Numbers still matter, of course. But strength of will can overcome hollow numbers. And nothing - nothing - gives men a greater strength of will than religious fanaticism.
We don’t want to hear it. Secular virtues were supposed to triumph. They didn’t, but we still can’t let go of our dream of a happy-face, godless world where nobody quarrels.
Our refusal to acknowledge the unifying - and terrifying - power of extremist religion has deep roots. As academics rejected and derided faith in the last century, even the Thirty Years’ War - the horrible climax of Europe’s wars of religion - was reinvented as a dynastic struggle, or a fight for hegemony, or a class struggle.
But the Thirty Years’ War was about faith. All the other factors were in play, but the core issue, from the Protestant coup in Prague in 1618 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was religious identity. And the atrocities committed on both sides make Iraq look like amateur hour: Wars of religion always demand blood sacrifice. (It was a compromise of bloody exhaustion that ended the Thirty Years War.)
Our problem is that, of those who rise in government, few have witnessed the power of revelation or caught a life-changing glimpse of the divine. They simply can’t imagine that others might be willing to die for all that mumbo-jumbo. Our convenience-store approach to faith leaves us numb to the passion of our enemies.
The true believer always beats the feckless attendee. The best you can hope for is that the extremist will eventually defeat himself.
And that does leave us some hope: Fanatics inevitably over-reach, as al Qaeda’s Islamo-fascists have done in Iraq, alienating those who once saw them as allies. But the road to self-destruction can be a long one: The people of Iran want change, but the fanatics have the guns. And sorry, folks: Fanatics with guns beat liberals with ideas.
Faith is the nuclear weapon of the fanatic. And there’s not going to be a religious “nuclear freeze.” It doesn’t matter how many hearts and minds you win, if you don’t defeat the zealots with the muscles.
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