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American political scientist Samuel Huntington had expressed apprehension way back in 1996 that the post-Cold War 21st Century would be marked by conflicts between Islam and the West, a throwback to the Crusades of the Middle Ages. This projection was also described in Western scholarship as the Jihad versus McWorld scenario, an eventuality that would test the resilience of the free world against the forces of fundamentalist insurgency. Still, it is rather disturbing that all such doomsday prophecies actually came true on 11 September 2001 with terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, New York and the Pentagon, Washington DC. Such mindless (?) acts of violence, however, provoke certain questions:
v Are the basic tenets of Islam incompatible with other world religions? We know that it is the religiously assigned duty of
Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims in order to transform the world into an acceptable and exclusivist dar-ul-Islam (World of Islam) from an unacceptable dar-ul-harb (World of Infidels). Islam as an organized world religion should come to terms with the realities of the new millennium, and should resocialize itself - so to say - to peacefully coexist with the emergent ethos of pluralist multi-cultural societies. The cultural worldview of Islam is more often than not informed by an authoritarian intolerance - this is not to suggest, however, that other world reli-gions are entirely above board in this respect. Still, it would appear that Islam's praxes have been more rigid and violent vis-à-vis Hinduism, for instance.
v Does violence beget violence? It obviously does but the United States at the present moment should also appreciate the exact nature of cross-border terrorism in flashpoints like Kashmir, India, and cooperate both with other NATO members as well as victims of insurgency in the Third World (like India) to combat militants who happen to obtain theological, military and financial support from Islam's thoroughly discredited thesis of the Jihad or Holy War. Americans should now realize the kind of trauma that Indian Hindus suffer daily in Jammu and Kashmir - this former valley of the gods has now been tragically reduced to a valley of fear and death by Muslim terrorists who have been trained and equipped by rogue states like Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Libya. President Clinton did not even condole for once the Mumbai Stock Exchange blast of 1993 that was masterminded by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence while Pakistan's army chief-turned-president had even had the insufferable audacity to describe Muslim insurgents in Kashmir as freedom fighters on his recent visit to India!
v Are human rights and democracy Eurocentric constructs? They are certainly not but the United States should stop acting as the moral guardian of a unipolar world, and should effectively build bridges underpinned by trust and a common agenda of human development to reach across to potential regional partners in the Third World like India, a country that has sustained its liberal democracy - unlike Pakistan - since Independence at 1947 despite poverty, malnutrition and hunger. But the US would now appear to be more inclined towards Pakistan to destroy Osama bin Laden and his Taliban cohorts in Afghanistan when Pakistan itself is one of the certified sponsors of terrorism in South Asia! This is most deplorable, and only serves to expose the short- sightedness of American foreign policy. The Bush Administration, however, may be actually commended for successfully diverting the attention of the archetypal WASP American and the co-opted African-American from serious lapses in internal security to a cowboy-type vendetta against a faceless enemy - this role is tailor-made for the Texan US President who has even invoked a Christian God in this final war against Evil, implying in the process that America is again poised to play God in the first major military engagement of the new millennium.
American policy-makers should realize that it is high time they begin dismantling the coun-try's strategy of cultural isolation and indifference. It is a disqueiting fact that an average urban student of the Third World knows more about the US than an average American undergraduate knows about other peoples and other cultures. Dissemination of multi-cultural knowledge should be facilitated both within and without the American academia, industry and social service sectors. Familiarity can also breed under-standing and help expand worldviews of an entire people. The logic of globalization more often than not has worked in an discrimi-nating manner, provoking even Western scholars to come up with insightful expressions like McDonaldization, Coca-Colonization and The US is us!
Moreover, the US should discontinue backing wrong horses and should realize that Less Developed Countries in the Third World may be impoverished but are not, however, bereft of dignity. Likeminded liberal democratic countries like India should be cultivated as reliable long-term allies on a level playing field by a series of confidence building measures. The US should also discontinue its interventionist policies that have generated such universal animosity and condemnation. Not for nothing has the expression Ugly American become well-known! Nobody has quite forgotten the acts committed by US Marines in Vietnam or the useless display of mind-boggling violence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Third World has not yet come to terms with the missile attack on a children's hospital in Baghdad during the Gulf War, to cite an example. Have the Americans themselves forgotten the faces of helpless women and chidren at Kosovo only a couple of years back? Americans should realize that the lives of non-Americans are also valuable in the context of the entire human civilization, and should also engage in soul-searching to understand the roots of this anti-US attitude around the world.
The clash of civilizations has only just about begun - it is now the obligation of a more conscientious American people to learn from their mistakes of the near and distant past to salvage the future of their free and sanitized and once-impregnable World. They should talk less about Human Rights and should work more to safeguard Human Rights as the self-appointed policeman of the world. Those who do not learn from history, demonstrably and most regrettably, are often condemned to repeat it.
Dr. Prasenjit Maiti, Lecturer in Political Science, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India.
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