A Clash in the Middle

You just have to look at Africa to understand where the next major chapter of colliding civilizations – Islam vs Christianity – is developing. For about four hundred plus years, starting in 622 during the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic world exploded, conquering lands in the Middle East and around and north of the Mediterranean with very little opposition. They later moved east across India and Central Asia. In 1071, after the Islamic world effectively cut off Christian access to Jerusalem, Christian rage ignited the Crusades. A series of on and off Crusades from 1095 through 1291 actually consumed about 119 years of active conflict during that period.

After the heyday of Islamic culture – where Muslims invented modern mathematics (try and multiply Roman numerals!), science and geography while preserving the great Greco-Roman books that were being burned as heathen texts by the Western world – the once-powerful Ottoman and Mughal Empires began to implode in the 18^th century. The West attacked, conquered and oppressed the weakened Islamic state and Christian missionaries spread the words of Jesus Christ all over the world.

The powerful Mughals were then shoved out of the Subcontinent. Even as the Ottomans held titular control of vast lands around the Mediterranean, European powers actually controlled most of their empire. By the end of World War I, Islamic power was a distant memory as European power solidified their legal hold of these once great Islamic states, now reduced to colonies of their former Christian enemies.

In a post-World War II era, with the Europe sequentially relinquishing its colonies and with the new force of economic power – oil – rising rapidly, the Islamic world was now driven to correct the humiliation that had defined their lives for most of recent history. The “rag-heads and camel jockeys,” angry, intolerant and anxious to recapture lost power and dignity resurrected their assault on the Judeo-Christian west.

Inflamed by the creation of Israel – seemingly at their expense – and feeling betrayed by the failed perception of economic success that was part of buying into the Western concept of modernity (poverty did not end), dormant Islamic fundamentalism woke up with a vengeance. There were several paths that Islamic anger could have taken, from uniting with impoverished former Western colonies (Christian or not) based on correcting “Western oppression” to embracing purely religious ambitions. Rather clearly, these new enraged Muslim groupings chose a most fundamental religious focus, anxious to purge anything Western from their lives, rejecting all religions except their own.

We have focused heavily on the Middle East. Palestine and Israel. The Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The rise of nuclear ambitions in Shiite Iran. Syria’s struggles. The failed U.S. efforts at creating pro-American states in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We have seen Islamic anger in the Subcontinent. Pakistan’s nuclear reality and the underlying sympathies for anti-American Taliban, even as Taliban forces attacked bastions in Pakistan itself.

But Africa, well, we have felt pangs of pain and guilt in places like Somalia and the Sudan. But after all, most Americans have a perception of an entire continent mired in poverty, disease, drought, brutal war lords, child soldiers, starvation and hopelessness – beyond salvation. Sure Nigeria has oil, but to most of us, it is home to nasty internet scams. What’s “Mali” and where is it on the map? It is precisely that map that merits another look. Christian missionaries and Western conquests inculcated Christianity throughout most of the Sub-Sahara… but the lands in the north were solidly Muslim states. And angry Muslims, with arms loosened from the stores of deposed regimes during the Arab Spring, began their efforts to eradicate the vestiges of Western culture and Christianity in a powerful march south.

Northern Nigerian Boko Haram terrorists have no problem blowing up churches and slitting the throats of Christians in their midst… or those to the south. Retaliation from Christians has only made the pot boil even more violently. Terrorist cells are now able to move their efforts to whatever conflict enjoys the greatest possibility of success. Al Qaeda was eviscerated in the Middle East, but it found new roots in fomenting anti-Christian violence in the naïve African republics, often with weak militaries and corrupt regimes.

Mali – a land unknown to most in the West – is just one more battlefield in this clash of cultures. Islamists have taken the northern section of that nation and were having their way with the weakened government in the south. As French forces joined the fray to push these anti-Christian, anti-Western forces out of their new stranglehold, the Islamists retaliated in their attack on the natural gas facility in Algeria. Oil and gas continue to be the Achilles heel of Western economies, and Islamists know how to make the West squirm. They also know that populist sympathies in the northern African Islamic nations hold disdain for any semblance of “cooperation” with Western powers, viewed as kowtowing to the colonial past.

“But the militants’ advance south, which set off an appeal for the French military intervention by the Mali government, and the hostage-taking at a gas-producing complex in the Sahara to the north have caught the United States by surprise and prompted fresh White House vows to combat terrorism in the region.

“In taking on the militants, Western nations are confronting multinational bands that are often able to move with relative freedom across porous African borders. And those cells have many inviting targets to choose from: the region is rich with oil, gas, uranium and other international ventures that clearly represent Western interests and in some cases are poorly defended…

“Forging that strategy will be far from easy, given those involved. The Algerians have an able, if heavy handed, military, but have not been eager to cooperate extensively with the United States or their neighbors. Libya’s new government appears willing to cooperate but has little ability. Mali has little military ability and any enduring solution needs to be crafted with an eye to internal politics.

“The harsh political realities of operating in Africa were evident during the hostage crisis in Algeria. Calculating that Algeria’s cooperation will be needed for the campaign against the militants in Mali, both France and the United States were careful not to complain that the Algerians had mounted their hostage rescue operation without consultation, nor did they complain about the tactics.” New York Times, January 20^th. As Latin America finds its new power in the world, bolstered by its own vast natural resources, from agricultural bounty to newly-discovered oil fields, and as Asia has embraced an unprecedented manufacturing capacity, the West (including Israel and the United States) is left alone to battle Islamist rage, a global guerilla war that will not end anytime soon.

I’m Peter Dekom, and massive armies and exceptional first strike capacities that define our military seem strangely out of tune with the military necessities to counter small, highly mobile bands of desperate warriors, terrorists with no fear of losing their lives in a religious war.