature Afghanistans, especially across Africa, while international peacekeeping forces composed of a combination of local militaries and NATO troops try to push out the local bands of Salafi holy warriors, and their pirate camps, brothels and drug labs. There will be drones over the skies of a hundred deserts fighting Toyota pickup trucks with bands of hooded men firing machine guns. There will be wire transfers from a dozen Islamic finance institutions wending their way from the great oil economies of the Persian Gulf and American soldiers, most of whom will have more in common with the special forces operator than the infantryman, who have never seen a conventional war fought in their lifetime, heading in on another rescue mission in the territory of a Terror Emirate.
Imagine the conflicts of the Cold War if instead of a single snakehead in Moscow, there had been a million Communist millionaires across the world, and if the Viet Cong were coming out of Oakland. Imagine the Drug War if the drug lords weren't just savages, but savages fighting for a world government that would turn us into their serfs. Imagine World War II if the Nazis were a religion that anyone could convert to and immediately become a member of the master race with the right to rob, rape and kill anyone from the inferior breeds.
But you don't have to wait for 2030 to see that world. It's already here.
By 2030, Europe will have an even bigger gap between the rich and the poor. Terrorism will be fought with surveillance cameras, DNA banks, numberless informants, some of whom may be double agents, constant technological innovations, many of them imported from the otherwise verboten Jewish State, and federalized police forces that are hard to distinguish from a police state. The new police state will be able to access the entire contents of any computer or mobile device at a click. Even speech that is still permitted today will lead to prison sentences at worst or at best, mandatory reeducation at special centers organized to combat extremism.
The bombs will still keep going off, but they will be a nuisance. Europeans will learn to adapt to the occasional suicide bombing the way that Israelis have. A bomb will go off, the survivors will be carted away to be treated by nationalized medical staff from the same religion as the bombers, who will occasionally help the bombers finish the job, the broken glass will be swept away and the television channels and newspapers will praise the spirit of a people unwilling to give in to extremism and hatred, while prominently featuring the half-hearted condemnation of a local cleric.
The No-Go Zones will grow and slowly turn into emirates. The authorities will make deals with the local gangs, who will act as Islamist militias. There will be lashes and honor killings in the formal setting of Islamic law and no one will pay attention. Urban and suburban enclaves will eventually become indistinguishable from Gaza. By 2030 the first crude homemade rocket, made with plans offered on the internet, may rise into the Parisian sky aimed at the Eiffel Tower.
By 2030 there will be more Muslims in the United States than there are now in France. There will be at least one Congressman who was not only sworn in on the Koran but who announces that his program is to implement full Islamic law. There will be at least one Muslim cabinet member in every single administration, regardless of party. The Muslim liaison may even be promoted to full Czar in charge of Muslim relations.
Like Europe, the United States will operate a paranoid surveillance state that its critics decry, even while both the state and its critics support the Muslim immigration that makes such a surveillance state mandatory. And to remind everyone of that there will be occasional terrorist attacks, some thwarted, some not, including possibly one big one, when an Islamist terrorist group finally gets its hands on chemical or nuclear weapons from one of the Islamic states in Egypt, Pakistan, Syria or the country formerly known as Saudi Arabia.
The America of 2030 will operate on the contradictory paradigms of Muslim affirmative action and Muslim wars. It will spend nearly as much trying to buy off Muslims as it will spend on trying to kill their terrorists. Half its intellectual capital will be sunk into praising Islam while the other half will be spent trying to find more elegant ways to stop Muslim violence and kill Muslim terrorists. Homo Americanus circa 2030 will be a veteran of two dozen wars in the Muslim world and two-hundred Muslim affirmative action programs. By 2030 the best way to get a job in the lagging American economy will be to be a Muslim.
The Russia of 2030 will be a Eurasian Empire that will incorporate Islam on equal terms with the Russian Orthodox Church. Muslims will be encouraged to think of Eurasia as their Caliphate and it will enforce Islamic law, with its own religious police, which will answer to Moscow. The Eurasian Union will be a decaying lawless territory run by warlords who pay tribute to the head warlord in Moscow. Some of those warlords will be Christian and some Muslim. In the cities they will look like the mafia and in the rural territories they will be conventional feudal lords.
Some Eurasian Muslim warlords will provide training camps and money for Islamic terrorist groups on the condition that they don't attack them. Many of the Jihadists of 2030 will come out of these camps, going off to fight in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Europe, and returning with trophies of war, slaves and tales of adventure that encourage other young men to follow in their footsteps.
Other countries, including possibly the United States, will set up similar terrorist training camps on their own territory for Islamist groups plotting to carve out their own Emirates in Russia. By 2030, there will be little Afghanistans everywhere, with Jihadis training in Arizona and North Dakota for attacks on Russia's Eurasian holdings, Jihadis training in Russia for attacks on America and Europe, and Jihadis training in China for an attack on everyone.
By 2030, most countries will have come to view Islamic terrorism as a strategic asset, the way that Saudi Arabia and most Muslim countries do. They will recognize that the only way to transform the strategic liability of Muslim terrorism into an asset is by funding it and aiming it at their enemies. This will not be an entirely new strategy, but it will be taking place on an entirely new scale, and there will be a dramatic expansion by Islamist militias, many of whom will gain valuable experience, training and weapons by serving as the barbarian armies of a decaying West that they will use to conquer the West, the way that the Goth ancestors of Westerners did.
The Western leaders of 2012, like their ancient Roman counterparts, have come to admire the virtues of the savage more than the virtues of their own civilization. By 2030 it will be clearer than ever whether the outcome of their bloody halfhearted campaigns to civilize the savages with doses of democracy and civic institutions will have led to civilized savages or the savaging of civilizations.
Is this world of 2030 inevitable? Not at all, but considering current trends and policies, it is a far more likely outcome than the end of Islamic terrorism.
In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono put up billboards with the message, "War is Over! If you want it" to protest against the Vietnam War. That's the magical thinking policy that Washington DC runs on now and the National Intelligence Council, under the Director of National Intelligence, who deleted any mention of Al Qaeda from the Benghazi talking points, reflect that magical thinking.
Will Islamic Terrorism end by 2030? It can if we want it to. There are two sure ways to end a war; either by winning it or by losing it. The world's most famous cokehead and mental patient duo meant the latter when they offered their Viet Cong Christmas greeting, but winning wars is still an option. It just isn't the option that we've chosen. The hearts and minds way of war will take us to the 2030 that I have described. And that 2030 will take us to a 2060 and a 2090 where the war is over because we weren't willing to fight our enemies as ruthlessly as they were fighting to destroy us.
Islamic terrorism can be over by September 12, 2030 if we decide to fight it the way that most of us thought we would on September 12, 2001. We can give our children and grandchildren the gift of a world without Islamic Terrorism. Or we can give them the nightmare of another 18 years of Islamic terror.
In the real world, by 2030, there will be thousands of emirates, many no more than small terrorist groups, but some of which control sizable territories. Mali is a reminder that a dedicated Islamist militia backed by oil money can create its own Afghanistan anywhere it likes. And once it has its emirate, then like any good bunch of robber barons, the Islamist militia will take a cut of the drug trade, kidnap the sons of the wealthy for ransom and shake down the international community for foreign aid.
Western countries are already paying their Jizya as foreign aid, trading cash for the promise of stability. The United States and its allies have paid out fortunes to Afghan and Iraqi militias during the past two wars. And that doesn't even begin to take into account the sheer amount of money spent on development in the Muslim world. It is likely that the United States has spent more on Jizya, the traditional protection money payment of the Dhimmi to the Muslim, than every other nation had throughout all of history. And that's just the down payment on the big bill.
Back when the Marines first saw action against the Barbary pirates, most nations found it easier to pay the savages than fight the savages. There are countless such private deals that have been made already and there will be countless more made to allow Western countries, and their companies and NGOs to function in territory controlled by Islamist Emirates. And that territory will include international shipping lanes.
The world could end Islamic terrorism by 2030, or at least depress its stock by quite a bit, but that would require doing something about the supply of terror preachers, oil money and spare males, and we have no interest in doing that. Instead the new program is to invest in Political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while maintaining selective peacekeeping operations against some of the more odious Islamic Emirates.
By 2030 there will be a hundred miniature Afghanistans, especially across Africa, while international peacekeeping forces composed of a combination of local militaries and NATO troops try to push out the local bands of Salafi holy warriors, and their pirate camps, brothels and drug labs. There will be drones over the skies of a hundred deserts fighting Toyota pickup trucks with bands of hooded men firing machine guns. There will be wire transfers from a dozen Islamic finance institutions wending their way from the great oil economies of the Persian Gulf and American soldiers, most of whom will have more in common with the special forces operator than the infantryman, who have never seen a conventional war fought in their lifetime, heading in on another rescue mission in the territory of a Terror Emirate.
Imagine the conflicts of the Cold War if instead of a single snakehead in Moscow, there had been a million Communist millionaires across the world, and if the Viet Cong were coming out of Oakland. Imagine the Drug War if the drug lords weren't just savages, but savages fighting for a world government that would turn us into their serfs. Imagine World War II if the Nazis were a religion that anyone could convert to and immediately become a member of the master race with the right to rob, rape and kill anyone from the inferior breeds.
But you don't have to wait for 2030 to see that world. It's already here.
By 2030, Europe will have an even bigger gap between the rich and the poor. Terrorism will be fought with surveillance cameras, DNA banks, numberless informants, some of whom may be double agents, constant technological innovations, many of them imported from the otherwise verboten Jewish State, and federalized police forces that are hard to distinguish from a police state. The new police state will be able to access the entire contents of any computer or mobile device at a click. Even speech that is still permitted today will lead to prison sentences at worst or at best, mandatory reeducation at special centers organized to combat extremism.
The bombs will still keep going off, but they will be a nuisance. Europeans will learn to adapt to the occasional suicide bombing the way that Israelis have. A bomb will go off, the survivors will be carted away to be treated by nationalized medical staff from the same religion as the bombers, who will occasionally help the bombers finish the job, the broken glass will be swept away and the television channels and newspapers will praise the spirit of a people unwilling to give in to extremism and hatred, while prominently featuring the half-hearted condemnation of a local cleric.
The No-Go Zones will grow and slowly turn into emirates. The authorities will make deals with the local gangs, who will act as Islamist militias. There will be lashes and honor killings in the formal setting of Islamic law and no one will pay attention. Urban and suburban enclaves will eventually become indistinguishable from Gaza. By 2030 the first crude homemade rocket, made with plans offered on the internet, may rise into the Parisian sky aimed at the Eiffel Tower.By 2030 there will be more Muslims in the United States than there are now in France. There will be at least one Congressman who was not only sworn in on the Koran but who announces that his program is to implement full Islamic law. There will be at least one Muslim cabinet member in every single administration, regardless of party. The Muslim liaison may even be promoted to full Czar in charge of Muslim relations.
Like Europe, the United States will operate a paranoid surveillance state that its critics decry, even while both the state and its critics support the Muslim immigration that makes such a surveillance state mandatory. And to remind everyone of that there will be occasional terrorist attacks, some thwarted, some not, including possibly one big one, when an Islamist terrorist group finally gets its hands on chemical or nuclear weapons from one of the Islamic states in Egypt, Pakistan, Syria or the country formerly known as Saudi Arabia.
The America of 2030 will operate on the contradictory paradigms of Muslim affirmative action and Muslim wars. It will spend nearly as much trying to buy off Muslims as it will spend on trying to kill their terrorists. Half its intellectual capital will be sunk into praising Islam while the other half will be spent trying to find more elegant ways to stop Muslim violence and kill Muslim terrorists. Homo Americanus circa 2030 will be a veteran of two dozen wars in the Muslim world and two-hundred Muslim affirmative action programs. By 2030 the best way to get a job in the lagging American economy will be to be a Muslim.
The Russia of 2030 will be a Eurasian Empire that will incorporate Islam on equal terms with the Russian Orthodox Church. Muslims will be encouraged to think of Eurasia as their Caliphate and it will enforce Islamic law, with its own religious police, which will answer to Moscow. The Eurasian Union will be a decaying lawless territory run by warlords who pay tribute to the head warlord in Moscow. Some of those warlords will be Christian and some Muslim. In the cities they will look like the mafia and in the rural territories they will be conventional feudal lords.
Some Eurasian Muslim warlords will provide training camps and money for Islamic terrorist groups on the condition that they don't attack them. Many of the Jihadists of 2030 will come out of these camps, going off to fight in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Europe, and returning with trophies of war, slaves and tales of adventure that encourage other young men to follow in their footsteps.
Other countries, including possibly the United States, will set up similar terrorist training camps on their own territory for Islamist groups plotting to carve out their own Emirates in Russia. By 2030, there will be little Afghanistans everywhere, with Jihadis training in Arizona and North Dakota for attacks on Russia's Eurasian holdings, Jihadis training in Russia for attacks on America and Europe, and Jihadis training in China for an attack on everyone.
By 2030, most countries will have come to view Islamic terrorism as a strategic asset, the way that Saudi Arabia and most Muslim countries do. They will recognize that the only way to transform the strategic liability of Muslim terrorism into an asset is by funding it and aiming it at their enemies. This will not be an entirely new strategy, but it will be taking place on an entirely new scale, and there will be a dramatic expansion by Islamist militias, many of whom will gain valuable experience, training and weapons by serving as the barbarian armies of a decaying West that they will use to conquer the West, the way that the Goth ancestors of Westerners did.
The Western leaders of 2012, like their ancient Roman counterparts, have come to admire the virtues of the savage more than the virtues of their own civilization. By 2030 it will be clearer than ever whether the outcome of their bloody halfhearted campaigns to civilize the savages with doses of democracy and civic institutions will have led to civilized savages or the savaging of civilizations.
Is this world of 2030 inevitable? Not at all, but considering current trends and policies, it is a far more likely outcome than the end of Islamic terrorism.
Will Islamic Terrorism end by 2030? It can if we want it to. There are two sure ways to end a war; either by winning it or by losing it. The world's most famous cokehead and mental patient duo meant the latter when they offered their Viet Cong Christmas greeting, but winning wars is still an option. It just isn't the option that we've chosen. The hearts and minds way of war will take us to the 2030 that I have described. And that 2030 will take us to a 2060 and a 2090 where the war is over because we weren't willing to fight our enemies as ruthlessly as they were fighting to destroy us.
Islamic terrorism can be over by September 12, 2030 if we decide to fight it the way that most of us thought we would on September 12, 2001. We can give our children and grandchildren the gift of a world without Islamic Terrorism. Or we can give them the nightmare of another 18 years of Islamic terror.
