The war we deserve?

So what would Sartre say now? The man who gave existential accounts of occupied Paris, attempting to give some sort of meaning to the horror Europe witnessed, and famously declared that 'each person got the war he deserved' with far greater respect for catharsis than for any notion whatever of historical accuracy, would yet be a better voice from the Cartesian land than the current French intelligensia. So let me take up the challenge and ask whether the non-Muslim world is getting the war it deserves. But first, I will make a slight foray into causal analysis, flawed though it may be, and defend the simple thesis that the global war of reactions against terror has one overwhelming cause, and that it is the obvious one.
It is frequently said that poverty and despair, not Islam, are the causes of terror. This is true; the behavior of the Islamic and non-Islamic people living in similar circumstances are not different in terms of their willingness to resort to violence, their attitude toward human life, in the epistomological and ethical attitudes they reveal. Accounts of the conflict in Sri Lanka I read in an anthropology journal a few years ago, countless reports on African wars, and the known historical record all confirm this beyond the shadow of a doubt. But does this mean that we should treat it similarly? Absolutely not; organization makes all the difference.
Put bluntly, local violence is a much more limited threat than global violence, even if it replicated in just as many places, causes just as much death and suffering, etc. A collection of locales does not the world span. Violence that takes aim at a global order is a threat to our vision of cosmopolitan identity, to a world where it is possible to identify with anything beyond one's immediate physical circumstances and the cultural representations these spawn. It is a threat to the ability of people everywhere to defect geographically and dissent intellectually. It is not bodies and lands which the Islamists are fighting. It is minds.
Whether perverting monotheism or simply laying bare what it does in certain circumstances in its original, unmitigated form, the Islamists attempt to destroy our global order because they have their own, a vision of how everybody everywhere should live that they find imminent. Only it bears no resemblance other than being a global vision to cosmopolitan ethics. The French commentator Baudrillard or his translator, writing in Harper's magazine, called Islamic terror the necessary other of globalization. But as Alain Badiou wrote in an anti-Levinas essay, 'the other must not be too different'. His sarcasm was as unwarranted as Levinas's initial idea of embracing the other would have been if he had been referring to a cultural other, as Badiou pretended to believe. This view is flatly correct; only a global vision is compatible with another global vision and can interact with it in a space. I am not Hegelian enough to think it necessary, although the long and checkered history of global visions since its obscure beginnings in the ancient middle east was in some sense bound to leave behind some traces of its many mutually distrustful selves. I leave it to others to explain to me exactly what the Islamic global vision is, although frankly my concern for its' finer points is limited. Since I believe ethics, the science of discovering the implications of one's actions for the life and liberty of others, can't start from any other basis than self-preservation, and is a logical extension thereof (as Charles Peirce among others wuite brilliantly demonstrated) I have a duty not to stop and ask whether those who would destroy my global vision have one with merits. I don't care, and I hold the particular stream of Islam known as 'Islamic radicalism' completely accountable for its actions. Trying to understand what poverty drives people to regardless of their traditions is an ethical duty. Understanding the Islamic worldview is ethically counterindicated. The duty of verstehende of the universals of poverty can be classified as an application of the cosmopolitan duty to enrich the world by comprehension of its' impersonal laws and to make these part of the personal soul. The interdiction of compatible other comprehension falls under the duty of self-preservation, a pre-ethical requirement for any coherent ethics, cosmopolitan or not. They are not contradictory, but complementary. The cause of terrorism may be poverty, but the cause of the terrorist threat to the world is radical Islam. Noone should feel required to mince words about this; quite the contrary.

There is no war without an internal war. As every empire falls from both within and without, the Western vision of cosmopolitanism has its cowardly dissenters, its enemy sympathizers, and even its collaborators. Many have reacted to the Islamist demands with a belief they must somehow be justified. They are not. Our world visions are not justified by external sources, so there is no way for the Islamist demands to be understood from without. There is only mitigation of its cost in human lives and suffering, and even were intellectual synthesis a possibility, I do not see the reason to believe it would get us any closer to achieving this goal. What I have learned of world history has taught me neither that mutual comprehension stops bloodshed or that mutual incomprehension causes it. Unreconcilable worldviews are perfectly fine, as I see it, and the duty of synthesizing our views and our enemies' is anything but fine. This view does not affect one's degree of hawkishness.
Should we choose to indulge in noble quests beyond self-preservation, we find it necessary to understand what circumstance drives people to, which is to say what we ourselves would do in their shoes. Trying to understand their traditions, a name for that part of their behavior that does not fall within a universal range of reactions, varying no more within tribes than between them, is no ethical or cosmopolitan duty at all. It is without malice that I say to radical Islam that I don't give a damn what it thinks.

So is this the war we deserve? I don't think we can answer that question any more than we ever could or ever will be able to. But it certainly has only a theatric rather than an historical meaning.