Is there a solution to Middle East violence?

While most of the media and the politicians they talk to are focusing on the ‘either/or’ argument over engaging Iraq, Clifford May questions the equation in this National Review Online commentary.

Iraq is a mess. We have come to that conclusion because virtually every day we see innocent Iraqis slaughtered by suicide-bombers. Of all the possible responses, the most perverse may be this: To propose that Americans pull out of Iraq, abandoning innocent Iraqis to the tender mercies of those dispatching the terrorists.

Yet that is what many Americans now favor, perhaps because they have been persuaded that when Sunnis and Shites kill one another, Americans must be to blame. With apologies to Carly Simon: We’re so vain, we probably think this sectarian strife is about us.

An insurgency led by Saddam Hussein loyalists also inflames Iraq. If the insurgents succeed in driving Americans out of the country, Saddam will be pleased but perhaps not astonished. He has long maintained that the United States lacks the will to prevail against a determined enemy. Years ago, he told Americans: “Yours is a society that cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.”

Many Americans see no link between the conflict in Iraq and America’s war with the militant Islamist movement…

That reminded me of the good piece George Weigel put out last month on the meaning and threat of jihad. It was a followup to a discussion Weigel recently had on PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer with Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

I read an Associated Press story which began with this suggestive lead: “Al-Qaida in Iraq and its allies warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were ‘doomed’ and proclaimed that the holy war would continue until Islam dominates the world.” The Al-Qaida statement was, shall we say, robust: “You infidels and despots, we will continue our jihad and never stop until God [permits] us to chop your necks and raise the… banner of monotheism, when God’s rule is established governing all people and nations…We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, [and] then the only thing acceptable [will be] a conversion or the sword.”

In other words, surrender to jihadist Islam or be murdered. As for the time-line involved here, Iraqi Al-Qaida took the broad view: “…jihad continues and should never stop until doomsday, when [Islam] ends victorious.”

I have neither the capacity nor the desire to engage in an exegetical exercise with Mr. Awad about the Qur’an and what it enjoins on Muslim believers. That can be done by specialists. But, had time permitted, I would have said to Mr. Awad that, irrespective of his understanding of “jihad,” there are tens of thousands of jihadis throughout the world who take a drastically different view: who believe that the murder of innocents in the name of God can be pleasing to God — indeed can be commanded by God — if it advances the cause of Islam.

How well do we understand this? Have we become dangerously complacent? Some of the experts – some Muslims among them, and some formerly connected to terrorism — tie these thoughts together, and answer those questions, in the Fox News special Obsession: The Threat of Radical Islam. It airs again tonight at 9 pm EST. It’s a must-see.