In Which I Ruffle Feathers and Play with Numbers

President Obama, in his address at the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon on Saturday, once again assured us that we are not at war with a religion, but with a group of extremists who pervert that religion to their own ends. He may be right, but coming from an administration that until recently would not use the phrase “Islamic extremist” this is useless platitude, and tells us nothing about our adversary.

We have been told before that radical Islamists make up only a small portion of Islam as a whole, that most Muslims do not harbor antipathy to America and the West, and this is certainly true. What portion then do hold such views; 1%, 2%, 10%? I don’t know that I have ever heard an official estimate, though undoubtedly given the nature of our enemy such a number is difficult to come by. So let’s run some numbers:

According to the CIA World Fact Book the world’s Muslim population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.6 billion.  The armed forces of the United States (second largest in the world, and the largest Western military force) equals about 1.4 million active duty personnel, with another 1.4 million reservists (per Wikipedia). That’s about one fifth of one percent of the World’s Muslims. Even if the percentage of those who call themselves Muslims (using the President’s formulations) and are intent on terrorist actions or the implementation of Islamic culture on the West through violent means is 1%, that is several orders of magnitude larger than the forces which stand between them and us. And the actual percentage is almost certainly higher than that.

What is the significance of all this? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Numbers do matter, though (otherwise why would we care what one billion red Chinese think), and in a war in which our leaders are uncomfortable even identifying our adversaries, the math becomes that much more complicated.