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Robert G.'s avatar

The preferred term would probably be "islamist tyranny". That was usually the way to differentiate between Al Queda and the mosque down the street.

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Vincent Cook's avatar

"These threats could and should have been removed in their infancy, sparing mankind countless horrors."

One does not remove an ideology or a religion from the world via the initiation of force against governments that happen to formally adhere to such a belief system. This is especially the case for religions, which spontaneously arise from cultural evolutionary processes that among the more successful examples tend to favor self-propagation mechanisms (e.g. true believers motivated to form large indoctrinated families, to evangelize, and to be violently intolerant of those subscribing to rival belief systems) and thus can spread and sustain themselves even in the absence of support from political and economic institutions. Wiping out a state with violence doesn't wipe out a deeply-embedded culture that informed that state's particular brand of authoritarianism.

In most Mohammedan nations, it isn't safe to express an atheist or a gay identity, etc. even in the absence of any formal state enforcement of Sharia law. Even decades of colonial political control by various Western powers in many of these nations did little to make their cultures tolerant of such identities, and experiments in democratizing these nations have usually resulted in the election of Islamist political parties that enforce Sharia-like restrictions against various Western influences.

Even worse, attempting to wage a religious war or cultural war by military means only makes things more authoritarian in cultural terms, both in the countries being invaded and in the countries that are doing the invading. Neoconservatives, ever prone to embracing false World War II analogies, plainly failed in their attempts to replicate the German "deNazification" and "democratization" processes in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as the British Imperialists had failed to fundamentally transform Iraq and Afghanistan during the heyday of their empire (notwithstanding the fact that they had literally invented "Iraq" as a distinct polity in the first place). What they succeeded in doing was seriously eroding civil liberties in America.

Moreover, it was obvious to informed observers prior to the outbreak of the war that the primary goal of Neoconservatives was to seize control of Iraq's oil resources as a part of their broader strategy to assure America's unilateral dominance of the world via control of access to natural resources and technologies (which was outlined in their manifesto _Rebuilding America's Defenses_), as well as secure profitable oil concessions and arms contracts for their corporate supporters. Neoconservative incitement of fears of jihadist movements (which were absurd in the case of Saddam Hussein, a long-time secularist from a minority religious sect) and of non-existent weapons of mass destruction only served as a flimsy pretext to seek the regime change in Iraq that the Neoconservatives had been clamoring for at least five years. Eliminating jihadism was never a serious goal of the "war on terror" or the war on Saddam.

By the way, the Chinese Communist dictatorship was provoked into instituting a strategy of its own to break out of this attempted encirclement by securing its own maritime and overland links to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This has come to be known as the "Belt and Road initiative." The military contest implicit in the conflicting goals of these strategies, where each superpower fears being cut off from the world by the other's military in the event of a crisis, has the potential to incentivize an arms race, etc. and ultimately the outbreak of World War III in much the same way that fears of strategic encirclement were a major factor in sparking World Wars I and II. The unintended consequence of Neoconservatives attempting to dominate the world a couple of decades ago (while pretending to slay Islamic monsters) may well be the thermonuclear annihilation of our civilization.

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