From journalist Paul Kelly comes an outstanding editorial that has many good insights, ‘An Enemy In Belief’, although some parts I do not think are expounded upon enough, nor do I always agree (my comments abound), and I encourage you to read it all, as well as the mentioned Robert E. Kaplan article (linked below). With much thanks to Australian Anvil regular Gramfan for pointing these articles out:
SIX years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, Western societies remain psychologically and politically ill-equipped to manage the Islamist terrorist threat with its ability to mutate, spread and to spontaneously erupt.
While al-Qa’ida is probably weaker than before September 2001, the trends are grim: in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East and within Western democracies, notably Britain, where the foiled doctors plot in London and Glasgow has links of some sort to Australia.
The CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, John Kringen, told a house committee this week of al-Qa’ida: “We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications.” This points to more attacks.
Much of the focus is Pakistan, a training haven for al-Qa’ida, with President Pervez Musharraf under internal assault and al-Qa’ida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri calling for an Islamic uprising in Pakistan, his response to the army’s defeat of Islamist fighters at the Red Mosque. As a nuclear weapons state, Pakistan would be the ultimate prize for the Islamists or the “leakage” mechanism to deliver them a nuclear device.
While al-Qa’ida regains its strength there is a deeper issue emerging: the internal crisis within the West over how to respond to the ideological, political and military challenge it faces. Western democracies are divided over the nature of the Islamist threat, its causes and the best response.
The Iraq war is not the source of this crisis but rather its brilliant catalyst. Iraq was George W. Bush’s war of choice and he made the wrong choice. Iraq is a stimulation point for al-Qa’ida, a recruitment banner for terrorists worldwide and, within the US, a trigger for polarisation, recrimination and demoralisation. The West is losing its way ethically and strategically in the long war.
I’m forced to interject here: Bush didn’t make the wrong choice in entering Iraq and getting rid of the Stalinist thug Saddam — he has made the wrong choices after the liberation, namely in not correctly utilizing Iraq as a stepping stone to castrate Iran, at least not yet, and in not prosecuting the war to stabilize Iraq brutally enough. The choices made early on to get rid of Baath Party military leaders near the outset of the liberation were also extremely foolish. This lead to an utter collapse of police and security in Iraq and we have seen the results.
Bush still has time to satisfy critics like myself, but his limited term in office is obviously becoming a narrow gap for the opportunity to act and every passing day makes the nuclear threat from Iran that much more likely.
Lastly, the idea that luring Al Qaeda elements to Iraq isn’t a good idea is wrong: Islamist terror groups are going to find a reason, manufactured or otherwise, to cultivate hatred for the non-Muslim world. If it isn’t Iraq it would be Afghanistan and if not either of those it would be having our troops anywhere in the Muslim world, the very same rationale that bin Laden used for his 9-11 attacks. It’s always a good idea to draw the armed jihadists into a fight that isn’t on the soil of Western nations. However, the fight against these elements hasn’t gone well because, as I’ve said time and time again, we aren’t just fighting terror groups — we are fighting the majority of the Islamic world which simply hides its intentions well enough to keep our leaders guessing and our people squabbling. Fighting enemies not in uniform should be the obvious red flag for mischief on all levels — after all, did we suffer from ambiguities in the first two world wars? Obviously not. Those were different times, fighting by Western rules. These are no longer those times and our enemies only play by the Qur’anic ruleset.
The Western mindset, secular, post-modernist and progressive, is hopelessly inadequate to meet this threat. The Islamist terrorists know they are waging a war with epic objectives. Yet the West still cannot decide whether it is waging war or merely resisting a more disruptive version of IRA-type gangsterism. It would be comic if it were not so tragic. Meanwhile its enemies aspire to a weapons of mass destruction capacity to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in their homes or places of work.
Again, important point that I have to beat like a dead horse: we are fighting enemies that, minority in the Islamic world or not, the weapons and mindset that these enemies are capable of using and wish to acquire, simply should wipe away all illusions of pretending that we can still hold Islam in the arms of the West and welcome it. All it takes is a relative handful of violent Islamists with the mixture of weaponry we as yet have never seen delivered upon any nation outside of Japan and we will be wishing that more leaders had the good sense to treat Islam as an enemy in wartime as it deserves to be held. To not subject a few million Muslims in the United States to restrictions, close observation and even incarceration or expulsion is a crime against this country. When the terrorist groups like Al Qaeda finally do manifest destruction again, will we wake up? Can we? Or have we simply become too weak to stand up and confront any one side and believe in ourselves first and foremost?
I hate to say this, but I believe it will not be until after dire tragedy strikes that my often repeated words of warning and cries for the outlawing and boycotting of Islam will be viewed as prophetic. I so hope I am wrong, but if I thought I was, I certainly wouldn’t be running this site and dedicating the better part of every waking day to better understanding the Islamist threat. Many will continue to label me a “hater” for my strong and frightening words, but I do not give a damn about that; what I care about is far too important to allow the mere words of weaklings and ignorant fools to deter me from speaking from my heart and mind.
In his brilliant essay “On Forgetting the Obvious” in the latest issue of The American Interest, Robert D. Kaplan drills into the reality. War is a fact of the human condition that, surprise, has not been abolished by Western ideals. The Islamist revolutionaries possess a deeper self-belief than the belief-eroded West.
The Pentagon’s much-touted “network-centric warfare” has succumbed to the far cheaper breakthrough weapon: the suicide bomber, a phenomenon that Dostoyevsky or Kipling would have understood. The fanaticism of the suicide bomber originates in the affair between the believer and God, a notion foreign to most Western culture.
While the West shunned the concept of total war after 1945, the Islamist militants have embraced total war. Witness Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa that it was the religious duty of “every Muslim” to murder “any American anywhere on earth”.
Universal values, though worthwhile, cannot save the West in this struggle. The contest with radical Islam that occurs outside and within our societies is more fundamental and elemental. It tests the morale of our culture, the spirit of our nationalism and the extent to which we have positive values that constitute a unifying narrative to bind our societies together. Last week, addressing the Australian Strategic Policy Institute conference in Canberra, Georgetown University’s Bob Gallucci, a former Clinton administration official, warned that a nuclear detonation in a US city is the main security danger to the US. Might al-Qa’ida soon be able to access fissile material? Yes. Would al-Qa’ida be prepared to use such a device? Yes. Would it be able to deliver the weapon? Yes.
“The US and Britain are probably the main targets for this kind of enterprise,” Gallucci said. “It’s a threat against which the US neither has a defence nor a deterrent.”
Gallucci’s statement there is absolutely erroneous. We have a defense to implement, we simply do not have the will, wisdom or the leadership to see it done. First step? Slam the doors closed to all Muslim immigration and put troops with loaded weapons on our borders. And start shooting a few criminals that defy the border guards instead of arresting them, only to watch them try to sneak right back across again after release. We are at WAR. What the hell is it going to take to get this through to people — a nuclear bomb explosion in Manhattan? God forbid we are that blind and without resolve.
Another former Democrat official, Graham Allison from Harvard University, argues in his 2004 book Nuclear Terrorism that “a dirty-bomb attack is overdue”. Stressing the need for urgent action and slamming Bush’s failures, Allison says: “In my considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”
It is inconceivable that a US president, facing the elimination of many thousands of people in a more serious event than 9/11, would not retaliate by striking against the source of the fissile material (if it could be traced). Retaliatory action would be a political imperative. Yet such action might intensify the conflict with radical Islam and even provoke home-grown terrorism within the multicultural societies of the West.
What have we become as a civilization when we are prepared only to fight back after already becoming the victim of murderous disaster on the scale of a dirty bomb or other WMD? How do we fight back then? What will keep other devices from being unleashed upon us by more Islamists out of uniform, again and again? Not a damn thing as long as we fail to confront the true source of all this danger: ISLAM.
And please note that voicing of fear in the last sentence above: “…might intensify the conflict with radical Islam and even provoke home-grown terrorism within the multicultural societies of the West.” Isn’t it very interesting that despite the fact that we are supposedly in a war with a “tiny minority of extremists”, this “tiny minority” seems to have a limitless well to dip into to refill its ranks? That is what we would call in plain language: hypocrisy. I hope by now you see the lies from our leaders as well as from within ourselves for what they truly are: this is not war with a “tiny minority” and never has been. The Pollyanna-esque, wishful dreaming of so many Westerners should be enough to make you vomit! Each and every hour someone on this planet is being murdered in the name of Islam!
Quick! Cover your eyes and surf away from the Anvil; you too have the chance to join the herd of lemmings as they dash towards the rocky shores below the cliff.
The 9/11 Commission report grasped that this struggle transcended any war on terrorism. The enemy, of which al-Qa’ida is part, is a global ideological movement. The threat is millennial.
That’s a very long-winded way of saying ISLAM without actually saying it. Sort of reminds me of the Harry Potter cast of characters not wanting to speak of “He Who Must Not Be Named”, because to utter his name actually threatens to summon Lord Voldemort and thus dash any hope that he might not really have returned!
When bin Laden says that the US must be converted or destroyed, the progressive instinct is to laugh at such nonsense. The Western progressive mind has no mechanism to process this threat or manage this enemy. It takes refuge in the stereotypes: that Bush is a liar, that Iraq is the problem, that John Howard corrupts our democracy, that the real danger is the risk to civil liberties. This is a political culture with no hope of rising to the challenge. Finding a new path between Bush’s militaristic hubris and the appeasement of the progressive class is a vast, though not insurmountable, task.
Meanwhile, the former head of Britain’s security service, Eliza Manningham-Buller, said last year: “Let there be no doubt about this: the international terrorist threat to this country is not new. It began before Iraq, before Afghanistan and before 9/11. Last month the Lord Chancellor said that there were a total of 99 defendants awaiting trial in 34 cases. My officers and police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas.
“The extremists are motivated by a sense of grievance and injustice driven by their interpretation of the history between the West and Muslim world. This view is shared, to some degree, by a far wider constituency. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified.”
Manningham-Buller continues: “The propaganda machine is sophisticated and al-Qa’ida itself says that 50 per cent of its war is conducted through the media. We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy. What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer 30 - that we know of. These plots often have links back to al-Qa’ida in Pakistan. Imagine if a plot to bring down several passenger aircraft succeeded. Thousands dead, major economic damage, disruption across the globe. And al-Qa’ida is an organisation without restraint.”
The enemy can be expected to grow, and the strains upon Western society will only intensify. In order to prevail, the West needs to repair its partisan divisions, devise a new foreign policy and anchor its debates in an intellectual and ethical realism so far conspicuously missing.
Of course the “enemy” can be expected to grow. It has the source of 1.5 billion Muslims to fuel itself with. Stop being damned fools and believing beyond hope that the Islamists think, dream and aspire to the future as typical Westerners do; that continued delusion will only result in one more giant step towards slavery for your great-grandchildren under Islamic religious dogma.
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