It's not going
to happen, but if we could mix together a "gaffe" by John Kerry — a
politician's slipping and telling an unpleasant truth — with the knowledge and
intelligence of Barack Obama and the intemperance of Donald Trump, we might get
a useful talk to Americans on terrorism.
*
As Democratic
candidate for President, John Kerry was impolitic but right in his assertion
that for the foreseeable future, the best we can hope for with terrorism is to
reduce it to the point where, in terms of America, it is a nuisance,
even as it is deadly for some Americans.
There's
a distinction there we need to get. Terrorists threaten American interests and
the lives of Americans and, more so, non-Americans in war zones; terrorists are
not a threat to the American State, what we have of an American nation, nor,
unless we panic, to the American Republic. One of the horrible lessons of World
War II is how many people can be killed, wounded, and maimed, how much property
and infrastructure and cultural products can be destroyed, without even
bringing down a regime, let alone destroying a State or a people.
So
get that straight: terrorists are a variety of "existential threat"
to Americans — they can kill (etc.) a fair number of us — but not to America.
That,
relatively speaking, is the good news.
The
bad news is that you will die. More or less unpleasantly, you will die; your
children will die; and every human, animal, and plant you know and love (or
hate or have never heard of) will die. As Hamlet's mom reminds him, "You
know it's common: all that lives must die, / Passing through life to
eternity," or passing on to just to being dead (1.2.73-74). You will die;
unless we screw up badly, human life and civilization will carry on.
Even
if you are one of America's fairly numerous homicides, however — 13,716
in 2013 — it is highly unlikely you'll be a victim of terrorism or some other
exotic crime where you'll be killed by a stranger. To repeat again a repeated
statistic, "between 2001 and 2013, there were 3,030 people killed in
domestic acts of terrorism" in the USA, plus 350 in that period killed
abroad. "This brings the total to 3,380," as opposed to more mundane "American
Deaths by Firearms on U.S. soil" during that period of 406,496, although
many of those deaths were suicides — 41,149 in
2013 — which you may count as you like.
Heart
disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, or just some dumb-ass accident: those
are the "leading
causes of death" for Americans, saith the Centers for Disease Control;
terrorism is nowhere near the top ten.
So,
first thing to do, fellow Americans, is to get your figurative spines stiffened
and "grow a pair": increase the size of the part of the frontal lobes
that does math and risk assessment, locate your gonads, and get those adrenal
glands going at a good level for courage but not panic.
Because
we are threatened.
President
Obama was correct in 2014 in saying that ISIS (ISIL, Daesh) was a junior
varsity team. The varsity would be a "kinder, gentler" successor
group to ISIS, one that can hold territory without extreme brutality and for
long enough time to prepare for the professionals. The true threat would be a
territorial entity that is the origin of a mass
movement with a charismatic leader, an expanding army, and, eventually,
access to air and naval power.
Think
of Muhammad,
Umar, and Abu Bakr (the first caliph), but with heavier weapons and a
variety of fundamentalism necessarily absent when the fundamentals of a
religion are in development. Speaking of initial expansion of Islam within and
then out of the Arabian Peninsula, my 1937 Thompson and Johnson History of Medieval Europe notes that it
is "impossible" in the early years of the Faith "to speak of
Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed
himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general
no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity
against paganism, characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam
is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been
marked in practice by its tolerance" (164; ch. 7, "The Empire of the
Arabs").
Such
tolerance is not a characteristic of ISIS, and they threaten wars of
Reformation plus a Sunni vs. Shia civil war, combined with warfare against more
obvious infidels.
The
serious danger is not the relative "nuisance" of terrorism nor even
guerilla warfare, but full-scale war that parallels the European Wars of
Religion following the Protestant Reformation in the Early Modern period,
combined with the Medieval Crusades, in turn combined with the earlier
expansion of Islam that marked the end of the Ancient World.
Except
that the Modern and postmodern world has a plentiful supply of nuclear weapons,
including in places in reach of an ISIS successor, like Pakistan and Israel.
The
16th- and 17th-centuryWars of Religion between Catholic
and Protestant Christians killed
over seven million people; if we are not careful, we in our times — with
more lethal weapons and far larger populations — can make such numbers look
trivial.
And
such a war would be fine with the members of ISIS with apocalyptic
aspirations, and with potential opponents with similar hopes:
"Onward Christian soldiers," marching into literal war, maybe joined
by extremist Jews and Hindus, "depending on the breaks,"
all in a world awash with heavy weaponry.
*
All
of which is why we must "Be of good courage" in the face of terrorism
and not panic. Our fears have led to enough damage already in Afghanistan and,
far more so, Iraq. Getting sucked into Syria would compound the damage. We must
indeed fight ISIS to prevent wars of religion that would be an existential
threat not just to the United States but to the human world as we know it; but
we must fight ISIS in cautious alliances that will not start the wars we wish
to prevent.
For
Americans, terrorism is a deadly but unliely danger; for America, it is, in
itself, a nuisance. A real clash of
civilizations — fights to the death among the armed forces of States and a
caliphate — would be massive slaughter.
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