Back away?

Stop the War on Terror, We Want to Get Off

Our government would have to back away pretty far, I think, for that to sufficiently diminish the threat posed by Jihaders to justify the economic and other risks we would incur.

Considering those other risks, I am not sure it's even possible, though I used to think so.

And considering that the problem originates in a global development in the Muslim world, and not with anything outsiders like ourselves have done.

In about a century, the countries of the Muslim world have passed through several stages.

During the Cold War, some of them emerging from European colonial/imperial rule, they formed closer or looser alliances with Russia, China, "the non-aligned," or the West.

All of those were secular influences and the major Muslim governments were on the whole relatively secularist and determined modernizers in that period.

Things began to go awry even before the end of the Cold War, as happened in the Iranian Revolution.

Since then, Muslim neo-medievalism has gone from strength to strength around the globe.

We did not make it happen.

It would not stop if we backed away.

The more states controlled by neo-medieval Islam the more danger is faced by any bordering states or civilizations not already subject to it.

The continued rise of Muslim neo-medievalism is a threat even to the New World in an age when the oceans cannot protect us from diseases born or missiles launched on the other side of the planet.

There were a century or two during which the great powers and great political struggles of the world were entirely secular and in which religion played no very conspicuous, direct part.

But now we have been forced by this development in Islam into a renewed period of ideological conflict in which the ideology most responsible for the conflict is in fact a religion.

And there is really not much we can do about it.

Like Israel, we just have to fight on, sometimes though perhaps not always with open warfare, in a struggle that will go on until it stops, no thanks to anything we can do to make it stop.

Muslim neo-medievalism was born and rose because of developments in the Muslim world over which we had no control, and it will wane and go away because of developments in the Muslim world over which we have no control.

Just as the global disease of communism rose and fell because of developments in Russia and China over which we had no control.

Most of what is important in what has happened, is happening, and will happen in the world was, is, and will be outside American control.