The Long War’s Long End of the Beginning by Andrew E. Harrod
The fifteen years following September 11, 2001, demonstrate that the free world is still struggling to understand the various jihadist threats that achieved such global notoriety in this day’s mother of all terrorist attacks. Yet slowly but surely citizens are comprehending centuries-old Islamic ideologies that are once again assaulting free societies, a sign of hope after years of policy mistakes and politically correct “Islamophobia” taboos..
Al Qaeda’s hijackings in this black September awoke wrenched America from a halcyon “holiday from history” derided by many like former CIA Director James Woolsey. While many who have come of age since 9/11 condemn an ensuing “endless war,” he complained that his commander-in-chief, President William Clinton, payed little attention to national security. Yet his notorious playboy manners inside and outside of the Oval Office seemed to befit the relative peace and prosperity of the long decade from the Berlin Wall’s fall on 11/9/1989 to 9/11/2001.
Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was thankfully made of sterner stuff for what would soon be sterner times, but history would pass critical judgment upon his neo-Wilsonian strategies for dealing with the Islamic world’s various dangers. Perhaps giddy with American “hyperpower” in a historic “unipolor moment,” this evangelical Texan sought to replicate Republican icon Ronald Reagan, whose Cold War defeat of Communism liberated millions. Efforts to extend a Kantian zone of peace would attract supposedly huddling Muslim masses yearning to breathe free away from the poverty and perils of dictatorships and religious fanaticism.
Costly expenditures of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq with little result dashed any hope of these countries celebrating Francis Fukuyama‘s End of History. His often misunderstood and maligned thesis rightfully noted that free societies had proven their superiority in good governance over all ideological competitors like Communism. Yet as his own reservations about the Iraq war indicated, many Muslims presently eschew such empirical evidence in favor of faith-based adherence to various sharia-supremacist illiberal beliefs.
Although Bush’s experience seemed to influence little President Barack Obama’s disastrous Libyan humanitarian intervention that left behind a jihadist-dominated country, his disengagement policies often personified an anti-Bush. Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden incongruously declared Iraq an Obama Administration success before Obama’s troop withdrawal helped unravel a dearly-won tenuous peace there. Meanwhile his lesson from Bush’s Iraq war of “don’t do stupid s-t” hardly produced any discernibly better results as Iraq’s neighbor Syria broke apart in a bloody regional war between Shiites and Sunnis. Most importantly, Obama’s enablement of Iran’s power and nuclear ambitions is only strengthening the Middle East’s most dangerous jihadist state.
Obama’s policy decisions like his cheerleading for the “Arab Spring” and its rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in places like Egypt have often provoked concerned speculation about who is giving official advice on Islam. Bush in his first presidential campaign and early days in office naively had contacts with MB supporters like Abdurrahman Alamoudi, later convicted on terrorism charges. Even worse, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide is Huma Abedin, a woman with deep personal and familial ties to the MB and other Islamists.
Obama’s advisers help explain his minimization of jihadist threats as discrete marginal actors. Following American decimation of Al Qaeda, his 2012 campaign slogan crowed “GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead” while he later dismissed the Islamic State as the “jayvee team,” only to see it rise to the jihadist big leagues. Obama fails to realize that the same jihadist ideologies that long ago motivated the Ottoman Empire and Barbary Pirates can also recruit successive waves of Muslim despite successive defeats.
Nonetheless, jihad’s opponents, including many Muslims who are often the first victims of sharia oppression, remain far more numerous and powerful than the jihadists. If only free citizens mobilize politically, they can demand sensible policies like ideological vetting of Islamic immigrants to exclude individuals hostile to individual human dignity. Liberty-minded individuals should also demand and defend critical inquiry into Islamic theology, as indicated by Egypt’s current strongman ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. He called in 2015 for a “religious revolution” in Islamic doctrine before Sunni Islam’s leading authority, Cairo’s Al Azhar University.
Against an ever longer list of global Islamic atrocities, platitudes about Islam as a “religion of peace” sound ever more like a bad joke to Western electorates, like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain‘s “peace in our time.” Political neophyte Donald Trump’s stunning Republican presidential primary victory derived in no small part from his tough, although somewhat incoherent, talk on Islam. Opinion polls in France and Germany also show increasing popular skepticism towards Islam. Islamists may celebrate their outrages like 9/11 as well as nonviolent victories, but as Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reputedly said after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, they only “have awakened a sleeping giant.”
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