Michel Gurfinkiel

Four American civilians were captured by a mob, tortured, lynched, cut up like pieces of meat, their amputated bodies dragged along the ground and then hung in public. As these infernal scenes unfolded, twelve year old children shouted "Hurrah for Islam." All this happened in Falllujah, an Arab Sunnite city in Iraq, a former stronghold of Saddam Hussein's regime. And it was an identical replay of another lynching three and a half years ago, this one of two Israelis gone astray in Ramallah at the beginning of the current Israeli-Arab war. These two people also were captured by a Palestinian Arab mob, tortured, lynched, disemboweled. Their executioners plunged their hands into their blood, in the name of Islam, and then, in a sign of victory, brandished their palms dripping with blood.

Paul Bremer, the chief of the allied administration in Iraq, has promised that the murders of Falujah will be avenged. Certainly, but how? When the Israeli army retook control of Ramallah in 2002, it did not destroy the city or engage in other forms of collective reprisal. It was content with searching for those directly responsible, who could be identified with certainty, and turning them over to a tribunal. Will Americans do the same? It's probable. I understand the Israeli response. I can understand the American response if it is of the same kind. But I ask myself questions. And I put them before you.

The first question: What does Islam do? What do Muslims do? What do the authorized and recognized representatives of this religion and this civilization do, in the Near East or elsewhere, and notably in Europe? Fallujah and Ramallah were commited in their name. Have they protested? Have they protested in a clear, loud, convincing and unambiguous manner? On Fallujah, a little, just enough not to make the U.S. too angry. As for Ramallah, virtually not at all, since Israel is merely Israel and the Jews are only Jews. Not one fatwa launched from the height of the mosques, not in 2001, not in 2004, against the lynchers, no curse, no excommunication, no call for contrition, no ceremony of repentance. Yes, certain Muslims, and even a few countries with large Muslim populations, including some religious leaders, have dissociated themselves from these acts, but not the most powerful and most listened-to scholars and princes of the Islamic world.

One can, one ought, to derive a simple conclusion from this. If all religions, all civilizations, including Islam, are worthy of respect, the current leaders of Islam do not conform to what one would expect from them, given the behavior of most other religious and spiritual leaders, or even simply the elementary universal rules of morality and the rights of man. Islam is going through a profound crisis, and it must be helped, in its own interest as well as that of other religions and civilizations, to reform itself, to help true Muslims, the children of Abraham, to take spiritual power over the hearts of their peoples and communities. Such a true Muslim, the iman of Rome, Abdul Hadi Palacci, two years ago put out a warning concerning French public opinion: "Your Islam will be in the image of the spiritual leaders you give it."
A second question: What to do, strategically, to confront barbarism? The first approach -- that of George Bush I after the first Iraq war, that of Yitzhak Rabin when he signed the Oslo accords, that of Europe -- was to abandon peripheral and secondary zones of this planet and to focus on the defense of that part of the world that not long ago was styled "civilized" and today one prefers to call "the developed world" or the "democratic world." This statecraft seemed sensible in Israel up to the launching of outright warfare against it, on September 28, 2000, in the United States, until September 11, 2001, and in Europe up until March 11, 2004. But since these three dates, such an illusion is no longer permitted: it is not enough to conclude a compromise with the barbarians and be satisfied to contain them, because they interpret this policy as an avowal of weakness and the beginning of capitulation and are encouraged to strike at the heart of their adversary, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in New York and Washington, in Madrid.

The enemy, whether Sunnite or Shi'ite, is barbarous in its goals and barbarous in its methods. It is prepared to do anything. If one does not annihilate it utterly at the outset, it gains in power. After Fallujah, President George W. Bush seemed to call for "the heads" of the guilty and Paul Bremer promised, publicly, "vengeance" that would be quick and without mercy. The Arab and Islamic world translated this as: Fallujah will be razed to the ground immediately. Of course the Americans were not ready to go that far. The result: the Americans and their allies are confronted today with a revolt, an intifada, no longer confined to one city but in a number of them. It's not only the Sunnis but the Shi'ites, and recently hostages, American and others, have been promised butchery and decapitation. It's high stakes poker, where the stakes keep getting higher. If the Americans do not take back control of the entirety of Iraq, very quickly and at any price, they might as well pack up.

In geopolitical terms, such a defeat will be worse than Vietnam. The Arab and Moslem states will fall like dominos to the side of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas, along with 70% of the world's oil. Pakistan will put its atomic bomb at the service of the Islamists. Iran will have its own bomb and rogue states will refurbish their non-conventional arsenals: the long range missiles and chemical and bacteriological weapons. Europe will go even further in its dodging, its capitulation, its collaboration. In Jerusalem, Israeli military chiefs Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Yaalon recently declared that the country must be prepared for a radical change in its politics of defense: the Jewish state, today besieged but able to count on American support, may become only a country besieged, to all intents and purposes deprived of outside support.

But is it possible to raze Fallujah, or at least to make an example of it? Wouldn't that be to combat barbarity by being barbarous oneself? The debate makes no sense if one does not understand how barbarism functions in Iraq and elsewhere, how the psychopaths come to ensure themselves of the obedience of an entire people.

Put yourself in the place of an average Iraqi family. Behind you are forty-five years of tyranny, of revolutions and coup d'etats, and finally the long ultra-violent, sadistic dictatorship of Saddam. Some of your relatives or your parents were murdered, tortured, raped, gassed by the henchmen of the tyrant. The village of your birth was destroyed. Or that of your cousin. Or that of your neighbor. You grew up in fear and lived in fear. True, for a year the Americans have governed. But they don't stop repeating that they will soon leave. And they do not take the trouble, in making themselves masters of the country, to hang Saddam and wipe out his supporters. Or to eliminate the extreme Shi'ites, who merit it. You make a rational calculation, a very simple one. If you oppose the Americans you risk nothing, because the Americans don't kill and in any case they are leaving soon. If you oppose Saddam's supporters, in the Sunni zone, or the mullahs, in the Shi'ite zone, you risk everything, you and your family, because the latter kill, torture and ravish and they remain in the country. You then support the barbarians against the Americans. The more they show proof of barbarity the more you support them. It is a matter of your life, your survival and that of your family.

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If you oppose the Americans you risk nothing, because the Americans don't kill and in any case they are leaving soon.

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This is the logic of fear, so simple, so inexorable, that the Americans must smash. By making it clear that they will remain a long time, a very long time, in Iraq. And that they will inflict on the barbarians, without delay, without mercy, without hesitation, a punishment in proportion to their crimes. Will George W. Bush be able to act? We are at the moment of truth. 

Michel Gurfinkiel is editor of the French newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles. (Translated from the French by Rael Jean Isaac and Donna Dalnekoff.)