Islam vs Christianity

I can understand that the administration is treading carefully when talking about the current Islamic State crisis. It is the Muslim world itself, and its religious and theological leaders, who ultimately are central to any successful move to damp down the appeal and spread of this group. The administration, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to alienate these leaders or the vast majority of peaceful Muslim followers by appearing to be at war with the entire Muslim world or the entire religion of Islam.

Nonetheless, ISIS is an Islamic movement, informed by the Qur’an and Sharia law, and there are historical precedents in Islamic history for most of what they are doing.  The Prophet, after all, led an expansionist empire whose conquering armies made it all the way to the gates of Vienna before they were stopped – by force. And the Qur’an makes it abundantly clear that the desired ultimate objective is to bring the entire world under Islamic rule.

The president’s comparison with Christianity was a little off center, since in fact the Crusades, brutal and misguided as they were, were fundamentally a defensive attempt to retake land originally conquered by Muslim armies.  Nonetheless, Christianity itself does have a bloody and intolerant history of pogroms, brutal Protestant-Catholic wars, Inquisitions, burning of “heretics” (anyone who didn’t subscribe to the “official” views) and mass eradication of whole “heretic” communities.  It is not a history to be proud of, but it is a history Christianity has at this point largely, if not completely, grown out of.  There are still fringe Christian groups and individuals whose interpretation of their religious duties leads them to do things like murder abortion doctors or harass the funerals of military personnel, but there aren’t very many of them. And there is in Christianity an anti-Jewish bias, and an anti-woman bias, that still persists, in part because early Christian writers embedded their own culture’s biases in the Gospels and the other New Testament books. But on the whole Christianity has grown out of wholesale conquest and murder in the name of religion (if not of nationalism). Nonetheless, a literal interpretation of the Bible and of the writings of various revered Christian saints and authors would provide ample theological support for many illiberal actions.

The core point that the president missed is that at this particular moment in history, it is a Muslim extremist group, not a Christian extremist group, that is conquering and brutalizing large swaths of Middle Eastern territory. And that Muslim extremist group is clearly and openly motivated and directed by their interpretation (perhaps incorrect, perhaps not) of the Qur’an, Sharia law and the Sunnah.  It will take Islamic theologians (not Christian ones) to fight this war of ideas.

Of course this is easier said than done, for a number of reasons. For one thing, Islam is still in the midst of its own version of the brutal Catholic-Protestant wars – the Sunni-Shia wars. ISIS is a Sunni movement, which is why it has yet to move successfully into the predominantly Shia southern half of Iraq. For another thing, the ultimate religious authority in Sunni Islam, the one person who might be able to authoritatively counter the ISIS theology, is the Caliph.  Unfortunately the last widely-recognized Caliphate lost power in 1924 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The only Caliph currently around is Abu Bakr al-Baghdad, ISIS’s own self-proclaimed Caliph.  Fortunately his seems not to be recognized as a valid Caliphate by the majority of the world’s Sunni or we would be in a lot worse trouble.

Ultimately the worldwide Islamic community is going to have to come to terms with the remnants of the harsh medieval, expansionist, desert culture embedded in its sacred writings and theology, either by ignoring the illiberal parts or by revising or reinterpreting them in terms better suited to today’s world as most Christians have learned to do with their sacred writings.

Recommended: The Nationalist Solution

Another good piece to read, in this discussion about how best to counter the Islamic State, is one by David Brooks in the New York Times a couple of days ago, The Nationalist Solution.  Brooks argues, as have several other writer in the past few days, that American foreign policy has been ineffective in the Middle East crisis because our politicians and ruling elites, whatever foreign policy "school" they adhere to, all make the fundamental mistake of assuming everyone wants what they want, everyone has the same aspirations as they do and the same values that they do.  That clearly isn't true, as any student of history can plainly see, and one wonders why it hasn't become apparent yet to all these supposedly bright, well educated leaders of ours.

As Brooks says:

"But people don’t join ISIS, or the Islamic State, because they want better jobs with more benefits. ISIS is one of a long line of anti-Enlightenment movements, led by people who have contempt for the sort of materialistic, bourgeois goals that dominate our politics. These people don’t care if their earthly standard of living improves by a few percent a year. They’re disgusted by the pleasures we value, the pluralism we prize and the emphasis on happiness in this world, which we take as public life’s ultimate end.

They’re not doing it because they are sexually repressed. They are doing it because they think it will ennoble their souls and purify creation."

He proposes that what will divert all these young extremists from their current apocalyptic theological views is something equally heroic, an intense commitment to nationalism.  It is an interesting proposal.

Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a revived Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism, some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.

Recommended: Nonsense about terrorism's 'root causes'

I have made the case several times that the root cause, or at least one of the root causes, of the current Middle Eastern radicalism is the great mass of unemployed and unemployable young men in that part of the world.  But Peter Bergen's recent CNN article Nonsense about terrorism's 'root causes' poses an interesting, and persuasive, counterargument.  As he points out, the mass of foot soldiers may come from the poor and unemployed, but a number of studies have shown that the leaders almost all come from middle-class or wealthy families with good educations.

So I may be wrong about my proposed root cause, but Bergen's article does support my argument that this battle will be won in a clash of ideas, not armies. Anyway, this is a good article to throw into the mix as we try to figure out how to handle this mess.

More on "What ISIS Really Wants"

I see that the article recommended in the preceding post has elicited almost frenzied attacks from some leftist magazines and academics.  Apparently the compulsion to be politically correct on this issue is overwhelming to some, even in the face of logic:

The ISIS members themselves consider themselves profoundly Islamic.  What standing do (mostly non-Islamic) writers and academics - or American presidents, for that matter - have to contradict them?

Do Protestants have the right to tell Catholics they aren’t real Christians because they have doctrinal differences on some issues? Do Catholics have the right to tell Mormons they aren’t real Christians: the Mormons themselves certainly consider themselves Christians.  Would these same leftist writers ever dare make such claims about Catholics or Mormons?  Of course not.  So by what right do they claim ISIS isn’t Islamic when ISIS members themselves not only believe they are followers of Islam, but indeed believe they are the only true followers of the Prophet's teachings?   

We (or at least those few non-Islamic Westerners who actually know what the Qur’an says and understand its context) may disagree with their interpretation of the Qur’an, but that hardly gives us the right to claim they are not followers of Islam.  Moreover, our apparent inability to understand the depth of their religious feelings and motivations is clearly hampering our ability to deal effectively with the whole situation.

Recommended: What ISIS Really Wants

The Atlantic Monthly has an article every American, especially every American politician, and certainly our President, ought to read. It is entitled What ISIS Really Wants, and it reaffirms not only that ISIS really is a religiously-motivated movement, but details exactly what that religious vision is.  We will never succeed in overcoming the medieval brutality of ISIS until we understand exactly what it is that motivates people to join and give their very lives to such a movement, because ISIS needs to be defeated in a battle of ideas - military force alone simply isn't going to do it.

And why does ISIS need to be defeated so urgently?  Because its ideology supports, indeed encourages, mass slaughter of unbelievers by any means available - including nuclear and biological means if they ever got such weapons into their hands.  So they are indeed an existential threat to the rest of us, even here in America.

The irrationality of the conservative and liberal ideologies

The nation is divided almost exactly 50-50 into conservative and liberal ideologies and the political parties that espouse those ideologies. There seem to be hardly any pragmatic moderates left in the middle.

In many ways both sides are the same. Both sides have issues on which ideology trumps science and hard evidence (for example, climate change for the right, vaccine side-effects on the left). Because of our flawed electoral process, both sides are beholden to special interests that pay for their very expensive campaigns (for example, unions on the left, corporations on the right – though in recent elections both sides seem to have been for sale to business.)  But they do have different ideologies, and therefore different agendas.

But each ideology, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, suffers from a fundamental flaw, which their followers are either incapable of seeing, or at least are unwilling to acknowledge.

Liberals, whose rhetorical focus, if not always their own actions, is on helping the underdog, want more social services from the government. Many have confused equality of opportunity with equality of outcome and would like a European-style welfare state to create (relative) equality of outcomes. But in fact the Europeans themselves have shown the two fundamental problems with this approach.

(1) It takes money, a lot of money, to pay for welfare states. If the nation taxes individuals and businesses heavily to pay for it, it drives the economy down and makes it less competitive in the world markets, reducing the tax take even further.  If instead politicians borrow heavily to pay for it, the nation accumulates a massive debt which it can never repay.  Greece is a classic case of this, but some US cities and states, whose politicians promised over-generous pensions in return for votes, are now in terrible financial straits.

(2) Humans respond to incentives, and are very good at “gaming” the system.  If the welfare state is generous enough, many people will opt to take the state money rather than work. If the safety net is generous enough, many people won’t bother to save or plan or buy insurance or retrain themselves when their jobs disappear. If pensions are generous enough, many people will opt to retire early rather than stay in the work force. All of these depress the economy, making even less money available to pay for the social services even as demand for these social services is increasing.  Again, Europe is a clear example of this. Nations like Greece, who espoused early retirement and generous pensions, are now in terrible financial trouble because their economies simply couldn’t pay for all the services they promised.

Conservatives, on the other hand, whose rhetorical focus, if not always their own actions, is on individual freedom, want a smaller, less intrusive and less expensive government (except, of course, that they would like to have government enforce their own “family values” on everyone). They profess to believe in unfettered free-market capitalism, in which individual initiative and work is rewarded (except, of course, that they also support market-distorting subsidies, tax credits and tax exemptions for favored businesses).

But the core flaw in the conservative ideology is that unfettered capitalism doesn’t work. As mentioned in (2) above, humans are pretty good at “gaming” any system, including capitalism. Without controls, capitalists will quite naturally maximize their profits by any means available – price-fixing cartels in product markets (or the equivalent wage-fixing cartels in labor markets – unions), misrepresentations and deceptive advertising, “dumping” below cost to drive competitors out of the market, bribes and kickbacks to obtain contracts, trading on insider information, buying protective tariffs and import restrictions from compliant politicians, etc, etc.  The list goes on and on, because people can be quite creative in this area.

When it is working well, capitalism does what no socialist central planning authority seems to be able to do, it continually and efficiently reallocates labor, capital, raw materials and finished products where they are most needed and best used. It does this with price signals.  If rare walnut boards can be sold for firewood at $5 a cord but will fetch $1000 a cord from a furniture factory, most of the walnut will naturally go to the furniture factory, which is a better use of such a scarce commodity.  If buggy whip makers can’t find work because their product isn’t needed much anymore but computer programmers make $100,000 a year because we don’t have enough of them, there is a natural incentive for at least some of the buggy whip makers to re-train themselves as programmers. The result is that even imperfect capitalist systems like ours are vastly more efficient and productive than central planning systems favored by communist and socialist systems, as even a cursory study of economic history will show.

But to work well capitalist markets have to be fair and the price signals relatively undistorted. It takes government regulation and constant, vigilant oversight to make that happen. The conservative myth that markets would work better if government would just get out of the way is just that, a myth.  It may well be true that in some areas government bureaucracy over-regulates (bureaucracies have their own pathologies), but it is naïve to think capitalist markets would work well without constant and tight government supervision.

What is true is that both liberal and conservatives ideologies have some seeds of truth or reality  in them, and a blending of the more rational parts of each would probably produce quite a workable system, as it has in the past. But to get back to that we need a lot more pragmatic moderates among our politicians than we seem to be electing nowadays, and that requires a lot more pragmatic moderation among voters than we are seeing.

Two further thoughts

Two further thoughts on this issue of Islamic terrorism:

1. Despite Washington's  tendency to see this as a military conflict, this not primarily a military conflict, even though military force may have occasional uses in special circumstances.  This is primarily a clash of ideas, and that is the arena in which we ought to be fighting it if we want to be effective. We have killed innumerable militant leaders and all that happens is that new ones spring up to take their place. We have killed innumerable jihadist fighters and all that happens is that yet more get recruited to take their place.

2. With respect to (1) above, a favorite saying comes to mind: "You can always get to people through religion. Their religion, not yours!"

More on Islamism and the Left

In the previous post I noted that several writers have speculated on the Left's "blindness" to the place of Islam in today's Middle East terrorism. One of the better articles is by Michael Walzer in the winter issue of Dissent: Islamism and the Left.  Also worth reading is Pewter Berkowitz's article Why the Left Casts a Blind Eye of Radical Islam in RealkClearPolitics.

Islamic terrorists and the American Left

There has been more than a little of Alice in Wonderland from the administration lately on the issue of exactly how the religion of Islam is related to the current wave of Middle Eastern terrorists. The administration’s recent public denial that the Taliban was a terrorist organization, and President Obama’s recent comments about the Crusades (which showed, among other things, that he really doesn’t understand history very well), all seem to reflect the American Left’s real difficulty coming to terms with what the rest of us can see clearly – Islamic terrorism is indeed obviously and directly related to the religion of Islam.  And just about any terrorist on a grisly YouTube video can be seen to be emphatically asserting that very fact. Apparently the Left’s fear of being politically incorrect is so great that they simply cannot bring themselves to face the facts.

Certainly the majority of Muslims in the world are content just to go about their business in peace, and the majority of Muslim clerics do not espouse or preach terror or violence against unbelievers. Nonetheless, one cannot deny that there is a virulent cadre of Muslim clerics preaching hate and intolerance and terror in some of the madrassas (religious schools) of the Middle East, and that they support these calls with direct references to verses in the Qur’an, nor can one deny that verses exist in the Qur’an that can be interpreted to support killing of infidels and unbelievers (for example 2:191-193 "And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah (disbelief)] is worse than killing...but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful.   And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah) and worship is for Allah alone”, or 8:12 “"I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them", or 9:123 "O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.").

It is equally true that the Christian Bible has some verses that can be used to justify violence, and indeed have been used in the past to justify things like the Crusades. And when present day Christian extremists justify violence with those verses we recognize that their extremism is indeed religiously motivated, however much we may think they have distorted the meaning of the verses they quote.  Just so, Islamic militants are clearly and obviously driven and motivated and instructed by the religion of Islam, whether or not we think they have interpreted the religion correctly.

Several writers recently have wondered whether this blindness on the Left is because philosophically the Left doesn’t understand religion, and seriously underestimates religion’s power in the world. It is the liberal Left, after all, that widely espouses the Enlightenment view that religion is a vestige of other, less rational times, and that it will inevitably wither away in the face of the advance of science and rationality. It is a compelling theory, but the evidence to date doesn’t support it. Religions are alive and well throughout the world, and have a profound influence on the cultures they inhabit.

It’s hard to see how we can effectively counter the current wave of Islamic militancy if we cannot bring ourselves to even see it for what it really is.

Obama and Iran

There is a pervasive restlessness these days, not only in Congress but in the nation as a whole, at what appears to be a fumbling indecisiveness in the White House about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Michael Doran has a provocative essay in Mosaic, Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy, which is worth reading and thinking about. Of course Mosaic sees the world from a Jewish point of view, and in that point of view Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a clear existential threat, not least because the current Iranian leadership has repeatedly and publically promised to “wipe Israel off the map”. Nevertheless, Doran’s narrative and interpretation of events rings true.

It seems to me clear that President Obama harbors a liberal vision of somehow converting autocrats like President Putin of Russia and ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran by sweet reason and diplomacy. We all know how the much-ballyhooed “Russian Reset” went.  Clearly President Obama’s naïve vision there was at odds with the reality on the ground in Putin’s Russia.

So the question now is how realistic is President Obama’s vision of achieving a deal with Iran that really eliminates the chances of a nuclear “breakout” for the foreseeable future. He clearly thinks it is possible. Many others, including a lot of very experienced foreign policy experts, think he must be smoking something if he really believes that. More than that, a lot of people are worried that he will accept a one-sided deal just to seal his “legacy” and be able to claim that he achieved something in this area, even if it is illusionary.  Certainly he has in the past made a lot of claims and taken a lot of credit for things that, in fact, were really fairly disastrous (think of all the claims about Obamacare or about the rate of US economic recovery.

Only time will tell whether his vision of what is possible is farsighted or simply naïve. But my own inclination, based on his record and actions (or lack of actions) to date, is to think he really doesn’t understand the cultural and political forces at work in the world today, and moreover that he appears unwilling to listen to advisers that don’t see things his way.  If true, this does not bode well for our foreign policy over the next decade or so, because if he fumbles the ball here the uncomfortable consequences will be with us long after he has left office.

Obama’s Budget Proposal

As I have said in previous posts, “It’s the economy, stupid!”.  My primary criticism of the Obama administration is that when it first came into office it focused too much attention and political capital on the ideologically-driven health care issue at the expense of reviving the economy, with the result that we have had a very, very slow and uneven recovery. Everything flows from the strength of the economy. Better social services, a stronger military, a more prosperous electorate, more “soft power” in the world, better education, etc, etc – all these goals, liberal and conservative alike, come only from a strong economy.

Now the administration is about to propose its new budget, the keystone concept being to tax corporation more (especially on their foreign and retained earnings) and use that money to upgrade the nation’s crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc). As is so often the case in Washington, this is a good idea coupled with a lousy idea.  The good idea is to spend government money improving the nation’s poorly-maintained infrastructure, something that has a direct effect on the economy.

The lousy idea is to tax corporation more. Yes, it sounds great, and will no doubt be very popular as a political talking point. But it shows an amazing level of naiveté on the part of administration policy makers.  The corporations that matter – the ones with lots of earnings one could tax – are almost always global in scope.  Make US tax laws too onerous and they will simply relocate elsewhere to a more tax-friendly nation.

Yes, there is a real problem with corporations moving US-earned profits offshore to evade taxes, just as there is a problem with corporations having bought endless other loopholes from compliant members of Congress. The result is that some huge corporations pay almost no taxes, and that certainly is unfair.

But the real solution is to revise the tax laws – reduce the corporate tax level to something competitive in the world market, but also eliminate almost all the corporate loopholes, tax credits and subsidies that have accumulated over decades so that corporations actually pay those reduced taxes. Obama’s proposed tax just piles yet another layer on top of an already Byzantine tax law (73,954 pages long, as of 2013). And as I pointed out, given enough incentive corporations can always relocate their headquarters, and many of their factories and facilities, to a more tax-friendly environment.

But then, most likely Obama never intended to propose something workable, but rather just something that can be used as a political talking point in the next election. Having spent 6 years with a “my way or the highway” approach to bipartisan governing, he now seems more intent on scoring political points for the next election than in actually achieving anything.

It always amazes me that the liberals who bash business and want a lot of government spending on social programs never seem to make the ( I would have thought obvious) connection that the only place to get the money to support their social programs is from the very businesses they are bashing – unless, of course they just want to keep borrowing it from their children’s generation.