Iran: The Debate We Should Be Having

Here the threat to American interests is clearer, but—barring a sudden influx of Muslim immigrants comparable to the numbers living now in France—it is limited. The attacks of 9/11 were the United States’ most harrowing experience with Salafi-Jihadist terrorism to date. This brush with extremism changed our politics, but it did not alter the fabric of American society in any fundamental way. Such distance is not possible in the Near East. The blood of Syria and Iraq’s 2,000 year old Christian communities testify to the scale of the changes this conflict promises to bring to the region. I tried to capture this scale in my last essay on this topic:

Think of these Salafi reformers as you do the first wave of Protestant reformers back in the 16th century. The comparison is apt not only because the goal of the Salafi-Jihadists is, like the original Protestants, to bring religious practice back to a pure and original form, or because the savagery displayed by many of the Protestant reformers was quite comparable to ISIS at its worst, but because this comparison gives you a sense of the stakes that are at play. This is a game where the shape of entire civilizations are on the table. The Salafi-Jihadists want to change the way billions of people worship, think, and live out their daily lives. ISIS’s success in the Near East gives us a clear picture of exactly what kind of society the Salafi-Jihadists envision for the Ummah.

I will not mince words:  humankind faces few catastrophes more terrible than allowing Salafi-Jihadist reformers to hijack Islamic civilization. Theirs is an ideology utterly hostile to human progress and prosperity, and their victory, if attained, will come at great human cost. The Protestants secured their Reformation with one of the most destructive wars of European history; there is little reason to think Salafi-Jihadist victories will be any less disastrous. Not every ‘great game’ of international power politics is played for civilization-level stakes. But that is exactly what is at stake here. [4]

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