Savi Technology, a wireless automatic ID pioneer, developed the system with federal support through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and private investments. According to the Wall Street Journal, one-half of Savi’s $40 million in revenue this year is expected to come from the Pentagon.

“This is a model for how our nation can improve port security,” said Sen. Murray at the little-noticed July news conference unveiling SST. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation, responsible for writing the budget of the Coast Guard and the new TSA, Murray claims she has been “the leading voice in Congress to improve port security.” She inserted a $28 million earmark in the appropriations bill to test the system.

The funds are for “a pilot project to push the American border back, so Customs [Service] officials would be in a foreign port taking a manifest of what goes into those containers, then securely locking them down and tracking them as they went into a U.S. port,” Murray spokesman Todd Webster tells Insight.

So far, so good. But alarm bells are sounding about the involvement in SST of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa. Advocates say that Hutchison Whampoa is the world’s largest seaport owner and administrator, with a history beginning in the 19th century when the firm was founded by the British. With partners PSA and P&O Ports, Hutchison Whampoa handles 70 percent of the world’s container traffic. In a statement to Insight, the company says it is a purely commercial enterprise and rejects allegations that it might be influenced by the Chinese government.

But those familiar with Hutchison Whampoa’s ties to the Chinese military are concerned. “This is a conflict of interest for a non-U.S. company,” says Al Santoli, a congressional national-security consultant and director of the Asia Pacific Initiative of the American Foreign Policy Council. Santoli is troubled that Tacoma, Wash. is an initial U.S. port for the program testing.

“The Chinese have been working hard to get into the ports near Seattle. They are among our most vital commercial ports and are home to key U.S. military bases.” Those bases are the home port of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft-carrier battle group at Bremerton and a strategic ballistic-missile submarine base in Bangor. “It’s a major site for espionage for our rivals and adversaries,” he says. “It’s absolutely mind-boggling that our national-security leaders would even consider a contract with a company that would at the very least have a questionable national-security status as Hutchison Whampoa.”

Sen. Murray defends Hutchison Whampoa’s involvement in the pilot program. “They are one of the largest port operators in the world,” says Webster. “To ignore Hutchison Whampoa is to ignore some of the largest port facilities in the world that send millions of containers to the United States every year.” The company, he says, is not receiving U.S. tax dollars earmarked for the project.

Insight first reported about Hutchison Whampoa’s control of ports at both ends of the Panama Canal following the U.S.

military pullout from Panama in 1999 [see “China’s Beachhead at Panama Canal,” Aug. 16, 1999]. The report raised concerns about Hutchison Whampoa’s reported connections to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and how its control of Panamanian ports could threaten U.S. interests.

Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart dismissed the Insight story and the surrounding controversy as “silly stuff.”

However, the year before, in 1998, a secret U.S. Army intelligence report raised concerns about how the Chinese government was anticipating the American pullout from Panama and the role Hutchison Whampoa could play in Beijing’s strategy to have a presence in the world’s major shipping choke points. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) information report stated that “Li Ka-shing, the owner of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. (HW) and Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd. (CK), is planning to take control of Panama Canal operations when the U.S. transfers it to Panama in Dec. ’99.”

The report, obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), stated: “Li is directly connected to Beijing and is willing to use his business influence to further the aims of his own son, Victor Li, to replace him in certain CK and HW operations such as HW’s Hong Kong International Terminals (HIT).”

According to a DIA analysis, “Li’s interest in the canal is not only strategic, but also a means for outside financial opportunities for the Chinese government. China, the canal’s third-largest user, consequently has a significant amount of influence. If China were to assume control of the canal operations, it would have to abide by the neutrality requirements of the Torrijos-Carter treaties.”

Critics of Hutchison Whampoa’s involvement in Panama focused on Beijing’s ability in time of crisis to sabotage or control traffic in the Panama Canal. But critics had other worries, too, including the Chinese government’s reported massive smuggling operations worldwide. There also were concerns about how private companies influenced or controlled by Beijing, to say nothing of the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), which is a major containerized shipping and trucking firm with reach into the heartland of the United States, could be used to subversive effect.

Referring to the Panama Canal controversy that Insight’s reports sparked in August and September 1999, a secret DIA memo dated Oct. 26 of that year cautioned, “Hutchison’s containerized shipping facilities in the Panama Canal, as well as the Bahamas, could provide a conduit for illegal shipments of technology or prohibited items from the West to the PRC [People’s Republic of China], or to facilitate the movement of arms and other prohibited items into the Americas.”

Hutchison Whampoa does not stand accused of knowingly handling illegal technology or arms shipments, and industry officials say the company has a solid professional record. However, Insight correctly has described Chief Executive Officer Li Ka-shing as “an important cog in the economic

machinery of the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA. Li is a board member of the Chinese government’s main investment arm, the China International Trust and Investment Corp. (CITIC), run by official PLA arms marketer and smuggler Wang Jun.”

Some China watchers are worried that the Chinese government, or elements therein, could exploit the assets of the firm and even apply leverage to utilize the port company as an intelligence-collection or operations asset. Insight spoke to British and American employees of Hutchison Whampoa, who call the idea preposterous.

Sen. Murray’s office appeared to be unaware of the DIA reports.

Western policymakers and business leaders have little or no idea of China’s grand strategy and how Beijing’s leaders want to situate their country for the next century. When, in 1999, Sen.Trent Lott (R-Miss.) sent Insight’s report, “China’s Beachhead at Panama Canal,” to then defense secretary William Cohen, he called for a full national-security appraisal of the problem. Lott told Cohen, “U.S. naval ships will be at the mercy of Chinese-controlled pilots and could even be denied passage. It appears we have given away the farm.”

At Lott’s request, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing in which four Clinton-administration witnesses testified that Hutchison Whampoa posed no security challenges to the United States [see “PC Answers on Panama Canal,” Nov. 22, 1999]. But not one of the witnesses could answer the fundamental question, posed by Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.): “Do you believe the People’s Republic of China uses commercial enterprises to advance their military interests?”

Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense, Brian E. Sheridan, who had issued a defense of Hutchison Whampoa, confessed, “I don’t know.” Alberto Aleman Zubieta, whom Clinton had appointed to run the Panama Canal until 2005, didn’t answer either. Neither did Joseph W. Cornelison, the deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Commission, nor Lino Gutierrez, then principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. All had contradicted their testimony. Only Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, then chief of the U.S. Southern Command, answered affirmatively to whether Beijing uses commercial enterprises to advance its military interests, saying only: “I think so.”

That was it. And apparently the government has learned little since. “Many of those who are engaged in China policy or who invest there remain blithely ignorant of Chinese goals to replace the United States as the reigning world power,” says Thomas Woodrow, a former senior China analyst at the

Defense Intelligence Agency, who authored a recent Jamestown Foundation article arguing that China’s future energy needs likely mean its development of a blue-water navy capable of projecting power around the world.

To advocates, the involvement of a Chinese company may be a necessary evil. “The administration, in the war on terrorism, is cooperating with a number of countries who might not be the best people on the planet, but their cooperation is necessary to ensure American security and the safety of the American people,” says Sen. Murray’s spokesman Webster. “I think the administration has been willing to make that trade off.”

According to Woodrow, “China has already adjusted its foreign policy and energy strategy to accommodate its need for a larger share of the world’s oil reserves. It has forged major oil deals with Sudan, Venezuela, Iraq and Kazakhstan. With these deals have come important military and security agreements. For instance, thousands of Chinese oil workers ... maintain security at facilities in Sudan. During Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s spring 2001 visit to Venezuela, he was greeted by that oil-producing nation’s leader, Hugo Chavez, with the declaration that the Chinese Maoist revolution was the source of his own social revolution. ... The Kazakh deals involve the construction of a massive pipeline across China from the huge Kazakh oil fields. China hopes to become a land bridge for future oil deliveries to Japan and South Korea, giving Beijing important leverage in its strategic goal to replace the United States as the major power in the Eastern Asian basin.”

All this means big headaches for the United States and its allies, say Asia specialists, and adds to the concerns of some in the security community about Hutchison Whampoa’s control of port facilities and shipping services along the world’s sea lines of communication, or SLOCs.

But the company also is a leader in the SLOC’s electronic equivalents in the cyberworld. Hutchison Whampoa has invested heavily in telecom companies around the world since the late 1980s, and has arranged satellite deals between the Hughes Corp. and a Chinese firm tied to the PLA. Hutchison Whampoa’s recent purchase of a 61 percent stake in the troubled fiber-optic giant Global Crossing also has raised national-security concerns, as the company operates much of the hardware on which U.S. telecommunications, including military and intelligence channels, operate. That deal, at least, is under review.

—Insight magazine, November 26-December 9, 2002, p. 30f. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2002 News World Communication. All rights reserved.

Brazil, Cuba and China
By Constantine Menges

Today [Dec. 10, 2002] President George W. Bush is to meet with President-elect Luis Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who will take office on Jan. 1, 2003. There will be cordial statements on both sides, photographs of friendly handshakes, and most observers will continue to believe Mr. Lula da Silva—despite his more than 20 years of self professed admiration for Fidel Castro—will govern as he posed during the election campaign, when he left behind his radicalism and projected the image of a pragmatic reformist.

That could happen, and many in the U.S. State Department seem to be making this hopeful assumption. But the more likely future is one on which the Lula da Silva government combines a strong interest in promoting Brazilian exports and maintaining good relations with U.S. business, foreign investors and international financial organizations with a parallel series of actions, both visible and hidden, that are intended to help pro-Castro anti-U.S. radicals take power in other neighboring countries such as Columbia—racked for decades by communist guerilla attacks.

A new pro-Castro coalition in the Western Hemisphere has been established including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Presidents-elects Lula da Silva in Brazil and Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador. As Mr. Chavez has done since 1999, these would pursue a parallel strategy of normal business and financial relations with the U.S. while they would also help other pro-Castro radicals take power and be allied with hostile state sponsors of terror such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Libya on many issues. They are also likely to establish close political-strategic, economic and perhaps military relations with Communist China, as Cuba and Mr. Chavez have done.

The pragmatic aspect of Mr. Lula da Silva’s policy is evident in a statement by two of his associates after the election that his government wants to “double exports to the United States within four years and triple them within eight,” while at the same time strengthening MERCOSUR, the trade agreement amount Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. In an interview with Lally Weymouth, Mr. Lula da Silva said his policy will be to “reach out to the poorest sectors of our population,” while at the same time being “aware of our dependence on foreign capital.” He also said, “We will fulfill all the contracts that the Brazilian government has signed”—meaning his administration does not intend to default on Brazil’s very large $260 billion public deficit.

But an important indicator of the radical dimensions of the future plans of “Lula” is that since 1990 he has convened an annual meeting called the “Forum of Sao Paulo” that has

included all the communist and radical political parties and armed communist terrorist organizations of Latin America together with terrorists groups from Europe (IRA, ETA) and the Middle East (PFLP GC), as well as participants from Iraq, Libya, Cuba and other state sponsors of terrorism. These meetings are direct successors to the “Tricontinental Congress” established by Mr. Castro in 1966 to help terrorist organizations from Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East better coordinate their attacks on the U.S. and its allies.

In December 2001, Lula da Silva’s group met in Havana, Cuba, and this December it met in Guatemala, again joined by delegates from Cuba, Iraq, Libya and North Korea. As an indicator of its political views, this year’s working paper for the Dec. 2-4, 2002, meeting included the following statements: “NATO troops perpetrated genocide in Kosovo, U.S. and British forces massacred the population of Afghanistan…[prisoners held by the U.S. in Guantanamo, Cuba] are submitted to punishment and tortures…with full U.S. support, the government of Israel continues to carry out a systematic policy of murdering Palestinians.”

This year’s concluding statement committed the participants to oppose the U.S.-supported Plan Columbia, to oppose the U.S.-supported Free Trade Area of the Americas, to oppose privatization, and said President George Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel are an “axis of evil.” Similar views have been expressed by Lula’s international group since 1990 and we can expect the Lula government to adopt many of these positions as it consolidates power.

Further negative indicators about Lula’s future foreign policy include the fact that in March, 2002 his political party formally established a committee in solidarity with the communist guerillas of Colombia, that in 2001 the radical wing of Lula’s movement expressed its full solidarity with Yasser Arafat and the PLO, and that in 1999 his Workers’ Party established a party-to-party “strategic partnership” with the Communist Party of China.

When harassment by Chinese aircraft caused a U.S. surveillance plane to make an emergency landing in April, 2002, Mr. Lula da Silva said his party “supports the just position of the Chinese government” against the U.S. When in 2001 U.S. and British aircraft used force against Iraq in support of U.N. Security council resolutions, Lula’s Worker’s Party reacted by stating it was opposed “to the armed aggression and …military action…violating all international norms.” It went on to condemn the Bush administration for “its unilateral and hegemonic vocation, placing at risk worldwide security.”

Also of concern is the fact that in the past, Mr. Lula da Silva had said Brazil should resume developing nuclear

weapons—a program that existed from 1965-1994 and successfully designed a 30-kiloton atomic bomb—and should have nuclear weapons because it is a great power.

During the presidential campaign, Lula said his foreign policy would be one of “love and peace.” His first recent hint that he still wanted Brazil to have nuclear weapons was given in a Sept. 13, 2002 speech to a group of military officers. Lula questioned whether Brazil should continue to abide by the treaty limiting its right to have nuclear weapons because “if someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?” Reportedly, the speech received “rapturous applause” from the Brazilian officers. This speech followed by weeks the decision of the International Monetary Fund to grant Brazil $30 billion to help meet its financial needs.

China has for some years been seeking to cultivate political and military leaders in Latin America and currently has two joint reconnaissance satellites with Brazil while the Brazilian aerospace company, Embraer, the world’s fourth-largest, has signed a contract to build hundreds of commercial aircraft in China. Before the presidential election campaign, Lula had often called for closer relations with China. In June 2002, Aloizio Merchant, a leading member of the Worker’s Party who may become Brazil’s foreign minister said publicly that “alliances with China, Russia…are important to give force to a possible anti-American coalition.”

It is quite probable that China will expand its economic ties with Brazil and welcome Mr. Lula da Silva’s intention to have Brazil reduce the influence of the United States in Latin America by having broader and more extensive relations with China. To counterbalance the United States, China might at some point help the Lula government with its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile ambitions, just as China secretly gave such help to Pakistan in order to counterbalance India.

These negative developments are possible, but not inevitable. At present, all the democratic groups in Venezuela are courageously seeking the removal of the pro-Castro Mr. Chavez because of his unconstitutional actions in 1999 and since. If the democratic governments and citizens of the Western Hemisphere, including the Bush administration, act with realism and skill, it may be possible to reduce the harmful consequences of Mr. Lula da Silva’s past decades of left-radicalism and work with Brazil to help all its citizens, including the poor, have a brighter future.

—The Washington Times, December 10, 2002, p. A15

Islam and The Sword

Review of The Sword of the Prophet: Islam: History, Theology, Impact on the World
by Srdja Trifkovic, Boston: Regina Orthodox Press; 332 pp., $19.95

Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that their religion has always been innocuous. What Srdja Trifkovic argues in The Sword of the Prophet, however, is that the raw stuff from which Islam is made is particularly dangerous and unpromising, that the bellicose tradition is worse than admitted by the influential Islamic Studies lobby, that the present threat from Islam is alarming, and that the future demands the vigilance of non-Muslims. In doing so, he challenges the opinion that all religions are somehow equally valid (or invalid). All theocracy, equipped with a scriptural license for violence, is dangerous, and Islam is—and has been, almost continuously—more theocratic than rival religions. The men and women born into this religion may deserve our sympathy, but they are not aided by a blanket respect for Islam. The assumption that there is no such thing as false religion is not a concession that Muslims would make.

Trifkovic will be accused of missing the essential point, which is that Muslim majorities do not want what the violent minorities want, that peaceful integration has a track record and a future, and that our immediate requirement is to divest ourselves of Christian prejudice. This is, at best, evasive. Christian prejudice is little more than a trace element among Westerners. The record of peaceful coexistence is too short, and it is outweighed by the record of human catastrophe where Islam and other religions have come together. Moreover, it is in the nature of religion that it is the minorities who take it seriously, and it is in the nature of serious people that they can be effective in leading ordinary people. Still, many Westerners will dismiss Trifkovic’s account of Islam simply because they refuse to take religion seriously.

Today, religion offers identity in a world whose leading powers have turned against nationality. Preaching, the example of personal sacrifice, and the threat of violence—by Muslims against Muslims—can impose new disciplines. Muslim communities, even when they are quiet, remain vulnerable to well-funded proselytizing that draws on sacred ideals. The myth—and, indeed, the history— of religious expansion and conquest achieved as a militant response to persecution is unalterably fixed in the standard narrative of Islam.

Islam is a religion born in battle and formed by war. Its adherents nourish their faith and their imagination with this story and derive a sense of manifest destiny from it. The faithful have no notion of the damage Islamic conquest did to Christian civilization, which, thanks in part to the impact of Islam, became Latin, not Greek, at the center. The destruction of the Byzantine Empire was a catastrophic loss that deprived many young nations of their patrimony and potential. By contrast, the pro-Islamic account of Islamic expansion—the advance of toleration at the expense of a Christian world that was probably unwilling to resist—is an amusing exercise in Islamo-Whiggery. An explosive mixture of poverty, lust for plunder, and religious excitement drove Islamic expansion—and that combination is by no means extinct. This force tore into the vital organs of three civilizations. Islamic arrangements followed a very secular logic: Islam was legally supreme because the Arab elite needed social advantages and a special solidarity, and it was tolerant because the conquering elite could not have retained power without toleration. Jerusalem was worth a Mass. Both the tolerance and the intolerance of the Islamic recipe served the goals of power and expansion.

Perhaps Islamic civilization flourished best when Islam was a minority religion and slaves were cultured, cheap, and diverse. After centuries of vigor, Islamic civilization declined. Many Western commentators argue that the religion poisoned its own civilization, even though this leaves open the question of why it was compatible with high culture and wealth-making at first. There could, theoretically, have been a different kind of Islamic polity than the ones that became moribund, but they all did become moribund. The Ottoman Empire grabbed a great deal of territory and power but, subsequently, decayed so deeply that the Christian nations whom it oppressed developed an overpowering urge to rid themselves of Islamic civilization as well as of Ottoman political tutelage.

Islam has played a role in legitimating the imperialism of Islamic states and their resistance to the imperialism of the West. Even where resistance has failed, Islam has still offered shape and identity to anti-imperialism. The cry of jihad is common; the real thing, however, is not. Anticolonialism after 1945 gave every appearance of owing more to secular nationalism than to religion, although their uneasy combination was inevitable. The British were perhaps being unduly cautious when they refused to intervene in 1924 to protect Mecca and Medina from Saudi war bands seizing the holy places in the name of Wahabi puritanism. To a secular-minded great power, the newly extended Saudi Arabian kingdom must have seemed an event of local importance. But the Wahabi ulema, and the al Saud, had been a danger to the peace and safety of the entire region since 1801, when they sacked the Shiite city of Kerbala and desecrated its shrine. No other Islamic regime has been as menacing and ambitious. However, not until after 1945, when the American oil companies paid for fabulous opportunities with huge royalties and favorable publicity, did the Saudis have good connections and serious financial resources to support them; and not until Presidents Kennedy and Nasser decided that they were, on balance, against each other did America really get behind the Saudis.

The West ended up surrendering to OPEC in 1973—a surrender partly engineered by American diplomacy—and so provided Saudi Arabia with immense sums to invest in Wahabi proselytism and Islamic prestige. America was backing Islam, in its most unattractive variant, because it was convenient when the strategic problem seemed to be communism. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran made this support seem even more urgent, and the real jihad in Afghanistan led to military and organizational backing by the United States. Washington’s patronage of Wahabi fanaticism tells us a great deal not just about Western raison d’etat but about the docility of the mainstream press and TV in modern society. Europe paid for OPEC oil with a political discretion—at times a servility—that ultimately meant funding Saudi Arabia’s palaces, airports, fountains, conspicuous consumption, and very costly weapons.

It might be argued that the problem of Islamic radicalism does not stem from Islam itself but merely reflects the nature of great powers and the opportunism of fanatics. But Islam has outgrown its origins and cannot be answered if we are too polite or frightened to see ideology in religion. Considering the attack on the Soviet Union, the challenge to the United States, and the continuing attacks on Russia, China, and India, we must conclude that Islamic jihad poses a significant threat to the world. Islam is much closer to world dominance than ever before. The Muslim world is experiencing a resurgence of Islamic proselytism, at a time when it is still in a vulnerable and suggestible state: After generations of marginality, Islamic agitation has become the central story in many countries. The work of Islamic charities is very important: The mosques in the West do not build themselves. What has been done in Algeria and Egypt, as well as in America and England, will now be difficult to undo.

Among the world’s great powers, there are no Christian states anymore and no instinctively secular states except China. The Western powers are confused about religion and toleration; they are trapped by formulas and traditions they cannot manipulate with the confidence of true belief. But any state with Muslim citizens must assert the right to intervene in religion, to be a filter against theocratic fanaticism and to be the sponsor of moderation. The Chinese may go too far in this respect, but they do understand the terrific price of religious warfare, and they are rightly vigilant.

The problem of Islam in the West raises questions that we mostly contrive to leave undecided: whether, for example, our public and educational values are strictly secular; what to think and do about blasphemy; whether the pulpit can be censored; and what is the legitimate power of foreign money. The presence of Islam forces us to resolve these conflicts. We are perfectly capable of harassing Muslims at the level of crude policing while being overly tolerant of religious fanaticism. There is no Western consensus—and there is certainly no wise magistracy—for settling disputes that politicians will flee and governments will refuse to adjudicate.

Western Christians and secularists form two sects

subservient to the dominant post-Christian religion. Intermittent belief in an enigmatic deity is an optional part of this faith, which includes some obligatory respect for selected aspects of Christianity, expressed by upbeat assessments of democracy, truth, beauty, openness, and the hatred of cruelty. This post-Christianity’s antitraditional origins, its unfinished status, its intuitions, and its evangelical hunger for new problems make it, in principle, a radical religion. It has even penetrated Christian denominations with its infectious humanism. And its proselytizers would not readily concede that they could fail with “ordinary Muslims,” given half a chance. The liberal, post-Christian cry has already gone up: Islamophobia is the new McCarthyism. The last thing that the modern-minded latitudinarian wishes to do is to pick a fight with that which he believes should be tamed and embraced.

Post-Christianity and Islam share roughly the same theological view of Christ. The attraction of Islam for ideological post-Christians is that its existence implies, more strongly than any argument, that traditional Christianity is unnecessary even if you wish to be monotheistic, pious, and mindful of a judgment day. The very existence of a plausible religious rival to the universality of the Church supplies a subversive argument of enduring force, which, though very old, is still being absorbed into the bloodstream of the West as Western parochialism and particularism are dismantled.

The post-Christian faith cherishes the notion of a friendly symbiosis with Islamic communities. But this desire for accommodation, and the difficulties that go with it, will lead to moral confusion absent an educated awareness of Islam’s bag of tricks. In particular, it should be clearly understood that Islam does not have the same distinction between religion and society as does the West (if, indeed, it has one at all), so the offer to tolerate Islam will be understood by some Muslims as going beyond what Westerners conventionally regard as “tolerating” religion. While it is still not controversial to say so, we must insist that sharia cannot be available in Western societies as a body of law applicable to Muslim citizens, let alone non-Muslims.

The most striking claim in The Sword of the Prophet is that the American elite’s extreme version of post-Christian religion is bent more aggressively against historic Christianity than any other religion in the West and could even enter into a partnership with Islam. A cultural process of this sort may already be at work. To laugh at the idea is to forget our recent history: a U.S.-directed jihad in Afghanistan; the covert U.S. alliance with Islamic revolutionaries in Bosnia; and U.S. support for the Taliban until 1998. The motives for these interventions have been ostensibly secular, but there was something excessive and intense behind them. Even if the motives of Islamic revolutionaries are not exclusively religious, can we say that the moral instinct of Washington globalists is exclusively secular? It is legitimate to wonder whether some

premonition of a new religiosity affected the don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts rectitude of the crusaders who dragged NATO to war in Kosovo.

One final point: Those Muslims who are outraged that the violent West should accuse the Islamic Other of intrinsic violence have a point. The Islamic world has reason to be worried by the West’s post-Cold War lurch toward high-tech crusades. Once a fatwa-opinion is issued in Washington, the media effervesce with moral fervor and military relish, the satellites and academics adjust their orbits and careers, and the bombs start to fall. This is the modern West riding the high horse of its supremacy. It is precisely because crusading globalism is likely to become more violent and better armed than ever, spurred by the attack on New York, that it is urgent to think defensively about Islam.

Of course, our alternative is to act more modestly in the world. But we are told that this would be immoral, that crime must be punished anytime and anywhere, so that no tyrant may sleep soundly in his bed for fear of the advancing banners of the New World Order, in which smart bombs and smart lawyers ring in the Reign of Justice. The new gospel destroys the old law: Let the nations tremble before the New Truth and its missiles! Global fundamentalism, lightly salted with American self-interest, is capable of being both sinister and religious.

Some may say, “But this is not Christianity!” It is more true to say so than it is to say, in the parallel case, “But this is not Islam!” But we are dealing not with Christianity but with what Christian civilization has become. The pacesetters in the West have expressed their post-Christian religion by casting off wisdom and any sense of geographic limits in their renewed willingness to make the world a better place at gunpoint. Islamic revolutionaries have done the same. The refusal to be prudent in dealing with a dangerous religion has condemned Western soldiers to wage strange wars far from their homelands and has all but forced us to tolerate global ambitions, whether we want them or not.

This is the modern jihad, the Western jihad, which has formed and swollen since 1989, and it has its own growing corps of political janissaries, military-industrial ghazis, and fundamentalist jurisconsults. If President Bush cannot achieve the goals he has set, the gaudy globalists will reappear—during his presidency or afterward—as the men and women with solutions. The recommendation of Srdja Trifkovic’s book—a severe view of Islamic militancy and of Islam’s political agenda—does not give Westerners any license to subscribe to the myth of their own perpetual innocence.

—Chronicles Magazine, December 4, 200