Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (31 page)

Bin Laden closed his speech offering a truce by reminding Europeans that al-Qaeda and its allies attack non-Muslims only if Islamic lands are attacked, and that therefore “the solution to this equation…lies in your own hands.”
¹⁵
The governments of Europe contemptuously rejected bin Laden’s truce offer, and al-Qaeda made its chief’s words good by attacking the London subway system on July 7, 2005.

Since 2002, then, bin Laden has carefully delineated a doctrine of international political warfare that combines the promise of reciprocal violence—if you attack us, we will attack you—and a pledge not to attack if assistance from U.S. allies for Washington’s terrorism war is halted. Declaring such a doctrine is well and good, but the question is, “Has it worked?” Has al-Qaeda’s policy resulted in any decease in the will of U.S. allies to support American military operations against the group and its allies? The following suggests that the answer to both may well be: Yes, it is beginning to have some impact.

• The conservative, pro-U.S. government of Spanish prime minister José María Aznar was defeated in an election soon after the March 11, 2004, attack on Madrid’s Atocha train station. The victorious socialist regime of Prime Minister José Zapatero is much less pro-American and has withdrawn Spanish troops from Iraq.
  ¹⁶
  
• In summer 2006, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative, pro-U.S. government was defeated by a narrow margin, much of which appears to have consisted of those voters opposed to Rome’s military support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. The new Italian government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi kept its campaign pledge and completed the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq in 2006.
  ¹⁷
  
• After facing a near revolt in his Labor Party in summer 2006, British prime minister Tony Blair was compelled to appease the dissenters by announcing, well before he intended to, a date for stepping down from the premiership. The Labour Party’s anger, backed by many public opinion polls, stemmed from Blair’s hardy military backing for Washington’s war on terror.
  ¹⁸
  
• In October 2006, a group of Thai military officers staged a coup that removed Prime Minister Thaksin from office. Allegations of corruption have since been made against Thaksin, but the generals appear to have acted in large part to stop Thaksin’s harsh military and law-enforcement operations against Islamist separatists in the country’s three Muslim-dominated southern provinces. The coup leaders named a Muslim Thai general as the new prime minister, and he immediately announced his willingness to slow military operations and consider increased autonomy for the southern provinces, each of which Thaksin had refused to do.
  ¹⁹
  
• In the fall of 2006, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and Afghan president Hamid Karzai repeatedly tried to distance themselves from the “excessive” military focus of U.S. operations in their countries.
  ²⁰
  
• In December 2006, President Jacques Chirac’s government, in the face of rising violence in Afghanistan and public condemnation of the Iraq war, decided to withdraw France’s entire contingent of Special Forces from Afghanistan.
  ²¹
  
• In February 2007, U.K. prime minister Tony Blair announced plans to withdraw about 25 percent of Britain’s military contingent in Iraq; Denmark announced that it would withdraw its 460-man force that had been serving under British command. Blair’s action was taken in the context of polling results that showed strong majorities opposing a continued U.K. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  ²²
  
• Also in February 2007, Italian prime minister Prodi’s government was defeated in parliament on Italy’s support for the U.S. war on terrorism. The specific issues were the maintenance of a two-thousand-person Italian military force in Afghanistan and permission for the U.S. military to expand its base at Vicenza, Italy.
  ²³
  
• In October–November 2007, the parties of Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Australian Prime Minister John Howard were defeated in their respective general elections. Both men were strong supporters of U.S. policy in Iraq; that support contributed to their defeat. The new Polish and Australian prime ministers quickly announced they would withdraw their troops from Iraq in 2008.
  ²⁴
  
• By November 2007, the rising lethality of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and/or domestic political dissatisfaction had caused Japan to end its naval support for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan; South Korea had begun the withdrawal of its troops from the country; Germany, France, and Denmark were leaning toward ending the military component of their Afghan commitment; and politicians and media outlets in several NATO countries were urging Afghan Prime Minister Karzai to negotiate with the Taliban for an end to the insurgency.
  ²⁵
  

All the foregoing have weakened the Western coalition that initially supported the United States after 9/11, and the impact of each was sharpened in that it occurred in tandem with the gradual post-9/11 resurgence of ingrained anti-Americanism in Europe. Moreover, each clearly advances the goals of the doctrine for international political warfare that bin Laden established for al-Qaeda: the erosion of popular support for the war on terrorism among the populations of America’s allies, and the gradual isolation of the United States. Al-Qaeda’s leaders, and those of the groups allied to or inspired by it, clearly see this doctrine as making an effective contribution to their war effort, one that is even having an impact in the United States. The Islamists interpreted the 2006 U.S. midterm congressional elections that overturned Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives as demonstrating that the Americans, like the French, British, and Italians, did not have the stomach for the casualties and expenses they are suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the Islamists, the midterm election results confirmed that Allah’s victory was edging closer.

Not Even in the Race for Hearts and Minds

Since 9/11 Americans have been bombarded by categorical assertions from Democratic and Republican leaders, academics, U.S. generals, and the media that the United States and its allies are in a race with the Islamists to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. The politicians and the generals’ claims are cynically grounded in the fact that they have used the nation’s military power too sparingly and are afraid to urge its more abundant use; thus we have too-little-too-late half-measures like President Bush sending five more brigades to Iraq when fifty would be too few to assure victory. These individuals are trying to convince the citizenry, and perhaps themselves, that they have not failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that military might has completed its part in the struggle and now victory hinges on a successful hearts-and-minds campaign. From academia and the media come claims that are grounded in abhorrence of the U.S. military and any use of martial force, a desire to pull out all the stops to prevent its further use, and career-focused ambitions to play the leading role in a gigantic, federally funded hearts-and-minds campaign; after all, is that not the proper role for sensitive, multicultural social scientists and kumbayahing journalists? Starting from different points, the two groups arrive at the same conclusion: we must win the war against al-Qaeda with a hearts-and-minds campaign. If honesty were in their toolkits, however, both would have to admit that they have nothing with which to win or even purchase Muslim hearts and minds, and that in that arena America will be drubbed to death for as long as the status quo in U.S. foreign policy exists.

To date, much of the U.S. public diplomacy effort has been conducted so as to avoid the issue of the Islamists’ motivation. For example, U.S. officials have placed great emphasis on the bin Laden-has-hijacked-and-distorted-Islam gambit. We have therefore tried to win Muslim hearts and minds by debating theological points, citing hadiths and passages in the Koran, or by backing one Islamic scholar’s interpretations over those of another. None of these tacks, however, address the main issue, which is the Muslim perception that U.S. foreign policy is an attack on Islam. Our hearts-and-minds voices claim that the renowned Salafist scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi has disavowed the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s justification for killing civilians, and Muslims respond, that is interesting, but why are you giving $3 billion a year to that butcher Mubarak? We say that Ayman al-Zawahiri is not a trained Islamic scholar so he cannot legitimately call for a jihad, and Muslims say, interesting point, but why are you helping Catholic Filipinos kill Moro Muslims in Mindanao? Theological challenges do not get at the main motivation of anti-U.S. Muslims, we cannot out-Islam the Islamists. The concept itself is, at best, rickety; it is like arguing we could have won hearts and minds in the Soviet Bloc by claiming that Moscow’s understanding of Marx and Lenin was way off target and that Washington had a better take on what Karl and Vladimir Ilyich really meant. Or, from the other side, for Brezhnev or Gorbachev to tell Americans that the Soviet Academy of Political Science had a better handle than Thomas Jefferson on the natural-law theory that informs the Declaration of Independence.

Ten years into the war declared by bin Laden, then, official Washington resolutely refuses to address the Islamists’ true motivation; only a single member of America’s governing elite—representative Ron Paul (R-Texas)—has publicly indicated that he has caught on to the reality that our enemies are motivated by U.S. foreign policy. Instead, U.S. government officials, and the leaders of both political parties, simply and reflexively repeat that the Islamists hate America and are waging war against it because of our freedoms, liberty, and gender equality, not because of what the U.S. government does in the Islamic world. This claim is a blatant lie, bad for that reason alone but worse because it keeps Americans from clearly gauging the enemy’s motivations and intentions, or bin Laden’s enormous potential appeal among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Frankly, persisting in this lie amounts to a death wish.

Not that bin Laden and his ilk are admirers of American freedoms; they are not, and no society they govern, be it Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Afghanistan, will even remotely resemble ours, although each is likely to be a more efficient and less corrupt government than the one they replace. But it is a lethal mistake for Americans to assume that because the Islamists would not adopt our society lock, stock, and barrel, they must surely be fighting to destroy it. Though incorrect in every conceivable way, this assumption is the one on which our governing elite is operating, and it is one, when boiled down to its essence, that concludes that the Islamists and their supporters are warring against the United States because they hate Americans as Americans, as well as everything they stand for in the political and social spheres, and in the end intend to eradicate our society from the planet.

Now, if this assumption were true, there would be no point in considering how best to conduct a public diplomacy campaign to change the hearts and minds of Muslims. If Americans are hated because they are Americans, the choice is black and white simple: we can completely abandon our beliefs, our lifestyles, and how we behave in the domestic, political, and social arenas to appease our enemies, or we can undertake the task of killing every last Muslim because that is what they intend to do to us. This is an unpalatable choice between ingesting strychnine and ingesting arsenic, but there it is.

Fortunately, there is a third option open to Americans, notwithstanding the seemingly permanent obtuseness of their elite. A careful review of the speeches, statements, and interviews that flow like a torrent from bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other Islamist leaders shows that they pay no more than lip service to what might politely be called our civilization’s failings. That we have such failings they leave no doubt, but they are never the focus of attention. These men, however, are all children of the era of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, and they all saw how the dour old Iranian failed utterly to initiate a global jihad based on the supposed threat from what he described as the debauched and degenerate society of the American Great Satan. Having witnessed that almost no Muslim was motivated to become a suicide bomber because American women compete with men in every field or because we have presidential primaries, bin Laden and his colleagues focused on what the U.S. government does in the Islamic world.
²⁶
By doing so, they have produced a motivational message that appeals to and, to a gradually increasing extent, unites the extraordinarily diverse and fragmented Islamic world. It also is producing a steadily growing flow of volunteers for jihadi activities, suicide and otherwise. The success of bin Laden et al. in this regard would have made the late Ayatollah salivate with envy.

If U.S. leaders would recognize that bin Laden has much more effectually defined Great Satan–ness as U.S. actions overseas and not as the lifestyle of Americans at home, they would be able to begin constructing a hearts-and-minds strategy that would slowly start to narrow the commanding lead that Islamists now enjoy among Muslims worldwide. Such a grasp of reality and common sense, however, would be out of character for our elite. It also would require senior members of the last three presidential administrations to recant most of what they have sworn to be true about our Islamist enemies’ motivations, to take on the politically powerful Saudi and Israeli lobbies, and to begin to destroy the energy-policy status quo that works so much in favor of the U.S. oil industry and against American interests. It is a tall order indeed, and as is typical in the post–Cold War world, the U.S. government does not have a lot of time in which to recognize reality and begin to make these changes. Time is running out for the United States if it wants to start clawing back some of the vast amount of ground it has lost to the Islamists in the hearts-and-minds competition.
²⁷