The Pastor's Dangerous Missive

First of all I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. The holidays, of course, pose a difficult hurdle for bloggers of my ilk. But now I'm back.

I, unlike some of my friends, have been diligently reading the foreign policy statements which had been put forth by the presidential candidates in Foreign Affairs magazine. While I have been stultified by the banal writings of the Democratic candidates, I have been incensed by the small-mindedness and, in some cases, radicalism of the Republican candidates. Obviously, my agita has not been so acute as a prompt me to write something about. However, after getting back from Florida, I was welcomed by the most recent copy of Foreign Affairs. In it was an essay by Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and fellow son of Hope (along with former President Bill Clinton). Now I have to admit that Huckabee makes me laugh on occasion. Growing up in the South, his soft-spoken ways and his pastoral (literal and figuartive) approach to politics speak to me, despite all my cerebrally-informed attempts for them not to. However after reading just a few paragraphs of his essay, the veil has been ripped from eyes. Now, I never thought he knew anything about international politics, but I was surprised to see that Chuck Norris’ candidate knows nothing about politics. Let me say it again: Huckabee knows nothing about politics.

The reason for this unqualified judgment is as follows: he says, "The first rule of war is know your enemy, and most Americans do not know theirs." He of course is talking about Islamic terrorists, and I agree with him there. Here comes the rub. Just a few sentences before he states that "they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it." This nonsense -- this Fox News, Ann Coulter, Kristol family nonsense -- cannot stand.

Osama bin Laden understands politics perfectly well. His decision in the late 1990s to abandon local wars in corrupt Arab states (the near enemy) and begin a focus on the global war against the United States (the far enemy) and its proxy in the region, Israel, shows calculation and an understanding of the way the world works, especially the postmodern, mass-mediated world in which live. Osama bin Laden has no desire to kill every last American. Only the greenest recruit in the Al Qaeda organization has the notion that they can actually rewrite the rules of civilization. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's mentor, has studied some of the greatest revolutionaries, including a Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. Al Qaeda's actions are carefully orchestrated to achieve tangible, concrete outcomes. If just killing Americans was their goal, there would be a lot more dead Americans.

Huckabee, while talking about Sayyid Qutb and other important aspects of violent global Islamism in his essay, fails to grasp even the most basic notions of political science. His embrace of this ideal of "Islamo-fascism" shows that his views of the outside world are just as paranoid and muddled as those of Rudolph Giuliani, who is currently under the tutelage of some of the most aggressive neo-conservatives. In Andrew Sullivan's recent article about Barack Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, discusses how having an American president whose father was born in Kenya, grandmother is a Muslim, and studied in a Muslim-majority school as a youth might actually deter some angry young Muslim youth somewhere in Pakistan at sometime in the future from sacrificing his entire life to kill Westerners. While I'm not sure I buy Sullivan's argument completely, a Baptist preacher from a Red state who sincerely believes that all Muslims want us dead will -- if elected to the presidency -- ensure that there will be at least a few more of those young men who choose the route of violence over pursuit of their own self-interest.