Extremism begets Extremism

There is a lot of looking back to the 1930s these days, and with good reason. The 1930s were a bleak time that faced democracies with stark choices. Nobody in the democracies wanted war, but war, in the end, turned out to be the only option. In retrospect, it's clear that had the democracies acted sooner, the war would have been far less destructive than World War II proved to be.

In the 1930s, democracies were afraid to fight. The 1914-18 Great War had been unimaginably horrible; so much destruction for so little gain. Anything, anything to avoid another war seemed worth trying. The democracies’ unwillingness to fight fed Hitler’s boldness, and it seemed the more they cowered in the face of Germany’s rising power, the more Hitler was determined to make war.

Stalin’s terror regime in the Soviet Union re-enforced Hitler’s drive toward aggression. While Hitler had little use for the weak democracies, Stalin employed force in a way Hitler understood. The two tyrants fed off each other. And by proxy, they clashed in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, trying out and learning new warmaking ways. As the terror regimes in Moscow and Berlin ground inevitably toward war, the democracies seemed ever weaker and more insignificant. Of course, by June 1940, democracies were wiped from the European continent, while Germany and the Soviet Union consumed every square kilometer of land that lay between them.

Today, extremists threaten to dictate events in what Tony Blair has called “an arc of extremism” running from Pakistan to Gaza. The Sunni extremist forces linked to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda are in Iraq and are resurgent in Afghanistan. Pakistan has lost control of its border regions to local tribes linked to al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s combustible combination of millions of militant, unemployed youth angry in a nuclear armed country threaten democracies as the 1930s Soviet Union never did. Osama wants the West out of the Middle East, and Israel destroyed.

As Hitler fed off Stalin, Iran’s Ahmadinejad has learned from the successes of the Sunni al-Qaeda. To Ahmadinejad, (see earlier post) the rightful world order would have the Shiites, led by Iran, strong in Iraq, and gaining power in Lebanon, be the force that terminates Israel’s existence and drives the U.S. Great Satan from the Middle East. The rivalry, so visible in the Iraq proxy war between Sunnis and Shiites, is also focused on Israel, where the Sunni Hamas and the Shiite Hizbullah pinch from two sides to squeeze out any democratic Palestinians.

When extremists make war, the grass of democracy gets trampled.