Christian Realism: An American Strategy for our War with Saudi Arabia and the Salafists

[first published June 30, 2016 with a revision Jan 5, 2017]



by Dr. David Pence

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The purpose of our Thursday Christian Realism entries has been to apply the religious historical thinking of Christopher Dawson to American foreign policy. He understood that nations grow out of cultures, and cultures develop within religions.

We have argued here and in the press that the Ivy League careerists and power couples who fill our State Department and foreign policy think tanks have a blind spot in understanding the male communal forces of religion and nationalism which drive so much of human history.

We have defined our true enemy as those who hold the Salafist-jihadi ideology contending for the soul of  Sunni Islam. [Salafi means "ancestor," and the ideology is a movement among Sunnis to return to a purer fighting form of Islam]. This ideology is centered in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is responsible for more than 95 percent of terrorist acts against the US. We then argued that we would have to realign forces with Shiite states (Iran and Iraq), Orthodox Russia, Hindu India, Jewish Israel, and Confucian China to isolate and destroy this movement within Islam that threatens to dominate the Sunni world.

The US has mistaken our enemy largely because we have tried to fight this new religious war within the structure of our Cold War alliances which tied us to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The baby-boomer presidents have also mistaken their generational revolt against gender and nature as a new chapter in human history. They brought neither historical intelligence nor matured character to the world stage where they found themselves as actors. They learned how to win elections, but they never became statesmen. Bill Clinton (with Sec of State Albright), Bush (Condi Rice), and Obama (Hillary Clinton) were utterly out-maneuvered on the world stage of religions, nations, and armed men acting in history. No matter how many awards a Bush would give a Clinton, or compliments a Clinton would give a McCain -- these officials would never approach the historical maturation of Eisenhower and Dulles, Nixon and Kissinger, or Carter and Brzezinski. This has led to a debilitating incoherence and misdirection in foreign policy since the Cold War was won. It got much worse after the 9/11 attacks as the worldly-wise Saudis played our partisan careerists like so many banjos.

The recent Orlando massacre, the exit of Britain from the European Union, and the growing Congressional movement to reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia have buttressed our earlier arguments. We offer six goals as a guiding framework for American foreign policy. These goals are not listed in chronological order. The art of strategy, in fact, dictates that the first goal will be achieved most effectively only as the latter goals are realized more fully.

First: The United States should declare war on Saudi Arabia and seek Muslim allies who will replace the Wahhabi Salafists as the keepers of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. This should be in strategic conjunction with a warning to ISIS to evacuate their women and children before a final reckoning destroys their short-lived state.

As the great Lee Kuan Yew said:
"In killing the terrorists, you will only kill the worker bees. The queen bees are the preachers, who teach a deviant form of Islam in schools and Islamic centers, who capture and twist the minds of the young."

                                   

President Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah

Second: The United States should seek deep alliances with our old allies in World War Two. We battled them during the Cold War. We made peace with our enemies -- Germany and Japan -- after World War Two. It is time to make a real peace with those who shed so much blood as our allies in WWII, and then all too quickly became our enemies in the Cold War. This begins with Russia, China, and India. We should concede to those great civilizational nations hegemony in their own regions. This means we should consider leaving NATO, and oppose the military build-up in the Russian western border nations. We should grant China hegemony in the South China Sea and encourage the development of that region as "a platform of cooperation," not a minefield for confrontation. China has a historical claim to territorial deference paid for by 10 million war dead in WWII. This is being ignored in the name of Eurocentric international rules of the seas. We should strengthen ties with India and its 125 million English speakers. We must end our alliance with the jihadists and Taliban enablers of Pakistan. We should concentrate much more effort on reforming our own nation and relating to the Christian nations of the Americas.

Third: The Salafist Sunni movement of Saudi Arabia is a sworn enemy to Shiites, Christians, and Jews. We must take seriously whom they are killing. The bombing of Shiites in Yemen is religious persecution and none of our claims as Christians for religious liberty is believable as long as we allow that slaughter in one of the poorest countries in the world to continue. Our country’s leaders have been deceived, misdirected, and manipulated by the Saudis. Somehow we think as long as the killing is from high in the air, and we have no "boots on the ground," that our hands are less bloody. Congress doing its duty in a time of war can reverse this policy. There are many indications that the Obama administration is open to correcting this contradiction that has been at the center of our policy for so long. This problem cannot be reduced to a debate of  Democrats against Republicans. A few men from each party will begin to see and speak clearly. Strange alliances will emerge as duty comes forward and careerism finally takes a back seat. We must work to deepen our cooperation with the Shiite states of Iraq and Iran. We must join with Russia to help broker a peace between Israel and Iran. The Shia have been the major victims of the Salafist Sunni religious persecution. This cannot be trivialized as "sectarian violence" or shrugged off as a thousand-year theological disagreement. Lynching black people was not a mutual  breakdown in interracial communications. Labeling the genocidal actions of Salafist jihadists toward the Shia as sectarian violence has been a decades-long scam to obfuscate the source of terror. Just "another instance of the Iran Saudi proxy war" has been another cover especially used by the Saudis in their invasion and bombing campaign against the Houthi Shia of Yemen. The Russian annexation of a willing Crimea and the Chinese port building in the South China Sea cannot hold candles to the Saudis' naked murderous aggression against Yemen’s Shiites. But, apparently, when Saudis cross national boundaries to employ high-tech warfare against religious enemies, there will be no outraged coalition organizing sanctions to protest the invasion. The Salafist/Saudi goal of annihilating Shia Muslims is a fundamental organizing principle of the terrorists. This stark fact necessitates a radical change in our alliances in the Mideast to defeat this demonic scourge.

The site of a car-bomb attack on Shiites in Yemen

Fourth: The alliances we must forge will be as religious men acting through nation states.  This includes an opening to India as an ally of Afghanistan in the battle against Salafist jihadists often based in Pakistan. Our NATO alliance has implicated us in the bombing of Christian Belgrade and the dismemberment of Libya. We must break free from the entangling relations of the Cold War. The nation-state is the fundamental actor in international relations. At the same time, as a Christian nation, we must make special efforts to align with Christian nations (from our South American Catholic neighbors to the Orthodox Russians). We must put forth the Christian goal for humanity as a fraternity of nations expressing the brotherhood of men under God. We must directly offer this as a more realistic vision than the Darwinian paradigm of perpetual war of all against all. We must not allow the Darwinian vision of Hitler to triumph as so called "realism.”
Our alliance with Israel must be much less covert and shaped by our new definition of the enemy to be engaged. This begins by accepting the territorial integrity of Israel as one nation. We must acknowledge the military irresponsibility of leaving Israel with geographically indefensible borders. The two state solution was dead long ago and impairs the clear thinking needed to make real progress. At the same time we must publicly acknowledge and criticize the dangerous alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia. We must attempt to broker a peace between Iran and Israel. One of the great sources of confusion in American foreign policy has been the de facto alliance of the Saudi royal family and Israel against Iran and all other manifestations of Shia Islam in the Mideast. A large faction in Israel sees Iran as the chief enemy and ISIS almost a welcome distraction and co belligerent against the Shia governments.  This is diametrically opposed to the US position.
We must learn geography and religion to understand the limits and providential design of territorial nations and religious communities. The states that are in a fundamental boundary flux are Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. What is their Ummah [an Arab word for community deeper and broader than nations]?  Is there an Arab nation? Is there a Greater Syria? Can there be an extensive new Palestine east of the Jordan? Who should govern the Holy Cities? Will the Shiite people of the Eastern Province and Bahrain be free to rule themselves and their resources? What is the role of the  Hashemites in reconfiguring religious and national loyalties? We know these questions cannot be answered until the demonic Salafist regime that is the queen bee for the jihadist hive is removed. Only then will these matters of religious authority and nation states be resolved by Muslims seeking to do God’s will.

Fifth: Our own nation must repent and turn our hearts back to God. We must culturally put an end to the disastrous baby-boomer project of drugs, sexual confusion, and libertine atheism in the name of feminism and personal autonomy. Our fight against the Salafist jihadists from Boko Haram to Al Shabaab to al Qaeda to ISIS cannot be won if we as a people turn away from God. What was true for Israel in the Bible is true for us: "Unless the Lord build the house, the workers toil in vain."

Atheism and gender ideology have turned American men away from our shared masculine duty and identities as protectors. The reason the nightclub in Orlando was picked for slaughter had nothing to do with hatred toward gays. Omar Mateen was very comfortable at the Pulse nightclub. He knew his soft target very well. He didn’t hate the place or the people. He enjoyed the anything goes atmosphere. There were no bikers or "let's roll" men there to thwart his murderous scheme. He did not go there because he was full of hate. He struck there because he had no fear.

If we are in a worldwide civilizational war and American liberty is represented by gay nightclubs for men and abortion clinics for women, we will lose the war. As Cardinal Sarah of Guinea has warned, these are death trips set against the protective culture of life. The African nations that sit on the dangerous and bloody Muslim Christian fault line must not be forced to choose between the twin demonic forces of Salafist ideology from the Saudis and gender ideology from the West.

We must end the failed experimentation of drug induced baby boomer sexual confusion. Our nation is in peril. We must return to our traditional sacral and sexual order. We must assume the protective relations of adult male groups in every city, town, and state to safeguard the nation. Our brotherhood knows neither class nor color line. We must actively socialize all young American men into an interracial brotherhood of local and national protection—that especially includes Muslims and new immigrants from Latin America. We cannot be strangers to each other—we are meant to be brothers. To love the nation is not to be racist. It is to give a territorial political form to male bonding which can make gangs, murderous brotherhoods, or brother citizens. American nationalism among men is not a form of racism, it is its antidote.

The shared male role of group protection is the fulfillment of the civil rights movement against racism and the answer to our urban strife between police officers and young black males. Black men were marching 50 years ago to be accepted as part of the civic community. The most important consequence of gaining local voting rights was to eventually become a county sheriff. They wanted to share in protection. The sexual confusion of gender ideology has stopped us from bringing young black men AS AMERICAN MEN into their natural role as fellow protectors in our schools and cities.

We must publicly assert a masculine Christian culture of fraternity, fatherhood  and protection so our enemies do not mistake us for a spiritually emasculated people. Nothing evokes the inner jihadist like an easy kill.

Sixth: Finally, how shall we speak of our enemy and how define our broad alliance? The Wahhabi/Saudi/ISIS alliance is of the Devil, and men of God must gather to stone him. The Salafist jihadi ideology is more diffuse than Saudi Arabia but that is its center. As long as the Salafists of Saudi Arabia  control the sites and practices of the pilgrimage, they will shape Islam. Christian nations must be the first to form this alliance of men who seek to do the Will of God. We must name  the Salafist-jihadi ideology for what it is and show above all that it will not be the winning force in religion or history. The Sunni nations and tribes will only join us when they know the Saudis will really lose their grip. The Salafists are not a radical form of Islam to be defeated by moderate Islam. No one should be moderate in his love of God. We are not fighting "radical Islam.” Islam means submission to the will of God. We must respect this religion(a set of practices binding men in obligation to God) while condemning the demonic death cult  of ISIS and the Wahhabis.  The Wahhabi/Saudi Salafists are a movement of Satan set against the will of God to elevate the prestige of certain men. All those who choose to follow God’s will are brothers in arms united to honor the name of God and to protect women and children by ridding the earth and Saudi Arabia of this parasitic death cult. Christian nations and Muslim nations are not fighting an Islam that is too religious. We are fighting a movement of Satan that has drunk too much human blood and thirsts for more.      

"It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible that this thinking -- and I am not saying the religion -- I am saying this thinking.
"This is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world! Does this mean that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants -- that is 7 billion -- so that they themselves may live? Impossible!" 

― President el-Sisi of Egypt, calling for a religious revolution in Islam (Jan 2015)