Iraq: The Unasked And Unanswered Questions.

Invasion Force: Western troops return from an exercise in the Saudi Arabian desert in the run-up to Operation Desert Storm (1990-91). St Thomas Aquinas enjoined his fellow Christians to avoid all wars in which the cost of their participation was, by any rational calculation, likely to be higher, in human terms, than their abstention. Is the Middle East a better or worse place after 25 years of Western intervention?

 

BY THE TIME you read these words, the dispatch of New Zealand troops to Iraq will, almost certainly, have been announced. For the fourth time in less than quarter-of-a-century, Kiwi boots will be kicking up sand in the Middle East. Unasked, presumably, by those seated around the Cabinet Table yesterday morning, were the questions:

 

“Has the Middle East become a better, or a worse, place since the West’s first, massive, post-war incursion, back in 1991?”

 

And: “Will it be a better, or worse, place for the Western “Club’s” intervention in 2015?”

 

It is worth reminding ourselves that Osama Bin Laden’s decision to shift Al Qaida’s focus to the “far-away enemy” was triggered by the arrival of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in the Arabian Peninsula – home of the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina. Imagine how Catholic Christians would react to the sight of several Arab divisions setting up camp in the Vatican City, and you’ll have some inkling of how profoundly affected Bin Laden and his followers were by the Americans’ arrival.

 

The past has much less purchase on the sensibilities of the average Westerner than it does on the hearts and minds of those belonging to the Islamic faith. Even today, both Al Qaida and Islamic State denounce the military contingents of the West as “Crusaders” – referencing the Frankish knights who invaded the Muslim world early in the Twelfth Century. Nor is this mere rhetoric on their part. Through all the intervening centuries, street-singers from Beirut to Baghdad have kept alive the horrors perpetrated by the Christian invaders, and recounted proudly how Islam’s great captain, Saladin, recaptured the holy city of Jerusalem. The Crusades are as real to the people of the Middle East as the much more recent tragedy of Gallipoli is to us.

 

Every grain of sand kicked-up by Kiwi soldiers’ boots in Iraq will be weighted down with centuries of history. It is, moreover, a living past, inextricably intertwined with the present, and its effects can be deadly. The terrible punishments meted out to those who have fallen into the clutches of Islamic State are not the random choices of sadistic criminals, but the fate prescribed by Islam’s 1,383-year-old holy book, the Quran:

 

“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter”.

 

This is the world into which our government has decided to send one hundred or more young New Zealanders. Our soldiers will now be numbered among “those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger”. From the moment New Zealand’s participation in the war against Islamic State is announced, the fate of any Kiwi soldier, or citizen, falling into the hands of Islamic State, is sealed.

 

New Zealand is very far from Iraq and Syria; so far that it is possible the self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has forgotten we exist. The news that 100 New Zealand troops are on their way to join the ranks of the “Crusaders” will, therefore, come as a forceful reminder of our role in Middle Eastern history. It is to be hoped that Prime Minister Key has not forgotten how far the influence of al-Baghdadi’s regime now reaches. If he needs instruction, he has only to ask the citizens of Copenhagen, Paris, Sydney and Ottawa. The “Caliphate’s” arm has grown very long indeed.

 

If our Government has deliberately invited the religious fervour of the Middle East into these peaceful and hitherto tolerant islands, then we, ourselves, will have to answer the questions they refused to consider: “Has intervention worked in the past?”, “Will it work now?” And, “Is it justified?”

 

The first two answers are, obviously, “No.” But what about the third? What possible justification can we offer for dispatching troops to a country where millions of the people they’ve been sent to help will curse them as enemies of God?

 

Is it possible that we, like the gullible inhabitants of Medieval Europe, have allowed ourselves to be goaded into action by sermons filled with the details of hideous atrocities? Are our soldiers about to depart these shores with the red cross of the crusader knights emblazoned – if only metaphorically – on their uniforms? If so, then we are embarked upon a fool’s errand that can only end in horror and despair.

 

St Thomas Aquinas enjoined his fellow Christians to avoid all wars in which the cost of their participation was, by any rational calculation, likely to be higher, in human terms, than their abstention.

 

Our presence in Iraq cannot be justified. It will end badly.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 February 2015.

Twilight Of The West?

Germany Wins And Europe Is Free: As the Nazi regime reeled before Stalin's armies, the focus of its propaganda shifted from glorifying German arms and aims, to one of providing Europe's last desperate defence against the bestial threat from the East. Worrying echoes of this propaganda theme can now be detected on the streets of Dresden and, increasingly, across the entire Western World.

IN THE FINAL desperate months of the Second World War, Nazi propaganda underwent a subtle but significant shift of emphasis. In the glory days of victory, when Europe lay at Hitler’s feet, it was Germany’s triumph that was celebrated. But, as Stalin’s divisions rolled inexorably across the Great European plain, and all prospect of a Nazi victory retreated before them, the war was re-presented as a titanic clash of cultures in which a bestial Bolshevism sought to obliterate 3,000 years of European civilisation and extinguish forever the light of the West.

 

The threat from the East is as old as Europe’s memory of Attila and his marauding Huns. That is to say, a strategic nightmare extending all the way back to the dying days of the Roman Empire. Nor was it an empty threat. In the Thirteenth Century the all-conquering armies of the Mongol Khan stood poised to make their final push to the English Channel. Only the untimely death of the Khan in faraway Mongolia spared Europe from the fate that overwhelmed the civilisation of the Han Chinese.

 

The other great threat from the East arrived in the form of the armies of Islam. The first onslaught came via Europe’s soft underbelly in the Eighth Century. Spain fell, and the armies of the Prophet were only finally halted at Poitiers in Central France in 732AD. The second onslaught, led by the Ottoman Turks, hit its stride in the Fifteenth Century, snuffing out the Byzantine Empire, swallowing Greece and the Balkans and striking deep into Eastern Europe. It was only decisively checked at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

 

Existential threats to the survival of Christendom cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere fever dreams of the racist European Right. From the Fifth to the Seventeenth Century the survival of Christian Europe was, to quote the Duke of Wellington’s pithy description of the Battle of Waterloo: “A damned near run thing!”

 

Precisely because they were real, these threats have become deeply embedded in Europe’s collective memory and are, thus, available to propagandists of every hue. Though the Nazis were defeated, their imagery of a defiant West holding the line against the Godless Communist threat from the East, slotted seamlessly into the propaganda of the Cold War.

 

Old memes, it seems, die hard. Just over a week ago, in the German city of Dresden, more than 18,000 people participated in a demonstration organised by a political organisation calling itself “Pegida” – which stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. Demonstrators wore black armbands in memory of the 12 people slain at the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

 

Pegida is an odd political phenomenon. Its tactics and slogans borrow heavily from the mass protest movements that contributed to the fall of Communism 1989. This has not, however, prevented Germany’s Chancellor (and fellow former East German) Angela Merkel, from accusing Pegida’s followers of having “hate in their hearts”.

 

Certainly the opinion of the German Left is that Pegida is a manifestation of the extreme “Neo-Nazi” Right. Counter-demonstrations attacking Pegida’s “Islamophobia” have attracted tens of thousands in Berlin, Cologne and other large German cities.

 

Many Germans are worried that their country’s erstwhile deeply-ingrained anti-Semitism, of which the Nazis took such deadly advantage in the Twentieth Century, has mutated into an equally irrational, but no less vicious, hatred of Muslims in the Twenty-First. After all, it’s not as if the modern-day equivalent of Suleiman the Magnificent is encamped in the outer suburbs of Dresden. Or that the self-aggrandizing “Islamic State” (barely the size of a single province of the mighty Ottoman Empire) constitutes an existential threat to European civilisation. Even thirty-five years from now, in 2050, the best demographic projections put Germany’s Muslims at just 7 percent of the German population.

 

What, then, is Pegida so frightened of?

 

Perhaps it’s the realisation that the rest of the world is crowding in on Europe. That European civilisation no longer commands the power and prestige of a century ago, when its empires bestrode the planet like armoured colossi.

 

As refugees from Africa and the Middle East clamour to be admitted to the member countries of the European Union, perhaps its peoples hear faint echoes of the Barbarian hordes clamouring to be admitted to the grandeur that was Rome.

 

Perhaps Europeans have been seized, like the Nazis in 1945, with the terrifying realisation that the world, upon whose resources they have all grown so fat, is very, very large; and that Europe, her 3,000 years of civilisation notwithstanding, is actually rather small.

 

Perhaps, like the Jews before them, Europe’s Muslim population has become an alarming reminder that history does not stand still, and neither do the peoples who make it. For five centuries Europe has been pushing against the world. Now the world is pushing back.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 January 2015.

Tolerating Islam

Meetings Of Minds: In the great trading cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, Islamic civilisation florished for close to 300 years. How did a culture once synonymous with tolerance and learning become so closely associated with violence and fanaticism?

THERE WAS A TIME when tolerance, compassion and the search for enlightenment were the singular virtues of Islam. When the peoples of Christendom still bent their knees to brutal mounted warriors, and the Papacy was little more than a trophy for the corrupt inheritors of Rome’s decaying grandeur, Islamic civilisation was the wonder of the world.

In the space of barely three centuries the followers of the Prophet Mohammed blended the best of the classical era’s legacy with the strict moral discipline and judicious social organisation of the Islamic faith.

 

In the Muslim Caliphate, which stretched from the Euphrates River to the Rock of Gilbraltar, Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in relative harmony. In return for a modest tax, the adherents of non-Islamic faiths were allowed to live in peace. In this tolerant environment scholars and craftsmen were encouraged to extend the boundaries of knowledge and technology. The resulting cultural flowering, subsidised by the immense wealth of the Caliphate’s trading centres, ushered in a golden age. Islamic merchants and traders dominated the exchange of the raw products of Europe and Africa for the finished goods of China and India.

 

Indeed, it might almost be said that the military and economic success of Islamic civilisation was the goad that drove Christendom to embark on its epic voyages of exploration, its exploitation of Africa and the Americas, and the rapid development of the mercantile and industrial expertise which ultimately permitted the peoples of Europe to dominate the planet.

 

Westerners all-too-easily forget that when Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Fonterra on 3 August 1492, the Eurasian landmass was dominated by two vast super-powers: the Ottoman and Chinese empires. The kingdoms and principalities of Christendom were bit-players.

 

The beliefs and institutions we prize most highly: the essential equality and “inalienable rights” of all human-beings; the primacy of reason and the scientific method over religious faith and “primitive” superstition; our democratic system of government, within which, alone, human equality and individual liberty, especially the freedom of expression, can hope to survive; all are the product of the West’s relatively brief (300 years) sojourn as global hegemon.

 

But all around us are signs that the era of Western hegemony is waning. Islam has become the vector of its decline – and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

 

From the First Crusade of 1096-99 to the Sykes-Picot “Agreement” of 1916, Westerners have disposed of the lands of Muslim peoples with breath-taking arrogance. The latter’s singular misfortune to live on top of the world’s most productive oil fields has only whetted the West’s appetite for domination. A resource which could have led to the flowering of a new golden age of Islamic civilisation has been sequestered for the United States and its allies by a vicious congeries of kleptomaniacal kings, sultans, emirs and military strongmen – all watched over by the garrison state of Israel.

 

Are we truly surprised that the West’s history of invasion, occupation and exploitation in Muslim lands has armed the most regressive and murderous interpreters of Mohammed’s message? What chance had moderation in the face of Western imperialism? Who else but the Wahabbists, Salafists and Jihadis were likely to benefit from the depredations of the Western powers?

 

While these extremists batter at the gates of the West: pronouncing fatwas on novelists, murdering artists and, as we have seen over the past fortnight, attacking US embassies and clamouring for the head of the film-maker responsible for the risible Innocence of Muslims; the cultural confidence of the West, its adherence to Enlightenment values, has already given way. Post-imperial guilt has given birth to the pernicious cultural relativism of post-modernism, and transformed the intellectual guardians of the West’s egalitarian and libertarian traditions into militant Islam’s fifth column.

 

Within the space of twenty years, the world will likely witness the ratification of a United Nations’ international convention, sponsored by the United States and its allies, outlawing the defamation and/or scandalising of the world’s faith communities. Once adopted by national legislatures, it will be a crime to write a novel like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or make a film like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

 

Let this paraphrase of W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming be Freedom of Expression’s epitaph:

 

The best lacked all conviction, while the worst

Were full of passionate intensity.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 September 2012.