That war itself seems a natural part of human existence is meant perhaps to teach us something fundamental about justice on earth: its symmetry. Like an echo coming back.
That sound strangely reverberated as I listened to the Jim Baker-led Iraq Study Group pronounce emphatically the need for Iraq to institute “milestones.” For, ironically, it is the book Milestones that terrorism experts claim is the manifesto for Osama bin Laden’s Islamic movement.
Written by the Egyptian writer and activist Sayyid Qutb during his political imprisonment in the late fifties, Milestones argues almost mystically against modern materialism. After circulating underground for several years, it was published in 1964, but thereafter banned as treasonous. Two years later, Qutb was hanged by the Egyptian government when he refused to renounce his beliefs.
For those neo-conservative and evangelical Americans who have foolishly fostered the predicted “clash of civilizations” – the West versus the Muslim World – the Iraq commission’s ironic insistence on “milestones” may eerily signal that the West has come full circle to defeat.
Baker and the others seek nobly to avoid the abyss that lies beyond this, but the invasion and occupation of Iraq has not just been a military miscue, but act of injustice. The commission’s 79 recommendations might correct the former, but something more will have to come around to right the latter.
Eric E. Vickers
St. Louis