Martin Amis is now past 50 and can no longer lay claim to the turf of anrgy young men. His novels, though still burning with intellect and full of illuminating insights, are hopelessly burdened down by the weight of their self-important prose. Well, Amis may have found a new calling in writing essays about current events. He does it rarely, but does it rather well.
This is a somewhat longish but very clear-eyed and somber article about Islam, the war in Iraq, the religious terrorists, and our West.
Choice sample:
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The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities.
First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room - did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Bernard Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in the trope of Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason", democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In
Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in
Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in
Palestine, victory for Hamas; in
Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the
Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.
Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd - a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Saddam Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq - or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.
Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond - in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.
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