If you haven’t heard already, Benazir Bhutto is dead.
She is a former Prime Minister of Pakistan, scion of a family known for leadership in that country’s government, and until recently, had been living in exile due to charges of corruption from the military and former political figures.
She was shot twice, once in the head, once in the chest, before a suicide bomber got close enough to blow himself up, along with her car, her entourage, and a few members of the crowd surrounding her. You can couch her assassination in whatever terms you’d like, but the fact is that she was a woman leader of a predominantly Islamic country. She is friendly with the West, progressive on the human rights front, and a proponent of democracy. In short, she is everything that conservative Islam deplores.
I have gone back and forth in my thought process. Shortly after 9/11, I believed that every government known to harbor terrorists should have been purged from the face of the planet. I include Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, the PLO, and Yemen. Other governments that have active terror campaigns in their countries, such as Indonesia, the Phillipines, Pakistan, India, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia should have been put on notice. Stop it now or the U.S. will, and damn the consequences. Such a stance is dangerous and provides the catalyst for a global war that courts nuclear annihilation, so after I cooled down a bit, I could see our measured response in Afghanistan (Iraq is a different kettle of fish).
After a while, I began to think of people in the Middle East as just “plain folks.” They don’t blindly follow their leadership any more than we in the West do. Most want to be left alone, to raise their families, and turn a profit in whatever business they’re involved in. I began to gave the bulk of the population there the benefit of the doubt.
After I became comfortable with this attitude, something like this happens. Any society, in any corner of the globe, has the responsibility to police itself and protect the people in that society from harm. When this is no longer possible, you have a breakdown in that society that becomes the breeding ground for extremism, civil war, and terrorism. In the Middle East, this degradation is done in the name of Allah, to take revenge on us for our success and our wealth. You can blame it on colonialism (popular in Europe), you can blame it on religious differences, but the fundamental reason why we are hated so much is that we are free, we are wealthy, and we are seeking to make the world in our image.
The last part is really the sticking point. I don’t know that any of your average Americans would put it so bluntly: “I want to export our culture of equality, democracy, and materialism to the rest of the world so that an open market becomes a check against future warfare.” Often I think that most practitioners of Islam who are not familiar with our country think we’re out to convert them. Most of us could care less who/what they worship. We just want to buy their oil and sell them luxury goods and technology. Everyone wins in our scenario.
Time and again, through the past one thousand years, it has been conclusively demonstrated that the core of Islam is rooted in violence. While the West has managed to overcome our violent pasts and move toward peace and diplomacy, increased standards of living, and freedom, this transition escapes the people of the Islamic crescent. Their people choose to remain ignorant and choose to allow the violence and evil of their forefathers to gain a foothold in their progeny. The sooner the West realizes this, the sooner we recognize that we have a new Cold War of ideology brewing in a part of the world that is essential for our infrastructure.
Once again, I am moved to a solution that contemplates annihilation. It is only a matter of time before some radical manages to obtain a WMD (biological, chemical, or nuclear) and release it on U.S. soil. It is my profound hope that we wake up to the threat that this poses and take the necessary steps to secure our future before the choice is taken from us by a radical with visions of virgins dancing in his head.
If we don’t have the stomach to do what is necessary, then I fear we will end up on the scrap heap of history. Islam collectively are the Goths to our Rome. I pray it doesn’t come to a dark age before we realize it.
