Redstate

The study group that joins in the unwillingness to study.

By Paul J Cella Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

As far as I can tell, the publication of the Iraq Study Group report amounts to a demonstration of the crippling intellectual fatigue of our elites. The problem that called forth this commission from the ranks of American statesmen was the failure of the policy of democratization to quell the Islamic revolt, which exploded upon our shores on September 11, and which followed rapidly, in Mesopotamia, in the wake of our brilliantly successful invasion of Iraq. It is fair to say, as many have been saying, that this failure was from the first theoretical; it is fair to say, therefore, that some new thinking is warranted. There is no fundamentally new thinking in this document, at least not when it comes to the issues of capital importance.

Read on.

The Islamic revolt is in a true sense ancient: as old as the creed of Muhammad. Yet virtually every generation it is made anew. As G. K. Chesterton, with penetrating insight, explains:

A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mohamet produces an endless procession of Mohamets.

The plain pulverizing fact is that five years ago this revolution or apocalypse came to us, like a thunderbolt of shock and cruelty; and the plainer and more pulverizing fact is that our governing class, and that class of court intellectuals which advises them, has still not come to grips with it.

So here come the Realists, full of recommendations for “new and enhanced” this and “a change in the primary” that; yet according to my examination of the document they produced, Islam the religion, and Jihad the doctrine, are not regarded by them as subjects worthy of study. Now lest the contemners of the Study Group feel vindication at this judgment, it must be noted that this poverty of critical thinking, this destitution of imagination, is not isolated to one faction. In fact it permeates the politics of our country. Virtually every “respectable” political faction shares a studied and resilient indifference to the problem of Islam as Islam, and moreover, an eagerness to take up the sword against anyone who disputes them on this point. In short, the basic issue in the bewildering and terrible war brought to our lands five years ago, has been left largely unexamined by the primary intellectual resources of the nation. Happily, it has not been left altogether unexamined, but this vital effort of inquiry and analysis has been made the province of, in John Randolph’s phrase, a “lean and proscribed minority.”*

An example. It has often been noted that great revolutions do not detonate in times of terrible oppression, but rather follow upon the relaxation of terrible oppression. Louis XVI was a very liberal monarch indeed compared to his ancestors. The last Tsar was similarly mild in comparison. This peculiar and perverse pattern of history — a pattern discovered and developed, in the main, by democratic theorists — has never, to my knowledge, been rigorously applied by today’s democratic theorists to the Islamic world. Now this insight is a solid and valuable one; something that these theorists can fairly point to as a real achievement. Yet when it is most needed, in a time of national crisis, they abandon it on what can only be described as narrow ideological grounds. That an emancipation of the Islamic world from its tyrannies would, according to the aforementioned pattern, unleash terrible (and uncontainable) excesses of revolution — this is not a possibility that was never explored, simply because those in the best position to explore it are absolutely committed to the denial of the true character of Revolution in Islam.

And so we may have liberated our own new “endless procession of Mohamets” and our own new apocalypses to be repeated and “the world end again and again.” We may have strengthened our enemy, not because, as the Study Group insinuates, we failed to negotiate with others of his kind, but because we refused to learn who he is.

Any study group worth its salt in a healthy republic would have avoided this staggering error; and the real tragedy is: our republic is so sick that few to even realize it is an error.

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* The symbolic and preeminent figure in this minority is Andy Bostom, a medical doctor who has made himself perhaps the foremost American expert on Jihad. He stands in a long line of physicians whose application of their training and diligence to other subjects of study has won them distinction in multiple fields. But it is noteworthy that, in addition to native intrepidity and industry, Mr. Bostom enjoys intellectual freedom of movement by virtue of his success in an unrelated field. He is an outsider, because the insiders have failed miserably; and the wealth of his contribution stands in contrast to the poverty of theirs.