Let Islam be Islam and America be America!

Allowing Islam to be Islam is an important new principle that can help change U.S. foreign policy and reduce warfare in the 21st century. Since I’ve been teaching about Islam and other world religions to sixth graders since 2001, this focus on Moslem beliefs and practices is a familiar subject. Every fall I begin the year studying ISLAM partly because American kids have great curiosity about it and also because of its great complexity and depth.
If the United States wants to avoid that ‘clash of civilizations’ Samuel Huntington warned us about — and which Bush and Bin Laden are bringing closer — we have to figure out “what IS Islam?” This question is more vital than “why do they hate us” and answering it will help us deal peacefully with Moslems globally. The Prophet Muhammed, may his name be blessed, received some explicit instructions from Jibril (Gabriel) — including praying 5x per day, making the hajj to Mecca, and fasting during Ramadan month. Many individual Moslems will actually obey these and other prescriptions from the Islamic pillars of practice. The US consistently enrages some Moslems when our foreign policy prevents them from carrying out these sacred actions prescribed in the holy Qur'an. Islam is by far the youngest of the three “western” Abrahamic religions that actually began in the Near East. Still without a “Reformation,” many Moslems are determinedly serious about carrying out the prescriptions of the Prophet, and this intensity is difficult for non-Moslems to appreciate.
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report stated that “the American homeland is the planet,” meaning an attack on American interests overseas is the same as a terrorist assault in North America [p. 362]. But if we have to consistently intervene to protect our “foreign” homeland — call it empire! — using military force, we encounter significant opposition by uprooting Moslem daily life. Thrusting troops into Panama, or stationing divisions in Germany or South Korea, works out globally, but having troops anywhere in Saudi Arabia near the Ka’aba becomes a problem. Our invasion of Iraq and ongoing bloody occupation there disrupts required Moslem daily practices. What about the mosques we’ve accidentally damaged, the civic destruction in the two battles for Fallouja, and the tens of thousands of Moslem women and children killed as collateral damage? We need to review our foreign policy principles, cease imagining the whole planet as part of our “homeland,” and admit to limits on our enormous power.
Andrew Bacevich, author of the acclaimed The New American Militarism (Oxford, 2005), recently posited 5 principles to guide American actions abroad; one of them is to husband your economic and military resources. Steering clear of reckless invasions or selective airstrikes (Cheney’s plotted cruise missiles vs. Iran) does not mean passive isolationism. As von Clausewitz famously stated, the THREAT of using force is usually more influential than outright attack. When we do attack this squanders our advantages, reveals the shocking limits of power, and damages the American planetary empire’s longevity.
Bacevich also advocates our need to reinvent that “containment” strategy which was so successful against the USSR. Thus we see the necessity of letting Islam simply be Islam, a 1300 year old “younger” Abrahamic religion with all the monotheistic aspects that go with that tradition. A new strategy of CONTAINING Islam by forgoing military intervention allows Moslem moderates time to calm the stresses of western modernity on their belief system. It gives the 1.4 billion Moslems the security to know they can carry out their sacred activities without an external threat, and WE can husband our resources.
Just as my students find Islam quite mysterious and complex, so do many Mohammedans find America enigmatic, violent, and imperialistic. As we struggle to understand them, let’s give them time to develop and to co-habit with a restrained American influence on our shared planet.

Fighting the Real Fight

Scholar Andrew Bacevich’s fine piece “Fighting the real fight” matters [LA Times, Nov. 6]! He’s absolutely correct — the USA has to move forward with a new foreign policy based on principles AND on a global “containment” strategy. George Kennan’s containment strategy won the Cold War for us, so perhaps we need to look at isolating, outwitting, and out-creating what Bacevich terms “Islamic radicalism.”
One of Bacevich’s five new international principles begins with this idea: “Let Islam Be Islam” We have to try to do this, and accept that the peoples of the earth aren’t waiting with bated breath for Americans to “fix” their problems. It isn’t the western civilized white man’s burden to cram democracy or modernity into the Middle East. Why should we ever imagine we can understand, much less change, the minds and hearts of 1.4 billion faithful Moslems??
Let us husband our resources and redeploy our men out of Iraq!