Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (49 page)

38.
Since 2001 Islamists have made strong gains in elections in Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Bahrain. For summary articles on this trend, see Roula Khalaf and William Wallis, “Rising Islamist Tide Redefines Middle East’s Political Canvas,”
Financial Times,
January 27, 2006; Jonathan Last, “One Last Thing—Democracy, of Itself, Is Not a Solution to All Problems,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
August 6, 2006; Hassan M. Fattah, “Democracy in the Arab World, a U.S. Goal, Falters,”
New York Times,
April 10, 2006; and Dan Murphy and Joshua Mitnick, “In Mideast Elections, Militants Gain,”
Christian Science Monitor,
June 8, 2005.

39.
Ironically, America’s wartime allies and U.S. officials also authorize prisoner releases that contribute to the Islamists’ manpower. Afghan president Karzai and Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki have both been forced by domestic political pressures to release large numbers of men captured on the battlefield. Karzai, for example, has been attacked by the Afghan media for declaring an amnesty for “thousands of Taliban and their terrorist guests” who almost immediately “regrouped against the government and security of Afghanistan. They have mocked the good will of the Afghan government and have made efforts to expand and aggravate aggression and warfare in Afghanistan.” On the American side, the U.S. military has released Saudi, Pakistani, Chinese, Yemeni, European, and Afghan Islamist fighters. The release of Afghan Pakistani prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, in particular, has repeatedly backfired. Many of the freed Afghans and Pakistanis have rejoined the Taliban-led jihad in Afghanistan, and some have been subsequently killed or recaptured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. See “The Son of a Wolf Will Be a Wolf,”
Cheragh,
October 24, 2004; Fayiz al-Maliki, “Mazhar: Saudi-U.S. Talks for the Release of 124 Saudi Detainees in Guantanamo,”
Al-Watan
(online version), October 18, 2004; James Gordon Meek, “Freed, Many Rejoin Taliban,”
New York Daily News,
February 13, 2004; “Ex-Detainee Leading Pakistani Militants,”
Washington Post,
October 13, 2004, A-14; and John Mintz, “Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight,”
Washington Post,
October 22, 2004, A-1.

40.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Multiculturalism in History: Ideologies and Realities,”
Orbis
43, no. 4 (Fall 1999), 538. Those in American political life who ahistorically insist that U.S. society and culture is no better than any others and that it is exportable to the world at large despite immense cultural differences, would do well to consider Dr. Fox-Genovese’s conclusion that “the United States ranks as the primary example of a democratic multicultural society, and it has owed its success to distinctly Western values and institutions, including individualism and democracy.”

41.
Fouad Ajami, “Where U.S. Power is Beside the Point,”
New York Times,
October 17, 2000.

42.
Since leaving the CIA, I have been involved in teaching intelligence analysis to junior U.S. military personnel—lieutenants, captains, and NCOs. Most of these men and women are on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan, many of them for the second or even third time. In late 2006 one young sergeant offered me an example of how difficult it is for U.S. soldiers and Marines to eliminate the threat they face. This sergeant said that his unit’s camp came under mortar fire from Iraqi insurgents, and his squad was sent out of the camp to try to find and destroy the mortar and its crew. The squad worked around to the flank of the mortar position and found that its insurgent crew had fired the last of its rounds and was breaking down the mortar to leave the area. The squad leader radioed this information back to his unit and asked permission to attack. His request was denied because the insurgents were no longer in the act of attacking Americans, and so they were allowed to move off with their mortar, presumably to attack U.S. forces again another day.

43.
“A recent conference of British and American experts at Ditchley Park in England,” Dr. Nye wrote in early 2007, “concluded that while a hard-power response is necessary against the identified hard core of terrorism, this might not amount to more than 10 or 20 percent of the whole defense effort [against militant Islamism]. A larger effort should be devoted to public communication with mainstream Muslims.” Nye suggests that using soft power and dropping the term “war on terrorism” are keys to winning “the generational struggle to win hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims and hinder al-Qaeda recruiting.” Again, Dr. Nye and the soft-power advocates press ahead with their advocacy despite polls that show that “mainstream Muslims” hate U.S. foreign policy as much as al-Qaeda does, and that while they are attracted to America’s values, they are increasingly repelled by its neopagan popular culture. In this context, a complete reversal of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world and the re-Christianization of America would be needed to enable U.S. soft power. Harvard would never approve. See Joseph S. Nye, “Just Don’t Mention the War on Terrorism,”
International Herald Tribune
, February 8, 2007.

44.
Quoted in Wright,
Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations,
368, 372.

45.
Quoted in Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton,
The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000
(New York: Viking, 2005), 336.

46.
Fareed Zakaria, “Why the War Was Right,”
Newsweek,
October 20, 2003.

47.
Fareed Zakaria, “The Radicals Are Desperate,”
Newsweek,
March 15, 2004.

48.
Fawaz Gerges, “A Change of Arab Hearts and Minds,”
Christian Science Monitor,
February 4, 2004, and “Al-Qaeda Represents a Security Nuisance, Not a Strategic Threat,” www.bruneitimes.com.bn, November 17, 2006.

49.
Three recent books suggest that the Islamists, Sunni and Shia, are attracting many of the Muslim world’s educated young. See Robert A. Pape,
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
(New York: Random House, 2005); Alan B. Krueger,
What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Marc Sageman,
Understanding Terror Networks
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Dr. Sageman is particularly good in using statistical research to deflate the West’s inexplicably durable myth that terrorists are bred by poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. On the issue of employment, for example, Dr. Sageman writes:

50.
Fareed Zakaria, “Terror and the War of Ideas,”
Washington Post,
April 10, 2004, A-15.

51.
Mansoor Ijaz, “Terrorism’s New Operating System,”
National Review Online,
September 17, 2005.

52.
While there is no end of bad advice and guidance from individuals such as these, a good deal of sound advice from Muslim commentators in Europe and the Middle East goes unheeded. An example comes from the pen of Rami G. Khouri, editor at large of Beirut’s
Daily Star.
“My conclusion,” Khouri wrote in 2005,

What Mr. Khouri misses is that President Bush’s foreign policy is essentially the consensus foreign policy of the U.S. governing elite, spiced with more pungent rhetoric but plagued by the same self-inflicted failures and disasters. See Rami G. Khouri, “Bush’s Fantasy Foreign Policy,” www.tompaine.com, October 11, 2005.

53.
Benjamin and Simon,
The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right
(New York: Times Books, 2005), 225.

54.
Baker III and Hamilton,
The Iraq Study Group Report,
xvii. Like the 9/11 commissioners, the Study Group’s members were served by an excellent and highly qualified staff. The published study seems to me to bear the same stamp of political expediency as the published
9/11 Report
, suggesting that the research and analysis done by the Study Group’s staff was not fully exploited.

Chapter 5. And the Islamists’ Fire Quietly Spreads

1.
The only senior U.S. official who has urged Americans to take seriously what bin Laden et al. say has been President George W. Bush. Mr. Bush did so explicitly in the fall of 2006 and in the 2007 State of the Union Address. Not surprisingly, however, Mr. Bush told Americans that if they read bin Laden’s words, they would learn that the Islamists hate Americans for who we are, not for what we do. To read, it seems, is not always to learn, but President Bush at least has taken the first step. See “Press Conference of the President,” www.whitehouse.gov, September 15, 2006, and “Our Enemies Are Quite Explicit About Their Intentions,”
Boston Globe,
January 24, 2007.

2.
The distinguished scholar of Islamic law Khaled Abou El Fadl has explained that bin Laden and his allies are waging a defensive jihad, the justification for which is solidly based in Islamic jurisprudence, and he notes that they have not argued that they are waging an offensive jihad to reestablish the caliphate. “But it is important to note,” Dr. El Fadl has written,

See Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Holy War versus Jihad,”
Ethics and International Affairs,
14 (2000), 138.

3.
In an incisive essay that the neoconservatives must have forgotten to erase from the record, Dr. Lewis has suggested that the current Muslim dictatorships imported their fascism from Europe, and traditional Islam contains materials from which a form of democracy could be constructed.