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Arabs, Jews, the West and the Rest  Trinity College Dublin, November 23, 2006

The War on Terror: A Realist Strategy  Irving, TX, November 9, 2006

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Squaring the Circle in Kosovo

Local Government House, London, December 11, 2006

Why is the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija – until two decades ago an obscure corner of the former Yugoslavia – relevant to “the War on Terror”? There are several answers to this increasingly urgent question, all of them valid, but let me start with the one that is often overlooked or unthinkingly discarded as either propagandistic or paranoid: Kosovo is a key link in the Grreen Corridor, or the Green Transverse, an Islamic belt anchored in Asia Minor and extending north-westward into the heart of Central Europe.

After 9-11, nothing was supposed to be as before, but the U.S. policy in the Balkans has inexplicably retained its Islamophile bias, so remarkably persistent during the Clinton years. In the meantime, the Green Route has morphed from an allegedly paranoid Islamophobic propaganda ploy into a demographic, social and political reality. The absurdity of this ad hoc regional alliance between global enemies is demonstrated by its end result, namely the further undermining of the weakest geopolitical link – that in southeastern Europe – in the war on terrorism.

The American curiously benign attitude towards Jihad in the Balkans is not a consequence of ignorance: within the U.S. policy-making community, there is awareness that the Balkans is a part of the front-line, and that those regions in the Balkans where Muslims are in a majority are prime entry points and transit routes for terrorists. And yet, when questioned about the existence and the magnitude of the threat in the Balkans, U.S. policy makers are typically evasive, sometimes aggressively so, as Bishop Artemije has found out on his previous visits to this city. They do not deny the existence of various activities that point to Islamic extremism and terrorist infiltration in the Balkans, but, as a rule, almost immediately relativize it by saying that it is unlikely to undermine the social, political and security balance in the region, or to threaten American vital interests. Then follows the reassuring mantra about the supposedly pro-European and pro-“Western” orientation of secularised Balkan Muslims – and the alleged pro-Americanism of Kosovo’s Albanians in particular – with the optimistic conclusion that the accelerated process of the Euro-Atlantic integration of the whole region would narrow the space for radical Islamism until such tendencies will finally disappear.

The problem with such rhetoric – detectable most recently during Donald Rimsfeld’s visit to Tirana on September 26 – is not that it is absolutely wrong, but that it had never been right, and that it becomes less right with each passing year. A majority of the Muslims in the Balkans may still be nominally “pro-Western,” but the question is how they perceive their vocation. Are they likely to remain so if “the West” stops pandering to their demands as a matter of course, and starts judging them on their intrinsic merits?

It may be true that a majority of Kosovo Albanians are 19^th-century-style nationalists who treat religion as an element of their core identity, but there are a growing number of those who insist that a return to authentic Islam is the key to their national aspirations; and then there are their leaders who have well documented and long-stablished links with various Islamic terrorist networks. All along, the principal defect of the American approach is in

(1) An unfounded but abiding faith in the attractive powers of secularisation and soft-porn consumerism; and

(2) The cynical expectation that feeding local Muslims with the morsels of Balkan Christendom will keep the global beast at bay. But it is still baffling that a failed paradigm continues to be applied in the Balkans.

On this latter part of the equation in particular, the involvement of the Clinton administration in the wars of Yugoslav succession was an excellent example of the failed expectation that pandering to Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. That notion matured in the final months of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, when his Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I. The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base the heart of Europe, a moral and political debacle most visible vis-à-vis Moscow and Peking, and the absence of any positive payoff to America.

The pattern of Washingtonian responses was established in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a microcosm of Yugoslavia itself. When it disintegrated in 1992 into three ethno-religious units, under the pressure of those same centrifugal forces that had been deemed irresistible in Yugoslavia’s case, the administration of Bush-father declared that it had to be put together again in the name of multiethnicity.

All along it was obvious to any sober Westerner that Muslims did not want a multiethnic liberal democratic society: An astute American military analyst, Col. Sray, warned in 1995 that “President Izetbegovic and his cabal appear to harbor much different private intentions and goals.” But the demonization of the Serbs proceeded nevertheless. Once the paradigm was successfully planted in Bosnia, the possibilities for Kosovo were limitless. The Albanians were supported in their bid to secede by NATO’s military intervention (“self-determination”) akthough that violated the borders of Serbia, but the Krajina Serbs were expelled in the biggest act of post-1945 ethnic cleansing in Europe, rather than allowed to secede from Croatia (“inviolability of borders”). Macedonia was effectively partitioned between Slavs and Albanians in 2001, but no such arrangement is allowed in Kosovo, where under NATO occupation three-quarters of Christians were expelled and over a hundred of their shrines put to torch. While The Hague Tribunal continues its frenzied quest for the remaining two alleged war criminals from Pale, three war criminals par excellence, Ceku, Haradinaj, and Thaci, run Kosovo as their criminal little fiefdom with the blessing of the “international comjmunity.”

The result of Clinton’s Balkan policy was the establishment of a vibrant, resilient jihadist base in the heart of Europe. The collusion between Muslim terrorist groups and criminal gangs in the Balkans has also spawned a criminal network with jihadist sympathies that currently supplies Western Europe with tens of thousands of smuggled humans (most of them Muslims) and with the bulk of its top-quality heroin, mostly of Afghan origin. The Interpol and European security agencies know, and occasionally are allowed to warn, that the trade is controlled mainly by Albanian Muslims from Kosovo – with the mujahedeen providing the logistics.

The denial of this reality is continuing, as we’ve seen in that remarkable Clinton interview on September 24. Given to tantrums unworthy of a schoolyard bully, he still pretends that he could “simultaneously be trying to stop a genocide in Kosovo and, you know, make peace in the Middle East, pass a budget.” He’ll never admit that Kosovo was a serious and perhaps a fatal detraction. In the words of Dimitri Simes, not only is Clinton trying to rewrite history – there was no genocide in Kosovo to justify the NATO attack – but he continues to gloss over the heavy price of his aggression for U.S. national security: thanks to his war America squandered a real chance to get bases in Uzbekistan by cooperating with Russia, and its cooperation with China – another key player in central and south Asia with considerable influence over Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan – suffered another heavy blow. Concludes Simes, “If Russia and China were in America’s corner in 1999 and 2000, the U.S. could have taken action against the Taliban and either driven them from power or at least severed their links to al Qaeda.  This would have made the September 11 attacks much more difficult to organize.”

The war was ostensibly waged for human rights, but on that front, too, judged by any rational standard, the NATO-UN mission in Kosovo is an unmitigated disaster. Under a string of Euro-Gauleiters (Kouchner, Haekkerup, Steiner, Holkeri, Petersen) the pretense of progress is still maintained, amidst murders, unreversed ethnic cleansing, rampant crime, prostitution, drug-smuggling, and general dysfunctionality of a thoroughly failed, violent, and dysfunctional polity devoid of a single redeeming feature. The former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis McKenzie, knows the score in the Balkans better than any think-tank “expert” in this city. He notes that, back in 1999, “those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers” – while the fact that the KLA was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be linked to al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored. And yet, the Albanians “have played us like a Stradivarius,” he says. If the Albanians achieve their independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, McKenzie warns, “just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported movements around the world.”

It is high time for the realists with no axes to grind in this conflict to resist the curiously undead Clinton model of the new Balkan order – known as “the unfinished business” – that seeks to satisfy the aspirations of all ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, all, that is, except those of the Serbs. A Carthaginian peace may be imposed on Serbia today, but the Radicals will be in power in Belgrade next year as a consequence, merely contributing to chronic regional imbalance and strife for decades to come. That is not in America’s interest. It is in the interest of Islamists in general and Islamic terrorists in particular, and therefore it should not be condoned.

The short-to-medium-term model for the future of a fully autonomous, but certainly not sovereign, Kosovo and Metohija should be based on the Cyprus precedent; those who lament the “boundary” on the Ibar in Mitrovica should recall that it was acceptable for an ethnically divided Cyprus to join the EU in 2004, and that its de facto ethnic partition into two self-governing entities has been effectively condoned by the UN and the US. The status of Serbian shrines surrounded by the Albanian-controlled territory — Decani, Prizren, Gracanica, Pec etc. — should follow the model of the Vatican, Castel Gandolfo, and St. John in Lateran vis-à-vis Italy. And finally, the status of Kosovo itself vis-à-vis Belgrade should be based on the status of the Åland Islands vis-à-vis Finland. The precedents exist, and the problem of Kosovo is neither so unique nor so intractable as to warrant a solution outside the parameters of established practices in other places where different ethnic and religious communities vie for the same space.

No effective anti-terrorist strategy is possible today without recognizing past mistakes of U.S. policy that have helped breed terrorism. Eight years of the Clinton team’s covert and overt support for the Islamist camp in the Balkans have been a moral disaster and a foreign policy debacle of the first order. Its fruits are visible in the world-wide threat that America faces today. Its chief beneficiaries were the upholders of global Jihad and their co-religionists in Sarajevo, Novi Pazar, Tetovo, Tuzi, and Pristina.

The problem of Islamic terrorism may not be resolved short of a major restructuring of the current Balkan architecture that would entail splitting Bosnia into three ethnically-based cantons, decentralizing Kosovo on the basis of pre-ethnic-cleansing population patterns, and vetoing its independence. The alternative is to create a lawless black hole, centered in Pristina, that would destabilize not only Serbia but also Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina by providing the Republika Srpska with a valid precedent for secession from the Dayton edifice. If the Bush Administration is half-serious about the GWOT, it should

(1) fire Nicholas Burns and all other bureaucrats left over from the Clinton years who have internalized the Albright view of the Balkans;

(2) reverse its current support for Bosnia’s centralization, and

(3) adopt a policy in line with the recommendations of the American Council for Kosovo.

To continue encouraging the global Muslim sense of righteous victimhood partly embodied in the myth of the “genocide” in Kosovo – as Bill Clinton tried doing in his memorable interview with Mike Wallace – is to feed would-be suicide bombers with a political pap that nourishes their hate. If the war on terrorism is to be meaningful, that idiocy must stop. Pandering to Islam’s geopolitical designs — in the Balkans, or anywhere else — is not only bad, it is counterproductive.

A national interest-based foreign policy, freed from claims of American divinely ordained uniqueness, is essential to make the United States victorious in the war on terror. George W. Bush’s belief that “history has called America and our allies to action” is as flawed as Madeleine Albright’s hubristic assertion, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

Such millenarian kitsch is both tasteless and dangerous. The notion that “we” are “indispensable” or “on the right side of history” breeds an irrational belief in the correctness of one’s own judgment, and it prompts strategies inimical to the task on hand and to the political and constitutional tradition of the United States. The historicist fallacy that “history” is an entity on a linear march is a gnostic myth worthy of jihadists, nazis and communists, but not of a democratic Republic. 

To deal with the terrorist threat effectively and on the basis of leadership willingly accepted by those who are led, the United States should discard the pernicious notion of its exceptionalism. This will be resisted by the advocates of “benevolent global hegemony,” of America’s open-ended and self-justifying world mission and its supposedly unfinished business in the Balkans that includes an independent “Kosova,” a centralized Bosnia without the entities, and the unspecified but certainly intended fragmentation of Serbia’s truncated rump. They need to be confronted, because their mindset and their policies are contrary to the American interest in general, and detrimental to the specific goal of defeating jihad.

The cultural context of that policy needs to be changed, too. The similarity of various Serbophobic rants and the anti-Russian odium over Chechnya, and the vehemence with which they have been deployed by the media and politicians in Western Europe and North America alike, reflects the deeply rooted perception of the Western elite class that nations formed by the spiritual and cultural legacy of Orthodox Christianity belong to an alien and hostile tradition. The vehemence hints that the cause is not in a misunderstanding of the East European spiritual tradition but, rather, that such reactions are due to the elite class’s accurate assessment that that tradition is an obstacle to the realization of their political, economic, and cultural preferences in the postmodern world.

As the shadow of global Jihad grows darker, that elite class is following in the footsteps that are 800 years old. When they sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, the Franks did not understand, or care, that the New Rome on the Bosphorus was the guardian and protector of the West against the same enemy we all face today. The treachery of Orthodoxophobic Westerners opened the way for the Jihadist onslaught against Europe that did not stop until it reached Vienna in 1683.

Replicating the same folly with Serbia today, by condoning the creation of an independent Muslim statelet that embodies everything that America does not stand for, brings to mind Talleyrand’s comment on Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake."

ISRAEL-PALESTINE, THE WEST AND THE REST:

TOWARD A REALIST PARADIGM

Trinity College Dublin, November 23, 2006

For all their differences of emphasis and substance in foreign policy making, Western Europe and North America share objective interests in the Middle East that require broadly similar policy responses. Since the notion of interests and the policies that they engender are defined by the ideological framework in which they are embedded, let me open my ideological cards before proceeding. Realism, Wilsonianism, and Neoconservativism are the three schools of thought in international relations that currently dominate thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. Each ascribe to a different underlining premise from which policies flow.

Wilsonian paradigm (to which most Europeans subscribe even without being aware of that fact) is embodied in Mary Robinson here, Javier Solana in Brussels, and the Democratic Party in the US.The “neocons,” on the other hand, include former Marxist intellectuals like Podhoretz, Kristol, or Muravchik, and policy gurus like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Let me add in passim that blanket depictions of neoconservatives as redesigned Trotskyites need to be corrected. In several important respects the neoconservative world outlook has some striking similarities with Stalinism and German National Socialism. Today’s neoconservatives share with Stalin and Hitler an ideology of nationalist corporatism in the economic sphere and internationalist imperialism so tangibly visible in Iraq.

Though differing in practice, both Wilsonianism and Neoconservatism derive their assumptions from Kantian utopianism. Both hold that peace and stability are the natural order of the world and that Man is improvable, that violence and barbarity are either socio-political pathologies or the fruits of flawed policies by “the West.”Wilsonians find remedies in multilateralism, foreign aid, and efforts at nation-building, while neoconservatives rely on the use of military power to impose their peculiar brand of “benevolent global hegemony” on a supposedly grateful world. On the whole, while the neoconservative mindset is apocalyptic (which is a Nazi trait), rather than utopian (which characterizes the Wilsonians), both are conducive to making the world as we want it to be, rather than dealing with it as it is, which produces policies that are invariably flawed, and occasionally fatal.

It is realism that, unlike either utopian school, accepts the anarchic nature of the world, and places national interest, pragmatically defined, as the basis of world affairs. It accepts, in sorrow rather than anger, the reality of a world where conflict, competition and power play a primary role.

Given the realities of the region, it is clear that the Middle East is not ripe for a speedy democratic transition. Despite politically correct fantasies to the contrary, Islamic cultural and spiritual heritage precludes the adoption of a political system based on the notion of popular sovereignty. Basing a foreign policy strategy on utopian fantasies that ignore power realities on the ground is foolish and dangerous. Democracy in the region will only flourish as a largely organic development; it cannot be successfully imposed. A realist analysis of the region as a whole must start from this critical first principle assessment.

The pursuit of Western goals in the region requires the frank subordination of secondary and peripheral interests. Our primary interests in the Middle East are:

1) Continued access to oil resources that demand regional stability.

2) Preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by regional actors, such as Iran but not limited to Iran.

3) Countering the terrorist threat that emanates from the region.

Secondary interests include ameliorating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and finding a solution that will leave both parties equally dissatisfied. Peripheral interests lie in opening the region to trade, encouragement of more pluralist forms of governance, promotion of the rule of law, human rights, free enterprise, diversity, pluralism, tolerance, anti-discriminationism, multiculturalism, multiracialism, inclusivism, environmentalism, free abortion on demand, constitutionally guaranteed gay marriage, healthy diet and exercise, non-smoking, animal rights, prevention of global warming, etc, etc.

Secondary and peripheral must remain subordinate to the primary interests when policy outcomes come into conflict. To put it brutally, should we promote “democracy” even if its beneficiaries are Usama and Ahmadinejad? Should we seek justice for the Palestinians – however defined – at the cost of risking the disappearance of the state of Israel? My answer is “no.”

I contend that even if an evenhanded and generous agreement were to be offered to the Arabs – including the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, an equitable sharing of natural resources, and a generous compensation package that would resolve the refugee problem – it would nevertheless prove to be unworkable in the long term because the notion of Israel’s legitimacy is simply unacceptable to traditional Islam.

The tragedy of the Israeli-Arab conflict is that a problem that may have been amenable, a few decades ago, to the conventional conflict-resolution approach has morphed into a civilizational and religious dispute beyond politics. Most principal actors now perceive it as a zero-sum game.Before 1967, Arab nationalism had tended to be secular, socialist, and anti-Western.  Its opposition to Israel also took a secular form: Israel was seen as a Western colony settled by Europeans and Americans in an Arab land. Europe and the United States created it both as a strategic outpost and as a means of getting rid of their Jewish populations. In the aftermath of the crushing defeat in the Six-Day War, however, the seeds of doubt were sown in the Arab street. How could three million Jews deliver such an humiliating blow to 200 million Arabs? Perhaps because they placed their trust in their God, while the Arabs – led by secular regimes – were unfaithful to Allah? The line connecting the Arab debacle of June 1967 and the reawakening of political Islam a generation later, following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, is uneven but clearly discernible.

Until roughly 1990, broader Arab trends also applied to the Palestinian political and intellectual mainstream. The opposition to Israel, in the occupied territories and in the diaspora, depended for support on pan-Arab sentiment, notably embodied in Egypt’s Nasser. Parallel with that sentiment, a nondenominational Palestinian identity was actively promoted. It was rooted in the myth of an idealized pre-1947 polity, and it amounted to a belated attempt to build a nation without a state and without much of the claimed land.The great realignment came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of its satellite regimes – notably in East Berlin, Bucharest, and Prague – that had provided help to various Palestinian factions when Moscow was reluctant to be seen as doing so itself. In the absence of the failed secular god, young Arabs turned to Allah in droves.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was soon followed by the defeat of militant Islamists in Algeria and Egypt, forcing them to shift their focus from the internal to the external front. The founder and leader of Hamas, the late Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, blended the nationalist slogans of the secularists’ pre-1990’s struggle against Israel with principles derived from the doctrines and values of Islam. The Islamic component in the equation, however, goes well beyond inspiring youngsters to sacrifice themselves and to hope for either victory or martyrdom: “Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed."

From the orthodox Muslim point of view, there is nothing remarkable about such statements. They are derived from the Kuran, from the political tradition and social outlook of 13 centuries harking back to Muhammad. Relinquishing any part of Palestine at the negotiating table is a disobedient act of blasphemy against Allah, and the alternative is the only right way (al-hal-wahid). As a modern Muslim commentator points out, “Such an outlook renders struggle a religious duty, not a nationalist or patriotic one.” The struggle against Israel is more than a “war of national liberation”: It is an act of worship for which God rewards a struggler in the form of victory in this life and eternity in the hereafter.

The religious contextualization of the Arab-Israeli dispute makes its resolution more difficult. It had been easier to look for solutions as long as the conflict remained stated in the secular, “rational” terms of power, territory, resources, and guarantees. Hamas and other Islamic groups have brought a qualitative change to the Middle Eastern discourse: From their point of view, no permanent peace is possible because it would be against Allah’s will to grant any piece of land once controlled by the faithful to non-Muslims.

A mirror image of this view, of metaphysical sophistry seeking to push its way into legitimate discourse, is the claim – embraced by many in the American evangelical movement – that the modern state of Israel is the embodiment of a biblical covenant: in other words, a Waqf under another name. Eretz Yisrael is the visible expression of the faithful God Who wills by covenant the permanence of the Jewish people (klal), whether Jews live in Israel or elsewhere. Israel “is the beginning of the flowering of messianic redemption” (resheet tzmihat geulateimu). The Jews have the right and the duty to settle the entire land, Eretz Ysrael: as per the book of Numbers, “the people that dwells alone, and that will not be counted among the Nations.”

The development of a coherent anti-jihadist strategy in Washington should go hand-in-hand with demystifying the relationship between America and Israel, redefining it in terms of mutual interests devoid of metaphysical or emotional mists. This would help Israel mature into a “normal” nation-state and help her to overcome the paradox that the state of Israel, instead of solving the perennial problem of Jewish insecurity, remains beset by it. Her real and eminently legitimate security concerns after 1948, and notably after 1967, were aggravated by the reemergence of an outlook predicated upon the premise of an inherently hostile world at large that includes Europe and the rest of the world, save the United States. America should grasp the causes of that insecurity from without – by scrutinizing the structure of the Middle Eastern conflict and the nature of the Islamic threat – rather than pander to its symptoms from within by the undissenting acceptance of various biblical and quasi-scriptural claims, as the “evangelical right” would like her to do.

Winning the War on Terror: A Realist Strategy

Probe Ministries Lecture Series, Irving, TX, November 9, 2006

I am not going to waste your time this evening with yet another treatise on the nature of Islam, with yet another refutation of the alleged dichotomy between something called “true Islam” (peaceful, tolerant, etc.) and its supposedly aberrant terrorist fringe. We are way beyond that, or at least we should be, because:

·          Had the Senate issued a rallying call for the War on Elephants, Hannibal would have marched into Rome in triumph.

·          Had World War II been waged by the Allies against Guderian’s Blitzkrieg, rather than against Nazism, the Reich would still have 927 years to go.

·          Had Americans agonized, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, whether Shinto war actually good but only Bushido was bad, the Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere would be going strong to this day.

Those who still have doubts on this score should read not only my books, but also those by Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or… and above all, they should read the Kuran. So, instead of covering the ground that is, or should be, familiar to most of us, I am going to talk about something called “Global War Against Terrorism” – but “GWAT,” and an ugly acronim it is, as well as misleading, in that it confuses the method of the enemy with the enemy himself. It is a misnomer indicative of the pathology of the elite class, whose squeamishness in naming the enemy is but one sign of a malaise that hampers a coherent effort.

Is our civilization in peril? Is it possible that today’s America, and the Western world in general – ostensibly more powerful and more affluent than ever – are actually in mortal danger?  There are many people who would say “yes” – but for different reasons. Some see the danger in still barely visible but ultimately catastrophic climate changes that may render our planet unfit for human life. Others point out that our environment is being degraded at an unsustainable rate, that we are not preserving the Earth for those who will inherit it from us. Others yet warn that, even if we take better care of the environment as a whole, the ongoing depletion of natural resources, and in particular the looming fossil fuel crisis, will lead to the collapse of the global economy.

But even if you are an optimist who believes that the environment can be protected, and energy renewed, and diseases cured – even then you’d be mistaken to think that we are relatively safe, that there’s not need for alarm and immediate action to save our civilization from annihilation; for there is one threat to our system of values and our way of life that is real, present, and deeply committed to either converting or killing us.

The most deadly threat facing the Western civilization today is Islam, a teaching that is part-religion, part-totalitarian ideology, and part-geopolitical project, a blueprint for global conquest.

Please note that I am not making a distinction that all too many politicians, academics and journalists like to make between an imaginary, tolerant Islam, and what they call “Islamism,” or else “Islamic fundamentalism,” with the implication that those alleged aberrations, extreme and violent as they are, distort the peaceful message of “true Islam.” Examples of this a-historical falsehood are too numerous to mention. It is almost invariably made in President Bush’s speeches on terrorism, in which he says that the ideology upheld by Muslim terrorists is very different from the religion of Islam.

Mr. Bush is wrong. The ideology of terror is immanent to Islam. While it is possible to dispute the details of al-Qaeda’s theological justifications for terror, it is not possible to dispute that its arguments are based on orthodox Islamic sources, precedents, and methods of deduction, too complex to outline now, but contained in my book The Sword of the Prophet and elsewhere. Those arguments are independent of any dubious or capricious interpretations of the Kuran or the Sunna.

Muhammad’s practice and constant encouragement of bloodshed, pillage, rape and mutilation – amply legitimized in the Koran and in the Traditions – are unique in the history of religions. He imbued his followers with a profound belief in the value of bloodshed. The view of modern Islamic scholars, that “Islam must rule the world and until Islam does rule the world we will continue to sacrifice our lives,” is neither extreme nor remarkable from the standpoint of traditional Islam. The Muslims may contemplate tactical ceasefires, but never complete abandonment of jihad, short of the unbelievers’ submission. For the fallen and victorious alike, the rewards are plentiful, and X-ratedly sensual.

While Islam differs in its details from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to create a new society; complete control over that society; and cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood. In all cases the lust for other people’s possessions and power over their lives have been justified by an ideology that perverts meanings of words, stunts the sense of moral distinctions, and destroys souls.

Mr. Bush has many harsh words for the “authoritarian regimes” in Syria and Iran, alleging that they “aggressively fund the spread of radical, intolerant versions of Islam,” but it is remarkable that he spares Saudi Arabia – the proselytizer-in-chief of Muslim radicalism in the West – and effectively gives a green light to Pakistan’s Prevez Musharraf to continue his well perfected art of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He mentions “American actions to protect Muslims” in Bosnia and Kosovo, as if Bill Clinton’s Balkan wars were something to be proud of, as if they had not secured a strong base for jihad in the heart of Europe.

All those inconsistencies were secondary to Mr. Bush’s fundamental error: his implication that lethal violence against non-Muslims is a “distortion” of jihad. He cemented the error a year ago with the assertion that “[m]any Muslim scholars have already publicly condemned terrorism, often citing Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Koran, which states that killing an innocent human being is like killing all humanity, and saving the life of one person is like saving all of humanity.” In reality “the idea of jihad” is a highly developed doctrine, theology, and legal system of mandatory violence against non-believers. It made Islam the first political ideology to adopt terrorism as a systemic tool of policy, not as a temporary and unwelcome expedient.

Even Mr. Bush’s solemnly quoted line from the Kuran was a distortion of verse 5:32, which states that “if anyone slew a person — unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land [emphasis added] — it would be as if he slew the whole people.” Immediately thereafter follows a list of horrid torments for those who create “mischief,” including death by crucifixion. That loophole embraces all those who resist the establishment of the Muslim rule or who disobey the sharia once it is established. Furthermore, Mr. Bush should be told that one single Kuranic verse, “the Verse of the Sword” (9:5) – which gives the infidel the choice between conversion or death – abrogates all 124 earlier verses, the ones that are quoted most regularly by Islam's apologists to prove its tolerance and benevolence.

Among reasonable and patriotic Americans, who have elected and re-elected Mr. Bush in the belief that he is one of them, the debate on the nature of Islam should have been long over. But while it is at least conceivable that Mr. Bush knows or suspects the real score on Islam, but feels constrained to pretend otherwise, for reasons good or bad, the moral and intellectual paralysis of the liberal end of the Washingtonian spectrum is terminal

Unlike Mr. Bush’s, the Democrats’ world view rejects in principle the notion that religious faith can be a prime motivating factor in human affairs. Having reduced religion, literature and art to “narratives” and “metaphors” which merely reflect prejudices based on the distribution of power, the Left treats the jihadist mindset as a pathology that should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.

The result is a plethora of proposed liberal “cures” that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia. Abroad, we are told, we need to address political and economic grievances of the impoverished Muslim masses. At home we need more tolerance, greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the minorities that feel marginalized and threatened by law enforcement. The failure of such “cures” leads to ever more pathological self-examination and morbid self doubt. If the spread of jihad is not due to the ideology of jihad itself, the argument goes, then it must be our own fault. The issues of immigration, identity, loyalty, and culture are accordingly not treated as an area of legitimate concern. The result is a cloud-cuckoo land in which much of what is said or written about terrorism is not about relevant information that helps us know the enemy but about domestic political agendas, ideology, and psychology.

On the key issue of the identity of the enemy, on the scriptural message and historical record of Islam, the Democrats have nothing useful to say. On the role of the Muslim disapora in the West they argue that: “The government must rebuild vital relationships with Muslim and Arab communities in the U.S. and around the world, that have been so severely strained by actions and policies undertaken in the name of homeland security.” They claim that “changes in visa policy and passport reform… have made America less attractive to students and visitors” from the Muslim world, which is allegedly detrimental to U.S. interests. Furthermore, privacy and due process must be protected so as to avoid “disproportionate law enforcement efforts against Muslim Americans.”

This insane mindset at one end of the elite spectrum and Mr. Bush’s incongruities at the other have contributed to the fact that we are in grave danger. In this “nation of immigrants” the Muslim diaspora is the only large immigrant group that is often reluctant to embrace American values and that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists. A sizeable minority of them wishes to transform the United States of America into a Caliphate and to replace the Constitution with the Sharia, by whatever means. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy, therefore, must entail denying Islam the ability to continue its demographic deluge, its quiet conquest of the Western world.

The unwillingness of the West to face reality has enabled Islam to use demography as a political weapon. Muslim countries export surplus population to Europe and America, aware that the bigger the diaspora, the greater the political influence it will exert. Some 25 million inhabitants of the European Union are Muslims. If present trends continue, including an ongoing demographic collapse of Europeans, by 2020 Muslims will account for over 10% of the population of Europe, and exceed ten million in America. This population is expanding by immigration and an enormous birth rate. In 30 years the Muslim population of Great Britain rose from 82,000 to two million. In Germany there are over four million Muslims, mostly Turks, and over five million in France, mostly North Africans. An eighth of all babies born in EU countries are Muslim, but in France the proportion is twice that high. With the expanding numbers and the creation of distinctly Muslim neighborhoods in many European cities, the bold notion of conquest by demographic rather than military means has entered the activists’ minds.

The blueprint was developed over two decades ago, in 1981, when the Third Islamic Summit Conference of Kaaba adopted the “Mecca Declaration.” It stated, inter alia,“We have resolved to conduct Jihad with all the means at our disposal so as to free our territory from occupation. We are convinced of the need to propagate the precepts of Islam and its cultural influence in Muslim societies and throughout the world.” In the ensuing two decades, on average two new mosques were opened EVERY WEEK somewhere in the Western world. Pledges to propagate Islam were advanced irrespective of the fact that the signers of the Declaration openly oppressed non-Muslim communities in their own lands, or prevented them from being established at all.

Good and orthodox, that is to say radical Muslims, dominate the Islamic life in the West. They control major Muslim organizations, most mosques and newspapers. They manipulate the public and politicians hiding under non-profit ‘religious charities,’ and the buzzword of human rights. This reality is denied by the multiculturalist establishment, producing a climate wherein it is easy for the Muslims to lie about the true nature of Islam.

It is thus insensitive to report that, in response to a survey of newly naturalized U.S. citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims say they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the proposition that Shari’a should be the law of the land. These people are a real and present threat to our survival.

Between 1987 and 1997, two million immigrants came to the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries. By 2000 over one million of them had been naturalized. There has been three-fold growth of overall immigration to the U.S. since 1970, but during the same period immigration from the Middle East has grown seven times, from under 200,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2000. It is expected that the number of immigrants from the Middle East in 2010 will be 2,500,000, overwhelmingly Muslims. By that time, U.S.-born children under 18 with at least one parent born in the Middle East will be close to a million.

The figures for immigration from the Middle East are matched and likely to be exceeded by the number of Muslim immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Currently Muslims account for close to one-tenth of all naturalizations, and their birth rates exceed those of any other significant immigrant group. Even a conservative estimate of their number of three million, or one-percent of the population, has alarming security implications and the potential for disproportionate growth.

A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy therefore must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the United States. The application of ideological and political criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective visitors or immigrants has been and remains an essential ingredient of any anti-terrorist strategy, whereby Islamic activism would be treated as eminently political rather than “religious” activity. The totalitarian nature of Islam makes the threat different in degree to that faced during the Cold War, but not in kind. It demands a similar response.

Perhaps not one in a hundred communists living in the West was an active Soviet spy; maybe not one in a hundred Muslim immigrants is a Bin Laden asset. Nevertheless, managing the communist risk 50 years ago entailed denying entry visas (let alone permanent residences, college training, or passports!) to self-avowed Party members. Doing the same now with Bin Laden’s potential recruits is the key to any serious anti-terrorist strategy.

Their deep disdain for the democratic institutions of the host-countries notwithstanding (and just like the members of communist parties before them), Muslim activists in non-Muslim countries invoke those institutions when they clamor for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs. They demand full democratic privileges to organize and propagate their views, while acknowledging to each other that, given the power to do so, they would impose their own beliefs and customs, and eliminate all others. Once it is accepted that "true Islam" does not recognize a priori the right of any other religion or world outlook to exist-least of all the atheistic secular humanism – a serious anti-terrorist strategy will become possible. That strategy should have TEN specific elements:

1.                   Seek zero porosity of the nation’s borders. Preventing illegal immigration is a desirable objective per se; in the context of stopping terrorists it is mandatory. No counter-terrorist strategy is possible without complete physical control of borders. Illegal immigration from Islamic nations (and indeed from all others) is a major terrorist threat that can and should be subject to the letter of the law. Current immigration trends – including illegal immigration – cannot be tolerated either for reasons of greed by those taking advantage of depressed blue-collar wages, or in the name of the false dogma that they are inevitable because of inexorable global market forces. The former is reprehensible; the latter is false. Americans must not risk their lives, and the security of their progeny, for the sake of avarice or a historicist fallacy.

2.                   Mandate cooperation of state and local law-enforcement agencies at all levels in apprehending illegal immigrants and assisting in their deportation, starting with those from nations and groups at risk for terrorism. The 9/11 Commission’s Final Report says, “better technology and training to detect terrorist travel documents are the most important immediate steps to reduce America’s vulnerability to clandestine entry” (emphasis added). That is incorrect. Better technology is certainly needed, but “the most important immediate steps” demand controlling the borders. Knowing who is already in the country illegally, expelling them, and stopping illegal newcomers is the highest priority. State and local law-enforcement agencies need to cooperate in enforcing the law and protecting national security.

3.                   Discard the irrational ban on “profiling.” Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists of concern to America’s national security and to quality of life are now Muslims. It is time to accept that “profiling” based on a person’s appearance, origin, and apparent or suspected beliefs is an essential tool of trade of law enforcement and war on terrorism.

4.                   Terminate the Visa Waver Program. The need for this measure is self-explanatory when we look at the number of EU citizens involved in Islamic terrorist activities.

5.                   Enact new immigration legislation, to exclude all persons engaged in Islamic activism from America. Such activism should be defined as propagating, disseminating or otherwise supporting “Jihad” (in its primary sense of divinely sanctioned war against non-Muslims), discrimination against Christians, Jews and other “infidels,” discrimination and violence against women and sexual minorities, anti-Jewish bigotry, sanction of slavery, poll tax, etc. Islam’s violent manifestations and discriminatory message are inseparable, and adequate safeguards against the adherents of that message put in place. The proposed definition of Islamic activism would be a major step in the direction of denying actual or potential terrorists a foothold on American shores.

6.                   New legislation should treat a resident alien’s or prospective visitor’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook as excludable – on political, rather than “religious” grounds. The broad model is provided by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA, the McCarran-Walter Act). It is possible that the “affiliation” in this clause will affect a number of people who do not actively identify with the goals and methods of the Jihadist core. That may be unfortunate but it is inevitable. Personal assurances by individuals thus affected cannot be taken at face value: Islam not only allows, but mandates lying to “infidels” in order to gain political or any other advantage (i.e. Taqiyya, the concealment of one’s Islamic beliefs to non-Muslims). The problem is well known to INS officials: attitudes of Muslims who apply for U.S. visas or asylum often change once their status in America is secure. When applying they complain about the lack of freedom in their native country. When they gain permanent residence, let alone citizenship, they often turn against their host nation and praise the virtues of an Islamic state. In addition, even “lapsed” Muslims are at permanent risk of going back to their roots, as many Western-born youths are doing.

7.                   Treat Islamic activism as grounds for the loss of acquired U.S. citizenship and deportation. The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, discrimination against “infidels” and women, the establishment of the Shari’a law etc., should be revoked and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.

8.                   Mandate registration of Islamic centers and their individual members with the Attorney General; subject them to legal limitations and security supervision that applies to cults prone to violence and “hate groups.” All over the Western world Islamic centers have provided platforms for exhortations to the faithful to support causes and to engage in acts that are morally reprehensible, legally punishable, and detrimental to the host country’s national security. The model for the proposed measure exists in the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950.

9.                    Include Islamist activism as the grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien regardless of status or ties, as prejudicial to the public interest and injurious to national security. Useful precedents exist. Keeping out and facilitating the expulsion of politically undesirable foreigners has been at the heart of this country’s immigration legislation since 1903 when Congress barred the admission of anarchists in response to President McKinley’s assassination. “Ideological” grounds for deportation were on the statute books until 1990, when they were repealed by Congress. After the Russian revolution foreign communists were singled out for deportation. One night alone in January of 1920, more than 2,500 “alien radicals” were seized in thirty-three cities across the country and deported to their countries of origin. Those who preach Jihad and Sharia can and should be treated in the same manner.

10.                Treat affiliation with Islam as grounds for denial or revoking of any level of security clearance. Affiliation with Islam is incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment, patriotic loyalty and unquestionable reliability that are essential in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other related branches of government. Presence of practicing Muslims in any of these institutions would present an inherent risk to its integrity and would undermine morale.

Acceptance of these proposals would represent a new start in devising long-term defense against terrorism. The proposed measures recognize that we are in a war of ideas and religion, whether we want that or not and however much we hate the fact. They reflect the seriousness of the struggle. This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep condition that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of “a candy store with the busted lock,” and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril.

Deadly Jihadism manifested on 9-11 must spell the end of another kind of extremism: the stubborn insistence of the ruling elite on treating every newcomer as equally meltable in the pot. These proposals are politically viable. They are likely to elicit an outcry from the elites, but the accusation of “discrimination” cannot apply to a proposal to exclude people not on the basis of their genes but because of their ideas, actions, and intentions. Supporting these proposals will be a boon to any politician bold enough to embrace them. A poll sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund of the United States found considerable support – 79 percent – for a total ban on visitors and immigrants from Muslim countries, and our proposals are far from advocating such radical solutions.

Other changes are needed, too, but they concern wider issues that require changes in strategic thinking. The United States should reduce its dependence on Arab oil. It must stop appeasing Jihadist ambitions in Chechnya and the Balkans. Neoconservative policy of global dominance, of which “exporting democracy” to the Middle East is but one manifestation, is self-defeating. Ultimately the outcome of the war against terrorists will depend on our ability to define ourselves and to understand the nature of the threat. “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” says Sun Tzu. By now we know the violent message of the Kuran. It is a problem for us, and for all Muslims. We cannot solve it for them, and we should not be asked to pretend that the Kuran is a pacifist tract. Those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves.

Yes, Islam has an inherent advantage over the tepid ideology of multicultural mediocrity in that it offers Allah in the place of nothing. Its adherents should not be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should blame ourselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts of the case and failing to take stock of our options. People did not take Mein Kampf seriously, at their own peril. The Kuran's exhortations to the believers to annihilate the non-believers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are equally frank, and the fruits visible through the centuries.

We cannot solve this problem for the Muslim, and we should not be asked to deem the problem solved by pretending that the Kuran is a pacifist tract. Until the petrol dollars support a line of Islamic exegesis that can renounce the ideals of jihad, terror, tax, and subjugation – and it is unlikely that will ever happen – we must have the sagacity to call the religion of war by its right name, and the guts to go at it hammer and tongs.

Those who claim that profiling is bad, that open borders are good, that “true Islam” is peaceful, and that jihad is anything other than a permanent declaration of war on all non-Muslims, belong to the Beltway culture that has lost its bond with history, and the supporting community. That supporting community, the real nation, is working and paying taxes. When it is told of Islam’s “peace and tolerance,” or when its children are forced to recite Muslim prayers in state schools, it grumbles about stupidity or ineptitude of those in charge but it does not suspect betrayal. In the meantime the quiet onslaught continues unabated, across the unprotected southern border and through the JFK and O’Hare. It does not bring any benefit to this country, just as it has brought none to Europe, and its cost is incalculable.

As for the money, among around three million Muslims in the United States of America there are sufficient numbers of terrorist sympathizers and active human assets to justify expenditure of some $300 billion annually in direct and indirect homeland security costs, excluding military operations abroad. That money would not need to be spent if America had been prudent enough to devise a sane immigration policy back in the days of Lyndon Johnson. The tangible cost of the presence of a Muslim man, woman and child to the American taxpayer is at least $100,000 each year. The cost of the general unpleasantness associated with the terrorist threat and its impact on the quality of our lives is, of course, incalculable.

Those Americans who love their land and who put their families, their neighborhoods and their nations before all others, need to stop the madness. They are normal. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global, that the Marines should patrol the banks of the Euphrates and not those of the Rio Grande, and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to whoever decides to settle in them, are sick and evil. They are jihad’s useful fools, enablers and fellow-travelers.

The elite class has every intention of continuing to “fight” the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win. Their crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty.

A new strategy is needed to give America an edge in this war. It can never be “won” in the sense of eliminating the phenomenon of terrorism altogether, but it can be successfully pursued to the point where the threat to the homeland comes to as near zero as possible. The victory will come, to put it simply, not by conquering Mecca for America but by disengaging America from Mecca and by excluding Mecca from America; not by eliminating the risk but by managing it wisely, resolutely, and permanently.

It is unpleasant but nevertheless accurate to say that it is now, as it has always been, us or them…