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Thursday, March 19, 2015

Islam Isn’t a Peril

The American Conservative - http://www.theamericanconservative.com - Islam Isn’t a Peril
Posted By Leon Hadar | March 19, 2015http://www.theamericanconservative.com/?index
In early 1993 then-Foreign Affairs managing editor Fareed Zakaria asked me to write a commentary for the magazine based on a policy analysis [1] that I had published as a research fellow at the Cato Institute. In the policy analysis, I challenged the thesis that Islam was replacing communism as the top ideological challenge to the West while at the same time, Iran was supposedly emerging to replace the Soviet Union as a leading global strategic threat to the United States.
My subsequent Foreign Affairs article, “What Green Peril?” [2] drew a lot of attention at the time but was displaced as a foreign policy Big Think piece by another Foreign Affairs essay, “The Clash of Civilizations,” in which the renowned political thinker Samuel Huntington contended that political Islam, together with other civilizational entities, would pose long-term perils to U.S. global interests.
In any case, the arguments I had stated in my earlier Foreign Affairs piece continued to haunt me through the years, first, in the aftermath of 9/11 when some of my critics, especially on the political right, suggested that my thesis was now overrun by events that supposedly demonstrated that the notion of Green Peril was not a figment of imagination of frustrated Cold Warriors.
More recently, I contended [3] that the failures of American democracy promotion and “nation building” project in Iraq, as well as those of the Arab Spring, to deliver on liberal-democratic promises made it obvious that the values of the Enlightenment project were not compatible with those of contemporary Islam. I was then criticized by some on the left for bashing Islam, if not exhibiting—Allah Forbid!—a certain level of Islamophobia that seemed to contradict the positions I laid out in “What Green Peril?”
But in fact, as I revisited my old Foreign Affairs piece, I discovered that my main thesis remains basically intact. If anything, 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror” coupled with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq only strengthened it by demonstrating that the United States and the West were facing neither an ideological challenge nor a strategic threat from a unified and monolithic Islamic ideological bloc a la the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/islam-isnt-a-peril/

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