Can the Terrorists Win?

How Extreme Islam has already lost the clash of civilizations

Three thousand Americans dead. New York and Washington wounded. One terrorist regime overthrown by U.S. military might and another about to be.

What more evidence do we need for historian Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis? In his 1996 book, Huntington argued that the old Cold War fault lines between democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism were giving way to a new global struggle between civilizations. "The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," he asserted. "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." More specifically, Huntington predicted that the main civilizational conflict in the 2lst century would be between the West and Islam.

Assuming that Huntington is correct, the ultimate result of the clash is a foregone conclusion: Reactionary Islam will lose. This point was forcefully made by Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul in his masterful 1981 tour of radical Islam, Among the Believers. In that book, Naipaul described his meetings with prominent Islamic intellectuals and ordinary citizens in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He found they were bewildered by what he called the "encircling universal civilization." They were deeply ashamed of the comparative poverty and incapacity of Islamic societies. If Allah is on our side, they wondered, why does the West have jetliners, antibiotics, computers, hospitals, automobiles, and honest bureaucracies, not to mention tanks, aircraft carriers, and laser-guided missiles? Worse, the Islamic societies were completely dependent on that universal civilization to produce all these goods for them.

To the Islamist intellectuals and demagogues interviewed by Naipaul two decades ago, their dependence on the "great new encircling civilization" outside Islam was galling and demoralizing. In the face of the West's challenge, they retreated to the fantasy that Islamic societies are "spiritually superior" to a decadent West. It is this dynamic of cultural inferiority that ultimately produced Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

Yet even Osama bin Laden realized he could not fight the West with swords and his twisted version of Islamic piety. He needed the Land Rovers, the cell phones, the radios, the videotapes, the computer networks, and, yes, even the guns that only the universal civilization he loathed could produce. Those goods are produced not merely by factories but by social and political customs–customs such as democracy, private property, a free press, free markets, an independent judiciary, academic freedom, limited liability corporations, the rule of law, women's suffrage, and universal literacy. Reactionary Islam, like Soviet and Chinese communism before it, is being undermined from within by the natural yearnings of all people for the good things of life, including the freedoms that make them possible. It turns out that social and political freedom is inextricably attached to imported computers and jeans.

The atrocities of September 11 showed that we in the West can be harmed by the raging death throes of a resentful, expiring culture. Whether or not direct military interventions will hasten the coming victory over reactionary Islam is arguable, but the ultimate victory is not in doubt.

As Karl Marx presciently declared in The Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie [ i.e., us], by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

That's what Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda cannot stand, but also what they cannot stand against. It is only a matter of time before the "intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners" represented by bin Laden and his followers will capitulate. Modernization, which is to say westernization, will inevitably smash all cultures that don't accommodate themselves to it. They will be smashed chiefly not by bombs and military force but by the choices of their own peoples, who will turn their backs on the traditions and institutions that have kept them so long ignorant and poor.

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse," Osama bin Laden famously observed. He was right; he just backed the wrong horse.