Ruminations on the spread of jihadism

[unixronin]

Time Magazine has an article online talking about the way radical Islam is recruiting among second-generation Muslims who feel they are rootless and have no home.  luxobscura pointed the article out to me in neph_politics.)

I find this article thought-provoking.  In particular, it occurs to me to wonder whether this is a serendipitous bonus side-effect for the likes of Osama bin Laden -- or whether it was planned this way from the start.  I don't put it past bin Laden to have conceived a long-term plan to try to provoke Western govermments into reacting in ways that would drive previously-moderate Muslims into the arms of the jihadists.

The problem is that our governments are, by and large, treating terrorism as the kind of problem you can solve with an army.  And, by and large, you can't, because it's very hard to define an enemy -- and when you do manage to define the enemy, you find as often as not that your enemy isn't one you can actually bring an army to bear against.  So the temptation to governments that think in terms of policy doctrines enforced by armies is to pick -- or define -- an enemy that you can field an army against, instead.

Perhaps the problem is that our governments are trying to put the wrong kind of army into the field.  Too often, too much of what our governments do seems to be decided from a viewpoint that says that once you have authority, people don't have to like you, as long as you can still convince them to vote for you at election time.  It really makes little difference whether you do that by putting a ballot in front of them and a [literal or figurative] gun to their head, or by offering them a free choice that is actually no meaningful choice at all.

There are several places where this model falls down.  For starters, there's the problem that when the sitting government fudges the elective process in this way, it can convince itself that it has a mandate from the people -- no matter how small the fraction of the eligible electorate that actually voted for it.  (This can be seen in any number of recent US elections wherein the winning candidate fails to achieve even a simple majority of the popular vote, with barely half the eligible electorate even voting in the first place, and the winning candidate -- for whom, when all is said and done, more than three quarters of the electorate did NOT vote -- then proclaims a popular mandate.)  And clearly if it has a popular mandate, its policies must be working, so there's no reason to change them.

In addition, the logical extension of this kind of mindset is that if someone can't vote either for or against you, it's unimportant whether they like you or not.  Thus it becomes politically acceptable to trample over any foreigners unable to materially retaliate politically, and if they act in ways you don't like and no other government that matters to you will support them, well, just hit them with your army.  In the world of entrenched governments, there's no particular incentive to be a good global neighbor, so long as you're a member of the neighborhood gang of bullies and wield a bigger stick than whatever neighbor you feel like imposing your will upon today.

We're now seeing the consequences of this kind of thinking.  The neighbors who don't have a big stick of their own will do things like pouring paint remover over your Mercedes-Benz while you're in the shower, or finding one of your kids who's feeling bored and resentful and convincing him that it would be a grand gag to release a jarful of yellowjackets behind the livingroom couch while you're watching Monday Night Football.  In the real world, this translates to international terrorism, and to recruiting the disaffected among your own population.

Granted, there will always be disaffected; and there will always be some foreign factions that feel you are the Great Satan for the crime of not being like them and must therefore be destroyed.  But you can take this into account in your actions and try not to give them any more ammunition to work with than you can avoid, or you can continue to act the swaggering bully and play right into their hands.  It may not always be possible to see an easy way to make the situation better; but at least one can try to always act in a way that does not actively make it worse.

Comments

[rbos.livejournal.com]

Clearly, then, the only solution is to lock up all the darkish people.

That will make America safe.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Careful, you'll give'em ideas. :p

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

Why don't we lock up all Americans, since that's who the rest of the world doesn't like, and that will keep the whole WORLD safe!

Waitaminit, our own government is already doing that...

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

with the consent of the masses!