Amir Taheri on What Is At Stake in Lebanon

Amir Taheri has an important piece in the Times, explaining just what is at stake in Lebanon and why the conventional analytic tropes of the MSM are irrelevant.

This is not, he argues, a traditional war over territory. It is part of a new global ideological conflict between the West, and "the Rest." He writes:

Since 2001 the [Middle East] has been turned into an ideological battleground between two rival camps with global ambitions. One camp, led by the United States, claims to represent the modern global system of open markets, free elections, religious freedoms and sexual equality. The other camp is represented by radical Islam, which regards the Western model as not only decadent but dangerous for the future of mankind. It hopes to unite the world under the banner of Islam, which it holds to be “ The Only True Faith”.

In the Lebanese conflict, Israel and Hezbollah are the junior proxies for the rival camps. Israel is not fighting to hold or win more land; nor is Hezbollah. But both realise that they cannot live in security and prosper as long as the other is in a position to threaten their existence. A Middle East dominated by Islamism could, in time, spell the death of Israel as a nation-state. A westernised, democratic Lebanon, on the other hand, could become the graveyard of Hezbollah and its messianic ideology. And if the US succeeds in fulfilling George W. Bush’s promise of a “new Middle East” there will be no place for regimes such as the Islamic Republic in Iran and Syria’s Baathist dictatorship.

But there is a second level of conflict here too.

The present rupture in Lebanon has much to do with who will lead the fightback against the West. For almost a quarter of a century there has been intense competition within the Islamist camp over who could claim leadership. For much of that period Sunni Salafist movements, backed by oil money, were in the ascendancy. They began to decline after the 9/11 attacks that deprived them of much of the support they received from Arab governments and charities. In the past five years Tehran has tried to seize the opportunity to advance its own leadership claims. The problem, however, is that Iran is a Shia power and thus regarded by Sunni Salafists as “heretical”. To compensate for that weakness, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made the destruction of Israel a priority for his regime. The war triggered by Hezbollah is in part designed to show that President Ahmadinejad is not bluffing when he promises to wipe Israel off the map as the first step towards defeating the “infidel” West.

This conflict cannot be understood or dealt with by traditional diplomatic means. Taheri warns:

All the talk of a ceasefire, all the diplomatic gesticulations may ultimately mean little in what is an existential conflict.

I would add only this. It is a mistake to see this as a conflict between modernity and the middle ages.

Radical Islamism is very much a modern development. It's roots are only situationally located in the deep past. Like all reform movements it picks and chooses aspects of the past that serve its very contemporary interests and needs, rejecting or ignoring others. The restored Caliphate is simply a convenient shorthand for Islamism's global ambitions. Nothing more. To the extent that Islamism has a real past, it reaches back no more than the Algerian insurrection of half a century ago. It's most important past triumph was the overthrow of the Shah three decades ago. Its most immediate inspiration was the rout of Soviet forces in Afghanistan more recently than that.

In this sense what we are witnessing is not a clash of cultures, or a confrontation of civilizations, or or civilization and barbarism -- it is a recent development; a competition between two distinct visions of the future -- one [liberal democracy] rooted in centuries of success, the other developing in opposition to those past successes. Islamism is the anti-West and its civilizational forms are still taking shape. We will never defeat it by looking to the far past. Instead we must confront its evolving and developing present and future forms.

George Bush is right to compare the current conflict with the Cold War. Then the US, leading the West, confronted a new counter-force -- one whose successes stretched back only a few decades. It took half a century of coordinated effort on the part of Western democracies to meet that threat. It will take a comparable effort to meet this new one.