Andrew Bacevich has provided us incisive critiques of the Long War, but his latest policy prescriptions have turned out to be less than helpful. Dr. Bacevich’s Washington Post op-ed (hat tip to Daniel McCarthy) adheres to modern universalism without any notion that it is at the base of our problems.
The competitive challenge facing the West is not to prove that Islamic fundamentalism won’t satisfy the aspirations of humanity, but to demonstrate that democratic capitalism can, even for committed believers.
Democratic capitalism can satisfy the aspirations of those who fervently believe in … democratic capitalism. Like the great majority of his contemporaries, Bacevich views economic solutions as all-encompassing. He treats today’s struggle between the West and the Islamic world as a matter analogous to the Cold War competition between the market and central planning. This places the entire affair on the material plane, as if consumer products, good sanitation and clean elections can fill, in Pascal’s words, the God-shaped void in man’s heart.
Bacevich’s conception of containment neglects Islamic doctrinal imperatives such as da’wah (the conversion of the world to Islam) and jihad (holy war). These factors are ignored as well by our secular elites, who entertain a fanciful vision of an Islam conforming to their own prejudices. Instead they continue to encourage the mass immigration of Muslims into the West, thereby heightening the risk of conflict. Such policies are based on the crudely simplistic attitude best summarized as “everyone wants the same thing,” with George W. Bush waxing eloquently about Iraqi soccer moms or Obama speaking of technological advancement in Cairo. Liberal democracy has not brought peace, but rather has led to both Muslim ghettoes in the West and Western counterinsurgency in the Muslim world.
Is it really so difficult to posit that the likelihood of massive disorder is corresponding to the growth of populations religiously, culturally and ethnically dissimilar in Western countries? Staying silent about the issue of immigration and persisting with interventions in the Islamic world, no matter the proposed lighter footprint, hardly makes Bacevich different from the other commentators on the Post’s op-ed page.
It is to be expected that the media and other elites will not acknowledge the centuries-long spiritual catastrophe of Western man’s abandonment of belief in Christ for the worship of reason, progress, and other totems of the Enlightenment. This empty faith in modernity’s power to transform humanity and the world will only lead our nations further toward the abyss.
Email Subscription
Fill out the form below to be notified when takimag.com is updated.
Bacevich, Jihad, and the West
Andrew Bacevich has provided us incisive critiques of the Long War, but his latest policy prescriptions have turned out to be less than helpful. Dr. Bacevich’s Washington Post op-ed (hat tip … [Read More]
Posted by Mark Hackard on September 29, 2009
The Usual Suspects