By Cliff May
Thursday, October 18, 2012
At the Aspen Security Forum this past summer, Peter
Bergen, CNN’s intrepid national-security analyst and a director at the New
America Foundation, gave a talk titled: “Time to Declare Victory: Al Qaeda Is
Defeated.”
Since then, AQ and/or its affiliates have launched lethal
attacks on American diplomatic compounds in Libya and Yemen, hoisted an
al-Qaeda flag above the U.S. embassy in Cairo, resurged in Iraq, and put boots
on the ground in Syria. They have bombed Christian churches in Nigeria and the
mosques of Sufi Muslims in Mali. They have battled African Union troops in
Somalia. Within the last week, Taliban terrorists shot Malala Yousafzai, a
14-year-old Pakistani, for the “crime” of advocating education for girls, and
bombed the office of moderate tribal elders in northwest Pakistan, killing at
least 17 people.
In this light, it seems obvious to me that reports of
AQ’s demise are at least premature. And I’m not alone. “Obama was out saying,
Hey, look, we have got al-Qaeda back on its heels,” investigative reporter Bob
Woodward said on Sunday. “Well, anyone in the intelligence committee knows
that’s not true.”
Bergen, however, is sticking to his story. And he is not
alone. On Tuesday, he and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lynch III (ret.), a
Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Defense University, defended the
AQ-is-defeated thesis in a debate with Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, two of
my Foundation for Defense of Democracies colleagues. Bergen and Lynch argued
that al-Qaeda’s offensive capabilities have been degraded and that without
Osama bin Ladin, the organization lacks a “mythical mystique.”
That’s true as far as it goes. But degraded is not
defeated. And Bergen goes further:
Even terrorists influenced by al Qaeda–like ideas have
only killed 17 people in the United States since 9/11. About the same number of
Americans are killed every year by dogs. In other words, in the United States
during the past decade, dogs have been around ten times more deadly than
jihadist terrorists. To win World War II, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin did
not feel it necessary to kill every Nazi. We should not impose a higher
standard in the battle against al Qaeda.
Here, in my view, is what that misses: Ideas matter. The
Nazis had ideas — vile ideas, but ideas nonetheless. Not even the most rabid
canines have that. Roosevelt and Churchill — and Stalin, too, I suppose — were
keenly aware that the Nazi threat was at least as much ideological as military.
Indeed, in January of 1943, at the end of the Casablanca
Conference, Roosevelt announced that he and Churchill had decided to adopt a
policy crucial to Allied victory and Axis defeat — a policy, Roosevelt said,
that would “not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or
Japan,” but would “mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries
which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.”
The jihadi philosophy/ideology is — no less than Nazism —
“based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.” The late Father Richard
John Neuhaus aptly defined jihadism as a religiously inspired ideology built on
the teaching “that it is the moral obligation of all Muslims to employ whatever
means necessary in order to compel the world’s submission to Islam.”
Most American and European leaders refuse even to discuss
jihadism openly, much less pledge to destroy it. Some are concerned that to do
so will offend Muslims by the tens of millions, turning them against us.
Others, I suspect, find it impossible to accept that, in the 21st century,
there are still those who believe in divinely endorsed wars, have no aversion
to violence, and see conquest as the most virtuous of pursuits. “Ideology,”
Hillary Clinton said not long after becoming secretary of state in 2009, “is so
yesterday.” Those who see America as the “enemy of God” are not convinced.
Proponents of the AQ-is-defeated theory also ignore the
fact that Saudi petro-princes continue to spend billions to spread Wahhabism, a
strain of Islam that disdains freedom and promotes hatred of infidels and
apostates. Wahhabism plants the seeds of jihadism.
And of course it should be clear by now that the regime
that rules Iran embraces a jihadi ideology. Iran’s rulers are Shia, a minority
within the Muslim world, which makes their aspiration to lead a pan-Islamic
global revolution against the West challenging. But that is their goal — a goal
they have reaffirmed repeatedly over the past 33 years; a goal that will be
greatly facilitated should they acquire nuclear weapons. It is in pursuit of
this goal that they are forcing average Iranians to absorb the economic pain of
intensifying sanctions.
Roosevelt and Churchill grasped what too many analysts in
government, academia, media, and think tanks do not: To prevail against
America’s enemies, kinetic warfare is necessary but insufficient. An
ideological war, a war of ideas, also must be waged. And on that front, we have
not yet begun to fight.
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