This War Started 28 Years Ago

Watching the House debate, this has emerged as one of the leading GOP memes--that the current struggle against Islamic extremism started not on 9/11, not with the Cole bombing or the first WTC attack . . . but with the taking of the hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. If true, then the GOP needs to rethink a few things, like the greatness of Ronald Reagan--a president who actually sold missiles to our Iranian enemies. I don't want to go all Ann Coulter on y'all, but that could be described as treason--selling arms to our declared enemies?

Of course, this is a silly frame, and it's really silly as a frame for the Iraq clusterfuck. Whatever one can say of Saddam--bloodthirsty tyrant, megalomaniac, psycho, that he liked to play dress-up, etc.--he was not an Islamic extremist. So, even if we have been fighting Islamic extremism since 1979, the Iraq invasion was still a mistake.

But, strangely enough, I was reading the latest issue of the London Review of Books, in which James Meeks reviews Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower: Al-Qaida's Road to 9/11, and there's an interesting passage at the very end of the article. Here it is:

Although this is not what it explicitly sets out to do, Wright's book supports the conclusion that the direct struggle between revolutionary, counter-Enlightenment Islam and post-Enlightenment world began some time before the Cold War ended--specifically, in 1979. That was the year of Iran's revolution, in which, significantly, Islamic reolutionaries overcame not only the pro-American Shah but also their leftist counterparts; the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan to protect its leftist regime against Islamic rebels; and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, was seized by a band of Islamic fundamentalists. It took Saudi forces more than two weeks to oercome the four to five hundred insurgents involved, who had demanded that Saudi Arabia isolate itself culturally and politically from the West, remove the royal family, expel all Westerners and stop selling oil to the U.S. Before the battle ended, women among the insurgents shot the faces off their dead male comrades to stop them being recognised. It was the first fortnight of the new Islamic year, the year 1400, the dawn of Islam's 15th century. The rest of the world was still operating according to a different calendar.

I'd never read about that before. I don't buy that we've been at war with Islamic radicalism since 1979, but that passage about the shooting off of dead men's faces sticks with you, doesn't it?