Art,
I do know of the famous Bernard Lewis and have read "WWW" as well as Islam and the West. I think Juan Cole did an outstanding review of WWW in particular, which you might be interested in reading here:
http://www.juancole.com/essays/revlew.htm A choice quote from the review:
A final question has to do with Europe, the explicit contrast for the Muslim Middle East in this book. Why does he think things "went right" in the West? I should have thought that the slaughter of World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, the 61 million butchered in World War II, the savage European repression of anticolonial movements in places like Vietnam and Algeria, and the hundreds of millions held hostage by the Cold War nuclear doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" - that all this might have raised at least a few eyebrows among emeriti historians looking for things that went wrong. It is true that the East Asian and European economies have flourished in the past 50 years under a Pax Americana, but this development hardly seems intrinsic to the West as a whole. Political and economic instability relentlessly stalked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and it was divided against itself in a bitter ideological battle for much of the second half. That is, even the Western European efflorescence of recent decades took place against the backdrop of a deadly Cold War that could have wiped us all out in an instant. In contrast to the massive death toll racked up by Europeans in the past century, Muslim powers in the second half of the twentieth century have probably killed only a little more than a million persons in war (mainly in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s). The Middle East has its problems and Muslims have theirs. Lewis's analytical views of what those problems are, why they have come about, and how to resolve them, would have been most welcome, given his vast erudition. Instead, he has chosen to play a different role in this book.
I have to admit, I lost a lot of respect for Lewis after he turned from historical scholarship to numerology-predicting August doom based on some odd religious calendar event from centures ago in Iran this past year.
That we quit at Mogadishu indicated to Arabs--and others--that patience and persistence would have us once again tuck tail and run. It's not that we need to do all that much killing, as it is to make it believable that we won't quit.
Again, this is hardly to do with a special feature of Arab culture. It's been well known for centuries that inflicting military defeats on a western power will cause it to withdraw troops from foreign countries. The problem with "showing that you won't quit" is that we're the ones with troops in their lands--hence, the impetus for wanting to expel those troops will be there and will continue to revive anti-American movements as long as the troops remain, and the people of the Arab lands don't want them.
The Israeli Palestinian conflict is a good model. Originally, communists were the ones opposed to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land-so they fought under the banner of a socialist program for Arabs. When they were destroyed in 1967, they were replaced shortly after by Islamists. And if the Islamists are destroyed, they will be replaced by something else. The source of the problem isn't the ideology-it's the conditions that will continue to produce ideology after ideology aimed at changing the conditions on the ground.
This circumlocution makes it easy to hide feelings, or to describe defeats as victories, etc., etc. This also allows a workup of emotion that--for example--led to the belief that 1967 wasn't really a loss, and that 1973 would succeed. The old saw about repeating an experiment but having a different result.
I have to disagree here. It's not the Arabic language that made them think the surprise attack in 1967 (a hugely successful surprise attack, I might add) was a victory, or that the loss in 1973 was a victory. It was the fact that the dictatorships in power during these times ran the presses-so they said whatever they wanted.
I do think it's good you brought up these models though, because what settled the wars between Egypt, Jordan, and Israel wasn't more warfare....the 73 war was undertaken just after the disastrous 67 defeat, and it's a virtual certainty that another war would've happened shortly after if Egypt had not been able to claim victory to its own population and then sign a peace treaty.
What settled that chain of wars wasn't force-a peace treaty finally did what even the astounding 1967 success could not do, and that was break the Arabs' will to fight. And on top of it, the stateless actors who do not benefit from treaties are indeed continuing to fight....no amount of force has yet led the Palestinians to quit fighting back, and it's unforeseeable that any amount short of genocide ever will.
