The New Cold War: Familiar battle lines, unfortunately

National Review, Nov 5, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

In front of our eyes, a new organizing principle is emerging in the world. Islamic extremism is an ideological challenge, and states have to respond to it accordingly. Another Cold War is taking shape. Its duration and scope are uncertain. President Bush is already speaking of a year or two, but some experts are forecasting as much as fifty years. The implications are global. Once more, people will be deciding what exactly freedom means to them.

Communist and Islamic extremism both have militaristic and imperial aims, directed to recruit where possible, and to attack elsewhere. Their claims to be universal imply the actual destruction of all other values. Communism turned out to be the Russian national interest in disguise. Soviet grievances against the West were unreal, but the expression of them was rational. In contrast, Islamic extremism has a restricted territorial base, and by definition cannot appeal to non- Muslims. The phenomenon arises from the complex interplay of an identity wounded by modernity, and the complete political and social failures of Muslim states. The grievances here are real, but their expression is irrational, even suicidal. Islamic extremism is therefore a more unpredictable and elusive enemy.

The failure of Muslim states seems to have taken the West by surprise. Decolonization, it was assumed after the world war, was the prelude to freedom. Emerging nationalist leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt were said to be "officers in a hurry," a phrase hiding the reality that under the khaki of their uniform were traditional tyrants intent on absolute rule. Such as it was, their modernization was at the expense of traditional Islamic identity. Fighting back, Muslims formed groups, some open, others clandestine, and all violent. In every country they appeared at first as a fringe minority, but dangerous to the state, therefore to be repressed. The Ayatollah Khomeini revolution in Iran fanaticized this minority to believe that power in other Muslim countries might be in their grasp.

A barbarous civil war between Islamic groups and the regimes in power has already spread through much of the Muslim world. Offering more of an identity than a program, Islamic extremists have been able to impose themselves only in Iran and Afghanistan, though in Algeria and even Egypt it has been-and still is-a close-run thing. During the past twenty years or so, fugitives from Islamic groups have been settling abroad, partly to escape the fearsome crackdowns in their homelands, and partly to pursue their cause in the countries of the West, where they exploit the rule of law and the structure of human rights that they have no intention of respecting for others.

Nobody knows how many such refugee extremists there are. Estimates range between 1,000 and 5,000. Organized to be self-contained, members of these groups cover their tracks with skill, making use of safe houses and false passports and identification papers. They appear to have acquired the techniques indispensable to subversion, with systems of communication, access to hidden funds, and the infiltration of "sleepers," or individuals planted to stay inactive until the moment arrives for whatever operation is planned for them. Communist cells throughout the West used to operate on just such lines, and Islamic extremists have shown themselves every bit as thorough and imaginative.

Most people in the West appreciated that the organizing principle of the Cold War had its either-or logic: for or against democracy. The NATO alliance was a symbol of the general will for self-defense, although in practice its military capacities and political inspiration were almost wholly American. Neither was the either-or logic absolute. Non-aligned countries played one superpower against the other, bidding for aid and weaponry in return for support. Following the example of Nasser, Arab countries specialized in this dubious variant of blackmail and made the Middle East an arena in which the Cold War was openly and regularly fought out. In Europe, the flashpoint was Germany, which had the particular misfortune to be divided between the two blocs, with the Berlin Wall to prove it. Successive West German leaders devised the policy of Ostpolitik to explore ways out of this predicament in the direction of neutrality and unification.

The Left in general did not share the either-or logic of the Cold War. "Better red than dead," was one of their slogans. A wide-ranging assortment of pacifists and Communist sympathizers, professors and students, Sixty-Eighters and Vietnam protesters, counter-cultural drop- outs, clergymen, Quakers, playwrights and actresses, historians and commentators in the mainstream press-revisionists one and all-liked to maintain that America was a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of West Germans could demonstrate against the stationing in their country of the missiles that alone protected them. Defeatism appeared to accompany democracy.