The Je Ne Sais Quoi Of Chaos

I don't remember the exact place, but I remember the conversation. I was standing with an Anglican priest in either Hastings or Brighton, England. It was April 1986. We were on the curb of a small street that ran at an odd angle through town. And I said to him that I was thinking of getting a PhD in Islamic studies instead of entering the ministry.

The priest looked at me quizzically.

"I can't imagine why you'd consider that," he said.

"My reasons are complex," I replied, "but the obvious reason is that I believe the single biggest threat the West faces is not from the Soviet Union, but from Islam. And not just the West's political structures, but also the Western church; both are under seige."

Odd that I recall my priest friend dismissing me as somewhat uncouth, even philistine. My interest in Islam, and my concerns about it, were insufficiently elegant for my interlocuter's impeccable tastes. The conversation ended awkwardly and abruptly.

***

Yesterday, while listening to The New Yorker writer George Packer on Public Radio's Here and Now, I heard a curious thing. Mr. Packer, author of the book, The Assassins' Gate, and a self-described liberal hawk who supported the Iraq War, posited for our rumination the following summary of a war he now criticizes. He shared that immediately after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq plunged into chaos, which no one predicted, nor for which anyone prepared. Mr. Packer (elsewhere) also described Iraq as anarchic (which is hard to jive with the demonstration of unimpeachable civility in last month's Iraqi elections).

My point in highlighting Mr. Packer's remarks has little to do with his abuse of the words "chaos" and "anarchy." I suppose I could point out that "chaos" is "complete disorder and confusion" and "anarchy" is the "disorder caused by a loss of authority." And I suppose I could also point out that the US military controlled every square inch of Iraq, albeit with difficulty in 5 percent of the country, in a few short days. Chaos would suggest riots and looting and protests everywhere unending, with troops scrambling to control air space, commerce, transportation, communication. But no such scrambling was necessary because so little of the country was indeed plunged into chaos.

But what is plunging into chaos is France. The riots there, not just the recent ones (there have been problems all year, with 29,000 cars burned since the beginning of the year [Theodore Dalrymple, Wall Street Journal, 11/7/05]). If Iraq is chaotic and anarchic, what is Clichy-Sous-Bois, festive and spirited? And if anyone continues to believe that Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans combined to reveal a despicable fact about the American Dream, France's own poverty issue is now plain to see, and clearly far worse than the American South's. In Vichy-Sous-Bois the Wall Street Journal reports that among 15 to 29-year-olds who are foreign born, that district's unemployment rate is 40%; while one analyst on Fox News last night said that parts of France have a 60% unemployment rate. Granted the welfare state of France has propped these folks up fairly well, though the projects in which the rioting folks reside are referred to as "chicken coops," a euphemism which surely does little to bolster French esprit de corps.

Yes, the violence in France is not "inherently Muslim", as the WSJ aptly reports. But there is a lot of Islamic rhetoric flying about the whole scene, and Muslim clerics are touting themselves as the only effective pacifiers in the 12-day-old struggle. But even those Muslim groups which seem to help soothe the rioters are viewed by some French officials as political opportunists seeking to prove their indispensibility to French governance. If all this is not chaos, chaos is at least knocking at the door.

I am in no way suggesting that France's struggle proves that America has no poverty problem, nor am I suggesting that France's nightly chaos proves that Iraq is going well. What I am saying is that when extreme language is used by critics such as Mr. Packer, there is no language left to describe similar, even more horrific struggles. And what I am also saying is that the West is under siege.

Look, this is my take on Western Europe's reluctance to support the Iraq War. Those countries such as France and Germany, which have large Muslim populations, at no point could support a military action in Iraq, or in any Muslim country, for that matter. Even much of the corruption in the Oil-For-Food scandal with the UN was perhaps partly motivated by a desire to appear less harsh (than America and Britain) on a Muslim country in an effort to appease the millions of Muslims living inside France. Just look at what happened in England and Spain when Islamic judgment was meted out for English and Spanish cooperation in the Iraq War. France was not ready, it is still not ready, to truly face the issue of accepting hostile immigrants who refuse and even oppose assimilation; who set up Muslim enclaves within France's borders. The struggle is hardly near reaching its zenith, I am afraid. And it is a struggle that is not confined to France.

***

I was wrong, partly, when I stood on the curb in England, my priest acquaintance rapidly losing interest in my conversation. The Church's biggest threat is not from Mohammed, though he is far less friend than foe. The Church's threat is from deep within itself as it attempts to appease the zeitgeist. And the West's political structures are also threatened from within; but perhaps from no less a threat than those westerners who find a political friend in Islamic militancy. For many of the critics of the West, Islam has provided a springboard and an excuse for their criticism. But it will be interesting to see whether, before it's too late, the West's critics recognize that their ally is more foe than friend.

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