In for the grim long haul
The failure of Muslim regimes is manifested clearly in the United Nations Development Program. Growth in per-capita income in the 22 Arab countries has averaged an abysmal 0.5 percent a year for the past 20 years, lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. The U.N. report blames the social and political structures, a bleak educational system, a patriarchal and intolerant social environment, with Arabs learning little from other cultures and languages. Spain, for instance, has translated as many books in a single year as Arab states have in 1,000 years.
We are in the midst of a global intifada that threatens and challenges the international order on which our security, liberty, and prosperity depend. President Bush was not off the mark this week when he compared our current struggle to that of the allies in World War II. Eliminating this threat must be the highest priority of the West. But the West is divided. Europe is threatened by mass migration from neighboring Islamic lands, young men bringing with them their radical faith and not much else. Some European countries have adopted an anti-Americanism in what the scholar Fouad Ajami describes as "an attempt at false 'bonding' " with the people of Islam. So as Ajami describes it, they "beat the drums of opposition to America's war in Iraq" in the hope that the "furies of the Arab world and of this radical Islamism" will pass them by.
It won't. But America, as the world's lone superpower, has become the common enemy of Muslim militants, in a war that is not about our foreign policy or about global inequities, or even about what we do. It is a war because of who we are--and it may well go on for decades.
advertisement
