Islam is one of the three mono-theistic religions of the world. Where does Islam fit into all this? It was the Jews, to their eternal credit, who discovered the idea of the one righteous God. Not only that, He was merciful and loving too. Indeed righteousness and love are opposite sides of the same coin; the one without the other, ceases to be itself. Righteousness without love is meaningless Puritanism. Love without righteousness is amoral permissiveness. So far, I imagine, most Muslims would agree. But if Allah does not seek man’s friendship, then it is meaningless to base human relations on an imitation of the Divine, as I did. Instead of the glorious variety of the Anglo-Saxon world, human relations are stereotyped by convention, and public opinion tends to become a mob shouting in unison. If my understanding is correct, then Islam simply does not fit into my picture of spiritual life.
Nor is there any agreement on the validity of suicide bombers. In the West, killing in war is not murder; and War on occasions may prevent the complete triumph of evil. So every society may consider it has to resort to war. So far, this is probably common ground. But must War always be to the death? Do we nowadays always insist on unconditional surrender? Not according to Emmerich de Vattel, if we have any sense. He lived from 1714-1767; and in his Law of Nations he insisted that regular war, as to its effects, is to be accounted just on both sides. Otherwise he argued, there is no possibility of a negotiated peace. It is tribal war to the finish, without any possibility of an armistice. So to avoid this, every peace treaty must be a compromise; and moderation must be the keynote, unless mankind wants to indulge in the blood-bath of total war, which solves little or nothing.
If proof is wanted that total war solves little or nothing, the Cold War following on the heels of the Second World War provides a reasonably good illustration. The slogan of “Unconditional Surrender”, coined at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, effectively prevented the possibility of an overthrow of Hitler by the opposition within Germany, and the formation of a better German government. Indeed most of those who might have formed a better government were executed following the forlorn 1944 July plot against Hitler’s life. Maybe this slogan “unconditional surrender” was the only thing the Allies could agree about; and they would have fallen out without it, as the Allies did in 1814 in the campaign against Napoleon. Maybe it was the lesser of two evils; but it was the end of the possibility of a negotiated peace with a better German government, and of any real peace in Europe for 46 years. If the Cold War proved anything, it was that it is time we returned to the moderation of Emmerich de Vattel.
But his concept of accounting war just on both sides extended only to regular warfare; not to irregular warfare, which has the nature of civil-war; and civil war is the most total and brutal of any form of warfare.