标题: 【转贴】A Battle for Global Values(仅供参考) [打印本页] 作者: nicholasxw 时间: 2010-12-14 03:26 标题: 【转贴】A Battle for Global Values(仅供参考) A Battle for Global Values
作者：Tony Blair 文章来源：Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007 更新时间：2007-1-13
Summary: The war on terrorism is not just about security or military tactics. It is a battle of values, and one that can only be won by the triumph of tolerance and liberty. Afghanistan and Iraq have been the necessary starting points of this battle. Success there, however, must be coupled with a bolder, more consistent, and more thorough application of global values, with Washington leading the way.
Tony Blair is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
THE ROOTS OF EXTREMISM
Our response to the September 11 attacks has proved even more momentous than it seemed at the time. That is because we could have chosen security as the battleground. But we did not. We chose values. We said that we did not want another Taliban or a different Saddam Hussein. We knew that you cannot defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.
In my view, the situation we face is indeed war, but of a completely unconventional kind, one that cannot be won in a conventional way. We will not win the battle against global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as that of force. We can win only by showing that our values are stronger, better, and more just than the alternative. That also means showing the world that we are evenhanded and fair in our application of those values. We will never get real support for the tough actions that may well be essential to safeguarding our way of life unless we also attack global poverty, environmental degradation, and injustice with equal vigor.
The roots of the current wave of global terrorism and extremism are deep. They reach down through decades of alienation, victimhood, and political oppression in the Arab and Muslim world. Yet such terrorism is not and never has been inevitable.
To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.
Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.
But by the early twentieth century, after the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment had swept over the Western world, the Muslim and Arab world was uncertain, insecure, and on the defensive. Some Muslim countries, such as Turkey, made a muscular move toward secularism. Others found themselves caught up in colonization, nascent nationalism, political oppression, and religious radicalism. Muslims began to see the sorry state of Muslim countries as symptomatic of the sorry state of Islam. Political radicals became religious radicals and vice versa.
Those in power tried to accommodate this Islamic radicalism by incorporating some of its leaders and some of its ideology. The result was nearly always disastrous. Religious radicalism was made respectable and political radicalism suppressed, and so in the minds of many, the two came together to represent the need for change. They began to think that the way to restore the confidence and stability of Islam was through a combination of religious extremism and populist politics, with the enemies becoming "the West" and those Islamic leaders who cooperated with it.
This extremism may have started with religious doctrine and thought. But soon, in offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, supported by Wahhabi extremists and disseminated in some of the madrasahs of the Middle East and Asia, an ideology was born and exported around the world.
On 9/11, 3,000 people were murdered. But this terrorism did not begin on the streets of New York. Many more had already died, not just in acts of terrorism against Western interests but in political insurrection and turmoil around the world. Its victims are to be found in the recent history of many lands: India, Indonesia, Kenya, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and countless more. More than 100,000 died in Algeria. In Chechnya and Kashmir, political causes that could have been resolved became brutally incapable of resolution under the pressure of terrorism. Today, in 30 or 40 countries, terrorists are plotting action loosely linked with this ideology. Although the active cadres of terrorists are relatively small, they exploit a far wider sense of alienation in the Arab and Muslim world.
These acts of terrorism were not isolated incidents. They were part of a growing movement -- a movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, and were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this takeover (as opposed to those who could see that the way to recover not just the true faith but also Muslim confidence and self-esteem was to take on the West and all its works).
The struggle against terrorism in Madrid, or London, or Paris is the same as the struggle against the terrorist acts of Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, or rejectionist groups in Iraq. The murder of the innocent in Beslan is part of the same ideology that takes innocent lives in Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen. And when Iran gives support to such terrorism, it becomes part of the same battle, with the same ideology at its heart.
Sometimes political strategy comes deliberatively, sometimes by instinct. For this movement, it probably came by instinct. It has an ideology, a worldview, deep convictions, and the determination of fanaticism. It resembles, in many ways, early revolutionary communism. It does not always need structures and command centers or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.
In the late 1990s, the movement's strategy became clear. If it was merely fighting within Islam, it ran the risk that fellow Muslims -- being as decent and as fair-minded as anyone else -- would choose to reject its fanaticism. A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. The extremists realized that they had to create a completely different battle: Muslims versus the West.
That is what the September 11 attacks did. I am still amazed at how many people say, in effect, that there is terrorism today because of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that 9/11 predated both. The West did not attack this movement. It was attacked.
THE NATURE OF THE STRUGGLE
For this ideology, we are the enemy. But "we" are not the West. "We" are as much Muslim as Christian, Jew, or Hindu. "We" are all those who believe in religious tolerance, in openness to others, in democracy, in liberty, and in human rights administered by secular courts.
This is not a clash between civilizations; it is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence -- between optimism and hope, on the one hand, and pessimism and fear, on the other.
In any struggle, the first challenge is to accurately perceive the nature of what is being fought over, and here we have a long way to go. It is almost incredible to me that so much Western opinion appears to buy the idea that the emergence of this global terrorism is somehow our fault.
For a start, the terror is truly global. It is directed not just at the United States and its allies but also at nations who could not conceivably be said to be partners of the West.
Moreover, the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan are plainly not about those countries' liberation from U.S. occupation. The extremists' goal is to prevent those countries from becoming democracies -- not "Western-style" democracies but any sort of democracy. It is the extremists, not us, who are slaughtering the innocent and doing it deliberately. They are the only reason for the continuing presence of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is also rubbish to suggest that Islamist terrorism is the product of poverty. Of course, it uses the cause of poverty as a justification for its acts. But its fanatics are hardly champions of economic development.
Furthermore, the terrorists' aim is not to encourage the creation of a Palestine living side by side with Israel but rather to prevent it. They fight not for the coming into being of a Palestinian state but for the going out of being of an Israeli state.
The terrorists base their ideology on religious extremism -- and not just any religious extremism, but a specifically Muslim version. The terrorists do not want Muslim countries to modernize. They hope that the arc of extremism that now stretches across the region will sweep away the fledgling but faltering steps modern Islam wants to take into the future. They want the Muslim world to retreat into governance by a semifeudal religious oligarchy.
Yet despite all of this, which I consider fairly obvious, many in Western countries listen to the propaganda of the extremists and accept it. (And to give credit where it is due, the extremists play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party.) They look at the bloodshed in Iraq and say it is a reason for leaving. Every act of carnage somehow serves to indicate our responsibility for the disorder rather than the wickedness of those who caused it. Many believe that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was so wrong that they are reluctant to accept what is plainly right now.
Some people believe that terrorist attacks are caused entirely by the West's suppression of Muslims. Some people seriously believe that if we only got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, the attacks would stop. And, in some ways most perniciously, many look at Israel and think we pay too great a price for supporting it and sympathize with those who condemn it.
If we recognized this struggle for what it truly is, we would at least be on the first steps of the path to winning it. But a vast part of Western opinion is not remotely near this point yet.
This ideology has to be taken on -- and taken on everywhere. Islamist terrorism will not be defeated until we confront not just the methods of the extremists but also their ideas. I do not mean just telling them that terrorist activity is wrong. I mean telling them that their attitude toward the United States is absurd, that their concept of governance is prefeudal, that their positions on women and other faiths are reactionary. We must reject not just their barbaric acts but also their false sense of grievance against the West, their attempt to persuade us that it is others and not they themselves who are responsible for their violence.
In the era of globalization, the outcome of this clash between extremism and progress will determine our future. We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction -- pushing the responsibility onto the United States alone or deluding ourselves that this terrorism is a series of individual isolated incidents rather than a global movement -- would be profoundly and fundamentally wrong.
TWO FRONTS
That is why it is a mistake to ignore the significance of the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact is that, given the chance, people want democracy. From the moment the Afghans came out and voted in their first-ever election, the myth that democracy is a Western concept was exploded. In Iraq as well, despite violence and intimidation, people voted, and not just a few, but in numbers large enough to shame many Western democracies.
What these votes show is that people do not want dictatorship, neither theocratic nor secular. When the supporters of Saddam or Mullah Muhammad Omar dare to stand in elections, they do not win many votes. Iraqi and Afghan Muslims have said it clearly: democracy is as much our right as it is yours. In embracing it, they are showing that they also want a society in which people of different cultures and faiths can live together in peace. This struggle is our struggle.
Who is trying to stop those who want democracy? In Iraq, a mixture of foreign jihadists, former Saddamists, and rejectionist insurgents; in Afghanistan, a combination of drug barons, the Taliban, and al Qaeda. Their case is that democracy is a Western concept that is being forced on an unwilling Islamic culture. Every conspiracy theory, from its being the West's intent to seize Iraqi oil to the West's having designs of imperial domination, is repeated. Some in the West even agree.
Why are these reactionary elements fighting so hard? Because they know the importance of victory or defeat. Right from the beginning it was obvious to them. Of course, there have been mistakes and unacceptable abuses of human rights on our side. But here in its most pure form is a struggle between democracy and violence.
For sure, it is arguable that de-Baathification went too quickly and was spread too indiscriminately, especially among the armed forces. It is easy to forget, however, that the real worry back in 2003 was a humanitarian crisis, which was avoided, and that the pressure at the time was to de-Baathify faster.
But the basic problem, from the murder of UN staff in August 2003 onward, has been simple: security. The reactionary elements have tried to derail both reconstruction and democracy by violence. Power and electricity became problems not through indolence on the part of either Iraqis or the coalition forces but through sabotage. People became frightened because of terrorism and criminal gangs, some of which had been deliberately released from prison by Saddam just before his fall.
These were not random acts. They were and are part of a strategy. When that strategy failed to push the coalition out of Iraq prematurely, when it failed to stop the voting, the extremists turned to sectarian killing and outrage -- most notably the savage and blasphemous destruction of the Shiite shrine in Samarra.
The extremists know that if they can succeed -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or any other nation desiring to go the democratic route -- then the prospect of a democratic future for the Arab and Muslim world will be dealt a potentially mortal blow. Likewise, if these countries become democracies and make progress, that will be a powerful blow against both the extremists' propaganda about the West and their whole system of values.
In each case, the forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other nations are there to help indigenous security forces grow, support the democratic process, and provide a bulwark against the terrorism that threatens that process. In each case, full UN authority is in place.
The debate over the wisdom of the original decisions, especially about Iraq, will continue. Opponents will say that Iraq was never a threat, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the drug trade in Afghanistan continues. I will point out that Iraq was indeed a threat, as two regional wars, 14 UN resolutions, and the final report of the Iraq Survey Group showed. I will remind people that in the aftermath of the Iraq war, we secured major advances in tackling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, not least a new relationship with Libya and the shutting down of A. Q. Khan's nuclear weapons network. I will recall that it was the Taliban who manipulated the drug trade and housed al Qaeda and its training camps.