Paul Krugman of the New York Times has a piece on “fearmongering” and the war posturing regarding Iran.

I’m not a Krugman reader. Don’t really know who he is. I looked him up, and it appears that he’s an economist. Clearly his specialization doesn’t help him in this article, because he appears to have no natural defense against the liberal errors in assessing the dangers arising out of militant (ie., orthodox) Islam. Were he grounded in history, or perhaps an unbiased view of religion, he might have had better luck.

It’s a shame, too, because not everything he brings up is incorrect. It’s simply poorly supported by his arguments. I will parse some of the more important bits below:

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”

I’m OK with this so far. When I read about anyone wanting to bomb Iran ASAP, I begin to get my hackles up. It’s bad policy, plain and simple.

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

Stop right there. Actually, Dr. Krugman, it makes quite a lot of sense. Some of it anyway. Not the “Islamofascism” bit, because that’s a stupid word, and I agree it’s used to sound scary, but it’s also used to try to differentiate militant Islam from the “religion of peace” that exists only in the land-of-liberal-make-believe and Muslim propaganda. I’m willing to bet that Podhoretz is wrong about Iran being the center of militancy, which is not to say that it’s a particularly nice place. But let’s be fair and not forget about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan for that matter. The “Arab Street”, as it were, is less Arab than it is Islamic, and as such, crosses national borders. It seems to me that its strength lies outside of Iran.

The idea of a movement within Islam to create a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes” is hardly a fantasy. It is a duty for Muslims to spread their faith, and their faith brooks no divide between church and state. Sharia law is required to be spread by Muslims in a way that is not even rivaled by our often ill-advised attempts to spread democracy. If allowed to happen, the spread of Sharia law will shape the world in their image, as it happened in Byzantium, North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and southern Spain.

Europe is, despite Krugman’s dismissal, heading rapidly toward the concept of Eurabia. The minimum birthrate required to replace a population is 2.1 children per family. Almost the entirety of Europe has a birthrate far below this, ranging between 1.07 and 1.2 children per family. The ratio of elderly to the working in Europe is quickly becoming unsustainable, and in order to stave off massive tax increases or economic chaos, the immigration floodgates will have to be opened yet wider. Where will immigrants come from? Surely not from other European nations. They will come from the third world, and notably from Islamic countries.  When Muslims constitute a majority in any nation, and they are not the liberalized Muslims holding deconstructionist views of religion borrowed from the West, can any serious person believe that they will not establish Sharia law in the countries they come to dominate by right of numbers?

Even American, female university students - who you might expect to be least likely to want such an oppressive system of governance - will tell you that this is true.

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.  

I agree that I find Islamofascism to be a misleading term. It’s not that militant Islam isn’t real, it’s that it’s not nationalistic, as fascism is usually understood to be. Whether or not it was used to achieve the blurred distinctions Krugman alleges, I think it’s hard to be certain. There was, however, a masterful diplomatic slight of hand employed that got us into a war in Iraq that people somehow associated with the “War on Terror”. As for Iran’s involvement in 9/11, we certainly don’t have any proof that they had any. We do have proof that most of the suicide crews on 9/11 were Saudis, but no one seems to be taking that threat seriously.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

I agree. This is oddly escaping most people. Alarmism is contagious.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.

I think Krugman at least partially misses the mark on this one. Israel is not the United States. Our military capabilities are unparalleled. As Pat Buchanan said recently, “While we lack the troops to invade Iran, three times the size of Iraq, the U.S. Air Force and Navy could, in weeks, smash Iran’s capacity to make war, blockade it and reduce its population to destitution. Should Iran develop a nuclear weapon and use it on us or on Israel, it would invite annihilation.”

Krugman’s second point is worth considering, however - Iran could well be the national equivalent of a suicide bomber. If they are inviting annihilation, it is quite possibly because they believe that their destruction could serve as a catalyst for igniting a global jihad that will replace the current disjointed strategy of various militant groups with solidarity and purpose.

Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda — an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world.

If Mitt Romney said this (as it appears he has) perhaps he understands the problem better than I would have given him credit for. The dissolution of the Caliphate by Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is looked to by many in the Muslim world as the source of many of their current problems. The restoration of the Caliphate - the only governing system that has the full approval of traditional Islamic theology, and which existed for most of the history of Islam - is the chief political aim of orthodox Sunnis. Sunnis, it should be noted, comprise about 80 percent of Muslims in the world. Al Qaeda is a Sunni group. (Iran, it should also be noted, is under Shiite governance, making the restoration of the Caliphate a less urgent aim of that nation, according to my admittedly limited understanding. It also means that the Iranian government and Al Qaeda members would make awkward bedfellows, though anything is possible, I suppose, when looking to the greater good of Islam).

Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. 

While Hillary’s election would be a disaster on a number of levels, not least of which would involve foreign policy, I think that this critique of Huckabee is spot-on.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.

Dammit, Krugman, you had me until that last sentence. This steaming pile of crap about conservatives and their fear of the brown-skinned people of the world is a limp-wristed sucker-punch straight out of left field. Need I remind everyone that eugenics, which focused on eliminating undesirable traits, including “inferior” races, was a project of the left? Margaret Sanger, that pioneer of liberals’ beloved “reproductive rights” champion, Planned Parenthood, was a principal advocate of these programs which sought to remove the “unfit” from the gene pool - including those of dark skin.

But this idea that the dark peoples of the world are perpetual victims of the white man’s rapacious cultural and national imperialism is their key blind spot in recognizing that they have befriended the devil. Liberals champion the Islamic cause because it makes them feel good; after all, they are working to eradicate the abomination that is white, Western civilization from the face of the earth.

They allow this to distract them from the instructions in the Qu’ran and the Hadith, as well as Sharia law, that provide for abominable treatment of women. They ignore the fundamental violence of the religion because it’s practitioners are impoverished and of brown complexion. They look away from the violation of basic human rights in nations under Sharia law, the tyranny that suppresses freedom of speech, the imposition of religion on the citizens therein or their subsequent execution or exile into dhimmitude. Nearly everything that liberalism stands for - even those few good things that liberals share in common with rational people - Islam stands against.

Yet they want to blame our policies toward this growing tide of jihad on racism.

Our problem, Dr. Krugman, is that we refuse to recognize the religion for what it is - a dangerous, violent, all-consuming faith that inspires fierce loyalty in its followers in this life and promises them better things in the next. Jihad is a precept, not an inconsequential option, and where it can be waged, it pleases Allah. History bears this out. Europe yet shows the scars. The peoples of the Qu’ran are not of a single nation, race, ethnicity or language. Recognizing the dangers that orthodox Muslims present to the world is not (and cannot be) racism - it’s common sense.

Krugman concludes:

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.

Excessive fear is, indeed, a dangerous thing, and can be used as a tool to control the will of the people. I don’t disagree that the GOP is infected with tactics like this. But to acknowledge that these components of jihad are real threats and yet not recognize what underlies the threat is to leave us defenseless against the enemy.

We can’t have a “War on Terror”, because “Terror” has no constituents. It has no citizens. It collects no taxes. We must have clearly defined enemies, and we must recognize the ideologies that drive them.

“You shall fight back against those who do not believe in GOD, nor in the Last Day, nor do they prohibit what GOD and His messenger have prohibited, nor do they abide by the religion of truth - among those who received the scripture - until they pay the due tax, willingly or unwillingly. “

Surah 9:29

Filed under: Common Sense, History, Politics