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Spengler adopts Separationism
In a long article at First Things (which I’m told is too long), David Goldman, a.k.a. Spengler, writes:
Nearly two hundred thousand Americans, military and civilian personnel, were exposed to Iraqi terrorist organizations that routinely employed suicide bombings in order to kill Americans and their supporters. Some of these organizations were supported by Iran, which employed waves of children as human minesweepers in its war with Iraq. These atrocities were motivated by a religion that permits a peaceful interpretation, but cannot refute the cruelest and most violent interpretation. America simply is in no position to expose large numbers of its military and civilian personnel to this sort of horror. Instead we should attempt to quarantine such cultures and expose our own people to them as little as possible. In other words, we should intervene in the Islamic world where urgent American security interests are at stake, but to the minimum extent possible, and with no commitment to determine the civil outcome. We must leave the Muslim world to its own destiny rather than to attempt to engineer a happy ending. And unless Western leaders, religious as well as civic, help their followers to understand the Islamic manifestation of radical evil, the West will continue to be vulnerable.An excellent statement, both in its own right, and because it echoes the approach I’ve been consistently arguing for since 2004 or late 2003 (originally adopted from Angelo Codevilla, who made the argument once but never returned to it), of destroying a threatening regime (which includes killing the top people in that regime), and then leaving that country, with a promise to do the same or worse if they repeat the same. As I’ve said many times, it would be infinitely less costly to invade a troublesome Muslim country for three weeks once every five or ten years, than occupy it forever. Given Goldman’s place in the conservative universe as an editor at First Things, his statement also represents a noteworthy advance for the larger civilizationist strategy toward Islam which I presented at length in my 2005 article, “The Search for Moderate Islam.” (part one; part two; and last page of part two where I lay out my strategy), and which I later dubbed Separationism. Here are articles in which I described the separationist strategy as one of quarantining the Islamic world from the rest of the world. This is the first time I’ve seen Spengler/Goldman propose an actual strategy vis a vis Islam. Of course Spengler says nothing about reducing, stopping, or reversing Islamic immigration into the West. Also, many readers have asked me if I’m going to write about the coming out of Spengler as David Goldman. I drafted something about that weeks ago, but through a gremlin in my computer, I lost it. So I have to recreate it, but I intend to do so.
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