Democrats' fixation on Iraq, in at least one
respect, is a boon to President Bush: It distracts
attention from the administration's
inept handling of the larger struggle against
jihadism. On Bush's watch, the jihadist contagion
has been spreading, not contracting. While the United
States has not been directly attacked since 9/11, the front has
simply shifted elsewhere: to Iraq, to Europe, to the Middle
East, and, disturbingly, back to Afghanistan. Islamist terrorism's
death toll has risen steeply over the last two years.
Attacks by "self-starter" terrorists with tenuous or no links
to al Qaeda suggest that the enemy now is less a specific terrorist
network than a diffuse ideological movement -- a global
jihad with no center or high command. A profusion of jihadist
websites, featuring videos of terrorist attacks and beheadings,
provides inspiration, religious sanction, and technical advice
to impressionable young Muslims everywhere.
There is no doubt that the Iraqi insurgency has been a
catalyst for the growth of the global jihad. But that doesn't
mean the jihadist fever will subside if the United States suddenly
leaves Iraq. On the contrary, driving the American
Goliath out of Iraq would burnish the jihadist mystique and
convince many fence-sitters to sign up.
Some foreign policy analysts dismiss the severity of the
jihadist threat, which they believe the White House has
exaggerated for political reasons.
That's a big mistake. Although the ranks of hardcore terrorists
may be small, the number of Islamist sympathizers,
theorists, enablers, and potential recruits appears to be
growing. Saudi Arabia has been particularly active in building
the infrastructure that supports extremism, recycling oil
revenues to the tune of $75 billion over the last two decades
to spread Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world.
Instead of minimizing the jihadist threat, Americans
should study the jihadist ideology. We need the equivalent
of the Cold War's Kremlinologists -- jihadologists who can
help U.S. policymakers understand what motivates extremism
and devise better strategies for diminishing its appeal to
Muslims wherever they live.
Bush's "war on terror" has focused too narrowly on terrorists'
means rather than their ideas. Reza Aslan, an
American Muslim, argues in With All Our Might that the
president seems oblivious to the context from which jihadist
extremism springs. The movement arises from a civil war
raging within Islam. It pits reformers seeking an accommodation
with modernity against fundamentalists determined
to rid Islam of all modern and corrupting
ideas.
"The simple truth is that the
United States has a national security
interest in the outcome of the Islamic
Reformation currently under way
throughout the Muslim world," Aslan
writes. "It must therefore do whatever
it can to tip the balance of power away
from the extremists and back to the
massive yet voiceless majority who are as much victims of jihadism as is the West."
Yet Bush's excessively militarized response to terrorism
and his reductive, good-versus-evil rhetoric has played into
the jihadists' strategy of framing their struggle as an irreconcilable
conflict between Islam and the "crusader" West.
The United States needs a smarter strategy for undercutting
the ideological appeal of the global jihad. For starters, we need
to rally the world's democracies to a stouter defense of their liberal
ideas. We should challenge the international community to
strengthen norms against killing civilians and impose meaningful
penalties on states that don't comply with tough new anti-terror
conventions. We should join the International Criminal
Court and seek indictments against Osama bin Laden and
other terror chiefs for crimes against humanity. It's time for a
real zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism, not one that makes
exceptions for "resistance to occupation."
Next, the West must make common cause with the majority
of moderate Muslims who want no part of the global jihad.
Borrowing from a successful Cold War template, we should
join with Europe in launching a Helsinki-type process to provide
moral, political, and material support for human rights
activists, liberal reformers, and independent civic groups in
the Muslim world. To spur economic hope and opportunity,
we should create a Greater Middle East Prosperity Plan
intended to lower trade barriers and double the region's manufacturing
and agricultural exports by 2010.
Finally, we should embrace Aslan's suggestion that we
enlist U.S. Muslims in our public diplomacy toward the
Muslim world. Compared with their European counterparts,
American Muslims are relatively prosperous and well-assimilated,
and they live in a free country that is still more
religious than secular. Who better to testify to the essential
compatibility between religious faith, free enterprise, and
liberal political and governing institutions?
It's time for America to speak to the Muslim world less
in the language of war and more in the common vocabulary
of universal human aspirations for freedom and justice.
