CHAPTER 13

MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST

CHURCHILL ANTICIPATES THE POTENTIAL FOR ISLAMIC TERRORISM

 

 

 

In 2004, Winston Churchill II met President George W. Bush in the Oval Office and read his grandfather’s 1921 speech to the House of Commons that predicted a terrorist threat posed by a fanatical sect of Islam—the Wahabis. The words of warning from the statesman who invented the modern nation of Iraq (and which he later pronounced to be “an ungrateful volcano”) found an attentive listener in the American president.

Having encouraged the Arab tribes in the Middle East to take sides against the German-allied Turks in World War I, Britain felt itself to be responsible for sorting out the political chaos produced by the Ottoman Empire’s demise. Churchill’s speech on the problem bore a remarkable resemblance to the situation the Bush administration faced with its difficult and costly occupation of Iraq. Churchill’s words might have been Bush’s:

We are at the moment in possession of these countries. We have destroyed the only other form of government that existed there. We have made promises that I have already recited to the inhabitants, and we must endeavour to do our duty, to behave in a sober and honourable manner, and to discharge the obligations which we entered into with our eyes open. We cannot repudiate light-heartedly these undertakings. We cannot turn around and march our armies hastily to the coast and leave the inhabitants, for whose safety and well-being we have made ourselves responsible in the most public and solemn manner, a prey to anarchy and confusion of the worst description.

In other words, although Churchill acknowledged that “the obligation is not an unlimited one,” it was a moral duty, as well as a political necessity, to install a stable government in Baghdad. “We have no intention of forcing upon the people of Iraq a ruler who is not of their own choice.”

While most of Churchill’s address concerned his plans to reduce the enormous expense of maintaining the British garrison in the Middle East, he could not avoid addressing the “delicate” political and religious character of the region. Churchill was behind the installation of King Faisal of Syria as the ruler of Iraq, in preference to the house of Ibn Saud. France opposed Churchill’s choice, for Faisal had led Syrian troops against the French during the war. Yet Churchill believed that this charismatic and intelligent second son of Hussein, the aged descendant of the Prophet, was the best choice to rule over the new state of Iraq. To Churchill, Faisal was not a fanatic. He would accept a monarchical role in the new Iraq, even if it meant allowing the return of Jews to Palestine.

But there was one reason above all for Churchill’s preference of Faisal over Ibn Saud:

The religious views with which [Ibn Saud] is identified, and which his followers would be bound to enforce, would, of course, have set the whole of Mesopotamia in a blaze.... A large number of Ibn Saud’s followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relation to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of the religious wars. The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.... Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous....

The key phrase in this assessment is perhaps “in their own regions.” Churchill was not unaware of the potential for Islamic extremism’s spread beyond its native region and into a wider jihad against the Christian West. Churchill had experienced firsthand the fanaticism for jihad of an extreme Sunni sect when he rode in that last cavalry charge against the Dervishes in 1898. These soldiers for Islam saw death in battle as their ticket to paradise, and were characterized by their strident war cries and frenetic scimitar-wielding attacks.

Churchill feared the fanaticism he saw. Such eagerness to die for beliefs violated his sensibilities. He predicted in 1921, “As the horn is to the rhinoceros, the sting to the wasp, so Islam is to the Arab—a weapon of offense or defense.” Such violent militancy, as practiced by the Wahabi sect, worried Churchill. It was like Puritanism carried to its most punitive extreme.

Churchill recorded a harsh judgment of fanatical Islam in the original, unabridged edition of The River War that he later suppressed for political reasons. The following politically incorrect passage does not appear in the subsequent editions:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

Churchill’s misgivings about Islam have been justified with a vengeance by the present-day Islamic terrorist quest to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction against the infidel West.

The passage of a century has not dimmed the fanaticism of Islamic extremism, and while Churchill could not have foreseen the events of September 11, 2001, the response was a rough parallel to the decision of Britain to avenge the killing of General Charles Gordon by going to war against the Dervishes and their leader, the Mahdi, in the Sudan in 1898. Like Osama bin Laden’s crusade to drive the American infidels from the Middle East, the Mahdi saw his sacking of Khartoum in 1885 as the beginning of a jihad to purge all Egypt of the European infidels. Churchill’s description of Britain’s grim determination recalls for a reader today the exhausted patience and dissatisfaction with the mere “stability” of post-9/11 America:

No terms but fight or death were offered. No reparation or apology could be made.... The red light of retribution played on the bayonets and the lances, and civilization—elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or to argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect a compromise—here advanced with an expression of inexorable sternness, and rejecting all other courses, offered only the arbitration of the sword.