Riding the Weak Horse III
When watching events unfold, it is customary to assume they will continue to proceed in a linear manner. Thus, it was impossible for most observers of Operation Barbarossa, seeing the Red Army retreating in disarray before the onslaught of the Wehrmacht, to imagine that in only four years, positions would be reversed and the Soviets would be marching through the streets of Berlin.
Such action, however, invariably inspires a reaction, while the vagaries of a dynamic situation always triggers complicating factors that tend to come into play on the side of the reaction. This is one of the most fundamental limits on exercising power, which has hampered victorious conquerers from the Hittites to the Bush White Houses.
In my first column in this series, I wrote:
''The West turned back the forces of an expansionary Islam twice before. Those hoping to see it turned back a third time would be wise to examine precisely how it was accomplished on the previous occasions.''
The first great wave of Islamic expansion ranged from 632 to 732 A.D.. During this time, Arabia, Persia, northern Africa, northern India and Spain all came under the domination of various Islamic powers; a succession of defeats at Byzantium, Toulouse and Tours finally exhausted its momentum. The disintegration of the great caliphates into rival emirates and taifas began almost immediately, starting with Berber revolt of 740.
The second great wave came under the Ottoman Empire, which rather like the current situation, began with a migration into the West. The migration was transformed into an imperial sultanate by Osman Gazi in 1299 and the growth of his empire saw Islamic forces expand throughout the Christian lands of the Byzantines, until Mehmet II finally took the great city of Byzantium itself in 1453. Large parts of Eastern Europe fell to Turkish scimitars and without the navies of the European Powers, the Mediterranean would likely have become a Turkish lake.
As with the previous wave, however, the climax of this second expansion was marked by failures, first with an unsuccessful siege at Vienna, followed by the naval defeat at Lepanto 42 years later. By the time the second siege of Vienna was beaten back in 1683, imperial decline had already set in.
It is important to note that successful Western aggression against the Dar al-Islam always took place during a time of Islamic quiescence due to decadence or internecine struggles. The Crusades, the Reconquista and the Colonial era were all marked by powerful rivalries between various Muslim potentates, indeed, had the Holy Lands been entirely in possession of the Seljouk Turks instead of divided between the Seljouks, the Sultanate of Roum, the Egyptian Fatimites and the emirates of Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul, it is very unlikely that the First Crusade would have ever survived to set eyes on Jerusalem.
The strategists of the jihad understand that internal division is their greatest weakness, which is why they are at war with the national leaderships as well as the West. They have consciously offered a pan-Islamic vision, which in an ironic mirror of the secular EU's post-Christian pan-Europeanism, transcends the nation-state. It is this vision which has allowed the jihad to escape its colonial shackles and explains why a jihadist is at home in Indonesia or Somalia as he is in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Or in the nations of the West. And this is the great challenge facing Western leaders, for the jihad cleverly takes advantage of the secular tradition of religious neutrality to provide it with protective cover for its ongoing Kriechskrieg. A future attack on Iran will no more solve the problem than did the conquest of Iraq. Bin Laden outright welcomed Western attacks on Islamic nation-states, for he knew they would primarily harm his nationalist rivals and strengthen the globalist jihad, moreover, the jihad cannot possibly lose so long as Islam continues to grow in the West.
Christendom twice turned back jihad. There is good reason to doubt the post-Christian West can likewise do so, unless it is willing to abandon its commitment to religious neutrality and return to the colonial policy of fostering the inevitable intra-Islamic rivalries.