A lot has been said about the Muslim outrage over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and why not? It's a great storyline. It has an us-versus-them quality. It has a "free speech" element, which always fires people up. It even involves a righteous boycott of the Danish dairy industry, collateral damage if ever there was.
Nevertheless, the deeper meaning of the whole situation is really none of the above. Rather, the episode is a window into how we win wars - and how we could lose this one.
The war on terror, as it is presently constituted, will fail. The failure will not be from a lack of military might or strategy - that part of the war is actually going well enough, though you wouldn't know it from watching the television news. (For some, even one American casualty is too many.)
The breakdown of the war will not even be economic or political. Rather, the pending failure lies in the fact that we have not employed the one great weapon that has sealed the success of nearly every war in our past: our culture.
What we're really seeing from the recent Muslim outrage is our own nation being dragged into a religious war. We can pretend to analyze our way out of it, but if the Islamic community feels that we're fighting against each and every one of them, we'll soon find ourselves doing so - like it or not. And that's a bad thing. A really bad thing. Religious wars never end, and no one ever wins them.
Any student of basic world history could easily begin to draw a line - one I believe we are approaching quickly - where this war on terror devolves into the same religious war that has been going on among Christians, Muslims and Jews for millennia. Throughout American history, we've done a good job of not fighting that war. And for good reason: That war generally topples empires. This time around, however, we're foolishly being tempted into it.
Culture As a Weapon
You obviously need two sides to a religious war. America and the Western World are not a religion, right? That technically may be true, but the dilemma lies in the fact that we're beginning to fight the war on terror as a war of principle.
Article comments
1 - RedTard
Very good observation. Cutting the Dubai ports deal was a huge mistake which could have been avoided if more people took your line of reasoning.
2 - Mark Schannon
Excellent analysis, albeit complex which is necessary in the morass. It's too bad no one in Washington will read this--it just might give them some good ideas.
3 - ash
Its western culture that spreads terrorism everywhere, the west support for israel is terrorism, and usa invasion for iraq and afgan is also terrorism, and usa supports for dictator regimes in south america or in middle east is also terrorism, or west genocide culture in america, and other parts of world , all these are the result of west culture.
4 - ALI
in west the most important industry arms, sex, and drugs, this is the result of west culture,unmorality, and to attack other nations to rape there resources.
5 - salah aldin
the west culture invasion in arab world is happening, iam arabian, and i can see how media is trying to invade our culture with the west dirty-porn culture, but InshAllah islam will win at the end, our people here are religious one, and know well how west is trying to enslave them
6 - JP
RedTard, I agree with you to a point. The Bush administration has done nothing to prevent generalizations about Muslims and Islam, which is the first problem. We can't collectively think of a people this way.
Further, the UAE played a part in preventing us from getting Bin Laden in 1998/99 and as this failure was exploited in the 2004 election, something's fishy about that relationship if you ask me. This is something questionable about *specific* Arabs, not about them as a people.
So I'm not sure the deal should have passed, given these same Emirates would have been in charge of the ports. But your overall point is correct, the generalizations about Islam aren't helping us convince anyone this isn't a holy war.