A civilization of clashes

On Valentine's Day in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rushdie's offense was that he had written a novel, "The Satanic Verses." For this, a large bounty was offered in public for Rushdie's head. Iranian authorities had dispatched death squads to England, and though Rushdie was unscathed, his Norwegian publisher was not so fortunate. This threat was a high challenge to civilized people everywhere. And the fatwa has recently been reaffirmed. \nI relay this story to readers to illuminate the war in which we are currently (and now honorably) engaged, in that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan. This is not, in Samuel Huntington's phrase, "a clash of civilizations." It is, rather, a civilization of clashes. I am not alone in this view. The Bush administration's National Security Strategy submits there is a clash "inside a civilization, a battle for the future of the Muslim world."\nThis logic recently fell on Jon Stewart when he argued that America is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East in a wild and arrogant Churchillian scheme. Granted, this aired on Comedy Central, but I have heard the argument before in, well, more serious venues. \nThe guest on "The Daily Show" that night was the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, a self-described recovering Marxist. He retorted that, "We're not the ones wanting to redraw the map. The bin Ladenists are ... They don't think Iraq should exist. They don't recognize the borders of Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan or Palestine. They think it should all be part of a huge Islamic caliphate. We are saying that we will save Iraq and make it a federal democracy." \nThis civil war has been raging for some time within the Muslim world. It will rage for some time more. But it is not the case, pace Huntington, that Islam has "bloody borders." Instead, it is that within its borders there has been a violent confrontation. The clash is about apostates, but as Sept. 11, 2001, demonstrated, infidels will not be spared.\nYou might have noticed Iraq is where bin Ladenists and Baathists are desperate to dislodge us. They have deemed it necessary to blow Iraq apart lest it become a hindrance in raising an Ottoman-style caliphate. Under the garish rule of Saddam Hussein, it offered no such hindrance. \nAn overwhelming majority of Iraqis have joined the American war against Baathists and bin Ladenists in large numbers -- on our side. In the words of President Talibani, that battle has become "the world's fight for the security of humanity."\nWe need to stand with the forces of democracy and decency. This means standing against the forces of tyranny and terror, which we oppose at any rate. So forget Huntington's "clash of civilizations." That, as the old Russian saying goes, was long ago and not true anyway. In its place, let us accept the clash between the civilized and barbarian elements within this civilization. For too long, American foreign policy sought to remain neutral by separating these dueling sides. Now we must take one.