Death of a Civilization

Islam has a new icon. Every media outlet from al-Jazeera to the Dallas Morning News is proclaiming Hezbollah’s Sheik Hassan Nasrallah man of the hour. His accomplishment? Provoking Israel to a massive campaign of destruction that has left Lebanon’s budding democracy a shambles, it’s once thriving tourism industry in ruins (again,) its infrastructure in rubble, a thousand of its citizens dead (all of them women and children apparently,) and a third of its population refugees. So low has Islam sunk that such men are her heroes, men known best for their hatred, men for whom victory is survival surrounded by carnage among the innocent, men whose goals are murder and mayhem, men who live to kill Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists or, failing that, fellow Muslims, men whose stature is measured by the misery they inflict on those around them.
Pundits like to call the War on Terror an existential conflict and for Islam it is. A way of life is being lost. It hasn’t gone quietly. It was baptized with the sword and never learned to live peacefully with its neighbors. Now it is going the way of the Byzantine society it replaced. A culture that defines itself in the dark terms of war cannot survive the modern age. The world has become entirely too small.
Islam can no longer even govern itself. The first obligation of any government is to provide for the common defense and in the Arab world governments don’t necessarily make fundamental decisions of war and peace. Those are often left to the most radical elements who always choose war. Unable to organize themselves to take, occupy, or defend territory from conventional forces they have adopted a strategy of provocation. They entice stronger enemies to retaliate and then hide themselves among civilian populations with the bizarre goal of producing maximum casualties among their own people. They imprison non-combatants in crowded apartment buildings and fire rockets from courtyards so that not even the most accurate return fire can avoid so-called collateral damage. Around the world Muslims watch bloody images on their TV screens and whip themselves into frenzies of support. Even those whose loved ones suffer the most join in the insanity.
The strategy might actually work if it were used in a defensive war of attrition with an enemy who valued human life and wished to spare a civilian populace the worst consequences of war, or one who might eventually grow tired of the cost. Americans withdrew from South Vietnam and ceded it to a far weaker enemy. The Soviet Union gave up similarly in Afghanistan. But in a triumph of delusion Muslim extremists are using it in what is essentially an offensive campaign. Hezbollah’s objective is the destruction of Israel. If Israelis thought they might be close to acquiring the means to achieve it they would destroy Hezbollah regardless of cost. For now they are content to allow Lebanon to descend into chaos. But Hezbollah has tasted Pyrrhic victory and rejoiced in it. They can be expected to rearm and try again in the never ending cycle of self destruction we have watched for so many years among Palestinians.
Sheik Nasrallah basks in the glow of infamy, his Iranian sponsors delightedly provide him with new financing and new weapons, Lebanon slowly picks herself up, and Israel licks her wounds in preparation for the next time. Does anyone seriously doubt there will be a next time? Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We have been here before. This is madness.