The Islamists are winning

19 July 2006

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century

Despite the heat and harm-doing of the present local warfare, the battlefront in the Levant is merely one front, and a minor front at that, in the wider conflict between the Islamic and the non-Muslim worlds. Moreover, the time for serious diplomacy and dialogue between the Muslim and the kafir has not yet come. Indeed, it may never come until one or other of the forces in this war of the worlds — a war now being fought, with differing degrees of intensity and in different ways, from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa, from the Caucasus to Kashmir, from Nigeria to Xinjiang, and from the Levant to South-East Asia — has finally been vanquished.

The arguments for ‘diplomacy’ in the Middle East are also not what they seem, since most of them stem not from the dictates of reason but from the geopolitical interests of rival powers, each in pursuit of its own ends. In the current flare-up, the US, Russia, France and Iran — but not Britain, since it has no foreign policy worth the name — all have distinct purposes in mind. For the struggle in the western Mediterranean is a war of position as well as of arms; so too with the conflicts in Chechnya, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan.

The combatants in each theatre of this near-global combat are fighting, by definition, for more than local causes. The US, weakened by divisions at home comparable with those during the Vietnam war, and poorly led, thus finds in Israel a useful instrument for the hoped-for imposition of a pax Americana upon Syria. Iran, a growing threat to Arab nations in the region as well as to the non-Muslim world, is likewise benefiting politically from the belligerence of its proxy Hezbollah, and from the fears in the infidel’s heart which it engenders on Iran’s behalf. As for Russia and France, they have their own historic relations with Lebanon and Syria, and their own interests in thwarting US hegemony wherever they can, and at whatever cost to the fortunes of ostensible allies in this vast war.