La Guerre d’après
2002
LAURENT MURAWIEC sought me out because his view of the Arab condition coincided with mine. I had recently published The Closed Circle, which is about one of the enigmas of the present age, namely why have the Arabs made such a frightful mess of things. They are heirs to a civilization of their own making. Since the end of the British and French empires, they have been their own masters, free to choose how to govern themselves to best advantage. New nation-states were supposed to replace the tribalism of the past. Some sort of modernization has occurred in forms such as urbanization or transport but little or nothing in spirit. On the contrary, for well over half a century now the Arab experience has been regressive: multiple wars and cross-border invasions, civil wars, military or political coups, assassinations of heads of state and other public figures, judicial murder, government by the will of an individual, not by law. Unable to end in definitive victory or defeat, these kinds of exercises in raw power are bound to be self-repeating, a perpetual treadmill of violence. In the circumstances there are no universities worth the name, no arts or sciences, no Nobel prizes for physics or chemistry, no advances in medicine. Arabs of course understand that they do themselves grave injuries. In their code of behavior, success brings honor and failure brings shame. Perhaps it is only human to shift their sense of shame on to someone or something else – the West, the United States, the Great Powers, Imperialists, democrats, oil companies, Christendom, Zionism or whatever. Through no fault of their own, in other words, history has come out badly for the Arabs and it will have to be reversed. Those who treat Islam as a fresh start outnumber those for whom it is a fossil.
The Closed Circle was banned in the Arab world but nonetheless I have anecdotal evidence of support. The lady in charge of the obvious bookshop in Cairo showed me a pile of copies hidden in a back-room. In London, the Egyptian Ambassador bought two copies. An influential Iraqi told Weidenfeld, my publisher, that I was hard on the Arabs but recognizably writing as a friend not a foe. A friend of mine happened to be present when a Saudi Prince told his wife she couldn’t have my book until he’d finished reading it.
When Laurent came to the house he was in the midst of one of the media tornadoes that can, and do, scatter bits of debris in Washington. His natural habitat was a high-powered think tank, first the RAND Corporation, then the Hudson Institute. The 9/11 terrorism had occurred some ten months previously and Osama bin Laden was a household name. A paper Laurent had written for the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon maintained that the entire chain of terror, from planners to financiers and activists and propagandists, were Saudis. Spreading their version of Islam by these means, they could no longer be allies. The time has come, he thought, to take the Saudi out of Arabia. His book La Guerre d’après is a blueprint for this reversal of American policy in the Middle East. The scandal was less than it might have been because Laurent, originally French, wrote this book in his mother tongue.
The great and the good on the world stage habitually play down the conviction of Islamist terrorists that they have Qur’anic sanction for their acts. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 President George W. Bush saw fit to declare, “Islam means peace.” Politicians, commentators and churchmen everywhere have followed this lead and repeat that Islamist terrorists are misrepresenting or perverting their religion. Apologias vary. Some Islamist terrorists are supposedly motivated by poverty; others suffer some psychological derangement and should be hospitalized rather than face justice. Euphemisms like activist, extremist and radical serve the purpose of obscuring reality.
Laurent was not having it. The Mind of Jihad, published in 2008, makes it very clear that what is atrocity to the infidel victim is devotion to the faithful perpetrator. Contemporary Arab-Islamic terrorism, he writes, is “the idolization of blood, the veneration of savagery, the cult of killing, the worship of death … exemplary actions pleasing to Allah and opening the gates of Paradise. In short, they are sanctioned by the highest religious authorities, they are condoned if not approved and organized by government authorities, they are praised by the intelligentsia and the media.”
Laurent was a master of controversy in his day.